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whataboutvideogames · 3 years

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Metroid: Dread Is About 80% of a Brilliant Game

The Journey to Dread I was born in 1992, and growing up I only had access to handheld gaming devices — which means the first Metroid game I ever played was Metroid: Fusion.

Released in 2002 on the Game Boy Advance, it was a departure from the previous three 2D Metroid games. It featured more narrative, inner dialogue for Samus, and a computer that gave you orders about where to go next. Fusion managed to include these elements without losing the spirit of exploration that marks the series – it may have more narrative and dialogue than the previous games, but it’s still minimalist in comparison to the Castlevania games of the same era. It gives you just enough to take you on a satisfying narrative arc without interrupting the exploration and combat.

The next 2D Metroid game was Metroid: Zero Mission, a remake of the original Metroid. Being a remake of the original game, it returned to the “less is more” style of narrative. However, a new section added to the end of the game still manages to — practically wordlessly — make Samus feel more like an actual character, in addition to flipping the gameplay completely upside down in a thrilling way.

Metroid: Dread is in many ways a brilliant game, but despite its technical achievements it fails to meet the bar set by the two games that came before it.

Technically an Achievement Metroid: Dread’s gameplay is designed to perfection, in the way the best Nintendo games are. Running, jumping, space-jumping, and shooting all feel great. Surprisingly, the best mechanical addition might just be the slide, which is intuitive and fun and feels like it must have been a part of the series all along. Between good pacing and a well thought-out control scheme, the game does an impressive job of feeding you a steady drip of new abilities without overwhelming you.

Much has been made of Dread’s difficulty, and it’s true: this game is hard. Mostly, however, the boss fights are hard. On my first playthrough on the Normal difficulty, I don’t think I died to normal enemies or even mini-bosses more than two or three times in all. In contrast, by mid-game I was easily dying a dozen times per boss, and probably died to the final boss about 50 times before finishing the game. The boss fights were fun and satisfying, but the swerves in difficulty made the rest of the combat feel trivial in comparison.

The E.M.M.I. Of course, between the bosses, mini-bosses, and E.M.M.I. zones, maybe the developers thought the player would need a break. The E.M.M.I., heavily featured in Dread’s marketing, are invulnerable killer robots that stalk certain areas of the game. They represent Dread’s biggest departure from the Metroid formula, and they’re a welcome addition. Samus is powerless against the E.M.M.I. for most of the game, turning ventures into their territory into tense stealth sections and fraught escapes. The AI for the E.M.M.I. keeps you on your toes as the robots anticipate your escape routes and appear when you least expect them.

While the E.M.M.I. are effective, they aren’t utilized to their full potential. Their confinement to explicitly defined areas saps away their intimidation, and while the E.M.M.I. do gain new skills as the game goes on, none of them really feel very distinct from each other. Encounters with them get harder, but your tactics for avoiding them never change. The menacing robots also have essentially no effect on the narrative of the game — by the last third, they’re basically a footnote.

Did I Miss Something?

That unrealized potential extends to the structure and narrative of Metroid: Dread as well. The sparse narrative is promising, right up until the final boss fight of the game, but then the game ends without reckoning with anything it’s introduced. Imagine if in The Empire Strikes Back, Vader told Luke that he was his father, but then Luke killed Vader, blew up the second Death Star, and the movie ended. This is supposedly the end of this part of the Metroid saga, so then imagine if there also weren’t any Star Wars movies after that, and you’ve got a good feeling for how Dread treats its story.

Compared to the emotional endings of Fusion and Zero Mission, Dread simply doesn’t stick the landing.

[Spoilers] The stuff about Raven Beak being Samus’ … dad? was wild enough, but then Samus turns into a human-Metroid-Chozo hybrid for all of two minutes before the X parasite possessing Quiet Robe turns her back? Somehow, and for some reason? If they wanted Quiet Robe’s sacrifice to be the emotional lynchpin of the finale, they needed it to make at least a little bit of sense.

