#honour mode has become the default

[wetcatspellcaster]

Metapost: "The Ascendent"

**this is a meta for my fic, Pieces Still Stuck in Your Teeth, and NOT a discussion of the BG3 game canon in any way. If you try and make this into a disk-horse, I will BITE you**

(spoilers under the cut for Chapters 1-23 of Pieces Still Stuck in Your Teeth).

So... remember in the Chapter One endnote when I said I was a Spike/Buffy fan first, and a person second? x

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In more seriousness, there was a number of fictional seasonings/ingredients that went into creating what I felt was the villain of a Gothic horror, and what I felt could turn the Ascendent into something that was both 'fixable', and something I enjoyed writing.

Those ingredients were:

Spike and the idea of 'soulless' vampires in the BtVS canon - do I like this conceit of BtVS worldbuilding and how it's used in the show? No. I think it often underlines how bad Whedon is at writing romance. BUT I do think it gives Buffy this free pass for which vampires she can/can't like or adopt, and I needed some of that for my protagonist. I need a 'I can fix him' moment - BtVS has those in fucking SPADES.

Howl's Moving Castle (this one was accidental, I'm still mad at myself but I can't deny it's there) - man conducts magic ritual for power, removing an essential part of himself in the process that needs to be returned

Picture of Dorian Gray (the idea of an exterior staying pristine while something hidden suffers and decays)

Curse of Strahd (the soulless in Barovia, which I mentioned in Chapter 23)

The idea of default moral alignments in D&D. I have a whole chapter arguing against this in my thesis (mostly bc it's often applied to entire races) but I was fascinated by creating a set of circumstances where I feel like a default moral alignment is valid, actually. 7,000 deaths seems like a good set up. I wanted to imagine a being that was trapped within a default moral alignment, and the laws of its very being prevent it from being good no matter what it tries, and it knows that (this kind of creates a feedback loop with the Spike/Buffy stuff)

The parts of the BG3 canon I took and REMADE (I'm stressing this throughout, I was making a horror story and a horror monster your honour):

Astarion conducts the Rite of Profane Ascension with scars on his back, but has to scar Cazador's back personally, suggesting that um... the Rite REALLY SHOULDN'T BE CONDUCTED BY SOMEONE WHO'S GOT THOSE SCARS. Cazador wasn't going to do it that way, is all I'm saying!!

The idea that Ascended!Ending Astarion is a concentrated version of certain traits that have persisted throughout his story - his flirtiness, his understanding of sex as a mechanism and expression of power, his use of a façade as a mask for trauma he refuses to acknowledge.

The lines alluding to dissociation in the brothel foursome, post-Ascension.

The idea that Astarion seduced Tav to survive or protect himself- in my case, because I made the Ascendent empty save for Astarion's survival instinct, the idea that he would gravitate towards Tav as one of his default modes to potentially survive made sense to me - this is why it becomes an obsession.

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For me, when writing, the Ascendent is a few things:

An intensification of vampirism in a different, fucked-up direction. Yeah, A!Astarion, you can walk in sunlight and you can eat and drink and don't need blood. But you are still a hungering maw of emptiness that feels like it will never be whole or close and connected to the living - just now in a wildly different, metaphysical/existential direction! Welcome to depression, alienation, and otherness!

A soulless being, that knows it is soulless - that initially was very happy with its life but then as the years passed, increasingly spends its every waking moment knowing there is something innately wrong with it that it can't seem to shake, no matter how much it engages with life and all the pleasures of life. (see the 'every meal without savour' speech)

A magically literal metaphor for Astarion's dissociation in moments of extreme trauma, up to and including the fight with Cazador - essentially, the moments when there is nothing but a performance or an exterior, because the self/soul are suffering and they cant' come to phone right now

Astarion's survival instinct. As I say in Chapter 23 - Mephistopheles thinks it is an empty body, who's performance is trying to deny the reality of it's own existence. Rosalie, who has a bit more understanding of Astarion, sees that the performance is not just a coping mechanism but one of Astarion's main modes of survival. The Ascendent is Astarion's survival instinct/techniques for endurance, without any soul or person behind them to protect. This is how I tried to tie in the flirty, hypersexual persona and wrap it with a bow.

I wanted a monster that was undeniably scary, and monstrous to me (oh? you can't fit in or be happy no matter what you do and no matter how hard you try, and you think there's something intrinsically off? how's that autism diagnosis going Emma) but that I also felt sympathy and true sorrow for. I needed to have motivations for him chasing after Tav that I could write meaningfully from and sympathise with.

Not only has Astarion used Tav as a life-raft once before, they've also proven to be the most secure thing he's ever clung to. Of course a rabid survival instinct Astarion would become obsessed, and see them as a potential solution to the problem (this was then intensified by Rosalie also being a walking, overbearing moral compass, and having bound him in a contract in the first week of living, accidentally - a lawful good immoveable objects meets a default moral alignment unstoppable force.)

...Because I also wanted that moral alignment spice!! Wizards of the Coast, default moral alignment is fucked up actually!!! Imagine something trying so desperately to be good - literally being bound in a pact and having been told to be good - but the laws of the universe and its very essence are like "nah mate, we kind of want to destroy and annihilate everything, we're neutral evil personified". That's scary!! that's fucked up!! that's what a birth from 7000 deaths gets you!!!

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So, now for the actual timeline, for people who aren't interested in my silly musings but mostly just want answers lmfao.

Rosalie makes the decision not to intervene in Cazador's mansion, making it seem like she'll support whatever decision Astarion will make there.

Rite of Profane Ascension happens. Astarion conducts the ritual, rips his own soul from his body, the Ascendent is born with literally zero context. Mephistopheles is fucked in Cania, because a bunch of stuff has just gone wrong.

(oh, by the way, the Ascendent knows Infernal as a default language. Bc it's born from an Infernal rite.)

The Ascendent is now default neutral evil, and feeling some kind of way. Rosalie and him break up. He's supposed to have everything, but the one thing he thought was a done deal - his most stalwart suppporter - just rejected him.

Netherbrain defeat (the Ascendent is not invited. Imagine being an all-powerful, hypersexual survival instinct vampire, and your ex-girlfriend neither wants you for sex, nor your power.)

Rosalie accidentally binds the Ascendent (a soulless devil) in a pact demanding that he never kill anyone, when that's literally what the Ascendent's new existence/new default moral alignment is driving him to do. Then, she fucks off and goes into hiding.

Well. The Ascendent can just get another wizard, to help him learn all of Cazador's secrets to cope [Hemlock is recruited].

The years go by! The Ascendent is doing sooooo well. Everything is great, guys! I'm rich, I'm beautiful, I have lavish parties and lots of sex - why do I feel nothing? I'm a vampire perfected - I have no hunger for blood, I can walk in the sun, I can enjoy all the freedoms of a living, breathing man - why do I feel like I'm starving? Why does everything turn to ashes in my mouth? I have friends - oops, I've sabotaged all those friendships with my innate neutral evil destruction. Why can't I feel anything? What's wrong with me? I'm doing everything right? Why doesn't it feel that way?

Also, I can't kill anything to feel better about it, because my hidden ex-girlfriend bound me in a pact.

In this time, to reflect the gradual degradation of the Ascendent's happiness and it's increasing awareness that it is something Other and innately wrong, the reflection starts going weird. Starts going strange. Starts getting a bit fucked up. Almost as if, when he looks in the mirror and sees a person, *nothing* should be what's there. Imagine being a spawn who couldn't see your reflection, and then a vampire who could see it's reflection, but knows that they're innately empty. Knows there's nothing there. I'd freak out a little bit about it as well tbh, I'd go a bit tooth and claw and elongated jaw about it.

The Ascendent finally admits that's there must be something kinda fucked about it. Life just ain't working out, lads. He starts looking for any and all impossible cures that will help with the malaise in his soul (and that innate essence problem, caused by default moral alignment). These include: more bad decisions, such as a house in Cania bc the Ascendent is hoping he'll feel more at home with devils than he does with mortals. All it does is make him feel more isolated and alone.

But eventually, he settles on two things! - Wish (Hemlock's idea), and Rosalie (the Ascendent's idea). Clearly, we just need Rosalie back! Her leaving is actually what fucked him up in the first place - none of this existential bullshit! She fixed us one, she can fix us again.

But looking for Rosalie hasn't worked out. In order to get a shot at her, the Ascendent goes and bargains for his own soul from Mephistopheles. Mephistopheles, adding a new sheet in excel titled 'what the fuck happens when i give this soulless monster a soul to play with?', agrees and starts tracking his new data.

Obviously, just putting the soul back in yourself will fix you. But the Ascendent, the nothingness living inside Astarion's body, will die. Taking the soul back would erase itself. The Ascendent - who is survival instinct personified - would never do this.

So instead, it starts interviewing and cannibalising the soul. Bc a soul is what it needs, this is the closest it's ever felt to being alive. Bc it's made this all about Rosalie, he thinks he's found his solution. The chase is making him feel alive again. It's true love, lads! not the soul.

Wish auction happens - the Ascendent is beaten to the punch by some unknown (hot) wizard.

This avenue cut off, the Ascendent makes the decision to try and win Rosalie back.

Astarion advises that to make her come back to the Gate, he should murder a bunch of people. Because this comes from the soul, not the soulless devil nothingness, it circumvents the pact.

...The events of Pieces begin!

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And finally - the Ascendent tries to destroy Jar!Starion for many reasons in Chapter 19:

The Ascendent knows that it dies, if the soul and the body get reunited (or is that constant high alert survival instinct just no longer needed, because the problem is fixed? you decide.)

The Ascendent values Tav above itself. Tav is going to fix them. Astarion believes he could never fix himself.

Dissociation - that soul isn't me. I'm here, looking at my soul. If I get too close, it'll kill me.

Self-hatred - that soul isn't me. That man made a mistake, and I've had to live with the consequences. He doesn't deserve to live, for what he's made me become.

The knowledge that Rosalie/Tav will only ever want that version of him, not the one that's living and breathing, that sees itself as the most wretched, fucked-up version of itself. So... give them no choice. They have to deal with me and love me at my worst.

And if the Rite didn't work - if the version of the Ascendent walking around isn't the best one, and the one people want... what was it all for? Why does the Ascendent feel like this? Why does it have to suffer?

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....And, that's my little meta post! If anyone has any questions about the timeline or any motivations at any points in the fic, I'm obviously more than happy to explain things via ask/comment, as always!

TLDR: I just wanted to make a Gothic horror. I wanted a dark romance, fucked up obsession vampire/mortal dynamic, but I also wanted a situation that was scary for both Astarion and my Tav. I personally think an Astarion who is so dissociated and separate from reality that he feels that in his bones daily, is scary. It's the lingering impact of the traumas the Rite and those 7,000 souls embodied.

I was literally just trying to make it a horror, for everyone involved.

#metaposts #long posts #my writing #wip: pieces still stuck in your teeth #spoilers! #i've never really explained my writing process before in this depth so... I hope it makes sense! #writing meta

[boredmezzosoprano]

In defence of Catherine Earnshaw

I just wanted to take this time to talk about the heroine of my all time favourite book Wuthering Heights. She is often described as "selfish" by a lot of readers and yes this is true, but there are reasons for why she acts the way she does. It bothers me how much quicker people are to defend Heathcliff than her when if you ask me, Heathcliff has done worse things than her i.e manipulating and abusing Isabella Linton, abusing his own sickly son, abusing Hareton and robbing him of his inheritance, manipulating Catherine Linton into marrying his son and then robbing her of her inheritance and kidnapping her so she couldn’t be with her dying father and then there’s the little matter of him being the last person to see Hindley before he mysteriously dies (admittedly Hindley was an a$$hole, but still). Don’t think I’m unsympathetic to Heathcliff’s own pain and suffering - I am, it’s just that you cannot judge Cathy harshly while whitewashing Heathcliff’s character🤷🏼‍♀️ Anyway the points I want people to keep in mind are thus:

Like Heathcliff, nobody ever really raised Cathy as her parents both died when she was a child (and even then she wasn’t the favourite of either of them) and Hindley and Nelly couldn’t have been less bothered. Even though the Linton's tried to tame her spirit and mould her into "a lady" it makes sense that her default mode will always be that of a feral child.

People often accuse her of being a gold digger and yes she did plan on marrying Edgar for his money in the hopes of using that money to get Heathcliff out from under Hindley's tyranny, it should be remembered that Cathy really did love Edgar too just not as much as Heathcliff. Also how was she to know that Heathcliff was able to make his own fortune? Given that he never reveals how he made his money and nobody ever finds out how could she have known. It’s speculated that he became a highwayman i.e a glorified thief, most people would choose to avoid living such a precarious lifestyle if given the choice and its hard to blame for not wanting to live a vagabond existence, even Heathcliff admits that he "struggled". As a woman living in the 1700s the only honourable way she could make any kind of life for herself was by getting married!

When she marries Edgar she had no idea where Heathcliff was and when or if he was ever coming back and her choices were limited to marrying into a family who treat you well or stay in your own chaotic and miserable household with your violent drunk if a brother and a maid who’s made it clear she hates you and does not see you as worth her time. So yeah…

Catherine seems to suffer from some sort of disease that’s only ever described as "brain fever". Some readers have described it as encephalitis and others have called it epilepsy. In any case anytime she’s aggravated or upset in anyway she becomes violently ill and this ultimately kills her. With that in mind it becomes understandable that she would actively avoid anything that would cause her any distress as it could (and did) kill her!

There were moments in the book where Cathy with her mood swings came across to me as being bipolar or at least having some kind of personality disorder. Nelly describes her as "having seasons of gloom" during her marriage and she self harms a couple of times in the book. She also threatens to kill herself if it would get a reaction! She seems to place her own sense of value on the men in her life which shows a fundamental lack of self esteem. As someone with BPD these things all hit home for me very deeply, but unlike Cathy I have the freedom to back away from situations that trigger me (well most of the time) and access to medications that even my moods.

While it was undeniably harsh of Cathy to humiliate Isabella by revealing her feelings for Heathcliff with both of them in the room but at the same time she wasn’t wrong to try to snap Isabella out of this naive fantasy. Isabella is a character I care about deeply but it’s obvious that she was in way over her head when it came to Heathcliff! Cathy knew better than anyone that he hated Isabella and would only hurt her. Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind. Poor Isabella does ultimately learn too late that Cathy was right. Even Nelly has to begrudgingly agree with Cathy on this one.

Speaking of Nelly, it should be remembered that everything we learn about Cathy as well as many other characters, we learn only from Nelly who it is clear is quite biased against the characters whose story she is telling. Because she can’t relate to the intense emotions of the other characters she tends to assume that it must be because there’s something wrong with them. It’s entirely possible that Nelly made Cathy out to be far worse than she actually was. It has to be said that Nelly is a character that I tend to back and forth on…

Anyway that’s my take on Catherine Earnshaw. If you disagree that’s fine but please no rude comments cuz we’re all adults and we can agree to disagree😉

#wuthering heights #catherine earnshaw #Cathy and Heathcliff #cathycliff #character study #emily bronte

[mk-wizard]

Proof that the Decepticon Way is Not Evil

Hello, Transformer fans.

After doing an essay on the glaring flaws in the Autobot way, I wanted to do one that points out the virtues in the Decepticon way. Note that these good points do not make Decepticons like Megatron or Starscream any less evil. A criminal/terrorist is still a criminal/terrorist regardless of how they identify as and nothing Megatron, Starscream, Knockout or anyone else says or does will dismiss their crimes. Also, Starscream is just a stinker in general. He is NOT the standard of how Decepticons are as even other bad ones don’t like him and think he’s a stinker.

This essay is meant to point out the TRUE things the Decepticon way stands for and why many bots believe in it, and how Megatron and other criminals don’t stand for it as much as they claim they do.

They allow free speech. - If there is one thing that we consider as the bedrock of all freedom, it is free speech even if we may not always like what the other person has to say. While most of the time, this practise of the exercise to say whatever you want is taken too far among the Decepticon terrorists to the point where they show no respect, but the fact that they can is telling. While I myself don’t encourage unkind words, I will chalk one up for the Decepticons in how a Decepticon can say what they want even to Megatron’s face and while he will chastise them vocally for it, unless your words have treacherous implications, he will not so much as give you a slap on the hand. In fact, Megatron will actually listen to someone if they have a good idea or will point out the flaws in his idea. A society that allows people to say what they mean even if it is “my leader stinks” is one that has the right idea. After all, how can you become a better society if no one is allowed to say what is bothering them so the problem can be fixed?

