#like this was the most surface level analysis i could do! this is a rabbit hole that just keeps going i could be here for WEEKS

[onehundredandeleventropicalfish]

so, anyone who knows me from previous blogs knows i’m an absolute music nerd who’s worked on both film score and musical theatre book before (and is still working in that vein, though i’m combining it with script writing these days)

and, god, i would be doing such an injustice to whoever is writing the soundtrack for the sandman if i didn’t talk about it at least once, because it’s one of the best tv scores i’ve ever heard, i wanna teach this as an example of how to do it right

i’ll be here for days if i try to cram all of it into one post, so i’m gonna focus on episode six, the sound of her wings, because that’s the one that really gripped me

(under the cut though to save dashboards bc this is still me and it will still get long)

so, to break this down, there’s a lot of different ways to add musical motifs (leitmotifs) into tv, but sandman is a show that does it (mostly) by character. in this episode we see a lot of dream’s motif, death’s motif, desire’s motif, and a slight appearance of johanna’s when the earlier constantine shows up (hob doesn’t have one, but i’m betting that’s deliberate). which makes sense for such a character driven show, especially in a story that’s got many anthology aspects - not much stays the same in this show but the characters, they are the through-line, and even the changing characters from episode to episode help give each episode its own musical feel

(people have said that sandman would work better with weekly episodes than binging, and this is part of why - they're very self contained, each episode a new vibe, and whether you notice it or not the soundtrack is contributing to that)

back to our episode 6 breakdown - so this is death’s motif, in its simplest form. and (barring a little of dream's when he's explaining why he's upset) this motif is the only motif we hear in the entire first half of the episode

the reason i’d wanna teach this is mostly that it’s not easy, developing a motif without making it stagnant. it’s actually the first thing we ever covered when i studied music composition, because they really wanted to get it into our heads - anyone can make up a melody, but our brains notice patterns. and the really effective patterns consist of, at most, four notes. in a sense, the notation i’ve added above is actually the motif four times, just phrased as a question, a pause, a question, and an answer. and developing a motif into a score means changing it enough to give it direction, but keeping it similar enough that it’s recognisable. and that’s a hard thing to do! but we spend a full 20 minutes with just this motif, and it not only never gets boring, it’s developed into such a beautiful moving score, going from this very simple theme that just exists in the background to a huge emotional orchestral piece

and in terms of what it's actually doing character wise, i wanna focus on those gaps in the original. bc those are some long pauses between each three note repetition. and i think that is a good representation of death, and her patience, this theme isn't trying to rush you into anything, it's just sitting there reliably for when its time comes.

but as we go through that development, those pauses start being filled. it's still just as much about death as ever, but we understand it more. and the development starts to take on a more hopeful character the more of these snapshots of people's lives that we see. and the music is telling us how dream is feeling, as he goes from not understanding death, to learning a lot more about her, to being overwhelmed by how easy it is to care about these random people in the last moments of their lives, and how death isn't a bad thing

it simplifies back down, near the end of their walk, because she's still the same person she was at the start of the episode, it's dream that's changed, but it doesn’t go entirely back to the motif we heard at the start. those gaps are now filled by gentle woodwinds, the understanding remains. and as soon as we say goodbye to death (specifically “i thank you, my sister”), we switch immediately to dream's motif

(technically, dream has two, but i associate one more with dream and one more with the dreaming, so i'm talking about the former)

now, we’ve heard this one a lot already, it's the title music for the show, here it is for the sheet music fans (you may notice it’s asymmetrical, the contrary bastard)

and we’re about to hear it even more - it's playing constantly from that goodbye right up until the start of the flashback (in more medieval sounding instrumentation than usual, alluding to the fact that hob is at the forefront of his mind), and we’ll hear the same thing coming back out of the flashback, too

now, within each flashback scene, there largely aren’t repeating motifs. and i mentioned this was probably deliberate - the music we hear in the background of each scene is fitting to the time period, and i think that in a way is hob’s musical identity. the thesis statement of sandman as a story is that you have to keep changing to keep living, and you have to keep living to keep changing, it’s why hob’s never ending immortality isn’t angsty like so many other immortals - he’s going to keep changing and keep living and it’s always going to be worth it. so his musical identity changes too, relative to wherever and whenever he happens to be living.

but then we get the moments where dream’s motif overtakes that -

1389, we actually get death’s first, when we first hear hob talking about how death is stupid and he’s not going to die, and it switches to dream’s with “why would any sensible creature crave an eternity of this?” (and back to death’s with “very well, little brother”, all three play off each other for the rest of that scene)

1489 is very much hob’s scene, there’s elements of dream’s motif in the arpeggios that pick up after “it’s fucking brilliant”, because now he’s caught dream’s interest, but it’s still largely the 15th century music, we only hear dream’s motif properly once he gets up to leave, and hob has to shout after him “you never told me who you are!”

in 1589, it starts to creep into the music (though still in hob’s native instruments), when shakespeare says “to give men dreams that would live on long after i’m dead”, and it overtakes it fully when dream leaves the table

the only moment in the flashback sequence which doesn’t have era appropriate music, is 1689, when hob is telling the story of how miserable the last 80 years have been. the music matches his mood, but it’s using modern digital instruments - this isn’t hob, not really. and while there’s no element of dream’s motif in this scene that i can spot, when we get “death is a mug’s game”, that’s when we switch back to the 17th century instruments, because this is the hob we know, the one who is always willing to live, no matter what

1789, dream’s motif when dream says “you need not have come to my defense”, through to the rest of that scene, this one stands out as a moment where he's not grabbing power, but sharing it

1889, when else - it comes in with “then i shall take my leave of you and prove you wrong”

1989, it’s so faint. it took me a minute to actually confirm that was dream’s motif - it doesn’t show up at all in the main scene, but when we switch to the view of dream in the cage, we hear a very hidden version of it, changed to the point of being almost unrecognisable

and then 2022. and we hear it in full again, but not just it in full. it gets an orchestral, uplifting development, both in tribute to the fact that this scene is very hopeful and heartwarming, but also explicitly mimicking the development death’s motif had when dream was watching her work, realising how much he cared about these random people, realising how much he therefore cared about people he’d known for much longer. her influence and her lesson is extremely present here, as she was the one who pushed him into returning

and as that scene ends, the music overlays with Desire by Bob Moses and Zhu, which is the cleverest part of the whole episode

because yes, the song is named desire, and has the word desire in its lyrics, telling you who this is, and yes, in an episode that has so far been full of medieval or orchestral music, the EDM is a sharp vibe twist, which fits with both desire’s character and the fact that their gallery in the show is styled to be very modern art/avant garde compared to dream's more renaissance style

but that’s not all it’s doing

because here’s the thing about desire. they absolutely have a motif in this show, that plays in the background every time they are on screen or talked about. but it’s not a melodic motif.

desire’s motif is the sound of a heartbeat

(often with accompanying ambient synths, but no melody)

and you don’t notice it when you’re just watching for the story, but every time you see desire on this show, there is a heartbeat playing in the background. and if you listen to this particular song, the dance beat is also mimicking a heartbeat, allowing it to blend in perfectly with desire’s existing motif, which is also playing in the background here

it’s just. brilliant

#like this was the most surface level analysis i could do! this is a rabbit hole that just keeps going i could be here for WEEKS #it's so wonderful #maybe i just gotta start doing a series of music breakdowns #next week: the corinthian and how he gets existing songs rather than his own score/motif #to represent the fact that he's constantly trying to mimic humanity but isn't #the sandman #1x06 #dream of the endless #death of the endless #hob gadling #desire of the endless #mine #sandman score analysis #music

[comicaurora]

I've started making my way through the playlist hbomberguy made of actually good video essays by queer creators and spotted a comment of yours on the one about the relationship between Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy, which was fun xD red in the wild!

Anyways, just wanted to appreciate how both you and Blue and you are very good at showing your sources! It's always nice to know that the people you've watched for years have good habits after an event like this, and I hope you guys are among the people that get some new fans after this whole debacle, because your channel definitely qualifies for "good educational videos made by queer people"

I'm glad! Blue's much better about listing his sources and follow-up reading than I am.

To be honest, I loved the video, but my imposter syndrome always flares like crazy when I watch an essay like that. It might be the ADHD or it might just be who I am as a person, but I feel like I've lived my whole life striving to make everything I do the best it can be, and still managing to fuck up and get criticised for things I could've done better if only I never missed anything. It's an actual gut-drop when it turns out a source I used wasn't trustworthy, or when in older videos I only went wiki-deep for some claims and didn't check every source to be 100% sure I wasn't being goat-fish'd. And this being the internet, I can get criticized at any time for things I've gotten wrong years ago, since it's evergreen online and to the new-viewing critic it's as fresh as yesterday. It makes it hard for me to stay proud of my work past the first moment of "oh I would've done that different now". There's a cocktail of complicated, scary feelings around this space, no matter how little I actually have in common with the bad guys of this scenario - it's less about the reality and more about who my imposter syndrome tells me I am. I saw several people saying that the video actually made them feel much better about their own work because it made it clear that accidental plagiarism on that scale is impossible, but if my anxieties listened to reason I would've successfully machete'd them out of my skull years ago. I just hope I never fuck up badly enough to deserve an hbombing of my own.

But my own stress aside, the hbomb essay exposed a level of laxness, laziness and entitlement on the part of these plagiarists that I think is almost incomprehensible to people who actually create for a living or even just the joy of it. How hollow do you have to be to take in someone else's writing and not consider it, digest it, let it reshape your views and then formulate your own interpretation on it, but instead to file off the serial numbers and pretend it's yours, trusting that the person whose thoughts and words you valued enough to steal will never be powerful enough to call you out on it? I go down research rabbit holes because I love the frustration and thrill of putting something together! How joyless it must be to skim the surface and borrow someone else's conclusions!

I've sometimes had people email asking for sources on parts of my interpretation of various myths, possibly in the interest of source-citing for school papers (a nightmare concept in and of itself) and with very few exceptions I usually have to tell them "the only sources were the english translations I used of the primary source where the myth was originally written, like I said in the video, and the part where I said I was conspiracy-boarding has no source other than my own analysis of the given source, which is why I called it conspiracy-boarding" and I was always a little baffled by those emails - half the videos are introduced like "this is The Prose Edda" or "this is in Ovid's Metamorphoses" or "this bit is Hesiod" so what else could they want - but seeing the hbomb of the week made me realize that truly original analysis might not be what most people are expecting from a "thing summarized." They might be expecting a compilation of other people's summaries instead.

#asks #not aurora

[wrencatte]

I don't know about you, but that "I'm so scared." panel is haunting me....

Please excuse all the weird errors of all kinds. I once again wrote this on my phone in tumblr drafts...at work (😅😅).

I won't know how many words this is until I can get it in a doc and clean it up for ao3 posting

Bruce closes his eyes and takes a deep breath, steeling himself.

Dick had a tendency to go high. Jason's tendency is to go low. He tucks himself under tables and in small spaces that adults usually can't fit into. The Cave has a lot of places to hide under (and has a lot of places to climb onto, high into the sky where fear is just a memory and your parents bodies seem so far away) and Bruce has scoured the more obvious places before finding this one: the work table, where he dismantles and fiddles with gear.

And where Jason has taken to messing with his own gear, absolutely fascinated by the intricate mechanisms that made it all work. The kid is an absolute gearhead along with his love for literature, several books on different engines and vehicles have started to migrate to his room.

So Bruce crouches on his knees and peers under the table. The table is deep for toolboxes and a set of drawers on top, and Jason has managed to shove himself in the darkest corner, curled up in the smallest ball possible. He's hit a slight growth spurt in the last few months, leaving his elbows and toes sticking out from the shadows. His face is tucked into his knees. His breathing frantic and hitching - but still so impossibly quiet, like he's spent years teaching himself to cry silently and Bruce's heart breaks all over again at the reminder

(This isn't the first time Jason's cried since he came to live in the Manor, and every single time Bruce never knows unless he's right there when he starts or if he walks in on him mid-sob. And Bruce hates it.)

Bruce's broad shoulders block the light, and Jason flinches into a tighter ball, toes disappearing in the shadows.

"Hey," Bruce starts then stops and doesn't continue for a long moment. Jason stills like a rabbit caught in a fox's gaze, barely perceivable quivers. He exhales slowly. His knees ache on the worn thin rug that's meant to keep dropped things from rolling away. He settles down, legs crossed, hands up on his knees to show he's unarmed, though who knows what Jason's actually seeing. "Want to come out from there?"

Jason shakes his head.

"That's alright," Bruce assures him even though it can't be comfortable down there. "You don't have to so anything you don't want to do."

Jason's next breath is the loudest thing he's ever heard since he got hit with the fear gas. A new batch, more potent than the last. Half a dose could give an adult a heart attack. Jason got one-eighth of a dose via a broken mask and a second too late realization. Hell, they didn't even know he'd actually gotten hit until they made it to the Cave and Bruce turned around and he was gone, the analysis beeping behind him with the announcement that their current anti toxins would be ineffective.

He has a new anti toxin slowly being pieced together by a program and under Alfred's watchful eye, but that does nothing for him right here, right now, with Jason too terrified to make a sound.

Bruce doesn't talk much - he's never needed to - but he sits there and he starts talking. First about a case, of a long ago Rogue that had a funnier gimmick than most and did surface level property damage more than anything else - but eventually he found himself talking about the Justice League, about their unprecedented expansion, about various antics some of the newer heroes get up to.

He doesn't know if Jason's listening or even hears what he's saying. The boy doesn't uncurl. Doesn't make a sound. He hopes that he's breaking through the living nightmare somehow, but he also knows that hope doesn't mean anything.

But he keeps talking anyway.

During a lull, when Bruce's mouth is dry and his throat hurts and - Jason shifts just the tiniest bit. He peeks out from behind his knees, eyes glittering in the dark, and stares at Bruce with pupils blown wide from fear and drugs, chin trembling. Bruce feels like the kid is looking into his soul and finding him lacking, but he opens his mouth anyway and croaks out,

"I'm scared," soft and wavering, thick with tears and the type of brokenness that lends itself to helplessness.

It's a little bit like a confession. An admittance he doesn't want to make but he has no choice but to make it.

"I know," Bruce says gently. "We can fix that, though. It may seem like it, but you don't have to be scared forever."

He holds out a hand, warm and inviting in that same way he did towards the kid sitting across from him at a rickety outdoor picnic table, one who'd just finished inhaling a subpar batburger and fries, one who'd just fifteen minutes ago had even caught jacking the batmobile's tires and had the moxie to whack Batman in the stomach with a tire iron.

The kid then had eyed it warily. And didn't take it, just took a sip of his drink and quietly agreed to let Batman set him up in a warm house with warm meals and clean clothes and the most comfortable bed ever with the 'person I trust the most' - which isn't Bruce Wayne, but one Alfred Pennyworth.

The kid now eyes the hand warily. And takes it. Lets Bruce help him from under the table and lets Bruce fold him into a tight hug, his face tucked against the man's neck, breaths sobbing and hitching.

"I'm so scared," Jason repeats.

"Not for much longer, Jaylad. I've got you."

"I'm so scared," he says out loud, but there's no one around to hear it.

Jason's both grateful for it and collapsing inward when there's no assurance that'll all be over soon, that it won't be forever, that dad's got him. He drops to his knees with a gasp, heart thudding so hard he can feel it in his throat.

He's alone.

He's alone and there's a fear in his chest, invading his lungs, burrowing in his bones. It's going to be there forever. Forever and ever until he dies from it because this isn't a new life, this isn't a gift or love. This is a death sentence. Jason puts a hand to the ground to heave himself up but the thought of walking onto those streets makes him gasp and choke and the fear cycles in on itself from fear to adrenaline to fear fear fear. Never ending. Ramping up bit by bit the more Jason breathes and trembles and, fuck, he's terrified.

Jason scrambles backward on his hands until he hits a shelving unit that rattles. It feels like a knee to the spine, holding him down, driving in, and he sobs quietly. Quiet like he always is when he cries because there's never been a point in being loud about it. Being loud just got attention and attention was always bad.

And he's back to where he was fifteen minutes ago before Marquise - Scandal - showed up and dismissed him and walked away before he could explain. Knees tucked to his chest, arms around his legs, trying to convince himself to stand up, to just go already. His chest heaves. The space gets humid from his tears. He feel like he's going to pass out, dizzy and nauseous.