They also reveal that Raven Beak was impersonating Adam for about 90% of the game and never mention it again. It should have been a great twist, but it’s tossed at you about 4 minutes before the game ends, robbing it of any impact. [End spoilers]

Don't Leave Them Wanting This Much More The game ends abruptly from a structural standpoint as well. With so much emphasis on the E.M.M.I. in the beginning and middle of the game, it’s unsatisfying that there’s no real final showdown with them. I was waiting for something like the final confrontation with SA-X in Fusion, or the curveball end section of Zero Mission. It’s like if an episode of a medical drama ended with the second diagnosis being right, or if E3 ended without “one more thing”; you know that when it seems like it’s about to end, there’s actually a surprise waiting for you. To use a more relevant example, it's like if a Zelda game ended the first time you collected the Three Magic Whatevers. I was so certain that Dread was saving something for after what appeared to be the Big Final Fight — but then it just actually was the Big Final Fight, roll credits.

Some games make you want DLC in a good way, because you just want to spend more time with them (looking at you, Hades). Metroid: Dread makes me want DLC because it’s about an hour of game away from being the new pinnacle of the series. Instead, it’s Empire Strikes Back without Return of the Jedi: brilliant, but unsatisfying on its own.

P.S. Also, was there music in this game? There are melodies from the Fusion and Zero Mission soundtracks that I still remember after at least a decade since I played them last. Even Metroid Prime: Corruption’s music had some memorable and distinctive bits. I just binged Dread for three days straight and I couldn't hum five seconds of music from it.

#metroid: dread #metroid #metroid fusion #metroid dread

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ship-to-hell · 5 years

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Being A Collection Of Letters Across The Sea

Have an emmhono epistolary fic, written uh...several months ago on AO3 and somehow neglected in the drafts of this tumblr since then. I offer no excuses, I’m just bad. have a future!fic with FEELINGS.

AO3

This letter has been written on the back of a colorful postcard proclaiming “Greetings From Kugane.” The penmanship is elegant, but a little scratchy on the rough paper. It’s also notably more cramped near the bottom where the author starts running out of space.

My lord,

I pray this letter finds you well. I have arrived in Kugane after a very uneventful journey; the only event of any import was the sighting of a great whale, which ignored our ship completely. The Bokairo Inn has opened its doors to me upon the Warrior of Light’s recommendation, and their hot springs are very relaxing. I wish Were you here, you would no doubt enjoy them; after spending three bells traversing Kugane’s winding streets with my bags, I’m not sure whether to credit my good opinion of them to the waters themselves or the sheer relief of reaching them. The cuisine here is unlike anything I am used to, but it is very good if you like fish, rice, and combinations thereof. You would not like wasabi paste; it is v. spicy. You would however like horses – like unicorns without the horns, and most of them are very friendly and not at all inclined to bite your fingers off. Please take copy of attached notes for safekeeping.

Wish you were here,

Sincerely,

Honoroit Banlardois

The attached notes stretch to several pages of dense handwritten vellum, and contain what seem to be a week’s worth of very keen observation of the city of Kugane. Amidst the footnotes referring to other works for background information, the author has noted major shops, cultural institutions, the correct method of donning a kimono, and how to perform a tea ceremony. There is a small, crooked sketch of a horse in one corner.

The handwriting on this fine parchment surmounted with the Fortemps seal bears a strong resemblance to Honoroit’s, but is looser and messier, suggesting the writer has much more practice with it. Blots of ink mark spots where the writer was distracted or searching for a word.

Honoroit,

Praise the Fury you arrived in one piece! The Warrior was very keen on telling me all about her first voyage to Kugane, including what she assures me was a thoroughly haunted ships’ graveyard. I, of course, knew you would encounter no such thing – and if you did, you would surely emerge unscathed. Kugane seems like quite the place; I wish I could see even half of the wonders you’ve described so well. Do they truly eat with sticks? However does that work? Speaking of food, I think you do me a disservice, my boy. This wasabi cannot possibly be stronger than good Coerthan horseradish. I demand a sample for comparison!

