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stxleslyds · 3 years

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Jason doesn't show up in DC's animated series (though the does "spiritually" show up as Tim Drake in Season 2 of Batman the Animated Series).

Jason has a strong presence in the video games, though. So what is your opinion on Jason's characterization for Arkham Knight? He is a DLC for the Injustice games as well. Judy be warned that I did watch some clips of Arkham Knight and the torture was too gruesome for me.

RED HOOD IN VIDEO GAMES.

Hey there friend, thank you for the ask!

INJUSTICE 2.

I had to do some research on Red Hood’s appearances in the Injustice games because I was never really in touch with that story. Here is what I knew about it, there are two games for PC, one of them is Injustice and the other is Injustice 2, the games also have the comic books that give context/background to the lore of the game.

I used to play Injustice: Gods Among Us on mobile phone, and I had Jason as a playable character there, I also found out way too late that “Nightwing” wasn’t really Dick Grayson, it was Damian because he took on the mantle after he and the rock killed Dick in the comic (forever mad at that ridiculous death and the kinda scary art that comic had).

I looked for information about Red Hood’s backstory in wikis and all that because I refuse to read an alternate universe book written by Tom Taylor, there are things that I am just not willing to do.

All in all, I think that this Jason was in surface level, the same as his canon comic counterpart up until the time of his resurrection. Given that the world was at war and the League of Assassins wasn’t working openly, he and the others had to live in the shadows, he seems to have been trained proficiently by both Batman and the LoA so he is a very hardcore opponent. There are some bits of his story with Damian and a place called Gorilla City that I do not understand because I haven’t read the comics but I am fine without it.

The thing is that this Jason is pretty cool, he sticks to his morals and fights for what he believes is right, he doesn’t look like the kinda guy that takes sides in this war which is probably the best idea. Both Batman and Superman seem to be on the wrong side of history with they ideals.

What I did see and I loved eternally was the ending to Red Hood’s story, I will link the video here! But I will also copy and paste all that he says there because I think it’s really important and where I was able to see more of his characterization.

"That. Felt. Good. Titanium composite hollow point bullets with a C4 kicker. Fastest, most explosive ammo in the world. I made them myself. With the invasion over, Bruce and Superman started fighting again. I wasn't down with either of them. On the one hand, the Regime's right. Scumbag murderers and rapists deserve to die. But on the other hand, I'm no fan of government authority. Especially the dictatorial variety.

So, while the world's finest fight each other, I fight for the people. The weak. The innocent. Anyone who can't protect themselves. When they cry out for a saviour, I'll answer. As for the criminals that threaten them? They need to know that their actions have consequences. That the Red Hood is coming for them.”

This is excellent, I absolutely love this, this Jason knows his morals and doesn’t bow down to anyone and in the end, he is truly a hero to the people that need heroes the most.

Him saying that he believes that some criminals have to die but that he can’t really join Superman’s side because he cannot associate with it because he isn’t a fan of dictatorial ideas, I love this man.

I feel like this is a fair characterization for Jason, I believe that if something along the lines of what happens in Injustice happens in current continuity then Jason wouldn’t join any sides, he wouldn’t be neutral per se but he will fight for his own ideals. And his ideals in most universes are protecting people and I think that’s great. I love to see a world where Jason is seen as more intelligent and put together than the Batman.

Something that I find quite funny and interesting from this game is the dialogues that characters have with each other when they fight, I found this video compilation where you can see all the dialogues between Red Hood vs Robin (Damian Wayne), they are so fun and I love the animations too.

BATMAN: ARKHAM KNIGHT.

Oh, ArkhamVerse Jason, my beloved.

He is, to me, the epitome of this meme.

I have actually watched the whole game playthrough, several times, and Jason had a DLC as the Red Hood for that game (Nightwing has one too and I will talk about it later because I love this version of him). And, yes, the torture scene is very gruesome, it was incredibly sad and it made me feel bad. But I also think that they made it that way so it could support the kind of storytelling they were going for.

The reality is that this Jason suffered his whole life, and was constantly introduced to lifestyles that he never wanted to be part of. The world around this Jason wasn’t kind at all to him and there is a long list of people who did him wrong.

Although ArkhamVerse Jason didn’t die, like his comic counterpart did, he suffered the most. And his suffering really drove him to be the best version of an unhinged Jason Todd. But it’s clear, his brutality and murder intent isn’t laced with his Red Hood persona or at least not on the same level as it is with his Arkham Knight persona.

This Jason’s characterization works to perfection, but it only works that way because he was well developed within the game lore and the comics. This Jason was extremely well trained, he is probably the smartest version of Jason, his mind and his level of preparedness are unparalleled when it comes to other Jason Todd variants (a little MCU Loki talk right there).

I would go as far as to say that this Jason would be an excellent match to peak Dick Grayson from before New 52 in comics. Those two would clash so immensely, but man, it would be one hell of an intellectual and physical fight. Two Kings doing what they do best.

Anyway, for now take my word for how well characterized Jason is in the ArkhamVerse, I will make a post were I deep dive more on his character both in game and comics. There is so much to say about him, he is truly interesting and very complex.

Now, I will be a little cheeky and I will use this ask as an opportunity to talk about my man, ArkhamVerse Nightwing aka Pretty Boy.

I love him so much! In the game when you get to meet him (I will link the video here! it’s five minutes long, and worth the watch) you get to see both Nightwing’s and Dick’s personalities. Nightwing is fun and relaxed, he is a little bit cocky and doesn’t let Batman be a pain in his ass, he is truly a beast. Although he is never seen without the mask in a moment when he is alone with Bruce you can really see Dick’s personality shine through. He obviously has had issues with Bruce in the past but there is also this palpable respect coming from both of them to the other. Bruce wants to protect Dick but he acts like a jerk instead of telling him what is on his mind. Dick wants to help Bruce at all costs, he refuses to leave Gotham until they solve something that he was already working on before Bruce needed his help.

There is also this sort of goodbye scene between the two (I will link it here!) that is extremely sad because Dick doesn’t believe Bruce when he tells him that he is proud of him. Dick cuts him off just when Bruce was trying to open up and I think that scene speaks volumes about how rough their relationship was. Dick never finds out that Bruce was “dying” after being infected with the Joker’s blood/gas, so it’s very bittersweet.

There is also the Nightwing DLC, where we get to see Dick being the best of the best, he is so skilled and funny and smart. It is amazing how much this game made me love their Nightwing even though he doesn’t appear much, his dynamic with Penguin is just perfect, Dick literally makes Penguin’s life very difficult. All of the people working with Penguin kinda fear Dick a little bit, some of them are even impressed by his skills.

Oh and, when Nightwing gets captured at some point in the game, Penguin’s men are saying something along the lines of “I was sure Batman will come in” “how come?” “what’s tied up downstairs and getting the crap beat out of it?” “Oh yeah, Nightwing” and that is so true, if I were Batman, I will also risk my life for Nightwing.

I just love Nightwing, he makes me so happy! He is the best here!

Anyway, enough of me loving Nightwing uncontrollably, I will make a separate post where I only talk about ArkhamVerse Jason so, yeah, be ready for that one because I love that Jason too, he is hot.

#jason todd #red hood #arkham knight #dick grayson #nightwing #arkham games #injustice 2 #arkhamverse #asksss

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comicaurora · 3 years

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Hi Red! I really admire your work and everything you do. Do you have any tips for someone who doesn't know how to art but really wants to learn?

Thanks! Boy, that's a tricky one. I've never been a very good art student, so I can't really speak for what teaching methods work.

For me, what worked best was sheer volume. My older videos are absolute Hot Messes for a reason - I was very inexperienced with digital art when I started out. But with dozens of illustrations in every video I ended up getting a ton of practice; I wasn't setting out to improve, but it happened naturally as I got a better feel for what worked and what didn't. No matter how iffy you are starting out, if you do enough art, you will become more polished. You'll look for shortcuts and simplifications, ways to make certain effects work, and in the process you'll build a style that works for you. This is why having a sketchbook is so useful - doodling a few things a day will make everything a lot smoother over time.

On a more technical level, I always recommend life drawing first and foremost. I'm also very bad at it, but it's ultimately the best way to improve. There's no better way to get a feel for musculature and anatomy, light and shadow, material textures - everything real and observable and frequently stylized. It's very tempting to try and learn by copying other people's styles, and I've seen a lot of very impressive artwork come from that practice, but you can almost always identify the source of the style. I've seen people who very clearly grew up drawing disney princesses, sailor scouts, and even one webcomic where the creator had very obviously learned to draw on Elfquest fanart. It's not bad, but it's limiting; it teaches you the shortcuts developed for that style and doesn't encourage you to find your own way to stylize or capture certain effects.

So: lots of drawing, lots of life-drawing. I think it's also important to internalize that no drawing has to be perfect. I had this huge problem when I was younger where I wouldn't want to draw anything if I didn't know I could do it right. Sketchbooks are for doodles, practice and half-finished concepts, not final "perfected" works. Don't hold yourself to an impossible standard or you'll be too stressed and frustrated to improve.

I also think it's ultimately most important to find a subject you actually enjoy drawing. I stalled out on art for years in middle school until I started developing ideas for Aurora and suddenly had a reason to draw. If you want to draw something, you'll want to get better at drawing it so you can make it look right. I know some people who love drawing environments, some who love drawing incredibly intricate and detailed objects from life, some who love designing characters, and several who love drawing fanart above all else. Like any art, it's important to find the aspects you're personally passionate about and encourage those. Especially if you're trying to get into the practice of art but don't feel confident yet, it's important to identify the things that energize you to draw so you can build up momentum without getting discouraged.

I also strongly recommend consuming a lot of art - comics, cartoons, illustrations, animation, etc. As you develop an artist's eye you'll find you engage with this media in a new way - not just appreciating it at face value, but seeing its style and how its creator handled certain forms of stylization and how they managed to capture and create certain visual effects. (I'm always intrigued by how various styles handle noses. Noses are terrible.) You don't need to reinvent the wheel, and seeing how other artists have done things you might be struggling with can give you a leg up in figuring out your own way to handle it. For instance, the current method I use to do forested backgrounds is partially derived from some pixel art foliage effects I thought were really efficient.

SO - draw a lot, draw from life, draw things you love drawing, don't sweat it too much, consume media, hydrate

#aurora #asks

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randomingoftherandomness · 3 years

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The Bone of Impurity

So with the upcoming Winner is King, my brain got whirling with the thought of The Bone of Impurity which is arguably one of the main plot points of the novel and I thought I would do a bit of a meta for it? It is definitely something I hope they do not dilute for the Live Action adaptation but even if they did touch upon 1% of the shit that goes on into making a Bone of Impurity, it's still pretty Dead Dove Don't Eat. So I thought I would preempt it by actually putting down a primer on the Bone of Impurity.

I did not read the novel in Chinese and read it in English, so some of the more subtle themes present in the original work will have been missed by me. If anyone who has read the Sha Po Lang novel as it was written by Priest, do let me know if I have made any mistakes on any of the below ( •̀ᄇ• ́)ﻭ✧

Fair warning, there's some pretty Nightmare Fuel inducing shit, so I'll be keeping things under a read more in case people get squicked by this lol I'm also basing my references around the translation that Northwest Flower did because that is the one I read.

Just a basic background on The Bone of Impurity:

It is essentially a curse unique to the Northern Man people who utilise it in moments where someone's country is broken and nothing remains but revenge. To attain that, they make a sacrifice to the 'evil' gods of their beliefs

It is a cruel and horrible affliction to put on the person, but the return for it is that the person who becomes a Bone of Impurity gains the strength, intelligence, foresight and abilities of two persons

Whoever becomes a Bone of Impurity is someone who is single-mindedly ruthless and bloodthirsty when pressed towards a goal; they will attain power and their near supernatural abilities will make them unstoppable in achieving their goals

They will also gain a sort of existence that is neither alive nor dead. Sort of a zombie-like living. They also don't live very long

For all this super abilities, the flip side for anyone living with the Bone of Impurity is that they will be constantly highly suspicious and paranoid of everyone and everything; they will be slowly driven mad by the visceral hallucinations that will leave them incapable of knowing what is real and what is fake (Volume 1, Chapter 26; Volume 3, Chapter 70)

A Bone of Impurity attack comes about when the afflicted experiences heightened emotions or moments of extreme stress (I seriously cannot list out all the times it popped up in the novel because we would be here quite long lol)

It manifests in dual pupils being observed in their blood-hued eyes, hypersensitivity of the senses, their body burning up, almost sleep paralysis levels of body-lockedness and they will experience extreme pain with the bouts of attacks lasting hours at a time (Volume 2, Chapter 50 & 51)

The method of 'refining' a Bone of Impurity is...

Basically taking two babies and putting them in a dark place with no air, no water, no food. One of the babies will survive while the other one dies (Volume 3, Chapter 70)

I'm not quite certain if they have to be blood related or not, but the examples given in the book all indicate that if they have a strong connection to each other, then it would be better and that the Bone of Impurity would better take

The dead baby is then... 'refined' with the arcane arts and medicines of the Northern Man Goddesses and fed to the surviving baby (re:baby cannibalism)

I told you it wasn't pretty...

In the novel, Chang Geng is the Bone of Impurity made by Hu Ge Er, his aunt, in order to bring about chaos and tumult to Great Liang that had subjugated her people. Chang Geng is repeatedly described to have almost scary levels of intelligence and foresight, to the point where some of the characters actually wonder if he is omnipotent.

Chang Geng is also revealed to have obtained characteristics of his cousin

One of the ways Shen Yi and Gu Yun identified Chang Geng as the missing Fourth Prince is the congenital defect of a toe - which, lol, the worlds where DNA testing did not exist - and Chang Geng insists that his toe deformity was caused Hu Ge Er (Chapter 8)

It is later revealed that this was one of the further side-effects of the Bone of Impurity where the afflicted would reflect characteristics of the 'devoured' counterpart (Extra: Souls returned home)

Now on to the meta bit:

Chang Geng has a pretty much single focus sexuality on Gu Yun; even when he wasn't clear on what the nature of those feelings were, he was already dedicated to the man, already thinking up ways of how he can support him in the future

Even when he was heartbroken by the reveal of who 'Shen Shiliu' was and the lies and the subterfuge that had flowed between them, just with an apology and assurance from Gu Yun, Chang Geng was already ready to forgive him

Now, we know that Hu Ge Er said with her dying breath that the Bone of Impurity will cause him to lose his mind and will cause the death of everyone he will ever love. I think she said this because she has already detected the level of dedication he has built for Gu Yun and also because she is a horrible person and wanted one last pot shot at tormenting Chang Geng

Through all his Bone of Impurity attacks, Chang Geng has one consistent thing that he fears the most above everything else - Gu Yun abandoning him, rejecting him, leaving him in any way

My thought is simple; what makes him different from the other Bone of Impurities that were explicitly said and described in the novel? One person. Gu Yun.

Had Gu Yun not saved him from the wolves outside of Yanhui Town, he would have definitely died right there and then being killed by the Northern Man wolves. I truly believed that at that time, Chang Geng really ran out there to die. With just the scant descriptions of what Hu Ge Er did to him throughout his childhood, even the brief glimpses into her horrible abuse, is enough to cement that he was very likely unable to handle everything anymore.

If Gu Yun had not shown up and took on the mantle of Chang Geng's Yi Fu - as clumsy and as emotionally stunted as he was to deal with a dependent - was kind to him without any sort of condition attached to it, if Gu Yun had not taken that spot in Chang Geng's heart and mind as a moral compass, guiding his path to tempering the more extreme effects of the Bone of Impurity, I have no doubt that Chang Geng would have destroyed Great Liang before he even turned 21.

