#the effect on the video might be a bit straining

[cellarspider]

5/?? The pseudohistory of Prometheus

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We return to a movie I wish to send on a journey down the Kola Superdeep Borehole, Prometheus.

And my insanity truly begins in this segment. We are only 1/10th of the way through the movie so far. Content warnings for discussion of racism in pseudoscience and historical anthropology, Spider getting hung up on logistics and space nerd stuff, and pictures of Yuri Knorozov, the most sour-faced man to ever live.

The cast sits down for a briefing. This is a scene with an easily identifiable narrative function: providing exposition to the theater audience. The act of doing a briefing makes sense. It is the last thing here that will.

We are introduced to a hologram of Peter Weyland, the financier of the expedition. The name means all sorts of Lore to the series, but what’s intensely distracting is that we seem to have caught Weyland halfway through applying his zombie makeup.

Weyland is played by Guy Pierce. As of the filming of this movie, he was somewhere around 45 years old. Yes, they smothered this Australian in old man drag so that he could play this character. This is a baffling decision, that only gets slightly less baffling if you know the production history of the movie, which I did not at the time.

Guy Pierce was hired to play a younger Peter Weyland. There’s a promo video out there of him giving a fictional TED Talk in the not-to-distant future of next Sunday AD 2023, there were various plans for him to appear in the movie proper. None of those scenes are actually in the movie. They refused to double-cast the role for some reason. While the practical effects in the movie are generally excellent and it does make the tiniest smidge of sense that a hypercapitalist asshole would be portrayed as a literal rubber-faced movie monster, this, like many things in Prometheus, made the movie a very weird sit. One where I was increasingly less open to going along with the movie’s fiction. You are telling me that this is an actual human man. I am not buying it. He looks far less human than David, the only non-human there.

Speaking of David, Weyland calls him “the closest thing to a son I will ever have”, and then immediately says David is an inhuman lesser being, who does not appreciate the specialness of his existence because he does not have a soul.

Which is funny, because I think you can see David’s soul leaving his body at this exact moment.

Weyland then tries to mash in some existential weight to the movie: they might finally get an answer for “why are we here?” and all that jazz! He also tries to explain why naming a ship Prometheus is totally not like calling it Titanic II: Don’t think about the part of the myth where Prometheus is chained to a rock and has his ever-regenerating liver eaten by an eagle every day! Think about the bit where he brought fire to mankind! We’re gonna bring back that bit!

And then the archaeologists take over the briefing, and this, THIS, is the bit where they entirely lost me. My suspension of disbelief had already been strained by multiple oddities up to this point. My skepticism about these characters in particular was already a bit elevated by their implied invocation of the ancient astronauts concept.

Turns out, only Vickers, Shaw, and Holloway know why they’re here. 

Two years away from Earth. On a massively expensive expedition that intends to make first contact with an alien culture, the first alien culture that humankind has ever found evidence of. Nobody has been briefed up until this point.

This is lunacy.

Explanations have been figured out by fans since then: this is a passion project by Weyland, an annoyance to the rest of the corporate structure that nobody else believes in. The movie eventually intimates this, through Vickers. 

Fans have thus speculated that Weyland was just quarantined off to do his little alien hunt, with no logistical support that would make it actually functional. He believed a crazy theory put forward by Shaw and Holloway, and everyone else wasn’t actually best-of-the-best, they were just whoever would take a big paycheck to do fuck-all for nearly five years of sleeping their way to and from their destination.

I am willing to consider that this was intentional. The movie possibly tries to confirm this with Mr. “I’m here for the money” Fifield, but none of the other characters have enough characterization to determine if this is the general trend.

How could we make a story that more clearly spells this out? Maybe Millburn the biologist could encounter more of the crew talking about the payout from taking the job, or reveal that he himself has some project he needs money for. It would also chip away at the dearth of character-building dialog for most of the cast.

As a result of those deficiencies in characterization, a lot of my discussion of plot points is going to be focused around what they do, rather than why. …Except when it is about the why, at which point the main commentary will be “WHY.”

In any case: while it makes sense, I'm still not certain the film meant for this character motivation. Prometheus is just so loudly explicit with so many of its plot points that it doesn’t seem like this is the case. The movie certainly believes in the sincerity and correctness of the archaeologists, though.

Unfortunately, it also immediately tells me that they’re a couple of wingnuts. I’m not sure if it intends to, for reasons I’ll get into after I foam at the mouth for a little while.

They present a series of artifacts to the crew: Egyptian, Mayan, Akkadian, Sumerian, Hittite, Hawaiian, and their Scottish cave painting. All of them feature “men worshiping giant beings”, who are pointing to what stargazer nerds call an asterism: a pattern of stars. Shaw and Holloway believe that these are aliens that engineered humans into their current state. Shaw literally says “it’s what I choose to believe” as the entirety of their justification for this.

Again: I knew the movie wanted me to take this as truth, within its universe. That’s the implicit deal the movie has made with the audience, this is truth. You are supposed to be contemplating the "whys" of it all. But the movie had also smacked me in the brain so many times in the past five minutes, that I, like Millburn the Biologist, was ready to call bullshit.

I appreciate him for doing so, and it shows he could have been a smart character, but sadly, he is in Prometheus.

Because he is a fictional biologist and I am an actual biologist, I will expand on his argument, as I descend into ranting for the rest of the post.

Millburn objects on the basis of evolutionary history, which the movie only partially succeeds in papering over: the implication is that evolution on Earth was directed with the deterministic outcome of creating something like humans.

This opens up a whole new can of worms that the movie doesn’t get into–when exactly did this engineering start? When great apes evolved? When mammals did? Tetrapods? Skeletons? DNA itself? After all, we know the aliens, now dubbed Engineers by the archaeologists, have DNA. Did they seed all life on Earth? How did they evolve? Our last universal common ancestor is believed to have already been using DNA 3-4 billion years ago, evolving out of a likely RNA-based genetic standard. Hominins diverged from other apes around 15-25 million years ago. What sort of culture would undertake a project that required at least 15 million years on the extreme low end?

All excellent questions! The movie is not concerned with them. I am, and that is part of why this movie still lives in a special, awful place in my head.

This isn’t actually what made me become actively hostile toward the archaeologists, though. What managed that, well! It was their archaeology. Anybody who had an Ancient Egypt Phase in their childhood should be able to articulate multiple reasons why the academic community would’ve laughed these guys out of the building.

Bigness in ancient egyptian art does not indicate literal size. It indicates importance. In fact, the artifacts the movie uses exclusively come from artistic traditions which feature hierarchical or non-literal scale. Do the Engineers turn out to actually be eight feet tall? Yes! Am I still annoyed by this? ABSOLUTELY.

You know what else is a big problem? Many of the cultures they reference here had written language! A LOT of written language! They include Egyptian, Sumerian, Babylonian, and Mayan art in their evidence, all of which not only wrote a LOT of things down, but had a habit of annotating a lot of their art with labels to tell you what was going on! You can actually see some on the props they used in this scene!

Beyond that, they had very prescribed formal styles, where you can follow the action entirely through gestures, held objects, attendant symbols, and clothing! If all these cultures, as implied, had actual, direct contact with aliens, recorded in the art presented here, we would know what they were told.

Skipping ahead of the movie for a minute: the Engineers were apparently not telling humans “we’re here in these stars, come find us”, they were telling humans “settle the fuck down or this is where the hurt’s going to come from”. 

Here's the thing. Ancient peoples weren't stupid. They wouldn't just not talk about this. If giant aliens came down from the sky and gave them a stern talking-to that contradicted their religion, that would be a big deal. And these characters specifically say the Engineers are being "worshiped" in these images! They're apparently taking onboard what's being said!

It is certainly possible for information to be lost. Over long time scales, that's unfortunately the rule, rather than the exception. But again: half the artifacts have writing on them!

I chose to believe that Shaw and Holloway simply did not attempt to read any available translations of attendant texts, and they were thus cursed for their foolishness by the ghosts of Mayan Studies pioneer Yuri Knorozov and EgyptologistJean-François Champollion, and the still-extant spirit of Assyriologist Irving Finkel.

Knorozov knows your sins against Mayan Studies. Knorozov is a vengeful god. Chapollion and Finkel are likewise very cross.

Two last things stood out to me in the theater. One of them was extremely petty but tied into some very serious issues with pseudoscience, and the other one was not.

Pettiness first: the asterism shown in the artifacts is a pattern of six stars. The movie wants you to believe that it is very spooky that the only asterism that precisely matches this pattern are six stars that are too faint to see with the naked eye. This is laughable, both because the asterism is so generic-looking that I can think of several very visible asterisms that are good matches for the pattern, but it also recapitulates a bunch of really fucking annoying shit from pseudoscientific bullshit. 

First: Pseudoscience and pseudohistory likes to make a big deal out of the fact that every culture has stories about the stars. Why? 

The sky is very important to every culture’s mythology, because every culture can see the sky. Like, that’s literally it. People can see the sky. They tell stories about it. There’s not much to do at night except look at the sky, when even keeping a fire lit can be an expensive prospect. It is not even the least bit weird when multiple cultures–all of them in the northern hemisphere in this case!–have stories about the same stars.

Second: Cultures vary in their ability to faithfully reproduce celestial landmarks in art and align their architecture is variable, and not as exact as modern techniques can manage. Pseudoscience will claim that they are exact, when it fits their pre-existing theory, or fudge the difference if they want something to fit their claims.

(This is a photoshopped image, by the way.)

Were the stone age temples of Malta secretly aligned with a particular star that foretold the doom of Atlantis, precisely tracking its location through the sky over thousands of years of Earth’s axial wobbling? No! They were roughly aligned with the sun. Sunlight is important when you don’t have electric lights. Were the Great Pyramids of Giza laid out ten thousand years ago to match the layout of the stars in Orion’s Belt, according to the designs of a legendary lost race of highly advanced non-African people? Were they tapping into the Earth’s magnetic field to generate energy? No! They were aligned with the cardinal directions, and they got them a bit wrong! 

