#the most obvious visual development clue

[deception-united]

Let's talk about foreshadowing.

Foreshadowing can add a lot of depth to your writing and make it more exciting for the readers. They create a sense of coherence and satisfaction when future events unfold as hinted—or shock if they don't.

Here are some tips for effectively using foreshadowing in your novels and books:

Plan Ahead: Foreshadowing works best when it's woven into the fabric of your story from the beginning. As you outline your plot, think about key events and revelations you want to foreshadow, and strategically place hints and clues accordingly.

Use Subtlety: Foreshadowing doesn't have to be obvious or heavy-handed. The best foreshadowing is often subtle and understated, leaving readers with a sense of intrigue and curiosity rather than outright prediction.

Establish Patterns and Motifs: Look for opportunities to establish recurring patterns, motifs, or symbols that can subtly hint at future events. These can be visual, thematic, or even linguistic cues that tie into the larger narrative arc of your story.

Create Tension: Foreshadowing is most effective when it creates tension and anticipation for the reader. Use foreshadowing to hint at potential conflicts, obstacles, or twists.

Reveal Gradually: Foreshadowing doesn't have to be limited to one-off hints or clues. Instead, consider how you can layer foreshadowing throughout your story, gradually revealing more information as the plot unfolds.

Pay Attention to Timing: The timing of your foreshadowing is crucial. Introduce hints and clues at strategic points in your story, building anticipation and suspense without giving too much away too soon.

Revisit Foreshadowing: Ensure that foreshadowed events are eventually fulfilled or addressed in the story. Revisiting earlier hints or clues can provide a satisfying payoff for readers and reinforce the narrative coherence.

Balance Subtlety and Clarity: Foreshadowing should be subtle enough to intrigue readers without giving away major plot twists too early. Aim for a balance where foreshadowing is noticeable upon reflection but doesn't detract from the immediacy of the story.

Let's look at some ways to incorporate foreshadowing:

Symbolism: Symbolic imagery or motifs can serve as subtle foreshadowing devices. Think about objects, settings, or descriptive details that can serve as symbolic foreshadowing. A recurring image or object, for example, might subtly hint at future events or themes in the story.

Dialogue Clues: Characters can drop hints or make cryptic remarks that foreshadow upcoming events. Dialogue is a natural way to introduce foreshadowing without being too obvious.

Character Reactions: Pay attention to how characters react to certain situations or events. Their emotions or responses can foreshadow future conflicts or revelations.

Subtle Descriptions: Incorporate subtle descriptions or details that hint at future events. These can be easily overlooked on a first read but become significant upon reflection or when the foreshadowed event occurs.

Dreams and Visions: Dreams, visions, and other forms of altered consciousness can be effective vehicles for foreshadowing—they can hint at an upcoming event, or explore characters' subconscious desires and fears. This method can sometimes be either blatant or subtle depending on how it is incorporated.

Foreshadowing Through Setting: Use the setting to foreshadow events or developments in the story. For example, a stormy night might foreshadow conflict or turmoil ahead, while a serene setting might signal upcoming peace or resolution. (On the flip side, this can be used to catch readers off guard, like a "calm before the storm" type of situation.)

Parallel Storylines: Foreshadowing can occur through parallel storylines or subplots. Events in one storyline can subtly hint at future developments in another, creating anticipation and intrigue.

Recurring Themes: Identify recurring themes or motifs in your story and use them to foreshadow future events. These thematic elements can serve as subtle hints or clues for attentive readers.

Misdirection: Foreshadowing can be used to misdirect readers and create suspense by hinting at one outcome while actually leading to another. (See my post on misdirection for more!)

Happy writing! ❤

#writeblr #writing #writing tips #writing advice #writing help #writing resources #creative writing #foreshadowing

[dailyadventureprompts]

Drafting the Adventure: Dungeon Layouts

One of my most famous complaints about 5e D&D is that the section on creating and running dungeons (one of the most enduring and iconic parts of the game) is only six pages long, most of which is made up of art and random tables. This frustration is born out of the fact that I’ve been struggling to figure out some kind of guideline for exploration based dungeons since I started playing over twenty years ago. I’ve been routinely let down by how our hobby seems to default to “ just wing it” as a guiding design strategy,  especially when it comes to new players who haven’t yet developed the conscious competence to build dungeons that won’t derail their game in some fashion.

While I’ve tried attacking the problem from many angles over the years, one of my latest and most successful breakthroughs was realizing that most dungeons can be broken down into distinct “units” of gameplay, and that if I could develop an understanding of just how these units worked, I could develop a working methodology for designing dungeons regardless of how large or complex they might be.

After examining the conventions of videogames, escape rooms, theme parks, and even playgrounds, I ended up using the term “ playspace” to refer to these modular blocks of dungeon creation. It’s far easier to design a dungeon as a number of interlocked playspaces than room by room, and it's likewise easier for our players to remember a few evocative backdrops and their associated options, rather than trying to memorize the layout of a structure. 

Each playspace is meant as a significant chunk of dungeon material, playing host to atleast one significant encounter (puzzles, combats, skill challenges etc) with an associated number of minor encounters of different types for variety. Players might face monster lairing at the top of an old mineshaft, then fuss around the surrounding structures looking for a way to get the old elevator mechanism working. They might be collecting clues to solve a puzzle, only for the ghosts of the past to present elements of the dungeon’s backstory, along with a few hints. 

These encounters can take place over multiple interconnected rooms which are grouped together as a sort of thematic “bite” of the larger structure.  A ���kitchens” playspace might include the kitchen itself, several storerooms, a wine cellar, and servants quarters where as a “battlements” playspace could be made up of the crumbling exterior of a fortress, a watchtower, armoury, guardpost, and a chamber beneath that the structure has crumbled into.

Below the cut I’m going to get into the three general types of features that make up a playspace and how best to chain them together to make a great dungeon, but to do that I'm going to need a lot of extra room and some god awful diagrams I made myself.

I want to use the playground as a visual metaphor for the idea of playspaces, so bear with me (and my sup par digital art skills) because I think you’re going to catch on quick.

Every playspace is made up of three main types of features: Hurdles, Diversions, and Slides

Hurdles are a soft barrier  to the party’s progression, everything from a stuck door to a cliff that needs climbing, to a mysterious message that hints at a hidden passage. Hurdles are meant to be solved, but they take some gumption on the party’s behalf before they can be passed outright. The use of multiple hurdles can offer an element of risk/reward as the party decides which path to go down next,  and can also softly encourage exploration before progression, if the hurdle is implied to be risky or one way.  A dungeon playspace that was nothing but hurdles would be a boring slog, trudging between one challenge and the next, so as useful as they are, it’s important to put breaks between them. 

Diversions break up the dungeon by offering stuff to poke and playwith, in many cases obscuring the most obvious route forward behind a number of minor steps and false starts. Rooms to search, environmental stories to uncover, hints about upcoming challenges,  oneoff combats or social encounters with minor dungeon denizens.  You’ll want to give your party a few varied diversions every playspace, some of which will be pure set dressing, while others are more substantial. At the same time, don’t swamp them with options. The average person can keep about four things in mind at a time and if one of those things is the party’s mission at hand, you don’t want to risk them forgetting about important elements.  

Slides are direct and one way paths of progression: a fight with a miniboss that blocked access to the next floor, the rope bridge snapping and dropping the party into the flooded cavern level below, pulling the relic from the altar and summoning a horde of “get the fuck out of here” ghosts that chase the party back to the entrance.  Some slides are obvious,  others are hidden and require discovery, a few of them might trigger unexpectedly and force the party to circle back around to where they were to either leave the dungeon or get back on track. The most important thing about slides is that they require setup, using hurdles and diversions to build the party’s expectations before delivering catharsis, the slow anticipation of the rollercoaster going up that first hill is what makes the drop after so thrilling. 

Now lets talk about how to mix these features ( and other playspaces) to make a larger dungeon

Imagine you were a kid looking at this playground and assessing your options of what to do next:  Even before you get onto the structure itself  you’re always presented with a variety of options on what you might want to do at any moment. 

Lets add a goal, some basic lock-and-key design, and imagine this playground is the ruins of a crumbling fortress

Now we’re getting into some interesting exploration: A group that pokes around the tube (crumbling outbuildings) and finds key B might have a significant lead on getting to the goal, but only if they think to climb up the balance beam ( a tough climb up a crumbling section of wall), choose to avoid the slide that will send them back to the ground ( a tough fight with an weight sentry), and get lucky in choosing which hallways to explore next. 

Another group that takes the more head on approach might try for the stairs only finding their direct way forward blocked, having to either engage in multiple hurdles before finding either the shortcut A, or stumbling into the combined slide/hurdle miniboss that guards access to Key C. After reaching the goal, since they didn’t find key B, their desire not to retrace all their steps and previous hurdles is going to lead them straight into that weight.

And here you can see how three very basic play spaces and a little forethought can make for a super interesting exploration based dungeon crawl. Give each zone a unique identity within the larger concept of the dungeon, and add some thematic challenges/encounters, and you’ve given both yourself and your party atleast a few sessions worth of classic delving fun.

As a side note: I feel like this term playspace is a bit more useful than “level “ which divides one section of the dungeon by difficulty rating and maybe theme, but isn’t very useful when it comes to imagining the structure when designing a dungeon top down. Likewise, when I think of fun and well designed dungeons in say.. The legend of zelda, the levels in those dungeons are made up of multiple interconnected play spaces, so I think the concept stands on its own.

#dungeon design #dnd #dungeons and dragons #d&d #5e #dm advice #dm tip #dm tips #dm tools #writing advice #drafting an adventure #d&d mechanics #homebrew mechanic

[luckydragon10]

One Interpretation: Dum Dum MV

I was looking around for some story interpretation for Jeff Satur's new MV that just dropped, couldn't find what I wanted, had to do my best to work through what I'm seeing and all my feels.

First, the video:

NOTE: THIS IS HIGHLY INTERPRETIVE. There's no one true way to interpret a music video like this. I'm going with the interpretation that I enjoy the most.

As much as I love everything Jeff does, I'm a story slut through and through, and this story lit my brain on fire.

On my first time watching, I was struggling to figure out what the story was saying. I felt like I was getting a lot of little pieces and clues, but they weren't forming a coherent picture for me.

Then like a lightning strike, "AHA!" I got it at the very end, BAM, right when this big gasping moment happened:

The story that came together for me:

Businessman!Jeff was murdered, brutally (stating the obvious here). Then somehow, some way, he was able to come back to life. The means and reason behind this are unclear, and what he comes back as is also up for interpretation, but for me it reads as Zombie!Jeff.

Visuals that support my zombie feels:

The scenes with the red windows with clawing hands

The washed out, faded hair, reminiscent of life being sucked away

The dance moves, which I know people are ragging on hard, but which to me read as "baby zombie relearning how to move"

^-- this basically comes from every zombie movie ever.

He doesn't go on his roadtrip of vengeance right away after his reanimation. He does some development first, learning how to move, getting tattoos, stockpiling weapons, etc. He also has to sing about it.

I also feel like there's a little bit of a choice that Zombie!Jeff has to make. Is he going to live his second life for himself, or is he going to pursue vengeance?

The DUALITTYYYYYY.

What happens if he does pursue vengeance? What does he lose? Does he lose his soul? Give up his chance at heaven? For me, the sky imagery supports the choice being made between heaven and hell:

Later, after he exacts his revenge, there's definitely a resolution and a CHANGE that occurs, when we see Zombie!Jeff drop like a puppet with its strings cut:

That's going to break my heart every time I see it. Ugh.

But, for me, storywise, here's the most important thing: It's only AFTER Zombie!Jeff collapses that we then see Businessman!Jeff gasp.

Big AHA! moment.

At this point, how I interpret the story is fuzzy and depends on whether I'm looking at it optimistically or pessimistically. And how that works has to do with the timeline:

The optimistic interpretation is a sequential timeline: After Zombie!Jeff gets his vengeance and then collapses, Businessman!Jeff comes back to life. Maybe his mission was actually what he had to do to regain his real life.

The pessimistic interpretation is non-sequential: After Zombie!Jeff collapses, he's finally dead for real. What happens then in the video is that we the viewers jump backwards in the timeline to see the moment Zombie!Jeff initially reanimated, taking his first zombie gasp, his lovely zombie life just beginning. Was he given a choice between following vengeance or living peacefully? Perhaps the cost of vengeance would be this second half-living life, a price to pay?