He's too exposed like this, Jason thinks. Realizes. Fears. (And that fear feeds back into itself, and he hates, hates this so much, but that's not enough. The hate isn't enough to override it.) The room is half trashed and covered in rubble, and he's a whole foot taller than he'd been as a kid, but there, right there -

Jason fits there. Here, under a metal table that has his mask sitting innocently on top. It got wedged against a wall, propped up slightly by some concrete. He tucks himself under it and stays there.

And thinks about - nothing. Because if he thinks about anything - like Batman across the rickety picnic table, offering him a warm house and warm food. Like Batman scolding him for doing something reckless and scaring the shit out of him. Like Bruce sitting on the floor, so patient and understanding and telling him that this fear is only temporary.

Like Batman throwing batarang and the thick spray of blood. Like Batman throwing a punch hard enough to shatter his helmet. Like Batman ripping the insignia off his chest and dragging him across a rooftop.

Jason can't help the whimper. He tips over to lean against a table leg and gasps around the vice around his lungs.

He won't make it out of here. He'll hyperventilate himself into unconsciousness and someone will find him, wearing most of his Red Hood suit, and that person will kill him. Or they'll call the cops and he'll end up in Arkham and he'll die there. There is no normal life. No identity in Metropolis for him. Even if he did make it there, he'd be dead at the first villain attack, unable to defend himself as his aderenaline surges and the fear sets in.

He never expected Bruce to be this so fucking naïve. Cynical idealism? Sure. But not this.

"Hood?"

Jason doesn't acknowledge his name, or the voice. Purposeful footsteps crunch on debris, announcing their path from the hole in the wall to Jason, getting closer and closer.

And closer.

Until there's a shadow of legs blocking the scant light. Until the figure crouches down and there's Nightwing, peering under the table with wide, concerned eyes. He's not wearing his domino, Jason notes almost distantly. His body doesn't feel like his own anymore for all that he can feel the cool metal table against this temple and the rough feel of his pants in his clenched fists.

All there is, is the fear.

"Jason," Dick says with his own kinda fear.

He's reaching under the table, not holding a hand out for Jason to take, for Jason to choose for himself - and the man doesn't know the significance of that, but something in Jason settles anyway at the stark difference.

Dick goes all the way, cupping Jason's face like he does with them all - a pinkie under the jaw for the faint hint of a heart beat, a thumb across the cheek for comfort, his palm to lean into and let him carry the weight. And Jason does lean into it, trembling and shuddery, wet eyes closing.

"C'mon, let's get out from under here." He guides Jason forward until he's spilling into his brother’s arms, face pressed into his shoulder. The Nightwing suit is too tight to grip so Jason wraps his arms around Dick instead, clinging to him tightly. Dick hugs him back just as hard, rocking back and forth.

"I'm scared," Jason whispers - an admittance he has no choice but to make.

Dick hugs him tighter, pulling him into his lap like he's a child. Under a difference circumstance it would be comedic - Jason is broader and taller than Dick - but right now he's just small.

"I've got you," Dick says gently.

He doesn't know why, but that juat makes Jason cry harder.

#jason todd #bruce wayne #dick grayson #gotham war #my writing

[lepusrufus]

I'm starved for theories and hcs and analysis of the blorbos so fine, I'll do it myself. Have some random gritty edgy hcs of Sombra because I'm bored and want to bug my followers with the brainrot

Sombra is a lot less prone to violence than most of Talon, but she also looks extremely apathetic to it on a surface level. She's been scouring and has seen the deepest, most fucked up and disgusting corners the internet has to offer. She's so desensitized to it all that sometimes even she has to take a step back and wonder what the fuck is wrong with her. Sometimes she ends up in deep rabbit holes without even meaning to, just because she can, but suddenly she's trying to find the source of a website selling the shadiest most unsafe spine implants and will need to get up and grab a coffee. (Maybe take Moira's example and steal some of her Irish coffee)

Being the one committing violent crimes is a bit of a different can of worms. Sombra is not usually a field agent and even when she is, that implies mostly staying hidden somewhere away from the fight and taking care of any security that could get in their way. Sure, the gun is there and she'll use it if needed, but she'd rather not.

In a similar vein, she has a very odd way of showing compassion (and has a particular soft spot for young kids in shitty situations). Sombra would find the most disgusting thing hidden somewhere on the web and bury herself neck deep in it to get rid of whoever is responsible. She'll get out of it without as much as a metaphorical scrap, sure, but there's only so many times she can pull this off without it getting to her.

The Implants in her head pretty much connect her brain to the whole wide internet. She's not concerned about anyone compromising her through it, with all the meticulously thought out security she put in place, but it still has its side effects. Sure, she has access to any and all data at any time, but with the amount of misleading and contradictory information you can find even through the simplest google search, she has to always be careful what she picks as true or false, to the point where she sometimes doubts even the simplest little facts. At least she got really good at recognizing lies.

Having any and all information at her fingertips is both a blessing and a curse. She can know anything on anyone in a matter of seconds but on the flip side she rarely gets to truly come in contact with the world if not through a pink tinted screen. She gets wrapped in her own head around motives and data and the inner workings of everything that she sometimes forgets that people are, at the end of the day, people and they will sometimes be unpredictable just because. It made her a bit of a paranoid mess throughout the years and despide how well she can hide it, constantly being on the lookout for something is beyond exhausting.

The implants on her spine are old. They're still very much functioning as they should be, but the one person that did them had died years ago and, without being able to do any tinkering on her own back by herself, Sombra didn't have any major parts of it replaced or updated like the rest of her tech. The knowledge that one day it's bound to malfunction and she'll be left to scramble for a way to fix it looms over her every single time she puts a little too much strain on the mechanical parts of her body and feels a little warning tingle of electricity running down her spine.

Less related to any body modifications, but i think we can all agree that she has the most fucked up sleep schedule in the universe. Sometimes she'll sleep for 12 hours straight. Sometimes she won't sleep for 3 days. Whether it's because she's working on something important or because sleep simply seems to elude her matters little, she'll still be holed up in her bedroom with a few screens floating around her and a pair of headphones blasting too loud music.

#*throws this at you* #have some blorbo thoughts #my love for taking the seemingly carefree character and making them kinda tragic will never die thanks for asking #sombra overwatch #bc i miss writing a bunch of hcs

[dionysusdecent]

Heathcliff sin analysis, but this time its just R Corp and Sunshower

My second post ever and its the same as the first, but smaller this time. After thinking about it, I figured that I should retry to do R Corp Heath and Sunshower Heath because I did not do good with them. So I decided to look at them again along with looking at what people had said about them. Before starting, of course this was made using @lu-is-not-ok’s sin affinity guide, because its really good and yes I will not stop asking people to look at their stuff. They did it before me and are doing to much better than me so check them out. But lets get started with analyzing Heathcliff’s IDs......but again. Also I'll probably do a quick version of this once Seven Association Heath comes out.

Spoilers Ahead

R Corp. 4th Pack Rabbit Heathcliff Again

Wrath - Wrath is his first sin, and so the most surface level sin. Wrath is the sin of defiance, which unlike what i originally said, could make sense. As @orfs had said, RHeath survived the Hatchery, defying death and taking pride in the fact that he made it, even if he is disposable. But something else is that him being a clone can technically be a defiance against The City and The Head. Multiple clones existing at the same time is illegal, but R Corp gets around this by using T Corp tech. While his current existence doesn’t break the rules, he did technically defy the rules of The City and made it out alive, even if it was just for a short time.

Gluttony - RHeath’s Gluttony is sorta obvious. He had to survive the Hatchery and he did. One way to look at Gluttony is for the hunger to survive, and he accomplished that. Another way to look at Gluttony is similar to Greed, to want more. More money, more power, etc. In this instance, it would be for combat. RHeath always wants more missions, more fighting, he always wants to be fighting. Even when fulfilling an extra condition in a stage, he wants to immediately go back into the fray.

Envy - Envy is RHeath’s core sin, which is very interesting for him. Because he is a confirmed clone (Thanks Meursault), as @lu-is-not-ok said, he would most likely be under heavy pressure from R Corp to do the best job he can, because if he didn’t, then they would either put him back into the Hatchery with the possibility of not making it out and a different Heath taking his place, or just outright getting rid of him. Another way it could be seen comes from @riellegaming. They said that it could be possible that RHeath’s Envy is based around the fact that he never got the chance at a normal life. The reason for this is because all the R Corp IDs have envy in some way. All the R Corp IDs never got a chance at a normal life. We don’t know if our sinners can actually affect the versions of themselves from different worlds. We know that versions from different worlds can influence them, but it could be the other way around as well. It’s possible that the R Corp IDs remember atleast parts of their time with Dante and the other sinners, experiencing a life where they are more than just expendable soldiers, and some part of them grows envious of that, whether they show it or not. Rhino Meursault has Envy as his first sin, which seems odd just in general for him. Meursault himself doesn’t really care what others say to him, you give him an order and he will follow through, no matter how heinous, and I don’t see that changing for a version of him that exists to follow orders. But it could be possible that even he, on some small level, is envious of his sinner counterpart, while Heathcliff might hide it, but wishes very often that he could have LCB Heathcliff's life, even with all the pain and suffering it would bring.

Lobotomy E.G.O::Sunshower Heathcliff Again

Sunshower Heathcliff gave me issues last time...a lot of issues. But having recently gotten him (at time of writing) has made me think about this version of Heath. And also is the reason I'm doing this again but with the two that needed to be looked at a bit closer than before. With all that said, @lu-is-not-ok did an analysis of Impending Day Sinclair/Doomsday Calendar (go check it out), and while reading it, I had a thought. If the EGOs can have information and ideas brought forth from the abnormality they are based on, then why can't the E.G.O gear IDs? So that's what I'm doing. That's right, your on a post about Heathcliff and now your gonna read my thoughts, ideas and ramblings about Drifting Fox and how its story and themes can connect to Sunshower Heathcliff.

Drifting Fox

The Drifting Fox itself has quite a bit to it. The basics of its log is Sinclair feeling sad for the creature, being able to feel the pain and sadness that it does. This is while Faust tries to convince him that the Fox is just trying to manipulate him, that its nothing more than an abnormality, a creature that just wants to kill the sinners. Interestingly enough, Heathcliff is also present in the logs, saying that the sinners not doing what they are told will get them killed, and comparing the Fox to the Fairy Gentleman, saying how he wasn’t easy to deal with either. 

Drifting Fox’s MD Event has the sinners finding it in an alleyway, sleeping in a corner, being disguised by the umbrellas. Two options are given, to pull out the umbrellas or to pet the fox. Choosing to pull out the umbrellas has the sinners believe that the umbrellas are causing the Fox pain. When attempting to pull the umbrellas out, the umbrellas do come out, but along with pieces of flesh, hurting the fox, causing it to retaliate and cause damage to all present sinners. The Fox seems to reprimand the sinners for trying to help it without actually thinking about what's happening, causing it more pain. Petting the Fox has two outcomes. On a failure, the Fox is extremely distrustful, yelping when touched and jumping away, before running away, leaving the sinners wondering what else they could have done. Succeeding has the Fox to recede its growling, before it closes its eyes, lays down and becomes the E.G.O Gift itself.

Drifting Fox is about feigning kindness and how that can hurt others. Even if you think you helped, that is only really true when you know what the issue is, and don’t just try to help without asking. The umbrellas are from people who thought they helped the Fox but just ended up hurting it. They believe that they helped and are good people because of it, but they just ended up causing pain.

This is all obvious from its log and MD Event, but something that the log and its fight itself made me think about, is how the Fox doesn’t seem to actually want to fight. In its event it either accepts your kindness, runs away, or retaliates. But before any of these, it growls, and that's it. Its not trying to attack you, its trying to make you leave. No matter the choice, it lets you get close, but only retaliates once you hurt it, and then it leaves. You hurt it and so it hurts you before getting away from you. Its log states how the Drifting Fox is wary of the sinners and watchful. It sometimes waits and does nothing, just watching the sinners, before retaliating with a powerful attack. It doesn't want to fight the sinners, and only does it once it has to. It tries to ward others off, to get them to leave it alone, so that it can find an alleyway, and sleep. Alone. Its only attachment being the umbrellas stabbed into its back. Alone, with his only attachment being the memories of the friends he lost, with a little fox trying to show him genuine kindness, when others wouldn’t.

Sunshower Heathcliff is in the same situation. Different circumstances, the same result. The Drifting Fox wants to be alone, it doesn’t want to fight and only does when it has to. Heathcliff only wants to be alone, he doesn’t want to fight but only does because he has to.

Drifting Fox and Sunshower Heathcliff share two sin affinities, Sloth and Gloom, with Fox having Gluttony while Heath has Envy.

Drifting Fox: Gloomy Moan/Raging Withdrawal (Sloth) - Sloth represents apathy, resignation, and inaction. This makes sense as the Drifting Fox’s two “surface” sins. Both its Skill 1 and Skill 2 are this sin, showing what we already know. It wants to be left alone so it can do nothing and just sleep in a corner, away from others.

Sunshower Heathcliff: Umbrella Thwack (Envy) - Heathcliff’s Envy here, i believe, is what i originally said and due to the friends he lost. He hates technology, he wants to liberate The City from all technology as a part of the TLA. But he also wants to liberate technology, not out of loyalty to the TLA, but for his friends. Sunshower Heathcliff says in his uptie story that his friends all died to technology, one way or another. One lost their job and starved, one got their flesh taken apart, and others were worked like cogs in a machine like junk. He’s doing this out of love for the friends he lost. Just like Dongbaek, the hatred for technology is only the front for their true goal. Dongbaek, to get revenge on Dongrang. And Heathcliff to get revenge for his lost friends.

Drifting Fox: Sorrowful Recoil/Sorrowful Torrent (Gluttony) - Gluttony for the Drifting Fox is its hunger for survival. It just wants to be alone, but if it is threatened, it will not hold back against those that hurt it. It will kill, but only when it needs to, when its survival is threatened. It doesn’t want to fight or kill, but it will when it has to.

Sunshower Heathcliff: Puddle Stomp (Gloom) - Heathcliff is acting out. He is acting out against The City due to the immense sadness and pain he feels because he lost those he cared about. He regrets the fact that he never showed that he cared, that he enjoyed his time with the friends that he can never see again. His Gloom isn’t just the feeling of sadness for losing his friends, but also his regret for never having truly shown that he cared, he never showed his kindness to them. Heathcliff isn’t the Fox here, he's the stranger that left the umbrella.

Drifting Fox: Cries Seeking Something (Gloom) - Gloom for the Drifting Fox represents its want for genuine kindness. It cries out into the sky, for the possibility that someone hears its cries and comes to help it, to be kind to it. Not the kindness that others have shown, which only hurt it, but kindness that truly makes it happy. The Fox dwells on its feelings of sadness and pain, letting it all echo out into the sky, but acting as a beacon of sorts. A beacon calling for the genuine kindness of strangers. Faust says that the fox is trying to trick and manipulate Sinclair in the log, but I don't think it is. This is a mistake on Faust’s part. She is too robotic, too logical to realize that the pain the Fox feels is real, and that Sinclair is just the one that can feel its sadness the most clearly. Sinclair is one of, if not the most emotional sinner. I do not see a reason for him to not be able to sympathize with the Fox. He has felt pain before, all the sinners have, but he lets it out the most and lets others know about it the most, even if unintentional. It’s not that the Fox is manipulating Sinclair, its that he can feel its pain and sadness, and wants to help, to give it the genuine kindness that it calls out for.

Sunshower Heathcliff: Spread Out! (Sloth) - Heathcliff always wants to sleep. He is always trying to find an excuse to look for an alleyway so that he can curl up in a corner and sleep. But unlike what i originally said, his want for sleep isn’t the reason for him having Sloth. It’s the result. He doesn’t have a Sloth sin affinity at his core because he is tired, he is tired because of his slothfulness. He lost his friends, people that he cared about, its possible that one of these friends could have been Catherine. It’s reasonable to think that for some time, this would have put him in a depression. He didn’t want to do anything, be anything. Just a Fox that slept all the pain away. Even with his Gloom and Envy affinities pushing him to destroy technology as revenge for his friends, the deepest parts of him don’t care. He's fighting for a cause, yes, but his true cause is wanting revenge for his friends. But they are all gone, he's fighting for people that can’t appreciate the fact that he's doing it for them. He is alone and just doesn’t truly care. He knows this, he understands this. He’s fighting a war, for his friends, but even he knows that in reality its for himself. His friends are gone and his quest to destroy all technology is just a way for him to deal with this pain. And even when given the chance to gain a new friend, a little Fox that wants to show him genuine kindness, he tells them to leave. He can’t even bring himself to try to connect with the one being that is trying to help. He is the Drifting Fox that was pet, but yelped and ran away. He was shown true kindness, but can’t bring himself to care. Even with the kindness given to him, he can’t bring himself to accept it.