Hell, if we want to play at that game, I found a decent match for the asterism in Stellarium's Egyptian constellation set. Just flip this 90 degrees clockwise and you'll see I'm totally right. Aliens confirmed.

I know the movie is trying to tell me that all the asterisms in the art are precise matches for each other and are thus impossible to explain without intercultural contact (or aliens!!), but it is also showing me that they are not that precise. So, it’s just showing me stars. At least in some of them. Their little charcoal lad from the Isle of Skye may be throwing fruit at his audience.

In fact, there's a further, probably unintentional link to pseudohistorical claims in the artifacts presented: the Maya artifact shown does not actually depict a "giant figure" being worshiped, in fact, it shows one instantly recognizable, known figure in Classical Maya history: It is an altered version of the ornately carved coffin lid of Kʼinich Janaab Pakal I (24 March 603 - 29 August 683), with the top quarter of the carving replaced with a star pattern that looks nothing like the ones on the other artifacts.

The carving shows Pakal in the pose of an infant, entering into death and being reborn. It is packed full of so many symbolic elements that can be easily recognized by those more familiar with the Classical Maya than I am.

Conspiracy theorist Erich von Däniken thought that it showed Pakal rocketing away on a spaceship. Däniken proposed this because he didn't understand the cultural symbolism, but he had seen pictures of astronauts before.

And on that note, 2,400 words into this rant, we get to the actually bad shit. Unfortunately, it ties into the issue I had with the premise to begin with: the real-world context of pseudoscientific claims of ancient alien contact. Specifically, the racism.

We’re going to unspool this more near the end of the movie, because there was further behind the scenes I was not aware of when I first saw Prometheus, and it just compounds this stuff. 

So, when I went on my first tangent on how unpleasant ancient alien theories are, one thing I highlighted is that the further from Western Civilization you get, the more these theories presuppose that fellow humans are incapable of building great works or imagining interesting things. No, they had to be guided, and explicitly shown things that they copied down to the best of their limited capability.

The only european example of alien contact they show is from the Upper Paleolithic, 37,000 years ago. All the examples around the Mediterranean and Mesopotamia range from 5,500-3,700 years ago. The examples from the Classical Maya and Hawaiʻi are from 620 and 680 CE. 

During this period, Tang Dynasty merchants were creating the first paper money as the famous female emperor Wu Zetian was on her way to the throne. The Prophet Muhammad went to al-Aqsa mosque, and we’re only eight years before the birth of Charlemagne’s grandfather. We’re no longer talking ancient, it’s just old.

I want to emphasize that the movie is presenting these not as depictions of myths that have been passed down–though there are more problems with that I’ll get into shortly–these are implied to be contemporary depictions of events witnessed by the artists, who were quite possibly instructed by the Engineers to record a precise pattern of stars. An equivalency is being drawn between stone age Europe, bronze age Africa and the Middle East, and a couple of startlingly recent Mesoamerican and Polynesian cultures. 

But let’s be generous. Maybe these aren’t supposed to be contemporary accounts in these two outlier cases: the movie’s script will certainly indicate later that they have no idea what they’ve implied here. Perhaps these are story traditions that were handed down from the Olmecs and Melanesian precursors of the first to sail to Hawaiʻi. 

Unfortunately, this just recapitulates a different racist trope: that European and more “developed” civilizations invented so much cool and comfortable material culture and philosophy that they forgot the Mystical Religious Truths of the old ways, which were preserved only in Primitive Lands and among Uneducated Peoples, where they never found anything better to do with their time. Oh, if only we had heeded the warnings from those spiritually attuned non-white people!

(Look, I only remember Devil (2010), which has 50% on Rotten Tomatoes, because M Night Shyamalan wrote and produced it, and this was two years after The Happening came out, so I watched it out of morbid curiosity. It's not as unbelievably bad as The Happening, but as shown in the clip above, the spiritually attuned latino security guard Ramirez attributes toast landing jelly side down to Satan. That is an actual thing that happens in the movie. He is proven right.)

But let's be even more generous: someone probably realized that they'd focused near-exclusively on Middle Eastern cultures, and wanted to throw in a couple from elsewhere. Sitting here, having seen the movie in full, this is the most likely option: their inclusion creates a contradiction with a later scene, and was thus probably not checked for consistency. These cultures were thrown in as a bit of background flavor. I list this last, because in the theater, there was no way to know this at the time.

That answer's still not great. Still leaves us in the same position, where Europeans are pretty much given their own agency, while other cultures need to be led.

Oh, and to anyone else who’s made it this far and knows the production history of Prometheus: don’t worry! I know what Ridley Scott told that one interviewer, about a contact between a less-ancient European power and the Engineers. I’m saving that one. I like to save that one, because strategic deployment of that quote made some of my IRL friends scream.

Next time: the Prometheus descends to an alien world, and I descend further into madness. I am going to drag you all down with me.

(Pictured: Yuri Knorozov, and my present mood.)

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Citations for alt text ramblings:

https://www.almendron.com/artehistoria/arte/culturas/egyptian-art-in-age-of-the-pyramids/catalogue-fourth-dynasty/

#Prometheus (2012) #prometheus 2012 #The last time I watched this movie with a scientific colleague and friend #this scene took us twenty minutes to get through #because we were both biologists #plus me with the archaeology and a dash of space nerdery #and they knew mesopotamian history #so by the time we were done with this scene we were ginned up and ready to fight the movie

[matoroblogs]

LEGO Almost Went Bankrupt. These Heroes Saved Our Bricks.

How a brain tumor inspired Bionicle, one of the most popular toys of a generation.

BY DAVID LUMB PUBLISHED: JUN 21, 2020

The Platinum Avohkii mask, a rare one- of-a-kind piece made of solid platinum purchased by Andre Hurley, who has The Bionicle Archives collection

Courtesy Andre Hurley/The Bionicle Archives

In 2003, LEGO seemed to be riding high after shrewd licensing deals brought Star Wars and Harry Potter sets to the masses. But unbeknownst to many—even those inside the company—sales were plummeting, and there were only guesses as to why.

Some blamed poor strategic choices in the 1990s—Legoland theme parks, forays into digital products—for LEGO’s hemorrhaging. All that misguided development time slashed profitability, and even Star Wars and Harry Potter sales shriveled between movie releases. It’s hard to conceive of now, but at the turn of the millennium, beloved LEGO might have been headed toward a pitiful end.

During this fallow period, one product line stood apart with startling, consistent success: Bionicle, a series of buildable action figures backed by rich worldbuilding and cross-platform promotion. Inspired by co-creator Christian Faber’s battle with a tumor at the base of his brain, the toy warriors of Bionicle wouldn’t just conquer their fictional enemies. They’d pioneer innovations that would transform LEGO and rescue the company from possible doom.

Courtesy Andre Hurley/The Bionicle Archives

Today, Christian Faber looks a bit like a Danish Paul McCartney. His youthful smile pairs well with his genial nature, which one might mistake for meekness until he starts talking about his creative projects. The 54-year-old embodies the unchecked enthusiasm you’d expect from a 28-year veteran of LEGO projects. If Faber’s long-time illness dimmed his appetite for play, you wouldn’t know it.

In 1986, Faber began working for Advance, a Copenhagen- based marketing firm that partners with LEGO. But shortly after his career began, Faber’s vision began to falter. A doctor found a benign tumor inside Faber’s pituitary gland that was impeding his sight, a condition called prolactinoma. Doctors said the tumor was maybe in the least accessible spot in the body for surgery, so they prescribed Faber daily medication to keep the tumor from growing. Among the drugs’ side effects, however, were severe nausea and dehydration, effectively sidelining Faber from social activities.

Courtesy Christian Faber

“It was the strangest mix of feelings,” Faber says. “I was happy at the job, but faced the physical and mental strain of the medicine and a long-term illness.”

Faber’s side effects attacked him hardest in the mornings, so he found most of his energy for work at night. Early in his career, Faber designed brochures for LEGO toy lines. Exposure to the different products, including the undersea-based Aquazone and the sophisticated Technic series, gave him experience with LEGO’s standards and practices—a moving target in the mid- 90s, when the rise of computers and video games pressured LEGO to move from their traditional years-long R&D cycle toward what Faber calls ‘craze products,’ toys tuned to current market tastes with a planned one-year shelf life.

The craze-products movement was rife with experimentation for LEGO, and it materialized soon after a medical breakthrough for Faber. After 10 years of daily medication, Faber’s physicians moved him on to a new treatment which, in Faber’s own words, gave him his life back. The new treatment was a regular injection scheduled just once every two weeks, allowing Faber to engage with the world relatively free from side effects. He could chase higher ambitions than brochures, and he had an idea for a new kind of LEGO toy: a sort of Bionicle precursor called Cybots.

Courtesy The LEGO Group

“I was sitting with LEGO Technic and thought I would love to build a character instead of a car,” Faber says. “I thought of this biological thing: The human body is built from small parts into a functional body just like a model. What if you got a box full of spare parts and built a living thing?”

With his assistant graphic designer Jan Kjær, Faber pitched Cybots, a line of humanoid action figures with attachable limbs and ball-and-socket joints. LEGO didn’t furbish Cybots, but they would implement Faber’s concepts in craze products like Throwbots in 1999 and RoboRiders in 2000. By 2001, LEGO was testing a line called Bone Heads of Voodoo Island—masked robots with heads that could shoot off their bodies like Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots. Most of Bionicle’s look had been seeded: masks, buildable bodies, articulate limbs.