Because of Gu Yun, Chang Geng plotted the way to peace for Great Liang; divesting of weak emperors and ushering in a new age of stability and peace, building a foundation for his nephew to take over and build upon. All because he knew that Gu Yun loved his country, loved the people, has broken his back time and time again to toil for peace and defend its borders.

In the novel, they even explicitly say that when Gu Yun is out doing routine inspections of the borders and stuff, Chang Geng essentially shuts down; starts living like a monk and a life without colour until Gu Yun comes back to him (I don't know which extra or chapter this is in because this post has been waaaayyyy too long at this point)

With Gu Yun, especially when he learns that his supposedly unrequited and unfilial feelings were not as unrequited as they seem, he found a path to a future where he can strive to live without pain and without worry. With Gu Yun, he could focus all of the ruthlessness and all the bloodlust and the brilliance and the horrors and make it into a fulfilment of Gu Yun's dream; to be able to walk away from the battlefield and live out the rest of his days in peace and leisure.

Think about it, especially if you have read the novel, how scary can Chang Geng get when Gu Yun isn't around to temper him?

Basically, yes, I am definitely saying that Chang Geng and Gu Yun doing the horizontal dance with no pants resulted in peace for the country lol

[Bit of Trivia] Chang Geng's name is also significant because, according to Hu Ge Er, it is the name of the 'Bone of Impurity' in the Chinese dialect (Chapter 6)

#sha po lang #feng huo liu jin #烽火流金 #杀破狼 #chang geng #spl meta #sha po lang meta #winner is king #gu yun #changgu #chang geng x gu yun

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brightblueinky · 3 years

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Pardon me for the intrusion, but you're the only person I found who's still into CC and I have to ask: does the romantic aspect of Chrono's and Rosette's relationship seem lacking to you? Like I can see when Rosette starts to view him as a love interest (chapter 28), but I can't see when Chrono starts to view her as one. To me it feels like he only had an interested in Mary, and Rosette is just his very beloved friend; the kiss felt too sudden. I'm sorry, I just need a second opinion on this.

Okay I am so sorry I didn’t respond to this until now, I’ve mostly been using tumblr on my phone and using it to check a few blogs and occasionally the CC tag, and apparently tumblr doesn’t notify for asks on the mobile app? Or I’m not seeing it? Something. I have no idea how long you’ve been waiting for a response on this, so I’m really sorry! I hope you find this!

I think I need a reread of the manga at this point--a lot of the stuff I’m writing these days is going off of head canon which might not be 100% accurate anymore. So I’m just going to write this off the cuff. Gonna be a bit stream of consciousness! So this is definitely not a definitive opinion or even one I’ll always stand by, just how I personally feel in this particular moment.

So off the top of my head...

I think we see less things from Chrono’s point of view than from Rosette’s, which is part of what makes this tricky. This isn’t ALWAYS the case obviously (we see his sort of...PTSD dream flashback after Rizelle’s death, the flashback in volume 6 is basically from Chrono’s viewpoint since it’s mostly his memories, etc), but since one of the way the plot moves forward is the mystery of what happened in Chrono’s past usually the viewpoint is more centered around Rosette. I actually always assumed that Rosette was the only character that Moriyama would consider the protagonist until I saw that on a dust jacket for one of the books he said that BOTH Chrono and Rosette are (can’t remember which book, sorry! it was a fan translation).

Thinking about it, I think we see Chrono start to realize he has romantic feelings at the end of volume 6. I think that’s the first time he really, truly comes to accept his contract with Rosette as a good thing instead of just...the lesser of two evils, I guess? It’s when he goes “oh, yeah, I made the contract because otherwise she would’ve run off to solve the problem on her own, and I didn’t want to leave her alone.” I think that’s when he starts to really see Rosette as someone that’s on the same level of emotional maturity as him, too--earlier he occasionally teases her for being immature, but I think when Rosette tells him that she wants to share his pain, and Mary’s, that he sees how emotionally strong she is as a person and really respects that. Not that he didn’t see her as strong BEFORE, buuut like...he’d been so hesitant to share his past with Rosette until right then, and her response, I think, makes him realize how helpful having her support really is to him.

This isn’t really the same situation and is definitely my own personal reaction, but as I write this it makes me think of when I was dating my husband. I was initially terrified he was going to break up with me because I was bisexual--we both came from conservative Christian backgrounds and were homeschooled, and in the past he expressed homophobic sentiments--but I felt like I HAD to tell him because I couldn’t see myself in a long term relationship with someone I couldn’t be 100% honest with. His reaction when I told him was to immediately tell me he trusted me and cared about me, start to reconsider what he’d been raised to feel immediately, and he’s become one of my biggest advocates as I’ve come out to friends and family. Coming out to him was one of the best things I’ve ever done, but it was terrifying until I did. I can see Chrono having similar fears talking about his past with Rosette, and having a similar sense of relief and healing as soon as he realized how much Rosette is in his corner and how helpful having someone he can be open with actually is.

In the next chapter, Rosette holds Chrono’s hands to comfort him while they briefly talk about their current situation (Chrono being held in, uh, demon jail? and Rosette being taken off of her mission to find Joshua), then they both blush and get flustered when they realize what they’re doing. They babble small talk afterward while inner dialogue repeats Rosette’s promise to share Chrono’s pain, and Mary’s too. And then RIGHT AFTER is when Remington walks in and takes them to Aion’s old house on the beach so...that’s about it.

So I think the manga does show that, either right after he’s pulled out of his coma by Rosette or sometime in the aftermath, Chrono is starting to acknowledge that his feelings for Rosette might be more romantic. But it is VERY brief, because literally everything after that is two volumes of the big finale, taking place entirely over no more than 24 hours. Everything after that is rushing to tie up as many loose ends as possible--Fiore being Satella’s sister, saving Joshua, Joshua beginning to grapple with the gravity of what he’s done and been a part of and what’s been done to him, Aion and Chrono’s confrontation, the Order and the Sinner’s confrontation, Rosette’s near death experience, Aion’s motivations revealed, Chrono and Aion’s true relationship revealed, Azmaria finally coming into her own in terms of taking ownership of her powers, the culmination of Aion’s plans (and near-Apocalypse caused by it), the true nature of demons, the deaths of most of the Sinners, Shader’s defection, Joshua and Fiore’s relationship being somewhat resolved, Rosette and Chrono’s relationship being somewhat resolved...like holy shit there is SO. MUCH. THERE.

On top of that, I’ve got the Japanese reprints and while I can read basically no Japanese (HUGE GRAIN OF SALT INCOMING), I’ve pointed Google Translate at some of the omakes and from what I can tell, Moriyama talks in the omake in...volume 6, I think, that he basically had a whole other volume’s worth of story for the flashback that had to be cut! If I’m understanding it right, it’s like...from Remington’s perspective, and involves some Native American tribe or reservation that had connections to the Sinners, and the woman in charge of the orphanage Joshua and Rosette grew up in was a child living in a town nearby....

Basically, from what I can tell? Moriyama had a LOOOOOOOOT of background stuff he wanted to go into in the back half of Chrono Crusade that he wasn’t able to do for time reasons. I’m not sure if his editor gave him a deadline, or he realized it would be too meandering, or what exactly happened, but...have you ever heard the “iceberg” theory of writing? Basically, flesh out as much of the backstory as you can--know everything about the town your story is set in, the family of your protag and their relationships with them, what they eat for breakfast, just...every little minutia you can possibly think of, but most of that won’t get into your story. The audience will only see the tip of the iceberg, but knowing so much background about your setting and characters will help it feel more alive and inform your decisions as you write.

I think Moriyama had a fucking huge iceberg, basically, and I think he actually wanted to show more of that, but...couldn’t. So we get little pieces of art that reference this entire backstory for Satella we never see, and Aion, etc....that gets small nods but doesn’t make it into the manga.

And I think there’s a lot of things Moriyama wanted to give time to breathe in the manga but due to space limitations, couldn’t. So that’s why the second half of the manga literally takes place from Thanksgiving to sunrise on Christmas Day and is...the entire second half of the manga. He’s rushing to get in as much as possible while still letting the story flow as a story and sometimes...it’s not perfect.

So....I think unfortunately, yeah, one of the casualties of that is that we don’t get a huuuuuge amount of Chrono’s side of the relationship, because most of the moments that really shows that they’re heading in that direction is from Rosette’s POV. Other than the scene I already mentioned, I think you could argue that Chrono’s reaction to “the place that Chrono can go back to was decided 4 years ago!” might also be the first moment he starts to consider how important Rosette is to him, but that doesn’t HAVE to be romantic...Chrono’s reaction to her death (and then realizing there’s a chance to revive her) again emphasizes how important she is to him, but it doesn’t HAVE to be romantic...the kiss at the end is the only thing that really 100% says “Yes, this is romantic and not platonic” on his part. And...yeah. It feels a bit sudden. There’s some underlying hints before that but...I mean, I know about them because I’m obsessive about character growth and narrowed in on it in subsequent rereads, I’m not sure if it came through right away on my first read of the manga, and I even knew going into it that they were at least meant to be teased as a ship, so, yeah.

Also I briefly want to admit that as I’ve gotten older, the age gap bothers me a little more. Not enough for me to abandon the ship, just, you know, it’s something I acknowledge will turn some people off. I think Chrono, maturity-wise, is meant to be seen as...about 20. I think Moriyama mentions in one of the early omakes that that’s what he looks like in his unsealed form, we know that when he leaves Pandaemonium it’s right after his coming of age ceremony so he’s about what a demon would consider to be 18 in terms of emotional (and physical?) maturity, and especially since he’s been sleeping for 50 years since that period of his life he doesn’t have the experience that his age really indicates (which Aion blantantly points out near the end). So I’m not THAT bothered by it because I don’t think that Rosette and Chrono are actually that inequal in terms of emotional maturity but it’s still...there, and...I mean he met her when she was 12...so...yeah that’s a bit weird!!

I’ve just gotten to where I shrug my shoulders and go “look, every ship in Chrono Crusade has something problematic about it, if you’re going to be a fan of Chrono Crusade you’re probably going to have to grapple with the fact that it’s messy and human and nobody is 100% good or bad in the manga, and that’s part of what I like about it, so, that’s cool, but it’s probably not for everyone.” It’s actually one reason why I’m kinda OK with CC not being as popular as some of its contemporaries because...some of the anti-shipper stuff I’ve seen online...oh boy.

So...I guess in conclusion, I think there’s stuff there in the manga to build up the relationship a little bit, but a lot of it is from Rosette’s POV and most of it is kind of subtle. I wouldn’t be surprised if Moriyama had wanted to flesh it out more obviously in the manga but the second half is stuffed full of wrapping up character arcs and questions and loose ends so it just didn’t really have the time to get as much focus. I really like the ship a lot, but a lot of it comes from analysis of the characters and how they relate to each other rather than it just being...canon. I’m okay with that, I’m the sort of person that will ship characters that never even meet just because I think the dynamic might be cool, but...I’m not surprised that not everyone would be into it, either.

And now I kinda want to make...a series of posts analyising the different relationships that are...either canon or teased in canon, see how much they’re built up, etc. Because this post makes me think a lot about Joshua/Azmaria and how confused I was by them apparently being married in the epilogue on my first read, and only seeing the hints Moriyama hinted about them possibly being a couple in the manga on subsequent rereads (and even then HO BOY it’s so subtle it makes Chrono and Rosette look really in your face aaaaaa). BUT I HAVE RAMBLED ENOUGH FOR THIS POST and, again, I need a reread. Maybe soon....!!!!

#chrono crusade #anonymous #ask #shipping #chrono/rosette #character analysis #ramble #long post #I'm so sorry this doesn't have a read more cut I don't know how to do that on an ask #I both love and hate tumblr #Anonymous

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midnightohmnia · 3 years

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“WHITE NOIZE” EP REVIEW

EP Review by Dawood Kroutz

Wine might be banned but the discussion through the grapevines is very much in demand. You may ask who is responsible for this intoxicating supply…

Coming at the world with an energy and frankness South African Hip-Hop has not experienced in recent memory, the EP ‘WHITE NOIZE’ is fast becoming one of the most acclaimed projects in the country.

Track 1 - ‘WHITE NOIZE’

https://soundcloud.com/memlamli/white-noize?in=memlamli/sets/white-noize

We assume the sonic journey with track number one carrying the title of the EP, “WHITE NOIZE”, loosely defined as; “a constant background noise, especially one that drowns out other sounds”. A fitting title, encapsulating the grace and voracity these artists display their work. Throughout the duration of the opening track the term ”Siyaphambili’, “we are moving forward” is constantly repeated and absorbed into the listeners subconscious like a mantra. It becomes apparent that the artists are making their intentions as clear as the crystal blue skies (see track 4 ‘CERULEAN’) that they are aiming for greater heights, forging ever forward and never looking back. They are hungry and have a point to prove (to themselves, I understood and not to the world). The cover art speaks volumes too - as if they are telling the listeners that they have arrived (cue the grand entrance) and that they are not here to make a mark, but rather, to leave a scar. With this, the in-your-face and fearless sound is present, combined with an abrasive masculine energy but still very much creative in energy.

Edging into an up-tempo sound I gather a Rockstar vibration elicited at 3:09 minutes into the song. The deep “omnispheric” sound effect of the bass, combined with the kick drums and snares, give a sort of rocking-chair feeling and with this, the new-school Hip-Hop sound emerges but with the elements of a classic Hip-Hop sound simultaneously present.

The rhyme scheme is professional, the delivery is far from monotonous and the flows chosen throughout the duration of the song are impeccable. I can deeply appreciate all the sonic variations present throughout the song, it takes me on a melodic experience when listening through. The lyrics and flow compliment the beat perfectly. The lyrics sort of crescendo with the tempo as the song progresses. The deep touches of distorted bass add to the Rockstar energy emitted from the track (at 2:44 minutes an example of this is showcased) which graciously assists in complementing the sound and lyrical aspects as a whole collective. Technical execution is upheld, the artist’s vocal performance coupled with the producer’s finely executed mix, make a cohesive and retail ready song. A quality of sound capable of competing amongst commercial cats of the industry.

Track 2 - INTERLUDE 4 YOU

https://soundcloud.com/memlamli/interlude-4-you?in=memlamli/sets/white-noize

The energy from track one carries through to ‘INTERLUDE 4 YOU’. The drive and ambition is still very prevalent here but the artists showcase a softer side of their sound. They are writing for the mothers. A theme that becomes prevalent in this body of work is that, the artists are growing to realize that what they are doing is bigger than them, that their influence reaches beyond the bounds of their circle, and they have an impact larger than what they once thought. As much as I hear a ferocious flame in-your-face attitude within their voices, I attach a deep sense of gratitude to it as well.

There is a definite sense of familiarity throughout track 1 and 2: the drumming patterns are consistent even though the overall sound is different between the two songs - the producer successfully blends the message, identical instruments, sounds and patterns to give a contrasting but cohesive catalog of songs in the EP. This highlights the fine technical ability possessed by the producer and the remarkable storytelling prowess of the artists throughout this production. The switch up at 1:11 minutes into the song, coupled with the robotic/distortion effect on the vocals bring in the next artist perfectly. The drums and bass in this specific section compliment this effect really well too. The predominant use of the filtered and robotic effect on the background vocals with a touch of reverb serve as a key characteristic for each verse to really stand out (this is shared throughout the EP). The melodic vocals that are present have been carefully crafted and engineered to suit the levels of the instrumental. This song in its totality sets the tone for the Hip-Hop/R&B-infused section we experience in the latter half of the EP.