#lcb #heathcliff lcb #lcb heathcliff #limbus company #project moon #lcb analysis

[kazuyummy]

Do you hc the boys would try to make it to the mlb?

for the best of them, yes. i'll be honest, i don't know a lot of how pro baseball works compared to say basketball or volleyball, but i do know it's pretty different in some regards - typically, american baseball values strength & athleticism while japanese baseball relies more on tactics and speed. this is highlighted a bit in the anime, but both games are certainly ever-evolving.

so i think smaller players like mei or kuramochi might dominate the japanese baseball leagues, and a lot of characters in the manga would certainly go on to play there. sawamura - i think it'd be his dream, but i'm honestly 50/50 on whether or not he'd be able to make it there. he'd need to fill out more (praying for timeskip content lol) but sometimes i feel like he could make it there on sheer determination alone lol. maybe take an alternative path at first like hinata in haikyuu (that's all i'll spoil for this post haha)?

again, i'm not by any means a pro at this nor do i frequently look at baseball analysis - but in terms of surface-level analysis, we see that ohtani actually does better in the mlb in ops (basically an overall hitting metric) vs. the npb - though that's only one stat and many factors can contribute to that increase like playstyle and growth in career. i did see that overall, japanese players do better in the npb but that could be a lack of opportunities as well.

which brings me to my next point! moving from npb to mlb is an extensive process and players aren't usually able to do so until later in their career (i.e. playing npb or other pro league for a certain number of years) - they go through a posting system and these roadblocks are partially in place so that mlb doesn't poach all of japan's talent.

that being said! i think some of the bigger players would be better off in the mlb, but they'd have to practice hard, have good luck, and be the best of the best! for some reason, i can't get it out of my mind that miyuki would find his way there eventually, and if chris overcomes his shoulder injury, grows a little, and continues to improve, i can see him playing there as well (... potential nepotism? lmao) otherwise i can see him being a physiotherapist / athletic trainer. or maybe i'm being biased since they're my faves?

the ones i'm on the fence about are sanada, furuya, raichi, and tetsuya. they all have potential to make it - tetsu & raichi the most out of them, i think - it would be difficult and i don't think they'd be star players in the mlb. for example, tetsu & raichi are great hitters relying on strength, but they'd have to grow a lot to match the strength of american players.

others i think would play in npb only are haruichi, kawakami, and okumura. again, smaller players with high skill levels (hc huge college improvement from kawakami for some reason lol) but not enough to go to mlb. there are some that i headcanon would quit baseball after high school (or college) for various reasons - including ryousuke, jun, shirasu, and toujou. hmu for those deets lol

sorry if you just wanted a simple headcanon but your question lead me down quite the enjoyable rabbit hole and i'd love to hear other peoples' thoughts on this - especially those who actually know baseball! 😅

this also almost became a whole-ass timeskip post lmfao. let me know if i missed anyone that you want me to comment on!

#💬-ani-chats #⚡️-ani-rambles #diamond no ace #baseball #headcanons

[m00n-riverr]

There isn't enough Sylvia Plath poetry analysis out there

So I think we need to assemble a team and share ideas.

I'm going through Carol Ann Duffy's collection of Plath in order, analysing each one, but I need help bc I want different interpretations.

So I'm just gonna put my analysis in here for Ode for Ted and you can read it and use it if you want, and tell me what you think etc.

Ode for Ted (An 'Ode' doesn't necessarily have to be a love poem, but it must be dedicated to a person.)

From under crunch of my man's boot

green oat-sprouts jut;

he names a lapwing, starts rabbits in a rout

legging it most nimble

to sprigged hedge of bramble,

stalks red fox, shrewd stoat.

(In this first stanza, I feel like 'red fox' is Plath herself. With this interpretation, it can be understood that she is describing his fuckboy tendencies.)

Loam-humps, he says, moles shunt

up from delved worm-haunt;

blue fur, moles have; hefting chalk-hulled flint

he with rock splits open

knobbed quartz; flayed colors ripen

rich, brown, sudden in sunlight.

(Here, Plath seems to be continuing her metaphor for her husband's love life. She is praising his strength and manliness, and connection with nature. Plath seems to have a particular interest in nature, which is explored further in her poem 'November Graveyard', which discusses the meaning we search for in nature, when in actuality there is none. To link this back to Ode for Ted, Plath might be arguing that though nature has no deeper meaning to reach for, she and her husband still gain pleasure from it. It is described as "rich", with words such as "ripen" to demonstrate this. I think that Plath is celebrating pleasure to be found in the mundane, whist also praising her husband's excessive, almost caveman like manliness, which attracts her.)

For his least look, scant acres yield:

each finger-furrowed field

heaves forth stalk, leaf, fruit-rubbed emerald;

bright grain sprung so rarely

he hauls to his will early;

at his hand's staunch hest, birds build.

(Plath is describing her husband's strength and power over the natural world, which seems quite rare. He harvests abundant crop, "stalk, leaf, fruit-rubbed emerald", which is described as something done "rarely". This emphasises Ted's deep connection with nature. To take a slightly different approach to the interpretation I gave with the last stanza, Plath could be commenting on her husband's superficiality. He has this strong connection to nature, the nature which Plath seems to find to have only surface level value. Rather than being a positive comment, Plath could instead be lamenting the lack of substance she sees even in the parts of life she loves the most.)

Ringdoves roost well within his wood,

shirr songs to suit which mood

he saunters in; how but most glad

could be this adam's woman

when all earth his words do summon

leaps to laud such man's blood!

(I didn't make a mistake in copying here, Plath chose not to capitalise 'adam', which, to me, seems to finally confirm to the reader that this poem was meant to be satirising the manly man. She chooses not to capitalise adam as a slight to the biblical significance of the name, and rejoices in the honour of being his "woman". There seems to be a sarcastic tone as she ends the poem - "leads to laud such man's blood!" - and seems almost to be mocking the godlike persona she has given him thus far. Though this poem was for her husband, this interpretation could be totally misinterpreting the original message because I am viewing the poem through a modern lense, but Plath has been seen poking fun at the stereotypical 'manly man'. Considering this with her over-the-top descriptions of her husband's connection to nature, and the general feminist tone of her writings, I think that this interpretation holds some weight.)

Okay thank you for reading if you did, I hope you found something useful here. If you have another reading you'd like to share I'd love to hear it, that's why I did this in the first place. It's just that I was looking up Plath analysis online and there was nothing so I wanted to do some myself and find some other people who like her.

#sylvia plath #poetry #poetry analysis #ode for ted #Sylvia Plath poetry #Sylvia Plath poem

[canmom]

Since I feel like they are generally sort of up your alley, I'll ask for your thoughts on Flip Flappers and really any other 3Hz anime you feel are worth commenting upon :3

ehehe sure! I had the pleasure of watching Flip Flappers at the house of @mogsk and @schizsune. Fascinating anime thematically, lots of splendid creative animation (not surprisingly it got the sakugablog treatment, though by liborek rather than kvin, who's laser-focused on the visual aspects). actually it seems like the anime blogosphere had such a field day with this series that there's a website just to compile everything that people wrote. It's definitely dense enough that I need to watch it again and read more of the writing about it to fully appreciate all that it does! But I'll do my best.

Anyway, in keeping with the format:

haven’t heard of it | absolutely never watching | might watch | currently watching | dropped | hated it | meh | a positive okay | liked it | liked it a lot! | loved it | a favorite

don’t watch period | drop if not interested within 2-3 episodes | give it a go, could be your thing | 5 star recommendation [this is a weird scale. i don't think there are many truly universal recs lol. but there are some things about flifla which may not be to a given reader's taste]

So let's preface this with a brief description of what this show even is for people who aren't familiar (obvs you are :p ).

Flip Flappers is an original anime directed by Kiyotaka Oshiyama, his first series director job after impressing with Space Dandy episode 18 and previously working on Ghibli projects and Dennou Coil. On the most surface level, it's about the relationship between two girls - at the outset, the seemingly demure schoolgirl Cocona and the wildly energetic Papika who suddenly appears in her life. They are together able to enter a realm known as 'Pure Illusion' - essentially a series of dream worlds which, it soon becomes apparent, represent the internal worlds of various characters around them. They do this under the stern control of an organisation called FlipFlap, opposed by a kind of cult called Asclepius.

All we really learn for a good while is that both are competing for mysterious objects called 'Amorphous', the conditions for which vary a lot with each world. To this end, we go through a variety of settings and tones - one episode may be an action spectacle in a Mad Max-like desert, another a mystery-horror. Generally speaking these wildly disparate settings are driven primarily by the emotional arc: Cocona figuring out what kind of lesbian homosexual she is going to define herself as.

The anime asks a fair bit of the viewer to figure out what it's doing beyond the gorgeous animation. Large periods of time pass between episodes which typically throw us in in media res, and we need to pick up on relations between characters and how they evolve through implication a lot of the time. It's v much a director's show with a lot of information conveyed by storyboarding and imagery, as Emily Rand expounds.

It assumes quite a lot of literacy with anime - episodes will pastiche a class-S yuri anime or a Kanada school super robot show, and of course the whole structure of the show is full of big nods to Evangelion, which really set the tone for 'psychoanalytic anime'. It's also packed full of allusions to philosophy of mind and psychoanalysis, both overt and structural. e.g. there's a rabbit-like creature called Uexküll after the scientist who coined the term 'umwelt', and the girls' route to Pure Illusion is a sparse cupboard called the Thomasson, which is a pretty obscure one examined in this post.

As such, psychoanalysis and ~queerness~ are the angles taken by the existing longer-form critical analysis, such as this video by zeria, who ranks it as their favourite anime:

In it, they argue that while absolutely about psychosexual development, the series represents essentially a critique of the overly narrow theories of Freud and Jung and is, going off the invocation of 'assemblages', a bit more Deleuzian in its outlook. Which is admittedly kind of the reading that you'd expect someone like Zeria to make, but they make a pretty good case.

Anyway, if I ever run FliFla on Animation Night, I might try and dig a bit more into all of this. Let's quickly run down the questions though...

fav characters: i'll be kinda basic with this one, but probably Papika; just plain fun to watch her antics lol. i admit most of the satellite characters feel more like symbolic instruments than people.

least fav characters: the pervy robot Bu-chan, even if the Kanada School episode inside his mind was fun, and he has his narrative functions, this was definitely the element that most made me sigh

fav relationship: given this show is all about developing one particular relationship, there's not a lot of options outside of cocona/papika here!

fav moment: probably the episode where we see like a dozen different interpretations of Papika and how she might relate to Cocona was the one that most sticks in my mind?

headcanons/theories: I'd have to watch it again with fresh eyes to see if there's anything beyond what's like, very overt in the text. apologies that i can't give more here. it doesn't really feel like a show very invested in 'worldbuilding' in any case.

unpopular opinion: maaan. the discussion of what amount of sexuality is 'necessary' to its themes and what is 'unnecessary' fanservice by 'perverts' makes me feel like i have bees in my head and open the safe where we keep the word 'libidinal'. i don't think i have an opinion fully baked enough to state here though.

how’d you find it: admittedly, bc of the context i watched it, with a big gap in time before when we watched the first half and when i got to see the second, it was kind of disjointed which made it harder to follow than it should be. still, i was extremely impressed by the animation and creativity and thematic ambition. i can see the criticism of pacing problems, and this probably has a lot to do with the production running increasingly behind schedule and almost collapsing towards the end, a problem rather endemic to anime - it didn't hit FliFla nearly as hard as its spiritual successor Wonder Egg Priority at least. overall it's still very good and i'd like to watch it again - maybe on an Animation Night to come.

random thoughts: the hyper-angular huge eye character designs (by Takashi Kojima, also the chief sakkan) are fascinating - they feel like they're pushing an extreme of anime design principles, which certainly gives the show a unique flavour.

I feel regretful I can't go much deeper than this but I think I'd basically have to do another rewatch and a lot of poking-through-essay-writing to get into the real meat of it!

As far as other work by Studio 3Hz, I regret to say I haven't seen any! I do like their parent studio Kinema Citrus's work a lot though so I definitely ought to check out more if they have a defined style, and it's cool to see a studio making original work as much as adaptations. Recs are welcome ^^

#anime #flip flappers #ask meme #solicit bryn's anime opinions

[ducktracy]

187. daffy duck & egghead (1938)

release date: january 1st, 1938

series: merrie melodies

director: tex avery

starring: mel blanc (daffy, turtle, duck), danny webb (egghead)

starting off the new year with a bang—the first cartoon of 1938 is one of my favorites! two tex avery creations, daffy and egghead, make their second appearances paired together.

both characters have gotten a makeover, though egghead’s is more drastic: he now has hair and talks in a dopey drawl courtesy of danny webb. daffy, on the other hand, now has blue irises and a matching ring around his neck—this design would be exclusive to this short only. but, it IS the first cartoon to pen him as daffy duck! he’d appear in a number of looney tunes shorts with porky as the year would go on.

like so many other “hunter vs prey” shorts, egghead is determined to hunt daffy. daffy, however, is prepared to do everything in his power to make egghead miserable.

ben hardaway, who would have been directing his own cartoons at the time of this cartoon’s release, is the writer, and it shows throughout. ben is notable for his more hayseed sense of humor, relying on puns so corny you’ll be flossing your teeth for a week to remove the kernels. his punny touch is noticeable right at the start, with daffy and egghead bursting out of literal nutshells in an odd little introductory sequence. irv spence does some nice animation here: daffy shakes his fists in the glory, soon to be interrupted by the fire of egghead’s gun. egghead chases after a HOOHOOing daffy, the smoke from the gun spelling out to the audience “DUCK SEASON STARTS TODAY”.

the scene is odd, but more so out of uniqueness rather than perplexity. one wonders how tex really would have prefaced the cartoon if he were paired with another writer instead.

in a tradition that would carry out into tex’s MGM days, one of our first impressions of the short is a facetious disclaimer:

a sense of tranquility is established through a soft, sweeping rendition of “morning song” from the william tell overture. various gorgeously painted backgrounds fade into each other to convey the passage of time and rise of the sun, each background absolutely stunning in its own right. in a tex avery cartoon, such peace and harmony can only mean one thing: chaos is soon to follow.

our eponymous hunter creeps onto the screen, remarking aloud on the eerie stillness of his surroundings. “i wonder if there are any more hunters out here this morning.” right on cue, a swarm of hunters pop out of the reeds, reciting a popular catchphrase from the ken murray show reused in many a ‘30s WB cartoon: “whoooooooooa, yeaaaaah!”

the sound of quacks ring out from the recesses of the reeds, turning egghead on the alert. just as he prepares to hunt his prey, a signature avery gag of epic proportions interrupts the scene... literally. 

tedd pierce’s silhouette darkens the screen as he makes his way to his movie seat--a latecomer. egghead spots him and urges him to sit down and not scare away his prey. the latecomer does so, only to rise up again and change seats. our frustrated sportsman urges the silhouette to sit down again, which he does so. the silhouette never utters a word, and that’s the best part. the matter of fact delivery of the gag, the control of it all is what makes the gag so funny. such even temperament from the silhouette juxtaposes starkly with the wild nature of avery cartoons. the normal is now the ridiculous. 

when the silhouette snoops around for a better seat once more, egghead loses all patience and fires his gun straight at the silhouette. tedd pierce’s theatrics are hilarious--he twirls around, clutching his heart, hamming up his injury to the last drop. the anticipatory drum-roll as egghead looks on brings the entire act together. finally, pierce collapses, much to the contentment of egghead. he merely rubs the dust off his hands in a job well done and continues where he left off.

cartoon characters shooting audience members isn’t an alien move in warner bros. cartoons (bugs in rhapsody rabbit, daffy in the ducksters), yet the inclusion of the silhouette and its subsequent dramatics brings a new level of inclusion with the audience. imagine what an uproar this would get in a packed house! it’s a great way to break the barrier between cartoon characters and the audience. WB did a great job of making the audience feel included. hell, a majority of daffy’s character throughout the ‘40s hinges on this! but that’s an analysis for another time.

speaking of daffy, he’s the perpetrator of those quacking sounds in the reeds. egghead parts the plants to see if his prey is still there. he is—daffy gives him a viscious bite on egghead’s bulbous nose before going back into hiding.