Kugane seems to love its tea nearly as much as you do. I’ve sent you a box of ours in case you miss it; it ought to arrive with this letter or I will be having words with the postmoogles. Pray write back soon; my days are very long and cold until I hear from you are missed dreadfully at Dragonhead. Corentiaux has been moping, and I have needed to reassure poor Medguistl a dozen times that you are not going to die eating foreign food. Please don’t die eating foreign food I pray this letter reaches you in good health.

All my love,

Emmanellain

P. S. - Unicorns are much better. They come with their own spears.

The heavy box of tea is stamped with the insignia of a shop in the Pillars known for its exorbitant prices and high quality. There is also a tea infuser shaped, for some reason, like a sleeping chocobo with its head tucked under a wing.

This letter has been written on smooth Doman paper. There is a slightly damp spot in one corner, probably tea, and the handwriting is less sure than it was.

My lord,

Thank you very much for the tea; I’m enjoying a cup as I write this, and the infuser is wonderfully charming. I had not realized how much I missed the tastes of home until you sent it to me. The tea in Kugane is very different; they seem to be very fond of a variety called matcha which is bright green and truly astonishingly bitter. I am assured that it is an acquired taste. Speaking of which, I must warn you again not to risk the wasabi! Though if you have the chance to try fresh sushi – I understand a fine Hingan restaurant has recently opened in Mor Dhona? – I think you would enjoy it. Yes, they do eat with sticks; I have provided a diagram, though I am no great artist.

Do tell the troops there is no need to fret over me; I remain quite well, and Kugane agrees with me. I would have preferred to explore more of Hingashi, but you know how they feel about foreigners. ‘Tis much like Ishgard before the opening of our gates. Likely by the time you get this letter, I will have left for Doma by way of the Ruby Sea. That country is far more welcoming; I understand their Enclave owes much to adventurers. Pray do not fret if my next letter takes overlong to reach you, but know that I lo you are in my thoughts. Please take the attached notes for my records, and do not mix them in with your own reports.

The tea makes me think of you.

Sincerely,

Honoroit

The abovementioned notes are, if possible, even denser than the previous ones, and seem to contain nearly everything the author thought noteworthy about Kugane. He seems to be especially keen to educate his audience on local folklore and cuisine, including several clumsy but charming sketches of various shrines and festivals. There is indeed a diagram showing how to eat with chopsticks.

The parchment is crumpled, as though it has been hastily shoved into a mail bag. One corner is ripped.

Dear Honoroit,

How dare you, old boy! You must know it’s been simply ages since I’ve mixed up anything with my own paperwork, never mind anything as important as your next manuscript outline! I keep your notes in a locked chest especially so that they come to no harm; I should die if anything happened to something you’ve worked so hard on. Regarding which, incidentally, I have enclosed your month’s profits for The White Yonder, and your publisher demands wishes to know when you will write another. I have told him quite firmly that he will get your next book when it is ready and not a moment before.

I have reassured the men that you are well, but you know how they will worry. I don’t suppose a daguerreotype is a possibility? I We should like to see for ourselves that you are doing well on your travels. Is it yet warm in Doma? The weather here continues freezing, and I pray that you at least are comfortable. I will send you more tea, and do please let me know if there is anything else. or if you want to come home

I have also tried wasabi thanks to the Warrior. I must admit, once again, that you are far wiser than me. On the upside, it does wonders for head colds, have you noticed? I will take your recommendations of Mor Dhona under advisement; I would far rather have my culinary adventures by your side. (And it shall give me more time to practice with the chopsticks.) Would that I could join you on your travels! Alas, were both of us to go on vacation, the garrison would surely collapse. I believe I owe my very life to Yaelle, though she can never compare to you.

I miss you so--

Praying for a swift reply,

Emmanellain

This letter has been written on a torn-off piece of notepaper, so rushed as to be nearly illegible.

My lord,

Your letter arrived barely a bell before my ship is due; I am glad to hear that all is well at home and v v thankful for the gil you sent; passage across the Ruby Sea is v expensive. It is warm here. When I return, we will go to Mor Dhona together & I insist it is my treat.

The daguerreotype is for you.