Track 3 - ‘TAKE FLIGHT’

https://soundcloud.com/memlamli/take-flight?in=memlamli/sets/white-noize

Floating into the third track, ‘TAKE FLIGHT’ opens up with atmospheric pads and hard hitting drums before the robust vocals and hook enter followed by a smooth verse with a melodic approach to his delivery. The song discusses a sense of belonging that can be achieved when accepting your circumstances. It appears the artists find belonging in elevation of all kinds, they are not afraid of aiming for unbelievable heights and take often take it “higher than a kite”, waking up and chasing the sun is the motto here, carpe diem, if you will. I also get the feeling that they do not follow the status quo and with this, they are able to dictate the pace of their dreams and chase it accordingly. The old adage of “what goes up, must come down” seems to be done away with in this song, the laws of gravity are bent here and I am reminded that what goes up does not necessarily have to come down if you have a skyrocket mentality.

When it comes to the production, a masterful transition occurs at 1:58 minutes into the song. The central deep/extraterrestrial sounding bass comes alive once again, especially during the transition, it sounds sonically pleasing and blended in the mix well. The outro makes the song even more memorable.

Track 4 - ‘CERULEAN’

https://soundcloud.com/memlamli/cerulean?in=memlamli/sets/white-noize

The title of each song carries much meaning and when it comes to a body of work, most times even more so. ‘CERULEAN’, that which is a shade of blue, a deep blue in color like the clear sky aligns and rounds up this body of work in a blissful way.

The track transitions well from track 3. The song speaks to the struggles of addiction, the loss of a dear friend, love, self-discovery and finally, to prosperity. “Better days are coming” are the lyrics molding this song and I can hear the artists passion, as mentioned previously, I confidently am of the view they know that what they are doing is bigger than them, and they are still humble enough to realize that when those better days come and that they take their dreams to the heights that for now seem unimaginable, those deep blue skies the naked eye cannot comprehend, that they will still value and appreciate the help of those that got them to where they are.

The production, mixing, arrangement and mastering are incredibly hard to criticize here. The engineer brings a technique modern Hip-Hop has not seen much in the last decade and that is allowing the instrumental to run through without vocals accompanying it in sections this makes the experience much more memorable. This is prevalent throughout the project and in this song I hear it once again at 2:59. the vocal sample coupled with the bass, and reverse elements work well with the top drums, giving the song an oceanic feel. Another contrast is apparent in this song and I am left asking myself do I want to chase my dreams in the sky or fall victim to my addictions that are so easy to access in this ocean… either way, they took me on an introspective journey, questioning myself and reflecting, while vibing out to the instrumental, smooth vocal delivery and catchy hook. The bass seems to be a tad amplified at the end of the back end of the song at 4:54 and that takes me back to the feeling I experienced at 2:59.

My final comments on this body of work: ‘WHITE NOIZE’ inebriated me, ‘INTERLUDE 4 YOU’ calmed my spirit, ‘TAKE FLIGHT’ elevated me once again and ‘CERCULEAN’ reminded me to keep my head to the skies and my knees to the ground. I sum up this EP in two words - Gratitude and Hunger. Published and Edited by Midnight Ohmnia

#hip hop #gqeberha #music #culture #eastern cape

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bcanetwork · 3 years

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BCA NFTalk Vol.3｜Art Blocks NFTs’ Imagination

Guest Speakers：Host ArthurLou BCA Co-Founder丨Vulcan DAO GP（简称A）

Zero Chen NFT Consultant of FTChinese.com（简称C）

Ting Song AI and Blockchain Artist丨IOAC Asia Ambassador（简称S）

Hesiod 「Theogo NFT Observer」Chief Editor （简称H）

Nico Yang VulcanDAO GP（简称Y）

Background: It's been a few months of a mini-bull market for NFT collectibles, which the frenzied sales of CryptoPunks have pushed up in recent days. In addition, Art Blocks, as a generative art segment, topped the 7-day trading volume list strongly, ranking first with The Art Blocks segment was ranked fifth overall with $498 million. These three segments - avatars, generative art, and solo editions - make up a solid JPEG Summer. In this context, we invite four guests to chat about the NFT imagination beyond Punk.

Host A: What do you think of the macro reasons for this 2021 Summer rampage? Share some of the recent Punk-like replica disc projects and NFT collecting tips that you've been following.

C: It's not very surprising that Punk is on fire; its holders or investors/collectors who are bullish think it should be higher priced. Its broken circle has become more apparent, and this mini-bull market is a spurt of an accumulation from the entire NFT market that preceded it. Social subcultures and aesthetic psychology drive NFT and trendy fashion, so its rise and fall may be very different from how technology has evolved and popularised. Compared to traditional art and traditional collecting, this wave in the crypto world should be just beginning. If CryptoPunks do become digital antiques, I believe they will be worth much more than that in the future.

Y: Until 2021, it will be difficult for digital content creators to get their work recognized by the market and to cash in without relying on big institutions with a centralized approach. The breaking of the circle in media and the entrance of money brought by the wealth creation effect have greatly refreshed the perception of digital content. Echoing what Che Guevara once said, "After we leave, they build you schools and hospitals, not because they have shown great mercy, but because we came."

The identity that comes with NFT is only really felt when it is held. The purpose is different, and the logic of buying and collecting can be very different. A scarce NFT is a status symbol in itself.

S: Compared to the art market, which is repeatedly tested and scrutinized by connoisseurs from different perspectives, there is a sizeable speculative bubble in the English-speaking community on Ethereum. A lot of this bubble is in cultural content and projects that lack culture can be short-lived. The works that I want to keep inside my wallet for a long time are the ones that I will be happy to look at even ten years from now.

In this JPEG Summer, I strongly feel that it is similar to 1CO at the end of 17, where all aspects of blockchain project parties were active, but the market turned cold after 18 years. A successful crypto art series is also a successful cultural product that combines technology and art.

Punk is Punk in the same way that an asteroid hitting the earth is hard to replicate, and special times happen like this. How do you ambush the next Punk? 1. Is there innovation? 2. Is the seed community very geeky? 3. Is it a historical level under the megatrend? 4. Can the team continue to do it? 5. are the institutional holders coming in at the middle stage good enough to drive the project forward? 6. can it create a cultural resonance in the circle? These are all worth exploring.

Regarding collection investment strategies, I am very much focused on niche artists from developing countries, especially those with a pure art background or a very pioneering sense of creativity in the contemporary art field and those who respect the blockchain spirit of the blockchain community.

Moderator A: Each Trader (trader) has a different investment strategy, and each person has limited energy to focus on one vertical track. Suppose one is easily influenced by the market and forcibly changes his investment strategy. In that case, it is scary for a Trader, which is equivalent to the whole cognitive system having to be reconstructed.

H: The cost of a physical painting is not high, but it can be sold for hundreds of millions. Therefore, the value of a work does not lie in its materials or cost. Its physical price does not determine the value of Jpeg. In the structure of the blockchain market, Crypto Punks, Art Blocks, and BAYC represent the three dimensions that can be found in the NFT market. Crypto Punks starts from a programmer and is driven by technology; the monkey BAYC is community-driven. The blockchain community may be The base for the survival of the future blockchain; Art Blocks enter from artistic creativity.

From the perspective of social governance, Token is an institutional symbol. Mature NFT projects must create a field and a way of existence, and a variety of hobbies professional life corresponds to the current needs of various communities. I don't see it as a speculative target but rather as a script for building a kind of Metaverse called the respective Metaverse, whose development depends on the evolution of the community.

Moderator A: The more successful 10K projects have a cultural tribe behind them, and the ethos can be very different from project to project. How do you see Art Blocks as a clear stream with awe-inspiring numbers? How do you see it breaking out and the appreciation and valuation insights into generative art as a discipline?

S: The group of projects in NFT that are particularly speculative and not culturally good enough are like passing clouds and won't be in the prosperous state they are today when the market is in a bad mood. But two things are sure to go a long way: firstly, good cultural content is never speculative. But anything that has an innovative aesthetic or interest that strikes a chord is not entirely speculative and has its own commercial identity quite typically. The second point, the trend towards avatars and social identities, is unstoppable.

I am very bullish on generative art. Behind it is a respect and exploration of the mathematical logic behind information technology. The methods used are engineering in nature and reflect the cultural identity of a group of people.

C: Generative art started with computer technology and continued until this wave of artificial intelligence, more precisely the application of convolutional neural networks, entered the aesthetic vision of the masses, with a low correlation to the market price of generative artworks. In the past, the general aesthetics of popular art did not break through the traditional class texture (strong mediated aesthetic vision), the blockchain market changed this law, and the same thing is now entering the NFT art collectibles market.

H: NFT is a fuse to the art market, not a monopoly on art history. When the financial operation goes to an extreme, it is decoupled from the actual value creator. Although Art Blocks has a centralized organizer, it is isomorphic with the state-of-the-art community. Generative art will present different visual effects depending on the materials used. With the rapid development of technology and speculation, it is possible to join the first-line NFT.

Y: Art Blocks is the same thing as the explosion of CryptoPunks. Looking at the top 20 Crypto Punks holdings, the most intuitive data is that there is a very high degree of overlap with the big Art Blocks accounts, with the smallest of these holdings holding more than 50 Art Block NFTs.

More generally, a large percentage of the first blockchain explorers to make a large fortune were programmers. The culture that Art Blocks carries is precisely an aesthetically pleasing phenomenon from a programmer's perspective.

Any art form first evolved from technology, and the value of NFT relies on the programmer-led blockchain revolution to provide sufficient wealth to support it. Crypto Punks represent a new class of people, the last piece of the puzzle in internet development.

A: The bigger the wave, the further back you look; what should be the kind of work that can be called classic or digital antiques? What is the view on the future of NFT?

C: If we look at this from a long-term perspective, three points need to be considered. Firstly, there is a characteristic of any cultural investment product that performs more similarly to financial assets in a bull market and can be less liquid than financial assets in a bear market, with a liquidity black hole. Classic core assets can find counterparties no matter when they are traded. Broad consensus and acceptance are the hallmarks of traditional investments, and a sense of scarcity and value is formed over a long period.

Secondly, whether crypto art or generative art, continuing to move forward requires special attention to fit in with other cultural and sub-cultural trends, the spirit of the times.

Thirdly, the artist is a profession, not an inoffensive one. One might as well consider the NFT market giving artists such opportunities as a form of nourishment. If it does not produce investment returns, it is still making its contribution to the art market.

H: I encourage artists to get involved in art that may not be very romantic because there is a massive demand for essential art waiting there. A good NFT project is hardly successful without the creation of artists, and NFT offers a vast blue ocean for artists. Calmness is always within one's heart, maintaining a sense of rationality in the course of a bear or bull market, no matter how noisy it may be.

Host's summary: Since I entered this track myself, there are still times of anxiety and confusion, but things are still in the making. I hope that I can do something genuinely long-term like the four excellent teachers.

#nftart #cryptoart #nftcollector #nft marketplace #nonfungibletokens #nftcommunity #MetaOpus

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davidmann95 · 3 years

Note

Comics this week (3/10/2021)?

cheerfullynihilistic said: Comics this week (03/10/21)??

adudewholikescomicsandotherstuff said: This week’s comics?

Anonymous said: Comics?

Anonymous said: 3/10 NCBD?

Non-Stop Spider-Man #1: The lead story was fun, the backup was dopey, I’ll give it another issue or two to see where it goes.

The Immortal Hulk #44: While it was too late for this week I’ve taken Hulk off my pull list, so the store won’t order any copies specifically for me and therefore my future purchase of the book won’t support Joe Bennett’s presence, just the store. This issue is typical of some of the books’ weaker installments of the last year or so - feels like well-done regular superhero comics instead of Immortal Hulk - but those last couple pages bring it back around.

Daredevil #28: Holy cow, those King In Black issues actually mattered. God this book is still so fuckin’ good in so many ways, everything every dumbass street-level superhero ‘deconstruction’ wants to be when it grows up.

Children of the Atom #1: Sucks real bad! This weird combo of ‘hip new young Marvel heroes!’ trappings and soulless X-Men lifer comics execution that feels certain to appeal to neither group.

Eternals #3: Of the listed Deviants I imagine I’d relate most to Annoyed Veug.

Commanders in Crisis #6: While I remain without the ability to weigh in on this objectively, this is the issue that to date most feels like it lives up to the promises of the series premiere.

The Wrong Earth: Night & Day #3: Little disappointed personally with the reveal of what the third world is - I assumed it was going to be more of a straight take ‘modern’ version to the other two’s flavors of throwbacks - but this series still rules. And that ending.

Home Sick Pilots #4: Okay, I think I can follow what’s happening at this point, still enjoying it.

Proctor Valley Road #1: I review these books in the order I present them to my dad since he likes DC/Marvel/Other to each be lumped together, but make no mistake: this is the last of the three Morrison books to read this week, because this is what comes next for them. A return to their roots - 70s kids way into music and dealing with the weird, girls adventure stories of the kind they apparently grew up reading - this feels like a refinement of their mid/late-00s Vertigo work in the same way they’ve been iterating on their superhero material for decades. The horror is sold excellently, whether by their own efforts or thanks to cowriter Alex Child this is their most fluid, ‘real’-sounding dialogue perhaps ever, and Franquiz with Bonvillain are instantly among their all-time best collaborators, perfectly capturing the shifting tone and character acting necessary to best put Morrison’s big ideas over in a way a number of their collaborators haven’t lived up to over the years (and speaking of the visuals, Jim Campbell does the lord’s work with that lettering trick near the end). Ritesh Babu and Sean Dillon have a lot more to say about the book and how it already acts as a darker, more honest take on your Stranger Things and the like as a commentary on its times, but I’m already loving to see this particular return down to Earth for Morrison and company and I’m glad to hear this is selling really well compared to their previous indie work.

Dead Dog’s Bite #1: This actually came out last week, but Ritesh recommended it so I figured it might be worth a look. A so far intensely low-key missing persons mystery with a touch of surreality around its edges, this already looks to be the best “look! A nine-panel grid! Fancy!” comic since Mister Miracle, really lived-in and emotional for as little happens in this debut. Very curious where it’s going.

Rorschach #6: I continue to like it.

Batman: Urban Legends #1: Glory be, a good Jason Todd comic - at last, you noble stubborn weirdoes living off of like six nonconsecutive panels all these years, you may lay down your burden. Not all you’d necessarily hope from Zdarsky tackling Gotham after what he’s been doing with Daredevil but rock-solid work regardless; the Harley story is fine, Outsiders is a letdown after Thomas’s shockingly good showing for them in Future State but it’s still fine, and the Grifter stuff is fun.

The Joker #1: I thought the advertised ‘a Joker story from Gordon’s POV’ angle was an interesting one even if I was concerned this book would in practice be pure editorial mandate, but in reality? Tynion has managed to pull the wool over DC’s eyes and do a full-on Jim Gordon book (one predicated with him being off the force to make it reasonably comfortable read in 2021) with Joker as the barest of pretexts to get it out the door and selling for as long as he wants to continue it. He even said in interviews that when the book was first pitched to him that his response was that a Joker solo book was a dumb unworkable idea until he had an idea for a ‘different way to approach it’, he knows exactly what he’s doing and I salute him. And it’s a darn good Gordon book even if the Punchline backup is predictably tepid, I’m in the tank for Gotham’s perpetual whipping boy dealing with weird noir international crime with Joker sort of hanging around in the background menacingly to justify the nominal premise.

Anonymous said: Hey, so I figure one random anon won’t change your mind, but like you I was disappointed by New Frontier’s immortal Wonder Woman, but I still got the new issue of Wonder Woman cause Wonder Woman at Valhalla still sounds great and I actually liked it! I think I’m gonna get at least the next issue, so there’s at least one recommendation for it

Wonder Woman #770: This combined with the store still putting it in my pile prompted me to give it a try after all, and whether because something here clicks better or if they’re simply not trying so hard without the pressure of doing a ‘final’ story for Diana, Cloonan and Conrad do in fact do substantially better on the main book than they did with Immortal Wonder Woman. Some fun, some fights, some mythology and intrigue, gorgeous landscapes and generous servings of beefcake from Travis Moore - this isn’t going to be sweeping the Eisners, but this is as enjoyable as a Wonder Woman comic has been in a good long time. My only concern is that the joyousness on display here might dissipate somewhat once Diana fully returns to herself, but in the meantime this was a very pleasant surprise (especially with the the Young Diana backup by Bellaire, Ganucheau, Goode, and Carey).