This is a face that says "my vengeance is worth any price":

Whew. Still having feelings over here. I actually hope Zombie!Jeff is okay, living his best undead life. 🥺🙏

#jeff satur mv #jeff satur #kinnporsche cast #dum dum #dum dum mv #music vid #music video #story meta #story interpretation #Youtube #zombies

[karenvideoeditor-blog]

Where we are with AI, in March of 2024

We’ve seen the development of photo and video manipulation, from the earliest days of Photoshop up to now. This year, though, things are reaching the level we’ve all been concerned about – we can’t tell if important things we see are real. Soon, not even the experts will be able to tell, and anyone will easily be able to make any fake video they want.

Look at this image. Does it look real? Give the article a read.

When I first glanced at it, I didn’t even notice he had shirt sleeves and no shirt! Because I was focusing on his face and the smoke. That article explains some of the best ways to tell a photo is AI. But most notably, it says, “There are so many obvious signs this is AI, but most would miss them because they’re not part of the focus of the image, and since this is not a case where you think someone would be tricking you, you have no reason to analyze it that closely.”

A colleague who works on visual effects for movies shared this video created by OpenAI Sora.

He explained, “I work in visual effects. It is my job to make the audience fooled by what they are seeing. Those of us in the industry tend to see a lot of flaws that most people miss. We will soon be at a point where I won't be able to see the flaws.”

Puppies playing in snow is fun, and I’m sure many people look forward to infinite adorable animal videos! But of course, that’s not why you’re reading this. This is about AI videos of any person, place, or thing that your average grade-schooler will potentially be able to create. Month by month the software will get better and easier and cheaper, and AI photos have already started appearing ahead of the election, and supporters on both sides of any politician will be using them.

Could you tell that the two photos are fake? As a video editor, I could. But the first one was harder; I had to look for clues like the McDonalds smoking man photo. The worst part of these photos is what the person who created them said in defense:

“I’m not claiming it is accurate. I’m not saying, ‘Hey, look, Donald Trump was at this party with all of these African American voters. Look how much they love him!’ If anybody’s voting one way or another because of one photo they see on a Facebook page, that’s a problem with that person, not with the post itself.”

It’s bad enough that they didn’t care people were sharing those photos under the impression they were real. It will be worse when people are using this software to purposefully manipulate people’s beliefs and feelings to sway their vote, or worse, to fuel outrage and despair.

So, you know how you’ll go online on April Fool’s Day and your brain will be on ‘suspicious’ mode? Have you heard stories of real things that people didn’t believe because they happened on April 1st? From now on, that is how you need to calibrate your brain for important images and videos.

If a familiar face says something notable, out of character, or outrageous, if you didn’t learn about it from a reliable news source and you plan to tuck it away in your brain’s section of “things I believe,” you will first need to verify it. Viral photos and videos on Twitter and YouTube aren’t reliable, and you’re better off only getting your news directly from trustworthy sources like news channels. If you find something and want to verify it, use your search engine and key words, especially for strange, suspicious, or implausible quotes, and find a news website you can rely on. If it’s gone viral and it’s AI, it’s likely that the top results will be news websites debunking it.

Starting now, remember: Suspicious and outrageous things are false until proven true.

To sum up, here’s the News Literacy Project’s guide for vetting news sources:

Do a quick search: Conducting a simple search for information about a news source is a key first step in evaluating its credibility.

Look for standards: Reputable news organizations aspire to ethical guidelines and standards, including fairness, accuracy, and independence.

Check for transparency: Quality news sources should be transparent, not only about their reporting practices, but also about their ownership and funding.

Examine how errors are handled: Credible news sources are accountable for mistakes and correct them. Do you see evidence that this source corrects or clarifies errors?

Assess news coverage: An important step in vetting sources is taking time to read and assess several news articles from them, not just the one you clicked on.

Also, look for clues that you should avoid a website. They include:

False or untrue content

Clickbait tactics (melodramatic headlines)

Lack of balance (feels like it was written by a person who took a side)

Manipulated images or videos

State-run or state-sponsored propaganda

Dangerous, offensive, and malicious content

Stay aware and attentive, good luck, and let’s hope we can at least keep this dumpster fire in the dumpster.

#ai #artificial intelligence #ai software #fake news #politics #politicians #trump #biden #openai #Gemini #chatgpt #news #skeptic #manipulation #manipulated video #manipulated photo #debunk #clickbait #propaganda #Suspicious and outrageous things are false until proven true #Youtube

[storytime-reviews]

The Dry Movie Review

Aaron Falk returns to his drought-stricken hometown to attend a tragic funeral. But his return opens a decades-old wound - the unsolved death of a teenage girl.

I know that the critical consensus was positive for The Dry, but I can’t say that I felt similarly. I had not yet read the book, but planned to change this after watching the film so I could compare the two, so this review is based on the film alone.

The Dry is visually appealing, and the cast is of course phenomenal. What I love most about films such as this one is that they are often a great vehicle for strong character work, and this is no exception. The depth that this film allows, furthered by the strong flashback scenes, is remarkable for character development. The most engaging aspects of The Dry are the relationships between all of the characters, particularly due to the tension exuded by Falk’s return to his hometown and what happened when he was a teenager. There is nothing more compelling than the back and forth that occurs between conflicting personalities with various suspect agendas. The actors portray their onscreen personas brilliantly. I also enjoyed the burgeoning friendship between Aaron (Eric Bana) and Sergeant Raco (Keir O’Donnell) as they attempted to discover the truth of the supposed murder-suicide.

Unfortunately, whilst I very much enjoyed the character work, I couldn’t help but be become more disappointed with the narrative the further the story progressed. This was particularly evident towards the end of the film, however I also felt that many of the supposed clues and plot twists were completely obvious early on. I have no idea if this is due to the shift from book to film, or common to both, but I could tell where most of the story was going almost immediately. This would not have been terrible on its own, but the fact of the matter is the end became a major letdown when revelations occurred that I just felt weren’t at all believable, and the person I was watching it with was also verbalising this as we watched it. The exception to this is the companion narrative set in the past, which I think was handled beautifully.

Did I enjoy my viewing? Yes, of course, there was a lot I liked about The Dry, but the essential elements of the crime/thriller narrative that were ‘revealed’ by its end just didn’t do it for me at all. Much of it felt out of place and didn’t make sense when compared to other aspects of the plot itself. We found ourselves looking back at things that had occurred earlier in the film and trying to understand how any of it made sense to end in that way.

#the dry #jane harper #australian cinema #eric bana #aaron falk #movie review

[weneverlearn]

George & Tammy & the Maggots

I'm not one to often offer up yet another internet opinion about yet another streaming series, as we have way too many of both.

I will quickly state that I thought the recent George & Tammy biopic (Showtime) was beautifully shot, wonderfully acted, and while apparently based on daughter Georgette Jones' book, The Three of Us, wisely paired the story down to the titular stars' love-ish story. The hazy cinematography, consistently vulnerable closeups, and lack of overdeveloping their pre-hookup life left it all as a narcotized dream -- not unlike how those two drifted through their beautifully damaged artistic and romantic life.

Unlike nearly every streaming series I have ever seen, I did not think George & Tammy was too long, though of course it could've used some editing here or there.

To a more pertinent point of my usual pursuits, one of the series top visual scenes was also an incredible use of a classic "Killed By Death" punk song -- something that happens numerically in the exact opposite proportion to how many goddamn streaming series are out there.

In the opening scene of the final episode, Tammy (played by Jessica Chastain) is seen running through woods and up to a stranger's house, saying something about how some men kidnapped and beat her. All the while the scuzzed-out keys, guitars, and cheekily sneer of The Maggots' 1980 SF punk classic, "Let's Get, Let's Get Tammy Wynette", chases down Tammy too.

It's the kind of jarring surprise the series definitely needed at that point (it is a mostly sad, morose tale and telling), and nearly knocked me off my couch. That, along with the generally excellent use of music all along showed this series had a stronger clue than most TV/streaming productions that still somehow rely on boomer-era hits or obvious current pop.

The story arc was at 1978, not only when Wynette was ensconced in the worst drug and husband abusive moment of her life, but also right when punk rock and a host of other modern musics were making her music irrelevant. The series did not delve into many pop cultural connections like that. Again, it was probably smart to stay in the insular worlds of the pair's personal heartbreak. But simply using The Maggots' track was a wild way to have the sonic world that was developing far past them creep into their dark bubble.

Now to my ears and assumptions, since I first heard "Let's Get, Let's Get Tammy Wynette" in the early '90s, I was a party to the era that critiqued the mid-century mores that Wynette's signature song -- the seemingly non-feminist statement, "Stand By Your Man" -- espoused. Right up to Hillary Clinton's famous 1992 supposed putdown of said song, Wynette seemed a relic, someone to be scoffed at, and The Maggots song did that most viciously, if underground.

I've always heard it as one of those proudly rude punk sentiments of the early days that aimed to severely offend, sarcastically suggesting killing the "Stand By Your Man" lady -- with a female singer no less, which gave an otherwise obscure, one-off 7" punk single more heft.

I'm old enough to remember, circa Clinton's comment, fans and industry types trying to defend Wynette and "Stand By Your Man," usually with pretty toothless justifications. To me, the song might as well have been from 100 years ago, and Clinton's comment was a societal no brainer. If anything, it seemed irrelevant to reference some old song; not to mention I kind of thought that taking that tune at complete face value -- when sung with such sad desperation -- seemed to be condescending to people's ability to digest the layers of an old pop song.

I never really knew much about the story of Wynette's involvement in her 1978 "kidnapping," which was later revealed as a hoax that her fifth fucking horrible husband, and songwriter of some of her biggest hits, George Richey (played creepily by Steve Zahn in the series) concocted to not only cover up having beat the hell out of her, but to then use it as hype for an upcoming tour. (Supposedly, details are still sketchy to this day, and disagreements about the story between Wynette's family and Richey remained past his death in 2010.)

The series does a good job of re-contextualizing Wynette -- historically a pop culture icon of spousal subjugation -- not only as a victim of patriarchal strictures, but as a drug addict making the usual fucked-up decisions.

In one quick small scene, as Wynette is heading through a throng of fans towards the tour bus, one female fan asks if women should really be like her songs, and always support their man, to which Wynette responds, "They're just pretty love songs, darlin', I wouldn't think about them too much." Chastain offers some brief, amazing facial expressions which show the many layers the better of all those depressing, drunken, violent, seemingly submissive country classics can contain, and that her thirst for stardom via repression has her questioning the same as that fan.

In its gauzy way, George & Tammy does make an argument for the complex, unexplainable, in-the-moment emotions of many old country songs, while not letting Wynette off for her terrible choices, of which there were just as many made as the legendarily self-immolating George Jones -- played, it must be said, incredibly by Michael Shannon who, admittedly, I'd watch read the phonebook.

Then I see this today, a comment below the above YouTube clip of "Let's Get, Let's Get Tammy Wynette":

"Found this post by one of The Maggots members: "yes the original maggots did put out an apparently highly collectable record in 1980 called "lets get, lets get, tammy wynette!!!" a song i wrote from the kidnappers point of view, after a bizarre "kidnapping" incident in the late 70s (later found to be an elaborate hoax concocted by tammy to cover up for her abusive husband kicking her ass...) no wonder she was pissed when this guy i knew asked her to sign a copy of it at an autograph session at marriots great america amusement park...she actually threw his record and started screaming, and they escorted him out, sans autograph...."

Nevertheless, be it feminist punk screed or silly playacting, whoever chose that Maggots track and got it into a major streaming series should be given an award, and should call me soon so we can collaborate on getting better songs into streaming shows. I mean how many more times do we have to hear "White Room," "I Feel Good," or "Firework"?!

#george & tammy #george jones #tammy wynette #paramount+ #country music #stand by your man #Youtube

[mrdworld8]

The expression "supernatural reasoning" has a terrible standing. It is related with odd notion, schizophrenia, visualization, and different getaways from the real world. In the event that you look for a definition that is liberated from judgment, in any case, mystical reasoning is the conviction that a secret reason interfaces occasions where no reason really exists. Science has gone through a long, hard trudge to supplant otherworldly reasoning with levelheaded circumstances and logical results, which is the reason we concentrate on the sun through telescopes as opposed to loving it.

It's amusing, then, that the most developed sciences has defied us with issues that topple regular reality so fundamentally that some sort of enchanted speculation appears to be inescapable. We are totally implanted in a supernatural reality that has not a great reason. The fundamental elements of enchanted the truth are the accompanying:

· Nature is worked from swells in the quantum field that can transform into particles. This double nature has not an obvious reason.

· Across the edge of room, time, matter, and energy is a pre-made express that can't be reached from our side of the limit. Consequently, physical science acknowledges that the universe is an instance of making "something from nothing." How this happens has no great reason.