Yrs,

Honoroit

In addition to the by-now-expected notes on Kugane, there is a daguerreotype in a cheap frame. It’s smudgy and not very clear, but it shows the author—freckled, lean, with slightly shaggy hair pulled back off his face and just showing the very edge of a scar on his temple —smiling for the camera in front of a massive building. The reverse is etched Shiokaze Hostelry, 5 7AE.

Dear

Honoroit,

Thank you for the picture; it rests on my desk, where I may be reminded of your face. Not that I am likely to forget, you understand – I could never do that – but you have been gone simply ages and I own that travel always changes a man. You look so handso very well in Kugane; longer hair suits you. It makes you look like quite the adventurer! Speaking of, you have not been neglecting your archery I hope? I have heard that Doma is home to monsters. And we will have no talk of this paying for meals – you must know I would simply die of shame. You who do so much for me deserve to be taken care of! Which does remind me: while I was perusing the fashion plates I saw a doublet I think would suit you very well for a dinner Artoirel is holding for the Feast of St. Valerinne, by which time you must be home. I’ve attached the plate in question; do let me know what you think regarding materials?

Ah – has the news reached you yet? I know the Warrior writes you, but in case she didn’t mention – I am an uncle again! Tristechambard de Fortemps weighs just a hair over ten ponzes and is simply the most adorable infant. (Do refrain from telling Linie and Charlemend I said that; I think they’re jealous that their new brother is getting so much attention.) Artoirel says I shall be a bad influence, but I think the little ones only need the sobering influence of their Uncle Honoroit to come out as perfect little ladies and gentlemen – and the Lady Rivienne agrees with me, so hah! You’ve only two more months of travel before you may prove me right, I think?

Please know that you are in my thoughts, and write back swiftly. And tell me everything about Doma, so I can see it through your eyes.

Yours,

Emmanellain

The attached fashion plate is a remarkably well-done engraving showing a generic young Ishgardian gentleman in the very latest sable-trimmed velvet coat, with a doublet of blue silk damask edged in gold to match the buttons on the coat. It is very fashionable and very, very expensive.

This scrap of paper is crumpled so badly that it’s difficult to unfold without tearing, and damp spots blur the ink.

Honoroit it’s been a month since your last letter where are you? Did something happen? Did you decide to stay in Doma you should, if you knew No, I know you wouldn’t want to stay, only to visit, but you’ve been gone so long and I miss you, I miss you

I love you please come home

The handwriting here is legible, but just barely. Seawater has dried on the torn page, leaving white streaks behind.

Emmanellain

If you get this letter, please know that

(a slash of ink)

--the captain of the Hideyori is a grasping skinflint who refused to pay the Tithe until we passengers mutinied & I don’t know if they will accept it

(An ink splot leaks onto the edges of the words, but they are still clear) --you hold my whole heart

This letter is written on cheap paper in a slightly trembling hand.

My lord,

Kindly disregard the previous missive; I was overwrought and have since landed safely in the village of Isari. The Ruby Tide Confederacy is really quite reasonable if paid properly, and our new captain is a very intelligent young woman. The village is small and close-knit; their local wares are mainly fish-based, but I have enclosed a scarf I think you might like. I have not been neglecting my archery at all; already it has come in quite useful, for the wilds of Doma have no shortage of beasts and Isari is willing to pay for their removal. I am afraid I had to spend most of my proceeds from the book on the Tithe. Never fear, however; I have quite enough funds to see me safely to the village of Namai, and from there the road to the Enclave is well-maintained.

I was overjoyed to hear of your new nephew; I hope he continues in good health. I look forward to meeting him, but you must cease calling me his Uncle Honoroit; though I would of course be proud to hold such an honor, people will talk. As regards the fashion plate, I shall reserve judgement until I am in the tailor’s shop myself; I do not think such bold embroidery quite suits.

Sincerely,

Honoroit

Attached to the envelope is a burlap-wrapped package; opening it reveals a finely-woven wool scarf in a deep brick red. It’s quite plain, but very warm.

At several points in this letter, the quill has torn small holes in the parchment. The handwriting shakes.