They assign leaders based on merit not a title. - Though the lineage of Decepticon leaders is passed on by default from the one Megatron/Megara to the their child, they are more than willing to make exceptions if someone better for the role comes along. Heck, heirs/heiresses have even been known to refuse the role of leadership. I have to admit that a system that recognises that leadership is not a trait that is passed down genetically is progressive. And for that, I give a point to the Decepticons in that. In Autobot society, a leader system is either hierarchical (from one Prime to their child) or the Autobot Matrix “selects” a leader (and might I add, sometimes, people have been known to misinterpret the Matrix’s reaction or lie about it entirely). The Autobot people have no say whatseover.

They respect individuality. - Did you know that an Autobot can live in a Decepticon community without converting? It’s true. In fact, there are many Autobots who live among Decepticons. Another thing that Decepticons allow is the freedom to believe in what you want meaning they permit people to be Atheist and allow varying levels of how devout you are. They believe religion is a personal thing. Another thing that is obvious about Decepticons is how different all of them are and not just visually. Their alt modes are very diverse. You change into anything you want even if it has nothing to do with your job because they accept that your alt mode doesn’t hinder you from doing your job. Look at Knockout who changes into a luxury car while being a Decepticon medic, Soundwave who changes into a palm sized cassette player and is Megatron’s confidante, and Reflector who change into a camera and is a force to be reckoned with. The only exception are the Seekers and from what I have seen, the Seekers are a special case of which they have the same mold because it is uniform in their case which they consider as an honour to wear. And even then, you can choose your own colours. Another thing that I notice and actually is rather heartwarming is that among Decepticons, they are even more diverse in terms of culture. They have bots of varying origins which you can tell by their accents. Among Autobots, you either sound American (even when oriental). From what I recall, only Perceptor had a European accent (British specifically). When they said “till all are one”, I they didn’t mean all had to be the same.

They are more feminist. - As much as I don’t want to be “that girl”, I have to give hats off to the Decepticons in how they treat women and this shows most of all in how they DRESS the women. Even when a female Decepticon is very feminine that dresses femininely, she will be covered and be dressed for the part rather than show a lot of plating (skin) or be overly pretty. Just compare designs using this list. As much as I myself don’t see anything wrong with female characters dressing beautifully, sexy or being naturally beautiful and sexy, or even them dressing sexy on their own time (I do sometimes), but there is a definite night and day difference between how female Autobots behave and how female Decepticons do. The Decepticon females are more professional and don’t do cute. Note that Blackarachnia was originally a Predacon not a Decepticon and she is also the exception not the standard. And even then, Blackarachnia was honestly good at her job, she was a genius scientist in her own right and she could take care of herself. Even Prime Arcee doesn’t display this level independence or emotional maturity. Another thing that is telling about how they see women and what they value in them is the kind of woman Megatron fell in love with. In G1, Megatron was attracted to a robot ninja Nightbird who wasn’t even a Transformer and wasn’t dressed sexy or anything. She never even flirted with him. He was charmed by her skills as a warrior and how she got the job done. This speaks volumes.

Megatron gives Decepticons a choice on whether to follow him or not. - And no, I am not talking about how he deals with traitors like Starscream. Since the days of G1, there have been Decepticons who did not work under Megatron and Megatron did not criminalise these Decepticons for it. He gives Decepticons a choice on whether or not to serve him directly, and if they say “no”, he moves on. The only time he will ever criminalise a Decepticon is if they directly act against him which is really the only valid reason to criminalise them. Megatron has even been known to respect Decepticons who were independent enough to do without him.

They do not outcast or ostracise the misfits or handicapped. - If there is one noble thing the Decepticons do that I will always take my hat off to them, it is that they do not deem a bot useless or will lock them up for being different or imperfect and they recognise that having a handicap doesn’t make you disabled at everything. Heck, they even employ unchangers (Transformers who cannot transform)! And I can’t help but notice that almost every beast type with the exception of the Dinobots is a Decepticon. I mean, just look at RID. All of the inmates were beast types. They aren’t concerned with what you can’t do or whether you’re pretty to look at. They are just concerned with what you can do. I also want to point out that their own leader Megatron may very well be a mutant, beast type or both. And in the defence of the beast types, mutants and the handicapped, where did the Autobots expect them to go if they got deemed as freaks or were chased out of town everywhere else? As we saw in Animated, Blitzwing who suffers from split personality disorder was still a high ranking respected officer who served Megatron directly and proved to still be a force to be reckoned with as he has a multi-elemental arsenal, he is an amazing fighter, he is a responsible leader when needed and he is a genius. Then we have the Insecticons from Prime who are fiercely loyal to Megatron and not for nothing. Megatron stands up for them even when other Decepticons badmouth them.

The Decepticon way is based on freedom. - The whole reason the Decepticons came to be and all of the points I listed all come back to freedom in all its forms. And after seeing that the Autobot way is not very free at all, is it any wonder that the Decepticons came to be? Now, I am not condoning any criminal activity or terrorism, but I cannot blame rebellion and the demand for change. If you even look closely at the Decepticon insignia, it looks like there is a flying vehicle on it and it was confirmed that this was intentional. Another thing that was intentional since G1 is that all Decepticons can fly in robot mode at least like Superman (though some series forget this fact). The ability to fly is in fact a metaphor for freedom and the original Megatron who founded the Decepticons (not the one we know now) wanted every Decepticon to be able to fly because he wanted every Decepticon to always remember what their faction stands for. Like I said, nothing the bad Decepticons say justifies their criminal activity or terrorism, but it’s clear that the Decepticon way itself isn’t evil.

This is why I think it is also high time we saw more good Decepticons who refuse to convert.

#transformers #transformers fandom #transformers decepticons #decepticons #autobots #transformers megatron #transformers fanfiction #transformers fanart #fanfiction #fanart #starscream

[thirddoctor]

Aside from being a bit too angry and shouty, Dhawan would be totally fine if he’d been introduced before we got Missy. He’s a good actor, and he has a lot of little moments I do like. I know the kneeling scene feels a bit uncomfortable due to the gender dynamics but I think it would be totally in-character for the Master prior to Missy. Same with his gleeful murder rampage at the exhibition. And I really like the “how’s the shoulder?” “painful” exchange---the way he smiles while saying that is fascinating. I also like his childlike pride at having hit C in one shot. There are so many nice bits of characterisation that it makes the overall mess all the more frustrating.

If we hadn’t gotten Missy, I would have quite happily accepted him (the Gallifrey stuff less so, but we’ll see where that goes). I mean, even his seemingly intense hatred for the Doctor/stronger than usual desire to kill her wouldn’t feel too OOC, because the Master has been like that before, particularly when they’re driven by bitterness (Crispy, for example). And he doesn’t actually kill her when he has the perfect opportunity to throw her off the Eiffel Tower, and he seems to plan on her being alive since he leaves that message for her. There’s nothing more Master-ish than constantly flip-flopping on killing the Doctor.

But after Missy, it just feels very hollow. After I saw Simm, I just wanted a Master who felt more like the Classic version of the character. I probably would have enjoyed Dhawan a lot, because while he’s not that Classic-feeling, he’s closer than Simm and also just generally more likeable. But we got Missy, and she was so good and not only did she honour the character’s history (all I really asked for) she went beyond that and actually took the character in a new direction. We were finally getting some really interesting development and to have all that wiped away (without even a single mention) for no reason is extremely frustrating.

I know some people are saying, “Well, what did you expect? It’s the nature of the show to reset to the status quo.” But that doesn’t have to be the case. There are plenty of ways in which long-running elements of the show have changed and developed. And there are even ways to continue using the Master as an antagonist without regressing the character. I didn’t need them to be a hero suddenly---I don’t think that would have made sense. Missy hadn’t become a good person at the end of TDF, but she’d made the first step and I wanted to see where that journey led. If the answer is nowhere because the Master will always snap back to their default evil mode, why should I care about anything the show does with them? I know it’s not going to mean anything. And it makes the character so boring. Imagine if we’d gotten a complicated morally grey Master with ambiguous intentions. There are so many new directions you could take them in---new kinds of Master stories to tell. But instead we’re just retreading old ground because the status quo is more iconic and marketable I guess.

Anyway, that’s my take so far. Who knows, maybe the finale will somehow turn it all around. I would like nothing better than to be proven wrong in my doubts. But I’m not holding my breath.

#Ranger yells about the Master #Ranger shut up about Doctor Who #Master meta #DW spoilers

[hellzyeahthewebwieldingavenger]

So I re-read Infinity Gauntlet #1 today, having also read the Avengers vs. Thanos trade and Rebirth of Thanos trade before it. A few years ago Marvel put out several trades that you can sort of read in a provided sequence to get the broad strokes of Thanos’ history so I’ve been trying to follow that. It greatly alters reading Infinity Gauntlet out of context.

Infinity Gauntlet Thanos, even before the movies, was easily the most iconic ‘mode’ for Thanos and obviously his most iconic story, so it was in the minds of many (especially those who’d heard of him but not read much of him) very much the presumed default setting for him.

When you read his whole history up to that point though you see how it was simultaneously a sequel to the second (arguably first) ever Thanos storyline ‘The Thanos War’ event (yes the 1970s still had event comics, they were just not labelled that) and also the natural evolution for his character.

It just highlighted and reinforced however how much more sense the original story made compared to the Infinity War film.

Comic book Thanos is the mad titan on two levels.

The first is that outside observers see him as the ultimate nihilist, a lunatic who literally worships Death to the point where he’s actively trying to destroy whole stars. To such people obviously he looks nuts.

To the readers though, Thanos’ motives in this regard aren’t really that crazy. At least they eventually come off that way. Whilst int he earliest Thanos stories featuring Mistress Death you could argue that’s all in Thanos’ insane head, it eventually becomes clear that it actually really isn’t.

Death is a literal entity, that at least appears to Thanos to be a tangible female figure and he is literally in love with her.

He kills basically to impress and honour her.

Which brings us to the second level for Thanos’ madness, the REAL reason he is the Mad Titan. It isn’t that he is nuts because he kills so many people, or because he thinks Death is an actual person.

He’s Mad because he doesn’t get that...she’s just not that into him. 

He doesn’t get that her being the personification of one of the fundamental forces of the cosmos and him being mortal means...she’s out of his league.

THAT is the real reason he’s mad.

He isn’t the kind of lazy story version of ‘mad’ wherein it’s used a licence for him to do anything irrational.

The best written villains who’re not in their right minds as a fundamental cornerstone to their characters can still be understood, they still make sense within the framework of their warped mentalities that the audience should understand.

This is even true of any of the good versions of the Joker. 

Whether he’s simply does cruel and horrible things because he believes the world to be one big joke and finds death funny or that he’s simply an agent of chaos because he realizes that’s the only truth of life with justice, order and morality as a joke, you get why he does the things he does. In particular in the latter rendition he is consistent in being consistent. His bouncing between contradictory irrational actions is still rooted in a reason.

Movie Thanos though...isn’t.

He wants to end half of all life because there aren’t enough resources for everyone to survive off of. Okay that makes sense.

But he’s going to do it via these items that give him ultimate power over everything, wherein he can shape reality to be whatever he wants and so could just make MORE resources, remove beings abilities to breed, move half of all life into a pocket universe, etc. Not to mention that surviving half will multiply to the point where the same problem would occur.

As soon as you introduce THIS level of power to Thanos his original M.O. breaks down to the point where the ONLY justification possible is ‘he’s insane okay so he doesn’t have to make sense’.

Compare this to the comic book Thanos who’s madness is not only understandable but who seeks the Infinity Gems for an entirely different reason.

He doesn’t want to kill 50% of everyone, he wants to become a worthy lover to the woman he has the hots for. 

It’s DEATH who wants him to kill half of all life, Thanos himself only cares about that up to the point where it can impress her or else be used as a cover story for him seeking the Infinity Gems. It’s not at all a key facet to defining who he is as a person.

his nihilism and (very literal) necrophilia is. 

And I’ll be honest...it makes him more unique too. 

Say what you want about every other comic book super villain but ‘is bad because he is literally in love with Death’ is an original motivation.

P.S. He isn’t even right about the over population problem. In the real world we don’t actually HAVE an over population problem, the media just claims we do because they don’t get science

#avengers infinity war #infinty war #thanos #Infinity Gauntlet

[sileeeles]

S9+ Review

Visually stunning. Amazing camera. Amazing screen. But as they say, looks aren't everything.

You will noticed that I mention and compare to HTC a lot, and this is because that its my only other point of reference. Its all I’ve had, Android wise, for the past 4 years.

So, mostly in order of things you encounter, I shall try to share my thoughts and feelings. First of all the size. Its fairly large. For people with dinky fingers/hands, I wouldn’t recommend it, I’d go with the regular S9. But the S9+ is perfect for me as I have larger hands and stubby fingers. I’ve always struggled on 4 inches or less especially with typing, I’ll come to that later. The main noticeable difference between the two is the camera setup. Beyond that the S9+ has a slightly larger battery capacity and 2 more gigabytes of ram over the S9.

One of the main things I thought would bug me, is the screen. The rounded corners. Which, overall, costs you 0.1 of an inch of screen real estate. And it hasn’t bothered me at all. Its rather cool and interesting. More interesting than that is the odd aspect ratio. 18:5.9. The .9 apparently accounts for the curvature of the glass at the sides. Which is another thing I thought would bug me. My wife didn’t get the S7 Edge because she thought the curves would be annoying, but these are more subtle and ... less curvy than those models. And it hasn't really been an issue. Sometimes (usually on badly optimized websites and a few pictures) the text spills over the edge no matter what you do, but turning the phone landscape usually makes everything visible. Apps and games all tend to scale themselves to whatever they work best at, but you can have them be full-screen if you wish. It warns you that some apps may no work or behave well when forced into full-screen, but thus far I’ve never had an issue.

The phone has a headphone socket (thank god) and has basically ripped off what HTC was doing with Boomsound. And more specifically, what they were doing with the HTC 10. You see, the Boomsound speakers that were part of the M7/M8/M9 were gone on the HTC 10. At the time (I had an M8), it was like a revelation. Why on earth wouldn't ALL smartphone manufacturers do this? Many of them, including Samsung, put the speaker on the back of the phone which was often muffled by your hand when you were holding it. HTC changed that, although rather than having the two speakers on the HTC 10, they opted to have one at the bottom of the phone, and used the earpiece speaker for the other. It worked, although something was lost in translation. It sounded good, and still a lot better than many of the other phones around at the time,but it never really had clear or consistent stereo or sound. Maybe because the down-firing speaker did the mids and lows, and the earpiece speaker did the highs, which were mostly just tinny and quiet. Rather than just the one speaker now, Samsung has seemingly copied HTC’s effort and used exactly the same system. However, it sounds infinitely better. The sound from it is very clear stereo, at times almost like it surrounds you. Partly, I assume, down to the Dolby Atmos/AKG tuning (which also includes some very nice and good sounding headphones in the box). As far as I know, HTC has not included Dolby in their phones since the Desire HD which also had SRS (and was my preferred sound setting).

We’ve also switched to USB C (also present on the S8/S8+) which is a much welcome improvement. In my experience it has been far more reliable and less damageable than Micro USB ever was, indeed after two years the USB C port on my HTC 10 is still going strong.

The physical buttons are something that will undoubtedly become a point of contention, largely because of the Bixby button. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not bothered by Bixbys existence. By and large, you can just disable it and ignore the fact that it was ever there. But the button was placed stupidly. Directly below the volume buttons, particularly on the S9+ where there is a tad more reaching for things, meant that I was pressing it. A lot. Which is a problem. Because initially I disabled Bixby all together. But I didn't really want the button to go to waste. So I searched, and as you would imagine I wasn’t the only one wanting to re-map it. And someone has helped with that, they created an incredibly useful app called bxActions. Which I mapped to the Camera. But of course the same thing kept happening. I pressed the button by accident, and the camera kept popping up. So I disabled it again, and had it play/pause audio when the screen was off. Yes, I do know that there are features like double press and long press, and perhaps it is worth using those instead. However, they are “pro” features you need to pay for.