“that duck’s craaaa-zy!” daffy pops his head out of the reeds again, shrieking a reply of “you tellin’ me? WOO WOO WOOHOO!”

daffy’s voice is significantly more shrill than his dopey guffaws in porky’s duck hunt. in fact, it’s so shrill that this could easily be considered one of his most annoying cartoons. though his 100% screwy, totally out of his mind personality isn’t my favorite personality for him, it’s still pretty damn great! so if you like obnoxious daffy (like me), this is a short for you. if you can’t stand him being a lunatic, stay away!

with that, daffy takes an exit, whooping and shrieking all the way in a direct throwback to his ecstatic exit in porky’s duck hunt. this is a game-changer for the merrie melodies series—the screwy, lunatic antics were typically reserved for the black and white looney tunes shorts. and here we have daffy, splitting the ears of his patrons and being a royal nuisance in the more expensive, esteemed merrie melodies, typically reserved for song and dance numbers! this ain’t your mother’s merry melody.

when daffy takes refuge within a cluster of reeds positioned in the middle of the lake, egghead uses this as an opportunity to lure out his prey with a decoy. specifically, ONE LOVE-LURE DUCK DECOY.

egghead sends the obnoxiously feminine duck decoy out into the water, quacking in time to the beat of stalling’s “the lady in red” underscore. the decoy disappears into the reeds, and there’s a pause.

a flurry of aggravated, warbled quacking cues us in that daffy is pissed off. the action is all hidden behind the plants, leaving details of their altercation is up to the audience’s interpretation. what we do see is daffy’s physical anger: he pops out of the water at the bank of the lake, throwing the decoy down at egghead’s feet. a makeshift sign cleverly held up by a cattail echoes a beloved catchphrase from the radio show fibber mcgee and molly:

bubbles rippling on the surface indicate daffy’s presence. he pokes his head out to heave a teasing quack at the befuddled hunter before dipping back down again, prompting egghead to stick his rifle in the lake. cue a tried and true gag that was likely much funnier then than now: the ol’ tie-the-gun-into-a-bow trick. 

the next gag is one that tex avery would refurbish in his MGM debut, the early bird dood it!: egghead physically lifts the lake up like a blanket, where daffy appears just in time to give his nose another honk for good measure. cue crazed laughter and intricate water aerobics. daffy halts, addressing the audience directly with a flimsy reassurance: “i’m not crazy, i just don’t give a darn!”

irv spence takes the next showdown between hunter and duck. look at how much more appealing egghead is in his hands! egghead leans down to retrieve his gun he tosses aside, when daffy zooms into frame and fights him for it. daffy’s consistent smile as he and egghead battle for dominance, both trying to reach higher and higher on the gun, is hysterical—he’s absolutely getting a kick out of egghead’s frustration. though it was clear he was reveling in porky’s own anger in porky’s duck hunt, here his enjoyment is much more blatant. he loves being a pest.

daffy slides the rifle beneath his legs and out of sight, bopping egghead on the fist and causing him to slug a haymaker against his own head. signature irv spence grawlixes add a nice level of two dimensional graphic design, like something straight from a comic.

out of nowhere, a random turtle disrupts the altercation. the turtle is a parody of parkykarkus from the chase & sanborn hour, speaking in a thick accent and slightly butchered grammar. he opts to settle daffy and egghead’s fight once and for all, posing as a referee. “just a minute, chums. just a minute!” he supplies the two with pistols, both fitted for their respective sizes. to daffy, “turn around.” to egghead: “now you turn around.”

i love how daffy’s curiosity with the turtle’s interruption is noticeable. so noticeable, in fact, that the turtle grows hostile, getting up in his face and shouting “KEEP YOUR NOSE OUT OF OTHER PEOPLES BUSINESS, AIN’T IT!” it’s rare to see daffy lacking control of the situation, even this early on. 

the two put their backs together per the turtle’s command, walking ten paces backwards in time to the turtle’s countdown. just as the turtle reaches ten, daffy jumps behind egghead, who fires. a potentially gruesome conclusion is avoided as the bullet hits the turtle’s chest instead, causing his head to rocket upward, hit a branch, and shrink back into his shell. in a hardawayian touch, daffy hands egghead a cigar, walking off screen, satisfied.

random as the scene is (hardaway’s influence seems to be particularly strong throughout this whole middle section), irv spence’s timing and appealing animation makes up for it. the switch to another animator entails an inevitable downgrade in draftsmanship.

after egghead realizes he’s been duped, he retrieves his rifle and prepares to shoot daffy. though initially startled, daffy thinks on his feet, and eagerly places an apple on his head for egghead to aim at instead. stalling’s fitting accompaniment of “william tell overture” raises in key each time egghead fires (and subsequently misses), a pattern that sounds almost identical to scott bradley’s scores under the direction of tex at MGM. 

egghead shoots a tree, the lake, a barn, and even straight past daffy, who grows increasingly irritated at the hunter’s incompetence, moving closer to him with each effort. hardaway’s influence is strong with the next gag, matched with tex’s fast pace to prevent it from overstaying its welcome: daffy thrusts pencils, sunglasses, and a sign that says BLIND on it before turning to the audience and tssking. “too bad. too bad!” harsh indeed. i imagine this gag would have been prolonged had hardaway directed this cartoon or wrote it under another director.

if anything, this cartoon certainly displays the importance of the relationship between director and writer. writers have a much bigger influence on the cartoon than one might believe! there’s a reason as to why chuck jones and mike maltese are touted around as a dynamic duo. i wouldn’t call hardaway a bad writer by any means, but his influence is certainly potent. tex is a strong director, and thankfully he could cushion the blows of hardaway’s corniness as much as he could, but it’s also evident that certain decisions were made that tex wouldn’t have made in other circumstances.

decisions such as daffy singing an entire ode to his lunacy as the cartoon’s song number. this is definitely a hardawayian insert--a prototype, hayseed, screwball bugs bunny sings his own nutty anthem in hardaway’s hare-um scare-um just a year later. full song numbers have been making their way out the door in avery’s cartoons, and by either this year or next they’d be absent in total from the merrie melodies series. it’s unlike avery to write a whole song about characters explaining their nuttiness.

that is why i have qualms with the scene. at his zenith, daffy never attempts to explain or justify his screwiness. even in the mid-’40s, when he’s able to think and speak coherently and isn’t a mere caricature of his name, he showed no self awareness for his condition. the “look at me, ain’t i a crazy one?” jokes with him were out the door by 1939. half the fun with him is how unaware he is of his daffiness--he lives in it constantly, always zipping from emotional extremes, but never stops to tell the audience just how crazy and fun he is. here, his self-awareness seems ingenuine and prideful. daffy is my favorite character for his humanity and relatability (even--if not more so--when he’s a total loon). here, he lacks that dynamism. he’s merely a stock reflection of his namesake.

with that said, daffy’s rendition of “the merry go round broke down” is my favorite merrie melody song number, period. i’m certainly biased due to my undying affinity with daffy, but irv spence’s animation is genuinely fun to watch, and mel blanc does a wonderful performance. i know all of the words by heart! essentially, daffy’s justification for his daffiness is because the dizzy pace of the merry go round went to his head and made him nuts. while this sense of bragging is relatively out of character for him, it makes for a contagiously fun song, and also, this is his second film ever. they still had much to explore. 

the scene concludes with daffy shaking hands with his reflection in the water and diving back in. fade out and in to egghead, still furiously attempting to pursue his prey. cue a fun little avery gag where our hunter nonchalantly opens the reeds he’s hiding behind like a pair of blinds. daffy’s carefree quacking and swimming in the lake almost seems to mock him. in a gag that would be reused in avery’s lucky ducky over at MGM to a greater extent, daffy puts on a mask to scare away the oncoming bullets. indeed, the bullets retreat into egghead’s gun, prompting befuddled stares at both the gun and the audience.

daffy engages in another round of spastic water aerobics, HOOHOOing all the way. he only pauses to cling to a cattail, echoing an averyian daffy catchphrase that he would also shriek in daffy duck in hollywood, “ain’t i some cutie? ahah! i think i’ll do it again! HAHAHA!”

a nice, jazzy score of “bob white (whatcha gonna swing tonight?)” accompanies yet another endeavor by egghead. he’s either stupidly bold or boldly stupid to keep up such a tiring charade--or both! egghead loads a pair of gloves tied to a string into the barrel of the rifle, cleverly using a cattail as a bore brush. and, despite the absurdity of his makeshift fishing pole, it works: one gloved hand grabs daffy by the neck, the other konking him on the head and knocking him unconscious. egghead reels in his prize, dumping daffy into a net and letting out a handful of gleeful “WHOOPEE!”s.

avery’s timing is succinct--immediately after egghead snags his duck, the sound of a siren drowns out his celebration. a duck nearly identical to daffy approaches the scene in an “asylum ambulance”. “gee, t’anks a lot for catchin’ dis goof!” duck confiscates his fellow duck comrade. the decision to turn the conversation confidential, complete with the lowering of the voice and shifty-eyed glances is great. “y’know, we been after dis guy for months!”

despite everything that egghead has endured, he seems genuinely shocked at the duck’s claim that daffy is “100% nuts”. “oh YEAH?” he echoes, daring to believe it. duck nods. “yeeeeah!” with that, he gives egghead a honk right on the nose.

daffy, completely unscathed, wastes little time in joining the festivities as both ducks beat the tar out of egghead from both ends, literally kicking him in the arse and honking him on the nose. both ducks head to the lake, HOOHOOing in shrill unison as they bound off into the horizon. egghead only has one more option... to join them. thus, we iris out on our brave hunter HOOHOOing into the horizon himself.

as i said at the beginning of this review, this cartoon is one of my favorites--for this era, anyway. despite its imperfections, it’s still a rather fun and rousing cartoon. it’s exciting to see daffy becoming more recognizable, in terms of voice,  demeanor, and appearance. the same can be said for egghead as well, though i doubt anyone has the same attachment to him as they do other characters. i certainly don’t.

admittedly, porky’s duck hunt is a more solid cartoon. this cartoon feels much more like a string of gags than anything, though i suppose that could be said for many a tex avery cartoon. he wasn’t known for his moving stories. hardaway’s corny, hayseed sense of humor serves as the biggest detriment to the cartoon, but luckily tex is a strong enough director to try and work around those weaknesses as best he could. and even though i disagree with the reasoning behind the song number, the song number will always be my favorite merry melody song. 

i didn’t mention the backgrounds very often, but they’re STELLAR. the colorful, whimsical palette brings a lot of energy and vitality to the table. if you were to describe the cartoon in one word, “energetic” would certainly be it.

so, with that said, go watch it! this is a really fun cartoon that serves as an interesting look into early daffy’s character, obnoxious as he may be.

link!

#lt #daffy duck and egghead #looney tunes #reviews #avery #long post

[timep3tals]

Since I’m such a slut for Iron Dad & Spidey-Son field trip fics, I decided to procrastinate my homework by creating a detailed list for clearance levels for the badges given out by SI because I’m sick of the same Alpha, Beta, etc. or just the numbers.

It’s too basic. In this household, we are Extra.

Shoutout to @riseuplikeglitterandgold​ for watching me go down a rabbit hole and not attempt to stop me whatsoever.

Please read this and use this, I spent too much time on this for it to go to waste.

Clearance Levels 

Visitor: 

Construction (1) - Not often utilized, as SI is fully completed, but when needed, will have a badge that grants them access to the construction zone only. Construction is entirely outsourced.

Tours (2) - Discarded after use; at all exits, there’s a box for discarding the badge. It is automatically deactivated once it passes through the bin, and is shredded before being recycled into new tour badges.

Educational (2.1) - One of the lowest levels of access to the building; often linked to the tour guides badge, and are unable to access any room the tour guide has not swiped into.

Science (2.2) - These tours are guided throughout the majority of the labs, often for parties interested in becoming an employee at SI. Can be more specific to a certain field, and will usually be conducted by interns-turned-tour guides as they move up through the ranks in SI.

Press (3) - Only has access to conference rooms, and are often allotted one badge per press company, which they pick up at the front desk at given times depending on the press conference schedule, as decided by the PR division.

Buyers (4) - Are considered an upper-level visitor badge, but mostly just for show to make the buyers feel important/be more likely to purchase from SI. Have relatively limited access, and are only shown products/labs that pertain to what they’re looking at purchasing.

Partners (5) - Are not very often used, as partners often meet off-site, or are communicating largely through email with either the Board of Directors, or Pepper. Have the most access out of all visitors badges, but is still usually directed by/connected to a tour guide’s badge.

Ex(s): Visitor 2.1, Visitor 5, Visitor 1

Maintenance: Access is often changed as needed. No subsections under maintenance; FRIDAY is in direct control of badges and will allocate where they are needed as work orders are processed. No attached number.

Ex(s): Maintenance

Janitor: Much the same as maintenance. There are specific crews of “spill/break/chemical teams”, but those requests are again processed by FRIDAY. No attached number, though an implied 1.

Lab Clean-Up (2) - Labs are largely kept clean and handled by scientists, but every Sunday there is a deep clean of all floors/surfaces. These janitors have higher access, as most of the janitors are kept locked out of labs for their own safety. Have to have special training.

Ex(s): Janitor, Janitor 2

Interns:

Business (1-9) - Any intern under any division in the corporate offices (financial, PR, HR, etc.) Level depends on sector/experience and where the intern is initially placed.

Lab (10-19) - Often the “janitors” of each lab throughout the week. Are allowed to work on small projects with a chosen mentor (usually Head Scientist). This is the largest, most diverse group, and their access depends on which lab they’re placed in (determined by prior experience, collegic level, etc.) Apply through Operations Management, not HR; no high school students are accepted as the work they’re surrounded by can often be dangerous. No interns are placed in High-Level Labs.

Ex(s): Intern - PR 5, Intern - Financial 8, Intern - Marketing 2, Intern - Lab 15, Intern - Lab 10

Tour Guides:

Press (1) - Technically classified under PR; is solely there to guide press to the designated location and manage traffic during conferences.

Educational (2) - Typically beginning level tour guides; still expected to know as much about the company as a tour guide for partners would.

Science (3) - Has to have intimate knowledge of the workings on each lab; usually coordinates with Head Scientists to stay updated on each lab. Often has the least amount of tours, and typically will have another job/duty elsewhere.

Business (4) - Mostly for corporation heads to come and tour the business portion of SI. Small business/first time business owners are encouraged to take these tours so they could see an example of an effective work environment/procedures.

Partnerships (5) - Has intimate knowledge of the going-abouts in all labs. They are also aware of some financial statistics in regards to new/upcoming projects, as well as ongoing projects. Out of all tour guides, these guides have the greatest access to the building. These guides also lead the buyer tours as well.

Ex(s): Guide 5, Guide 2

Financial: (1-7)

Chief Financial Officer (CFO) (7) - Head officer that has primary responsibility for managing the company's finances, including financial planning, management of financial risks, record-keeping, and financial reporting. The CFO is also responsible for analysis of data, but has the option, and often will, to delegate it to others in the financial sector.

There’s probably a lot of other jobs in this, but it’s unimportant and I do not possess that sort of energy.

Ex(s): Financial 7 (only applicable to the CFO), Financial 2

Public Relations: (1-7) There’s probably a lot of jobs, but it’s unimportant and I do not possess that sort of energy. Ex: Social Media Manager, PR Specialist, Spokesperson, etc. (I’m of the opinion they created a section specifically to help handle whatever it was that Tony said this time. Official title: Owner Management. Unofficial title: Tony’s Bullshit Cover-Up Specialists.)

Ex(s): PR 4

Marketing: (1-7) There’s probably a lot of jobs, but it’s unimportant and I do not possess that sort of energy. Ex: Designers, Web Content Writer, Supply Chain Analysts, etc.

Ex(s): Marketing 5

Human Resources: (1-7) There’s probably a lot of jobs, but it’s unimportant and I do not possess that sort of energy. Ex: Compensation and benefits managers, Training and development specialists, Employment, recruitment and placement specialists, Human resources information system (HRIS) analysts, etc.

Ex(s): HR 6

Board of Directors: Despite being one of the highest positions in SI, they have extremely limited access. This clearance level is mostly restrained to the upper level offices and meeting rooms, but can have special access granted to visit labs, if absolutely necessary. No attached number.