Honoroit Banlardois,

I shall not be disregarding any letters you send me. Did you think I would dismiss you? That it would be possible to know you, to live beside you, and not love you in return? I have been near to dying with thoughts of you. I have been dreaming of nothing but your smile; I haven’t been able to look at anyone else Fury knows I tried, and yet I could barely look at you – you are so beautiful and clever and wise and wonderful, I felt so sure you would hate me, that if you knew what was in my heart you’d just stay in Doma and count yourself well rid of me--

Forgive me. I have far too much to say to you to ever put my thoughts to a proper letter. By the time you get this, I will be well on my way to the Doman Enclave, where I intend to kiss you breathless until you are quite, quite sure that I love you beyond my own life.

With all my heart,

Emmanellain

P. S. - And if you call me my lord after that, I shall be quite put out.

This letter is dated several months after the preceding ones, and is written on very fine paper indeed.

My lord brother,

Must I apologize again for my sudden trip to Doma? Well, you’ll be happy to know that Honoroit and I are on our way home, and you may expect us for Valerinne’s Day. This letter ought to arrive before we do; you know how taxing aetherytes can be. I am glad that all remains well at home; Corentiaux assures me that, contrary to what you may believe, Dragonhead has not collapsed, burnt down, or otherwise been destroyed since my departure. Give my love to the children, and let them know that their favorite uncles are coming with as many toys as they can carry. Honoroit is telling me that I shall spoil them; I think you’ll agree that they deserve the best we can give them. As for the adults, I am sending you several bottles of the finest Doman rice wine – well, they call it wine, but really ‘tis more like beer with how it’s brewed – and enough silk for a gown for Rivienne and a doublet for you. I think they will meet with your approval, especially the wine.

Yours in the Fury

Emmanellain de Fortemps

P. S. - Honoroit’s manuscript is nearing completion. You and Father will, of course, be entrusted with the advance copies.

These notes have been written on high-quality paper, but appear to have been torn from a larger sheet. The edge of the Fortemps sigil is just visible in one corner.

I never thought this day would come, but you were right. Gil enclosed.

I told you so. To think it only took five years of the most awful pining I have ever seen. If he stops treating you right, I know where he sleeps and which laundry bags are his.

Your concern is touching but unnecessary. He is wonderful.

This particular note has been ripped into pieces and reconstituted from the scraps.

So, a spring wedding?

#emmanellain #honoroit #saulette #emmanellain fortemps #emmhono #honoroit banlardois

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ricekilla · 6 years

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u.s. hip hop artists must learn from bad bunny

There’s a nobility to watching someone speak a second language in public—especially on live TV, as Bad Bunny did in his performance on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. It is that cringe-inducing reality of imperfection; of the accent, the mispronunciations, the stuttering, that can leave a human so vulnerable. You’re watching a young man who knows his grip on The World’s Most Important Language is far from perfect. But rather than quietly accept this and avoid speaking it altogether, rather than resting on his native tongue and his many native successes, in a moment of exposure wherein most young artists would understandably reserve their vulnerabilities to avoid ire, Bunny decides to go for it. He speaks English, and it’s not perfect; but it is powerful. In his first televised American performance, El Conejo Malo spoke on the natural disaster that ravaged his home of Puerto Rico, including a barb at Donald Trump, all in accented English.

Yes, everyone’s got a Trump take, and most of them are Trump Bad. And yes, we need more than just cute speeches, verses, and social media posts. We need real activism; the activism that can actually send an impoverished child to school and help a sick mother pay for her health care. We should expect that Bunny put his money where his mouth is and work to fight against white supremacist leaders like Donald Trump as well as continue to repair the damage caused by Hurricane Maria. But there’s something special about Bad Bunny’s words in particular; unlike your safe American (and Latinx) stars, he’s not necessarily supposed to be speaking out. He could easily just be Lil Pump Puerto Rico for some years before his stature expands to the point of political expectations. He could easily just be the ignorant Latino rapper, or the ignorant Latino star, and not be expected to empower the world his art illuminates.