Courtesy Andre Hurley/The Bionicle Archives

Bone Heads of Voodoo Island was a bust—focus groups demonstrated kids didn’t respond well to detachable heads—so that same year, LEGO pivoted to focus on Bionicle. The plan was to take a more holistic design approach with these new toys than with craze products, but LEGO extended that comprehensiveness to the worldbuilding around the toys, too, a new strategy for the company. Faber and LEGO design manager Martin Riber Andersen were joined by former BBC film and TV executive Bob Thompson and writer Alastair Swinnerton to refine the Voodoo Island concept and pitch a new story. Faber, fresh from working on Star Wars LEGO sets, imagined something massive.

“After being on Star Wars, I was thinking that the only thing to do from here is our own stuff, but it should be as big as Star Wars,” Faber says. “It should be a big, full universe.”

For the storyline, Faber drew on his experience with prolactinoma. To him, his every-other-week injections seemed like sending in a new wave of protectors to battle his tumor with every dose. Faber imagined this group of disease-fighters arriving on an unknown beach with no memory. The story of these warriors would be called Bionicle, a portmanteau of ‘biological chronicle.’

Courtesy The LEGO Group/Christian Faber

Courtesy The LEGO Group/Christian Faber

Courtesy The LEGO Group/Christian Faber

“We took an episodic story line but chose not to play it out in any single medium,” Thompson told Kidscreen in 2003. “We would take that story and scatter it like a paper trail through different types of media.”

Bionicle’s in-world story evolved through comics and chapter books, written in large part by Greg Farshtey of LEGO’s promotional periodical LEGO MANIA Magazine (also known as LEGO Club Magazine, but now called LEGO Life Magazine). Farshtey followed Bionicle’s story bible from the original team, but as he began accounting for character changes correlating with new toy sets, he added his own takes. By the end of Bionicle’s run in 2010, he had interwoven the story with three feature films and shepherded the comic series that, at its peak, reached almost 2 million readers per month, making it the most widely circulated monthly comic on the planet.

Courtesy Andre Hurley/The Bionicle Archives

By all accounts, Bionicle was the hit LEGO needed. In 2001, its first year on the market, the line brought in over $160 million in sales, it was declared “Most Innovative Toy of the Year” by the Toy Association.

"Flat sales and profit decline made LEGO believe the brick was passé and it needed to move to digital and virtual toys to remain relevant,” David Robertson, author of LEGO history book Brick by Brick, told Popular Mechanics. “But as Bionicle became a success, LEGO learned the difference between sufficient and necessary. It wasn't sufficient to just offer customers another box of bricks, but it was necessary. If a LEGO toy didn't have interlocking plastic pieces, consumers didn't want it. But to succeed and grow, it was necessary to embed a story in that box of pieces and tell that story through comics, books, video games, movies, and events at the LEGO Stores."

Courtesy The LEGO Group

In other words, Bionicle had all the ingredients of a fun LEGO toy, but Faber’s inspiration was key to making it a smash. “[My condition] had a direct effect on my career, and especially on the creation of Bionicle,” he says, ticking off the allegories. “A biological robot attacked by ‘illness,’ waiting for the right ‘medicine’ to arrive. Even the canisters the Toa warriors arrived in resembled the medicine capsules I had to eat every day.”

Bionicle hit its stride just as LEGO’s financials were bottoming out. While LEGO flirted with bankruptcy in 2003, Bionicle accounted for 25 percent of the company’s total revenue and 100 percent of its profits. As LEGO slashed its workforce, reduced the number of pieces it produced, and increased its range of licensing deals, Bionicle continued to diversify. Partnerships spawned. There were Bionicle-branded Nike shoes, McDonald’s Happy Meal toys, even Colgate toothbrushes. The cross-promotion paid off: By the end of Bionicle’s initial run in 2010, it sold over 190 million toys.

All the newness shook up LEGO’s tried-and-true project structure. Bionicle’s multifaceted development process blended design, marketing and engineering teams to hash out new sets, ingest market feedback, receive directives from LEGO executives, and issue their own directives to subsequent narrative and design teams. Under the new dynamic structure, development time for a new toy line at LEGO accelerated from three years to less than one. The rapidity created an exciting energy.

“We broke a lot of new ground experimenting and pushing boundaries,” Bionicle co-founder and design manager Martin Riber Andersen says. “One of the key ethos of the core team was this is a shared collaboration: We stand together. We all believed it was so in contrast to ‘the normal LEGO company’ that we might as well direct our energy to the team instead of our individual career objectives.”

Courtesy The LEGO Group

Courtesy The LEGO Group/Christian Faber

From 2003 to 2005, Bionicle was the reported top-performing LEGO toy line, but after that, sales dipped below expectations. The decline continued to 2009, when LEGO handed down word it was time to end Bionicle. The creators wrapped up the narrative in 2010, but it was hard to let go. Farshtey wrote Bionicle stories on the now-defunct BIONICLEStory.com until 2011, fans dissected the line’s mythology on BZPower forums, and custom Bionicles continued to appear. In 2016, Faber wrote to series fans: “The stories we hear and the stories we tell shape who we are and what we do ... through almost 30 years [of my career in storytelling], no story has proved this stronger than Bionicle. The fans were, are, and will be the true heroes of this ... great adventure.”

These days, you still see Bionicle at toy conventions, and the r/bioniclelego subreddit is alive and well. In fact, the front page of Reddit was graced in November 2019 with an essential, timeless question: “What is the appropriate amount of time to wait before showing your new significant other your Bionicle collection?”

The toys’ invigorating combination of articulate LEGO figures and intricate, multimedia story resonated with the LEGO company as well as fans. The brickmakers use the business strategy they honed on Bionicle with lines like Ninjago today, to great success.

"It's hard to overstate how important the Bionicle line was for LEGO,” Brick by Brick author Robertson notes. “Without the sales and profits of Bionicle in 2003 and 2004, the company would not have survived. Bionicle taught LEGO that success depended on the ability to hook kids on characters and story, and LEGO was smart enough to spread those practices throughout the company."

Courtesy Andre Hurley/The Bionicle Archives

After Bionicle, Swinnerton moved on to write children’s books and TV scripts, Andersen took on a senior position

at a European consulting agency, and Thompson founded a media production and consultancy firm. Farshtey, meanwhile, still edits LEGO’s free fan magazine. All cite Bionicle as high points in their careers.

“We should all be proud of what we achieved individually,” Thompson says. “But in my view, more important is what we did collaboratively. After all, LEGO fans are still talking about what we did with Bionicle—after two decades.”

Faber moved on from his design job at Advance in 2014 after 28 years working on LEGO. His medical journey continues to inspire his creative work, including a post-apocalyptic world he’s designing filled with adventure, danger, and a pro- environmental bent. Looking back, Faber sees the impact his illness and treatment had on the stories and projects he’s touched. Almost 20 years after co-creating the action figures that sustained LEGO through one of the darkest times in its history, talking about Bionicle still makes him reflective.

“Biology is a balance more than a battle between good and bad,” he says. “Ever since Bionicle, balance has been my goal in the stories and pictures I create.”

Courtesy The LEGO Group/Christian Faber

article graphics faber bs01

#sunday paper #bionicle #2020 #article #faber

[loversj0y]

midnight caller

in which barre chords are hard, and being apart from your love is even harder

wilbur soot x reader (gn)

yeah @lyssys this was inspired by your lil post. was supposed to be a blurb. might be longer. 

for tws: theres references to being over life and to wilburs hypochondria but not much other than that i suppose

The emptiness of your apartment was filled only with the soft and gentle sounds of shakily practiced plucking and hands striking chords. The darkness of the midnight sky contrasted the lamp on your bedside, as well as the streetlight from the window casting an orange haze over the room. 

Your hands were shaky. It was important to figure this out. You wanted to figure this out. 

Wilbur was so excited when you asked him. 

“You want me to teach you guitar?” And when you’d subsequently nodded, he’d given you his grin and his praise in response of “Darling, I’d love to. We could play together!”

And he was so, so excited. You couldn’t risk hurting his happiness.

Of course, that was when you two were next to each other. Wilbur was intrigued by America, said he’d always had been, so of course he’d jump at the opportunity to visit his American partner at any turn (aside from his love being housed there, both literally and figuratively). But he would always have responsibilities. And it was a bit hard to keep a secret partner if you would have to stream from their home on another continent. 

This always seemed so easy when Wilbur did it. When his hands wrapped around your own to show you finger placements, or explaining how you can use semitones to make new chords with less strain on your fingers. Maybe things were just easier when he was here. 

But in a sunset glow, hands shook as they moved and tried to remember the words of your boyfriend a few weeks (or maybe months now) before. 

“So, for a standard C, you’ll start with the ring finger on B at the first fret, then your second finger skips G and goes to second fret D, and you finish it with third finger on third fret A. And then you just strum and,” he paused for dramatic effect there, “you have a C chord.” You couldn’t help but look up at his slightly goofy but loving smile. He always was one for the dramatics. He looked up at you and his grin only increased, leaning forward to gently place a kiss on your forehead. 

“Here, you try, darling.” His hand gently took hold of your own, taking each finger and delicately placing it exactly where he’d said. After a few moments of adjusting, you strummed out a C chord, and you could watch the fireworks in Wilbur’s eyes over and over in your head in that moment. 

But now your own eyes were not sparkling but rather dull as exhaustion creeped into the brain. You were still practicing chords, missing your boyfriend and pretending it would make the distance shrink to sit in his clothes and play guitar. But the more and more you messed up the chords, the more lonely you felt. The swell of emotion in your chest finally reached it’s apex when you tried your hand at an F chord, and the only sound that came out was a muted buzzing. You let your head fall against the guitar, letting out a long and low groan. If he was here, it’d be easy. If he was here, it’d make sense. The ache in your chest only continued to grow as you placed your forehead against the guitar, a cold contrast to the warm lips you craved to be placed there instead.  In a moment of frustration, you harshly set the guitar down on the bed next to you, letting your face fall into your hands instead. 