· Purported "dull" matter and energy comprise by far most of issue and energy in creation, yet there are unquestionably the smallest clues about what they are, since they evidently don't submit to the vocabulary of normal regulations that work in the known universe.

· The human mind is made out of similar iotas, particles and electrical fields that relate to different cells in the body (with a couple of particular changes). The acknowledged truth that the cerebrum can think self-destructs when you look for the reason for thinking, since nobody has found how, when, or where fundamental iotas and atoms out of nowhere became cognizant.

· The five faculties don't get sight, sound, contact, taste, and smell. They make them through a demonstration of change nobody can make sense of. Red looks red, salt preferences, pungent, and sandpaper is unpleasant as we see them, however in Nature none of those characteristics exist.

In the event that you unite these secrets, reality itself becomes one, immense, peculiar sorcery act, adding a couple of additional variables acknowledged by science, similar to the tweaking that held the newborn child universe back from falling in on itself or, the other option, flying separated in a nebulous cloud (modify early stage powers by one section in a billion, and the baby universe would go poof!)

The astounding part is that the regular three-layered world exists and furthermore, that people explore through it so easily. We acknowledge an all day, every day, fold over deception in light of the fact that our progenitors acknowledged it, leaving on the periphery a diverse group of sages, spiritualists, soothsayers, and others with strange approaches to seeing reality...

(If you want to read more visit this link.. https://mrdworld.substack.com/p/the-world-is-magic-so-where-is-the?sd=pf )

[terrihockey]

Download we. the revolution

DOWNLOAD WE. THE REVOLUTION INSTALL

DOWNLOAD WE. THE REVOLUTION DOWNLOAD

Processor: 3.1 GHz Dual-Core – Intel i3 2100.Additional Notes: The game currently only works in windowed mode on SteamOS and Linux.Graphics: 512 MB VRAM – NVIDIA GeForce 9600GT / AMD Radeon HD 3850.Processor: 3.0 GHz Dual-Core – Intel Core 2 Duo E8400.Tested on Ubuntu 18.10 / amd64 Linux System Requirements

DOWNLOAD WE. THE REVOLUTION INSTALL

info : unmodified edition of GOG.com.ĭownload => make executable => run => install => play If you like the game please support the developers by buying it…Īdd.Then just treat it more or less like one of those Setup.exe’s on Windows. start.sh, select “Properties”, go to the “Permissions” tab, mark the file as executable. tar.gz Files using Linux Command Line here). The Revolution for linux is done downloading, Extract (Unzip) “*******.tar.gz” -if you encounter this file- (To do this you must know how extract.

DOWNLOAD WE. THE REVOLUTION DOWNLOAD

Click the button to open the client to let the download begin and wait for it to finish.

Notification will pop and say “that our site wants to open this application”.

Click the Download link below and you should already have installed a download client on your system.

Try to live in times of revolutionary unrest. The Revolution is a symbolic story based on the historical events of the French Revolution.

enjoy a unique visual style that combines the simplicity of polygons and the neoclassicism of the revolutionary era.

test yourself in a mix of genres where case investigation is combined with political intrigue and turn-based tactics.

Win them over to your side or get rid of them forever!

make friends and make enemies from opposing political factions.

conduct trials: interrogate witnesses, analyze clues and clues, read reports and pass sentences.

explain your decisions to your family – your family may not share your opinion.

reach verdicts in dozens of unique and morally ambiguous cases.

immerse yourself in the oppressive atmosphere of the French Revolution, familiar from the classic novels of Alexandre Dumas and Joseph Conrad.

make history and decide who lives and who dies.

The game is designed primarily for players who like to solve moral dilemmas, make difficult personal choices and immerse themselves in the world of political intricacies. Keep this in mind when assigning tasks to your agents, making speeches and weaving political intrigues behind the scenes. Power over human life is a great burden, responsibility and power that can influence the outcome of the revolution. The Revolution will put you in a situation of choice without obvious solutions, where any of your actions can be called into question. You will also have to justify your decisions to your family, who may have a completely different point of view. As a judge of the Revolutionary Tribunal, you will have to find yourself in the most difficult circumstances, pass sentences, play a dangerous political game and do everything possible not to be guillotined for opposing the revolution. The Revolution is a unique game with unusual stylish graphics, which takes place in the bloody and paranoid world of the French Revolution, where it is so difficult to distinguish friends from enemies. The best part: all the content you'll find inside.We. Wrestling Revolution 3D is a great wrestling game and while it doesn't have brilliant graphics, it's still a lot of fun anyway. With the virtual crosspad you can dodge and control the movement of your wrestler, while the buttons on the right allow you to hit, grab, pick up objects (chairs, tables, etc.) and run into the ring's ropes. The control system in Wrestling Revolution 3D is simple and direct. However, more astute players will recognize some of them anyway, since most are inspired by real wrestlers like Andre the Giant, Hulk Hogan, or the Undertaker. Wrestling Revolution 3D's wrestlers are unofficial, so they don't have real names. In one event, for example, the player has to fight up to 20 fighters, whereas in another the player has to beat only one opponent. In Wrestling Revolution 3D, players can choose from various special events throughout many international circuits. Players can control dozens of different fighters in loads of different events, with each held in a special type of setting: a ring, a cage, a double ring, etc. Wrestling Revolution 3D is a 3D wrestling game inspired by the popular WWE.

#Download we. the revolution

[tomgreys]

Crossword quiz pop culture level 5 a cop an indian

#Crossword quiz pop culture level 5 a cop an indian movie#

#Crossword quiz pop culture level 5 a cop an indian free#

#Crossword quiz pop culture level 5 a cop an indian movie#

Without wasting any more time, we are sharing with you all the crossword test movie solutions as shown. A very popular game developed by Random Logic Games which are also known for other extremely fun and popular games such as Guess the Emoji and Symbology. The next time you want to move a conversation forward, these pop culture trivia questions used as ice breaker questions will also do the trick. Please find below all Crossword Quiz Pop Culture Level 10 Answers, Cheats and Solutions. Choose a theme of pop culture that would best suit your audience.

#Crossword quiz pop culture level 5 a cop an indian free#

Of course you’ve seen all the normal free crossword games for your phone, they’re similar to what you grew up with either in the Sunday newspaper or puzzle. It’s a classic word game that challenges your vocabulary and is a powerful tool for learning. If you're with a group of music-lovers, then the music pop culture trivia is the best choice. Crossword puzzle games have been around for ages. You'll have to be living under a rock to not know at least some of the answers. Don't ask movie-related questions to a group of people that don't watch movies a lot. Gather everyone and enjoy the night away with these trivia questions that anyone can relate to. This game reminds me of 100 Pics a bit, even though it is totally different If you are looking for a fun new word game, then this is for you We have answers to almost every level, so if you want a. What an awesome game There are almost 50 different packs to choose from, and each pack has 10 levels. These pop culture trivia questions the most fun trivia questions you can have. Crossword Quiz: Pop Culture Level 4 Walkthrough. There's no pressure now in choosing what theme to choose. Have a variety of topics to ask with these random trivia questions and answers. Topics include the solar system, animals, winter words, grammar, and. These crossword puzzle worksheets provide practice with context clues and enable third grade students to build new vocabulary and test their grasp of grade-specific words across content areas. The best questions are the random questions that just get blurted out. Review, revisit, and reveal words with our third grade crossword puzzle worksheets.These trivia questions for adults will do the trick to get those adults thinking. Of course, having fun on trivia night isn't for kids only.Make sure the children enjoy trivia night as well with this list of trivia for kids. See who knows most about these. There are just some things that are meant for children.Bring variety by choosing different topics. Challenge your friends or family and have fun with them with more questions than you can ask them. That's why we have more awesome trivia questions for you. It doesn't matter who you're talking to, they just work. That means not only noticing what the picture looks like, but what might not be quite right about it, or what details might be calling out for your attention.Via: Mantelligence More Awesome Trivia Questions Of course, not all of these visual riddles will be simple to solve you'll need to look beyond the obvious and train your eyes - and your brain - to see things in a different light. Enter the word, replacing missing letters with dots Example: cro.w.d (Finds crossword) by using wildcards. Taking the time to unscramble the pictures or notice how they are arranged can help them take on a much larger meaning than what you see at first glance - turning snowflakes into a snowman, or transforming seemingly unrelated images or jumbled letters into a brilliant play on words. Enter the clue from your puzzle to find matching results Examples: river in Germany, Kitchen utensils and Greek letter. Many common phrases, idioms, places and objects can be represented by pictures. jen lilley husband occupation / boundary county rodeo / crossword quiz celebrities level 3. Are you the type of person who is always the first to spot Waldo? Are you a word search master, crossword champ, or Sudoku expert? If puzzles are your thing, see if you have what it takes to ace this quiz of visual riddles! There's no way to Google the answers here, you'll have to use your raw brainpower!

#Crossword quiz pop culture level 5 a cop an indian

[shipping-receiving]

“Is there a chance you won’t be okay?”

An Analysis of Hwang Si-mok and Han Yeo-jin’s Final Scene in Stranger/Secret Forest Season 2

Alright, it’s been almost a week, I’m still crying every time I re-watch this scene, and somehow I’ve written 3,500 words about five minutes of this damn show, so here we go:

As with Stranger/Secret Forest Season 1, Si-mok and Yeo-jin’s final scene in Season 2 ended with a farewell meal, complete with soju. On a very basic level, this meal felt significant in a season where Si-mok was subject, more than ever, to interrupted meals or meals he didn’t particularly want to be present for – at least until he was able to have a drink with Yeo-jin in 2x12, and then lunch with her in 2x13.

More importantly, though, this scene is the most loaded scene we’ve ever witnessed between these two characters. That’s saying something for such a nuanced, detail-oriented show, in which two people placing their phones in a storage locker at a detention centre can possess such emotional weight, particularly when played by two actors who make very subtle and sophisticated acting choices.

I’m struck particularly by the way this scene bursts with subtext – things unsaid and unresolved – when Lee Soo-yeon could just as easily have written a neater, more light-hearted exchange that reaffirmed their connection, more along the lines of their final scene in 1x16. There are a thousand other ways their farewell could have been presented to us that would have given a greater or at least a more comfortable sense of finality, even taking into account their character development over this season. This lack of resolution is evident not just from what happened during the scene, but also when the scene happened within the episode itself. The meal occurred after Yeo-jin had been bullied by her colleagues, but before she met her new boss – at this point, it seemed to the viewer that her promotion would likely bring not the pride she experienced in S1, but more challenges and isolation.

More so than the Seo Dong-jae cliffhanger, this scene makes me think that this was written with a future Season 3 arc in mind, one in which Si-mok and Yeo-jin’s relationship will continue to evolve and deepen substantially (whether that will be ‘romantic’ remains to be seen). Considering they’re the core partnership of this series, there was a deliberate withholding of stability in their farewell, rather than an affirmation of it. I won’t go so far as to say destabilisation – because despite their separation, I think their bond is more profound than ever – but at the bare minimum an absence of certainty, when it could have been written otherwise.

Anyway, on to the breakdown:

The scene opens with Si-mok carefully folding a napkin and placing cutlery on it for Yeo-jin, a simple gesture of care that Cho Seung-woo plays with a startlingly gentle attentiveness. Immediately, it signals that there’s been a shift in Si-mok – how he’s able, at least with Yeo-jin, to do something that isn’t just polite, but also thoughtful. The director even snuck in a little clue that Si-mok is thinking of Yeo-jin as he’s doing this – Yeo-jin actually appears at the left side of the frame from the start, as the camera pans over to Si-mok: 

In this shot, Si-mok is visually separated from Yeo-jin by a pillar. This could be read on the one hand as a kind of sectioning out of his mental space – a visualisation of his thoughts of her as he prepares her cutlery – and on the other hand, as a foreshadowing of their impending separation. (I do, however, enjoy the first interpretation more. It reminds me a little bit of her sketch of the inside of his head from 1x06.)

Back to the napkin: if you look closer, Si-mok didn’t fold a napkin for himself – his spoon and chopsticks are on the table next to his bowl – so this isn’t just a matter of neatly setting the table for their meal. In a very small way, he’s anticipating her needs, just as she has done with him in much more demonstrative ways in both seasons (helping him with his headaches being the most obvious one). This isn’t something he’s necessarily actively worked on in the past two years; he’s still the person who doesn’t instinctively say ‘hello’ over the phone, or ask after someone’s kids without being reminded. Yet, it’s a capacity for care that has expanded significantly, at least where Yeo-jin is concerned.