The home button and hardware touch keys are gone. Replaced instead with Androids navigation bar (which is re-mapable by default so you can put the buttons the right way around). The home key is pressure sensitive (what they call 3D Touch which sounds more like an Apple thing). I’ve not really needed to use it, to be honest, or understand what its for. If the phone is locked, you can press the home key (if you can find it) instead of the power button, which takes you to the lock screen and whatever method of security you happen to have (iris of whatever). But I can bypass needing to do any of that by just using my fingerprint. Which is what I tend to do, beyond the “hey look at this, my phone unlocks when I look at it” novelty. I’m also incredibly aware with this phone that it has the potential to get screen burn in. This increases exponentially with things that are on the screen for longer periods of time than others. Such as the navigation bar. What would lower that risk, is having the position of the symbols move a pixel or so from where it was last time, each time the phone is active or each time the navigation bar is on screen.

The phone, like the models before it including the s6/s7 has a glass back. But in Samsung's case, there is a reason for it extending all the way back to those models as well. How big a reason that is, ultimately, is down the the individual user. And I imagine, most of the individual users would rather they didn't have something that was breakable. As if the front of the phone wasn't already enough of a risk for that. The reason for it is Wireless charging. If you’re like me, nothing will ever beat the cable, and wireless charging is fiddly at best. You need to get it in the right spot, and from what I’ve seen, it was never really that fast. Certainly not as fast as the fast charger.

Using the phone is, at this point, pretty intuitive. If you’ve used Android for long enough, you know where everything is and how everything works. Software wise, there is not much that you can moan about. There is, overall, less bloatware and what there is, most of it can be uninstalled. Samsung wise, their layout of things is a little ... oddly arranged but you get used to it. At this point its pretty close to the way HTC was laying things out.

One thing that does bug me though, is that there is a lot of content they will charge you for. Such as themes. HTC never had such a system, indeed you could create and customize pretty much each area that you wanted. Wallpaper, lock-screen, app background, icons, ringtones, even the background of sms messages. Whilst Samsung themes will do this, there is no option to create each one individually yourself, and there is no way (at least that I’ve found) where you can apply individual items from certain themes. For instance if I only want the icons, I can’t do that. I need to install the whole theme and the re apply my wallpaper and ringtone afterwards etc. Another thing is the warning you get when you turn the volume up so far. I don't need it every time, yes I know its not sensible, its never for very long, go away! Its as bad as the Netflix "Are you still watching?" Yes. And my controller turned off two episodes ago and is over the other side of the room! Go away!

One thing I have been using that I would normally have ignored, largely because it was already there and I wanted to explore, is Samsung Health (which was previously just called S Health). It will allow you to track a variety of things, including steps every day, excersize, heart rate and stress (there are sensors in the phone that include this, which is pretty normal for Samsung). It even allows you to track sleep, and even has the ability to keep track of blood sugar levels and such for diabetics.

A few of the packaged defaults I have changed. For instance the keyboard. There is nothing wrong, or that I found wrong, with the default Samsung keyboard. I am just far to used to Swiftkey, and my defaults within that, so I installed that. It has a one handed mode just like the Samsung default, so it makes it easier to type with one hand. Also the music player I have used, and will probably always use on Android is PowerAmp. Also use Chrome as well.

The camera is probably the most interesting thing about the phone at this point. It was the most heavily marketed aspect of it (because, ultimately, I suspect there isn't much different from the S8+). Whilst everything thats included in it is, at this point, nothing new ... well, except the variable F-stop, maybe, its the way it has been implemented that is cool. More so on the S9+ with the extra telephoto lens. I was an avid user of the slow motion on the HTC 10 (and the M8 I had before it) and for the S9/S9+ to have that in a supercharged way, is very fun for me, although they aren’t the first to include 960FPS. That honour goes to the Sony Xperia XZ I believe.

The always on display is cool, although I’ve found that, honestly, id rather have it off than have it on, and if I have it on, the design I’d choose is the edge one. Thankfully the risk of burn in from this is minimal, as it changes position and never stays in one place too long.

Beyond the phone, some of the extras that I have found to be useful are the adapters included in the box. Specifically the Micro USB to USB C adapter. Because, more than once I’ve forgotten my charger, and nowhere (at least nowhere cheap) seems to have USB C cables for sale. They’re all bloody Micro USB. This adapter means that I needn’t worry if I forget my charger again. I just go into poundland and buy a cable. You also get the standard OTG adapter in the box. Samsung's intended purpose for this, I believe, is for you to connect your old phone to it and copy over your content. But it has many more uses beyond that including game controllers, even charging up other devices and connecting USB sticks to your phone.

#samsung #galaxy #s9 #s9+ #s9 plus #htc #htc10 #boomsound #dolby #atmos #bixby #bxactions #usbc #android #electronic

[adelineadkin]

Lawyer Ethics in the Virtual Courtroom

By: Gideon Christian

PDF Version: Lawyer Ethics in the Virtual Courtroom

The COVID-19 pandemic has radically altered the way we live, work, and play. As will be examined below, it has altered the way lawyers conduct litigation. By mid-March 2020, the justice system in Canada (and in most other jurisdictions around the world) was scrambling to change its default ways of doing business – from the service of court documents to hearing of matters before the courts. Within a very short timeline, the courts and the legal profession quickly became open to doing things in a way they have long resisted.

Practice directions emerged overnight permitting parties to electronically file and serve documents. Virtual hearing became the default mode of court hearings in many jurisdictions during the early stage of the pandemic. On March 19, 2020, the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales issued a directive that, “[t]he default position now in all jurisdictions must be that hearings should be conducted with one, more than one or all participants attending remotely.”

Soon, in-person hearings gave way to e-person hearings using innovative videoconferencing technologies like Zoom, WebEx, Teams, Skype, GoToMeeting, BlueJeans, CourtCall, etc. For many in the legal profession who were previously familiar with these technologies, the transition was very smooth. For the Luddites who were forced to embrace the change, the transition turned out to be (to their amazement), not as difficult as they had previously thought. They have discovered that legal technology is no rocket science after all.

The fact, though, is that the COVID-19 pandemic has let the legal technology genie out of the bottle. It will never fit back, and this is fortunate, because so much has changed. There is no going back to the “good old days” – whatever was good about those days. Electronic hearings in virtual courtrooms will revolutionize our judicial system in ways we never imagined. Rather than waiting for things to return to normal so that we can go back to practicing law the way we used to, every reasonable lawyer should prepare and brace up for an exponential growth in the use of technology in their practice. There will be increased use of electronic hearings in the resolution of civil disputes whether by mediation, arbitration or litigation. For civil litigators I say, get used to it.

As lawyers, the shift from in-person to e-person hearings in virtual courtrooms has not lessened our ethical obligations. On the contrary, it has raised our duties, especially as litigators. There are novel professional and ethical duties that arise from the change that has been imposed on us by the COVID-19 pandemic. While some of these duties arise expressly from our existing code of professional conduct, some others can be implied from it. Below, I will examine some of these. 

Technological Competence

All provincial and territorial codes of professional conduct impose a duty of competence on lawyers. A competent lawyer “has and applies relevant knowledge, skills and attributes in a manner appropriate to each matter undertaken on behalf of a client and the nature and terms of the lawyer’s engagement” (Federation of Law Societies of Canada, Model Code of Professional Conduct, Rule 3.1 (Model Code)). The duty of competence is fundamental to ethical lawyering. A lawyer who lacks competence does disservice to the client and brings discredit to the profession (Rule 3.1-2 [15], Model Code)). While a competent lawyer is not required to know everything about the law, they must be skilled and knowledgeable in the matter undertaken on behalf of the client. This will inevitably include skills and knowledge in the use of the tools needed to efficiently and effectively perform the tasks undertaken on behalf of the client.

This is where technological competence comes into the equation. In recent years, we have witnessed the continued development of legal technologies that dramatically reduce the cost of legal services. Predictive coding technology is being used to substantially lower the cost of eDiscovery document review in litigation. And as discussed above, tele- and video-conferencing technologies are increasingly being used to conduct hearings. Even in a world without COVID-19, the use of these technologies can result in cost efficiencies for the client – reducing lawyer’s travel and accommodation costs which are subsequently billed to the client.

In the COVID-19 era, these technologies have become a household tool for legal practice. They are primary and efficient means of meeting with clients and opposing parties and conducting questionings and hearings. In light of the current state of legal practice and our justice system, can we still factually assert that lawyers who lack skills and knowledge in the use of these technologies are competent lawyers?

The Federation of Law Societies of Canada (the umbrella body of all the territorial and provincial law societies) had late last year adopted a 2017 proposed amendment to the Model Code of Professional Conduct to explicitly impose a duty of technological competence on lawyers in Canada.

The amendment to rule 3.1-2[5A] of the Model Code provides that “[t]o maintain the required level of competence, a lawyer should develop and maintain a facility with technology relevant to the nature and area of the lawyer’s practice and responsibilities.” This amendment, which predates the COVID-19 pandemic, has become more necessary than ever. The Law Society of Alberta amended its Code of Conduct (LSA Code) on February 20, 2020 – specifically Rule 3.1-2, Commentaries 5 and 6 – to reflect this obligation. The fact that some 38 states in the United States have already adopted this duty in their codes of conduct goes further to show its relevance to lawyers and the profession.

For lawyers in provinces and territories yet to adopt the duty of technological competence, you need not wait for your provincial or territorial law society. Take immediate steps to acquire vital legal technology skills and knowledge that will set you apart from the crowd. The COVID-19 pandemic will create many successful law practices along with many failures. And I make bold to predict that lawyers who will emerge successful from this pandemic will be predominantly those who have expended time and resources to build their legal technology skills, knowledge and resources. So, take the time to innovate your legal practice, otherwise you will be left behind. Familiarise yourself with (among others) virtual courtroom technologies, because the virtual courtroom is here to stay.

Civility – Courtesy and Good Faith

The success of remote hearings in virtual courtrooms will inevitably require the cooperation and professionalism of all parties in the proceedings, including counsel and their clients. A lawyer has a duty to “be courteous and civil and act in good faith to the tribunal and all persons with whom the lawyer has dealings” (Rule 5.1-6 LSA Code). Notwithstanding the adversarial nature of the proceeding, a lawyer must act in good faith and cooperate with opposing counsel at all stages of the virtual proceedings – including, but not limited to, preparation and conduct of the proceedings in the virtual courtroom. A lawyer should consent to reasonable requests from opposing counsel relating to trial dates and time (especially where the party’s witnesses live in a different time zone), adjournments (in cases of technical difficulties, e.g. connectivity), and waivers of procedural requirements that may not be prejudicial to the interest of their client, especially where such waivers may be necessary to accommodate hearings in a virtual courtroom setting. Counsel should resist any urging from their clients to act in an unreasonable and uncooperative manner.

The duty of courtesy and good faith also obligates lawyers to avoid sharp practice and not take advantage of slips or mistakes by the opposing party that do not go to the merit of the case or that are not prejudicial to the rights of the client (Rule 7.2-3 LSA Code). The virtual courtroom environment is still new to most lawyers. While some lawyers might be sophisticated in their knowledge and use of the technology, many others are still struggling to develop their technological skill set. For the latter group, it should be expected that their learning process will be characterised by slips and mistakes. It will be unethical for lawyers to take advantage of such slips or mistakes by opposing counsel (that does not go to the merit of the case) to secure benefits to which their clients are clearly not entitled. Always remember that your client has no legal entitlement to a benefit founded on error (Rule 7.2-3[3] LSA Code).

Advocacy

Oral advocacy in a virtual courtroom presents new challenges to lawyers. Many lawyers have before now built their oral advocacy on a theatrical courtroom environment characterised by pomp and drama. With all the physical space in the physical courtroom, the lawyer has much room to dramatize. This dramatic environment may be lost in the virtual courtroom where the lawyer is subject to very limited space – they must remain within the limited scope of the camera or microphone. This changed environment imposes a professional obligation on the lawyer to develop new advocacy skills necessary to “represent the client resolutely and honourably within the limits of the law, while treating the tribunal with candour, fairness, courtesy and respect” (Rule 5.1-1 Model Code). A lawyer’s theatrical fireworks in a physical courtroom when re-enacted in a virtual courtroom may come off as a terrible blast. On a positive note though, the restricted environment in a virtual courtroom may actually enhance the dignity, decorum, and courtesy in the courtroom and reduce the theatrical drama of which laypersons have often been critical of physical courtroom trials.

When acting as an advocate, the lawyer is openly and necessarily partisan and generally not obligated to assist a party adverse in interest. That notwithstanding, counsel should seriously consider their professional obligations when engaged in litigation involving a non-lawyer self-represented litigant. The obligation to clearly inform the self-represented litigant that you do not act for them remains even in a virtual courtroom setting. This is even more important as the act of preparing for the virtual courtroom proceeding may result in frequent communication between the lawyer and the self-represented litigant which may erroneously lead the latter to believe that lawyer may also be acting in the interest of the self-represented litigant.

In Best Practices for Remote Hearings, developed by the joint E-Hearings Task Force of The Advocates’ Society, the Ontario Bar Association, the Federation of Ontario Law Associations, and the Ontario Trial Lawyers Association, they recommended that in dealing with self-represented litigants in virtual courtroom environment, counsel should:

(i) not take advantage of a self-represented litigant’s unfamiliarity with rules of practice and procedure, and, if practicable, point them to sources of information and advice to help them understand their obligations, including duty counsel services, where available;

(ii) where possible, consider providing other assistance (including technical assistance) to a self-represented litigant when doing so will not prejudice or conflict with their client obligations, will move the case forward, and will not result in significant costs; and

(iii) be alert to the potential for self-represented litigants to be “left behind” during a remote hearing, and take reasonable steps to ensure that self-represented litigants are following the proceeding.

eHearings in the Best Interest of the Client

The virtual courtroom is a revolutionary by-product of the COVID-19 pandemic. There is no doubt that the virtual courtroom holds great benefit for the justice system. For the client, it may represent some great savings in legal costs and efficient adjudication of their matters. But this does not mean that the virtual courtroom is suitable for all cases. Cases that are heavily reliant on the demeanour of the witnesses, or cases built on physical (as opposed to electronic) evidence are not really suitable for the virtual courtroom environment.

Respondents to a survey conducted by DLA Piper, a global law firm, noted that complex commercial disputes may not be amenable to remote hearing in a virtual courtroom because of the need for detailed technical presentation and models at the hearing. It is important to study the nature of your client’s case to determine whether it is really in their best interests to proceed by way of remote hearing in a virtual courtroom.

Having come to the conclusion that a virtual hearing is in the best interest of your client, it is important to carry the client along in the decision-making process. Remember that the case belongs to the client and not to you as the lawyer. Hence, it is important to seek the consent of the client to proceed in a virtual environment. Electronic hearings are still relatively new to our justice system. To many clients, their idea of a trial is still the old default in-person process. They may have a legitimate expectation that their matter will proceed in that format. The clients may want to have their day in court and not in Zoom. If the client refuses to consent to a virtual hearing, the lawyer must comply with the client’s directive (subject to the direction of the court) unless the client is so unreasonable that there is a serious loss of confidence between the lawyer and client, in which case the lawyer may withdraw from representation in accordance with the provisions for withdrawal in the appropriate code of conduct.

Communication in the Virtual Courtroom

Lawyers are generally free to communicate with clients in the courtroom as long as it does not interfere with the proceedings. Lawyers may need to communicate with their clients during the proceeding to assist in the client’s understanding of the process. However, there are communications in courtroom settings that are not only unethical but legally prohibited. An example is where the client (as a witness) is being examined or cross-examined by the tribunal or opposing party. The lawyer for the client/witness is prohibited from interfering with or obstructing the examination or cross-examination. In a physical courtroom setting, the fact that the witness is in a witness box which is some distance away from the bar reduces the likelihood of a lawyer’s inappropriate communication with the client/witness.

However, in a virtual courtroom setting, the client may be in much closer proximity to their counsel. For example, they may be sharing the same computer screen. This proximity may give rise to the tendency for counsel to communicate with their clients by whispering answers during the proceeding. The ethical duty against improperly influencing witnesses during examination or cross-examination also applies in a virtual courtroom. Such conduct is highly unethical and may give rise to professional discipline.