Superman #29: PKJ’s Superman thus far has been a story of overcoming initial worries of mine - in this case, my concern that he’d have a bad Scott Snyder-ey case of “if you’ve read the interviews you’ve pretty much already heard the dialogue of the comic verbatim”. In practice here most of what he’s had to say about these issues are distilled down really succinctly and poignantly in the midst of a fun little upper-atmosphere adventure portending something grimmer, and while I know it didn’t click with everyone I thought Phil Hester’s work here was a perfect accompaniment. The Tales of Metropolis backup wasn’t nearly as enjoyable, but hints at some interesting worldbuilding I’m hopeful will pay off in the main run.

The Green Lantern Season Two #12: The final Grant Morrison DC comic. One of two anyway, but if the next story I discuss is their broader final (non-Klaus, hopefully) statement on the superhero subgenre and a bridge to what they’re doing next, this is the one that’s about being The Final Grant Morrison DC Comic. A mélange of pretty much all their other DC finales into a shamelessly self-reflective meditation on the limits of what they can accomplish in shared universe storytelling where Green Lantern saves the universe through collective action and then fucks off to do his own thing elsewhere while the kids take over the ongoings. Weird and kinda perfect, and if nothing else this series took Liam Sharp from “really? This dude is drawing the last ever Morrison DC ongoing?” to “HOLY FUCKING SHIT LIAM SHARP”.

(The panel folks blew up over I think can be read multiple ways, but not in a ‘it’s open to interpretation!’ way so much as the storytelling/framing being unclear. I personally read it as ‘this is what neighbor versus neighbor looks like now’ rather than ‘calling someone a TERF or a Nazi is as bad as anything the other side does’, because oldster and out of touch though they may be I can’t see Morrison seriously saying that, especially after coming out.)

Wonder Woman Earth One Volume 3: At long last, after a hideous misfire kicking the series off and a second installment best described as ‘well, at least it wasn’t the first one’, this while not without elements I want to see femme and nonbinary critics discuss critically lives up to what you want to see out of ‘Grant Morrison’s Wonder Woman’. Big utopian fiction breaking the typical boundaries of superhero stories with aplomb in implicit conversation with a ton of their previous work, a bridge from what they’ve done to what they’re doing next, it’s an imperfect (especially with Paquette’s art, which while gorgeous and majestic in the way this story demands really doesn’t living up to the ‘acting’ necessary here in a way thrown into sharp contrast by Franquiz in PVR) but shockingly passionate statement of intent - if the last two volumes felt like Morrison struggling to have something to say with Wonder Woman in the same way they did with Superman and Batman, this feels at the close like them at last finding in her a way to do everything left with the cape and tights crowd they wanted to but couldn’t manage anywhere else under the Big Two umbrella. Odd and lovely, a fine sendoff.

#Week's Comics #Opinion

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xfadingstarx · 4 years

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A Bleach Retrospective: In defense of Bleach

These are opinions, please respect that.

_______________________________

My Journey with Bleach (please skip if you want to go straight to the analysis):

On September the 8th, 2006 YTV’s weekend evening anime programming block (Bionix) aired the first episode of Bleach. I, unfortunately, did not catch this episode, instead, I caught the second episode on September 15th the following week. I was ten and from then on, Bleach fascinated me. It had an interesting concept, tight pacing, catchy music, a good story, and unique character designs. I also really enjoyed how Bleach lacked the same kind of emotional labour that Naruto demanded (as child who survived off of constantly seeking validation from others because of absentee parents, Naruto is way too much work).

My fascination with Bleach got me started in the fandom communities of yesteryear, for I was a child with zero internet supervision. My introduction to fanfiction was because I loved Hitsugaya Toshiro.

Bleach was my entry into poetry (poem at the start of every volume).

But alas, all good things were not meant to last and by the summer of 2009, I was officially done with Bleach. It had felt stilted for some time before then. Over the years, I would gradually revisit bits and pieces of Bleach, but I would not read it in its entirety until months after its finish, about a decade after I had first saw Bleach on my TV. Between the time I stopped reading and the series ended, I became friends with people who didn’t think highly of Bleach and I also started seeing criticism I had made about Bleach in 2011 being repeated by fans on the internet, I started to think that maybe Bleach was bad, but I knew what bad writing looked like —I started reading fanfiction through Bleach fanfiction AMVs on YouTube — and somehow Bleach didn’t sit right with me in the “bad writing category”.

I sit back now, a decade and ahalf later from when I first started and ask, “was Bleach really that bad, and if so, why do I keep coming back to it?”

-----------------------------------------------

What Made Bleach So Good?

Unique story and aesthetics: When Bleach first started in 2001, it was one of the first manga series to talk about souls and death in a poetic way and with such coherence. Bleach clearly knew what it wanted to say about life and death. It also had a very unique aesthetic, very similar to that of “The World Ends With You” or “Persona 5″ — an urban Japanese take on R&B kind of vibe. Also, Bleach had the most “realistic” and minimalist art style amongst the Big 3.

Cool Music: Bleach had cool music, from very solid rock’n’roll and R&B style songs in its OPs and EDs to very funky OST music with lots of pizzazz. Many singers feature by Bleach ended up successful (to varying degrees) outside of anime, eg: Orange Range, UVERworld, YUI, sid, etc.

Versatile tone: Bleach was edgy, there’s no doubt about that. It was willing to show a lot of blood and bodily violence, especially in the manga (eg half of people blowing up and bits of bone still attached). Despite this though, it was not pretentious about its edginess — it didn’t revel in it. To contrast the edginess, there is a lot of humour in Bleach with character interactions. It was able to be laid back enough with its strong characters that it would rely on the characters’ relationships for comedic relief. The post-credit skits and the fillers really helped to add to this overall feel as well.

Maturity of the Story: Bleach was very willing to handle topics that made people think. For example, the Ulquiorra - Orihime subarc was treated with a sense of carefulness about it, as if to reflect Ulquiorra’s own cautious curiosity about the heart. A less emotionally mature story would’ve gone for the cheap rape/torture porn, but instead we are treated to determined strong Orihime, who has found strength through the heart after the death of her brother, clashing with the nihilistic hollow who wants to know if there is happiness outside of emptiness. It’s a very loaded question and one that requires both perspective and life experience to fully understand both parties. As well, Bleach always knew what it wanted to say about life and death as the final conflict of Bleach is between Ichigo, who has accepted his transient life and Yhwach, who is scared of death. And ultimately, underneath all that action, Bleach produced takes on its themes that were hard to relate to unless the reader themselves had a certain level of emotional maturity (eg: 12 year old me got nothing out of the Ulqui-Ori arc, but 20 year old me spent a good 10 mins crying after)

Strong characters: Contrary to popular belief, Bleach does have quite solid characterization. In fact, Bleach is the journey of Ichigo as a character, from grappling with his weakness and pain to finally accepting all the parts of himself and his history in order to defeat Yhwach and protect those he cares about. Even the secondary characters of Bleach receive a sizable amount of backstory and/or development. Bleach also managed to have more proactive female characters. Even the damsel in distress Orihime stands up to Ulquiorra and slaps him. As a result of these strong characters, Bleach was able to rely on them and their relationships to drive aspects of the story (eg Ichigo crying in the Fullbringer arc).

Willingness to Deal with Emotion: Given that Ichigo is an internally motivated character, it was obvious Bleach would deal with emotion at some point in time. Making Ichigo just a normal high school boy also relives the previous edginess. Bleach also clearly too the time to make its readers feel in its early years. We are treated to beautiful panelling and very real displays of strong negative emotions. Bleach is also very good at giving its characters room to breathe and be sad. Eg: moping Orihime, moping Ichigo, etc. As well, Kubo went to extraordinary lengths to break Ichigo down during the Fullbringers Arc.

Interesting Character Designs: Every character in Bleach feels vibrant and unique with their personality showing through in their designs. For example: Shunshi’s sloppily tied up hair, visible stubble, and overcoat-hidden-haori show that he is both easy going and not looking for a fight; meanwhile Byakuya’s neatly pulled back hair and neck covered by scarf show that he is both someone who likes structure and is conservative.

Poetry and Symbolism: Kubo manages to weave poetry into Bleach in the beginning of each volume. The poem was said by the character on the volume. It gave the reader insight to this character and it gave Kubo a chance to flex his poetic chops. Further proof of this is the fact that many people don’t realize that the name “Bleach” refers to the bleaching of soul that is key to the story. Kubo loves to use rain to set sad scenes. It rains when Ichigo fights Grand Fisher, Zangetsu tells Ichigo that he hates the rain, etc. Kubo also specifies that he wishes for the reader to read certain volumes on stormy, rainy nights.

Panelling: Many people like to criticize Kubo for the lack of effort with the Bleach manga, but Kubo has stated that he uses negative space (i.e., foregoing backgrounds) to focus more on his character’s expressions. This not only further proves that Bleach cares a lot about its characters, but it’s done well enough that the average reader likely doesn’t notice the lack of background on the first read through. As well, Bleach has very cinematic panelling. Kubo uses the format of manga well, utilizing the human mind’s ability to fill blanks in with clever panelling to create tone and build tension and the feeling of movement through a scene.

In fact, in finding pages for this analysis, I found myself noticing that Bleach panels very similarly to slice-of-life shoujo but with a boy MC manga like "Horimiya": focus on expression through intimate angles and use of panels and breaks to create mood and the feeling of cinema; whereas something like DBZ panels like a shounen action manga with many hard lines and action shots, instead of a focus on subtle details and emotions.

Some Examples:

Notice now in Chapter 197: The approaching danger, Kubo uses a gradual zoom to build tension and the black background to add intensity and signal to the reader that Hitsugaya is relaying important information.

Here in Chapter 234: Not Negotiation, the immediate close up to Ulquiorra’s eye from the full body shots creates a sense of intimidation and unease with its sudden intimacy. As well, the immediate zoom in from Ulquiorra’s side full body shot to his facial profile creates tension and the change from the dark background to the white face with Orihime releases this tension (very fitting with considering the line for this panel is “but not you”). (This scene also ties into Ulquiorra’s central dogma of “that which is not reflected in my eyes does not exist’.)

Again in the same chapter, this gradual zoom in on the two creates tension that is then release in the next panel and summarily cements Ulquiorra as a terrifying BAMF.

In Chapter 262: Unblendable, Kubo uses the negative space to create a feeling of isolation, similar to how Orihime is supposed to be feeling.

In the same chapter, notice how Kubo creates a sense of intimacy (not in the romance sense) with the relationship of Ulquiorra and Orihime. He creates tension gradually with the zooming into Orihime’s eye and releases it with the zoom out to Ulquiorra. Through this scene, Kubo has shown us that Ulquiorra and Orihime have a tense relationship and with the implication of eye contact through the shots and panel breaks creating both the intimacy and showing Orihime’s defiance.

(Interestingly, I’ve noticed that Ulquiorra and Orihime have a lot of these intimate zoom shot-reverse-shot eye panels)

___________________

What are the Bad Parts of Bleach?

Okay, so by now, you’re probably thinking that I’m ignoring the massive amounts of critique that Bleach gets and don’t get me wrong, while Bleach does have a very special place in my heart, I’m also not maudlin enough to pretend that Bleach was all good.

Pacing:

Pacing in the First Half of Bleach (Karakura Town - Arrancar)

When Bleach first started out the pacing was excellent. Kubo showed great mastery of pace to control the tone and highlight the emotions throughout the first two arcs. Mid-way through the Arrancar arc, the fatigue sets in and it was hard to keep up with, especially since Kubo would interrupt one exciting fight set up to go set up more plot elsewhere (eg Fake Karakura town right as Ichigo and Ulquiorra were about to battle). Whilst looking back and reading it all at once does help with the pacing, it was frustrating if you were reading/watching on a weekly basis.

Pacing in the Anime:

I don’t ascribe to a simplistic belief of “fillers bad” simply because I think that sometimes fillers can be a good thing, for example, since every chapter is ~15-20pp, some character interactions have to be cut for the sake for space, so filler is a great opportunity to add those moments back into your story. For example, a lot of early Bleach fillers are just the people of Karakura town just hanging out. That being said, Bleach does have an unfortunate amount of fillers, with some of them even interrupting tense fights (eg the Beast Sword Arc interrupts Ichigo’s battle with Ulquiorra). However, the padding that the fillers provided did wonders for the transition between Soul Society to Arrancar Arc in the anime. Ultimately, the Bleach anime adaption was a long-running anime made for syndication and that’s okay.

******* Brief Aside: many people like(d?) to point out that Bleach has a very cyclical plot structure. I used to think this way too; however, this is not the case. There are many other long running stories that repeat similar goals. The problem lies not in the idea, but the execution. The main complaint about the Orihime rescue was not that it was uninteresting, but instead that it felt a rehash of the plot of the previous arc. This is largely because the story was not given enough time to breath between similar character arcs. For example, in One Piece, Luffy and Co have to save Nami and by extension, her home village so she can join them; however, the next time a Straw Hat needs to be saved is 227 chapters (2 whole story arcs) later. In between saving Rukia and Orihime, there is only a really an arrancar encounter, a bit of training, cheering up Ichigo, and a Grimmjow encounter before Orihime goes with Ulquiorra, thus making the goal of this arc “save Orihime” in only ~59 chapters vs 227. These two similar arc goals so close to each other does indeed create the sense of repetition.

Pacing from Fullbringer to End:

This is where Bleach really lost a lot of people. If you weren’t gone after the Ulquiorra fight, you probably were by this arc.This arc went at breakneck speed, and ngl, during my first full read through I almost gave up here too. I mention earlier that Ichigo had been broken down in this arc, but it was hard to feel his despair and the weight on his shoulders because there wasn’t enough for the reader to take a beat and breathe. The Thousand Year Blood War, similarly suffered from sloppy pacing, with many readers feeling like story lines of Squad 0 and the Soul King were anti-climactic. As well, this arc started with a massacre and feature the deaths of many fan-favourite characters, and unfortunately due to the pacing, their deaths were not given a sense of gravity.

Missed Opportunities and Forgotten Story lines: Many people felt that Kubo forgot about a lot of his characters after the Aizen arc. Many thought the Fullbringer Arc was going to be a Chad/Orihime Arc. Whatever happened to Uryuu lolol? We all just collectively forgot about him for a large portion of the last half of Bleach. At one point in time, there was a rumour going around that Kubo had written out the story for Bleach and lost it. Idk if there is any credibility to it. However, in a 2017 interview, Kubo did say that he did end the series exactly the way he wanted to.

(If anyone wants to see me write an entire ass text post about Orihime and her treatment in Bleach, please let me know because I will do it)

Too mature:Even though above, I praised Bleach's mature handle on its themes, an unfortunate side effect of this is forgetting that the characters are only 15 at the beginning and for the first half of Bleach. This unfortunately, leads to some readers feeling disconnected from Bleach.

Epilogue: THE DESTROYER OF SHIPS!!! A lot of people hated this ending. Many people felt like the romance was shoe-horned in, others didn’t like the pairings, and there were some people who actually liked it. Personally, I didn’t like it too much, but it was a cute conclusion nonetheless. Since it didn't add anything to the story except for a "where are they now" look and because of that, I low-key felt like it was unnecessary, but w/e.