Compare his behaviour with the equivalent scene in 1x16 – back then, he only ordered a bowl of noodles for himself and not for her. Interestingly, Yeo-jin’s comment to Si-mok during that part of the S1 scene was, “Gosh, you haven’t changed one bit,” suggesting that he was, by nature, somehow unable to be considerate to someone else. Just from the opening to the S2 scene, we see that that comment is not or no longer true, at least when it comes to the way he acts around her. In both the S1 and S2 scenes, he was the first person to arrive for their meal; in S1, the first thing he said was, “Why are you late?” and had already ordered his soju and noodles. This time, however, Yeo-jin asks him, “Why didn’t you order something first?” – implying that although she was late again, he was patiently waiting for her to arrive.

There’s also a difference in the way he responds to her appearance. Now, I personally don’t think we can frame Si-mok’s connection with and care for Yeo-jin in conventional understandings of romantic attraction (which is not to say romance isn’t possible for them canonically, I just think it will manifest differently). Nevertheless, I’d say that he responds to her haircut in a way that is probably as close to the mechanics of attraction as we could possibly expect from Si-mok – not just the shock of “oh, you cut your hair,” but lingering looks and nostalgia for when they first met; nothing at all like noticing that she’s wearing lipstick and saying, not so kindly, that it looks weird. In fact, in a direct parallel to this moment in 1x16, Yeo-jin asks him if her haircut is “weird”, and he says, “I just meant it’s different.”

(I think the way he stares at her is not wholly due to being ‘transfixed’, but also because he’s trying to figure out what such a drastic change means, and why now, and whether he has to worry. Basically, his brain is trying to compute; part of his stare is him trying to analyse her behaviour, just as part of it is him revisiting his memories of her from two years ago, and part of it might well be an attraction he doesn’t quite understand or know how to reel in. He does stare at her for an inordinately long time.)

Switching over to Yeo-jin, I really enjoy this little routine of hers when they have meals together – how she narrows down options for him to a series of questions, and even helps him decide on occasion. It never feels like she’s trying to speak for him, but rather that she knows his likes and dislikes. Her question in this scene – makgeolli or soju – is phrased like her question in 2x02, when she asks him to choose between stir-fried octopus and hot pot; when she specifically requests a lot of cabbages, she must be thinking of how he ate lots of them in 2x12. This kind of care comes naturally to Yeo-jin – we’re talking about the person who took in a murder victim’s mother in S1 – but it’s still a form of intimacy, and one that Si-mok is clearly used to as well.

Soon, though, we have our first indication that things might not be so comfortable – not in the sense that their bond has weakened, but that there are fundamental shifts occurring in both of their lives that affect this bond. Si-mok, after a lot more staring, points out that her short hair reminds him of when they first met. (He wouldn’t have needed to take that much time to come up with that simple observation, which makes me think he was trying to choose his words carefully.) With enthusiasm, Yeo-jin responds with, “I haven’t changed a bit, right?” – echoing her comment about Si-mok in 1x16.

Perhaps Yeo-jin had meant this comment sincerely in the moment, but given context, her cheerfulness feels performative. We’ve just witnessed her crying after being bullied by her colleagues, in contrast to the warmth that she enjoys with her old Yongsan team; we’ve observed her changes – a result of maturity, disillusionment, a loss of innocence – throughout the whole season. In fact, she seems to have cut her hair precisely because she feels weighed down by all that has unfolded, just as one might after a break-up or some kind of painful life event. It’s a decision that seems to say: I acknowledge that everything has changed around me, but maybe doing this will make me feel like myself again, or the ‘myself’ of two years ago.

Si-mok, of course, isn’t quite so able to agree that she hasn’t changed. Multiple times this season, he’s observed the changes in her – “You don’t draw these days?” in 2x06, “Didn’t you want to work in police administration?” in 2x08, “You weren’t the kind of person to postpone things.” in 2x12. Now, he doesn’t respond to her question, and instead looks at her in silence, smiling only ever so slightly when she shakes her head playfully (and we know that she can make him smile wider than that). Perhaps he’s even choosing to withhold any judgment of her. But this is a moment, I think, that factors into his decision to ask her that question at the end of this scene.

Next, we have confirmation that Si-mok was the one who asked Yeo-jin out for dinner, just as he had in 2x02 once he’d settled into his new posting. It isn’t clear in 1x16 if it was Yeo-jin who’d asked to meet Si-mok when she found out he was being posted to Namhae, but it’s been affirmed twice this season that he prioritises this time with her (even more so than meeting his own mother). Then, he breaks the news to her that he is leaving for Gangwon Province this weekend.

In 1x16, Yeo-jin finds out that Si-mok is leaving from the special investigation team, without Si-mok being present. At the time, they still think he’ll be sent to the US for training, and Yeo-jin is visibly disappointed. She has the same crestfallen look on her face in this scene, in front of Si-mok. She doesn’t want to be separated from him, and when she asks about his cases, it seems she’d expected him to stay for quite a while longer to see them through. Mind you, Wonju is only about 1.5 hours drive from Seoul (yes, I mapped it), but Yeo-jin still looks like she’s had the rug pulled from under her. Perhaps, in an uncertain time, she’d hoped that Si-mok would be in her life more than the few weeks he’d spent in Seoul.

Yeo-jin’s responses in both 1x16 and 2x16 are a pretty big indicator that she has feelings for Si-mok (whether she’s aware or willing to acknowledge those feelings is another matter). I suppose one could argue that her reaction is simply out of sadness at the thought of being separated from a friend, but based on certain events in S2 – for example, Choi Bit questioning Yeo-jin about her relationship with Si-mok, and Yeo-jin deflecting – I think the viewer is at the very least meant to question whether their bond is truly ‘platonic’. This isn’t the type of show to include superfluous details just to tease their viewers, and in any case, Si-mok and Yeo-jin’s connection has only deepened through the course of this season despite being on opposing sides of the council. It feels like the emotional stakes are much higher this time than back in S1.

As Yeo-jin is absorbing this news from Si-mok, there are a couple of little details here that feel significant to me, but could be nothing: first, the way Si-mok half-holds out his hand as Yeo-jin is pouring her soju, just as he’d held out his hand when she was pouring makgeolli in 2x13. Second, how she pours out a cup of soju for herself first, but not for Si-mok. In any other situation, it might seem impolite – after all, Si-mok is the one who’d chosen the drink – but here it seems that she’s pouring a drink to steady or busy herself more than anything, and she doesn’t drink from it till after their toast.

Following this, Yeo-jin confides in Si-mok that “I never thought the council would end like this. [...] Will the higher-ups be replaced with more honest people while I’m catching bad men out there?” When he replies with, “Why are you talking as if those two are the same?”, it’s yet another of his probing questions, questions she never seems to have an answer to. The Yeo-jin of old would never have assumed that all the higher-ups are dishonest – she has always seen the good in people – but she feels betrayed by Choi Bit, the one person she sincerely respected. Here, she changes the topic rather than opening up, reverting to her most comfortable mode of showing care for someone else by asking Si-mok why he looks so tired. It’s a guardedness that we’re not used to seeing from Yeo-jin; when Si-mok met with Choi Bit at the start of the episode, he describes Yeo-jin as someone who “opens up easily”, even if she doesn’t “blindly trust or respect just about anybody”.

While Yeo-jin is evasive, Si-mok is more willing to be vulnerable in comparison. His openness isn’t surprising, given that Si-mok has shared more about his life and thoughts with her than with anyone else, but it is still heartwarming to see. Instead of brushing off Yeo-jin’s comment, he tells her about his dream of the prosecutors from the Western Office. For anyone else, this might not seem like a significant conversation topic, but for someone who hardly ever dreams (which Si-mok mentioned in S1), it feels like he’s sharing something special with her. This dream, and his factual recounting of it, seems to be a means for his brain to process the traumatic events of two years ago.

Before Si-mok tells Yeo-jin about his dream, there’s a quick insertion here – a lament about seeing your boss in your dreams – that suggests that she is still troubled about Choi Bit, more than she’s letting on. Again, Si-mok doesn’t push her to elaborate, though I think he’s been absorbing all the things that seem off with Yeo-jin since she arrived. Yeo-jin proceeds to analyse his dream in her head, but doesn’t verbalise her interpretation (that Yoon Se-won might be considering suicide, since he went off in the same direction as two characters who have both passed). As she’s deep in thought, Si-mok tilts his head questioningly at her; she says that he probably won’t have time to go anywhere else this weekend, implying that she was thinking of bringing him with her to visit Yoon.

Knowing that Si-mok won’t be able to come with her, however, leaves Yeo-jin resigned. As she announces, “All right, then,” I wonder if this is the moment that she’s choosing to steel herself. The two people she treasures and respects most in her life (Si-mok and Choi Bit) are disappearing from it, and she will have to learn to move forward without them.

Now, we come to their toast. In the corresponding scene in S1, their toast is bittersweet, but has a sense of resolution; upbeat piano music plays in the background as Yeo-jin says, “Goodbye, I won’t be able to see you off,” while Si-mok echoes that with, “Good luck in your new position. Sorry I can’t attend the ceremony.” In S2, the music is quieter, and much more sombre – I’ve been describing it in my head as ‘breathy sad wooooo music’ – even as Yeo-jin laughs and says, a little helplessly: “It feels like we keep repeating this.”

Si-mok, on his part, doesn’t even echo her laugh with anything more than the barest smile. Instead, he says, with a deep sincerity: “Take care, Senior Inspector Han.” As I mentioned earlier, there are many ways that they could have written or played this scene to convey even a little more resolution – choosing different music, or having Si-mok smile along with Yeo-jin, or even giving Yeo-jin a bit more notice of his departure so that she can prepare a gift (as if to say, she doesn’t draw as much these days, but she would for his sake). But the viewer is made to feel all of their reluctance, even sadness at this separation, even if those feelings are hidden beneath pleasantries. “Well, I guess I’ll be okay,” Yeo-jin says, as if there’s a possibility that she won’t be – that this is something she has to recover from in the future.

Si-mok considers her words, her phrasing, her demeanour, tilts his head at her again and says: “Is there a chance you won’t be okay?”

This, above all other lines, shows how much Si-mok has grown in the past couple of years because of Yeo-jin’s influence. Whereas he started S1 cold, guarded, and isolated from the rest of his colleagues, he has arrived at a point where he has cultivated enough of an emotional sensitivity to ask her this question – to show her care, just as she has shown care to him and other people around her. I’d even venture to say that Si-mok feels, himself, that there’s a chance he won’t be as okay with their separation as he might have been two years ago. In 2x05, during the conversation with Seo Dong-jae outside the prison, Dong-jae asks Si-mok: “You don’t feel a tad bit sad even if you’re sent far away, do you?” Si-mok answers, “No.” That doesn’t feel so definitive anymore. There isn’t anything either Si-mok or Yeo-jin can do, given that they both prioritise their careers and understand that these careers follow a certain trajectory, but parting feels a little bit harder this time.

Yeo-jin answers Si-mok’s question as reassuringly as she can, with an adorable smile and shake of the head; she lets out an “ah” after she downs her soju, as if to reorient herself. Yet, her cheerfulness in the rest of the scene – her excitement at the food, her over-enthusiastic chewing – rings empty as the sombre music continues to play in the background. For perhaps the first time in the entire series, there is something about Yeo-jin that seems feigned. Strangely, it is Si-mok’s blank expression that represents the more authentic emotion in this scene – communicating the very resignation that Yeo-jin must be feeling inside, beneath a facade that might read as comical in any other context.

“Is there a chance you won’t be okay?” is, in fact, the last thing that Si-mok says in this whole scene, despite quite a few more lines of dialogue from Yeo-jin. The way he looks at her for the rest of the scene, though, is charged with meaning. It seems to say: ‘I don’t really believe that you’re okay, but I’m going to give you space because I can tell you don’t really want to talk right now.’ It’s not as if Yeo-jin hasn’t confided in him before – their phone call in 1x15 was especially intimate – so it’s not that Si-mok is incapable of listening to her. Still, he respects her choice to deflect, and continues to observe her closely while ignoring the pajeon, even leaning forward right at the end of the scene. This very overt concentration on her is something we’ve never really seen from Si-mok before; even in the rooftop scene in 2x06, which is probably the most loaded scene they share after this one, they’re standing beside each other and rarely make eye contact. Here, his focus on Yeo-jin is palpable.

As much as this scene felt heartbreaking to me (thanks breathy sad wooooo music), it actually left me with a lot of optimism for the development of their relationship in the future. Lee Soo-yeon has said that she has enough material for five seasons of the show, and while I’m not so sure we’ll get as many seasons as that, it feels like she’s pushed Si-mok and Yeo-jin out of their comfortable friendship – planting the question, “is there a chance we won’t be okay?” I wonder if we’ll see something quite different in the third season (which is apparently in discussion!), which surely won’t see them on opposing sides again.