A few silent moments later, your phone set a soft glow across the room, with a message notification and a heart. 

“Good morning, darling. Hope you’re sleeping well. I miss you so much this morning <3” 

Attached with the message was a photo of Wilbur, still with messy bed head, holding a small plushie you’d bought him as a gift last time you visited. That alone was enough to turn the lights up in the room and hit the video call button. 

A few seconds past before he picked up. He was still in bed, face confused as he lifted it up towards his face. 

“Darling? Why are you still up? Isn’t it like… four am for you?”

You sniffled a bit. “Yeah. I couldn’t sleep.”

He nodded softly, leaning back in his bed. “Alright, what can I do for you, love?”

“I dunno. I just- I really, really miss you. I was trying to play guitar, and I just kept fucking up the chords, and I-“ You sighed a shaky breath out, tears welling in your eyes. “Everything is easier when you’re here. I can’t stand not being around you anymore.” 

He frowned softly and nodded as he listened. He pulled the plushie you’d given him closer. “I miss you too, darling. Every day that I wake up without your face next to me I feel the cracks in my heart grow deeper. But, I can at least help with the guitar part. Is it with you?” 

You nodded, straightening up and grabbing the guitar. 

He hummed softly, “Okay, show me what the problem is.” 

You nodded again, leaning the phone against a pillow. You started doing the F chord again, and once again, the same odd buzzing sound came out. 

He made a soft “oh” sound before speaking again, “That used to happen with me before I started my lessons. You have to move your thumb placement, so,” He stood up, grabbing his guitar and setting the phone up like yours was. 

“Right now, you have it nestled along the neck of the guitar. It’s not necessarily wrong, especially for your more basic like C or E chords, but it’s a bit harder when you’re doing a barred chord.”

You nodded, listening to his words closely and feeling warmer just at hearing his voice. 

“So, it’s going to feel weird at first, but place your thumb in the center of the neck, sort of in the middle of where your fingers are placed.” 

You did as he said, and he nodded again. 

“Perfect, you’re doing great, love. Now, strum again.”

You did, and instead of the weird buzzing, you were finally met with the soft, albeit a bit weak, sound of an F chord. You let out a deep breath you didn’t realize you were holding, letting your head fall.

“Thank you,” you whispered softly. 

“Of course, love… do you… want to talk?”

You shook your head softly, “Not really. Just feel really far from you recently. Every time I play it helps because it reminds me of when you were here, but today, I just couldn’t get anything right.” You yawned a bit, setting the guitar down again and grabbing the phone, holding it closer. 

“I know we wanted to wait some time to see each other again so we could still live our own lives, but I really don’t know how to do that anymore. I hate being so far from you, I hate everyone here, work sucks, fuck, I’m even missing Tommy, now.”

“Wow. You have to be really upset if it’s got you missing Tommy.”

“Exactly.” We both laughed a bit before you continued more, “But seriously. I just don’t know if I can handle it anymore.”

“Hey, don’t talk like that. You can handle anything. If it helps, I haven’t been much better. I get scared every time you go to sleep, or when you tell me that you will be gone for a bit. I’m scared something is going to happen to you one day, and that I won’t be there to help you. I don’t think I’d ever be okay if I lost you.”

You laid down, sighing softly. There was a silent moment before Wilbur spoke again,

“You know, there’s a far more simply solution to this.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Here’s the plan. You go to bed, and by the time you wake up, I’ll have everything figured out. I’m talking every detail, jobs, plane tickets, everything. Every tiny detail.”

“Wait- Wil. Are you talking about me moving there?”

He blushed a bit before nodding softly, “Yeah. If you’ll accept, and are okay with moving all the way out here, I’d love to have you live with me.”

You were silent for a moment, before nodding softly. “Yeah. Okay.”

A grin split out on his face, and he stood, jumping out of bed and letting out a huge yell. 

“My darling loves me! Brighton, are you hearing this? I am in love! My tiny person will be moving in with me!” He was essentially yelling out the window now as you laughed loudly. 

“You’re going to get a noise complaint.”

“Hey, wouldn’t be the first. And with you here, it won’t be the last.”

“I- you- stop it!” 

He just laughed, grinning at you, “Sorry my lovely little piece of sea glass, I’m just incredibly excited. I’m going to start figuring stuff out literally right now.” 

You grinned quietly, “Okay. Mind staying on the phone so I can at least fall asleep with you there?”

He smiled fondly. “Of course. And soon enough, you’ll never have to worry about falling asleep with out me ever again. I won’t even let you. I’ll find you wherever you are and wrap you in a blanket, and we will cuddle. No choice there.”

You laughed softly, “I don’t need a choice, because I already agree.” You yawned again.

He smiled fondly, sitting down at his computer and setting the phone up to view his face. “Sleep well, darling. I love you so much. I’ll send you all the information I get as I plan it, okay?”

“Are you gonna make a spreadsheet?”

“Of course I am.”

“I expected nothing less,” You yawned softly, eyes starting to slip, ”I love you too, my favorite wet bandaid. I’ll dream of you.”

“It won’t be a dream soon.”

#wilbur soot x reader #mcyt x reader #dsmp x reader #mar writes

[dimbulb0]

Cassie said over the phone that she had outgrown her bra again, but there was something in her voice that hinted she was hiding something. When you got home from work that afternoon, you heard her giggling in the bedroom. "All right," you said. "Let's see what ha--" Cassie was sitting on the edge of the bed--or at least someone with the face of Cassie. She was almost completely naked, save for a few straining stitches of black lingerie. Her breasts had become two globes of flesh that bulged from every angle and had to have been at least a hundred pounds each. Her hips were enormous, so large that they looked like they couldn't fit through the bedroom door without scraping both sides. Her legs were as thick as tree trunks and seemed to go on forever. "Holy shit!" you exclaimed. "Thank god," she said. "You're finally home!" You stared at the woman--no, monster--in shock. You'd never seen anything like it before; not even the most insane pornography videos could come close to conveying just how much bigger your wife had gotten since this morning. Cassie had always been obsessed over her breasts. Although she had proudly flaunted her C cups whenever she could, she had wanted to go up a few sizes for years. The clinic she went to yesterday advertised natural breast enhancement, but this was far from natural. "What happened!? Did you call the clinic?" "No, why would I? Just look how big my boobs have gotten." She patted one for effect. "But… but… you're eight feet tall!" Cassie rolled her eyes. "No I'm not." She stood up, as if to prove her point--and up--and up! You tried to hold your ground, but her sheer enormity caused you to step back as she reached full height. Her head was an inch away from the ceiling. She looked around the room in awe of her new perspective. "Oh! I didn't even notice." "What do you mean you didn't notice? Look at you. How could you not have known?" "You don't understand," Cassie said. "My breasts feel so good every time they grow, it's all I can think about. I guess the rest of me was growing, too." Your brain struggled to process what she was saying. When she came home yesterday, she was noticeably larger chest-wise, but only by a few cup sizes. You both had a good (and sexy) time having her try on her old bras and seeing how much she had outgrown them. Her new bras were all even a little bit too big, but she said that she might still grow a little bit as a side-effect of the treatment. Now, one of those new bras was close to exploding. "Every time? How many times has it happened?" "I tried to hold back, but--" she let slip a small sigh. "But I couldn't help myself. I wanted to wait so you could see . . ." "How many times?" you asked again. ". . . but now that you're here . . ." She tore off one of the remaining cups on her bra, baring one monstrous tit, and groped as much flesh as she could. She grew. Her breasts were already so gigantic that the first thing you noticed was Cassie's head bumping into the ceiling. The whole house shuddered. She gave herself another squeeze and her boobs finally grew enough to completely rend what was left of her top. "Yes . . ." she hissed as she grew bigger in pulsing waves of growth. "More!" You began to back away as Cassie's massive breasts, free from their confines, began to loom higher and higher over you. "Stop! You'll outgrow the house!" Just before you turned and ran, you caught sight of the hungry look in her eyes. "Think of how big my breasts will be by then!" she moaned, crouching down as she gained another foot in height . . .

*****

Made with NovelAI. Prompt: giantess, tall woman, sitting on bed, legs spread, growing bigger, curvy, sexy, torn bra, towering, heavy, filling, squashed, titanic, laughing, too big, squeezing

#giantess growth #giantess #growth #growth caption #breast expansion

[sataniccapitalist]

#thewaronyou

Another winter of death is now unfolding in the United States and across the Northern Hemisphere as the JN.1 variant of the coronavirus continues to surge globally. Wastewater data from the United States released Tuesday indicate that upwards of 2 million people are now being infected with COVID-19 each day, amid the second-biggest wave of mass infection since the pandemic began, eclipsed only by the initial wave of the Omicron variant during the winter of 2021-22.

There are now reports on social media of hospitals being slammed with COVID patients across the US, Canada and Europe. At a growing number of hospitals, waiting rooms are overflowing, emergency rooms and ICUs are at or near capacity, and ambulances are being turned away or forced to wait for hours to drop off their patients.

According to official figures, COVID-19 hospitalizations in Charlotte, North Carolina are now at their highest levels of the entire pandemic. In Toronto, Dr. Michael Howlett, president of the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians, told City News, “I’ve worked in emergency departments since 1987, and it’s by far the worst it’s ever been. It’s not even close.” He added, “We’ve got people dying in waiting rooms because we don’t have a place to put them. People being resuscitated on an ambulance stretcher or a floor.”

Dr. Joseph Khabbaza, a pulmonary and critical care specialist at the Cleveland Clinic, told the Today Show website: “The current strain right now seems to be packing a meaner punch than the prior strains. Some features of the current circulating strain probably (make it) a little bit more virulent and pathogenic, making people sicker than prior (variants).”