------------------------

Perspective

Making a long-running weekly serialized story is hard and doing it for 15 years is gruelling (obligatory “fuck capitalism” here). Like many artists of long-running manga, Kubo destroyed his health for the sake of publishing Bleach weekly. Kubo on his health after Bleach (photo from AshitanoGin on Twitter):

Given this insight, I think it’s only fair to be respectful and grateful for Kubo’s contribution to the anime-sphere. Also, through his work, Kubo seems to be a very understanding person and artist. I’m sure he knows better than anyone where Bleach went wrong, but there’s nothing that can be done now. Despite him having a twitter, he is not Joanne and doesn’t feel the need to constantly hemorrhage out word of god info about Bleach (and thank god for that).

------------------

Final Thoughts

It’s hard to forget my happy memories when I think about Bleach. It had my first adolescent crush and first OTP. As a result, I think the best way to enjoy Bleach is to take what you want out of it. People always think that something has to be 100% without flaw for it to be good, but that is not true at all. It is totally okay to just like the parts that you like without engaging with anything else. It’s special to you for a reason, you know?

There’s no use in fretting over what Bleach could’ve been, besides, very rarely is the reality better than the fantasy in your head.

I do think though that a lot of Kubo’s issues could’ve been fixed if he planned the story better but not all of us can be “I've been planning One Piece since elementary school” Oda Eiichiro.

Other voices on this issue: here

----------------------------

Wow. I can’t believe you made it this far down. Congratulations! Thanks for reading my 2:30am non-sober take on Bleach (it only took me 7 hours to write). Here's a cookie <3

#bleach #pro bleach #analysis #writing #characters #ramblings #pro orihime #orihime #ichigo #ulquiorra cifer #hot take #quarantine thoughts #late night #weebshit #criticism #critique #anime review #manga #i'm still bleach

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soyouareandrewdobson · 4 years

Text

Charles Schulz vs Andrew Dobson: What a Blockhead!

There are certain things about Dobson’s behavior and particularly his approach at being a nerd and presenting himself as someone who enjoys the art of storytelling that I have issues with. Issues I want to tackle on in more detail within later entries quite a bit.

One such tendency is, that he mocks directly or indirectly the work and accomplishments of others.

See, if Dobson doesn’t like you as a content creator because he does not like something you work on, he will try to show it. He will make stupid assumptions of you (like how he accused Kojima of being a sexist creep because of Quiet and how he deals with “male gaze” in MGS compared to Death Stranding), half heartedly mock you (look at anything he makes about Ethan Van Sciver) or he will call a piece of work boring and dull based on a minor element instead of overarching problems (calling Batman the character a white supremacist based on the dumb work of only one author).

By doing that he also tries indirectly to insinuate that he is better in some manner, though most of the time it really just shows his own ego and that his pet peeves are rather petty compared to the overall quality of the work he criticizes as well as its flaws.

One such sight of ego boosting while mocking the work of his better is in my opinion to be found in this comic he uploaded sometimes around 2016/17 randomly online.

This comic in my opinion is both laughable and insulting. Why? I will explain soon.

First however I want to clarify that I get that this comic is supposed to be a joke mostly. The old “What others expect, what I expect” thing, where the punchline is supposed to be the discrepancy between the two fractions and what they expect, mostly by making one of the expectations come off as worse than the other. However, I find the punchline to be Charlie Brown (and as such what Dobson seems to see as something he does not want to be favorable compared too) quite insulting. Why, as I said, will be elaborated on sooner.

First, let me just get on the part I find laughable: The fact that Dobson in his own head seems to believe he can be even remotely compared to people like Paul Dinni, Bruce Timm, Greg Weismann, Justin Roiland, Miyazaki, Shigeru Miyamoto and all the other character creators and animators whose creations we see in the first panel.

Dobson, don’t make me laugh. Putting aside the fact that those people are animators more than cartoonists, what makes you even believe in your wildest dreams you are on the same level as them? The fact you too are an animator, seeing how you graduated from an art school with a degree in that field? I have seen your contributions to the field and honestly, I would expect a bit more. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0tdWNCrIxo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ps6PfiUCxHQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PyonOqClf8

I give you credit, you can animate. Which is more than I can say for myself when it comes to the arts. But when you look what other freelance animators can do online, some of them younger than you and NOT with a degree in animation…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=64&v=FmkAcGz1BJk&feature=emb_title

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97IfPfjSaDg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEUoxQ4qSfs

Viviepop’s demo reels alone are just gorgeous to look at and more fluid than what I have seen of you. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFlha-KOKCc

And it is not just the technical quality, Dobson. It is also just the overall “originality” of your work. Cause this is the thing with those animators hinted on in the first pic and even many, many freelancers/fanartists as well as webcomic creators online: They have a spark of originality in presentation and storytelling that you lack. I will one day go more into detail for that, but here is the most brutal thing I can say at the moment: I know shitty porn fanfictions, that have more plot development and character growth than all of Alex ze Pirate.

Your characters and stories tend to be derivative and you barely take any risks in telling a story. Neither in your fanbased work (like the Miraculous comics) nor your original content (mostly because you take comfort in four panel strips anyway) and when you have an idea for something on which the basis idea actually sounds good, you screw it up by a lackluster execution. One example I want to give for that, would be this fanart of yours in regard to Steven Universe.

(I apologize for not getting one in better quality) This pic was something Dobson created around 2015 for Steven Universe. The picture is supposed to show Lapis, trapped under the ocean following the events of the season 1 finale of the show. A very emotional situation if you are aware of why Lapis sacrificed herself and was “banned” to the ocean floor. Short explanation: Fused with Jasper and then took primarily control of the fused being they became (Malachite) by using her water powers to bond it with heavy water chains on the ocean floor, so that Jasper would not hurt Steven anymore.

How much of that was even an emotional strain on her and her psyche was in one episode of season 2 even a theme, as seen here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SK3l8mGNhMg

I am not even a fan of the show and I get the emotional weight and impact of Lapis actions.

So… why is that not conveyed in the artwork? If you are so talented Dobson, why is none of the strain and despair on the character? The idea of a pic showing Lapis under water, longingly looking up, even in despair is a good basis for a fanart. But the execution lacks any emotional detail. You want to know how I would execute the thing if I had the artistic talent? Make the picture a huge horizontal pic, where we slowly decent from water surface down the ocean. The light getting dimmer. Blue turning into dark. The silhouette of a hand and an arm similar to Malachite’s in the background, trying to travel up, the fingertips barely touching the surface. Heavy chains around the flesh. Symbolic of the fusion trying to break free and cause havoc. And down on the dark bottom, beaten and exhausted Lapis with tears in her eyes and chains all over her body like she is Jacob Marley, desperately trying to keep Malachite at bay for the sake of the only being on earth who ever showed just a little bit of kindness towards her.

Why can’t we have something like this here, Dobson? If you were even remotely as original as the creators you want to be compared with, I think you could come up with something like that and perhaps even draw it.

But you know, his delusions of being as good as them is one thing. It is even funny.

Pissing over the Peanuts is another. Dobson, what are you trying to hint at?

That people comparing you to Charles Schulz and his creation is in your eyes automatically a sort of insult? That it is something that should at best only be a mockable punchline in a comparison?

Just to clarify a few things: I am NOT much of a fan of Charlie Brown and the Peanuts as a property. As a child, I was just not very entertained by them. Yes, I saw animated movies, episodes and specials of them here and there and my grandparents gave me volumes of them to read, but as a whole I never thought them quite as entertaining than other comics or cartoons I watched. Some parts of Peanuts animation felt to me often times like just dead air (especially parts of Snooby dancing with Woodstuck, as they had no function to move the plots forward) and I really could not stand how some characters treat Charles on a regular basis. I mean, we all agree that Lucy is one of the worst female characters in fiction and that even while we hate Family Guy, this clip likely gave some of us some sort of satisfaction, right?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZkJAx8FycI

But before the Peanuts fan out there go and want my head on a silver platter, let me make one thing clear: I may not like the Peanuts franchise… but I respect it and the man behind it.

Charles Schulz drew the comic strip from October 1950 till late 1999 (the final strip being finished months before it would be published on February 13 of 2000, one day after he died of colon cancer) , creating a total amount of 17,897 Peanuts’ strips. His work marks a major impact in the nature of newspaper comic strips and inspired many people out there, including Bill Watterson, to create comics or be in the field of animation. His achievements include among other things, that he created what many people consider the first animated Christmas special ever. The names of his creations became nicknames for the Apollo 10 command module and its’ lunar modul. Four of the five Peanuts movies in existence (animated made for tv specials not withstanding now) were written by him. And the fifth was only not by him, because that one came out in 2015, a decade and a half after he died.

And speaking of things Schulz wrote for the Peanuts, let me mention two things. Two things that though I am not a fan of the Peanuts, I have mad respect for existing in the realm of animation. Two animated specials that stuck with me ever since I was eight.

“What have we learnt, Charlie Brown?” from 1983 and “Why, Charlie Brown, Why?” from 1990.

In the first special, which functions as a semi sequel to the fourth Peanuts’ movie “Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown”, the characters actually travel across France and after ending up on Omaha Beach and Ypres the special turns into a tribute to the soldiers who fought in World War 1 and 2, elaborating on the sacrifices made during the war by showing actual footage of fights, recordings of Eisenhower and reciting the poem “In Flanders Fields” among other things. Do you know how impactful it is to learn about the world wars as a small kid, by being reminded of the actual sacrifices others made in order for your own grandparents to survive?

And speaking of grandparents, I lost my grandmother as a child by cancer. So when I saw the second special I mentioned, you can bet it stuck with me. After all, of all the things in the world, the Peanuts addressing the seriousness of cancer by having a story where a friend of Linus is diagnosed with leukemia and we follow the emotional impact it has on Linus and the girl? Again, I may not like the franchise, but I am not ashamed to admit I think the special treats the subject with a lot of respect and dignity while telling a good story. You bet your ass I get a bit teary eyed when the little girl survives her leukemia treatment and finally gets on that swing again. Those two specials alone are more mature than ¾ of the shit Dobson likes to gosh about, including his oh so precious gay space rocks. And just for those things existing I have respect for Schulz, his creation and the impact it had on so many people. As such, Dobson “belittling” the Peanuts, at least for me, is a freaking insult. The only way Dobson could have been even more insulting is if he called Schulz something derogative. Dobson should be glad if his life’s work in total could even amount to 10% of what Schulz has done and achieved.

Cause Dobson, you are NOT a Charles Schulz. Schulz served during the second world war on the front, fighting actual Nazis instead of calling idiots on the internet fascists for not liking Star Wars. He had integrity and work ethics that drove him to draw and write over 17.000 strips, while you can not even finish one FREAKING story. He knew how to tackle a mature subject, while you make shitty shipping jokes involving Ladybug and Cat Noir and claim Steven Universe knows how to be about psychological trauma, when it just romanticizes abuse. He may have drawn simplistically, but at least he could tell a joke instead of constantly berating others for not sharing his opinion. He did all of that and more without having graduated from college.

And what have you done, Andrew Dobson?

If Dobson reads this, there is one thing in my opinion he should take away from more than anything else: That if people compare him to Charles Schulz’s work, that it means a) he should not be ashamed of it and b) they overestimate him.

#adobsonartworks #andrew dobson #so you are a cartoonist #syac #sjw #peanuts #charles chulz #charlie brown #snoopy #fuck you #animation #steven universe #disney #cartoons #cartoonist #adobsonartwork

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wrathion · 4 years

Note

I’m pretty new to wow. My friend convinced me to try it and I’m a bit hooked. Where would you recommend I start if I want to learn the lore?

welcome to the wow community, anon!

there’s a lot of entry-points for lore, so i’ll split this post into different sections so you can pick what you think works best for you. if you want access to (most) of the books and whatnot, i made a post a while ago with links to all of them. i’ll get to updating it...one day.

1. wow chronicles

the easiest and most reliable way to catch up on all the lore and important universal concepts you need to know is the world of warcraft chronicles series. it has three volumes detailing everything from the universes’ creation all the way to cataclysm.

you should start this way if you:

like looking at gorgeous art

want something somewhat concise and to the point

just want a general overview of what’s going on

you should NOT start this way if you:

find it difficult to focus on reading

especially don’t like textbook-style reading

want to get into one, specific part of lore

2. the novels

this was one of the ways i originally got into the lore! the novels, while they have their faults, are generally very fun reads. there’s a lot of them but i highly recommend war crimes (christie golden) for a general recap of important novels and events pre-warlords of draenor. and if you want to get into one specific thing there’s tons of focused novels (such as arthas, rise of the lich king for arthas/lich king + scourge lore).

if you know of one character in specific you want to follow, check out this page, it shows every character as well as every possible bit of prose you can find them in.

you should start this way if you:

enjoy reading fiction

would rather get to know the characters instead of just the history

want a versatile starting point, where you can focus on smaller events or bigger overviews

you should NOT start this way if you:

don’t have a lot of time to spare

find it difficult to focus on reading

just want to know the basics quickly

3. fandom wikipedias

if you want everything in its most up-to-date form, as well as little community fun facts and speculation, i highly recommend checking out wowpedia! the timeline is a good general starting point, but there’s other good starting points listed here.

wowwiki is also a good fandom wiki, but it’s a bit out of date in areas. wowpedia overall is more consistently managed.

you should start this way if you:

specifically enjoy going down wiki rabbitholes

love learning weird and obscure bits of lore

want to learn all the most up to date information

want a very versatile starting point, whether it be a general overview or specific details about characters or events

you should NOT start this way if you:

hate reading big blocks of text

don’t want 20 multiplying tabs open at once

get overwhelmed by information easily

want an official source

4. lore videos

i feel like this is how most of us get into the lore, it’s easy, straight to the point, and perfect to play in the background while you’re doing other things. nobbel87 is by far the best source of these. if you want absolutely everything, check out his lore of warcraft in chronological order series (parts one, two, three and four). for a more quick start, absolutely check out this video. otherwise, you can search practically any character, expansion, event, etc. on his channel and there will be a video describing it in detail.

i’ve also heard good things about the lost codex, though i haven’t personally delved into their stuff too much.

you should start this way if you:

don’t like/want to read

want the information in an organized and concise form

want something to just play in the background (though there’s videos if you feel like watching too!)

you should NOT start this way if you

don’t have a lot of time to spare

want to get the info quickly

want an official source

5. playing/watching a play-through of warcraft 3

i admit, i did not get into the lore this way, but i know plenty of people who have! warcraft 3 introduces all the core concepts you need to know about azeroth’s life and history. it has two installments, reign of chaos and the frozen throne, as well as nine campaigns combined in both. the storyline follows the orcs, humans, undead and night elves.

you should start this way if you:

want an interactive way of getting into the lore

would like to get to know both the characters and relevant events

have a lot of time to spare

you should NOT start this way if you:

don’t want to buy/watch a play-through of a game

specifically hate RTS games

do not have much time to spare

6. conclusion

wow lore is pretty complicated, but it’s honestly so worth it to get invested. i really hope you enjoy your time here in the fandom though :D!!

i would like to specifically note that reading quest text while leveling is not a good idea for starting out, at least not until shadowlands comes out. the zones all take place at different points and time through the game’s history that it all muddles together.

don’t worry about the three separate war chiefs in orgrimmar, or how the human starting narration mentions the “missing king varian” when varian’s most definitely dead and not missing. it all makes sense most of the time i swear

finally though, if you have absolutely any specific lore questions feel free to shoot me an ask! whether it be about a specific book or comic, or a complicated character timeline, i’m more than happy to help out.

#world of warcraft #Anonymous #asks

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damn-the-dark · 4 years

Text

FAQ

Mobile friendly! :D Just some trends I noticed in my ask box, I figured I could sum up a few things and give some general info! This post will be updated occasionally as new info is needed!