I’ve been burned by enough ships that can potentially be read as ‘platonic’ to know that I shouldn’t hope for any overt romance, but Si-mok is such a unique character and has such a unique connection with Yeo-jin that I’m hopeful that their relationship could be deepened with nuance, even if it doesn’t become romantic in ‘recognisable’ ways. (I have other thoughts on his asexuality/aromanticism that I won’t get into here.) It’s precisely because their connection is built on mutual trust, respect, and understanding that it remains so compelling, and I think this scene promises growth, and some resolution, whenever we see them next.

#tvn stranger #secret forest 2 #stranger 2 #stranger #hwanghan

[inmyarmswrappedin]

So, because Fatou’s season ends today and, as far as we know, Druck hasn’t been renewed yet, I want to go over the things I feel the team did well in this season and the things I hope they take with them when they sit down to write the next season (which I’m manifesting will be Ava’s).

I think that s5 and, perhaps to a bigger extent, s6, were the team’s attempt to address fan feedback for and criticisms of s3 and s4. So I have hopes that, after possibly the most scrutinized season of any Skams, they are still willing to read even more feedback and sit down once again to craft a couple more seasons (possibly even 3 or 4 more seasons!).

So, without further ado, things that were done well! (Do I have to add “in my opinion”? Do I??)

I liked that for both s5 and s6, the thorough-line for the season wasn’t made obvious or shared in a press release, but rather it was up to fans to connect the story threads for themselves.

I loved that the team sought to address one of the biggest criticisms of s3, that is, that Matteo was given so many symptoms of a mental illness, but it ultimately went unaddressed in the narrative. They did this by giving Nora a dissociative disorder, and Fatou dyscalculia. (Matteo has been headcanoned as being mentally ill and having a disability.) It allowed the teams to develop both fan theories into full-blown seasons and give each of them the importance they deserved.

I have said this already, but I really appreciate that the team chose misunderstood, misrepresented and underrepresented mental illnesses and disabilities. I feel like s5 and s6 will be referents for many years, because they really took the time to portray a dissociative disorder and dyscalculia in a down-to-earth, unhurried way that isn’t meant to shock and awe, but simply allow us to understand why and when Nora and Fatou will struggle. Druck got the viewers to anticipate when Nora and Fatou would struggle, and that’s the first step in being able to anticipate and accommodate the needs of the Noras and Fatous of the world. I really can’t overstate how important this is and what a difference it makes in a real, tangible way. These seasons aren’t meant to be enjoyed for voyeuristic reasons, but they will legitimately help people.

One of the biggest criticisms of s4 was that Amira and Sam didn’t connect as women of color. In fact, it seemed like in s4 Sam was treated as another white friend, when in s2 both she and Amira were the victims of Kiki’s racism. The team addressed this by giving us Ava and Fatou’s friendship, which I want to say might be the first friendship between main characters of color where their race is a substantial reason for their bond. (There are the Sanas with their Jamillas, but the Jamillas aren’t main characters, and then there are friendships like Jo and Megan and Zoya, or Imaan and Liv, or Luca and Yasmina, but iirc in every case their bond as women of color isn’t made explicit.)

Another criticism of s4 was the way Kiki turned into the world’s most understanding white friend offscreen. The team addressed this with the Ava and Mailin storyline, which I think was wonderfully and subtly set up in s5, then built on with the biology test leaked answers.

On the topic of race, I think a major criticism of s3 was that David’s ethnicity wasn’t acknowledged (to the point where a white actress was cast to play his sister gvhvhv). The team has made up for this with Josh (more in the s6 sm than in s5, but I still count it) and with Kieu My. Fatou and Kieu My bonded over being first/second gen children of immigrants, and in doing so, they acknowledged that these characters aren’t white and have different experiences than white Germans.  

The first 6 episodes of this season were some of the finest writing in the Skams. The storylines all connected and built on each other. The motifs were just so good and beautiful and fitting. The themes were all clearly defined and easy to follow.

The tortoise plot was one of the most fun and imaginative storylines in any Skams, it connected Fatou and Ismail in a believable way. And not to rave about a fucking tortoise, but animals can be really uncooperative and that tortoise delivered every fucking clip. Druck has a reputation for being one of the most depressive versions of Skam, but the Maike/Burger plot was just plain fun.

I feel like some of the old gen’s instas were a bit self-indulgent. I’m thinking specifically of Matteo’s memes and how they they weren’t necessarily the kind of memes a gay dude born in 2001 would pick, but someone a decade older. I think this is much better done with new gen. Fatou’s memes reflect her age and her sexuality, and not just that, but Ava, Mailin, Kieu My, Josh, etc. all pick memes and even focus on different aspects of recent news, based on their gender, race, personalities, interests, etc.

I appreciate that the team found a way to fit a sex scene between Fatou and Kieu My to add to the small catalogue of wlw sex scenes on Skams (I’m including the scene in lovleg or we’d only have two lol). While I understood the reasons eskam opted not to include one, I thought there were ways to feature a sex scene that didn’t sexualize the actresses and didn’t require nudity. Cases in point: the lovleg scene, and this scene in Druck.

And it also needs to be said. This is the first original season with a main of color, and the third season overall (after Liv and Imane) where 10 episodes are given to a character of color and no one else. Of the three, it’s certainly the season that loved and respected its main the most. The bar is so low it’s in hell, but Druck did clear that bar!

With all that said, let’s talk about the things I would really want the team to address in following seasons:

The thing I most want them to fix might be small or unimportant for a lot of people, but I think it’s at the core of why the season has been unenjoyable or certain plot points haven’t come across the way the team wanted, for many people. I am talking about the overly expositional nature of the writing.  It appears as if the team approached the writing of the clips with the intention of hitting each beat as noted in their agreed upon outline, and absolutely nothing else was to be added. This is an issue both in s5 and s6. It’s just less noticeable in s5, because s5 is setting up stuff for Fatou’s season, and possibly even seasons that haven’t been written yet. The fact that absolutely every second counts makes for a stressful watching experience for me, because the narrative tension is always heightened. Whereas with Skam, the narrative tension would build throughout the clip. Take the Pride scene in Skam, for instance. The clip allows for Isak and Eskild to get increasingly more agitated as they butt heads. I feel like if this Druck team had done the Pride scene in s5 or s6, the clip would’ve started with both Isak and Eskild already on edge, and cut much of the dialogue that got them there.

On the topic of naturalistic dialogue, this season doesn’t have it. Here is an example from ep 10 clip 2, Wieder vereint/Reunited 11:37.

Fatou: I’ll get a certificate too and bring it over to you. And I checked it, I only have to change one course and my schedule will work.

Teacher: Miss Jallow, you are not the first one to come to me with an epiphany. We could fill entire school weeks with the lessons you missed. In addition, Doctor Steinberg told me about your, well… activities. You don’t have a lot of arguments on your side. 

Fatou: But I’ve spoken to all of the teachers and they said they are okay with it. 

Teacher: You seem to have friends among the teaching staff. Mrs Pavlovic put in a word for you. Okay then, do it and go before I change my mind. [translated by @kieu-tou! Thank you!] 

Like. This is the bare bones version of a dialogue. This should be the first draft, not the final version. The coordinator goes from absolute no to yes, with just one line from Fatou. The coordinator gives reasons that would necessitate more than one sentence of counterargument, like Fatou’s absences and the Biology test leaked answers. The coordinator even says Fatou doesn’t have a lot of arguments on her side, and yet it takes Fatou one line to change her mind!

And of course we viewers don’t want or need a lot of time with the coordinator. And particularly at this point in the season, no one would enjoy a naturalistic dialogue with the coordinator of all people.  But my point is that this is an issue with the dialogue all this season (and last season as well, but this season has been more scrutinized), the reason I picked this example is because of how easy it is to see here.

Which brings us to the pacing of the clips, and specifically the Friday clips. Because the script goes straight to the information the team wants to convey to the viewers, skipping the build up to it, many Friday clips have fallen flat, felt abrupt, and have been, tbh, unsatisfying. Again, I had this issue in s5, but as that season went on, I felt like the team had a better grip on Friday clips. But then they did it again in the first Friday clip this season, and so I think this is something the writers really should work on. The first Friday clip in Isak’s season closes on Isak being sandwiched by Emma and Even on a bench, visually setting up the love triangle, or more accurately, the personifications of who Isak should want to hook up with and who he really wants. But in order to get there, we’re shown a good amount of info, from the way Vilde, Eva and Sana are handling Noora’s absence, to Chris and Kasper, Even hovering around Isak, Emma trying to impress Isak, Isak escaping and, like, draping himself on the walls because he’s so over it all. Isak playing a game on the bathroom to stall for time. The paper towel maneuver to immediately give us a sense of what a weirdo Even is. A conversation between Isak and Even that gives us some clues about Even’s shame, as well as establish interests in common (like weed), and this is all before Emma even joins them! Just think of all the stuff we learn about who Isak, Even, Emma, Eva, Vilde or Sana are as people, before we get to the point of the clip! Fatou’s season simply didn’t have that. Compare it with the first Friday clip of Fatou’s season where the cashqueens quickly talk about the leaked answers, one of the major storylines this season that only gets a couple lines, before Fatou says she doesn’t want to talk about school (Fatou’s struggles with school, another major storyline), and then we’re onto the point of the clip, which is that Kieu My likes girls too. AND FADE TO BLACK. When people say they want longer clips, what they mean isn’t artificially inflate the clip length or add more plot stuff. Just let us watch the characters interact with each other so that we get a feel for how they relate to each other. I know I wish we’d have gotten more of Ava and Fatou interacting with each other before things turned to shit, and Ava with the other girls, so that I know why they all like and value Ava so much. I wish we’d have gotten more of Kieu My talking to the cashqueens about, like, why she didn’t make use of the biology test answers, instead of getting it on a chat. Or food combos they don’t like. So it makes more sense that later on Kieu My actually thinks she and Fatou are friends.  And every line doesn’t have to count. In Skam España, the characters are constantly talking and not everything they ever talked about ended up being relevant. When one of the characters lied about her house undergoing renovations to hide the fact that she was poor, the characters joked about Italian marble and put on bad Italian accents and made that Italian hand gesture. None of this was important to the plot because those renovations weren’t real to begin with, but they made viewers feel like these were real friends joking around, instead of characters needing to hit every storyline beat in a clip.

I have this joke with my friends about Druck always going 🤪🤪 in the last third of every season, in which a season that was very tightly written and cohesive suddenly pulls something inexplicable and pretty much impossible to resolve in 1-3 episodes. Hanna’s season suddenly switching to Mia, Björn creeping on Mia in episode 9! of a total 10, David getting outed in episode 8 and then disappearing for a whole week, Amira’s season pivoting to Mia and Hanna. It has happened in every season except Nora’s, so I thought the team had learned its lesson, but then the forgotten date with Ava happened. To be clear. It really makes no sense that Nora would have hung out with Ava several times since Tuesday, and the topic of the cashqueens being officially introduced to Kieu My wouldn’t have come up. it’s just not realistic.gif I feel like at that point the writing for the rest of the reason became super contrived to keep Fatou miserable and apart from Kieu My and Ava to artificially delay the reunions until episode 9 and 10. Why add a cheating insinuation and the main checking her partner’s messages in episode 8 if you know you won’t be able to properly resolve it? Why make Kieu My mock Fatou’s “uhm” if it’s not going to be addressed in their reunion clip? Kieu My had taken the initiative for a lot of the relationship, so it’s okay for Fatou to take the initiative when it comes to making up. You don’t have to add things that can only be resolved through an expositional info dump. (Please no more exposition than it’s necessary! I think we’ve established that at this point lol.) In the case of Fatou’s season, this is even sadder because I feel like Kieu My’s intimacy issues could’ve been the reason to drive them apart for two weeks, rather than the Maya/uhm stuff. This could’ve also been resolved through Fatou and Kieu My explicitly negotiating their boundaries and how they want to be comforted and how they want to comfort each other, which I thought was the issue with Fatou rejecting Kieu My’s attempts to help while wanting physical touch, while Kieu My didn’t want to be touched but rather seen.  