There is an ignorance associated with Latinx rappers in comparison to their influential American counterparts. The mainstream American musical lexicon only knows Daddy Yankee and Don Omar; Calle 13 is not even a footnote for your average hip hop fan. People are just beginning to take Latin “urbano” seriously as being led by artists that do more than make bops for your friends to slur-sing at high school dances. Bad Bunny sat with Colombian reggaeton king J. Balvin for an interview with Complex magazine, in which they announced a potentially seismic collaborative album. The two discussed and affirmed their place as trendsetters shirking norms; Balvin describes Bunny’s nails as a “very beautiful thing”. He tells Complex in Spanish that the message of expressions such as these is to “Be yourself. …If they say, he’s crazy, or he’s gay or whatever, who cares? If he’s gay, then he’s gay! When they see that, they say ‘Okay, if Bad Bunny isn’t gay, but he feels comfortable with what he’s doing, why won’t I come out of the closet and say it’s okay?’”

And in this moment wherein the ostensible Drake of Latin hip hop is encouraging defiance towards gender norms, I have a realization: somehow, the artists that do not even perform in English are the ones whose words should be most important to us in American hip hop right now.

How many American artists put themselves in a position to be vulnerable or ill-equipped for the sake of trying to say the right thing? It’s easier for G-Eazy to drop Donald Trump diss verses; he’s rich, established, and white, and he’s got little to lose. It’s easier for a rapper like Logic to plead for everyone to get along. It’s easy for Soundcloud rappers to dye their hair, rock their satchels, and tat their faces; how many of them are going to tell you about what social standards made those features shocking in the first place? How many of them are going to speak out against traditionalist aesthetics that they’re breaking? How many of them have something important to say?

We should, of course, be careful to exalt El Conejo Malo as some sort of feminist hip hop icon. Though he’s shown remarkable qualities as a public figure, he’s still a work in progress like the rest of us; often his music is charged by hints of debaucherous misogyny that is understood as the genre standard. It’s nothing particularly out of the ordinary, but that doesn’t make it ideal. And in this moment of hypertense political stances and, of course, Cancel Culture, seeing Twitterers post quips like “we stan an artist that is against toxic masculinity and gender norms 💅🏽” causes me to cringe; it feels like we’re setting ourselves up to be let down whenever Bunny makes a mistake.

Bad Bunny has not been cancelled yet, but he has been tested. His encounter with a salon that refused to paint his famous nails caught some flack from commenters. Many were angered by his reaction, in which he told doubters of his sexuality to “bring their women to his house” to watch them “have his babies”. In response to this, he clarified his sentiments in a classically defiant way (as translated by Remezcla: “’I was saying that I’d have sex with their wives, get them pregnant (which is wrong) and the men would raise my kids,’ he wrote, adding, ‘It was only a nice and exaggerated way of saying, no, I’m not gay and I love women. That’s all.’”) Eventually, the Latin trap star deleted his Twitter account.

Like the Fallon performance, this was an instance of Bunny using his words even at a point of potential vulnerability. He started by doing a typically millennial thing in calling out a salon for being decidedly unwoke and refusing him nail service because he was a man. He affirmed his gender expression as a straight man painting his nails because he wants to, understanding that there’s nothing wrong with that. Yet, in trying to say the right things, he said some wrong ones. There’s an obvious tint of misogyny in the “I’m gonna fuck your girlfriend” approach, particularly in this case, even if it is so hip hop and so inane that your average person would hardly bat an eyelash to it. Regardless, it was a failure on his part; he was a bad Bad Bunny, and it’s important that we acknowledge that.

It’s not to say that we should totally overlook the misogyny in Bunny’s lyrics or any other rap artists’, which both result from and contribute to a society that sidelines women as objects of desire, existing as complements to a man’s journey. I just want to write some nice words in Bad Bunny’s obituary before a Twitter storm eventually comes and gets him. He’s made mistakes and he’ll make more; unfortunate word choices and collaboration choices will get to any rapper’s resume in this toxic landscape. But what Bunny has decided to do so early in his career is remarkable for the fact that he is being abnormally, bravely thoughtful for someone in his position; someone who is young and misunderstood.