In Law Society of Alberta v Adelowokan, 2020 ABLS 3 (CanLII), a lawyer was reprimanded for her conduct during an immigration hearing conducted by videoconference. During the course of the examination of the refugee applicant by the single-member panel, the lawyer on many occasions whispered answers which were taken up by the client and repeated to the panel member’s questions. A virtual courtroom setting will result in lawyers being in closer proximity with their clients during questionings or examinations. Counsel must be cautious and avoid the tendency to engage in inappropriate communication with their clients that may obstruct proceedings and result in disciplinary actions.

Even in cases where communication with the client may be proper, lawyers need to be careful about the risks involved in using technology to communicate with clients in a virtual courtroom. For example, Zoom videoconference software provides a feature that enable participants to privately communicate. But what is not often understood is that private communications using this feature cease to be private at the end of the meeting. Once the meeting is over, the private communication forms part of the larger transcript. Hence, any solicitor-client communication using the private communication feature may lose privilege.

Virtual Courtroom Etiquette

Counsel has an ethical duty to treat the court with courtesy and respect. This obligation applies even in the virtual courtroom where counsel is still at all times subject to court etiquette and procedures. While various practice directions have exempted lawyers from robing when appearing in the virtual courtroom, these directions have not in any way excused lawyers from appropriate dressing in the virtual courtroom. By appropriate dressing, I mean appropriate from head to toe and not just from head to waist. There is a common tendency when using videoconferencing technologies to appropriately dress from head to waist. This is based on the notion that the camera will often focus on the upper part of the body only. While this may be true in many cases, a change in the participant’s physical position in relation to the camera may reveal parts of the body below the waistline.

It is best for lawyers to conduct themselves appropriately at all times during the proceedings in the virtual courtroom. As a rule of thumb, always conduct yourself as if you are being watched even when your video is turned off or your microphone is muted. Adopting this principle will help you observe your duty of courtesy and respect for the court. It may also save you some avoidable embarrassment similar to the “supreme embarrassment” from a recent US Supreme Court teleconference proceeding. A participant in that proceeding flushed the toilet without muting their microphone, which was embarrassingly heard by all participants in the proceeding.

Conclusion

For a very long time, in-person presence in a physical courtroom was considered the ideal means for conducting hearings in litigation. Then came the COVID-19 pandemic, which altered the way we practice law. As a result, what was previously ideal is hardly attainable at the moment. We must innovate and adapt to the factual realities that have been imposed on us. In this quest for innovation, we must be conscious of our existing ethical and professional obligations as lawyers, while at same time being alert to new obligations that arise from a changed legal environment.

This post may be cited as: Gideon Christian, “Lawyer Ethics in the Virtual Courtroom” (June 3, 2020), online: ABlawg, http://ablawg.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Blog_GC_Ethics_Virtual_Courtroom.pdf

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[dalanmendonca]

Decadence & The End

Snap back to reality

So this was the final term and things started with a bang. I used the term break to go on a trip to Rajasthan.This was my first proper ISB trip. I’m a complete laggard in this matter. A lot people travelled the surrounding hillscapes like there’s no tomorrow, before placements and much more after placements. I loved campus a bit too much and didn’t want the (apparent) hassle of travelling. Rajasthan was warm and fun. It was a new experience visiting forts and palaces, seeing old weapons and finding out that the Rajas smoked a lot of hash! A Desert Safari and tent stays in Jaisalmer were fun too. The warm(er) weather was good break from the chills of Mohali. And soon I was back.

On the academic front things were as cool as they could be. Over-loading on courses earlier meant that I had to study only 3 courses and had plenty of time for socialising, fun and … co-ordinating my marriage!

My courses for Term 8 were ENVC (Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital), MFIN (Micro-Finance) and MKAN (Marketing Analytics).

ENVC was about the world of startups and venture capital. It was taught by Professor Francis Kim who is a former (successful!) entrepreneur and covered both sides of the table; we learned how to value a startup company and also about what kind of ideas succeed and what it takes to be an entrepreneur. The most amazing (and useful) part of the course was the simulation. Many academic courses use a simulation to show you how markets evolve, and how a manager has to respond. These are usually computer-based simulations, so they don’t feel all that real. In ENVC, the professor divided the class into 24 teams, 8 of these were VCs and 16 were ENs (entrepreneurs). All the entrepreneurs competed in the same market (“Edtech in India”). Every class entrepreneurs would present to VCs and half of them would get eliminated. Watching the simulation progress and observing the economic + human dynamics play out was a real treat. Initially, all but a few teams had over-lapping ideas. As rounds progressed and teams observed who died/survived, they started learning from each other and incorporating each others ideas. Every VC had 15 sticks to invest. As expected from economics, one team (mine! 😉)got a disproportionate share of the total funding in accordance with a power law distribution. Politics played a huge role too! Many couples put themselves into complementary EN-VC pairs; so that they could support each other! People called upon friendships and other niceties to get funded; objective judgement RIP. It was a faithul simulation of the ugly truth that is human life.

MFIN was about a still emerging branch of the finance that deals with facilitating the development of the poor/not-so-well-off. Here are the core ideas: To make people well-off we want to give them income sources, the simplest of these is running a small business. To start that business requires some inputs/capital. These inputs are beyond the means of these folks (else they would’ve started these businesses already!). So we can just lend money to these folks, right? Wrong. All of lending works on the idea of collateral, the poor being poor don’t have any collateral in the first place! All is not lost, this challenge has been confronted head-on by social entreprenuers, most notably Mohammad Yunus of Grameen Bank in Bangladesh and replicated in many countries world over. Their weapon of choice is group lending, where you start by lending to a group of people who keep each other from defaulting. Initial loans are small and grow with time. Because these banks can’t take the easy (and impersonal) way out when it comes to lending, banks like Grameen Bank have innovated on multiple fronts to make finance accessible to a whole new section of society. For example, repayment happens daily/weekly (as opposed to monthly) as this keeps the borrower engaged and aware of their loan. Loan repayment is a social process done in front of a group, thus adding social pressure to avoid shirking on a loan repayment; some wonderful uses of human psychology these are. Grameen Bank is the posterchild of the microlending/microfinance movement and a huge chunk of the economic and social development of Bangladesh has been attributed to it. An interesting concept I encountered was the double bottom--line (we measure only the financial impact of a business, business should also evaluate their social bottom-line and their impact on society). The course was taught by Shamika Ravi, who is a fantastic teacher (and a member of the Prime Ministers Economic Advisory Council); I really felt like I was understanding the core economic concepts as their immediate applications throughout the class.

Finally there was MKAN. MKAN was using the now available glut of data to apply age-old marketing principles of Segment, Target, Position. We used the now classic tools of clustering, regression, etc to do everything from segment customers to predict sales. The course was a good blend of hands-on tool driving while keeping marketing principles in mind. The classes happened at 8 AM in the morning, and hence I scarcely have much to say about this course. That wraps up the acads front.

Offer letters started pouring in for a few people with proactive companies. The gym was finally a thing for me. Some attempts were made in a bid to get skinny before the wedding. The attempts weren’t very successful. However, I’m glad that I got rid of my unfamiliarity anxiety about the gym. One of my reasons for not going to the gym is that I just don’t know what to do there, fortunately the ISB gym has two full-time trainers available 24x7 to guide you. It was my first honest attempt at gyming after trying in the 11th standard, and I’m now comfortable doing basic weights and using the machines. ISL continued its march in March (shitty line, I know). I remained blissfully ignorant.

Yearbook awkwardness continued. People scoured the land for places to get their yearbook photo clicked. Some people came with highly representative ones. It was also time to write yearbook testimonials for people. You had to nominate 3-4 of your friends to collectively write one testimonial for you. Here is where your true friends were revealed! This became just another group assignment with 1-2 people leading the charge for every testimonial.

CS and AoE sessions: A small segment of brave laptop warriors rekindled the joys of multiplayer games. And given the amount of free time available, a lot of kindling happened until the the wee hours of the night. I earnestly tried to join the fun by watching AoE tutorials, but then AoE on my PC kept crashing. And then I was like, why isn’t this in a browser?

SLC calendar

The Student Life Council went into beast mode, driving a ton of events on campus.

These events covered everything from Food fetes (like a giant potluck) to SV wars (which was basically student housing buildings competing to see who can throw the best party). The Food fete really brought the campus together, with everyone either cooking or helping or eating! The dishes students cooked up turned out to be better than expected – not everyone is an amateur in the cooking domain!

This period being a sort of end-of-days, for us all meant that people were extremely enthusiastic about partying. The winter had started relenting a little and spirits were uplifted.  SV wars and the usual birthday parties that happen on campus meant that there was a party every other day, but you couldn’t say no to the next party because this was the last time this would happen.

Which brings us to the most epic party after all the other parties. Holi! The Holi was lit and was the best party I’ve attended in my life. The SLC provided gulal and pichkaris and a giant inflated swimming pool and a DJ and a raindance area. In addition, there was bhaang-laden thandai and bhaang-laden bhajias. It was a warm(er) day compared to others. People were excited and in good spirts, going about throwing colour on friends, enemies, everyone. Then throwing friends, enemies, everyone into the inflated swimming pool. Then dancing and losing their shit after having bhaang. The post-holi post-bhaang time warp in which I struggled to get back to my room and ended up bathing for what seemed like an eternity is something I will never forget.

This concluded formal student life on campus, … or did it?

D-week

The conclusion of ISB life happens through two events - one formal and one informal. The formal one is of course graduation day – the hat toss, the tassel turning, the address to the graduating students by the guest of honour, etc. The informal one, unique to ISB, is what we call D-week, short for De-orientation week, the evil twin of O-week, that happened at the start of the year. Feeling the need to make the final week of ISB life super-duper-ultra-goddamn fun, I joined the D-week team to plan some events.

The D-week happens after ISBs academic session has wrapped up i.e. after the last exam has been written and before the graduation ceremony. Students officially have nothing to do, which adds to the pressure of planning some nice long events. Obviously, students are also free to leave campus and travel around, so making the events awesome and crowd-pulling becomes a must.

This D-week we had a game night, a “hotbox” party, a stand-up performance along with a roast of the GSB, a sundowner party, paintball, sufi night, an awards night along with a prom (the last party). The last event was the distribution and signing of yearbooks.

The events where I contributed to the most were the standup/roast and the awards night.

I gave the longest standup performance of my life (and emerging comedic career), lasting more than 20 minutes. I cracked jokes on every aspect of ISB life and proceeded to crack a few general ones. The auditorium was FULL, as the entire batch had turned up. It was my honour (and pleasure) to entertain these folks laugh; they laughed, a lot, which was a very inspiring and proud moment for me. Fortunately, this time the performance was recorded (by multiple people!).

Me and a handful more folks planned the awards and content for the awards. The winners were decided by live public voting which made the event really fun; thus the winners were a surprise to us too. Lots of controversial awards were given out. To add to the fun, we played jingles related to every award when the winners came on stage, adding to the cheery vibe of the vibe of the evening.

All D-week events were accompanied by some party or the other. I didn’t partake much in the daily drinking, however I did partake hugely in the daily eating. It was such a tough choice between indulging in end-of-days hedonism & trying to get in shape for my wedding. Both sides had a strong case.

On the last day, students gathered in “The Hub”, a small lawn in front of our main building to collect and sign yearbooks. This was fun few hours, writing messages to each other and recollecting memories. With this informal student life at ended.

Graduation

Graduation was a moderately long drawn out affair. Over the course of two days, we had a rehearsal of the graduation, “The Deans Dinner”, the ISB award ceremony, the official graduation ceremony followed by the Deans lunch.

For starters, it was complicated to wear graduation robes. While it’s fun to look like you’re in Harry Potter, wearing a gown is moderately difficult, especially the ISB gowns which have multiple moving parts. I’ve graduated before and it wasn’t so difficult :P. Also, ISB follows the tradition of turning the tassel - when you receive your degree, you turn your tassel from the right side of your hat (“mortarboard”) to the left indicating your successful graduation.

After the rehearsal we had the batch photo clicked followed quickly by the official ISB awards night. I am happy to state that I won awards for winning competitions, being a torchbearer (i.e contributing to student life + the brand of ISB) and finally also won a giant gold trophy for best club. Winning best club was thrilling to say the least. Just before the awards night could start, my Mom who was travelling all the way from Bombay arrived, coincidence? divine providence?

The awards night was followed by the Deans dinner where only the elite (like Deans listers, Club presidents, etc.) were invited. Yours truly was invited too, and he watched the awkwardness of socialising unfold for the umpteenth time.

That was it for pre-events. As I had dinner that evening, it was with my mother instead of the usual coterie of friends/students, it really started to sink in that things were coming to a close, whether I was transformed or not, a whole year had passed by. A year quite different from those before it.

I dropped my mom off and wished her goodnight. Tomorrow was going to be a momentous day.

Graduation day started early with breakfast opening at 7. Me being an eternal early bird, arrived promptly at 7. Then came the … waiting, students, who were all gown-ed up, waited in the academic block in a neat line so they could walk in a procession into the convocation hall. The convocation hall was a newly setup airplane hangar-like structure on the lawns. After a long wait that involved lots of photo sessions and false starts, some orchestral music was played and we all went into the hall in a glorious procession. An invocation was sung, our GSB president gave a speech followed by a few more addresses. We were told that our placements had been the best ever, and thus we were a great batch (Thanks!). The guest of honour gave a really boring and uninspiring speech, lots of people slept off or got busy on their phones. This was followed by announcements of the best professor, best academic associate. Finally we came to the graduation, students were called on stage one by one, in alphabetical order, except for those who received any sort of ISB honours, they went on stage first. My row got up all together, I waited for my moment, my name was called, I walked towards the center of the stage, shook hands with everyone present, grabbed my degree, looked at the camera, smiled, click, and walked out. As I walked out, I remembered to turn my tassel and officially become a graduate. Ah! Long journey. Then I sat as the degree disbursal wrapped. Finally, we all stood up, did a royal hat toss, smiled, laughed, cheered and walked out of the hall as graduates together. It was a fun ceremony. Then there was my favourite part, lunch

Since I had a plane to catch from Delhi, for which I had to take a 4-5 hour cab ride, I was in a rush! There was sadly no time for pleasantries and ooh-aahing. I wrapped up all my exit formalities, packed my bags a proper and took one last look at ISB, a place and people that I did indeed feel a little fonder towards.

This was the end. Of one sort.

I had come here with few expectations, for me B-school was just a brand and a network, these benefits come to after you graduate, I thought (back then) that this was mostly not relevant, I just had to get through it. But I was in for a lot of surprises, mostly pleasant. Apart from discovering news branches of knowledge, made new friends and newer perspectives, headed a club, won competitions and honours (in a far cry from my undergraduate days), tried standup comedy, gotten a kickass job and more. It felt like an eventful and significant year had gone by.

The transition from student to alumnus is most stark when you turn in your student ID card and receive your new Alumni ID card, it is precisely when the feeling of “shit, it’s really over” sinks into you. I wasn’t too emotional as I left, I had come prepared for this end. Back in Bombay, when I was packing for ISB, I packed quite lightly knowing that this was just a year, a temporary stay; and I could also save myself a lot of effort in moving stuff around. My past self had seen my future self which was now my present self and done it a favour! Cool, right?

The fun wasn’t over. Members of the drama club got together and gave every student leaving the campus a proper tear-filled and emotional vidaai; while I left early and couldn’t get one, it was a very sweet gesture.

But there was no time to be chill, my wedding and honeymoon were oncoming!

And so ended #LifeAtISB

#lifeatisb #journal #endings

[lonnybaine37590-blog]

Wild Hastings.