Ex(s): Board Member

Operations Management: 

Hiring Managers (1)  - These managers directly oversee hiring of all lab personnel, including interns. 

Inspectors (2) - Inspectors handle all safety precautions/procedures in all labs in SI. Are often updating rules and regulations in order to best protect all personnel and equipment.

Lab Overseers (3) - Are who Head Scientists report to. Overseers are then to report their findings to the Head of Research and Development in a succinct manner. Are one of the last lines of defense when it comes to arising issues.

Project Managers (4) - Their job corresponds directly with the Principal Investigator and the financial & marketing division to help get finished products out into the market. Often help oversee manufacturing of said products at the different plants across the planet.

Ex(s): Operations 3, Operations 1

Research and Development:

Low-Level Labs (1-15) - Low level of risk. Most often handle coding/computer sciences/refining formulas sent down from some of the upper level labs.

Research Assistants (1-3) - Hand selected by the Principal Investigator from the top universities across the nation to help with research. Found generally at conferences hosted by SI at universities.

Graduate Student (3-5) - Single student from a graduate program, also hand selected. Typically have worked on projects in SI before.

Post-Doctoral (6-9) - Single student from a post-doctoral program. Prior SI experience is required for this position, and must present a thesis project based off outside research in order to maintain position.

Principal Investigator (10-12) - Previously Post-Doctoral, generally, but the position can be earned through impressing the Head of R&D at conferences/presenting thesis work or previous research on a specific topic.

Head Scientist (13-15) - Manager of funding for project, and overseer of the work being produced by the team. Doesn’t typically involve themselves in actual research, but is more the manager to maintain structure/order in lab and ensure work is flowing smoothly.

Ex(s): LLab 14, LLab 3

Mid-Level Labs (16-30) - Mid level risk. Performs higher risk sciences, more along the lines of a chemistry lab. Tests different types of products for higher efficiency.

Research Assistants (16-19)

Graduate Student (19-22)

Post-Doctoral (22-25)

Principal Investigator (25-38)

Head Scientist (28-30)

Ex(s): MLab 25, MLab 19

High-Level Labs (30-45) - High level of risk. Handles all new and volatile materials, and is the most involved in the newest products, etc. on the market. Requires highest grades/performances/experience/etc.

Research Assistants (30-33) 

Graduate Student (34-36) 

Post-Doctoral (37-39) 

Principal Investigator (40-42)

Head Scientist (43-45) 

Ex(s): HLab 43, HLab 30

Head of R&D: (All Access) Tony Stark. Oversees all divisions and labs. Spearheads the creation of new tech and development in the company, and is expected to continue to expand SI’s reach into new areas of science and technology.

Ex(s): You Know Who I Am

Avenger: (Residential: Semi-Access) No associated number. One of the most lucrative badges, only granted to Steve Rogers, Sam Wilson, Natasha Romanoff, Bruce Banner, Clint Barton, Thor Odinson, and a few select others. Most have been deactivated following the events of the Civil War. Typically allowed access to all floors (though entry to labs was not granted unless necessary), the residential living spaces, and the training room.

Ex(s): Avenger, Residential: Semi-Access

Remaining Badges (All Access) - Granted only to James Rhodes and Peter Parker (Peter, although classified as Avenger, will be announced as Personal Intern, as per his request). 

Ex(s): Avenger, Residential: All Access, Personal Intern: All Access

CEO: (All Access) A lovely Miss Pepper Potts. Her job is kind of a given, I don’t think an explanation is necessary. Also I’m tired.

Ex(s): Virginia Potts

#I hope SOMEONE finds this useful #I spent over an hour on this nonsense #sos #tony stark #iron man #peter parker #spiderman #pepper potts #rescue #james rhodes #war machine #peter parker & tony stark #peter parker tony stark #iron dad #spiderson #spider son #iron dad and spider son #iron dad spider son #marvel #mcu #field trip fic #steve rogers #captain america #sam wilson #falcon #natasha romanoff #black widow #bruce banner #hulk #the hulk

[threewaysdivided]

I saw your conversation about Sam Manson. I was talking to Imekitty about this, but I’ve noticed a few things that (sort of) make Sam’s relationship with her parents seem more like teen-drama than actual hardship. If you look closely, she’s got a lot in common with them: outspoken political-activism, possible shared-interest in vintage clothes, and no shame in saying they don’t like certain people. Also, after the Fentons, they were the first to volunteer to use the Ecto-Skeleton, risks and all.

(In reference to this post.)

It’s been a little while since I rewatched DP so I’m not well-placed to do a detail-analysis implication-breakdown right now, but yeah - that fits with the overall impression I remember getting.  To me they came across as being sort of old fashioned set-in-their-ways conservative and snooty, and maybe a bit too Pleasantville -  but more often in the way of parents who do genuinely want good things for her and to be able to be proud of her despite not really understanding her interests, choices or friends and being very bad at expressing it.  Plus she seems to have her grandmother fully in her corner a lot of the time.

I really wish that the writers had committed to one or the other; either making it clear that Sam’s martyr/ persecution complex is mostly just regular self-inflicted teen-drama BS and giving her an arc addressing it, OR fleshing out the idea that she faces a lot of judgement/ pressure/ control/ nonacceptance in her home life and that her negative traits are a bi-product of defensive/ coping mechanisms resulting from that strained dynamic, rather treating things with Roger Rabbit Rules.  

(Which isn’t to say that a person can’t have similar interests/ personality traits to, and positive interactions with, their parents while still having a strained, broken or even abusive relationship with them on a deeper level, but the show never really goes hard enough in either direction to make it work.)

As mentioned the last post, this is kind of a consistent pattern across DP - the writers tend go with the low-effort first answer for whatever is Funny or Awesome or Convenient in the moment rather than putting in the work to find a solution that’s consistent with the characterisation, themes and world-lore overall.  There’s enough internal contradiction in the show that I don’t think it’s actually possible to take every canon detail as canon without fundamentally breaking things.  And in some ways that’s kind of cool; it makes the series more open to interpretation, and trying to distinguish authorial intent from authorial incompetence and come up with theories that account for as many pieces of canon as possible is really satisfying.  But, you know, it’s also kind of bad writing in general.

I think the thing that bothers me about Sam’s characterisation in particular is that - where it tends to be more obviously out-of-character when it shows up in other places - there’s a pattern to the inconsistency with how the writers handle Sam:

Throughout the series there’s a double standard in how Sam sees herself/ seems to expects others to act, compared to her own behaviour:

Despite being pro-pacifism she’s okay with smacking Tucker and encouraging Danny to destroy the trucks she doesn’t like

Sam values self-expression and is a feminist, but derides other girls for wanting to express themselves in a conventionally feminine way

Sam doesn’t like being forced to conform to others’ values but is okay with forcing others to conform to hers

Despite being anti-consumerist she shows very little discomfort at, or awareness of, her lavish home life and material belongings

She encourages Danny to take the moral high ground towards his bullies but has no problem antagonising and getting into petty verbal spats with Paulina herself

Sam stalks Danny and his love interest out of jealousy/ protectiveness but threatens to end their friendship when he does the same

In Mystery Meat, when Danny tries to express his discomfort/ anxiety, Sam hijacks the conversation to complain about her own parents instead of listening.

In One of a Kind Sam photographs Danny and Tucker hugging in their sleep, without their knowledge, with the stated intent of putting it in the yearbook, then uses it to blackmail them into silence. 

Side note: this joke is also tacky on a meta-level because it boils down to “male intimacy ha ha toxic masculinity no homo amiright?“ Would have been nice if show didn’t use low-key sexist humour as much as it did.

Instead of expressing that she’s hurt by Danny’s “pretty girls” comment in Parental Bonding, Sam retaliates by pushing him to ask Paulina out - a move she knows will most likely result in him getting publicly shut down and humiliated.

Then, after getting the result she wanted, she comes over to gloat and insults Paulina, rather than dropping it now that her point’s been made, which is what ultimately sets off the episode’s subplot.

In Memory Blank Sam permanently physically alters Phantom’s appearance to better suit her tastes while he’s not in a position to understand or give informed consent, then lies when Danny notices and asks about it later.

To be clear this definitely isn’t the be-all-and-end-all of her character and it’s not there 100% of the time - there are plenty of moments when she is loyal and generous and helpful and sincerely kind and where her stubbornness comes in handy.  But it’s the aggregate pattern of all these small instances that drives a crack through the foundation of her character integrity; producing this insidious undercurrent alternate-reading of Sam as someone who, at a deep level, just doesn’t respect or recognise that the emotional needs, pains, opinions, autonomy and boundaries of others are as real and valid as her own, and who responds to criticism with passive-aggressive hostility.

Again, I think that’s why people are so quick to point out that line from Phantom Planet, even though we all know the episode was a complete mess.  None of the examples above are particularly bad in isolation - you can’t really point at any one of them and say “oh no, bad girl” without sounding like you’re making a mountain out of molehill and irrationally hating on her just to hate on her.  It’s an uncomfortable slowburn pattern of subtle micro-transgressions that accumulates across the series - a “you might not notice it but your brain did”.  And it makes sense that it would be the worst-written episode that amplifies and brings that regular bad-writing undercurrent close enough to the surface for people to consciously recognise and use it to articulate those frustrations.

To wit: Not because it’s most telling of her character but because it’s most telling of the specific bad writing that regularly hurts her character. 

And again, from a storytelling point of view, it’s okay for Sam to have flaws.  She’s a teenager!  She’s learning.  She’s allowed to be egocentric and self-important and do things that aren’t the best at times.  It’s okay if these are her character weaknesses and a source of conflict with the rest of the cast.  But again, for that to be satisfying something really should have come of it.  It would have been nice if the writers were willing to have any self-awareness about these flaws being flaws that a person should recognise and grow past in order to have healthy relationships with others.  But they didn’t - because it’s easier to keep her as she is - to the point that they’ll actively bend the narrative to roll back or skip over moments that would have necessitated that growth.  So, even though they call attention to her flaws, the writers end up rewarding and enabling them instead of letting her learn.

And again, this isn’t meant to hate on Sam.  Hanlon’s Razor in full effect: it’s clearly a result of authorial/editorial incompetence rather than deliberate malice.  I know this isn’t the intended interpretation.

My preferred reading of Sam Manson is that she’s a Rosa Hubermann/ Hermione Granger/ YJS1 Artemis Crock-type character.  Someone who’s passionate and forceful and maybe a bit abrasive and hard to love at a glance, but whose core nature is compassionate and sincerely kind and loyal-to-the-death for the people they value.  I wish I could 100% like her without caveats; to be able to say that even if I don’t agree with her flaws I can at least understand that they’re a valid product of the life she lives, that they make her who she is and that she’s trying her best to be a good person who will get better despite them.  

But I can’t because the writers don’t give her that.  They’re always prioritising other things over the integrity of her character.  They don’t give her background enough time and context to make her negative traits feel resonant with it (because that would take time away from the Wicked Cool Radical Ghost-Fighting Superhero Action™) and the framing and plotting doesn’t give her chances to recognise or grow past them (because that would mean character development and those negative traits are an easy source of cheap conflict).  The writers just don’t seem to care all that much about Sam - her actual character, who she is, how she came to be that way, what she wants or how her negative traits would actually play against Danny and the others.

And that sucks.  Because she has a lot of potential to be a well-rounded and great character.  I’ve seen plenty of fics that seize that potential and roll with those gaps and the result is very good.  I wish I could like her canon depiction without feeling like I have to actively ignore a bunch of latent behavioural red flags as the price of entry.

She deserved better.

#Danny Phantom #Sam Manson #Character Writing #Character Analysis #I'm also going to cop to the fact that this part of Sam gets to me personally #because it mimics some of my experiences with emotionally abusive relatives #feeling really uneasy and uncomfortable and upset but not being able to articulate what they're doing that makes you feel that way #and wondering if maybe it's your fault and you're just reading into things too much and you're bad for not defending them #until they do something really egregious and suddenly it's like 'oh' 'OH' 'OH SH*T THAT'S NOT OKAY' #And then you look back and see all the little red flags and from then on you can never un-see them #One of the reasons I only like fanon!AmethystOcean is I can see how badly things are likely to go when Danny's flaws meet these problems #Danny's canon flaws are ones that make him particularly susceptible to emotional abuse #and they accidentally wrote canon!Sam with a lot of latent proto-abusive red flags #they both need character development to work as a couple #but this is Danny Phantom and I guess we're chumps from expecting that #anonymous #3WD answers

[kryptsune]

🌼Yes I know I said I needed a break but here is my proof that I love what I do. I spent today and yesterday crafting a little drabble for Felldritch. I am unsure if this is going to be exactly how this story is going to go but it’s a general idea. If it becomes a proper fic then I will elaborate more. Hope you enjoy it C: Tell me what you think and if you would like to see more.

DO NOT REPOST MY WORK WITHOUT MY PERMISSION IT IS NOT FOR YOUR USE. IF YOU LIKE MY WORK PLEASE REBLOG INSTEAD! It helps me so much! It makes such a difference.💙If you want more of these just let me know! It’s the only way I can gauge interest!

FELLDRITCH DRABBLE {1/3}: The Madhouse

Chocolate colored walls surrounded her day in, day out, though chocolate was something one would associate with something pleasant. This room. Was not. All appearances led one to believe in the fastidious nature of this place. This containment. This prison of foul-smelling chemicals of an unknown substance. The scent of something burning followed by screams for mercy. No…they never heard that. No. This was not a place one would associate with something sweet. 

It was a facade. A simple show for those that did not know any better. A dull green leather sofa sat along the wall. The rivets bolting it down were just hidden by an ornate rug of ghastly reds and browns. Some unknown crimson stain that was never able to be washed out was just covered by a wooden table. A few books here and there slightly worn decorated its surface. They were books one would not make an effort to pick up. The Nature of the Mind, An Essay on the Success of Electrostimulation, CareGiving, A Safe Haven. All books that might lure one into a false sense of security about this place. This madhouse of screaming lunatics and suffering patients. Ruttledge Asylum… The home for the Mentally Tortured and Disturbed.   

A large wooden desk, a full coat rack, a diploma hanging just over some gaudy floral cream-colored wallpaper. Giant books filled with fancy penmanship. A ledger and a quill. Meaningless. Small details that had no value or purpose other than to be eye candy. A pale face watched it all from above surrounded in a golden frame, “Frisk… are you even listening?” Chocolate eyes flecked with ruby stared down from that pale face. Its lips moved expressing a lack of thoughtfulness. A dull tone of acceptance, “I’m sorry Dr. Ruttledge. I will pay more attention.”

The voice that came from that pale face was soft, almost a whisper. One would question if they were truly there, to begin with. A kind of lifelessness that illuminated the tribulations of the past, present, and future. The face that stared back, mahogany hair cut in places haphazardly sticking out, a bandage around a pale throat, eyebrows furrowed with despair. This was her… 

A young woman lay on a lounge staring up into the mirror that the nurses and doctor had placed there. They had claimed it was a means of self-reflection. To be able to see one's own progress and health improving. To her, however, it was a wraith. Every time she stared back at that girl she could see herself being whittled away.  Every question asked left her more and more hollow. No one believed her and why should they? Her experience was something out of a fairytale. Something that only the mad would conjure up, “Frisk I am going to ask you once more and I want you to respond honestly. Do you understand?” 

Dr. W. D. Silias Ruttledge owned this madhouse. He was the presiding caregiver and psychologist to those that did not have violent tendencies. The rest were thrown in solitary beating their empty skulls against dirty white padding. Only hearing the voices of others through a bolted latch in the door. At night she would hear them pacing or talking to themselves. 

He had a suspicious voice. One that was soothing in understanding but he didn’t take that tone with everyone. She always felt he was hiding something. Of course, he would just add paranoia to her list of ailments if she even exhibited such an accusation. His black hair was neatly combed where she could just see a streak or two of grey by the side of his skull. A crooked nose had a pair of golden spectacles perched lightly. She noticed it was a habit of his to pull them off and clean them with this handkerchief when he was beginning to grow irritable. A faint scar ran from the bottom of his left eye and she could have sworn also the top of his right. He was properly groomed, a high white starched collar resting below his chin. An ebony and cream waistcoat showed how successful he had been in his career. The finery of a medical professional.