He is misunderstood because of the way he rebels against gender norms. He is misunderstood because his music isn’t in the right language; he’ll always be a Spanish rapper and not simply a rapper to the average hip hop head. He is misunderstood because of his drawl, his sluggishly opened vowels both as an intended stylization and as a natural result of his speaking voice and accent. He is also misunderstood as a young Latino from an island ravaged by natural disaster and poverty; overlooked by world powers, mocked by their cultures. He is misunderstood within that Latin American culture that physically and emotionally beat down young men who express themselves in “feminized” ways. If we know anything about mumble rap, or even music in general, it’s that the misunderstood artists have the most to add to the conversation.

Some of our misunderstood artists beg to be misunderstood. Kanye West went on NBC’s Saturday Night Live in a MAGA hat, highlighting a Yandhi press tour which we may otherwise know as Crazy Kanye 2: Electric Boogaloo. What’s most insulting about his whitewashed whimpering is that it’s become boring. We already know that none of us will completely understand his actions; he and his stans will equivocate that with us not being able to criticize him, which, no. The ignorance of his political speech is staggering, almost purposefully so. Rather than work to validate his perspective through an informed compassion, he manufactures a plastic one to hide behind when critiqued by the likes of known Chomskyites like Lana Del Rey. It’s a circus sideshow that only exists to benefit TV executives, Kanye West, and to some degree, Lord Voldemort himself.

Let’s compare that to another performance on a marquee NBC program. In his television debut on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, Bad Bunny gave a speech to the opening chords of his trap banger “Estamos Bien”. In his gravelly Borinqueño drawl, he preached with efficiency: “After one year of the hurricane there’s still people without electricity in their home. More than 3,000 people died, and Trump is still in denial, but you know what? Estamos bien!”

Rather than simply make fun songs and letting the rest of us intellectualize his place in this crazy world, Bunny is telling us what he’s fighting for. Rather than benefit himself through latching to causes, Bunny is benefiting causes through testing himself. And although his message is still a bit surface level and his songs sport the occasional (frequent) shallow lyric, his choice is important. He is putting words to his rebellion; substance to his style. Rather than settle for iconicism like young American rap stars, or navel-gaze with conjecture like some of our living (dying) legends, Bad Bunny is fighting for goodness that should be much simpler to see than it seems to be.

#bad bunny #j balvin #kanye west #snl #jimmy fallon #puerto rico #latin trap #machismo #latin masculinity #hip hop masculinity

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maiji · 6 years

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Thoughts on Grasses of Remembrance (The Tale of Genji through its poetry)

Finally had some time this weekend to sit down with A Waka Anthology, Volume 2: Grasses of Remembrance Part B by Edwin A. Cranston. This book is the last in an impressive and intimidating collection translating a number of major classical poetry anthologies. It’s basically a speedrun through Tale of Genji (if such a thing were possible) filtered through all 795 waka poems written or uttered by the characters over the course of the novel.

Poetry was a Really Big Deal during the Heian era. If you were an aristocrat, not only were you expected to compose decent poetry, you had to be able to do it off-the-cuff appropriate to the occasion. AND to do this properly, you were expected to be able to recognize and respond cleverly to references to a ton of other existing classic poems from memory that people would just mention casually in conversation or writing (kinda like how people quote the Simpsons today lol). This was a prime marker of how intelligent/competent and - no joke - how sexy you were. So not surprisingly, these poems are extremely important to the development of character interactions and themes in the Tale of Genji which has a lot of romance and relationship plotlines.

However. Translating Heian era Japanese into modern Japanese is already challenging. Rendering Heian era Japanese waka poetry into modern English is, as you might imagine, harder for a bunch of reasons. Considering how dense the actual novel already is, it’s super easy to gloss over the poetry, and some modern translations simply integrate the basic intent of the poems right into the main text/dialogue.

I was really interested in finding something specifically focusing on and analyzing the poetry, and this book appeared to fit the bill.