The Giornate del Movie theater Muto honours the 50 years presence of The Ceremony's Gone By. English movie historian Kevin Brownlow's timeless narrative history study was actually 1st posted in 1968. Fifteen folks participated in today's Community Rail Stroll coming from Accrington delighting in a stroll in mild problems on the tops above the community coming back through the old train line coming from Baxenden. The wellness club different colors possess some coloring possibilities at the same time and can be adjusted under Options-Colors-Target. Lately, an alternative has actually been contributed to show length of a warm as a cooldown clock shadow, in a similar way to exactly how cooldowns are revealed on all buttons in default UI. It allows for much smaller hots and also additional grid-like appearance. Advanced Notification: For those signing up with the upcoming Rail Rambler to Todmorden at Burnley Manchester Road & Accrington satisfy book a Time Go back to Hebden Link as this is a cheaper option than reserving a Time Come back to Todmorden due to a charge anomoly. Along with the tracking the electronic camera will certainly make use of the consumer picked AF trend to discover the target (shape as well as shade) about what you lock through pointing cam at it with those chosen AF factors and afterwards half-pressing the shutter. Feel free to review this web site regarding the Traveling Plans for each and every Rail Rambler Walk to guarantee as much as time relevant information. Some of the best prominent concerns about E-M1 Mark II is definitely the capacities in reduced lightweight firing along with higher ISO use. Generally, we stay motivated due to the proceeded advantages our company have actually seen from our polished programming tactic, and we believe the mixture of even more separated innovation, stronger advertising efforts, as well as a promising movie slate tactically install the business for the years ahead.

I have three times to examine the E-M1 Symbol II. I performed certainly not have a bunch of opportunity, and there were actually numerous locations I needed to cover. Our Easter Sunday Rail Rambler strolls reside in the Truly worth Lowland - a superb walking area dealing with the Bronte Moors and also the Really Worth Valley Train Line.

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[entergamingxp]

Ghost of Tsushima review – a likeable, if clunky Hollywood blockbuster • Eurogamer.net

Quite early on in Ghost of Tsushima, you’ll be introduced to its dramatic, one-on-one duels. Two warriors, a dozen yards apart, face each other down across the divide. Up close: narrowing eyes and crumpled brows. Hands hover at hips, knees bend, feet press down into the earth, muscle, sinew and fingers tighten. Then – bang! – combat. It’s a cracking moment, especially the first time you give one a try, and it’s also a cracking example of what Ghost of Tsushima’s all about. These heightened standoffs begin with shot-for-shot facsimiles of that famous scene from Yojimbo, an Akira Kurosawa classic that’s both a mirror of older westerns and an inspiration for the ’60s greats.

Ghost of Tsushima review

Developer: Sucker Punch

Publisher: Sony

Platform: Reviewed on PS4

Availability: Out on 17th July on PS4

They’re also, once you’ve done a few of them, slightly flat, the enemies you battle mostly re-using the same attacks and movements of ones you’ve faced before, and the concept quickly becomes a little overused, predictably occurring at the end of certain quests, and generally lacking the complexity to require more than a few tries each time. Like the game itself, they go for authenticity through facsimile – recreating moments without the requisite weight and context. And, like the game itself, they’re lacking a little depth. Despite the immediate and undeniable thrill, the gloss can be just a little too quick to wear off.

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Still, much of Ghost of Tsushima is enjoyable enough. Developer Sucker Punch has definitely aimed high with its first full-length effort since InFamous Second Son, way back at the start of the generation in 2014. The much-trumpeted inspirations here are the stirring epics of samurai cinema. It’s a tough genre to crack, nevermind the potential for awkwardness in an American realisation of feudal Japan. Namechecked directors like Akira Kurosawa, who gets his own grainy, black-and-white mode in Ghost of Tsushima, are known for their lengthy epics of extraordinary nuance, adapting – and arguably mastering – the works of Shakespeare, or chipping away at the great problem of the human condition. Next to inspirations like that, Ghost of Tsushima is never really going to compare. It lacks the nuance and the depth, or the dedication, even, to telling a good story itself – as opposed to telling a story that simply keeps out of the way of the mechanics – and the slack left by its story isn’t picked up in those mechanics, either. But it has a kind of Hollywood, popcorn charm, which shouldn’t count for nothing.

In Ghost of Tsushima you are Jin Sakai, a samurai of noble birth, tasked with almost single-handedly fending off a Mongol invasion of the feudal Japanese island he calls home. In doing so you’re forced to evolve, from staid and honourable samurai to the Ghost, master of underhand tactics. And therein lies your central conflict, as the screenwriting gurus would put it: Jin has to defend the people of the island, but he does so at great cost, abandoning tradition, honour, and everything that comes with it. It’s a bit of a cliché – and one that happily departs from Sucker Punch’s stated aim for authenticity, when you read historians’ arguments that for most samurai in feudal Japan, there was no such code of honour at all – but Ghost of Tsushima is good at carrying you along with the drama.

As far as stoic male video game protagonists go, Jin Sakai sits somewhere in the middle, but he’s played with likeable subtlety by Daisuke Tsuji, who leads a fantastic voice cast. It’s a shame they don’t benefit from Kurosawa’s framing – for a game inspired by cinema, Tsushima sure does like a default over-the-shoulder.

It’s helped by some stellar voice work from a cracking cast, including a turn from the magnetic François Chau, of Lost fame, as a curmudgeonly master archer Sensei Ishikawa, and an imperious Patrick Gallagher as the big bad Khotun Khan, a fictional descendant of that famous one Ghengis. There are some stirring sequences, too, especially when Sucker Punch digs a little deeper into its characters to mine their pockets of rage, or just finds an excuse for another heroic charge, while the family-political intrigue is at least more accurate to the period than the lengthy monologuing on honour and tradition. And there’s a stunning, sweeping score to accompany it all, capable of dragging you up from even the deepest mid-game cutscene malaise, carrying you across rolling landscapes and striking wonderfully at the story’s noticeable highs.

What it lacks is the grit to go with the melodrama. Samurai tales are, famously, much the same as what we’d more quickly recognise as westerns, and as such they’re reliant on certain things to really work. One of them is that grit, or rather a sort of tangible earthiness, that comes from a particular grounding in the world. There have been obvious examples of earthy cowboy games recently but the best illustration in this case remains The Witcher 3, which told a similar story of a stoic, semi-outlawed warrior riding into villages and solving problems with his sword, but did so through the immense weight of its world, through the detail and humanity of its side stories and the intimacy of its smaller, quieter moments. There are countless others – Assassin’s Creed’s now known for its side stories that bring levity, heart and mystery, and the first Red Dead Redemption has even been cited by Sucker Punch as inspiration.

As far as the bulk of side quests go, ‘Help! The Mongols!’ is about as sophisticated as it gets.

This is why Ghost of Tsushima feels so frustrating. Side quests are the beating heart of a good outlaw story, the secret to a great samurai game that so many others not set in feudal Japan have managed to master. For Sucker Punch they seem to have been almost an afterthought. There are effectively four kinds of quest in the game: the main story, one-off side quests, mythic quests, and “tales” – multi-step quests – that are tied to a specific named character. The character tales are far and away the highlight – Lady Masako and Ishikawa’s standing out among them, thanks to the strength of the performances and melodrama of the stories – but they’re sadly over before they really begin, and the actual activities involved are still far too limited. Follow a character, track some footsteps, fight some enemies and maybe grind out some instant-fail stealth sections, onto the next. There’s some minor variation on this for the mythic ones but not much – not enough – and the standalone ones are worse, often feeling like a procedural patching together of pre-set objectives and activities, wrapped in the loose-fitting context of another unnamed peasant crying for help from the Mongols. The only reward for your time with them is a nudge of XP or some upgrade materials, as opposed to a chance to really bed yourself into the character or the world itself. They’re a huge disappointment.

In fact, if you pick at the surface of Ghost of Tsushima it all starts to quite worryingly unravel. The world as a whole is beautiful – utterly, undeniably, oppressively beautiful. Such colour! Everywhere you look, it’s crimson, windswept fields and forests of golden yolk. Sunsets and oceans, beaches and snowy mountain peaks – environments of improbable range for a temperate island of Tsushima’s kind, set to broad, enrapturing splashes of orange and teal. The vivid green bamboo jungles, the ephemeral fireflies, the swirling, milky petals that rise and fall with the wind – a wind that could be a game of its own, a magic thing bending everything around you. It’s a sign of a studio that’s mastered the tech, with a console generation’s worth of experience behind it, but what it’s missing is the maturity or restraint to put it to use. Ghost of Tsushima’s bursting with undeniable beauty, yes, but beauty of the obvious, in-your-face kind, the kind that doesn’t offer much thematic or tonal subtlety but makes a great ad for HDR OLED televisions. It’s an odd thing to find a problem with – an excess of sumptuousness – but Sucker Punch is best imagined here less as master painter than overexcited barkeeper, serving up shot after shot of wincingly concentrated emotion, slamming the table and pouring out another – bigger moon! more falling leaves! make it a double! – before you’ve gulped the last one down. It’s a bit much.

Ghost of Tsushima is absolute photo mode fodder. It’s gorgeous, but conceptually that beauty is a little shallow.

More troublesome is the construction of Tsushima’s open world, which is technically open but best described as closed. It’s a big area – there are three parts to the island, the second and third opening up after you reach the end of the first act plenty of hours in, and they contain all the breadth of those wildly varied biomes outlined above – but the sense of closedness comes from how little mystery there is to it. In fact, there’s really no mystery at all, once you get to know the way the game works.

Spanning the island are a litany of fixed, more or less identical locations-of-interest, which all involve a set interaction and a set reward (and all of which you’ll be led to by the game’s clunky, if admirable attempt at using nature for navigation – gallop past a nearby point of interest and a golden bird will appear, piping up incessantly in invitation to follow it to whatever that undiscovered spot may be). Those points of interest never change, though – they never deviate from the set list of things to do that you can check off from lists in the menus. So there are hot springs which you press R2 at to bathe in and increase your max health; fox dens, where you follow a mewling, over-adorable fox to a shrine, which you press R2 at to increase your max charm slots; bamboo strikes, which do at least give you a very brief, quick-reaction button-pressing minigame to beat before their designated reward (there’s an accessibility option for turning off the time-sensitive element, if that sounded worrying to you).

Haiku spots, another point of interest, might be Sucker Punch’s most egregiously fawning decision, and a key example of where they’ve gone wrong. You look at one of three preset points and press X to select a line of Haiku. It’s such a lovely idea, with some nice writing, but practically it’s all back to front, taking an act of observation and conscious mindfulness and making it one of passive follow-the-dot. An attempt at poetry through literalism.

I could go on, but the point is sooner or later you’ll realise this is it. A bird will chirp and, after slavishly following them until now, you’ll decide the bird can do one, actually, because it’s just going to take you off your path to something you’ve already seen and done a dozen times before. Even the rarer, more elaborate activities like Shinto Shrines – locations that sit atop mountains and cliffs, requiring a spot of ultra-light, golden ledge guided platforming to reach – start to wear thin after a couple climbs. The result of it all is a busy world, full of activities, but one that soon feels paradoxically empty of things to do.

A brighter, if still imperfect part of Ghost of Tsushima is its combat. In melee, Sucker Punch has created a kind of Arkham-Sekiro hybrid, which works relatively well. Enemies all have a guard meter as well as a health meter, which will need to be broken for you to really get in there with the pointy end of your katana and do some damage. Much of your success will come from successfully countering, as is the Arkham style: you can dodge and perfect dodge, dodge-roll, parry, and perfect parry, all of which feel snappy enough – although I’d like some attack-cancelling to feel a tad sharper. And while there are unblockable enemy moves, marked with a red symbol – hello Sekiro – most of these can be turned into parryable ones with an early upgrade in the skill tree (Ghost of Tsushima has something between seven and ten skill trees, depending on how you look at it – don’t ask), which unfortunately takes away much of the tension and skill.

The world is so darkly lit and densely packed that often you can’t actually see what you’re doing or where you’re going, so the game resorts to overt and heavy-handed methods to compensate. Trademark golden climbing ledges is one. The guiding wind is another: a great idea for reducing ugly UI that soon becomes an aesthetically pleasing version of the infamously passive big Bioshock arrow.

Where it gets interesting is stances: there are four stances in the game, each granting new heavy attacks effective at breaking the guards of a certain type of enemy. You unlock them and their respective skill trees one at a time – with another slightly repetitive open world task of killing certain numbers of Mongol leaders – but once you do the combat gets noticeably more interesting, becoming a much more conscious exercise. At its most satisfying, you’ll be facing swollen numbers of varied enemies, requiring you to rapidly switch between stances as frequently as every enemy attack, so as to clash swords, break shields, charge archers, parry spears and slash brutes as effectively as possible. In these moments of intimate violence, the music soaring, enemies cowering and crumpled, Jin clad in some imperious armour lashed with rain and soaked in mud, Ghost of Tsushima feels glorious, and also truest to its soily roots.

The problem is they come too rarely – there are a smattering of climactic battles in the story that open with a bang, before swiftly fizzling out – and too late, with the enemies only getting really varied and dense towards the end and the game falling into the usual RPG-lite trap of dishing out its most enjoyable gimmicks after a load of time without (or hiding them behind mythic quests, some of which are only accessible after certain points of the story). It struggles with the camera, which sits too low and close over the shoulder, and doesn’t come with an option to lock onto an enemy. It sounds minor, but can result in annoying hits from enemies out of shot, an awkward inability to act and look around at once, or worse still a totally obscured camera altogether, if you get too close to an object or wall.

In motion Kurosawa mode is stupidly pretty, and lip syncing aside – oddly, it’s not synced to Japanese dialogue – there’s real attention to detail in the conscious application of shade, grain and sound. It’s more than an Instagram filter, and makes me wish Sucker Punch had payed as close attention to samurai games as they have the aesthetics of the films – in focusing on the latter they seem to have missed the basics of what makes them great.

Ghost of Tsushima’s stealth, meanwhile – which is prominent enough to be the driving force of its story, and technically half of your own arsenal – is frustratingly unsystemic and largely underbaked. It’s very much stealth-lite, closest to modern era Assassin’s Creed with even fewer toys, and so you’ll be frequently defaulting to the usual suspects: X-ray vision, throw a jingly distraction bell, pop a smoke bomb if you get in trouble and try again. All of that couples meekly with a range of insta-fail stealth missions and yet another selection of excessively crunching, crackling and squelching neck stabs.

It’s desperately frustrating, because I maintain that Ghost of Tsushima is still, largely, quite fun. The problem is it’s an easy, breezy, lite beer kind of fun – the kind that Sucker Punch is known for, after all – and the blanket genericism of it just doesn’t sit well against such a po-faced tone. It’s another game fallen victim to the palatability blender, coming out the other side as a slightly formless smudge of every genre, without a mastery of any. Going back to Ghost of Tsushima’s roots, as an American game inspired by the comics and the movies of Japan, in a way it’s quite apt. It’s what happens when you want to pay homage, but don’t want to add anything new of your own. It’s Hollywood.

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2020/07/ghost-of-tsushima-review-a-likeable-if-clunky-hollywood-blockbuster-%e2%80%a2-eurogamer-net/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=ghost-of-tsushima-review-a-likeable-if-clunky-hollywood-blockbuster-%25e2%2580%25a2-eurogamer-net

[hoangdodinh]

In this post, I want to give a general guideline over how to set up default SMTP Email for Magento 2 stores. Not like SMTP module, the setting for default SMTP mode is quite complicated for newbies.