There are going to be many thinkpieces on why a myriad of stuff didn’t work for people, so I’m going to keep this simple and address one last thing. I think that choosing to focus on Nora’s mental illness and Fatou’s disability is a great choice that doesn’t complicate the themes too much, but Druck (and all the Skams, but I’m invested only in Druck succeeding at this point) still struggles with being intersectional. This is the major reason why the Ava/Mailin storyline ended not with a bang, but a whimper. There just wasn’t enough work done to connect Fatou’s struggles not just to her disability, but also to her race (and even her sexuality). I think that if people really want (and lbr, it’ll be mostly poc who will put in that effort and work), they can see how Fatou’s race affected the way other people and especially adults reacted to her, but this wasn’t made explicit. If Ava and Mailin are going to argue about racism all season, why not connect that with Karin firing Fatou from Aquarius? As it stands, Karin fired Fatou because of a disability neither of them knew Fatou has, and that was the resolution to that storyline. Why not make it explicit that the Physics teacher had preconceived ideas about Fatou because Fatou is black? Why wasn’t Fatou’s disability addressed in the meeting with the coordinator? Why didn’t Fatou express to Mailin that Fatou, too, had issues with how Mailin was acting wrt racism? It felt like, with the way the season was putting so much emphasis on racism, all these threads were going to be connected. In the end though, it almost felt as if only Ava is affected by racism (aside from Mailin mentioning Fatou in the last episode). It’s not like talking about how racism affects Fatou is going to make the topic redundant for Ava’s or Ismail’s season. As a light-skinned black lesbian with a disability, Fatou’s life is going to be impacted by racism in a different way than Ava’s will, as a dark-skinned black fat straight cis girl, or Ismail’s, as a Turkish-German possibly Muslim possibly non binary person. All these experiences are specific enough, and different enough, that they can be touched upon in different seasons without becoming redundant. The fact that Fatou’s season almost seemed to forget at times that she is a black lesbian, doesn’t bode well for Ava’s and Ismail’s season to acknowledge all their struggles.

The bottom line is that this season really was great and did a lot of good, and I feel like the writing just needs to be tweaked a bit for further seasons to be even better and more enjoyable overall. I am very pleasantly surprised by how the team took s1-s4 fan feedback to heart and worked to implement suggestions, and so I really trust them and hope they keep working on the show. It’d be a shame if Druck wasn’t renewed, with this team at the helm.    

#druck #this post is 3K+ words in word I'm so sorry #but I really hope it makes its way to the writers and is helpful

[countessofbiscuit]

Aaaah I was hoping you'd reblog that meme! 10, 16, 20 🤌

:D thanks for the ask!

10. How would you describe your writing process?

Erratic. Anyone who’s ever seen one of my drafts can attest that it’s a casserole of __blanks__, {placeholders}, and words piled on top of each other like an eldritch text string. When writing fiction, full sentences do not come naturally for me—often I have to keep random articles or reddit stories open in browser tabs to remind myself what full sentences actually look like and what my options are. (Drawing without references is how I describe the difficulty.)

But to speak more broadly to my process, once I have an idea, I open a google doc as fast as possible or find a post-it note and just plow down whatever English comes to mind to cement the concept, so I don’t lose it. Usually, it’s patchy dialogue. It may stay in this state for … weeks. Then, if I realize I am committed to finishing the thing, I decide how long it can be and think up a title and pray.

After that, I try to … complete a puzzle by making the puzzle pieces first. If this seems like a terribly inefficient way to go about story-telling, that’s because it is! I’m a formalist who’s crippled at the sentence level and blinded by my own visual brain so everything is kind of done bass-ackwards.

16. Tried anything new with your writing lately? (style, POV, genre, fandom?)

Can’t say I have; I’ve been stuck in a short-story cycle for over 6 months now and breaking out is hard.

20. Tell us the meta about your writing that you really want to ramble to people about (symbolism you’ve included, character or relationship development that you love, hidden references, callbacks or clues for future scenes?)

Hmmm. I guess the most meta thing I’ve ever done is create an entire series off the back of a single line. Six, Six and a Kiss was the first Foxiyo story I wrote, and the final line unexpectedly inspired pretty much everything about where I went with Fox and Riyo’s relationship, in terms of motifs, themes, and characterization.

He flicked through pistol settings in his mind until sleep overtook him, wrapped in Riyo’s perfect arms and perfect legs, her cheek cool like moonlight against his neck.

The most obvious example is the title of Fantasia Fourteen — a reference to Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 14, Sonata quasi una fantasia — famously known as his Moonlight Sonata, a piece that is ‘almost a fantasy’ <3

Fun Meta Asks for Writers

#asks #biscuit fic #writing

[tmntallthewaydown]

Tales of the Hidden City Writing Appreciation Post Pt.1!

The last batch of episodes, Tales of the Hidden City, were excellent. As an animator, it’s easy to get bowled over by the visuals of the show and just rant about those, but I wanted to spotlight another awesome part of Rise of TMNT -- the writing!

The writing is always fun in the show, but there were parts of these episodes that I really wanted to call out for how clever and great they are.

Each of the Tales of the Hidden City eps puts the characters in a situation where their strengths are negated or challenged. (Also, big cheer for a bunch of episodes finally exploring the Hidden City. It’s such a fun location, I want to see it all.)

Donnie Vs Witch Town  an episode where Donnie’s tech can’t solve the problem Raph’s Ride Along  an episode where Raph’s heroics are seen as anything but Hidden City’s Most Wanted  an episode where Mikey’s peacekeeping can’t keep the peace Bad Hair Day  an episode where the face man’s face ain’t enough

I figured I’d do a separate post for each episode so it doesn’t get over-long. 

I’ll be focusing on character development mainly since that’s what stood out to me most!

Donnie Vs Witch Town

Directed by Abe Audish, Written by Ian Busch, Storyboarded by Alicia Chan

*Spoilers for the episode!* I won’t do full recaps, and assume you’ve all seen the ep if you’re reading this..

We start with Donnie referencing the Shadow Fiend in the Battle Nexus. 

“Rumour has it, this Shadow Fiend is quite the fierce champion”

I’m assuming this line’s here because the writers want to keep dropping us tantalizing crumbs to set up the Shadow Fiend as being an important figure in this season. The writers want to keep them present and in our minds as well as let us know that whoever the fiend is, (I bet we all have guesses), they’ve gotta be making quite the name for themselves if even the Turtles have heard of them.

April says she’s headed to Witch Town, whereupon Donnie is horrified. I think horrified is the right word.

“Drop it, D.” “Why not ask me? Mr Science!”

The “Drop it, D” is an elegant way to imply this conversation is a continuation of one they were having pre-episode. April is already very done with the discussion.

Donnie’s line is great because it’s one of two times in this episode that he calls himself ‘Mr Science’ or ‘The Science Guy’. Here, the line comes off as triumphant and proud, but later there is a feeling of desperation to it. It’s a really nice parallel to set up at the beginning, so we can hammer home the duality of what that label means to Donnie.

To preface, this episode deals with Don’s self worth being tangled up in his ability to do Science good. Because of this, he does a lot of projecting in this episode. For the most part, you can assume any time he mentions ‘Science’, he is actually talking about himself. Basically, substitute that word for his own name, and it makes the subtext more obvious.

Here, have these just because they’re fun.

Don ‘helping out’ with various Science Fair projects. April has a good reason not to ask him for help again.

A nuclear powered cooking multi-tool?

The Erupting Volcano. The floor is literally lava.

The Classic Potato Battery experiment.

“Hmm. That must have been the work of another Teenage Mutant Ninja Dummie.”

I’m calling out Donnie’s response here just because I enjoy the consistency the writers give to the way he handles failures. Innnnn that he will feign complete ignorance of the incident and claim it must have been someone else entirely.

--

“You turned a cuddly animatronic bear into a psychotic robot bent on destroying us? No? Got April Fired? Mmm? Nothing? Mmm?” “That does not sound like me, no.”

- from Al Be Back

--

In general it’s an established part of his character that he has problems accepting failure.

Donnie deflects blame in many other episodes - to April in ‘The Purple Jacket’ and to his brothers in ‘Todd Scouts’ off the top of my head. This trait is pertinent to this episode in particular because the apology we get at the end of the episode from him is by far the most full and cohesive admission of blame he has given in the two series so far. I’d say it’s a step forward on the level of Leo’s apology from the ‘Air Turtle’ episode (another great episode showing Leo’s growth towards becoming a team player!). 

Either way, it’s nice that we see him redirect the blame early in the episode so the moment can provide more of a contrast to him coming full circle and accepting the blame later.

One last thing about the line - I put my hands up to admit that this may be me overthinking it, but Don essentially calls himself a dummie here. Whether this was intentional by the writers to hint at his insecurities or just a fun line, I couldn’t say - but since it relates back to events later in the episode I thought it might be worth mentioning.

Moving on, Donnie accompanies April to Witch Town despite it being the last place he wants to be. It’s our first hint that his obsessive need to convince April that all Mystic stuff is garbage might run a bit deeper than just vocal teasing. 

April calls him out on being closed minded and we get

“Oh I’m sorry, I was just stewing over how everyone needs to be more like me.”

Of course we know that’s not how he really feels, as we’ve all seen that episode.

The writing here is nice and subtle. It lets us know that Donnie isn’t being honest. He’s giving April sass, but the sentiment he’s expressing is false.

The episode continues with Donnie comparing every feat of magic to it’s scientific equivalent until April essentially tells him to can it if he doesn’t want a bat to the plastron. The witches show off, prompting exclamations from April at how amazing their magic is.

Then we get one of my favourite lines from Donnie as he snaps.

“Your Mystic Magic is not amazing, it’s simple and soft. There, I said it.”

That soft is a word that Donnie would use as an insult, associating it with something he dislikes and looks down on, is very affecting. You know what else is soft?

The writing here is so revealing and wonderful. They could have used any insult, but the writers chose to have him express his frustration in a way that sheds light on the way Donnie sees himself. It gets right to the root of the problem he has in this episode, which is that without his science and tech, Donnie doesn’t feel like he is particularly ‘Amazing’ either.

That April calling magic amazing is what prompt’s Don’s snap, rather than any of the words of the townsfolk, is one of the clues we’re given to the truth behind D’s drive in this episode. The writers will bring that back later on!

So April and Don are kicked outta Witch Town when Don’s improv musical performance to convince April to let him help her instead ends up blowing up in his face.

Popping this here because watching Donnie get deservedly smacked by April at this point was very cathartic for me. Dingus.

Donnie offers to help the witches in return for them helping April. It seems sweet at first, but it becomes plain fairly fast that this is really another opportunity for D to try and prove that science is king.

“Ah would you look at that. Banished, and I still saved the day.” “Wait, is that why you did this?” “Nooo! It’s because I was sorry - about being closed minded - about how wrong I were.”

Again, it’s up to the writers to show us that Donnie is lying about his motivations here. That little bit of incorrect grammar (saying ‘were’ instead of ‘was’), calls out to us that something is up. Donnie is smart, and it’s out of character for him to word things sloppily. It lets us know that all is not well, and that things are yet to be resolved, internally at least.

I couldn’t help calling out this wonderful posing, even though I’m trying to focus on the writing. It really sells us on the dissatisfaction brewing between them. Gorgeous acting from the animators.

The peace offering potion the witches were making seems to work, and Donnie wastes no time in trying to rub their faces in the fact that science provided one of the ingredients - until it becomes clear that Donnie’s contribution has soured the brew. He tries to avoid blame and responsibility, as we’ve seen him do in previous episodes (and earlier in this one). Nothing I’m calling out here besides the novelty of seeing a mob of witches trying to lynch a scientist - a bit of a historical reversal!

The big bad is storming Witch Town and Donnie gets ready to smack down - specifically “because when I defeat it with my tech, they will have to admit science is better!”

It’s worth saying that on the word ‘they’, he points directly at April. Because as we’re about to discover, it’s not actually proving to these random villagers that Science is best that’s important to him (though maybe that would be nice), but about proving to April specifically that Science is best. Thank you animators/storyboarders for making that subtext more explicit!

At this point we as the audience have had it up to here with Donnie’s bullheadedness. The reveal that D’s gripe is personal and April/brother specific, rather than just a frustration with Witch Town in general, goes some way to explaining why he is so obsessive over it.

Donnie’s Tech Bo breaks in the conflict, and we get the awesome reveal of April’s Mystic Bat. She is of course, badass with it and kicks butt. April saving Donnie’s hide with Mystic Magic prompts the confrontation between them that is the emotional heart of the episode.

“Why are you so obsessed with proving me wrong on this!?” “Because! I’m the Science Guy! (sigh) If Mystic Powers can do everything I can do but better, then why would you guys even need me?”

Here is the payoff to the opening ‘Mr Science’ line from earlier in the episode. The wording is similar, however this time the line is tinged with defeat. The duality revealed is that Science makes Don feel powerful, but without it, he feels powerless.