Indeed, two recent studies indicate that JN.1 more efficiently infects cells in the lower lung, a trait that existed in pre-Omicron strains which were considered more deadly. One study from researchers in Germany and France noted that BA.2.86, the variant nicknamed “Pirola” from which JN.1 evolved, “has regained a trait characteristic of early SARS-CoV-2 lineages: robust lung cell entry. The variant might constitute an elevated health threat as compared to previous Omicron sublineages.”https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/1MGIQxPf0Ig?rel=0An appeal from David North: Donate to the WSWS todayWatch the video message from WSWS International Editorial Board Chairman David North.DONATE TODAY

The toll on human life from the ongoing wave of mass infection is enormous. It is estimated that one-third of the American population, or over 100 million human beings, will contract COVID-19 during just the current wave. This will likely result in tens of thousands of deaths, many of which will not be properly logged due to the dismantling of COVID-19 testing and data reporting systems in the US. When The Economist last updated its tracker of excess deaths on November 18—before the JN.1 wave began—the cumulative death toll stood at 27.4 million, and nearly 5,000 people were continuing to die each day worldwide.

The current wave will also induce further mass suffering from Long COVID, which has been well known since 2020 to cause a multitude of lingering and often debilitating effects. Just last week, a pre-print study was published in Nature Portfolio showing that COVID-19 infection can cause brain damage akin to aging 20 years. The consequences are mental deficits that induce depression, reduced ability to handle intense emotions, lowered attention span, and impaired ability to retain information.

Other research indicates that the virus can attack the heart, the immune system, digestion and essentially every other critical bodily function. The initial symptoms of COVID-19 might resemble those of the flu, but the reality is that the virus can affect nearly every organ in the body and can do so for years after the initial infection. While vaccination slightly reduces the risks of Long COVID, the full impact of the virus will be felt for generations.

The latest winter wave of infections and hospitalizations takes place just eight months after the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Biden administration ended their COVID-19 public health emergency (PHE) declarations without any scientific justification. This initiated the wholesale scrapping of all official response to the pandemic, giving the virus free rein to infect the entire global population ad infinitum.

A virtual blackout of any mention of the coronavirus in the corporate media accompanied the swan song of official reporting. From then on, if illnesses at hospitals or among public figures were referenced at all, it was always with the euphemism “respiratory illness.” The words COVID, coronavirus and pandemic have been all but blacklisted, and the facts about the dangers of the disease have been actively suppressed.

Summarizing the cumulative results of this global assault on public health, the WSWS International Editorial Board wrote in its New Year 2024 statement:

All facts and data surrounding the present state of the pandemic are concealed from the global population, which has instead been subjected to unending lies, gaslighting and propaganda, now shrouded in a veil of silence. There is a systematic cover-up of the real gravity of the crisis, enforced by the government, the corporations, the media and the trade union bureaucracies. Official policy has devolved into simply ignoring, denying and falsifying the reality of the pandemic, no matter what the consequences, as millions are sickened and thousands die globally every day.

In response to the latest wastewater data, there have only been a handful of news articles, most of which have sought to downplay the severity of the current wave and largely ignored the deepening crisis in hospitals.

The official blackout has given rise to an extraordinary contradiction in social life. The reality of mass infection means that everyone knows a friend, neighbor, family member or coworker who is currently or was recently sick, or even hospitalized or killed, by COVID-19. Yet the unrelenting pressure to dismiss the danger of the pandemic means that shopping centers, supermarkets, workplaces and even doctor’s offices and hospitals are full of people not taking the basic and simple precaution of masking to protect themselves. Every visit outside one’s home carries the risk of being infected, with unknown long-term consequences.

As the pandemic enters its fifth year, it is critical to draw the lessons of this world historical experience. The past four years have demonstrated unequivocally that capitalist governments are both unwilling and incapable of fighting this disease. Their primary concern has always been to ensure the unabated accumulation of profits by corporations, no matter the cost in human lives and health.

The real solution to the coronavirus is not to ignore it, but to develop a campaign of elimination and eradication of the virus worldwide. To do so requires the implementation of mask mandates, mass testing and contact tracing, as well as the installation of updated ventilation systems and the safe deployment of Far-UVC technology to halt the spread of the virus. The resources for this global public health program must be expropriated from the banks and financial institutions, which are responsible for the mass suffering wrought by the pandemic.

All of these measures cut directly across the profit motive and the real disease of society: capitalism. As such, the struggle against the coronavirus is not primarily medical or scientific, but political and social. The international working class must be educated on the real dangers of the pandemic and mobilized to simultaneously stop the spread of the disease and put an end to the underlying social order that propagates mass death. This must be developed as a revolutionary struggle to establish world socialism.

#the enemy is strong #protect yourself #protect your family

[canmom]

@centrally-unplanned - replying here since OP of that post seems pretty upset and I don't want to bother them any more:

Why DO anime production lines produce in 720 for the production art? I have heard that before but it never made a lot of sense to me - sure sure I get that some of it might be broadcast in 720p, but surely it would make better art to produce at higher resolutions. Is it just a “in 2008 720p was all any TV was doing and we just haven’t updated since and so now are a bit behind”? Or is maybe “honestly most of them have adapted already and *our* sources for this knowledge are outdated?” Or is there a real art reason for that choice?

I honestly don't know! To me it seems like often you get really nice drawings at the genga stage and then they lose a lot of their character at douga, and I wish I knew why. But I have done guesses about technical reasons.

One is computer memory. Animation software can be a real memory hog since it has to hold just so many pixels uncompressed at once. Using indexed colour helps a lot (one byte instead of four bytes per pixel per layer for 256 indexed colours vs 8-bit RGBA). For older computers, this may have been a consideration perhaps.

That said, I find it hard to believe that's the whole reason. I hit my RAM limit when drawing a ridiculously overcomplicated cut in Krita with hundreds of frames and dozens of layers at like 1440p res, and most anime cuts do not have anything like that much.

Another reason may be to save time and costs. The higher your res the more time you have to spend fixing stuff - small gaps, times when the fill tool won't get into those fiddly little corners.

Outside of that though, I don't know. Maybe it's just when the norm wasn't to watch anime on a computer screen near your face, blurry lines and low detail bg characters weren't as noticeable? One day maybe I'll be able to ask someone in the industry about this lol...

There's other stuff that's common in modern compositing I just don't get. e.g. a haze effect using a blurry white shape in the foreground seems to be common (there's a brief bit in Shirobako where you see a character apply it), and that just seems to be going to extra effort make the picture worse to me. I generally do not love gradients, though that's a matter of taste. A lot of colour design in mainstream shows seems to be either very flat or overly contrasting hdr-like pseudo-photorealism, even though the indie scene - stuff like Eve's videos - has been pushing into some really cool spaces.

And like OK, some stuff, like digital backgrounds with very obvious textures and artefacts, can be explained by the fact that the industry is strained to breaking point and taking every shortcut it can to release on time, or the training crisis hitting the layout system. But I do feel like if I pull out a random 80s anime, it will probably have much nicer colours than a recent one, and I don't really know why that is. (Selective memory maybe lol)

All that said, things do seem to be looking up a bit... I feel like I've been seeing an uptick in shows with good colour design and more thoughtful compositing in the last few years. So here's hoping that will continue...

#anime #animation

[princessaurorasdiary]

Diary 2/26: life update cause it's been 6 months at least

Hi 👋🏼, It's been a long time, about 6 months about. I'm 23 now

I have a lot of up and downs and haven't felt like writing, and my main creative outlet has been TikTok because to be honest, I feel less alone when I can see that people saw my video, and maybe ever gave it a like or comment

I guess I'll talk a bit about the last 6 months, I work at a craft store now, quit my old horrible job that mistreated me constantly, got COVID soon after quitting the old job, went and saw a medium sized artist I like in concert, second ever concert, her name is Tessa Violet, dragged my bff with me cause we planned it for her to come down and visit me during Spring Break.

I also confessed to my crush, they said they like me too and have just as long as I have but she thought me flirting was pitty compliments cause ADHD runs through both of us lol, it's been moving really slowly cause things keep happening to her, the universe is just slapping her weekly bro.

I don't hate my job at the craft store, but I miss doing a version of my chosen career as a baker/cake decorator, really wish that place wasn't so toxic and that I had a car already.

I'm still trying to get a car, it took me 3 months to get a new job after quitting my old one, the COVID thing was a month of that but also just this job market sucks, origami current job was seasonal, but I have really good numbers on the register and I'm good at the other parts like stalking and sorting and fixing things on the shelfs so I got kept on. I make sure not to give a ADHD 100% anymore, it killed me at my old job and whenever I only had a normal person's 100% they acted like I was failing when I was just doing a normal amount instead of a crazy amount, so I learned not to grind myself to the bone.

I can't remember if I've mentioned this, probably not tho, I go to a weekly crochet club for months now, it's all older ladies and me but it's better than nothing with how I don't really have friends other than my best friend. They care about me and I care about them and it's nice to talk to others once a week.

I kinda ran outta steam for finding friends the last 2 months, I was trying and trying and I'm just tired after months and months or trying 🤷

I think about making a post all the time, but also feel like I'm writing into the void, which has been terrifying me lately, the void that is, long story short, I was stressed AF and couldn't sleep for days the day before Halloween and tried to smoke to fall asleep, but before I'd just taken a hit or two of my brothers sleep type vape, but actually smoked it that night for the first time and instead tripped horribly and it's still affecting me mentally, the memory of the horror that was that night.