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[gabrielleharwood-blog]

Center Rate Info

The Giornate del Movie theater Muto honours the half a century presence of The March's Passed. English movie historian Kevin Brownlow's classic oral history questionnaire was actually first released in 1968. High quality of the video varies but you can easily observe on cover what video high quality possess the motion picture: HD, VIDEO, CAM, 3D. About 3D films, I had not been able to examination does the films are actually in 3D, but if you have actually 3D monitor you can examine this option. This setup will definitely be per panel, as well as will apply to all debuffs on that particular raid board. Wednesday has a Community Rail Walk starting at Langho Sta, whilst on Saturday our team possess a Rail Rambler to Knutsford and also on Sunday it is the regular monthly Ribble Lowland Rambler along with a stroll beginning with Horton in Ribblesdale. " Barry" is just one of two theatrics movies (of what will certainly be numerous) that take a glance at the life of a much younger Barack Obama, the male that would certainly someday become the very first dark head of state of the United States. This is actually an usual resource of complication as people are actually attempting to delegate spells to the computer mouse buttons as well as are actually forgetting they have at some aspect helped make macros with the exact same title. If having said that, you like your macros to carry out incredibly certain things, you as if modifiers as well as time combos and so on, you can either create the macros your own self in the default macro blizz food selection, newsport-john2018.info and also bind to the mouse switches or even move them to the activity bars and make use of as any normal mouseover macros or you can use the Options-Spells-Keys Citizen area of vuhdo to save macro space. Lancaster is our upcoming Rail Rambler place this happening Saturday along with the briefer stroll consuming a number of Lancaster's absolute best sites including its Roman Catholic Basilica, Williamson Park and the Ashton Remembrance plus the Lune Acqueduct. I might possess possessed a strong 1 hour capturing opportunity, yet I only had 100mm lengthiest telephoto end with me. I took this chance to assess out the Pro Squeeze Mode Low. Beulah Bondi (Might 3, 1888 - January 11, 1981) was actually a fantastic personality starlet best-known as the mama of Jimmy Stewart's characters in 4 movies, very most particularly It's A Terrific Life as well as Mr. Smith Goes To Washington. Matock, i locate the FR model of the clock outstanding ... Yet i wan na utilize the arduino mega as opposed to the uno to have additional moment to include some more clock methods. Wager a ton of people bear in mind the "Worlds Largest Board" before the Mills and also Nebraska lumber retail store. A great day to be out on the moors - a perspective coming from yesterday's Community Rail Walk coming from Todmorden to Stoodley Pike and also back. ' Since there are actually issues along with video clip hosting company, MEGASHARE is actually closing and not updaing new motion pictures in future. Since the learn was actually cancelled at Blackburn, apologies to those that desired to join today's Neighborhood Rail Stroll which couldn't take spot. You may additionally pick to save your warm arrangement with this profile. On a particularly blustery day, the heroine of "A Fantastic Female" hikes via a twister therefore highly effective she can rarely stand upright. Software application IT solutions company. The dreadful weather is actually taking its own cost on support for our strolls with only eleven individuals ending up final Sunday. One of my few frustrations with the E-M1 Score II, is making use of the specific very same Liquid Crystal Displays contact panel as the older Olympus Micro 4 Thirds cam! If you really want to see some 2+ months outdated flick on excellent High Interpretation quality, this web site is one of the far better places. . Today I opened the code in the arduino course and also added the public libraries. The nonpayment bouquet is mana bar display yet you may change it to all power display, danger, certain HoT or even debuff display screen etc After what seems an age, the upcoming Rail Rambler occurs this happening Saturday with an opportunity to check out the Pennine community of Marsden and also its links to Final of the Summer White wine - with, possibly, an emotional see to Auntie Wainwright's store - and also the renowned Standedge Tunnels close by.

[privateplates4u]

Bentley Bentayga review – the ultimate luxury SUV?

For  Immensely capable, W12 and V8 diesel options both immensely rapid Against  Very heavy, and not really able to shrug it off... and just look at it... Bentley's first SUV is sure to be a sales hit, but its sheer weight limits the appeal as a drivers SUV The Bentley Bentayga takes the terms ‘performance’ and ‘luxury’, ramps them up to the extreme, and then attaches them to an SUV. It’s Bentley’s first car in this class, and as such it’s an extremely polarising model. Is it a triumph of modern engineering and proper Bentley to boot, or is it a cynical attempt to cash in on the growing global SUV market at the expense of the British brand’s rich heritage? Whatever the Bentayga is, it’s certainly not a half-baked effort. In fact, it might be Bentley’s most advanced car to date. This near-2.5-tonne beast may have a cabin stuffed with as much fine leather and wood as a gentleman’s club, but it also has performance to rival serious sports cars. There’s even a modicum of off-road ability – not exactly a Bentley hallmark – and a reassuringly hefty price tag to match. > Click here for our review of the Range Rover The Bentayga may not be a classic Bentley in spirit – in fact, we’d be very surprised if owners are ever let out of a side turning – but in engineering terms, it’s up there with the best, and sits pretty much in a class of one at the top of the luxury SUV pile. Image 11 of 34 Image 11 of 34 Bentley Bentayga in detail: Performance and 0-60 time > Staggering pace from such a huge car; 0-60 time rivals even sports cars Engine and gearbox > Choice of W12 petrol or V8 diesel, both mated to smooth auto gearbox Ride and handling > Impressive, but there’s no disguising the size and weight of this monstrous car MPG and running costs > ‘Frugal’ is a word that doesn’t feature in the Bentayga’s dictionary, but diesel will do 600 miles between fill-ups Interior and tech > Shades of Audi Q7, but stuffed with enough leather, wood and technology to make up for it Design > It’s difficult to call the Bentayga pretty, but ‘imposing’ certainly covers it Image 12 of 34 Image 12 of 34 Prices, specs and rivals The Bentley Bentayga is, perhaps understandably, priced out of reach of all but society’s top earners. A starting price of £135,800 gets the ball rolling, but for most owners that’ll just be a jumping off point for even greater expense. For instance, you’ll need to cough up an extra £30,000 if you want the stonking W12 petrol engine, while it gets even more extreme if you begin to peruse the expansive options list. That said, most Bentayga buyers will let their accounts worry about the price lists, and are unlikely to baulk at a £22k Naim stereo upgrade. The dash-mounted Breitling clock may raise a few eyebrows though – it’s machined in solid gold and costs over £150k (on top of the price of the car!). Rivals? Not many. The elite may consider the Bentayga alongside more traditional luxury cars like a Rolls-Royce Ghost or even Bentley’s own Mulsanne. But we think it’s more likely to appeal as a luxury option for those who need genuine practicality for outdoorsy pursuits. After all, the children’s riding gear can be awfully muddy, and the family Labrador can’t ride in an enclosed boot either. That pitches it as a rival to the Range Rover, Porsche Cayenne or Audi Q7 – albeit at a significantly higher price point. The Range Rover offers the most compelling alternative – a long-wheelbase SVAutobiography fitted with a 550bhp V8 engine starts from £167,280, offering comparable performance and luxury to the Bentayga. In fact, some might argue that it provides a better luxury experience. The Range Rover does after all ride on its own platform, while the Bentayga – no matter how powerful and expensive – shares a great deal of its components and oily bits with the considerably humbler Audi Q7. The Range Rover also offers a far more imperious driving position, while it’ll show a dirty pair of heels to the Bentayga off-road. Performance and 0-60 time Four seconds. That’s a 0-60 time you might think belongs to a low-slung sports car, or perhaps an entry-level supercar. But to apply it to a car weighing well over two tonnes seems impossible. Yet thanks to its 12 cylinders and duo of twin scroll turbos, the 6.0-litre W12 model will leave a Porsche 718 Cayman or Audi RS3 trailing in its not inconsiderable wake. It’s then capable of going on to a frankly ridiculous 187mph top speed, which is pretty pace for a car that shares it  footprint and kerbweight with the average two-bedroom cottage. Plump for the diesel model and you’ll have the honour of driving one of the fastest oil-burners around. 4.0-litres of V8 – the same block as you’ll find in the Audi SQ7 – makes 429bhp and a truly colossal 664lb ft of torque. 0-60mph takes 4.6 seconds, while top speed is 168mph. Image 23 of 34 Image 23 of 34 Engine and gearbox There are only two engine choices in the Bentley Bentayga for now – a 6.0-litre W12 petrol engine or a 4.0-litre V8 diesel. We may see a smaller, V8 petrol in the future, as in the Continental, which could become the engine of choice. No matter which unit you go for, out-and-out muscle is the name of the game. > Click here for our review of the Continental GT Both engines are mated to the same smooth ZF 8-speed gearbox, which sees service in everything from the Range Rover Sport to the BMW 1-series, so there’s no cause for concern there – it’s smooth and quick-shifting and, more importantly, can handle the 600+lb ft of torque that both engines produce. Image 17 of 34 Image 17 of 34 Which engine you choose depends where your priorities lie. A diesel engine in a supposed ‘luxury’ vehicle may seem like sacrilege – and owners of the Bentayga aren’t likely to have more than a passing interest in fuel economy anyway. No, where the diesel wins out is range. It’s not very glamorous filling up at the local Esso, and stopping every 350 miles in the W12 is bound to become tiresome on a cross-continental cruise. The diesel on the other hand can manage almost 600 miles on a tank, theoretically nearly halving your fuel stops and making for a much more relaxed, and faster, journey. Ride and handling Bentley’s engineers have tried hard to hide the Bentayga’s considerable mass, but in the final reckoning you can’t cheat physics, not matter how hard you try. That’s not to say the big off-roader isn’t composed and competent, but it certainly doesn’t put the Sports into Sports Utility Vehicle. The Bentayga shares the basic chassis architecture as the Audi Q7, which means it gets the same anti-roll system. Powered by 48 Volt electrics, this set-up essentially tautens the anti-roll bars in a fraction of second, helping keep the Bentley on a surprisingly even keel through a series of corners. There’s surprising grip, too, and the Bentayga clings on with greater tenacity than you’d think possible for a car weighing the best part of three tons. Direct and accurate steering helps place the car, even if feedback is in limited supply. As you’d expect, there’s a raft of driver modes to choose from - Comfort, Bentley, Sport and Individual, plus another four off-road settings. ‘Bentley’ is the default setting and aims to strike the right balance between comfort and agility. On the whole it’s well judged, the air suspension soaking up big bumps and pummelling the smaller stuff into submission. Selecting Sport tautens the dampers a little without damaging ride quality, but the changes are so small that it’s best to leave it to its own devices in Bentley. Image 21 of 34 Image 21 of 34 Drive briskly and the Bentayga feels decently planted, but up the pace a little and it starts to unravel a little. Body movements are kept in check better than you’d think, but it’s the brakes that suffer the most. Not only are they tasked with slowing the hefty Bentley, they’re also working hard as part of the torque vectoring system, constantly nibbling away to keep the Bentayga’s nose locked as faithfully as possible onto you chosen line. However, it doesn’t take many corners before the effort involved in keeping the Bentley pointing where you want takes its toll on the braking performance. As a result, it’s best to take it a little easier and rely on the old tried and tested technique of slow in and fast out. Driven with this sort of decorum, you can make impressively rapid progress as you make the most of the combination of the engine’s explosive performance and four-wheel drive traction. Speaking of all-wheel drive, the Bentley will head far further off-road than most owners will probably ever dare go. The air suspension can be raised for greater ground clearance, the various driver modes deliver grip where you’d expect slip and there’s even hill descent control. Whether you’d want to risk those 21-inch rims in the rough stuff is an entirely different matter…. MPG and running costs The Bentayga is predictably costly to run. Everything – from premium petrol to the first-rate servicing it requires – costs extra, but that’s not really a problem for most Bentley owners, is it? Very few of these cars will be bought by penny pinchers, and so owners will be willing to pay whatever it takes to keep their ultra-luxury SUV in fine fettle. Fuel economy will be an alien phrase to most Bentley buyers, but owners of the W12 can expect mpg figures in the late teens in real-world driving – compared to Bentley’s official figure of 21.6mpg. CO2 emissions are a similarly hefty 296g/km, which is enough to put the Bentayga firmly in the highest road tax bracket. That means you’ll have to shell out £2000 in first year road tax, and then £140 a year thereafter – plus a further £310 for the first five years owing to the high list price. Image 24 of 34 Image 24 of 34 Opt for the diesel and things become rather more palatable. A combined fuel economy figure of 35.8mpg is positively frugal, while CO2 emissions are two bands down on the W12 at 210g/km – attracting a £1200 first year road tax fee. Regardless of engine, the Bentayga slots into the top Group 50 for insurance – though we suspect most owners will have these garaged, which could keep premiums reasonable.   Interior and tech The Bentayga is as ostentatious inside as it is out – clamber inside and you’ll find swathes of quilted leather, incredibly intricate wood veneers and handcrafted details all over the place, as you would in any Bentley. It’s all very lovely, but try not to prod too hard or you may find certain features remind you rather too much of the Audi Q7. The cupholders, for example, are made from cheap plastic, while the infotainment is straight out of a high-end Volkswagen in look and feel. That’s not to say the cabin doesn’t work well, but it lacks the bespoke nature of something like a Range Rover – ignore the lustrous materials and organ stop ventilation controls and you could quite easily be in an Audi Q7, Porsche Cayenne or even – whisper it – a Volkswagen Touareg. At least you won’t be wanting for technology. Bentley has thrown the book at the Bentayga, and almost everything you’d want comes as standard – sat-nav, wifi, soft-close doors, full LED head and tail-lights and plenty more besides. Image 27 of 34 Image 27 of 34 Of course, you can personalise your Bentayga, specifying your interior finish with as much precision as you like. Choose a bespoke wood veneer and leather colour – even split the front and rear seats with different finishes if you so fancy. On a more sensible note, we’d probably spec the surround-view camera system, as the Bentayga has very expensive bumpers to ding, while adaptive cruise control will make those trans-continental road trips all the more relaxing. Design The Bentayga is based on the same platform as the Audi Q7, so its basic proportions are fairly similar. The scalable nature of the VW Group’s MLB platform means it’s a significantly larger car, though – and at two metres in width (without mirrors!) it commands a significant road presence. That’s aided by monstrous 20 or 21-inch wheels and of course the huge chrome Bentley grille up front. Styling is inspired by the EXP F9 concept, but we’re glad to see that it’s been toned down from that car. Traditional Bentley styling cues – the quad headlights, the classic grille – combine with modern touches like the LED taillamps, which proudly display a Bentley ‘B’ when illuminated. You’d be hard pressed to call the Bentayga pretty, but it’s definitely imposing, and that’s what really matters to a lot of buyers. Image 5 of 34 Image 5 of 34   10 Nov 2017

http://www.evo.co.uk/bentley/bentayga

#Cars

[flauntpage]

Thinks: Ina Blom

Appreciating the Weirdness: An Interview with Ina Blom

  Ina Blom: If I’m a little bit off, it’s because for some time now I haven’t slept much, after a bad bout of flu. But I’m symptom free now!

Keeley Haftner: Yes I’m glad to hear your feeling better, and we’ll forgive you for any illness-related errors [laughs]. So I’d like to begin with the basics. You teach at both University of Oslo and the University of Chicago; what do you find most different and most similar about working between these two contexts?

IB: I mean, both are art historical departments, but I think the greatest difference is that while we do have a number of foreign students in Oslo, I think the international mix in Chicago tends to be greater. In Oslo, teaching tends to be more lecture-based, with larger classes, whereas in Chicago it’s generally more seminar-based. Also, importantly, the University of Chicago is an expensive private university, where in Scandinavia all universities are state-owned and basically tuition free, and this of course creates a different study environment. The free education system also draws foreign students from beyond the EU. I probably shouldn’t advertise this to the world [laughs], but so far the government is keeping it free also for non-EU students because they want more people around the world to be aware of our research institutions.

KH: Let’s talk about your writing. It has appeared in a number of different types of publications, including art critical journals such as Artforum, Afterall, Parkett, and Texte zur Kunst, and exhibition catalogues, as well as more standard academic journals and publishing houses. Would you say that this allows you more freedom within your writing practice?

IB: Yes, absolutely. I started out as a music critic and radio DJ many years ago, so I got a lot of training in basic journalism and various genres and styles of writing, depending on the publication and the audience – from straightforward reporting to the more literary or essayistic and the more academic. I really enjoy being able to have different voices for different contexts, and I also just enjoy writing! [Laughs] One of the reasons I went back into academia was because I got a bit fed up with the free-wheeling, impressionistic voice that was de rigeur in most music journalism. The more analytic side of me wanted to be more hard-edged and focused, and also more philosophical, and this did not always go down so well in the more journalistic contexts. So ultimately I felt greater freedom having the academic world as my main professional platform. But I really enjoy the back and forth between different contexts.

KH: I’m thinking about the article you wrote for Artforum’s September 2015 issue, which was accompanied by what is probably one of the most arresting covers for the magazine I’ve ever seen (Torbjørn Rødland’s Baby (2007)). Can you describe how his innovative approach to photography, as you say, “the entire image made punctum”, holds your interest in reference to your larger research interests?