What do you draw with/on?

I have two set-ups :3 I primarily use my iPad Pro (the newer model, 2018 I think) and the app Procreate, especially because it’s surprisingly powerful for being a mobile program! But if I need to work on really big canvases (body pillows, large format prints etc.) I have at home an HP desktop with a Huion KAMVAS 22 drawing monitor and Clip Studio Paint & Paint Tool SAI. The huion ran me about 900$ but there are smaller versions that are much more cost effective :D and it performs as well if not better that the cintiq I had prior! Also! Both Clip and SAI are only 50$ but if you catch Clip on sale it’s only 25$!!

How are you so good at art???

Aw geez I’m not good at answering this ;w; I’m going to preface this by saying the ‘goodness’ of art is arbitrary and often formed from the western ideal that good art is how well you can capture reality. This isn’t inherently true, in my eyes art is good when it establishes a connection between the artist and the viewer, everyone has different tastes than the next person so different art will resonate with them while with others it won’t.

That said I did spend all my life drawing, it was fun for me to be able to appreciate things I liked by drawing them! I landed in art school and spent 6 years getting my bachelor’s degree in illustration, however I’ll say that the only thing beneficial I got out of it were the figure drawing classes and even then, drawing a figure over and over means nothing without understanding the anatomy underneath it |D (I recommend this book even for 2-D artists because it covers the topic so well) Of course this only applies if your art is representative in some way, cartoons are even improved by a general understanding of anatomy!

In short just keep learning! You’ll never stop! You will improve! You Have No Choice :)))

Do you take commissions?

I take commissions from time to time, the best way to find out if I’m available is to ask! Feel free to DM me, I’m Soft and cry every time someone wants to get a drawing done by me ;w;

My current rates are:

40$ Icon/Headshot (comes fully colored + shaded)

60$ Half-Body Lineart

70$ Half-Body Color and Shading

85$ Full-Body Lineart

100$ Full-Body Color and Shading

Ref Sheets start at 150$

Example sheet can be found here :3 Additional characters are +50% of the base price, all commissions come with a simple or transparent background, it is +50% of the base price for a complex bg. Complex characters (armor, scales, detailed/patterned clothes etc.) are subject to a maximum +20% complexity fee of the base price. By contacting me for a commission, you agree to my TOS.

And just to address the inevitable: Your prices are so high!!

I didn’t spend 6 years and 60,000$ on art school to hear that my cheaply priced skilled labor is too expensive. Any freelance artist with my level of experience charges a day rate of at least 250$ multiplied by as many days as it takes them to complete the art. Please do us both a favor and instead of complaining an artist’s prices are high, maybe appreciate their work in other ways, leave them a tip or reblog their work. It goes much farther AND we will appreciate it very much!!

How come it takes you so long to reply?/ Why are you so sporadically active?

As an adult, currently employed, I tend to have rather busy days during the week. It really depends on how much a toll work takes whether I have the energy to respond to things qwq And like... I don’t like to bring it up much, but unfortunately I have contracted a cocktail of mental illness that effects my ability to interact with others. I promise I respond as soon as I am mentally able, and I am always appreciate the patience that everyone extends me on account of this ;;;;w;;;; Also I’m in the mysterious and feared ‘Arizona’ Time zone (we don’t do daylight savings time so we just end up bouncing back and forth between Pacific and Mountain time lmao) so depending on the time of year that can probably effect when you see me online |DD

I unfortunately can’t reply to everyone in my notes due to the sheer volume of them, BUT do know I absolutely read all tags and comments and they mean so fucking much to me ;;;;w;;;; Thank you for your kind words and above all Thank you for your understanding!! ❤ ❤

Do you take requests?

In a word; kinda |D I tried to have an Open/Closed system but people would send them regardless. I don’t mind! I like reading what people come up with but unfortunately I can’t draw them all, and I appreciate those so far who seem to understand this and don’t spam me with tons of requests ^w^)/ Thanks you guys!! This fandom is one of the most appreciative and courteous ones I’ve had the pleasure of being a part of! ;w; ❤

#FAQ #damn-the-dark

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back-and-totheleft · 4 years

Text

His anger is his art

Oliver Stone is worried that Donald Trump doesn’t get enough sleep.

“He doesn’t sleep a lot. He doesn’t take good care of his health. Don’t you think there’s some pile-up, if you don’t sleep for several years like this?”

I feel a movie coming on. Stone, after all, made W, a film about President George W Bush; this one, perhaps, could be The Don. Sure enough, he seems to be thinking about it.

“There’s nothing that could quite capture this fellow. He’s quite a whirlwind, a fascinating dramatic character. Shakespearean too, in the sense that he’s so emotional — at times he creates a storm, almost purposely every day, to keep the energy going. He creates a storm inside himself. He’s King Lear in a strange way too — which daughter loves me more?”

He’s also thinking about the murder of George Floyd, but he thinks a black director should make it.

We are Zooming. He is in Los Angeles in a large book-lined room, I am not. He’s not lost his looks — sort of handsome, friendly but in your face — and his conversation is warmly attentive.

The talk of possible films is all Stone business as usual, running towards the news and the gunfire, especially if it’s American. At 73, his soul is still that of the gonzo movie-maker who turned out almost unbearably violent films such as Platoon and Salvador. But he did them because he hates film and television violence. He learnt about the real thing when, in 1967, he joined up and volunteered to fight in Vietnam. He left garlanded with honours but angry.

“I was known for my violent screenplays, but it came from a background of real violence. There was a lot of it I saw, and I wanted to depict it accurately. I really hated that. All the TV shows — 1970s, 1980s, 1990s. Same old bullshit. I hated the fake violence, so I was trying in my movies to move away from Rambo bullshit. It just doesn’t look as good as it does in the movies; it never does.”

And now he’s written an autobiography, Chasing the Light, covering his life up to 1986. He was 40 then; Platoon had just been released and, earlier that year, Salvador. Platoon won four Oscars, one for best director, and Salvador was nominated for two, one for best writing — Stone co-wrote it. It was, as he says, “a remarkable two-film journey from the bottom back to the top of the Hollywood mountain”. He had arrived, he had been accepted. The book ends with him trailing clouds of glory.

“I’d managed to crest into the light,” he writes. “Money, fame, glory and honor, it was all there at the same time and space. I had to move now. I’d been waiting too many years to make films. Time had wings. I wanted to make one after the other in a race against that time — I suppose really a race against myself in a hall of mirrors of my own making.”

Will there, I wonder, be another volume?

“Yes, of course. Why not? I think it’s important for me to at least come to grips with things because it goes so fast. You don’t really get it all. You don’t — one event after the other. One movie after the other. You’re always dealing with people, people, people. It’s hard to have that solitary space.”

He kept diaries “to understand myself, to understand what happened”. As a result the book is phenomenally well detailed. It opens with an account of filming a scene from Salvador. It’s a cavalry charge being shot in Mexico; everything that could go wrong seems to be going wrong, and the money — where on earth is the money? But somehow he pulls it off. Reading that made my head spin: how could anybody live with such levels of risk? Reading his diaries made him ask the same question about himself.

“I always knew I was bold, but I never realised that I was crazy too and risked a lot. At 39, with nothing in my future, my father dying, my mother dependent on me, a new wife, a new baby — and I go and put everything I have into this idea, this crazy idea to shoot this movie.”

He has, as the critic Pauline Kael noted, a divided sensibility: “He’s working outside the industry, in freedom, but he’s got all this Hollywood muck in his soul.” She never liked his films, but he accepts this judgment. The book also stands up her analysis — one minute he’s the guerrilla film-maker, the next he’s lapping up the glamour, the drugs and the schmoozing with stars. But the real divisions are much deeper than that. The first is the division between his father and mother.

He was born in New York. His father, Louis, was a high-ranking soldier turned stockbroker; his mother, Jacqueline, an elegant, beautiful French lady Louis met while fighting with the allies in Europe. She loved parties and glamour — Stone says she would have loved him to make a flowery romantic film. His evocation of her character is laden with love for her. Louis was more complex, serially unfaithful and constantly at war with the demon money.

One day, when he was 16, Stone had a phone call at his private boarding school: his parents were separating. It was a pivotal moment.

“I was naive. I thought it was a happy, loving family and I was very privileged to have that. The divorce was cruel in the way that it was done. It was brutal, and it shocked me because I was naive. The whole world fell apart. They split, and there’s nothing else. There’s no brothers, there’s no sisters. There’s no home. And as a result you become an orphan of the storm. If Charles Dickens were writing it, it might be an Oliver Twist story … I used to get kidded that my name was Oliver. And maybe I did feel an identification with him.”

His education faltered. He went to Yale but never completed his degree. At 18 he started wandering the world and at 20 he enlisted, then apparently forced himself to see the worst things that could be seen in Vietnam. The book starts 10 years later when he is at his lowest ebb. He speaks of himself in the third person while talking about this moment.

“He confronts his failures in life. He sees that he hasn’t gotten his dream, what he wanted to do. And his grandmother dies. He had gone to see her on this deathbed in Paris and he talks to her. And she communicates to him, and she tells him how he must live his life the way he is doing it, he’s following his instincts. And she loved me, and she’d always loved me and believed in me. That was a big thing. Something happened at 30 with her death. And I became more mature, and my success started to flow from there.”

His attempts to reconstruct a family have been patchy. His present wife is his third, and he has two sons and a daughter. There’s a moving moment in the book when he holds one of his sons, Sean, in his arms.

“If ever there was proof,” he writes, “we are born with a sweet nature, this was it; the veils come later.”

He has a Wordsworthian sense that we arrive trailing clouds of glory, but somehow the world takes all that away. So does he think we are born good? “Yeah, I think so. A baby is innocent, beautiful. You see it in baby animals. They don’t know what the world is.”

The second division is America. He came back, he says, “very divided and alienated”.

“Nobody was walking around over there saying: I’m against the war. No. A lot of us knew the war was bullshit. Certainly the black soldiers knew that, they didn’t really believe in it.”

Stone became an American exceptionalist. Usually that means somebody who regards the US as an especially good country; Stone regards it as especially bad.

“The divide was growing when I came back and that’s still with us. You see it coming down to us to this very day. We have a law-and-order candidate in Mr Trump. He talks like a fool, but he talks like many people — more military, more power, more application of force, more violence.”

From Salvador and Platoon onwards, Stone’s work became an angry charge sheet, an indictment of US postwar politics. His 1989 film, Born on the Fourth of July, attacked the treatment of veterans; JFK (1991) embraces conspiracy theories about the death of Kennedy; Heaven & Earth in 1993 skewered the behaviour of Americans in Vietnam, and so on. Postwar American history became, for Stone, a descent into insanity.

“America just goes mad after the Second World War — it just goes mad. Under Eisenhower the beginning of this madness sets in. The question we have to ask ourselves now is: was there really an enemy? Russia was not the threat to Europe we pretended it to be. And, for that matter, China neither. And we created this postwar scenario that was culminating in this economic concept that had come out of the Depression, that we cannot go back to the old way again and have to keep going. We have to put money into this military economy, to keep the country pumped. There’s been no end to that, no end at all. It just keeps going up. It doesn’t matter who the president is in the end. It’s the system. And no one can beat that system. No one can control it.”

This is, you will gather, a tremendous book — readable, funny and harrowing. It’s also full of movie-making gossip, scandal and fun. If you want to know what working with a truly difficult actor is like, read his account of handling James Woods on the set of Salvador. Nevertheless, Stone sticks with Woods because “he is a genius”. Also if you want to know what it’s like to be so intoxicated at a Golden Globes ceremony that your speech is so bad and almost denies you an Oscar, then you need this book.

There is much to disagree with about Stone’s politics — America’s iniquities in the postwar period are nothing next to China’s — but his anger is his art. It’s a way of balancing out the deep divisions in his character and his feelings.

For the moment he is not too worried about the pandemic, but he is taking on a new cause: nuclear power.

“The virus seems to me the ongoing business of history. It’s just... there’s so many viruses. I don’t see it as an existential threat to the world. It’s more of a mood thing. No, I think the real issue is global warming.”

He is making a documentary, A Brighter Future, about the need to deploy nuclear power to reduce carbon emissions. “Renewables,” he says, “cannot solve it.”

There he goes again, running towards the news and the gunfire, like Oliver Twist always asking for more.

-Bryan Appleyard, “Oliver Stone interview: the Platoon director and Vietnam vet on his new memoir about his early days in Hollywood,” The Sunday Times, July 12 2020 [x]

#oliver stone #chasing the light #platoon #salvador #the times #the sunday times

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queermediastudies · 5 years

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Blue, the Warmest Color? Or the Most Profitable Color?

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Blue Is the Warmest Color is a 2013 French movie directed by Abdellatif Kechiche, which won a lot of rewards including the Palme d'Or and the FIPRESCI Prize. This is a three-hour film about the romance story of a 15-year-old high school girl, Adèle (starring Adèle Exarchopoulos) and a female artist Emma (starring Léa Seydoux). The entire story depicts carefully about Adèle’s growth from adolescence to middle age, accompanied by confusion and struggle for her sexual identity.

At the beginning of this story, Adèle was dating a boy, Thomas. Once they were dating, Adèle passed by a blue-haired girl when crossing the road. After this encounter, Adèle woke up in a dream about making love with this girl. She was confused and embarrassed by this fantasy. When her best friend Valentin, an openly gay man found her unhappy, he took her to a gay bar for fun. But later, Adèle came out and entered a lesbian bar by chance, where she met (again) and started getting to know the blue-haired girl, Emma. Adèle and Emma became friends and hung out with each other frequently. And their romance relationship confirmed by a shared kiss when picnic. A few years later, Adèle realized her dream to become a primary school teacher; Emma was preparing her art exhibition, and their relationship was not passionate like it used to be. Adèle had a sexual relationship with her male colleague Antoine because of Emma’s indifference. After this was known by Emma, she drove Adèle out of the home immediately and refused her apology. Although Adèle expressed her love for Emma again a few years later, could not recover the relationship. And Emma had formed a new family with her first love, Lise.

At the end of the film, when Adèle attended Emma’s art exhibition and saw many portraits of her own, she chose to leave quickly, which also marked the complete end of this relationship. In general, this film records the whole story of Adèle and Emma in a very delicate way, trying to present the audience with true lesbian life detail. And the goal of making the audience get involved in the real-life of the LGBTQIA community can contribute to the sympathy and understanding of them to a certain extent, which is conducive to the diversity of the media. But I critic that this film is still unable to break away from the use of lesbian love as the strategy “for creating ‘edgy’ programming and attracting a wide range of viewers” (Kohnen, 2015). And many descriptions in this film deepen the audience’s misunderstanding of the lesbian group.

Firstly, this film does a great job of recording Adèle’s life detail. For example, she always has a messy hair, she will open her mouth when sleeping, and she loves biting the bottom of the pen when she reads. When she gets lost or drunk, the film’s scene will shake and be a blur, just as seen from Adèle’s perspective. When she in the literature class, the shots keep switching to the teacher’s lecture and the students’ distraction because of the boring content. As a viewer, I can also feel that this content was very boring. The film recorded all these tiny details by using this first-person perspective technique to make Adèle just like a friend in our own life, or actually, she is ourselves. I believe to depict a character on a very personal level is a great strategy to promote the audience’s understanding. And this method also mentioned in the Goltz’s article for finding an effective term to refers to gay or lesbian in Kenyan language context, that one man focus on “there was more to him than his sexuality and that he was ‘beyond being homosexual or being a gay man’ ” and “ ‘to come out as me and not to highlight his sexuality, preferring to ‘talk about me, about my life, not about my queer life” (Goltz et al, 2016).