Editing a note: I was basically trying to test for a bit if a sleep strain of weed would help with my at the time rampid insomnia since sleep meds either don't work on me or give me bad side effects, but after that night I'm probably never touching it again so ✌🏼

I also am just not feeling great medically, I just got my broken tooth pulled through and did my wisdoms at the same time and already feel better even with the jaw pain, so hopefully some of the not feeling well was because of my teeth, I've been working on trying to finally fix my teeth as well and I think it might actually happen now

Anyways, it's after 3:20am so I'm gonna go lay down even if I don't sleep till 4 cause laying down is better than nothing

#diary #diary entry #dear diary

[flameaurasphere]

"Miserere mei, Deus” by Gregorio Allegri

Gregorio Allegri (c. 1582-1652) was a late Renaissance composer, best remembered for his ‘Miserere’ for two choirs. Allegri began singing in San Luigi dei Francesi before joining the Sistine Choir in 1629. Renaissance music was built upon plainchants, and is characterised by polyphony, imitation, motets, superimpositions, and overlapping cadences that convey flow, expressiveness, and devotion. ‘Miserere’ exemplifies Renaissance polyphony—one choir of five voices sings a fauxbourdon of a plainchant for the Tonus peregrinus, while the other choir of four voices supplies with elaborations and cadenzas, forming a 9-part polyphony.

Sistine Codex of 1661

‘Miserere’ is an acapella performed exclusively during Holy Week in the Sistine Chapel for ages. The church forbade it from being transcribed, so while the original 1661 codex might not reflect the true composition, it reveals the secret ornamentation practice of the olden Sistine Chapel Choir.

The Sistine Chapel Choir is a permanent choir in the chapel that never sings with instrument accompaniments. In this historical recording, a group of voices sings the plainchant, and then a second group of voices responds with elaboration. This repeats four times, as Allegri intended. The two choirs are distinct—even without video, one could picture that the second choir is singing far away at another end of a massive room. While I appreciated the contrast as it dynamised the plainchant, the upper voices in the second choir had drowned out the lower voices, resulting in an “airiness”. Nonetheless, the voices were well-blended and captured the essence of Renaissance music—the melodies flowed smoothly with no fixed tempo, and the music was expressive, whereby the soft tenor solos sounded pleading, but the choir in tutti sounded haunting. ‘Miserere’ means "Have mercy on me, O God" in Latin; fittingly, the acoustics of the chapel allowed their voices to echo, amplifying their devotion to God.

King’s College Choir 1963

The world-famous Choir of King’s College, Cambridge sings in the King’s College Chapel. This is one of the first modern recordings, conducted by David Willcocks and featured soloist Roy Goodman. It differs vastly from the original—during the 19th century, ‘Miserere’ was incorrectly transcribed, transposing the solo choir up a fourth.

Although sung in English, this version still preserved the smooth melodies and distribution of rubato in the original 1661 codex. However, it is more textured, dynamic, and exciting. The articulation of words is clearer; the tenors used a higher vocal placement to produce a more lightweight sound; the basses were audibly growing louder and softer, shaping a slow push-and-pull melody; the boy sopranos pierced through with their resonance and agility in the ornamented lines. Nevertheless, the pièce de resistance is boy treble Goodman’s breath-taking high notes during the second half of the four-voice falsobordone. Though his entry was a little shaky, the transition to the “top C” note was slick and precise, with a slight crescendo and close-to-none sliding. It is astonishing how Goodman sustained those notes—four times—without sounding strained; his pure and aethereal voice quality cannot be replicated by a female soprano. The high notes are my favourite part in contemporary ‘Miserere’, and I have yet to hear one as moving as Goodman

Ofra Harnoy

Ofra Harnoy is a widely celebrated classical cellist with over 40 solo albums. This recording is part of her ‘Back to Bach’ album, filled with Baroque favourites. Harnoy’s vision was to design a large cello ensemble by herself. To attain that effect, she harnessed the power of technology to overdub and produce multi-tracks.

I thought Harnoy’s work was innovative—the mixing and mastering were done so well that with eyes closed, her arrangement did seem like a grand cello ensemble. The tempo was a bit slower than the original 1661 codex and King’s College Choir 1963 recording, but that allowed the strings to ring longer, hence extending the crescendos and decrescendos. Additionally, the lower parts are more discernible than in the previous recordings. The rich bass and use of vibrato dramatised the music, creating a hauntingly beautiful and poignant experience. The high notes did not overpower, unlike in the King’s College Choir 1963 version, hence highlighting the polyphony.

One might think that Harnoy made her cello sing, but I felt that she transformed ‘Miserere’ into a cello piece. My only critique is that all the verses should have been recorded, to demonstrate how each verse differs in the embellishments—for example, the appoggiaturas sung by the higher sections.

Montechait

Montechait is a YouTuber who does piano cover videos and arrangements. He played on a Studiologic SL88 Studio keyboard, then produced and edited the audio using Pianoteq and Cubase software. 

The pitches were not the most precise in the original 1661 codex and King’s College 1963 recordings. Hence, the pitch-perfect keyboard demonstrated how the melodies could sit with one another to deliver chords that assert gloom. I enjoyed that the ending verse was in forte, emphasising the volume of a 9-part polyphony. But this performance lacked expressiveness, which is quintessential to Renaissance music. Despite Pianoteq being one of the greatest virtual instruments that simulate the playability of an acoustic instrument, the recording had a largely manufactured sound. Furthermore, the piano is limited in the expressive shaping of notes as it does not offer dynamic nuance or vibrato.

I learnt that every performer has a unique story to tell in ‘Miserere’—whether it is of worship by the Sistine Codex of 1661, of tradition by the King’s College Choir, of beauty by Ofra Harnoy’s soul-stirring cello, or melancholy by Montechait’s solemn keyboard. In my opinion, the key change from G minor to C minor—due to scribal error—echoes the famous saying: “There are no mistakes, just happy accidents.” ~Bob Ross.

#music appreciation #critique #critic #school assignment #essay #student #Miserere mei deus #Gregorio Allegri #late renaissance #choir #song #church #choral #Sistine Codex of 1661 #King’s College Choir 1963 #Ofra Harnoy #Montechait #classical music #youtube #music #singapore #Youtube #roy goodman

[kyndaris]

Blessed Mother

The Diablo series has always had a soft spot in my heart ever since I played the second game back when I was 12 at the behest of a few school friends. Yes, it was MA15+ and I probably shouldn’t have been playing it at that age but I managed to convince my father to buy me it, one of a thousand cherished memories that I had with him, because I was already hooked on Blizzard’s other games: Warcraft and Starcraft. So began my descent into the terrifying world of Sanctuary and humanity’s quest to purge the evils that stalk its land.

Unlike its other major franchises, Diablo is an action role-playing game. Or, ARPG for short. But for many, it’s known as the one game that helps most people develop repetitive strain injury (RSI) because of the constant clicking that goes throughout the gameplay.

Diablo IV continues in this vein as very little of the core gameplay has changed. The playable character moves around by clicking the mouse to a specific spot on the map. The playable character attacks by clicking on enemies. Occasionally, one can mix it up with a variety of other skills by pressing something on the number pad.

That is, of course, if you play Diablo IV on the computer. The controls might be a little different on consoles but I’ve always found that the best way to play isometric click-heavy ARPGs on computer.

Besides, I didn’t get a heavy-duty PC just to write my stories. I mean, yes, that is the primary purpose but not the sole reason. I do use it occasionally to play video games that seem best suited for the PC. Why, just recently, I even bought an external SSD to possibly install Baldur’s Gate 3 and Starfield because these games require an SSD. And while my PC does have an SSD installed, since I bought my PC about five years ago, the storage on it is only about 256GB with quite a bit of it taken up by...well...normal PC function.

How was I supposed to know that game development would go towards SSD? I’m not a TECH expert with a pulse on the ground when it comes to new technology although my work colleagues think differently.

Anyways, back to the game at hand: Diablo IV.

While I was excited to re-enter the world of Sanctuary following the events of Diablo III and the interesting premise promised by the trailers regarding Lilith, it is my personal opinion that opening up the world only served to damage the game. While some might enjoy having an open world to explore, I personally found the countless cellars and dungeons repetitive. With level scaling and how quickly I managed to level up to 50, much of Diablo IV felt much the same. Especially when I’d unlocked all the skills that could fill my skill hotbar.

True, I could have respecced my character but there wasn’t much need for it with my storm wolf druid. It was an effective DPS machine and with the added ability to fortify at the end, I was essentially unkillable in the lower world tiers. Especially when I began to be level past the recommend threshold.

Open worlds, it must be said, used to be one of my favourite game builds. However, as worlds have become larger with needless collectibles to fill out the world, they have also become some of my most hated elements because I’m a compulsive explorer - always desperate to check out the next nook or cranny in case of side quests or something interesting. Diablo IV proved infuriating in this respect as it had so many side quests but no way to track the ones you’d completed except with a ?/45 on the world map. This made knowing which side quests I’d completed difficult to keep track of and figure out which ones I was still missing.

For a completionist such as myself, it was a nightmare. 

Even as I attempted to get most of the blue exclamation marks that I could find. It doesn’t help that they also only appear if you’re in that particular segment of the map, which makes it even harder to mop out unless I decided to hop between fast travel portals.

Despite this, I can see why the developers decided to go for an open world. After all, Diablo end-game (at least from 3 onwards) has always been about collecting the best gear and becoming stronger than you were before. Slap on live-service with battlepass and it’s a winning formula to become an endless grind quest. 

A part of me almost wanted to shake the developers and have them turn the franchise into a massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG) for it appears to be the direction that the franchise is going. Should it go down this route, I’d also be happy for it to ditch the isometric focus on the ground. 

Alternatively, Activision Blizzard, you could also scale it back down. At least for the story segments and have it opened up afterwards. I much prefer the more compact nature of Diablo II, where I was free to explore the map of the immediate area, kill all the enemies it contained and be awed by the majesty of how large the world COULD be rather than be faced with all the open space and respawning enemies. Which, also, only seem to attack the playable character rather than have any real conflict amongst themselves.