Torbjørn Rødland’s Baby, 2007, as seen on Artforum, September, 2015. Photo Credit: Artforum

IB: I’m not sure that there is a direct link, per se. As an art critic, I tend to be most interested in works that I don’t immediately “get”– when I can’t instantly tell what the work is about or what exactly the artist’s project is. Rødland’s work is very much like that; his photographs are always somewhat mysterious to me and I feel I’m always kind of scrambling to understand what he’s doing, and my own response. In the mid-90s, he got a lot of attention because he appeared to rehearse an nineteenth-century Nordic Romanticism that seemed contrary to the conceptually-oriented art practices that was re-entering art practices at that time, and also very much at odds with my own preoccupation with Dadaism, Constructivism, Fluxus and other anti-romantic- and anti-expressionist forms of art. Rødland seemed to recirculate Romanticism with a strange and idiosyncratic twist that made you pay attention. This was something completely different from conservative-post-modern pleas for past glories or ironic recirculation of too-familiar motifs. You simply had to pay attention in a new way. So that was the beginning of my interest in this work, but as his project grew I think the images just got stranger and stranger. And increasingly I started to think about them as opening up the horizon of what photography is and can be, in really new ways – pertaining, among other things, to the relationship between images, technical apparatuses and various types of natural phenomena, as well as the question of the contagiousness of images and their affective dimensions. These were ways of trying to approach his take on photography, but I still think they are inadequate in terms of just appreciating the weirdness of his work, which I think is great.

One of the first articles I wrote about his work was called “I’m With Stupid”, because I was obsessed with rock and roll stupidity, which I think is a sensibility I shared with Rødland. The celebration of idiocy, all those things for which there’s no explanation and no excuse. So I wrote a long essay about how that sensibility made its way into his work, and how that’s also linked to a celebration of vulgarity, which Robert Pattison sees as the underlying romantic impulse in rock. Vulgarity here has nothing to do with bad taste – it is rather a sort of blankness that refuses to recognize given hierarchies of values or systems of knowledge. This is yet another half-baked critical approximation which may be meaningful to some extent, but which does not say all there is to say about the work.

KH: In a studio visit I had with you while at the School of the Art Institute Chicago, I seem to remember that in your own words, you encouraged me not to beat the dead horse of Conceptualism, and emphasized the importance of sincerity over the ironic in contemporary production. I’m wondering if you can talk about sincerity after Conceptualism and Minimalism?

IB: It’s not as though I want to promote one attitude or approach over another. I’m just afraid of anything that becomes a default mode of operation that art students feel obligated to follow no matter what. The critical/conceptual art practices and their traditions are incredibly important to me, but they carry a specific form of authority which can be crushing, and which, in its less intelligent or self-critical moments, becomes just another form of academicism. Anything that is able to present itself as the one proper critical approach may have this effect, and will easily appear as more valid than something whose framework or mode of operation is less clearly formulated. I believe that art students should be thoughtful and critical in their approach, but good art does not always emerge from well-formulated critique. So this is why I get a bit concerned when students seem to feel they need to justify their work in terms that are perhaps at odds with their best capacities and resources. There should be a lot of room for following pathways that have as yet no clear direction.

  Bill Viola, still from Reflecting Pool, 1979. Photo Credit: Bill Viola

KH: And you have a lot of different modes yourself, in terms of your focuses throughout your research. Shifting to one of these modes, I’m thinking about a term you briefly used in On the Style Site. Art, Sociality and Media Culture from back in 2007: the term “social site”. Can you talk about how it does or does not relate to Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics?

IB: The key term for me there was “style site”, which I used in order to honour the idea of site specificity while also questioning the idea of the simple access to something called “the social” in art practices of the 1990s and early 2000s. I was profoundly skeptical of the concept of relational aesthetics, and the way a number of works seemed to have been reduced to the idea of convivial togetherness of one kind or another. I saw very different things in the work of a lot of the artists associated with this new form of sociality in art, such Philippe Parreno, Liam Gillick, Rirkrit Tirivinijia, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and others. These works were not just about people gathering and doing things together, such as cooking. Every single one of these works was actually a media machine. They were without exception channeling other times and other places, inserting them into the live “here and now” of togetherness through a dynamic that was reminiscent of what is accomplished with real-time technologies such as television or digital networks. On closer look, these works turned out to be exceptionally complex assemblages that often associated televisual dynamics with the time-machine aspect of architecture, fashion and design elements – a whole range of phenomena traditionally linked to the phenomenon of “style”. Style used in this way was not about the look of things, or a static description and periodization of art history. It was all about the open-ended becoming or self-styling of modern subjects. In the works in question, architecture, design and fashion appeared as integral elements of media machineries that were no longer defined in terms of the programs or messages it presented to the public. Instead they were understood in terms of their role in the modern “production of subjectivity”, which many would claim is the key product of media and information industries, and their appeal to our apparently endless desire for self-development. Does this make sense?

KH: Yes, it does, and it makes me think about how you’re approaching media not only in terms of communicating the subjective but also in terms of the collective legacy of our technologies and data. I know some have referred to your research practice as a “media-archaeological approach”, which makes me think about your collaboration with Jussi Parikka, Matthew Fuller and many others in your latest anthology Memory in Motion. Archives, Technology and the Social.

Steina Vasulka, still from Orbital Obsessions, 1977. Photo Credit: Steina Vasulka

IB: Yes, this book came out of a research project called the Archive in Motion and that I headed at the University of Oslo. The project took a media-archaeological approach to the question of the contemporary archive, exploring how twentieth-century media technologies have changed our very understanding of what an archive is. The other book that I did which related to that project was called The Autobiography of Video. The Life and Times of a Memory Technology, where I really approach early analog video technologies as a set of agencies that explore their memorizing capacities in interaction with human actors, within the context of 1960s and 70s art. I spent a lot of time learning the ins and outs of video technologies, and the upshot was a story about the way in which these technologies propelled new social ontologies in the field of art production. In related ways, the point of departure for the Memory in Motion anthology was the basic sociological claim that society is memory. The idea was that fundamental changes in the technologies of memory might also change our idea of what the social is, how we should define whatever it is that we call social. Older memory technologies seem to privilege storage, containment, and stability over time, and seem to have promoted an idea of the social as something contained. But the ephemerality of contemporary memory technologies – which are all about updating and transferring in the present moment – may support a very different social ontology. So ultimately we were exploring the connection between technology and social thought, in many instances as articulated through early artistic prehensions of the implications of new media technologies.

KH: Both of these books were released very recently, but in regard to this call you put forward within them asking us rethink social memory from the ground up through the lens of digital and media technologies – I’m wondering whether you’ve noted historians beginning to rise to this challenge? [Laughs]

IB: [Laughs] I think it’s a bit early for that. All I can say is that the writing seems to have a lot of downloads on academia.edu! [Laughs] But it is not as though we were working with these topics in a vacuum. Gabriel Tarde and Bruno Latour’s writings speak to these issues at a sociological and philosophical level, as does Maurizio Lazzarato’s contributions to the Italian post-workerist tradition in political philosophy. Additionally, important work on digital archives has been done by Wolfgang Ernst, among others, who are among the contributors to our book. Our job, as I saw it, was to connect theories of new memory technologies with certain traditions in social thought and study this from a media archaeological and historical perspective. We are currently living in an almost hysterical memory culture, obsessed with storage and safekeeping, and where the old museum principles of careful critical selection are replaced by digital technologies that seem to promise that now there will be storage capacity for everything. The reality is that nothing is stored in digital space – documents only exist in terms of code that may or may not regenerate an image or object depending on whether your software and file format has been updated. Our desperate quest for infinite storage is an effect of this half-awareness of potentially catastrophic memory loss. These are strange times for archives and collections, and we were curious about the wider social, technical and aesthetic scenarios associated with these developments, both historically and in the present.

KH: You talk about the way encoded material feels but is not actually immaterial, and how computer memory is an active electronic event. To me this seems to relate to the well-known psychological understanding that memory is created in the mind through the activity of remembering – that it is not accessed as a pre-existing object and then replaced like a book on a shelf. Would you say that we humans have a tendency to forget or misunderstand this about our own memories, or, that perhaps we understand this all too well, and we’re hoping that technology will succeed where we fail in creating an indexical record? 

IB: There are many different ways of studying memory. If you follow the thinking of Henri Bergson, memory is essentially a function that serves our basic need for mobility. It relates to our capacity to propel our bodies into the future, so that memories are basically created as a function of such movement. Other theories – particularly related to sociological studies of collective memory – pay more attention to distinct monument-like memories of the past and the need for safeguarding such memories. There is nothing wrong with that perspective per se, except for the fact that it may tend towards unnecessarily rigid conceptions of what it means to be a collective. It can potentially underplay the fact that memory-monuments, whether they are rituals, institutions, language or works of art, only appear as stable and everlasting because their relevance has been constantly renegotiated or recreated through new networks of influence and new forms of attention. I am not saying this to advocate change for change’s sake, but because the idea of a collective based on a rigid idea of identity modeled on an unchanging past is not helpful in a globalized world where the worst forms of xenophobia are one the rise. We need social ontologies that make it easier, not harder, to handle the encounter with and co-existence with new “others”.

  Aldo Tambellini, still from Black TV, 1968. Photo Credit: Aldo Tambellini

KH: Yes, and this idea of memory as mobility, or memory as the active present rather than the unchanging past – it reminds me of your use of Bill Viola’s “Video Black – The Mortality of the Image” in the beginning of The Autobiography of Video and the Transformation of the Artist’s Studio, where Viola was lamenting that a surveillance camera lacked the memory and comprehension of the human subject. He describes it as having no history and limitless present. So I’m thinking about that in reference to what you just said, but I’m also thinking about it in reference to something that interests me personally, which is the notion of ascribing subjecthood to the video camera. You appear critical of Viola for forcing subjecthood onto the camera, but you also talk about the technological agency of camera, and its “power to unfold” outside of the will of the artist. Can you talk about the difference between your assertion that video has “subject-like properties” and Bill Viola’s assertion that the security camera is a failed subject?

IB: I found Bill Viola’s statement interesting because when he wrote that video has no memory, he pointed to something very important, notably that closed circuit video has no storage memory. (I could add that what is “stored” on videotape also challenges ideas of storage, since videotape does not safeguard images, like film or photography does, only electromagnetic patterns that may generate an electronic image which is always a new, live, phenomenon.) But once you think memory beyond the concept of storage, video of course does have memory. These ideas are much more developed in the work of Frank Gilette and Paul Ryan, who thought of analog video as a quasi-biological memory system exemplifying the future-oriented memory of living bodies, bodies that act and react to whatever is going on around them. So I would say that Viola’s statement was basically the negative point of departure from which I could approach the ways in which video, as a memory technology, also had certain rudimentary features in common with human forms of memory. And how knowing this might affect our understanding of the encounter between artists and new technologies in the 1960s and 70s.

By writing the “autobiography of video”, I was not actually trying to say that video technology is like a human subject or to portray video as a form of subjectivity. What I was interested in was the idea of technical concretization or individuation, which I take from the philosopher Gilbert Simondon. The history of technology is not a linear set of developments that take place in reference to the world of intra-machinic functions only. Simondon described the fact that technologies change as a result of their interaction with a specific environment: this is how the inner workings of a machine become more concrete, or more specific or individuated. So I was interested in how video technologies became something very specific in interaction with an environment dominated by artists, artist-engineers and political activists, in contrast to what they became within the context of state or corporate broadcasting. Each of these contexts produced different technical/social realities. Here it is important to note that Simondon does not approach the individuation from the perspective of a finished individual, but from the dynamic process of individuation itself. It was such a process – or, more precisely, set of processes– that I tried to get at in my book, as best I could, and with all the limitations that will necessarily haunt such a project.

Keith Sonnier, still from TV In and TV Out, 1972. Photo Credit: Keith Sonnier

KH: What are you working on now?

IB: I’m a bit hesitant to discuss it because it’s so new, but I just gave a keynote lecture on the transformation of the straight line in twentieth-century art – a topic that I related to the ongoing discussions about the concept of “contemporaneity” and its institutional and discursive realities, the topic of the conference. I’ve been working for quite a while now with La Monte Young’s seminal 1960 composition, Draw a Straight Line and Follow It, and everything that happened around this work. It is a long story, but I am interested in how this work might be related to the sensorial alignment and coordination in contemporary computing and new concepts of so-called “common sense”.

Another aspect of my current work returns to the issue of machine environments, more specifically by looking into the way in which new media technologies are increasingly associated with all sorts of meteorological phenomena. Machine weathers, in other words. This is something slightly different from John Durham Peter’s discussion, in The Marvelous Clouds, of all sorts of natural phenomena as media. I am more interested in the way in which machine realities, technical realities, are approached in atmospheric terms, and also in psychological terms, having to do with moods, with subtle environmental shifts and changes. Such ideas have a long history, and it probably was the constant appearance of snow and rain in the media-oriented works of Philippe Parreno, among others, that first made me think about these ideas.

KH: Anything else?

IB: Well, there are lots of other subjects I could talk about that annoy me a great deal, but that I should probably avoid since it may turn into a rant. [Laughs]

KH: You can rant! This is Bad at Sports, after all. [Laughs]

IB: [Laughs] No no, let’s end before I do.

  Ina Blom is an art historian, critic and writer working between Norway and the United States. You can find her faculty pages here and here.

    Episode 583 Paul Catanese

Episode 567 Yesomi Umolu

In The Late Afternoon of Modernism: An Interview with Graham Harman

The Aesthetic Origins of the Anthropocene: An Interview with Jeremy Bolen, Emily Eliza Scott, and Andrew Yang

Economies of resignation

Thinks: Ina Blom published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv

[nofomoartworld]

Thinks: Ina Blom

Appreciating the Weirdness: An Interview with Ina Blom

  Ina Blom: If I’m a little bit off, it’s because for some time now I haven’t slept much, after a bad bout of flu. But I’m symptom free now!

Keeley Haftner: Yes I’m glad to hear your feeling better, and we’ll forgive you for any illness-related errors [laughs]. So I’d like to begin with the basics. You teach at both University of Oslo and the University of Chicago; what do you find most different and most similar about working between these two contexts?

IB: I mean, both are art historical departments, but I think the greatest difference is that while we do have a number of foreign students in Oslo, I think the international mix in Chicago tends to be greater. In Oslo, teaching tends to be more lecture-based, with larger classes, whereas in Chicago it’s generally more seminar-based. Also, importantly, the University of Chicago is an expensive private university, where in Scandinavia all universities are state-owned and basically tuition free, and this of course creates a different study environment. The free education system also draws foreign students from beyond the EU. I probably shouldn’t advertise this to the world [laughs], but so far the government is keeping it free also for non-EU students because they want more people around the world to be aware of our research institutions.

KH: Let’s talk about your writing. It has appeared in a number of different types of publications, including art critical journals such as Artforum, Afterall, Parkett, and Texte zur Kunst, and exhibition catalogues, as well as more standard academic journals and publishing houses. Would you say that this allows you more freedom within your writing practice?

IB: Yes, absolutely. I started out as a music critic and radio DJ many years ago, so I got a lot of training in basic journalism and various genres and styles of writing, depending on the publication and the audience – from straightforward reporting to the more literary or essayistic and the more academic. I really enjoy being able to have different voices for different contexts, and I also just enjoy writing! [Laughs] One of the reasons I went back into academia was because I got a bit fed up with the free-wheeling, impressionistic voice that was de rigeur in most music journalism. The more analytic side of me wanted to be more hard-edged and focused, and also more philosophical, and this did not always go down so well in the more journalistic contexts. So ultimately I felt greater freedom having the academic world as my main professional platform. But I really enjoy the back and forth between different contexts.

KH: I’m thinking about the article you wrote for Artforum’s September 2015 issue, which was accompanied by what is probably one of the most arresting covers for the magazine I’ve ever seen (Torbjørn Rødland’s Baby (2007)). Can you describe how his innovative approach to photography, as you say, “the entire image made punctum”, holds your interest in reference to your larger research interests?