A set of hazel eyes were kept focused on the clipboard he had resting on one leg dressed in black slacks. A lapel pin of a deer rested on the fabric standing out very minimally. It must have been his lineage she guessed just from his British accent, “Yes sir, I understand.” He tapped the quill he was using to write against the inkwell gently ready to write down any notes that may implicate her level of delusion. It was hopeless.    

“Frisk, can you explain to me how you got here?” He replied, moving in his chair to find a more comfortable position before reaching for his usual cup of tea and taking a sip, “I want a full and complete answer, no one-word responses today.” 

She just turned her attention back up at the doppelganger in the mirror, watching it speak but not feeling anything about what it was saying. It could have been a doll or a dead body for all she cared. That was how hollow she had become. Was there even a soul left within her? Her eyes fell closed before he even asked. It was a typical procedure. Everyday, “Yes, Dr. Ruttledge. I promise I will answer completely and honestly.” Even answering fully wouldn’t put any emotion behind it. A soft sigh escaped her, “I was found wandering the woods late at night nearly seven years ago.

He nodded his head, never once looking up at her, “Yes and why is it you have found yourself in our care?” His quill scribbled something down as she responded, “I was confused trying to remember what had happened to leave me there. Alone in the woods...” The writing stopped, soft scratching absent from crumpled parchment, “You were found exclaiming that you came from a world of monsters. That you needed to help and that you made a promise. A promise to free them from their underground prison.”

Frisk swallowed thickly, “Dr. Ruttledge please I-” He cut her off, listing off her supposed illness calmly. She didn’t want to hear it anymore, “You became hysterical and physically aggressive when you were found and brought here. You begged to be released. So that you could return to them. You continued to talk about these demons… skeletons, fish people, dragons, and goat beasts.” He removed his spectacles and set them down on his clipboard, folding his hands in front of him, “Now tell me, is this due to some trauma or hallucination that you have had? Do you still believe in these fabrications?” 

Her eyes fluttered open to look off to the side, “Frisk? Did you not hear my question?” She took a breath but did not respond to the question. She could just hear that soft sound of metal folding upon metal, “I see. We shall skip that question for now. Now... tell me about these friends that you talk about. That you confide in.” 

She stared as he sat calmly looking down at her. He never seemed to move positions except for maybe switching the leg he crossed. His attention was back on his notes, but only for a second, “Let’s start with your ‘Best Friend’. You seem to talk about him quite a bit.” Frisk felt her body stiffen. Of course, he would ask about him, “Frisk, I want you to talk about him.” She didn’t want to. She never wanted to because she knew what would happen when she did. 

“He was one of the first monsters I met. He helped me and watched over me… protected me. We became close friends. He saved me. I would have had to sacrifice myself to save them all. They all told me that it wouldn’t be the same if I was gone. He begged me to leave my mission behind. Save myself.” 

Dr. Ruttledge just nodded his head, “Yes, as we have discussed before. I must ask if your analysis of this… situation is correct. To me, it sounds as though you possibly had feelings for this demon. Which concerns me greatly.” Frisk shook her head before bolting upright, “He is not a demon!” He raised a brow before shaking his head, “Is? As in present tense. Oh, Frisk, I thought we had made progress today. We will continue tomorrow. Rest up, I will see you in the morning.” He rose from his chair, setting the clipboard down on his desk with a soft sigh and opening the door. His gaze was locked on her, just waiting for her to leave his office, or the most likely reason: waiting for the nurse to “escort” her out. 

Of course, she was upset. He just called her best friend a demon. He was nothing of the sort, even if he was skeletal in appearance. His brother was not that way either. As much as she wanted to play the game to get out of here she wasn’t going to agree to that. Sans and Pap. They were her friends and family. Nothing would ever change that. Even as the nurse glared at her, grabbing her arm and leading her down the hall. 

She didn’t even bother to look around the room she was in. It was the room she had been in for nearly seven years. The soft clink of the lock reminded her that she was still a prisoner, regardless of her “ailments.” At least she had a small window to look out over the grounds. It was sad, really, to think that such a small thing was even worth mentioning. It was dark outside with the fire of the lanterns flickering back and forth.

Her hand slipped from the wooden frame only to make her way to the small bed she knew. All she could think of was her bed back in Snowdin. How she would cuddle under those warm covers, snuggled up with the boy's pet dog. Well, more like a wolf. Now she just laid there cuddling a plush she kept close to her. It was a rabbit. A white stuffed rabbit with little button eyes. She had painted them green one day with some of the paint from the rec room. A place she was apparently forbidden from for it would “worsen” her delusions. 

All she could do was close her eyes and try to rest, all while slipping into her memories of a better time. One that she wanted to return to. A place where she was loved and accepted. A place that withheld judgment. Home. She buried her face gently against the plush in her arms, her whole body shaking from the thoughts that clawed at her mind. It was at that moment she felt terribly alone and hopeless.   

Frisk could feel the tears slipping down her cheeks as she curled into a ball on top of the thin blankets. A few soft sobs caused her to choke on what little words she could get out, “I want to go home.” Would they even recognize her anymore? She was broken. A fragile thing putting up a smiling face in the jaws of adversity. That tightness was starting to constrict her chest before she let it out. Trails of tears poured from her eyes as she fell apart, slowly struggling to take in proper oxygen. This place was breaking her. If she just admitted that they didn’t exist maybe they would let her leave. Maybe she could live a normal life, but that wasn’t the one she wanted.

A few hours later and she was shaken awake only to be greeted by an old frowning face. The nurse. Frisk didn’t bother to remember her name. She was a crotchety old crone that treated the patients like dogs. The cup in her hand found its way into her cheek, squishing against her face and forcing her to take it from those leathery hands. It was her medicine. The kind that would make her sleepy. It was a feeling she hated; not being in control of herself properly. She took the pills and hid them under her tongue as the nurse walked away. Normally they checked to see if they were swallowed, but they had never caught her not taking them before. 

She spit them out before tossing them through the bars of the window. There were worse things here then not taking ones medication. Tortures she had been subjected to even though she was not supposed to. That was when she noticed a sliver of light coming from the hallway. The nurse had forgotten to shut the door. 

All that was running through her mind was that she could be free. She could escape this place. Adrenaline was coursing through her as her feet flew toward the crack in the metal. A promise of freedom and escape. There was no one in the hallway. 

She grabbed some of her clothing. The same ones that she had been found in and threw them on. The striped shirt that she wore in the Underworld for so long they had thrown away a long time ago. Now all she was left with was the patient clothing now hanging on her shoulders and a pair of boots and socks. She hated being stuck in that sterile smock, but she couldn’t waste any time. 

She grabbed what she found valuable from her room before creeping down the hallway, passing a security guard easily. The spare keys were kept in the office as she snagged one from the drawer before rushing toward the door. That soft click of the key being inserted into the lock caused her heart to jump, as she stumbled out into the night. Where was the mountain? She could just faintly make out the silhouette of Ebott from where she was. 

Frisk ran as hard as she could and as fast as she could, stumbling through the trees, climbing rocks, and doing everything in her power to reach the summit. She knew where she had fallen; it was all rushing back. A branch caught at her cheek, causing a thin line of crimson to bead from the wound. Just a little bit more. 'Seven years ago she had been here,' she thought as she stared down into the open mouth of the mountain. So long ago. 

It didn’t matter… she was going home.

A simple jump and she had flung herself into the darkness once more. Only this time she knew what awaited her. At least… she thought she did….

#sans #undertale #sans x frisk #frans #horrorfell #underfell #friskys multiverse #Saw #horrorfell sans #horrorfell frisk #undertale multiverse #undertale universe #undertale au #underfell au #eldritch #horror #occult aesthetic #occult #my work #Felldritch #pychological horror #asylum #drabble #poor Frisk

[magnificenttitanic]

Was Malinda Borden, a black woman, on Titanic?

In this post, I will be looking at the story of Malinda Borden, a black passenger claimed to have died on the Titanic, and the various claims within the story. The standard response from many Titanic enthusiasts and historians is to just brush this off with “hoax” or “not true.” That’s not really good enough. When I heard about this, I wanted to dig as deep as I could to see what I could find. The short answer is: The story is not true, it’s entirely fabricated. For the reasons why, and in-depth analysis for the claims, please continue reading. If there are any updates, I will add them to the end of this post as they come.

This is a long post, so I’m putting most of it under a cut. Given the nature of the story, its claims, and the sensitive issues it involves, it may be triggering. Continue at your own discretion. With that in mind...

This post has been making the rounds on Facebook lately. For those who don’t know the Titanic story beyond what they remember from the movie, it might seem plausible, but is it true? What’s the full story? Where did it come from? What’s the evidence? Let’s jump down the rabbit hole!

The story in its above form is the most popular version with 43,000 shares on Facebook, and it's been shared and tweeted in plenty of other places. Snopes debunked it, but they didn’t really look into the story very far. When you dig deeper, you’ll find the story seems to have its roots in a series of posts on Facebook made by someone named Helen Griffin in early 2016. She claimed to be a descendant of Malinda Borden, that this story was passed to her via her grandfather, and that she has a letter telling the story from a black survivor. Griffin posted versions of the story in various places, and one version was featured on a black culture Facebook page:

There’s a lot to unpack there, but there are a number of problems that can be pointed out with the main claims, your standard debunking, including:

There’s no record or account of a Malinda Borden being on Titanic beyond these Facebook posts, in any capacity, on any list, and no body of a black woman was ever found or documented. That doesn’t prove she wasn’t there, necessarily, but all we have to go by are the claims themselves.

The lifeboats were not segregated by race. There is no record at all of that being a policy. In fact, people of color did get into or were rescued by lifeboats, primarily the two half-black children of the one black man who was on Titanic, a Japanese man who jumped into a boat, and six third class Chinese men.

There is nothing to indicate any number of black crew anywhere, in any list, manifest, name, photo, reports, or testimony, nor is there anything in records, plans, or testimony to indicate the presence of a “negro cabin” for black crew. Nor is there evidence for any substantial number of black servants or passengers. Titanic’s manifests have been poured over many times since the disaster, every name studied, every background looked into, and only one black man (along with his two half black children and white wife) have thus far been proven to be on board.

There’s no evidence that black crew would have only been listed on post-sinking lost property lists. Any people on board had to be rigorously documented, be they passengers, servants, or crew. The laws at the time were very strict about this, and the White Star Line and immigration authorities took the careful documenting of all people on board ships very seriously as an issue of health. On top of that, nobody has ever found anything listed on post-sinking claims for lost property (or in any cargo manifest) that could be described as a human being.

While people of color on board would have certainly experienced some level of prejudice, the idea that black crew or passengers were tied to heavy objects and thrown overboard is pure absurdity. Nowhere is anything like that ever mentioned anywhere, by anybody, at any time since the sinking beyond the few Facebook comments made by this one person.

The story has its issues, but that’s not even all of it. The supposed source of the story, the long version as detailed in the letter Griffin claims to have, is most telling about the story’s legitimacy (or lack thereof) because it contains the most claims and details, and if there’s one thing that’ll kill a bad fake story right quick fast in a hurry, it’s detail. The letter contradicts known, proven facts about what happened aboard Titanic, and makes some rather absurd claims. Here is the letter as posted by Griffin in 2016:

The Titaniacs reading this might notice a couple issues right away, but for the uninitiated, here are the things that stand out the most as being historically and factually problematic:

It claims Borden was a nurse. If she’s supposed to be part of the crew, that doesn’t work. Titanic didn’t have any nurses, be they men, women, black or white. There were only two surgeons and a male hospital steward, and their cabins/bunks are accounted for on plans of the ship.

Titanic had six lookouts, all of whom survived to tell their stories. The lookouts worked on strictly scheduled shifts, with none allowing for additional unlisted lookouts. None were black, none were women. In fact, women were generally barred from taking such positions, so even if black people were barred as well, they still wouldn’t let a woman do the job. Of course, if you claim there was a segment of secret unlisted crew who wouldn’t appear on any manifest and who have been hidden from history, I guess you can claim anybody was a lookout, eh?

The letter asserts that only white immigrants and Americans were allowed to leave the lower decks. This is not entirely true, as there were quite a few non-white passengers, especially women, who quite easily made it to the upper decks, although some - along with white passengers - did run into issues with less-bright crewmen and crew who told them to go back below decks in an attempt to keep some semblance of calm (or perhaps because they were racist, who knows).

It also propagates the claim of gates below decks used to keep passengers down. This is mostly a fiction of the 1997 film. While a few Bostwick gates and a couple other types of barriers were used to close off crew areas and separate alternating areas of the classes, there were no gates or barriers preventing people from going up on deck from their respective classes, and some of the below decks access points were even open. The only issues with gates were outside, up on the decks of the ship, far from the lower decks, which were waist-high gates to divide the outside promenades into classes. If there were any issues with gates, it would be there, out in the open with lots of witnesses. Funny, no survivor ever mentioned people being gunned down at the gates.

“A big fat white crew member” - No comment.

What would a crew member be doing with his wife on board? Nothing like that has ever been documented, which you’d expect even in this story since they’re white.

Additionally, there’s no account of anybody ever being in labor or giving birth on the Titanic at any point, least of all during the sinking.

“White female” - Yes, exactly how people talked.

I don’t know how much plastic was on the Titanic or how many poor crew women would have had bras, but plastic and mass-produced, cheap bras were quite new at the time, especially the bras, so that is a very odd line given the context.

I already addressed the black people being tossed overboard, but that absurdity of that line just needs to be pointed out again.

Many hours…” - They’d likely be dead after only a few dozen minutes in the freezing water. A few did survive longer, including one man who may have been more or less in the water for a couple hours, but that was rare.

The boats did not refuse to pick up non-white people. There were very few picked up from the water in the first place, but one of the last ones to be recovered alive from the water was a Chinese man. There are no accounts of the boats refusing to pick up or beat back people who were black after the sinking.

The letter claims one black man flipped an entire lifeboat full of people over, drowning everybody on board while the man survived. Meanwhile, back here in reality, Titanic had 20 lifeboats, all of which were accounted for, with all of them having passengers who survivived. Only one boat ever capsized, and that happened when it was pushed off the roof of the officers’ quarters. It still floated and a number of people found refuge on the overturned lifeboat.

10 hours in the sub-freezing water without dying of hypothermia? And I’m the reincarnation of Titanic’s center anchor.

A homemade lifeboat? What the…

The very existence of the letter itself is problematic. Grammar, for one thing. The author’s posts, in general, have the same kind of bad grammar, spelling, caps, etc., so one might assert it just carried over in the transcription. But then what people in 1912 talked like that? It honestly sounds like something a modern person just made up based on some stuff they remembered from the film and details they pulled out of their rear. Grammar aside, is there a physical letter? If it’s real, there would be a physical letter she transcribed from. Why not show the letter? Even bad fakes in the past have been physical letters you could look at, with effort taken to look old. They didn't just make a badly-written post on Facebook. Has it been studied by experts, verified? (No letter was ever shown as far as I can tell, just this text in a Facebook post.)

The photo posted with the “letter” is also questionable. It’s a picture of a picture, ensuring that no reverse image search can pull up anything. Doing such a search pulls up no previous examples of the photo, and searching with “Titanic” shows only two links where the story is repeated. No other versions have surfaced so far. The name is a mystery, too. One person claimed this as proof:

But if you go back through her lineage, there’s nothing to indicate anything more than that she was born in 1874 in a family from a series of marriages going back to 1770s Virginia. The family’s probably not even African American. She wasn’t the only Malinda Borden, either. Another post from Griffin suggests “Malinda Mary Borden” as the full name, for which you’ll find the following page:

Funny, they don’t seem to have died in the Atlantic ocean in 1912, but in Alabama in 1930. Regardless, without more information on the first Borden, it just doesn’t prove anything.

One of the main claims of the story, and one of its biggest problems, is that there was a shadow crew of all-black people on board Titanic, kept off manifests and listed only as property, housed in segregated cabins. The claim is further detailed in the below comment left by Griffin on a Titanic blog:

The issue here is that we have extensive, detailed lists of every single crewmember aboard Titanic. Historians have spent decades going over the manifests, of people or otherwise, compiling lists, removing people who were proven not to be on board, adding people who were, combing through cemeteries, recovery and death records, records of recovered bodies, finding people’s original names, their families, comparing with accounts and finding records of all sorts. At the same time, we’ve also compiled detailed, well-researched deck plans of Titanic and her identical sister ship, Olympic, so we also know what parts of the ship housed what classes of people and crew, and how many of each type of crew were in the various crew dormitories. When you compare the capacities for the lowest and mid-level boiler and engine room crew with the manifests, you get the following:

161 firemen capacity - 161 on manifest

72 trimmers capacity - 73 on manifest

34 greasers capacity - 33 on manifest

15 leading firemen capacity - 13 on manifest

Doing the same with all other categories of crew on the manifest will give similar results. Nearly every alotted crew bunk is taken, and ever spot on the manifest has a name, and each name has been researched over the decades. None of the listed boiler room crews are known to be black. They were called the “Black Gang,” but that was due to their tendency to get covered in coal dust. 