Are you honestly telling me that the demons and the snake cultists wouldn’t fight each other or the hellspawn-esque willdlife?

Honestly, I pity the people still alive on Sanctuary. It’s clear that they can get nothing done without being mobbed by an endless amount of bandits, goatmen, cultists and demons.

Yes, it works from a gameplay perspective but it SUCKS from a world-building perspective. The people of Sanctuary might as well give up and succumb to the end if all they have to look forward to is being eaten alive by cannibals that are just outside their gates.

Now, most of my readers, and friends, would know that I love myself a good story. And Diablo IV delivered it, especially at the start. Lilith’s arrival in Sanctuary was suitably chilling and the prologue with the people at Nevesk laid the ground work for what I had hoped would be an interesting throughline of the greyness that encompasses real-life morality and perhaps have the playable character struggle with the implications of ingesting Lilith’s blood.

But did we get any of that?

No. No, we didn’t.

The playable character serves as a patsy to link up the other main characters: Lorath, Donan and Nyrelle. It is never explained why the playable character is so strong, tearing through demons left, right and centre as they traipse through Estuar (the eastern continent of Sanctuary). Or how they seem able to resist the influence of Lilith’s blood in their veins. Even Lorath is amazed at their mental fortitude but it’s never truly explored. I never see my character waver in their convictions although there is a scene where they confess to Nyrelle that they have flaws.

WHERE ARE THESE FLAWS? All that the playable character does is help out those that need it and shout defiance at the demons of Hell.

I would have preferred a story with more player choice and to see us grapple with the consequences of our actions. Instead, most of the major decisions were made by other characters and the player character was simply along for the ride as the hired muscle. 

It would have been far more interesting to me if we could have chosen to follow Lilith rather than stop her and allow Mephisto to do what he will upon Sanctuary. I mean, with that ending, there is little doubt in my mind that the world will be drenched in Hatred. A rather frightening prospect although it’s no different to the world we live in today. And while we fight amongst ourselves, the world as we know it steps ever closer to the edge with climate change wreaking havoc.

Let it be known that our current civilisation was laid low by our own hubris and the fact that we had grown fat and indolent on greed that thinking to change our ways to ensure our own survival came second to materialistic objects.

But enough of the doom and gloom! Diablo IV! 

Personally, while I am fascinated with the lore of the Diablo franchise, this recent game left me wanting. I would have much preferred a more engaging story where the playable character didn’t sit on the sidelines as the other characters decided the fate of the world. In fact, I’d have rather a slow-burn corruption story where we step off the path of the lawful good and accept the lesser-evil to save Sanctuary.

Or perhaps have us turn away from the Light entirely and fight against the Heavens for their callous disregard of humans.

At this point, I probably have a corruption kink. 

Wait. What are you doing?

No. Don’t look at that!

...

...

...

Okay, yes. Voldemort x Hermione Granger and Voldermort x Harry Potter are a few of the things that I like to peruse on the odd occasion. No, I won’t explain myself.

All right. Where were we? Ah, right. BALANCE!

For all its talk of balance, Diablo IV very much likes to paint things in black and white. Lilith, the Mother of Sanctuary, has an evil plan to cull the weak. As such, we must stop her even if it would open us up to the Greater Evils. Elias, because he brought the Mother back, is also evil despite his intention to save Sanctuary because of the ongoing threat.

As for the Angels, well, they’ve all apparently abandoned humanity. They might not have voted to destroy Sanctuary but they are doing nothing to combat the threat of the Greater Evils in the world. 

Tyrael, a mainstay of the last two games, is absent in Diablo IV and its difficult to understand why.

In any case, if Activision Blizzard ever saw fit to paint out a little more of the world, I would have liked to play a game where the playable character deals with the corruption of the Zakarum by Mephisto. 

Or maybe if we finally saw a few demons turn to the light. 

Why is it that angels can fall but demons remain forever in the depths of Hell?

Despite quite a few gripes regarding Diablo IV, I still enjoyed the majority of the game. My only wish was that it was more concise without so many open-world shenanigans thrown in to elongate the longevity of the game. Yes, there will be  a large group of people that will enjoy the end-game portion of it, but for those that thrive on story, the open world proves to be detrimental to one’s enjoyment. Especially when the world is so utterly grim. 

And I think the wider question that needs to be asked is if Sanctuary ought to be saved or not.

#video games #diablo iv #lilith #mephisto #should the franchise be renamed mephisto? #nyrelle #lorath #donan #the cycle of war

[pinkbelievercycle]

This Is Your Brain on grey python strain

Everything about Get A Euphoric High With Gary Payton Weed Strain

Table of ContentsAll About Gary Payton Weed Strain Review8 Easy Facts About Gary Payton Strain - Review & Info DescribedFacts About Gary Payton Weed Strain Information RevealedGet This Report on Gary Payton Strain - Hybrid Cannabis Video, Thc, Terpenes

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The 3-Minute Rule for Gary Payton Strain - Review & Info

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8 Simple Techniques For Cookies Gary Payton Marijuana Strain Information

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In spite of being called after an NBA legend, the Gary Payton grass pressure won't leave you in a state to talk, much less dunk a basketball. gary patron strain. If you're appearing for a tough smart high undoubtedly attempt this stress out! Read through on to get more information regarding the mental and also physical impacts of the pressure (gary payton קנאביס).

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These buds are actually. rootbeer float strain. The most ideal opportunity to use this tension is actually in the evenings when you don't possess any kind of job delegated perform (cookies packwoods gary payton). Gary Payton possesses a thus deep blue sea leisure can at some point trigger you to float off. Ensure you go to home or even in a safe and also pleasant location.

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Beginner tobacco smokers ought to certainly not make an effort and trying out this stress, while as well as start along with a dish rather of a forthright. gary payton strain percent. If you are actually seeking a stress that will definitely soothe your thoughts, rest your body, as well as put you in a pleased as well as euphoric mood after that Gary Payton is actually the grass pressure for you. gary cookies strain.

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[useful-health]

Spectacle Saviour: My iGenics Review

For years, I've relied on spectacles, or as some of you might call them, glasses, to see the world clearly. They've been faithful companions, but let's be honest, they can be a bit of a faff sometimes. Constantly cleaning them, the frantic searches when you misplace them – you know the struggle is real! So, when I came across iGenics, a vision supplement being touted as a "hot new offer," my curiosity was piqued. After all, the idea of naturally improving my eyesight was certainly appealing.

A Scientific and Natural Approach

What initially drew me to iGenics was their focus on both science and natural ingredients. Their website, packed with informative articles and engaging videos, explained their unique formula. It combines well-respected ingredients like lutein and zeaxanthin, which have scientific backing for eye health, with the goodness of natural vitamins and minerals. iGenics seemed to offer a holistic approach, not just a quick fix. It was about nourishing my eyes from the inside out, something that resonated with me.

Effortless Integration into my Routine

Being a busy bee, convenience is key. Thankfully, iGenics comes in easy-to-swallow capsules. No more fiddling with complicated routines or messy concoctions. Just a quick pop with a cup of tea, and I'm sorted. This made incorporating iGenics into my daily life a breeze. Additionally, the website offered a variety of resources, both written articles and video talks from experts. This catered perfectly to my learning style, whether I preferred in-depth reading or engaging visuals.

Real People, Real Results

Reviews are a fantastic way to gauge a product's effectiveness, and iGenics didn't disappoint. The website featured testimonials from real people sharing their positive experiences. Hearing their stories about sharper vision and reduced eye strain definitely resonated with me. It wasn't just marketing speak; iGenics seemed to be making a genuine difference in people's lives.

A Brighter Future for my Peepers

It's important to be realistic – iGenics isn't a magic potion that will instantly grant you perfect vision. However, after using it consistently for a few months, I've noticed a positive change. My eyes feel less strained, especially after long days spent glued to screens. Colours appear more vibrant, and my overall vision feels sharper. While I haven't completely ditched my spectacles yet, I definitely find myself reaching for them less often.

A Visionary Investment for your Eyes

Overall, I'm thoroughly impressed with iGenics. It's a well-researched supplement that prioritizes both convenience and natural ingredients. The combination of informative resources, genuine user experiences, and the noticeable improvement in my own eye health has made iGenics a worthwhile investment for me. If you're looking for a natural way to support your vision and rediscover the joy of seeing the world a little clearer, then iGenics is certainly worth exploring.pen_sparktunesharemore_vert

#financial assistance #mutual aid #financial aid #the vision #vision pro #home improvement #self improvement

[fryeroach24]

Savoring Video clips on the Entire world-broad-website

You might be dealing with Television just 1 night time scanning by way of the reruns believing it really is pitiful how modest tiny little bit there is to watch any more when a astounding motion photograph trailer commences. It is each individual little issue you like - the really most effective stars, the wit, the motion - and your coronary heart beats a nominal far more speedily in anticipation - if only you could possibly point of view it Proper NOW! Efficiently, the motion image area has essentially read through you. Along with with the velocity of the entire world-vast-net, buyers have essentially now occur to a producer-new section of want. A$AP Rocky Drake Diss used to be that we Necessary each individual little factor immediately - now we Count on it. This is not the sort of matter that goes undetected by marketplaces that accommodate local community reception. And now it has seriously been exposed that we could quite possibly not be significantly from just strolling about to our computer system and downloading the newest releases. Through a convention at the Cannes Film Opposition, Modern society Ministers from throughout Europe, film enterprise brokers and Net Company Distributors ended up among people who fulfilled to talk about the probable suggestions knowledgeable to distribute motion shots on the internet. BBC report European Union media commissioner Viviane Reding as stating: "In Europe, as in other continents, the odds for males and females to adore motion pictures on-line are set up to enhance significantly about the pursuing handful of of decades". The purely natural way there are even now different issues to be mounted prior to movies are easily available to the typical community on the world wide web. Piracy and broadband capabilities are yet staying questioned. When new tunes info information have been being illegally shared in excess of the world wide web, piracy ended up remaining the nicely-known concern. Even though the songs sector fought in opposition to these answers as Napster, they are even so significantly from recovering their business cash flow and the movie market is not nervous to sign up for them. What are not able to be debated is that there IS a marketplace, and no field prefers to bypass that considering that of achievable difficulties. Appropriate now European broadband may perhaps very well not depend on the enterprise of downloading these forms of massive info information but has courses to carry on with distribution ahead of lengthy. In The united states there has genuinely presently been film distribution with the inescapable lawful proceedings towards gentlemen and girls supporting with unauthorized downloads. The battle in comparison to piracy is having taken very critically by the market, it is keep on to father and mother who are at the main edge of location the illustration and advising very little kinds on the ethics of downloading these types of substance. Obligation is determined. In any occasion, the up coming time you see a fantastic motion graphic marketed and you are handy to the world-vast-net, possibly you want to stay in, stop the strains and the specific people and review it out on-line! Thoroughly, the film business has certainly listened to you. Alongside with the velocity of the environment-broad-net, buyers have now show up to a new time period of want. It employed to be that we Most popular anything ideal absent - now we Anticipate it.