The visuals that go hand in hand with the dialog are very telling here, too.

The image of Donnie holding his broken Tech Bo isn’t just to show us that his technology isn’t enough to win, that it can be broken. It’s also showing us how he sees himself, drawing a direct comparison between Donnie and his broken Tech. He’s not always perfect, but he’s ultimately useful, right? Until he’s not. I’ve no doubt that this was a deliberate move from the Storyboarders, and I think they sold the moment brilliantly.

His words make it clear that Donnie believes that “if Mystic Powers can do everything I can do but better”, ie, help April with her project without blowing her classroom up, why would she not keep going to Mystics instead of him in the future? 

With her not ‘needing’ him for scientific assistance any more, he sees no reason for her to continue hanging out with him. This ties back to the clues the writers dropped earlier in the episode, that suggest he doesn’t regard himself highly without his science. 

The obsession this episode with disproving how ‘Amazing’ Mystic Magic is in front of April makes a lot more sense through the lens that he is fighting to keep April’s friendship.

“You Guys” expands this sentiment to include the rest of his family. If his tech ends up letting down the team and is unneeded then by extension, he would also be unneeded.

As viewers, we know this is untrue. Even beyond the fact that these characters rely on one another emotionally, we saw Don fight alongside his brothers in ‘Insane in the Mama Train’ - all of them tech-less and Mystic-less - and they kicked butt, even if they did end up being eventually captured. However, it’s clear from the writing here that this isn’t how Donatello himself feels.

“You’re not important to me because of your tech, you’re important to me because of you! I don’t think Mystic Powers is better than Science. If anything, they’re stronger together, just like us! Right?” “Right!”

April’s comeback is wonderful. Super eloquently written and gets right to the heart of his insecurities. First undermining the thought that if Don didn’t have tech, she wouldn’t need him, then framing Mystic Powers as something that will bring them closer together. Beautiful writing! 

I also want to just celebrate how the writers handle April’s characterisation as being someone who is super excited and curious about any kind of Mystic Magic or supernatural shenanigans. I really like this consistency in her character where she is way into anything otherworldly or unexplained. I hope we get to see more of it in the future!

We get to see April and Donnie kick butt together which super fun! I’m very happy we got another episode with these two, the way they bounce off one another is really enjoyable to watch.

“I was wrong to not be more open-minded. It’s just that Mystic Powers are the one thing I have not been able to solve. As a man of Science, it is maddening to finally come upon something that you do not understand. Especially when your dum-dum brothers totally do, and they wave their dum-dum weapons in their dum-dum hands all the dum-dum time! But that is just a long way of saying I am sorry’.

The apology is very articulate, letting us know that D is truthful here. It’s a nice little payoff when compared to his earlier lie with April, where the writers had him fudge his words to imply his dishonesty. 

April actually believes him this time too, judging by the lovely acting here. 

 We’re treated to this perspective on Donnie’s feelings, which reveals a couple of interesting things to us. ‘The one thing I have not been able to solve’ indicates that he has previously attempted - and failed - to understand Mystic stuff, which is new information. It goes against our impressions from the rest of the series so far (that he is simply disinterested). We also learn that his brothers’ understanding of their powers has created a knowledge imbalance that is a frustration to him. I very much hope that the show keeps taking steps in this direction with Donnie, just because I would love to see an arc that results in him getting more involved with the Mystic side of things.

To wrap up the episode, I really appreciated the way the writers handled the internal conflict in Donnie Vs Witch Town. There was a lot of subtlety and subtext in the writing, which I am absolutely here for. Donnie’s end reveal really recontextualizes the earlier shenanigans in a meaningful way, and marks a step forward for him. April has her Bat now, and Don is a little more open to Mystic Powers as a possibility! I’m excited to see where we go next! 

Thanks for sticking with me, if you got to the end, and I hope you found it as interesting as I did! ‘Raph’s Ride along’ is the next ep I’ll dig into.

#rottmnt #donnie vs. witch town #analysis #writing #episode #rise of the tmnt #april o'neil #rottmnt donnie #rottmnt april

[itsbenedict]

I didn’t post about everything I played this year, so here’s my opinions on the stuff I played that I didn’t make a rec post for:

Raging Loop 

Raging Loop is one of them twisty meta Zero Escape-y branching-path visual novels where an ensemble cast is trapped in a mysterious circumstance where people are dying gruesomely, and you have to find out what’s happening and stop it by looping a bunch. 

I can’t wholeheartedly recommend it, because... it tries to have its cake and eat it too with the supernatural elements. Clearly magic is real and has important impacts on the scenario, but then other parts are trickery you’re supposed to see through, and it’s entirely uninterested in cluing you in to how that trickery was accomplished. Not exactly a fair play mystery, in that regard- you have to kind of just be along for the ride, rather than try to figure it out.

That said, it’s a good ride- pretty strong character writing, and the central conceit of the Werewolf/Mafia-style murder scenario creates really interesting drama. It’s more concerned with making itself feel clever than letting the player feel clever, but it’s still well-paced and gripping and has a pretty decent resolution.

Detective Grimoire

I recommended Tangle Tower, the sequel, pretty strongly- and this one, while obviously a little rougher around the edges with the art and mechanics (the suspicion tracker system is a total dud; I didn’t even realize it existed until I realized I was missing an achievement for using it), it’s still pretty darn good. Really fun character designs and animations, fully-voiced, and a solid whodunit backing it all. Plus- while the two are more or less self-contained, the continuity threads with Tangle Tower raised some really interesting questions.

Contradiction - the all-video murder mystery

This one was pretty fun, largely on the strength of the actors. The main mechanic of interrogating people on evidence and using their own statements against each other was some good stuff, too. Definitely had that Phoenix Wright quality to the deductions, and Jenks is a really fun character. (Had a few points where progression was just linked to standing in a certain previously-abandoned area of the map where a clue was suddenly there for no reason, there- good thing it had a hint system.)

As a mystery, it could use a little work- most of what you end up finding out is sequel bait (for a sequel that never actually came together, unfortunately), and the actual whodunit is just sort of hiding in the cracks of all that. And... cornering the culprit just sort of happens out of nowhere once you’ve got your hands on the right piece of evidence, without much fanfare. You’re following up on leads like usual, you find a little lie in someone’s testimony, and then- oh, shit, they’re just confessing everything! Unlike all the previous times you questioned them and they were super evasive like everyone else! And then the game is over. 

All in all, it’s pretty meaty and entertaining and I’d recommend it, but unfortunately the creators have moved on to other things, so there’s not going to be any follow-up on the stuff it left unresolved.

Ikenfell

Ikenfell is a tightly-designed RPG about kids at a magic school, with Paper Mario-style action command mechanics and a battle system that makes a big deal out of careful positioning and movement, which was really enjoyable. The difficulty’s a little high (I recommend always always always speccing into max damage because killing things before they kill you is worth more than any amount of defense, speed doesn’t work, and healing is cheap), but I found it really satisfying.

There’s... something... off? About... I don’t know how to put it, it’s... doing that “yes, everyone is queer and mentally ill, deal with it” thing, which, sure, okay. But for a lot of them it’s such a background thing, like... half the playable cast is unambiguously nonbinary, but like... I don’t know if it’s trying to make some statement on how there are no rules to being NB and you can 100% perform a particular binary gender presentation but still count, or if they wrote the whole story and then changed the pronouns of some of the characters for Representation Points, or what. Probably the former? I dunno, it just feels weird. Maybe I’m just not woke enough to Get It.

(unrelatedly: why the heck is the official art they use everywhere so... off-model? none of them look like they do in-game- they look like the creator commissioned someone to draw a group shot with one reference image each and didn’t tell them anything about the characters. how much you wanna bet they commissioned a friend and it came out wrong but they were too polite to say “sorry, no, this is wrong, can you do it over?”)

Trails of Cold Steel IV

Hoo boy. It’s... not great, and it’s not great in a pretty predictable way for an even-numbered entry in the Trails series. It happens every time- first there’s a game in a new engine with new characters and a new world to explore, and it’s really nice and does interesting things... and then it ends on a cliffhanger, and then there’s a sequel game in the same engine with the same characters and the same world, reusing as many assets as possible. Also the League Of Generically Evil Anime Supervillains is there causing trouble for reasons they refuse to explain, and the plot is a storm of magicbabble and macguffin-chasing that makes little to no sense. 

Cold Steel IV is that for Cold Steel III, full stop. Welcome back to all the same places you visited last game, except this time there’s some stupid magic apocalypse happening (not that it stops you from taking the time to do random sidequests constantly, of course). The whole “oh, the evil curse mind controls people and that’s why they do stupid bullshit that’s in no one’s interest” plot point is leaned on super hard, and it’s just a big yawn the whole way through.

It’s still really fun, though, because the battle system remains really well-designed. (The same battle system that was just as fun in Cold Steel III, mind you, but it hasn’t gotten old.) And- though they’re struggling to square it with the dumb mind control apocalypse plot, the NPC dialogue continues to make the world feel believable and lived-in. They don’t slack on the parts that make Trails good- it’s just the parts that make Trails bad are making themselves more evident than ever.

did finally get to date Towa though so that’s a win

One Step From Eden

OSFE is... uh. It’s fucking hard is what it is. It’s sort of a deckbuilding roguelike, and there’s this combat that takes place on a grid, and- wait, it’s like Mega Man Battle Network, it’s exactly like Mega Man Battle Network. Man, I forgot about that, but the mechanical influence is extremely obvious. It’s MMBN meets Slay the Spire.

Except it’s super duper hard as hell, because unlike MMBN you can’t pause and swap out chips or anything- everything is just always happening so much, all at once, everywhere, and you have no recourse but to git gud and learn all the enemy patterns and the behavior of your own spells and develop the twitch reflexes necessary to not fucking die from all the shit that’s on the screen always.

(What’s the story? Uhhhh, there was some kind of magic apocalypse, and some anime girls are trying to reach a city for some reason that doesn’t really get explained ever. The game doesn’t really care to build its world at all- it’s all mechanics plus a little token character dialogue that doesn’t say much.)

The point is it’s really frickin’ hard but I am an epic pro gamer and I got ALL THE ACHIEVEMENTS, MOTHERFUCKER. If you’ve played it, I expect you to be really god damn impressed with me, okay???

A Short Hike

This one was really relaxing! It’s a platformer where you explore an Animal Crossing-y island of cartoon animal people, collecting mobility upgrades- but like, mainly it’s about straight chillin’. The flight controls are fun and there’s lots of little secrets to find and it’s just a nice time that doesn’t drag on too long. Not too much to say about this one.

Pokémon Sword

Ehhhhh.

I’m not here for the hot takes about how Dexit is good actually. Development hell happened, they had to make cuts for time, I get it. It’s disappointing and makes the game a little bit worse, but it’s not the end of the world.

Apart from that... perfectly serviceable? The Wild Area could’ve used a little more technical polish (as could most things in the game, really) but was a step in the right direction, giving the player a wider array of early-game team-building options than ever before. No HMs is good. Story and characters were kind of nothing, but that’s par for the course. “At least this time they’re not shoehorning in some kind of stupid evil-team-wants-legendary-pokemon-to-destroy-the-world apocalypse plot”, I thought to myself before they managed to shoehorn one in at the last minute with zero buildup- but, hey, beats wasting half the game on it.

It’s nothing special and it’s missing a lot of polish, but its problems are mainly due to being rushed, and presumably next gen they’ll be able to reuse a lot of the models and animations (maybe even improve the animations so they’re not so boring??? a man can dream) and make something interesting. SwSh seem like they were testing the waters for something else, and not taking too many chances in the meantime. 

(yo why would you sell all these cosmetic items and then turn them all off during gym battles, though) 

Hades

Hades is- oh, who am I kidding? Everyone knows Hades, it’s the game of the year, greatest thing since sliced bread, Supergiant are heroes, yada yada yada. I’ve played almost 300 hours of it and I’ve completed everything except all the Resources Director levels (currently a Sigma Wraith), it’s extremely fun and you don’t need me to tell you that.

Petal Crash

It was that thing the Paranatural creator helped on? It’s, uh. It’s a block-sliding puzzle game thing, sort of in a Puyo Puyo vein. It has fun character designs and some good dialogue, like you’d expect from Zack’s involvement, but it didn’t really leave an impression otherwise (besides how got dang infuriating some of its Turn Trial puzzles can be.) The story is... kinda heartwarming, kinda didactic, kinda childish, not especially deep or interesting. Hard for it to be, when it’s told through little bits of fluffy character dialogue that exist to set up a puzzle battle as quickly as possible. Not super recommended unless you really really like block-sliding puzzles.