The claim, of course, is that black crew were unlisted except on manifests of lost property, but that’s still a problem. The spaces allotted for the crew were full when accounting for everybody on the manifest. Where would this extra crew stay? The claim is there was a segregated cabin, but nothing like that has ever been found on any plan, in any record, in any testimony, by any researcher. They wouldn’t be kept in 1st class, or 2nd class, or in aft 3rd class (where single women and families were kept apart from single men). That leaves forward 3rd class. Would the White Star Line really house whole teams of black-only stokers they didn’t need in facilities that were generally nicer than those for the rest of the stokers and adjacent to the rest of 3rd class, taking up cabins from paying passengers for the highly lucrative immigrant routes at the time? The stokers worked in specific shifts, distributed across the boiler rooms so all the furnaces could be serviced, with trimmers moving coal about. They didn’t need an extra all-black cache of super secret unlisted stokers.

But this all leaves an important question: What IS the actual evidence for this story?

Nothing is offered by Griffin beyond the Facebook posts the story comes from and the occasional comment repeating the story. The supposed letter is never shown. The photo isn’t elaborated on. No corroborating details are given about Malinda Borden’s life, nor about the other people mentioned in the letter.

The most you get from its believers is “Google it.” I did just that. With a Google search for “Malinda Borden Titanic”, I got 5 pages of results. Only the first page or so had relevant results. Of those, most were reposts or links to the story. Then there’s the Snopes page debunking it, and a few pages linking to the Snopes page. Finally, there are a couple of original posts of the story and one or two comments from the author. All results point to short versions of the story. To find the full letter, you have to look through Griffin’s Facebook page going back to 2016. There, nestled among hundreds of repeated posts about politics, punctuated by many graphic, horrific photos of lynching victims every few posts, you’ll eventually find the original posts for this story and the text letter.

Beyond that and what I’ve shown here? Nothing. Zip. Zilch. Nada.

Titanic has also been intensely studied since the disaster. It’s quite literally one of the most written-about subjects in modern history. Thousands of historians, authors, and enthusiasts from all walks of life, races, classes, and political affiliations have studied Titanic and written about it. Every aspect of Titanic has been studied front to back, left and right, up and down. Every minute of the sinking has been scrutinized, every word of every survivor account from both inquiries and countless interviews and news pieces analyzed, every detail carefully pieced together. Nowhere is there a gap or an anomaly that would point to the sort of hidden history this story claims exists.

It’s also important to remember that Titanic wasn’t an isolated thing. Stories about Titanic are often larger than life, as if it was a singular, special thing. But it was just a ship that met an unfortunate end. It had an identical sister ship at the time, as well as one that would follow later. The White Star Line had dozens of ships around the world. There were many shipping lines in Britain, Ireland, America, Germany, France, and more. If the policies hinted at in this story were real, we wouldn’t just have to look at Titanic. Olympic sailed until the 1930s and for almost year before Titanic, you’d think there would be something somewhere by now about the secret all-black groups of stokers in the boiler rooms, or the mysterious, unlisted black cooks, stewards, nurses, etc.

This is all to say that, if this story were true, SOMETHING of that would have been discovered in the last 108 years. Some historian would have uncovered this story, or hints of the details told within. And not everyone would sit on that. Some historians would love to overturn what we think we know about history, and something like this would revolutionize and overturn our understanding of the Titanic story. Instead, the only evidence for this story is the story itself as told in a Facebook post from 2016; poorly-written, full of holes, and utterly unconvincing and unsupported. The only thing that props it up is its own vaguery and reliance on conspiratorial unfalsifiability.

In order to believe this story, you have to not only go against a century of some of the most rigorous research and a massive body of evidence, you also have to believe that literally everybody involved in Titanic’s story - every surviving crewmember, every passenger, every builder and White Star Line official, everybody from that time, until the death of the very last survivor in 2010 - and literally everybody involved in Titanic research and publication of any kind in the last 108 years - from Walter Lord to James Cameron and everybody between - is in on a grand, far-reaching conspiracy of coverups. Surely, the story’s apparent originator isn’t a conspiracy theori-

Oh... FUCKING. OOPS.

That’s right. The ROTHSCHILDS. An anti-semitic conspiracy theory you’ll often find favored by, you know, Nazis. The intentional sinking theory that’s only been debunked 44,765,334,896 times, the theory that’s supposedly been covered up by the Jews and the government. Oh and also that nonsense about the bunker fire taking down the whole ship, which was supposedly covered up by the WSL, now mixed in with a super secret unknown crew of black firefighters, whose story has supposedly been successfully covered up by all white people everywhere until one person on Facebook posted it. What’s next, Titanic was switched with Olympic which was then sunk for insurance money, then covered up by the 10,000 workers at Harland and Wolff and the WSL?

And like all conspiracy theories, this story is written in such a way as to make it both unprovable and unfalsifiable. “You can’t prove or disprove it because there are no records and all traces have been covered up.” Some eschew any sort of research in favor of simply believing based on what they feel, like this person:

In the age of Trump, fear, and increasing social and political tensions, in the world of bite-sized tweet-n-share social media, it’s a story that can easily gain traction despite there being no substantiated evidence at all for it. Its believers and defenders do the utmost minimal level of research (”I Googled it and found more than one link for the story!”), make assertions of coverups and use appeals to feelings and numerous fallacies while accusing the story’s skeptics of being racist, ignorant, or in on the grand conspiracy to keep these stories under wraps. (Some people who refute the story probably are racist and ignorant and haven’t offered much beyond “IT’S NOT TRUE DUMBASS!” But that has no bearing on the facts.) To the believers, none of this matters. If someone believes this, why does that matter, even if it’s not true?

Except it should matter. While people focus on this fake story, they miss out on the real stories of real people that were often overlooked until recent decades, stories that are supported by mountains of evidence and documentation.

Like the real story of Titanic’s Chinese passengers:

Eight of them boarded in 3rd class, six survived, with one of them being one of the last people rescued from the water. That rescue was even featured in a deleted scene from the 1997 film. “The Six” as they’re known fell into obscurity upon returning to China, with their story only recently being pieced together in a documentary slated to be released later in 2019.

Or the real story of Masabumi Hosono, the only Japanese man on Titanic:

He boarded in 2nd class and, after initially encountering a crewman who wouldn’t let him on deck because he was assumed to be 3rd class, eventually made it up on deck and into a lifeboat. He faced a great deal of shame upon returning to Japan.

Or the real story of Victor Giglio:

He was the half-Egyptian valet to Benjamin Guggenheim, staying with him in his 1st class stateroom, who “dressed in his best” along with Guggenheim, with both refusing a lifeboat in favor of “going down like gentlemen.”

Or the very real and tragic story of Joseph Philippe Lemercier Laroche:

Laroche was, as far as we know from nearly 108 years of research, the only black person on the Titanic when it sank, although you could say there were three if you count his two half-black daughters. He was an engineer from Haiti who studied in France and was heading back to Haiti in 2nd class along with his pregnant French wife and two daughters, seeking job opportunities that were denied him due to racism in France. They were originally supposed to travel on a French ship, but the line’s strict policies on children made them change their tickets for a voyage on Titanic. During the sinking, Laroche made sure his wife and children got into a lifeboat, but like many other men that night, he stepped back and stayed on board with the hope that rescue would come for the men and others who remained on the ship. It did not, and Laroche died in the sinking.

Titanic’s story isn’t free of prejudice. From antisemitism and anti-Italian sentiments among crew to racism and abuse directed at non-white and poor passengers to some extent or other, as well as the simple fact that almost certainly many on board were just plain racist (it was 1912, after all). Meanwhile, the stories of non-white passengers have indeed often been overlooked, sometimes due to the disinterest and racism of reporters at the time. But despite all that, these stories came out, and really were known to an extent all along, their evidence easy enough to find. That’s just not the case with the Malinda Borden story. The fact is, there were not many people of color on the Titanic, and even fewer black people. Making up and propagating likely false stories about there secretly being tons of black crew and passengers based on literally no evidence at all (the only evidence offered for this story is the story itself), I believe, takes away from the precious few stories that are true.

Nor is there nothing to be woke about. White people in positions of power and in general have covered up or ignored all sorts of racist acts and black history. Education has utterly failed in that regard. The lessons from black leaders have been diluted into soundbites white people can feel good about. COINTELPRO, Jim Crow and more on the government side, a long history of segregation and discrimination on the business side. There are many proven, documented, substantiated examples of genuine coverups and covert racism in government and business, disenfranchisement, and more. This story, however, is not one of them. Be woke, just don’t be so woke that you fall out of the bed, hit your head on the nightstand, and pass out again.

You don’t have to accept or believe any of this, though. Few of those faced with refutations of the story did, appealing to attacks and fallacious arguments instead. A Titanic researcher friend of mine was told to go “jack off to a Trump poster” for doubting this story. Do with this (and that) what you will.

UPDATE 1:

In the months since posting this, there definitely has not been anything to prove anything with this story. In fact, much of the “evidence” I covered here no longer exists. The Facebook page of Helen Griffin no longer exists and their posts are gone, and it’s possible some other posts about this vanished as well. I was going to add something about how you can do your own research on this if you feel it necessary, but that’s apparently impossible now. All that’s left of this story on social media now are the various reposts of the short summaries of the main claim. This Tumblr post, and possibly a few buried comments on one of the Facebook posts linked here, are the only places you’ll likely be able to find the full version of the story that sparked these claims. Of course, the original content may be gone, but the story they spawned will no doubt continue to be spread.

#titanic #the titanic #rms titanic #malinda borden

[bemundolack]

I have THOUGHTS about US

Below the cut so I don’t spoil anybody. I just got out of the theater to watch the new Jordan Peele movie. This isn’t gonna be Nyx Fears or hbomberguy levels of analysis, I’ve never studied film, but I have some thoughts. I haven’t read any analysis or anything, so I reserve the right to change my opinion later.

Okay, so I think this is partly about the Society of the Spectacle? Which is a book I still need to actually read, but the basic idea is that we interact with images or facsimiles of reality because of the way neoliberal (not a buzzword, here, I mean neoliberal) capitalism commoditizes/marketizes our social interactions.

HERE COME THE SPOILERS, LADS. I warned you.

So, in the universe of the movie, there are people above ground in the world that we know, and they each have an exact copy that shares the same soul that lives underground. They’re tethered together, the ones below bluntly and disjointedly copying the ones above, down to their movements and activities and sensations. It’s really weird. Very Silent Hill. Basically, they’re all led by the main character, who switched places with her copy as a young child, and they all rise to the surface and murder their copies. They call it the “untethering.” But you don’t know that the girl switched places until the end of the movie. That’s the twist. I honestly knew it was coming, but it’s not explicitly revealed until the end.

So, I’m seeing it as a literal translation of the idea of the Spectacle? The surface people are the image and the tunnel people are the real versions? And the tunnel versions are... they’re presented as really creepy, they move really quickly and stiffly, they don’t talk to each other. The story was that the main girl, Lupita’s character, got them organized. 

Y’all. She literally put them all in red uniforms. The character is called Red in the credits. They carry gold scissors. -communism intensifies-

I thought the scissors were really good, and they play visually into another theme: 11′s and 2′s. The girl says she wants prize number 11 at the fair. It’s on the 2nd row. There’s a man holding a sign that says “Jeremiah 11:11,” and that guy has 1111 carved into his forehead. The scissors are one object that looks like a 1 when they’re closed, and they’re an 11 when they’re open. There’s the fucking rabbit ears (I still don’t understand the rabbits, but I’ll get there).

So, I’m getting a little ahead of myself. Things that reinforce the surface characters as the spectacle: the white couple (I’m specifically mentioning that they’re white because they’re VERY white and they play into some stereotypes that are used for comical levity in otherwise very heavy and confusing moments). The wife is the stereotypical wine mom who hates her husband and is obsessed with beauty and aging, and is very resentful of the main character’s appearance. There’s a bit about plastic surgery. It could come off as misogynist, I think, but the way the other women and girl characters are treated makes me give this a break. I dunno. 

The white husband and the main character’s husband are in a “keeping up with the Joneses” stereotypical thing about boats and cars. The MC’s husband says “He bought that car just to fuck with me” at one point. Like, very materialistic. The MC’s daughter is constantly on her phone, which like, social media is probably what Debord had nightmares about in terms of full marketization of social interactions. The little boy wears a mask, which is kind of on the nose. Honestly, a lot of this is a little on the nose, but the way it’s presented is so bewildering that I didn’t mind the directness.

So, when they first break into the house, which happens way earlier in the movie than I was expecting, the MC asks who they are, and Red says “We’re Americans :D” which was hilarious and terrifying. That’s most of this movie, hilarious and terrifying. But also... Americans .... the movie is called Us .... US. USA. hehe hoohoo. Like I said, on the nose, but so sublimely weird and anxiety inducing that I don’t mind it.

But also, I feel like that reinforces my communist angle? Like, they’re these masses of people rising up to destroy the people with a monopoly on superior material conditions???? Ahhhh I don’t know how to explain it right, you’ll have to see it to know what I mean. Like, there’s this bit where Red explains to the MC the differences in each stage of their life, like how MC got soft toys while Red got sharp, cold ones. MC had a c-section while Red performed one on herself. MC got warm, nutritious food, and Red ate rabbits raw and bloody (the rabbits confuse the fuck out of me). Like, it feels like a parallel between the working class and the capitalist class on the subjects of healthcare, food, material needs, etc.

It shows them being coordinated, living in barracks that look like military bunks. The only entrance is a down escalator into the underground. It’s basically impossible to get out once you’re down there. It’s not explained how the little girl got out. Also, the spectacle version of the girl who got left down there as a child is technically the one who led the revolution, but she was killed by the tunnel version, even though the tunnel version had been living as the spectacle? Is this a metaphor for taking over the state and doing a dictatorship of the proletariat? Am I reading entirely too fuckin much into this movie? Yes.

There are handcuffs that feature immediately in the movie as a way to restrain the MC, and she only gets rid of them after she kills Red. Like. You have nothing to lose but your chains?????? Also, they form a big, red line across the landscape, “From sea to shining sea,” at the end. A civil war? A revolution? They’re hand in hand. all facing one direction, united. It’s kind of beautiful and terrifying and invigorating.

Also, there’s a PTSD angle that I really appreciated. The MC is shown being diagnosed with PTSD as a child after the incident where the girls swapped (but the audience doesn’t know that at this point). Dissociation is a huge part of PTSD, and it almost feels like there’s a spectacle vs reality dynamic in your own head. I have PTSD, it sucks. It’s the worst. This really reminded me of what I’ve been thinking about lately, which is the psychosocial effects of capitalism. So I don’t know if I saw it because I’d been thinking about it anyway, or if it’s actually part of what Peele was doing.

Anyway, if Jordan Peele isn’t a communist, I am very confused and seeing communism in places it doesn’t belong.