Torbjørn Rødland’s Baby, 2007, as seen on Artforum, September, 2015. Photo Credit: Artforum

IB: I’m not sure that there is a direct link, per se. As an art critic, I tend to be most interested in works that I don’t immediately “get”– when I can’t instantly tell what the work is about or what exactly the artist’s project is. Rødland’s work is very much like that; his photographs are always somewhat mysterious to me and I feel I’m always kind of scrambling to understand what he’s doing, and my own response. In the mid-90s, he got a lot of attention because he appeared to rehearse an nineteenth-century Nordic Romanticism that seemed contrary to the conceptually-oriented art practices that was re-entering art practices at that time, and also very much at odds with my own preoccupation with Dadaism, Constructivism, Fluxus and other anti-romantic- and anti-expressionist forms of art. Rødland seemed to recirculate Romanticism with a strange and idiosyncratic twist that made you pay attention. This was something completely different from conservative-post-modern pleas for past glories or ironic recirculation of too-familiar motifs. You simply had to pay attention in a new way. So that was the beginning of my interest in this work, but as his project grew I think the images just got stranger and stranger. And increasingly I started to think about them as opening up the horizon of what photography is and can be, in really new ways – pertaining, among other things, to the relationship between images, technical apparatuses and various types of natural phenomena, as well as the question of the contagiousness of images and their affective dimensions. These were ways of trying to approach his take on photography, but I still think they are inadequate in terms of just appreciating the weirdness of his work, which I think is great.

One of the first articles I wrote about his work was called “I’m With Stupid”, because I was obsessed with rock and roll stupidity, which I think is a sensibility I shared with Rødland. The celebration of idiocy, all those things for which there’s no explanation and no excuse. So I wrote a long essay about how that sensibility made its way into his work, and how that’s also linked to a celebration of vulgarity, which Robert Pattison sees as the underlying romantic impulse in rock. Vulgarity here has nothing to do with bad taste – it is rather a sort of blankness that refuses to recognize given hierarchies of values or systems of knowledge. This is yet another half-baked critical approximation which may be meaningful to some extent, but which does not say all there is to say about the work.

KH: In a studio visit I had with you while at the School of the Art Institute Chicago, I seem to remember that in your own words, you encouraged me not to beat the dead horse of Conceptualism, and emphasized the importance of sincerity over the ironic in contemporary production. I’m wondering if you can talk about sincerity after Conceptualism and Minimalism?

IB: It’s not as though I want to promote one attitude or approach over another. I’m just afraid of anything that becomes a default mode of operation that art students feel obligated to follow no matter what. The critical/conceptual art practices and their traditions are incredibly important to me, but they carry a specific form of authority which can be crushing, and which, in its less intelligent or self-critical moments, becomes just another form of academicism. Anything that is able to present itself as the one proper critical approach may have this effect, and will easily appear as more valid than something whose framework or mode of operation is less clearly formulated. I believe that art students should be thoughtful and critical in their approach, but good art does not always emerge from well-formulated critique. So this is why I get a bit concerned when students seem to feel they need to justify their work in terms that are perhaps at odds with their best capacities and resources. There should be a lot of room for following pathways that have as yet no clear direction.

  Bill Viola, still from Reflecting Pool, 1979. Photo Credit: Bill Viola

KH: And you have a lot of different modes yourself, in terms of your focuses throughout your research. Shifting to one of these modes, I’m thinking about a term you briefly used in On the Style Site. Art, Sociality and Media Culture from back in 2007: the term “social site”. Can you talk about how it does or does not relate to Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics?

IB: The key term for me there was “style site”, which I used in order to honour the idea of site specificity while also questioning the idea of the simple access to something called “the social” in art practices of the 1990s and early 2000s. I was profoundly skeptical of the concept of relational aesthetics, and the way a number of works seemed to have been reduced to the idea of convivial togetherness of one kind or another. I saw very different things in the work of a lot of the artists associated with this new form of sociality in art, such Philippe Parreno, Liam Gillick, Rirkrit Tirivinijia, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and others. These works were not just about people gathering and doing things together, such as cooking. Every single one of these works was actually a media machine. They were without exception channeling other times and other places, inserting them into the live “here and now” of togetherness through a dynamic that was reminiscent of what is accomplished with real-time technologies such as television or digital networks. On closer look, these works turned out to be exceptionally complex assemblages that often associated televisual dynamics with the time-machine aspect of architecture, fashion and design elements – a whole range of phenomena traditionally linked to the phenomenon of “style”. Style used in this way was not about the look of things, or a static description and periodization of art history. It was all about the open-ended becoming or self-styling of modern subjects. In the works in question, architecture, design and fashion appeared as integral elements of media machineries that were no longer defined in terms of the programs or messages it presented to the public. Instead they were understood in terms of their role in the modern “production of subjectivity”, which many would claim is the key product of media and information industries, and their appeal to our apparently endless desire for self-development. Does this make sense?

KH: Yes, it does, and it makes me think about how you’re approaching media not only in terms of communicating the subjective but also in terms of the collective legacy of our technologies and data. I know some have referred to your research practice as a “media-archaeological approach”, which makes me think about your collaboration with Jussi Parikka, Matthew Fuller and many others in your latest anthology Memory in Motion. Archives, Technology and the Social.

Steina Vasulka, still from Orbital Obsessions, 1977. Photo Credit: Steina Vasulka

IB: Yes, this book came out of a research project called the Archive in Motion and that I headed at the University of Oslo. The project took a media-archaeological approach to the question of the contemporary archive, exploring how twentieth-century media technologies have changed our very understanding of what an archive is. The other book that I did which related to that project was called The Autobiography of Video. The Life and Times of a Memory Technology, where I really approach early analog video technologies as a set of agencies that explore their memorizing capacities in interaction with human actors, within the context of 1960s and 70s art. I spent a lot of time learning the ins and outs of video technologies, and the upshot was a story about the way in which these technologies propelled new social ontologies in the field of art production. In related ways, the point of departure for the Memory in Motion anthology was the basic sociological claim that society is memory. The idea was that fundamental changes in the technologies of memory might also change our idea of what the social is, how we should define whatever it is that we call social. Older memory technologies seem to privilege storage, containment, and stability over time, and seem to have promoted an idea of the social as something contained. But the ephemerality of contemporary memory technologies – which are all about updating and transferring in the present moment – may support a very different social ontology. So ultimately we were exploring the connection between technology and social thought, in many instances as articulated through early artistic prehensions of the implications of new media technologies.

KH: Both of these books were released very recently, but in regard to this call you put forward within them asking us rethink social memory from the ground up through the lens of digital and media technologies – I’m wondering whether you’ve noted historians beginning to rise to this challenge? [Laughs]

IB: [Laughs] I think it’s a bit early for that. All I can say is that the writing seems to have a lot of downloads on academia.edu! [Laughs] But it is not as though we were working with these topics in a vacuum. Gabriel Tarde and Bruno Latour’s writings speak to these issues at a sociological and philosophical level, as does Maurizio Lazzarato’s contributions to the Italian post-workerist tradition in political philosophy. Additionally, important work on digital archives has been done by Wolfgang Ernst, among others, who are among the contributors to our book. Our job, as I saw it, was to connect theories of new memory technologies with certain traditions in social thought and study this from a media archaeological and historical perspective. We are currently living in an almost hysterical memory culture, obsessed with storage and safekeeping, and where the old museum principles of careful critical selection are replaced by digital technologies that seem to promise that now there will be storage capacity for everything. The reality is that nothing is stored in digital space – documents only exist in terms of code that may or may not regenerate an image or object depending on whether your software and file format has been updated. Our desperate quest for infinite storage is an effect of this half-awareness of potentially catastrophic memory loss. These are strange times for archives and collections, and we were curious about the wider social, technical and aesthetic scenarios associated with these developments, both historically and in the present.

KH: You talk about the way encoded material feels but is not actually immaterial, and how computer memory is an active electronic event. To me this seems to relate to the well-known psychological understanding that memory is created in the mind through the activity of remembering – that it is not accessed as a pre-existing object and then replaced like a book on a shelf. Would you say that we humans have a tendency to forget or misunderstand this about our own memories, or, that perhaps we understand this all too well, and we’re hoping that technology will succeed where we fail in creating an indexical record? 

IB: There are many different ways of studying memory. If you follow the thinking of Henri Bergson, memory is essentially a function that serves our basic need for mobility. It relates to our capacity to propel our bodies into the future, so that memories are basically created as a function of such movement. Other theories – particularly related to sociological studies of collective memory – pay more attention to distinct monument-like memories of the past and the need for safeguarding such memories. There is nothing wrong with that perspective per se, except for the fact that it may tend towards unnecessarily rigid conceptions of what it means to be a collective. It can potentially underplay the fact that memory-monuments, whether they are rituals, institutions, language or works of art, only appear as stable and everlasting because their relevance has been constantly renegotiated or recreated through new networks of influence and new forms of attention. I am not saying this to advocate change for change’s sake, but because the idea of a collective based on a rigid idea of identity modeled on an unchanging past is not helpful in a globalized world where the worst forms of xenophobia are one the rise. We need social ontologies that make it easier, not harder, to handle the encounter with and co-existence with new “others”.

  Aldo Tambellini, still from Black TV, 1968. Photo Credit: Aldo Tambellini

KH: Yes, and this idea of memory as mobility, or memory as the active present rather than the unchanging past – it reminds me of your use of Bill Viola’s “Video Black – The Mortality of the Image” in the beginning of The Autobiography of Video and the Transformation of the Artist’s Studio, where Viola was lamenting that a surveillance camera lacked the memory and comprehension of the human subject. He describes it as having no history and limitless present. So I’m thinking about that in reference to what you just said, but I’m also thinking about it in reference to something that interests me personally, which is the notion of ascribing subjecthood to the video camera. You appear critical of Viola for forcing subjecthood onto the camera, but you also talk about the technological agency of camera, and its “power to unfold” outside of the will of the artist. Can you talk about the difference between your assertion that video has “subject-like properties” and Bill Viola’s assertion that the security camera is a failed subject?

IB: I found Bill Viola’s statement interesting because when he wrote that video has no memory, he pointed to something very important, notably that closed circuit video has no storage memory. (I could add that what is “stored” on videotape also challenges ideas of storage, since videotape does not safeguard images, like film or photography does, only electromagnetic patterns that may generate an electronic image which is always a new, live, phenomenon.) But once you think memory beyond the concept of storage, video of course does have memory. These ideas are much more developed in the work of Frank Gilette and Paul Ryan, who thought of analog video as a quasi-biological memory system exemplifying the future-oriented memory of living bodies, bodies that act and react to whatever is going on around them. So I would say that Viola’s statement was basically the negative point of departure from which I could approach the ways in which video, as a memory technology, also had certain rudimentary features in common with human forms of memory. And how knowing this might affect our understanding of the encounter between artists and new technologies in the 1960s and 70s.

By writing the “autobiography of video”, I was not actually trying to say that video technology is like a human subject or to portray video as a form of subjectivity. What I was interested in was the idea of technical concretization or individuation, which I take from the philosopher Gilbert Simondon. The history of technology is not a linear set of developments that take place in reference to the world of intra-machinic functions only. Simondon described the fact that technologies change as a result of their interaction with a specific environment: this is how the inner workings of a machine become more concrete, or more specific or individuated. So I was interested in how video technologies became something very specific in interaction with an environment dominated by artists, artist-engineers and political activists, in contrast to what they became within the context of state or corporate broadcasting. Each of these contexts produced different technical/social realities. Here it is important to note that Simondon does not approach the individuation from the perspective of a finished individual, but from the dynamic process of individuation itself. It was such a process – or, more precisely, set of processes– that I tried to get at in my book, as best I could, and with all the limitations that will necessarily haunt such a project.

Keith Sonnier, still from TV In and TV Out, 1972. Photo Credit: Keith Sonnier

KH: What are you working on now?

IB: I’m a bit hesitant to discuss it because it’s so new, but I just gave a keynote lecture on the transformation of the straight line in twentieth-century art – a topic that I related to the ongoing discussions about the concept of “contemporaneity” and its institutional and discursive realities, the topic of the conference. I’ve been working for quite a while now with La Monte Young’s seminal 1960 composition, Draw a Straight Line and Follow It, and everything that happened around this work. It is a long story, but I am interested in how this work might be related to the sensorial alignment and coordination in contemporary computing and new concepts of so-called “common sense”.

Another aspect of my current work returns to the issue of machine environments, more specifically by looking into the way in which new media technologies are increasingly associated with all sorts of meteorological phenomena. Machine weathers, in other words. This is something slightly different from John Durham Peter’s discussion, in The Marvelous Clouds, of all sorts of natural phenomena as media. I am more interested in the way in which machine realities, technical realities, are approached in atmospheric terms, and also in psychological terms, having to do with moods, with subtle environmental shifts and changes. Such ideas have a long history, and it probably was the constant appearance of snow and rain in the media-oriented works of Philippe Parreno, among others, that first made me think about these ideas.

KH: Anything else?

IB: Well, there are lots of other subjects I could talk about that annoy me a great deal, but that I should probably avoid since it may turn into a rant. [Laughs]

KH: You can rant! This is Bad at Sports, after all. [Laughs]

IB: [Laughs] No no, let’s end before I do.

  Ina Blom is an art historian, critic and writer working between Norway and the United States. You can find her faculty pages here and here.

    Episode 583 Paul Catanese

Episode 567 Yesomi Umolu

In The Late Afternoon of Modernism: An Interview with Graham Harman

The Aesthetic Origins of the Anthropocene: An Interview with Jeremy Bolen, Emily Eliza Scott, and Andrew Yang

Economies of resignation

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#IFTTT #Bad at Sports

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MUMBURGER by Sarah Kosar Directed by: Tommo Fowler Old Red Lion Theatre 27th June – 22nd July ‘Kosar’s surreal premise creates a thoughtful and moving meditation on grief.’ ★★★★ In Sarah Kosar’s Mumburger the mundane and brutal aspects of grief collide. Father and daughter Hugh and Tiffany deal with the sudden death of their wife/mother Andrea. Hugh is disorganised, with little appetite to complete the tasks in Tiffany’s voluminous spreadsheets. It soon becomes apparent that his languor and detachment is not totally down to grief but is his default mode. It is the role reversal of a cliché parent/child relationship. They are somewhat distant, despite the fact that Tiffany is still living at home in her mid-twenties. Andrea was the glue that held the family together. Inevitably there are endless arrangements to be made. Kosar does well to capture the banality of these small tasks. Tiffany throws herself into these. Yet she is also drawn to the more dark distractions provided by social media. After watching footage of a fairground disaster multiple times, the temptation becomes too great, and Googling her mother’s accident leads her to finding footage of the incident, which she can’t resist watching. Andrea’s death means that father and daughter have to communicate and work together now their go-between is gone. Or is she? Death does not prevent her driving their relationship and providing them with new challenges. It is here the play takes a surreal turn, with parts of Andrea’s body being delivered in the form of burgers. She was a vegan, although she seemingly took this stance for environmental as much as ethical reasons. This means that roadkill is permissible. Including herself. Fowler’s taut direction keeps the play focused and maintains momentum. A strength of the production is that, other than the surrealistic cannibalistic element, it remains pretty much naturalistic. This means the dilemma whether to eat the, well, ‘mumburgers’ provides the piece with a powerful device, giving two people a quandary – recognising conventional moral standards or respecting the extreme views of a loved one, views only nominally shared by yourselves. The scenario provides the play with many memorable moments, including a coup de théâtre that involves a blowtorch and the unmistakable smell of cooked meat filling the theatre. In the two hander the actors excellently play a straight bat to the dilemma. Rosie Wyatt as Tiffany drives the piece, as the digital savvy but lost millennial. Bringing a mix of vulnerability and assertiveness when harassing Hugh, she contemplates how to honour her mother’s legacy, as well as trying to sort her own life out. As Hugh, Andrew Frame brings a languid charm that makes him the kind of laid back pot smoking father that is so popular with their children’s friends but often less so with the children themselves. His reluctance to accept Tiffany’s partner Bea seems less to do with homophobia than an inability or unwillingness to take Tiffany seriously. But the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Both have a habit of scratching the same part of their scalp. They are linked inextricably biologically. This is inescapable, whether they like it or not. Kosar’s surreal premise creates a thoughtful and moving meditation on grief. She creates an imaginative and compelling exploration of a situation most will have to face eventually. Andy is a playwright who regularly has plays performed in London fringe theatre. He graduated from three cohorts of the Royal Court Theatre’s Young Writers Programme

#Mumburger Old Red Lion Theatre Review