The tricky thing is that even though this film wants to show the real-life of lesbian, it almost becomes the most controversial lesbian movie because of the ten-minute (or even longer) lesbian sex scene. In fact, I was super embarrassed when I watch this scene because I invited all my roommates to watch this film together as a celebration of the weekend. I am not an extremely conservative person, I mean, the sex scene in this film is simply porn-level, so that we had to turn down the volume and made some jokes to cover up our embarrassment. Firstly, there was no background music in this scene, only big gasps instead and the sound of skin rubbing. Secondly, the scene boldly shows female whole body, without cover. In addition, the two actresses are very good in shape, without flaw or even pubic hair. This is the most confusing place for me. On the one hand, the director wants to present the most authentic lesbian life, which even refuses the background music at the sex scene; on the other hand, it idealizes the female body just as the male gaze, the flawless body, and the perfect shape.

Interestingly, the original author of this story, Julie Maroh expressed the same shock as me. She rated the most lacking in this film is lesbian, and aired her suspicion that there were no lesbians present onset (Romney, 2013). And “a brutal and surgical display, exuberant and cold, of so-called lesbian sex, which turned into porn” (Sciolino, 2013). Maroh replied in the interview, “everyone was giggling. Heterosexuals laugh at because they don’t understand it and find the scene ridiculous. The gay and queer people laughed because it’s not convincing, and find it ridiculous; and among the only people (who) we didn’t hear giggling were guys too busy feasting their eyes on an incarnation of their fantasies on screen” (Sciolino, 2013). When I learned that the director and both two actresses are straight, this makes more sense.

Director Kechiche labels himself as an unconditional devotee of realism. “I don’t want it to look like life,” he says of his cinema. “I want it to actually be life. Real moments of life, that's what I’m after” (Romney, 2013). But at the same time, he also admitted that his purpose is to idealize the female body (Sciolino, 2013). He explained, “Like paintings, or sculptures” (Romney, 2013). Ms. Seydoux counters the Kechiche’s use of the so-called real lesbian sex scene as an eyebrow-raising directly. When the reporter used “several unsimulated sex scenes” to ask Ms. Seydoux, she interrupted immediately, “Be careful, they are simulated. We were wearing prostheses” (Sciolino, 2013). Ms. Exarchopoulos used the word manipulation to describe the director's guidance for them. For both actresses, the filming process was horrible and indicated that they would no longer work with Kechiche (Stern, 2013).

(Léa Seydoux, Adèle Exarchopoulos, and Abdellatif Kechiche won the Palme d'Or.)

It can be said that this film is successful in regards to cultural diversity as brand management. This movie has received a high honor, people should know it is the first film to have the Palme d'Or awarded to both the director and the (two) lead actresses (RFI, 2013). Not only that, but the film also performed not bad at the box office. It can be said that this is a work that has gained a good reputation and attracted the audience through brand management of cultural diversity. But as Kohnen mentioned, “the strategic use of LGBTQ content to signify edginess has not disappeared” (2015). Lesbian movies, especially those including so-called real lesbian sex scenes, are not only targeting the group that supports LGBTQIA and cultural diversity but also a straight (especially male) group who wants to satisfy their own sexual fantasies. Although shocked, it is important to know that Lesbian has been the most popular porn search term for porn sites (Lufkin, 2016).

So I have been thinking about whether lesbian movies are the most cost-effective thing. Due to the brand management of cultural diversity, LGBTQIA films can gain a good social reputation, because more or less they are showing/facilitating the spread of cultural diversity. On the other hand, this type of film caters to the Queer Market, as we mentioned the homonormativity, “depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption” (Duggan, 2002). In addition, a large number of heterosexual groups who want to satisfy their sexual fantasies/curiousness are attracted to the cinema.

The toughest point is that, as mentioned above, the director's purpose is to idealize the female body. And the two actresses clarified their heterosexual identity immediately after the processing of the film. Everyone has made a profit from this lesbian-themed film, but everyone is trying to getting rid of any suspicious of homosexuality identity after making a profit.

As an Asian (I used to believe myself as) straight woman, I have to admit that this film started to make me doubt my own sexual orientation. When I was watching this film, I would involuntarily introduce myself to Adèle’s role, and I found Emma to be a very charming woman. In the film, Emma's hair is blue in the first half and light brown in the second half of the film. The blue hair period is the sweetest time for her and Adèle. I think that Emma was really attractive at that time. And the second half with the light brown hair is the period that her relationship with Adèle is about to burst. I think this is why the film's name is Blue Is The Warmest Color. In fact, in the original comics, all the scenes are black and white, except that Emma's hair is blue, and the intuitive contrast that comic can present can more express this theme.

I have always lived in a heterosexual culture community. The heteronormative in Asian culture is more ingrained than Western culture, so I never thought about my sexual orientation. It’s like I also cannot figure out the sexual orientation of Adèle. She did not show any love for women other than Emma, and she had an affair with a man, not a woman. By watching this film, I am rethinking whether it is a wise choice to define sexual orientation based on gender. I love a person because of the gender of that person, or because that person is that person.

In general, I would think this film is a good movie, especially from the contribution that made me rethink my own identity. But when I know more about the story behind this film, the harder it is for me to evaluate it from the work itself. Everything became complicated when lesbian-themed movies/televisions connect with cultural diversity brand management, homonormativity, Queer Market, and even male sexual fantasy.

Reference:

Duggan, L. (2002). Equality, Inc. The Twilight of Equality? (PP. 43-66). Beacon Press, Boston.

Goltz, D. B., Zingsheim, J., Mastin, T., & Murphy, A. G. (2016). Discursive negotiations of Kenyan LGBTI identities: Cautions in cultural humility. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, 9(2).

Kohnen, M. (2015). Cultural Diversity as Brand Management in Cable Television. Media Industries Journal, 2(2).

Lufkin, B. (2016). The Most Popular Porn Searches in Every State. Gizmodo.

RFI. (2013). Blue is the warmest color team win Palme d'Or at Cannes 2013. archive.org. https://web.archive.org/web/20130608102433/http://www.english.rfi.fr/culture/20130526-wins-palme-dor-cannes-2013

Romney, J. (2013). Abdellatif Kechiche interview: 'Do I need to be a woman to talk about love between women?'. the Guardian.

Sciolino, E. (2013). Darling of Cannes Now at Center of Storm. Nytimes.com.

Stern, M. (2013). The Stars of ‘Blue is the Warmest Color’ On the Riveting Lesbian Love Story. The Daily Beast.

#blue is the warmest color #queer media studies #QueerMovieAnalysis #léa seydoux #adèle exarchopoulos #abdellatif kechiche

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cadpadawan · 4 years

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A Presentation of Epic Proportions

Just the other day, I had a school assigment of the most peculiar kind. It was supposed to be executed as a collaborative team effort in groups of 2-3 students. I was blessed with two individuals, whose contribution to the project was very minimal. One of the guys was too busy with his part-time job to contribute much, though I have to give him credit for trying anyway. The other one focused more on waiting for some kind of a divine inspiration to start working, and spent the time in the local pubs looking for it. Such a bohemian approach might have proven quite effective, had this assignment been associated with the nuances of various craft beers, but alas, it was about a sheet metal design that, by definition, must have dearly dispirited my fellow student not to give a shit. So, I basically had to maneuver this team project to completion practically on my own. For a solo endeavour, it simply was a bit too much to chew, especially as I initially set the goal a little bit too high, in some ill-adviced burst of optimism. Well, when the project started, I genuinely thought that these two heroes, without a cape, would actually contribute more to it. Eventually, I made it – but as you may observe in the transcription of the project presentation, that I had to perform in English...oh, well...check for yourself. Here it is, in full detail:

“Ok, ladies [articulated with an extensively sarcastic tone, as the audience was 99% young men], may I have your undivided attention, please...

We have gathered here today to witness the ultimate triumph of the human mind over matter, that is, sheet metal matter in this particular case. I have the immense pleasure to welcome y'all to the magical mystery Powerpoint presentation of a state-of-the-art sheet metal gun cabinet. This spectacle will be brought to you by this dubious threesome of mechanical engineering undergrads... Oh, wait. My dear colleagues in this joint venture could not make it today, unfortunately, quite like they could not make it most of the time, during this whole project. For starters, I might as well introduce you to my designer team, anyway – the aptly named Team Ahma [a reference to a Finnish sitcom]. My team consisted of these two characters, who magically were mostly absent throughout this ordeal. Had they actually made it to school today, here in the right hand corner of the podium, you'd be seeing a handsome young bloke named [I better not publish any personal information, y'know...], and in the penalty box, for cross-checking the progress, you'd be witnessing the hangover happyface [please, insert a sophomoric genitalia reference here]. Please, give a round of applause to these two high-performance individuals here.

The underlying objective of this collaborative effort was to design a steel cabinet, with the basic function to store away four individual pieces of firearms in an upright position, hence designed exclusively for weapons of the long-barreled variety, such as shotguns and hunting rifles – or, if this cabinet was targeted at customers in the Middle Eastern regions, also AK-47's. This design project was commissioned, supervised and reviewed by our Dear Leader and mentor in 3D design [well, y'know how it goes by now, don't cha...]. This sheet metal design project was commissioned with one precondition: the cabinet's storage capacity was to be limited to four guns. It was due to the fact, that the Finnish gun legislation had a thing or two to say about storing larger number of guns. The material thickness of the cabinet walls, locking mechanism and whatnot were strictly regulated if the number of weapons exceeded four. So, basically I had free hands to come up with pretty much any kind of cabinet, as long as I maintained some kind of an awareness, that the gun rack was not designed for more than four pieces.

Sounds relatively easy, right?

Except maybe for the fact, that the flood of options presented a kind of a challenge in itself. I was faced with the pointed question: where could I find a single, all-consuming concept for such a sheet metal design? You see, I didn't really pay attention when we had the theory class. I was too busy typing cover letters for a summer trainee position. Ok, where do people find info on anything nowadays?

Well, online, of course.

Despite being a member of the sad boomer generations, whose level of internet comprehension usually will not suffice for anything more than checking emails and watching dubious adult entertainment, I managed to do quite an extensive round of online research. So, before getting my hands dirty with the tedious maneuvering around the minute details of the actual design, I navigated in the cyber jungle of gun retail. I checked what kind of cabinet applications were available, with what specifications – and most importantly, for what price range. I browsed through the online bazaars of long-barreled guns typically stored in a cabinet like this, as well. In the hope of gathering some information that might prove useful in my project. I even gave a once-over at the legislation. It was totally unnecessary, but some of the imperatives imposed by the law actually seemed worthy of consideration.

Maybe I should elaborate...

As I do not have any prior experience in the sheet metal industry, except at the customer end, I was essentially shooting in the dark at random. I could have squeezed my brain juice into the project design, with neither forethought nor intention, and just hope for the best. I decided to implement some of the basic tenets of the gun regulations in the design, instead. Neither of my fellow designer students objected. One was too busy, trying to make some money with real work, and the other one just didn't give a shit. Why did I want to go the extra mile, then?

[Off-topic alert: here comes a lengthy rant about the sad state of affairs, when you’re getting re-educated in the ripe age of +45...]

I shall graduate in December 2021, and when the day comes, I'll be closer to 50 than 40 years old. My past work history consists of mainly irrelevant bullshit jobs. Until my life drastically changed in 2016, I used to consider work as just a nifty means to pay for my real passion, that was to make music with no inherent commercial potential, that is: all kinds of progressive rock, for beer money and ”exposure”. Work was just the necessary evil to pay for all this. What I actually did for work didn't really mean shit to me...and now, as I've been trying to apply for any kind of a trainee job, suitable for a mechanical engineering undergraduate, I've come to notice that my previous work experience doesn't actually mean shit to my potential employers either. I started applying for trainee positions starting next summer already in early December. Now, we're living in mid-March. Each and every application that I sent out, bounced back like a boomerang, with the bulk response written in the most dry and academic tone: thanks, but no thanks. So, if I wanted to make a difference in the eyes of my future employers, I would be compelled to go the extra mile every single time I had the chance. I guess I can now better relate to how it must feel to be, say, young, gifted and black in this country – or in any other Western country, for that matter. I had become an old white nigga in the eyes of society. I might as well have shot heroin all my life so far...I have skills and experience that are totally irrelevant for an engineering job.

I wonder if there was actually some factual point, that I was circum-navigating there...

To cut to the chase:

I chose to apply the minimum material thickness of 4 millimeters to the outer walls of the cabinet, along with the idea, that this cabinet ought to be practically impossible to break into. I hoped that these design constraints would lace this project with more focus and drive. After all, it's quite a hard-wired human tendency to fall into the trap of under-achievement, or to get overwhelmed by the sheer volume of a design project like this. In this particular case, lowering the standards would have probably saved my ass, though. Usually, being dolled-up with no exact destination to go, getting the job done without paramilitary leadership, or the channeling of demons, might prove unnecessarily hard.

On top of this, a sneak peek at the similar products on the market provided some crucial insight on the basic dimensions and structure for this type of a gun cabinet. There was no need to invent the wheel anew, when all I needed was some modifications on it. With all the necessary background information gathered, I was ready to outline the initial to-do list for the project, where to start, and how to stay on track. In short, I decided to go for a cabinet of impressive proportions and powerfully expressive character – a sheet metal cabinet on steroids, sort of. The preliminary online research also implicated, that the market was actually dominated by rather second grade tin cans. In this respect, I assumed that it wouldn't really take much of an effort to stand out. I concluded, that my desire to put a little more emphasis on the function and safety of the cabinet would suffice to differentiate it from the competition in this particular capacity range. Thus, one of the key elements in this cabinet design was the double-layered steel chassis, structured in 4 millimeter steel plate. For the sake of simplicity and cost-effective manufacturing, I favoured the basic perpendicular bends of 90 degrees. After all, I was not about to design a fancy mobile decoration of steel, to be suspended from the ceiling on Christmas eve. For such an unregulated cabinet design, the material thickness was probably a bit of an overkill, but I reckoned that it would prevent any unauthorized entering into the cabinet. Furthermore, I assumed – and quite rightly so – that these two layers of steel were prone to make the structure heavy enough, not to be moved into the pikey-model Toyota Hiace with Bulgarian register plates, at least not single-handedly by any amphetamine-fueled random break-and-enter artist. Obviously, a determined professional would make his way for the guns, no matter what this cabinet was made of. First and foremost, I designed this cabinet along the lines, that the robust structure would essentially discourage any half-assed attempts to illegitimately take possession of the goodies inside. I would guess, that it's not a thoroughly thought-out idea to break and enter into a house of some old timer who owns guns, in the first place. Let alone, the idea of trying to break into a cube of steel, without proper power tools. In the unfortunate case, that a random junkie decided to go for it, I would dare to envision, that all the meth in the world was not enough to grant manpower to manually force this steel door open. It would require spesific tools, paired with an exceptionally determined or desperate mindset. Although, I guess it would certainly make for a hilarious episode in one of those popular reality shows you can watch on TV nowadays

In conclusion, taking on such an extra challenge provided me with a clear objective for this design project. Had I known the amount of work that ensued, I might as well have chosen to install a beer tap, or a Nintendo Wii game console with motion sensors to my design. I opted for enhanced security. Although, the Finnish gun culture is nowhere near as bizarre as the American ”Shoot 'em up”-culture, quite the contrary, actually. In the outbreak of a zombie holocaust, the Finnish gunmen are more likely to remain as one of the last sane frontier guards on the fault lines of civilization, in my honest opinion. We don't get to witness random mass shootings, conducted in a spur of the moment drug-frenzy, so often. Nor do we need to read about juveniles shooting one another in a fit of an existential teenage angst, because the Playstation 4 abruptly went offline for no apparent reason.