[privateplates4u]

2018 Nissan Leaf First Drive Review

“You know what I’d do if I were you guys?” The jet lag from the 11-hour flight to Japan had me talking in a stream of consciousness. “I’d build a NISMO version of the Leaf. Make it all crazylike, you know what I mean?” The young Nissan engineer sitting across from me stared back blankly. I tried a different angle. “The Leaf’s image needs a big shakeup. I mean, Elon Musk has had the press in the palm of his hand with his Insane- and Ludicrous-mode stuff, right? How about you do something like that!” Without a muscle twitch of expression, he replied, “Thank you for your suggestion, Mr. Reynolds. I’ll pass your views along to our team.” Then he gave me a polite, Japanese nod of the head. Well, that went badly. Was it too obvious that I think the Nissan Leaf is a car in need of a pulse? If done right, though, this redesigned 2018 version of the car has the makings of a NISMO EV heart-pounder. About 30 minutes earlier, maybe 50 of us were seated around the Leaf for its styling explainer at the Nissan Technical Center. But the whole time, I’d been staring at its profile, thinking that it reminds me of another car. Light bulb: the Faraday Future 91 I rode in a few months ago. I Googled its profile. The 91 is longer, but yes, there are some very similar ideas here. And what’s important about that statement is this: Whether that Faraday sinks or (miraculously) swims, it’s a seriously cutting-edge design. And here I am, comparing it to the descendant of one of this century’s most notorious oddballs. If Leaf 1 (my name for it) looked like a four-wheel amphibian, this Leaf 2 before us has not only flash-evolved into a svelte automotive shape, but it’s also learned to speak in the visual language of the rest of Nissan’s edgy designs. I must say, I’m not a fan of every word in its vocabulary—particularly Nissan’s Vmotion grilles. But for Leaf duty the rabbit-grin frames an interesting 3-Dish blue finish, which does pull you closer in to study it. And did you know that Leaf 1’s surprised-eyes headlights had an aerodynamic purpose? They did—to twirl air sideways and around the side mirrors. Now the twirling’s done by more elegant ribs on the hood, a trick Nissan’s aerodynamicists later demonstrated in a full-size wind tunnel where we watched smoke from the tip of a handheld wand magically bend sideways off the cowl. EVs are quiet, amplifying your awareness of side-mirror wind hiss; the ribs specifically hush that. There are additional noise defeaters, too, including greater rigidity of the inverter, a noise-blocking top for the integrated charger and DC-to-DC power inverter, and even a quieter motor. I looked back at the profile. There’s a lot going on here. But I’d characterize it as complex rather than busy. Although the Bolt shares many of these same EV-identifying cues, it’s a jigsaw jumble of pieces—some of them are a bit too forced into place. The Nissan’s elements are all aware of each other. Fit together like the neat rectangles in a Piet Mondrian painting. (Ironically, the Model 3 entirely dispenses with all these noisy little EV cues, being finished with starkly pure surfacing. To equate it to another painter, I’d pick my favorite one, Mark Rothko.) While we’re staring at the new Leaf’s profile, let’s use it to do a little automotive detective work. Imagine overlaying the current Leaf’s profile on it. See the match? The front and rear wheels exactly align—a giveaway that Leaf 2’s platform is fundamentally carryover bones not only in wheelbase but also in front track (its rear one is 0.8 inch wider), its essential suspension components, and the positioning of all the basic building blocks needed to assemble a modern EV. Consequently, its interior specs are a close match, too (it’s luggage space is more useful from ironing out small intrusions); externally, it’s 1.4 inches longer, 0.8 inch wider, and 0.4 inch taller. But don’t dis Leaf 2 as just some sort of overblown reskin. Nissan’s techs took the time to sprawl it out on their engineering operating table for a marathon multiple-organ transplant; the motor is all-new, spinning out a chunky 147 hp instead of 107 and 236 lb-ft of torque, up from 187 lb-ft. The electric power steering is more refined. Nissan is anxious to note that although companies are ballyhooing the births of their first EVs, Yokohama was there/did that back in 2010 and now has 270,000 customers, 2.1 billion miles of user experience, and programs such as 6,000 Leaf-to-home installations in Japan, where bidirectional charging/discharging coupled with solar roofs is slashing power bills. This ain’t Nissan’s first rodeo. It’s their second. And the show could be on the brink of going big time—the cost of battery storage has dropped from $300/kW-hr in 2015 to a projected $150 by 2020/23 and below $100 by 2025/26, according to a Morgan-Stanley analysis. (Nissan’s says they’re beating this.) And by the mid-2020s, battery-electric cars will be cheaper than internal combustion ones (in part due to the ramping complexity of internal combustion engines). So. Nissan should have anticipated the Bolt and base Model 3’s 238- and 225-mile ranges, right? Cue the drumroll. How big is the new Leaf’s battery pack (still underfloor and cooled with recirculated air, by the way)? Forty kW-hrs for 150 miles of range (S and SV trims). Eyes narrowed. Chins rubbed. True, that doubles the original Leaf’s 73-mile capability (from 24 kW-hrs) and is a 40 percent jump from its current 107 miles (from 30 kW-hrs). In a world without the Chevrolet Bolt, 150 miles would be a bold type headline. Now it’s a number in a math problem: How much less is it than 238? There’s going to be a lot of data thrown at you arguing that 150 miles more than matches most people’s real-world lifestyles most of the time. Let me ask you: How many gasoline-powered, five-passenger sedans could be sold with a 150-mile range? Maybe anticipating criticism, the Leaf will offer an even-better-chemistry 60-kW-hr pack next year (SL trim), likely extending its leash to about 225 miles (a two-tier strategy akin to the Model 3’s estimated 50 and 75 kW-hrs). Thus, the Bolt’s singular battery size will be bookended by its competitors, with the Nissan’s upgraded pack matching it and the Tesla’s smaller pack offering Bolt-competitive range due to better sedan aerodynamics. (One of the reasons, by the way, why I think Tesla controversially went with a mass-produced sedan first: A crossover’s worse aero would require a bigger, more expensive battery—something that’ll be more affordable by the time the Model Y makes its debut.) If carrying over the Leaf 1’s platform has painted Nissan into a corner, it’s these subsequently locked in battery dimensions that require expensive chemistry to keep it apace with the Bolt and base Model 3. (A plus for us is that it offers an insight into the march of ever-rising energy density; those additional 16 kW-hrs crammed in there mean 67 percent greater energy density in seven years, or 9.5 percent per year.) Another questionable call: clinging to the CHAdeMO standard for fast charging. Maybe it’s stubbornness, maybe Nissan’s got a giant investment in this thing, but CHAdeMO is a dead plug walking in the U.S., and Nissan would do the EV cause a big, fat favor by finally adopting SAE (or everybody going to Tesla’s standard). Time to drive. During their presentations, Nissan repeatedly emphasized twin messages: One, the Leaf is about making driving less stressful, and two, it’s about making driving fun. Not knowing what stress-free, fun driving exactly means, we headed out onto the test track to find out. The new Leaf’s most potent driving relaxers? ProPilot Assist is sort of a Tesla Autopilot light (at a fraction of the price). Relying on just a single forward-facing radar and a monocular video camera, ProPilot Assist provides single-lane, feet-off-the-pedals driving (what’s called adaptive cruise control). Alone, this is nothing unusual. Its dexterity in responding to slinkying traffic (including right down to 0 mph) is, though. Yet what elevates it to the same conversation as AutoPilot is how accurately it also threads down the center of the road. Like with other Level 2 semiautonomous systems, you need to keep your hands on the wheel, but here, there’s no need to give it periodic tugs. The electric power steering’s frequent and small corrections automatically sense their presence. I later tried the system in Detroit, driving for several miles on an expressway with my hands relaxed on the rim. No scoldings to put my hands back ever appeared (which, if persistently ignored, would ultimately result in the car stopping in its lane). Available later this year, ProPilot Assist is ordinary sensors doing an extraordinary job due to great software. Within two years, the system is expected to be even greater (perhaps with added sensors) by expanding to automated lane changing, and by 2020 it should have the skill to negotiate city scenarios, too. Next year it will joined by ProPilot Park, which highly automates parking, including selecting an empty spot not already bordered by a parked car (reading lane stripping). Remember this system as the tipping point when semiautonomous driving finally met the masses. (It’s had a 60 percent take rate in markets where it’s already available on other Nissan models.) The Leaf’s other driving simplification is its one-pedal EV-driving feature—what they call e-Pedal. Tesla has long offered a similar heavy-regen effect when you release the accelerator. But completing a stop requires a brake pedal dab at the bitter end. In its transmission’s Low mode, the Bolt will come to a one-pedal stop without touching the friction brakes, but the deceleration rate isn’t always enough. E-Pedal leapfrogs both with a deceleration rate of 0.2 g’s (covering 90 percent of real-driver stopping, Nissan says) and comes to a complete stop (including automatic friction braking, if necessary). If that stop is on a hill, the Leaf’s motor will just hold it motionless (after pausing, you can lift your feet from both pedals; no need to hold the brake). The new Leaf could quickly become the most popular car in San Francisco. E-Pedal and the availability of ProPilot Assist spotlight the intention to make the Leaf the tech standard-barer for the Nissan Intelligent Mobility Initiative, Yokohama’s campaign to destress driving. The notable destresser, though, is the car’s lowered MSRP of $29,990 ($30,875 including destination)—a $690 drop. Standard with that is a noticeable upgrade in interior materials, and when you option a nav system, Apple CarPlay and Android Auto are included, too. After incentives, this is a heck of a deal. But what about that driving fun factor? I can answer about 65 percent of that question. Without a doubt, its extra power and torque renders the new Leaf satisfyingly quicker and more responsive. Test-track recordings are yet to come, but given the Bolt’s and Model 3’s better power (and power-to-weight ratios) it’ll probably lag in a three-EV drag race. Interior noise is phenomenally hush—a nice complement to its supple yet controlled ride quality (absent of the bounding I’ve sometimes noticed in the Bolt). Indeed, it’s downright limousinelike compared to the Model 3’s German sport sedan tautness. However, the Tesla’s payoff is razorlike steering response, which is tough to compare to the Leaf’s because the suspensions of these Japanese prototypes were not yet tuned for Nissan’s intentions for the American market. Intentions? Sportier ones. Which circles me back to that styling walkaround earlier in the day. As it concluded, the chief designer had an impish look on his face. The one you have when there’s something you want to semaphore with minimal words. As he neared his seat, it finally came out: “Oh,” he paused, “and eventually, um, the letter N will be associated with the Leaf, too.” He had said too much, so out it came. “Not now, but eventually … there will be a NISMO version.” OMG! A NISMO Leaf. The last time I predicted something this correctly was in 1987 when I knew I’d regret selling my Austin-Healey Bugeye Sprite. But here’s the deal, Nissan: Don’t screw it up. It’s your chance to permanently flip the Leaf’s librarian identity right on its peroxided head. With wings and flairs, there’s room between the rear wheels for a second motor, too. (I looked.) Ludicrous Leaf sounds like a villain in a Batman movie. Holy anticipation.   Chevrolet Bolt EV Nissan Leaf Tesla Model 3 BASE PRICE $38,370* $30,875* $36,200* VEHICLE LAYOUT Front-motor, FWD, 4-door hatchback Front-motor, FWD, 5-pass, 4-door hatchback Rear-motor, RWD, 4-door, sedan MOTOR permanent magnet, 200-hp/266-ft-lb rear (MT est) AC induction, 147-hp/236-ft-lb permanent magnet, 258-hp/317-ft-lb (MT est) TRANSMISSION 1-sp Auto 1-sp Auto 1-sp Auto BATTERY 60 kWhr, Li-ion 40 kWhr, Li-ion 50/75 kWhr, Li-ion (MT est) CURB WEIGHT (F/R DIST) 3580 lb 3433-3508 lb (mfr) 3,550-3,800 lb (mfr) WHEELBASE 102.4 in 106.3 in 113.2 in LENGTH x WIDTH x HEIGHT 164.0 x 69.5 x 62.8 in 176.4 x 70.5 x 61.4 in 184.8 x 72.8 x 56.8 in TRACK, F/R 59.0/59.1 in 60.6/61.2 in 62.2/62.2 in CARGO ROOM, BEHIND 2ND ROW 16.9 cu ft 23.6 cu ft 15.0 cu ft DRAG COEFFICIENT 0.31 0.28 0.23 0-60 MPH 6.3 sec 8.0 sec (MT est) 5.6 sec (mfr est) LEVEL 2 CHARGE TIME 9 hrs 16 hrs, 3.6 kW/8 hrs, 6.6 kW na FAST CHARGE TYPE SAE COMBO, 50-kW CHAdeMO, 50-kW Tesla, 145-kW RANGE 238 miles 150 miles 220/310 miles *Before potential federal and state incentives The post 2018 Nissan Leaf First Drive Review appeared first on Motor Trend.

http://www.motortrend.com/cars/nissan/leaf/2018/2018-nissan-leaf-first-drive-review/

#First Drives

[mathematicianadda]

Self studying - how to know if i am on the right track?

Hello guys, i am a mathematical physics student in the mid of my second year and currently starting to learn about differential forms, integration on manifolds and functional analysis. prior to that i have studied proof based linear algebra and real analysis up to measure and integration theory.

while looking for books to study from i realized how vast mathematics really is beyond basic topics like real analysis and somehow i have the feeling that i am not grasping the new topics as good as the old ones.

for example, in linear algebra most theorems make sense intuitively when you imagine them in 3 dimensions with subspaces being lines and planes. in integration theory you define integrals as the limit of integrals of simple functions and you can then proof things like fubinis theorem by proofing it for simple functions and extending it to integrable functions by limit theorems etc. most of the time you can see why things are true and what the theorems mean intuitively and they seem like important statements to know about the objects youre dealing with.

now in those courses i felt like i am just studying familiar objects like integrals in greater detail. on the other hand, in functional analysis it seems to me that you just proof how random spaces are related to each other or how integral operators are continuous in different norms. the "applications" of the big theorems in my textbook consist of proofing such things most of the time. while there are sometimes also interesting statements about how you can solve integral oder differential equations using this, i just dont know why i would e.g. need to separate convex sets by continuous functionals.

i think differential forms make kinda sense to me after i read terence taos pdf and some things people wrote on stackexchange. still, learning about the lemma of poincare yesterday, i have no idea why it is true neither how one would come up with the idea to proof it or why it is related to the space being contractible or why the constructed form is the "antiderivative" (my book used a pullback from the space X to XxI using the projection to X and defined an integral form on XxI by just integrating the termins involving dt).

as i try to look up why this is true i find explanations on stackexchange involving things that seem very advanced to me at that point, like cohomology groups and cannot really follow them without getting lost in a rabbit hole of looking up definitions. most of the time i give up because it would just take too long. this feels wrong, because the authors of my books usually tell the reader that the books are written for self study and i have to move on without really having the feeling that i grasped the theorems. the book which covers differential forms for example, is the last book of a 3 book analysis series which starts from the basics like set theory and i read all the previous books and chapters, so i should get the theorems without looking up things from other sources for hours right?

often, authors hint to further topics and to me they all seem important to understand the material well, like category theory to understand de rham cohomology, yet i feel like i cant learn about all of them during my degree. when i look up how to get into category theory, i hear that i first have to read a book about algebra (which would take me like 3+ months probably, maybe more if im doing regular coursework parallel to it) and then about category theory (another 3 months), then maybe about topology and only then i can get started with a book about how those tools are used in manifold theory. so it would roughly take over a year TO GET THE BASICS. namely of one field (differential geometry). or do i just mistake pretty advanced stuff for "basic"?

or is it really supposed to take so long to undestand something well? this would mean that i could only reasonably learn about one field during my degree. but the description of the graduate level courses at my university states that prerequisites from many different fields are needed, mainly differential geometry, functional analysis, partial and ordinary differential equations and complex analysis. this is bothering me, because how could i possibly pick all of that up when i already need 1 year to learn the basics about the first field? am i just confusing the "basics" with pretty advanced topics? i cannot really tell how important things are and what i should know yet and what can wait until later.

so my questions are:

is it normal to move on in books without having the feeling of really understanding things well? do i just have to be patient and go on and eventually as i learn more about a topic and read more than one book about it i will slowly understand it more intuitively?

do you think i should ignore that feeling and things will suddenly clarify during a second read? or should i rather focus on getting intuition on the constructions etc as far as i can before moving on?

are these hints to further topics like category really intended for the average student, or are they aimed to people possibly specializing in this field later?

or should i consider to study different topics which are easier for me, like statistics oder progamming?

tldr; i am self studying and dont really know how to tell wether im doing good. solving exercises doesnt mean i understand the theorems intuitively, it just tells me that i can do computations. sometimes i have the feeling that im only progressing very slowly because there is so much (essential) math to learn. how much math does the average graduate/masters student know and how long should it take to pick that knowledge up? for example i consider the areas of differential geometry of curves and surfaces, integration of on manifolds, functional analysis, complex analysis and ordinary and partial differential equations to be something i should know at least at the level of an 300 page introductory textbook before applying to a masters, is that true? graduate course descriptions and the amout of classes some fellow students take make me think this is true.

i am sorry for the long post, but as i am self studying i do not really have anyone else to ask or any other way to know if i am doing good or i need to improve my study habits/the way i approach math.

thanks for reading this and (maybe) helping me!

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#Blogger