Hollow Knight

Man, why’d I sleep on this for so long? It’s a metroidvania platformer with heavy Dark Souls inspiration, in terms of tone and difficulty and death mechanics and environmental storytelling. And it’s... apart from all that, just really good as a game, with tight controls and juicy movement and great animation. Progression is linked as much to mastery as it is to upgrades collected- I found myself in lategame areas facing down things that would’ve killed me ten times over at the start- not because I had the best gear, but because I’d learned the game’s language and understood how to move in ways that wouldn’t get me killed.

(Usually. Sometimes I’d walk into a room and sit on a bench and suddenly there’d be a boss fight and I’d get slaughtered. Ain’t that just the way it goes?)

Anyway, on top of all that it’s just charming as hell, with a really unique and well-realized world full of little bug people. I love how, like, your character is clearly some kind of eldritch abomination, but it’s small and cute and so everyone (besides enemies that attack you on sight because they’re possessed by some kinda evil mold) is like “awww, who’s this little guy? want some help, little guy?”

(except Zote, who is just an ass hole. i love him.)

#game rec #also some game non recs #long post

[ms-march]

Lead me to the Garden

So I got this originally as a prompt several weeks ago by @anahiranz from the Eye for an Eye playlist prompts list and the quote was "we were so very wild and free" and while I was not able to use all of the quote exactly, I did incorporate it in the piece! While it was probably intended for Thadrienne, I had this John and Adrienne scene from the wedding weeks sitting in my notes app for so long and I could not even stop outthinking about it. Thank you to @tallmadgeandtea and @culper-spymaster for beta reading! If you liked it PLEASE give it a like, comment, and/or reblog!

John finally spoke, “You know I feel horrible about this.” Adrienne snorted, incredibly unladylike, moving around him and wedging herself between him and the railing.

She wrapped her arms around his torso, resting her head on his chest. She paused, allowing him to wrap an arm around her before she spoke, “So you waited till now to get cold feet?”

John just laughed, his chest shaking her as he laughed. He replied, speaking quietly, “No, I feel horrible taking you from him- your father, I mean. He loves you so much, and I barely know you. It feels like some kind of cruel joke.”

“Well,” Adrienne smiled against his waistcoat, “I, for one, have no regrets for taking you from your father.”

It was John’s turn to release a very un-genteel snort of his own, wrapping a single arm around her petite figure and planting a single hand squarely in the middle of her back to keep her in place before replying. “I do not think that stealing me away from my father is possible. Trust me, I went all the way to London to try.”

Adrienne hummed in agreement, grumbling about the man in her reply. “He is a rather miserable fellow. And, if you would permit me to say, a bit….”

“Perverted? Slimy? A thorough ass?”

“I was going to say discomforting.”

The pair broke out in a peal of happy laughter at their own jokes, all made at the expense of Henry Laurens, for several moments before they were once more rudely interrupted by the silence.

“What about your mother?” It was not a question Adrienne would have dared to ask a week ago. She would never presume that she was close enough to him to be privy to such private knowledge, but it had been eating at her all week. His mother was named Eleanor. She had discovered that while being in the wrong place at the right time.

That was the kinder way to say she had been eavesdropping on Henry Laurens a few days prior.

Adrienne had so many questions. How did she pass? Why did they never speak of her? Did John favor her or his father more in character or appearance? She had so many questions about Eleanor Laurens, and it had been driving her mad for the past week.

So she had asked.

She did not wish to bombard him with all of her questions, not at once. That would only ensure that she did not receive an answer to a single one of them. No, she couldn’t ask it all, so she settled for asking a question about nothing at all. What about his mother?

He was a mama’s boy. That much was evident by the softened look in his eyes and the melancholic smile that graced his face at the mere mention of her. Good, that was good.

“What about her?”

Well, that certainly had not been the answer Adrienne had been expecting to pass from his lips, but she still faulted herself for being surprised. Of course, he would want to evade her question; he had done well covering the coveted memories with his mother from the bald eye, and he was not to stop now. Besides, Adrienne could hardly make a claim of being privy to such personal information.

But it was eating her alive.

She just had to know.

“Anything really,” Was her reply. She had so many questions and not a single clue as to an answer to them. Adrienne would take anything he would give her. “I do not know a thing about her, none beside her name.”

“She was beautiful.”

There was a long pause after his wispy words that almost made her think that he had told her all he was willing to share, but just as she prepared to drop the subject and be consumed by the silence once more, he continued. “She was the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. Her hair… Well, I am no student of poetry, Miss Fairfax, so I am afraid I haven’t a poetic comparison to give you, but it was a beautiful golden color. It had streaks of honey and even a few light brown in it, but you could never tell they were different from the rest of her hair unless you got close enough.”

He had paused again, looking out over the railing as he had been before, but this was somehow different. She could not place it precisely, but Adrienne knew better than to interrupt him. She shifted on her feet in his arms, letting out a small yelp in surprise when he suddenly lifted her to sit on the railing, placing the hand that had not been holding her before on her waist as he propped himself up with the other.

“I cannot figure out for the life of me if she would have liked you or not.”

Adrienne was not sure if she should take that as a compliment or an insult, but decided to keep her mouth shut, merely tilting her chin up to look at him, encouraging him to continue with that happily curious smile of hers. “And why,” his eyes dropped to hers at the suddenness of her words as they interrupted his previously silent space, “is that?”

He continued to look at her eyes with quite a quiet intensity that she had become familiar with in the past week before a slight toothy grin spread on his face. “Well, she would have been mortified by such an attraction as this,” he nodded vaguely at the property Belvoir sat on as he spoke, “She was always saying that Mepkin was like an out-of-place monument to material among the natural beauty of the Carolinas. She would have called this a palace. And she would have been mortified by how strictly grown the gardens are.”

“She did not enjoy such things? Even for the sake of the visual beauty?” Adrienne could not help but let the questions slip from her lips and found that she only slightly regretted asking because, much to her surprise, they were met with an answer and an eager one at that. She could see it clear as day in his baby blues, or ought she to say Carolina blues?

“She loved nature as it belonged,” was John’s reply, continuing more with that same smile on his lips, “It was my father’s wedding gift to her. 100 acres around the house to do whatever she pleased with. I think just about everything that could possibly grow in the Carolinas can be found there.”

“And my gardens are a testament to who I am as an individual?” She had meant it as a jest, she really had, but he had other plans in mind for the comment, cupping the hand he had been propping himself up with on the side of her face.

“Yes,” he replied, not noticing just how hard she was trying to regulate her breathing at the soft touch of his bare hand on her cheek. “It says a good deal as a testament to your character.”

Adrienne was not sure why this had affected her constitution so greatly, sinking her heart in her chest as he uttered the words. “Then she would not have liked me?”

Perhaps it had upset her because she rather believed him to favor his mother. The heart in her chest was outweighed by the stone in her stomach, and, were she a weaker-willed woman, there might have been tears sparkling in her eyes. Adrienne, however, would not be moved to tears when she was not entirely confident why she was crying.

“No,” he said tenderly, wickedly interrupting her silence, “I rather think she would have considered it quite a complementary recommendation.”

“She would?”

Who could blame her for being startled at such a sudden change?

“The neat rows of manicured hedge, monuments to towering statues and fountains of marble, and the piles of pure bloom flowers..” he hesitated before continuing, not stopping his tender study of her face, “They are certainly a spectacle, but they are warm. For some reason.”

She understood him immediately. Belvoir was always warm to Adrienne.

The imposing facade, elaborate decor, and imported marble floors were intimidating to most of the guests. It was designed for such an effect. The house was, by the family’s station, public grounds. But William Fairfax made sure that those who entered knew deep down it was not theirs.

Everyone except for John.

Belvoir was always warm to Adrienne, and eventually, it would belong to John.

And it was warm to him.

“And what does that say about me?” It came out as a hushed whisper, not wanting to disturb him when he was so close to her as if any louder might have caused him to rear her off the balcony railing.

“Is it not obvious?”

What kind of answer even was that? Adrienne was not sure to proceed in her questioning, as she did suppose that she could make sense of his comments on her own if she tried, but something in her wanted nothing more than to hear him say it. She wanted it, quite frankly, to pass through his lips rather than be developed in her own mind.

Thankfully, she did have to ask him for such. John took her lack of speech as ignorance and continued. Unfortunately, his continued speech meant a finger— a thumb, to be precise— caressed her cheek as he spoke, “Because somewhere, underneath this beautiful facade, I believe you have a heart.” She laughed suddenly at the solemn tone that accompanied the statement, bringing a smile to his face and humor to his tone as he defended himself. “I am serious! You pretend to be all formalities and— what’s that phrase you just used… the...ah, yes— “visual beauty” I believe that, somewhere, locked away, you have an extraordinarily warm and tender heart.”

“I would not particularly hold your breath for that.”

John had a quite unusual laugh, Adrienne had never paid it any attention till now, and it came from so deep within him it seemed to be a part of his very nature of being. It was oddly warming and made her want to smile to join in his joy. And oh, oh he had called her beautiful, of all things.

“And she jests!” He exclaimed with a grand flourish, lifting her off the railing and giving her a short spin through the air before placing her into the crook of his arm to hold her near him.

Adrienne might never get used to how he looked out of uniform.

She might never become used to it, but, oh, did she love it.

He had called her beautiful.

He had called her beautiful and held her to him as a man and wife ought to be, and, oh, did she love it. For just a moment, they were alone on a beautiful marble balcony, and just for a moment, the two were so at ease.

And for just a moment, they were so very young and wild, free of the burdens of station for a mere moment on that marble balcony.

#lbl #luck be a lady #turn amc #turn: washington's spies #adrienne fairfax #john laurens #henry laurens #william fairfax #turnfic #turn fanfiction #eleanor laurens #prompts and drabbles

[charaznablescanontoyota]

4, 15, and 20?

4. Share a sentence or paragraph from your writing that you’re really proud of (explain why, if you like)

the arena fight in antlers (part 2) is my favorite action sequence i've ever written in my life and i think it fucking rules. idk i'm not someone who writes a lot of action or fight scenes but i was truly off the shits with that one i got so excited to write a tournament arc style magic fight

15. Which is harder: titles or summaries (or tags)?

summaries which is why i usually just use an excerpt and a tiny subtitle. i never know how to tag my stuff cleverly either lol i'm just straightforward and tag everything that's in there

20. Tell us the meta about your writing that you really want to ramble to people about (symbolism you’ve included, character or relationship development that you love, hidden references, callbacks or clues for future scenes?)

oh hey meta my favorite thing to talk about :]c let's talk about uhhhhh space ghosts and foil characters. join me won't you

when i was writing all this time (the space ghosts fic) i did a lot of thinking on shaq and combs estes as foil characters because like. i knew i wanted to bounce them off each other pretty much from the beginning but also the more i bounced them off each other the more interesting they became to me as foils?? there's the obvious thing of shaq being the most honest person alive (shaq not lying is something i try and stick to like 98% of the time) and being very genuinely himself and combs constructing their identity as a performance and not really knowing what to do when they end up in the trench and can't make themself useful or find a role to play. and they have that conversation in all this time where combs identifies shaq being honest about his emotions as patheticism because that's how they think of it in themself! but maybe shaq is teaching them to think of it in a kinder light sometimes.

combs is also i think. someone who has trouble feeling at home in most of the places Where They Are whether it's breckenridge or the trench. and the trench is shaq's home! that gets repeated like a billion times in the fic. and i think as far as that's concerned like. shaq is trying to help combs feel more at home in the trench and sort of share the wealth of the good things he's been able to find there, whether it's having someone who will sit outside your door and listen to you when you're sad or having a friend who will barge into your room and invite you along to do something objectively stupid

i ALSO think a lot about the fact that shaq and combs e are both, in theory, dancers, because that FASCINATES me. i have a shorter fic on the backburner that was intended to be just a lot of them bickering about their respective dance related hobbies because shaq plays ddr-likes and combs (in my hc at least) did argentine tango seriously enough to be in competitions, and also tap when they joined the jazz hands. and. idk. i've been watching freestyle ddr videos and thinking about how they are sort of show choir for rhythm game community nerds and how it's interesting that they place more importance on the visual performance than on actually doing well in the game itself or playing the game very fast or technically perfect. also two player ddr-likes and tango both require a partner who you like. know and trust and yeah where i'm going with this is that i think shaq teaches combs to play pump it up and combs teaches them to tango.

this is a billion words long. i like them

#writing meta meme #skeleton crew #so i don't lose my big ramble lol