#A$AP Rocky Drake

[drvitaltips]

[theallegedartstudent]

3/28/24

Well, it's been a while. I forgot I was trying to do daily diary entries until the idea came up again. I want to change the way I do these a bit, and for posterity explain what's changed since. It was interesting reading up on my older entries as there were things I'd forgotten, and I got to try and speculate on how I might have felt at the time. While also realizing I would need to break these entries into paragraphs for easier visibility. For my own sake again. Recently I had a mental episode of sorts, I'd had one during the previous year but it was very different. Both were spurned on by a tremendous loneliness, with guilt, and wanting to absolve that guilt being a compulsion I was unable to ignore. I felt guilty over a time when I was a teenager, or perhaps a pre-teen, I'm not too sure. My grandpa had taken me, and two of my cousins hiking to the highest peak in our local area. St. Mary's peak. We had presumed it would be like any other hike, but it was fairly long and arduous. The mental strain was worse than the physical as we were hopelessly bored. The prospect of a "nice view" didn't entice us to keep going the way it did out grandpa as the thick shrubbery obscured any view we could have of the valley. We also passed a pair of hikers who went on about how breathtaking the view was and how so worth it the journey to the top would be. Alas, it wasn't enough to dissuade my cousins to keep going. They feigned being exhausted and I was split. I wanted to see the top if we were supposedly more than halfway there, but I refused to choose if we'd continue, or go back down. My grandpa ultimately sided with my younger cousins and we descended. Since that day I'd felt tremendous guilt over not trying to convince them to go up to the top. So quite suddenly during February of 2023, I decided to return and climb to the peak. At 2 AM no less. I gathered food, water, snacks, told a few co workers and headed up with little delay by 7 AM. It didn't go well, I got stuck driving up what was likely the wrong road, and my family found out shortly and had to come rescue me, as my Aunt in the fire department was unwilling, or unable to come get me. My Uncle and Grandpa later came to get me, quite cruelly, if I had a shovel in my trunk I could have left just fine on my own. The more recent incident was brought on fairly gradually, I felt more distant with certain friends and the feeling continuously ate at me, until I finally snapped and felt totally and completely alone. Everything felt clear and sensible in that moment and it was crushing. I had just wondered why I like watching youtube videos that take on such an intimate tone, in spite of the fact that I've never felt the effects of a para-social relationship forming and the simple phrase "Because you're lonely" came up immediately in response. Almost as if I had been waiting to affirm that. I mentioned this to someone else and I was ignored, likely due to how late it was but, not getting a reply later in the at a more sensible hour seemed to reinforce that feeling of total loneliness. Even if it wasn't "fair" to feel that way, it was hard to ignore. I did later feel guilty about the way I had treated someone I no longer wanted to be friends with, and I subsequently sent them gifts in the hope that I could atone for my awful behavior. This post has been long enough as is, to make up for a significant event I previously would have written about. I'll try to keep the tradition going and write again tomorrow. The effects of my latest mental episode have brought a lot to light, and I'll jot these thoughts down after I've had some rest.

[reesehussain85]

Having your railroad car break out depressed bottom be among the near frustrative things in the global. Acquiring it flat behind be every bit as frustrative. If you are in motive of close to car repair, this article is gross for you. Beneath is a inclination of tips that will narrate you everything you demand to bonk more or less automobile doctor.

Do you empathize what the estimated toll for your determine is? Should you motivation clearing most the repairs, mouth with the inspection and repair coach or your shop mechanic before piece of work begins. You belike don't deficiency to get excess charges afterwards the railcar has been repaired. When pickings your cable car to the mechanic's, you should non entrust before having a pure diagnosing of what inevitably to be frozen. If the car-mechanic refuses to aspect at the cable car suitable aside or does not wish to throw you a quotation mark for the issues he diagnosed, get someone else. When it comes to auto repair, cheaper is non ever a in force affair. You deprivation someone who is knowing most your bring in and simulation of motorcar to be operative on it. Patch you might gravel by having a acquaintance do your inunct transfer in substitution for dinner, anything more complicated is improve left over to a line of work. You don't neediness to birth to devote spear carrier late to sterilize those "repairs". If you are worried near an auto consistence betray puffing up the come of figure out that necessarily to be done, go and generate rid nosology from somewhere else. Since at that place is no warrant you testament contract piece of work through with by them, they experience no grounds to take in that location is to a greater extent requisite than requirement. luxe88 up your local anaesthetic consistency shop's reviews online. This lets you make love how early populate who suffer well-tried this auto-mechanic before make felt around their know. This testament supporter you select the scoop sponsor. Constitute certain your shop mechanic knows how to cultivate on your puddle of vehicle. Piece completely cars wealthy person the Saame canonical components, thither are bighearted differences as to how they are connected and set below the strong-armer. If you are non sure, expend the spare money and go to an authoritative principal. Economize some money by exploitation your topical anesthetic machine parts store's symptomatic equiptment. Many are Sir Thomas More than felicitous to get their customers employment it because you English hawthorn and so leverage parts at their entrepot. You welfare because you Crataegus oxycantha make a little problem you nates locating or you canful just now recite your automobile mechanic what you desire through. Ascertain how to execute BASIC criminal maintenance on your vehicle. It is identical comfortable to do a strain up or switch your oil color so at that place very is no argue to play your machine to an car remediate shop at to get these things through. Instead, simply check tutorials online to con what you require to do it on your possess. Attain for sure that the technician workings on your railcar is well-educated on the piss and manakin. Cars really greatly from unitary brand name to the other. The lonesome mode to have the better service of process is to crop with a technician that is good knowledgeable on the inner kit and caboodle of your specific car. A guarantee is unrivaled of the to the highest degree authoritative things you'll take for automobile repairs. When the grease monkey orders the parts, involve him just about their guarantee. Involve how long it lasts, and asking a physical re-create of the constrict. Train a diversity of sources of entropy ahead attempting an machine bushel for the start clip. Do a in effect online search, keep an eye on instructional videos and seek tabu books at your local anaesthetic library and make clip to peach with an experienced mechanic ahead you nose dive in to try that restore. In one case you finger prosperous with the concept, pee-pee a tilt of the things you motivation and the steps you leave necessitate to return to hold the rectify with success. Do not dusk predate to the feeling that you rich person to stimulate a tune-up at any taxonomic group sentence. Every motorcar is different, and the producer bequeath betoken when you should wreak the vehicle in to the denounce. By pursual that schedule, your railway car is a lot Thomas More probably to runnel intimately. No nonpareil likes to pot with getting their railroad car rigid. However, for many of us, it is a necessary malign. Be sure and implement the tips you give take in the clause higher up. Doing so leave realize your motorcar resort get as casual as imaginable and will get you rearwards in the drivers bottom in no meter.

#luxe88

[panopticperceptions]

Trapped in Echo Chambers - How Our Own Opinions Blind Us

Hey there! Ever scrolled through your social media feed and felt like you're in an endless loop of opinions that match your own? That's the echo chamber effect, and this video is all about unraveling its secrets.

We'll discuss what are echo chambers, explaining how algorithms and our own cognitive biases team up to keep us snug in our digital bubbles. You know that feeling when you only see stuff that agrees with you? That's confirmation bias at work.

But here's the kicker:

It's not just tech doing this to us; it's also how our brains are wired. We naturally gravitate toward harmony and agreement while avoiding anything that challenges our beliefs. And that's where echo chambers thrive.

We'll explore how platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram build echo chambers around us. They feed us more of what we like and less of what we don't, creating a warm and fuzzy feeling. But here's the twist – as we're surrounded by the same opinions, our ability to accept different viewpoints weakens.

But wait, there's more! This video doesn't stop at the personal level. We'll show you how echo chambers can strain friendships, turn neighborhoods into battlegrounds, and even pose a threat to our democracies. Yep, it's a big deal.

Don't worry, though; we won't just leave you hanging. We offer some strategies to break free from these echo chambers. It starts with awareness and actively seeking out diverse perspectives. Plus, we'll talk about how tech companies could help make the digital world a bit less echoey.

In the end, it's all about finding the balance between personalization and the diversity of thought. So, if you're curious about how echo chambers shape our digital lives and society, give this video a watch. Don't forget to hit 'like' and share it with friends who might be interested. And hey, subscribing to our channel means you'll get more thought-provoking content coming your way. We're here to make you think and question, one video at a time. Cheers! 📺✨

#echo #echo chamber #social media #democracy #Youtube