On a more serious tone, I started the project by searching for some vague idea for a steel cabinet, and the gods of mechanical engineering must have been in favor of this humble endeavour, since I managed to formulate the concept fairly quickly. At the end of the day, how hard can it be to sketch a rectangular box with a door? My kids are reaching teen age, but I'm sure they could have managed to draw something like this with a slide ruler and a pencil way back when they were only five years old or something. In retrospect, though, I feel compelled to make a bold statement, that it sure ain’t easy. Somewhere along the way, I was introduced to a phenomenon, that I would like to refer to as What The Fuck-factor. I apologize for the graphic and evocative term I coined for it, but believe me, it is quite an appropriate definition for such an indecent phenomenon. It is formulated also in the Murphy's Law: if something has even a slight chance of going wrong, it most certainly will. I had my fair share of that in this project, that’s for sure.

The next chapter in this surreal drama, the actual design process itself, was carried out with the PT Creo 3D-modeling software, in compliance with the guidelines imposed by the sheet metal standard DIN 6930. Without giving it that much thought, I adopted a kind of top-down approach. I decomposed the concept into smaller sub-concepts, such as the individual components in the assembly. It all sounded great in theory, but in the rush of a work overload, the emotional strength to actually keep the big picture clear in mind at all times...it just magically seemed to evaporate into the thin air, like fairy dust...

To be brutally honest, the design process was a fucking nightmare.

I apologize for my frequent use of French adjectives. I've been trying to discipline myself against the abundant use of such foul language, but I just can't help it. My mouth is quicker than my moral filters for politically correct choice of words. Besides, the occassional strong word usually gets the point across much better, and I wouldn't be surprised if the cuss words were accountable for the most part of the modern office communication. Before starting a new life as a CAD-padawan, I used to work for a company, where the corporate language was best described as management by perkele.

Perkele is a vintage cuss word in the Finnish language, loaded with some eerie sense of personal empowerment, thus way more powerful than the more offensive ones, that are trending in the speak of the millennials.

The sketching started in a tried-and-true manner: by throwing up some random ideas in whatever form seemed fit. The design concept for the steel door seemed to provide a promising start. So, without further experiments, the steel door design was underway. Since the door played quite an integral part in the cabinet, the dimensions of the door pretty much laid out the framework for the rest of the design. And this small, ill-considered choice of component was probably the single most damaging factor contributing to why things got essentially sour a little bit later. The overall thickness of the door, in particular, set all kinds of funny little restrains on the design of the other parts, consecutively. It was 35 millimeters, that is a relatively large number in this context, and it projected a certain set of esoteric demands on the dimensions of the doorframe, and particularly on the hinge mechanism needed.

Now, the hinge mechanism...

That was a real pain-in-the-ass in this project...

The ultimate can of worms.

There is an idiom in the Finnish language, usually uttered aloud in a fairly sarcastic tone. It goes: ”liian monta liikkuvaa osaa” - that stands for ”too many moving particles”, in English.

It's a perfect description for the hardships that I encountered with the hinge design. The mission objective was to control the movement of two metal bodies, in relation to each other. Or to be more precise, to control the opening of the door. The doorframe was pretty much a static component. So, I had one moving particle – the door. Due to all kinds of funny preconceptions, it soon became painfully obvious, that this one moving particle was actually one too many.

Liian monta liikkuvaa osaa, y'know...

And little by little, frustration was gaining momentum...

I had the steel door assembly figured out by now, as well as the design for the doorframe. Then I realized, that I had figuratively shot myself in the leg. I could almost taste the irony in my mouth. The universe seemed to have a sick sense of humour. Don't get me wrong, I am actually one of those Myers-Briggs personality types who prefer their humour just like they prefer their morning cup of coffee – pitch black, with absolutely no sweeteners. (I'm also quite fond of quality gin, and craft beers with a bitter flavour...so, I guess I'm a downright psycho, and those of you, who order soya frappuccinos in Starbucks, will be my first victims, when I finally lose my shit and dash off on a killing spree...I'm joking, right?)

I soon realized, that if I wanted to implement all the safety measures that I originally opted for, I needed to ensure that the door fit the doorframe like a glove. The tight clearance between the door and the frame was an inherent part of the whole concept for an idiot-proof gun cabinet. In practice, the idea was that the door would refuse to eject open, even if you cut your way through the bolt of the lock, or the hinges. This approach necessitated a lot of extra work. It also called for a special kind of double-action hinge mechanism, something similar to those jump-action hinges that come installed in some of the hipster brand kitchen cupboards, like Puustelli etc. This type of hinge ejects the door outwards first, before opening 90 degrees in the desired direction. Well, it works wonders in the kitchen fixtures, but...

Would it work with a steel door that weighed like a ton?

That was exactly what I needed to find out.

Had this concept fully realized in practice, which it obviously did not, it might have actually imposed an additional set of requirements on the hinges, in turn. I formulated all kinds of funny little mental configurations, how this particular type of hinge might have worked in this cabinet setting. At some point, it finally dawned on me, like a sudden moment of comprehension, or the sensation to which the Japanese zen buddhist tradition refers with the term ”satori”. I was practically shooting myself in the leg some more...

Even if I made this science fiction hinge mechanism work, so that the door would actually open beautifully, without any obstructions...then what?

In the name of safety, I had adjusted that clearance between the door and the frame to be extremely tight. Thus, it was absolutely necessary for the door to be perfectly aligned with the frame, vertically. Otherwise, the door would neither close nor open. This concept seemed to suggest that it was essential to lock the door into position, when either fully open or fully closed. Otherwise, it would get stuck. So, the deeper I delved into the details of this particular hinge mechanism, the more evident it became, that it would probably be way too complicated to design. I must admit that I felt tempted to call it quits, and go home and watch football on satellite TV. This project was turning into a joke, with me being the punchline, and it wasn't funny anymore.

I introduced this sheet metal project as state-of-the-art, remember?

Now we're getting to the artsy part.

I could have responded to this unfortunate turn of events by sketching an alternative, or even a set of alternatives, and then move on like nothing happened. Sticking to the idea, that my steel door insisted on the application of this particular type of hinge mechanism, was beginning to resonate the ambience of a game of Tetris, where you kept getting the wrong pieces round after round, ad infinitum. At this stage, however, my unjustified optimism hadn't been killed yet, so...when this issue called attention to an ever-increasing amount of detail, I simply considered it as a challenge accepted, or a personal insult to my intelligence, even. It was a call to arms. Thus, I insisted on not to seek any alternatives, not yet, as if bound by a samurai honour code. After all, I had the concept for this particular type of hinge mechanism clear in my mind. There was only the trifle matter of putting it into realization, to take care of.

At this stage, the summoning of demons might actually have proven quite handy.

I was faced with the ultimate question: how to tap back into the creative flow, when the empire was falling around me?

Maybe I should have attached a slide of the hinge mechanism I found in some engineering porn site that was infested with a multitude of graphic illustrations and video shootage of all kinds of highly technical gadgets and gizmos. Y'know, the one that I found most promising to develop further.

Well, I didn't – so, you'll just have to imagine how it looked like.

I'm sure this sounds like the stuff from some poorly screenplayed science fiction movie, or the mindless verbal rambling of a voodoo hierophant who's probably tripping balls on magic mushrooms. However, I'm afraid that I'll have to let you down on your vivid speculations about the origins of this concept. It was very real. We found something similar applied to safes and vacuum containers, and such, with more or less sophisticated mechanisms, that might have worked with our sheet metal cabinet. The only catch with all the mechanisms was that they seemed to require lots of time to design, especially to get the dimensions exact – and this project was little by little running out of time. Our cabinet door required something sturdy, like the hinges on a huge cast iron safe. The weight of the door, fully assembled, approximated near thirty kilos already. On the other hand, we needed something compact, in order to squeeze the hinges in the formidably narrow space between the outer sheet metal casing and the doorframe of steel.

For some peculiar reason, this project suddenly started to feel like the biggest wild goose chase in the history of gun cabinets...but, like I said: after an extensive online research, we finally came across such a sophisticated mechanism, that seemed appropriate for our needs, with just a few minor modifications. It called for an infinite amount of trials and errors to dimension right, but we gave it a go, anyway. The margin to have each component in our cabinet assembly in working condition by the deadline was getting incredibly small, and risk assessment probably wasn't our strong point. We took on a challenge, only to fail in the most beautiful fashion. Obviously, this particular hinge design proved way too sophisticated to execute in the given time. Eventually, we had to face the facts, discard this fancy hi-tech mechanism, and go for the second best option. Just twelve hours before the deadline for the final submission, I basically had to witness my deep faith in humanity disappear into the ether, as this issue with the hinges turned out to be such a gift that just kept on giving. I resolved this problem with a straightforward and brutal solution: by thrusting a simple rod of steel vertically through the door, attached with a pair of bronze sliding bearings. After that, I extruded a couple of additional holes in the doorframe – and voilá! The cabinet design was complete. This impromptu change of plans, conducted in the very last minute of the project, obviously compromised the original idea for an idiot-proof cabinet door, but we really had no choice.

Maybe next time we'll be equipped with more profound wisdom and battle-hardened experience, so that we'll be able to execute more informed choices. This project was supposed to be a crash course in the wonders of sheet metal design, and provide us with some hands-on experience with the topic. In practice, it was more like an experiment in the dark forests of the human mind. In this respect, however, we did quite well. Yes, the design process turned sour and frustrating at times, or to put it in a more evocative wording – it was a genuine pain in the ass, but did we die? Nope. It certainly is a very human trait to lose focus and give up, after reaching the ultimate frustration point. On several occassions, during this endeavour in psychological torture, I was tempted to take a Big Lebowskian stance, let go and cry out:

”Fuck it, let's go bowling!”

But I didn't.

Of course, I can only speak for myself, when I say that out of sheer hatred towards anything even remotely related to sheet metal, I forced myself to complete this assignment – like, when the software crashed on me for the fifth time during the course of just a few hours. My immediate urge, more often than not, was to smash the computer screen with a baseball bat, when things didn't quite go as planned. But, instead, I manouvered myself into a kind of zen state of mind. Of course, my mind was not completely empty, like in a genuine higher state of consciousness. It was actually pretty full – filled with some explicit thoughts, certainly Not Safe For Work environment, but I guess it's safe to say that these thoughts mostly hinted that I was not going to let a stupid machine get the best of me. Well, I have 15 years' worth of experience in logistics, so I guess I am more resilient to stress than the average person. I have worked for Satan himself, in a most high-stress job you can imagine. So, as an afterthought, I guess this project was actually fairly easy on me. It was challenging in many respects, but eventually the project design was completed with not much collateral damage.

Maybe this chunk of metal does not provide enough ground to build a profitable business model on it, but it just might suggest a novel and street smart way to store away your firearms. I'm sure you could get a bigger and standardized cabinet for almost the same amount of money, but then again: who actually needs to possess more than four pieces, anyway? If you feel a sting in your heart, when I say this, maybe you should ask yourself:

Did Jeffrey Epstein really kill himself?

Am I just preparing for the zombie apocalypse?

I would guess that no one in his, or her, right mind really needs five or more firearms. For those of us, who need a cool storage application for max. 4 guns, I designed this shiny little sheet metal beast. I am still entertaining the possibility, that this boutique cabinet might have an enticing appeal to those of us, who prefer a highly customised luxury approach, rather than a generic application of nothing special, dashed out for mass production in the sweatshops of the third world countries. Obviously, this design philosophy did not quite exclude the need to take the ease and cost of manufacture into account – and that's what I did.

I refrained myself from integrating overly complicated shapes, just for the sake of appearance. Every bend in the sheet metal structure was well-thought out. Maybe I could have done with less welding seam, but I opted for reinforced safety. Remember, the primary goal was to enhance the possibility to come up with an idio-proof cabinet design. You see, idiots and guns don't really mix that well. It sounds like common knowledge, but as we all can see in the nine o'clock news on a daily basis, not many are catching up...

From the very outset of this project, I tried to view this cabinet design through the imaginary lens of the potential customer. I dare to guess, that the most likely candidate to purchase a weapon storage application of this caliber (pun intended!) would be a white, heterosexual Finnish male going in his late 50's. This stereotypical character resides somewhere in the back of beyond, in the most rural areas of Finland, in the hard core of the Baby Boomers paradigm, that is the classic ”rintamamies”-house, built in the 1940's. Our protagonist here presents the Jungian archetype of a DIY-handyman, with a passion for hunting wild game in his spare time. He is quite an active and respected member of society – the local hunting society, in particular. He's got his mortgage paid off by now, which means that he can very well afford to treat himself to something special, every once in a while – like, a brand new, state-of-the-art gun cabinet, because the old one is...well, old. With this in mind, I decided to design this cabinet for the higher price range. I rest assured that the hefty price tag would be justified by the extra emphasis on security. I wanted to take my cabinet design to the next level, and to some degree, I guess I succeeded. After all, it usually is a tell-tale sign of an amateur-at-work to compete on price. I opted for excellence without compromise. All too many gun cabinet manufacturers seemed not. The vast majority of the products on the gun cabinet market seemed to capture the ethos of the classic one-liner, said by the American musical genius Frank Zappa, back in the day:

”If we can't be free, let's at least be cheap.”

For many, this kind of an approach seemed to be a very viable option in a gun cabinet design. I'm sure it can be a convenient philosophy in life, in general – as it seems to be for many, too. It was never an option for this particular design project, to say the least. I am a firm believer, that you are the sum of all the experiences you go through, as well as the people around you. Being surrounded by dysfunction and incompetence will eventually get you nowhere. At the end of the day, with all the designer's blocks and frustrations dealt with, after getting strangled in a multitude of loose ends, for God knows how many times, overcoming the obstacles in this ”joint” venture eventually provided me with a sense of pride in a job well done. My gun cabinet might not become a nifty prototype for a potential customer product, but nevertheless, I came up with something unique. The technical documentation of this project design might seem like a white paper on how to ruin a perfectly promising raw idea, but then again....there is no such thing as perfection, when it comes to rushing things to completion, especially, when it's not something you're doing by choice.

In retrospect, with the hinge issue aside, the design for this cabinet evolved pretty smoothly and effortlessly. The double-layered steel chassis took maybe a couple of days to sketch, model and annotate – just like most of the other components did too. Believe me, it's not an understatement, when I tell you that 90 percent of this project consisted of figuring out how to make a double-action hinge work in a desired way. Maybe it could serve as a topic for further development. It probably would require quite a few iterations to configure the mechanism to work perfectly in the context of this gun cabinet. With this project, though, I had to rush the design to meet the deadline. Thus, I cannot say for certain, whether this sheet metal cabinet will perform as desired, or if it has any of the enhanced technical value I opted for. Chances of true success might be minimal, respectively. With the benefit of doubt, however, I dare to suggest that the original objectives of this project could still be accomplished through the application of such customised hinge mechanism. Now, we'll probably never know.

Unless, of course, the conservative dark forces are going to bring back the good ol' times, and I can have another go at this...

Or, maybe not...

I thank you dearly for your time and patience. If you wish to ask me anything about this project, I will gladly answer. Of course, it would be more convenient to continue with the technical and psychological nuances of this project over a pint of beer...but alas, the school cafeteria does not have the licence to sell alcohol. Well, anyways...knock yourselves out.

Ok, that's about it. Now I'm excited to pass the torch on to the next project team: the podium is all yours.

Arrivederci!

It remains to be seen, how my English teacher reviewed this presentation. Most likely, the required level of formality was not reached, which might be reflected in my English grade. However, I think that there is only a narrow window of opportunity to make a lasting impression, in the everyday interaction with the people around you. I would guess, that this presentation will not be as easily forgotten as the ones peppered with rambling formalities. My last Powerpoint slide, that was depicting the benefits of this design project, was basically just a picture of a giant facepalm. Try erasing that mental image from your mind now, eh!

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