Short review: IT TOTALLY DOES. If you’re into Tale of Genji, Heian era, classical Japanese history, classical Japanese literature, Japanese poetry, or just love reading translators articulating eloquently while sassing characters or flailing through linguistic complexities, I RECOMMEND THIS BOOK

Long review: blah blah blah thoughts follows, including some quotes/poem for reference.

The book starts with a quick 2 page intro setting the context of the Tale of Genji, then goes straight into the poems. TBH I personally found it more flowery and redundant than necessary (it repeats a few poems that are then explained later). But it’s only 2 pages, we’ll live.

Then, the poems. For every poem (or poems, in the case of an exchange - sometimes a flurry of them with multiple characters speaking or dashing letters off to each other) there’s an intro and summary of context followed by an analysis, including notes on meaning, narrator and character intent, structure, symbols and wordplay. The original Japanese is included in romaji alongside the English translation. The commentary also flags known references to other classic poems (WITH those poems in-line! This is awesome because I don’t have the rest of these books!), and even mentions poem and folk song quotations from the rest of the novel where the characters have not composed new poetry, but are reciting other existing known pieces.

Overall, I have only three real “warnings” about Grasses of Remembrance Vol 2b:

1) It’s very academic and flowery in tone. If you’re not used to it, it can be hard to read. But then again, if you’re not willing to get past that, how are you reading Tale of Genji? lol. In any case, I personally thought the commentary was a lot of fun. Cranston definitely has opinions and can get pretty sarcastic in places, which I found hilarious. Here are a few sample quotes:

“Tamakazura has remarked to herself how superior the Emperor [Reizei] was in looks to all the courtiers in his train (It is a principle with this author that superior people be dashingly handsome or ravishingly beautiful).”

“The ruefully witty poems exchanged between Yugiri and To no Naishi [Koremitsu’s daughter, the Gosechi Dancer] are rather more to my taste than the soggy ones Yugiri and Kumoi no Kari exchanged on their wedding night. Might it be the case that a totally sanctioned relationship is literarily uninspiring?”

“The old lady reaches for the melodramatic ultimate and dies just as Yugiri’s letter arrives.”

The overall effect is like an exceedingly well-educated, gossipy and sassy ride through the entire novel hahaha.

2) Minor typos. I noticed some speckled throughout the text every so often (e.g., Tamakazura being rendered Takakazura, Akashi as Asashi, instances of accidental extra letters, etc.). It was pretty clear what the correct spelling was supposed to be, and TBH considering this is the last of a huge-ass series of over 1300 pages I think it’s forgiveable. Maybe a few that spell-check should have caught, but oh well.

3) This book is NOT CHEAP. As I mentioned in a previous post, not only did I not buy the entire collection, I didn’t even buy a complete Volume 2 - I only bought the last half of the second volume lmao. And the Tale of Genji translations are only HALF of this half of a book. The rest is actually the footnotes, appendices, notes to poems, glossary, bibliography and indices (including indices for every poem by author and by first line) for this beast of a translation/compilation project. This includes a lot of additional commentary and other poems and makes for pretty interesting reading itself, even without the rest of the volumes/parts. The price can definitely be scary and an issue for a lot of people, so if you’re interested in it, I suggest try checking it out at your library or on Google Books first. (In fact, Google Books is how I learned of this book in the first place.)

For me, the depth of insight for the poems was fantastic. It gave me a lot more appreciation for the scenes, including the mental state of the characters, plus a million more symbols, metaphors and ideas for my own creative works like the Genjimonogatari illustration series, North Bound and other original stuff.

It also clarified several fuzzy translation questions I had that relied on specific knowledge of Heian culture and history/evolution of the use of the language and wasn’t easily found in Google searches or online language resources. And even if you’re already familiar with common allusions, metaphors and puns/homophones in Japanese poetry, it’s still helpful to see them all summarized. And sometimes lamented by the book’s author too. SO MANY PONIES EATING GRASS. SO MANY PINES. Especially the pines. (It IS an amazing pun though, especially because it works in both English and Japanese. Pine [tree] -> to pine, matsu/pine tree -> matsu/to wait)

In term of the actual translations themselves, you may still find them coming off a bit roundabout in some cases when comparing to the original Japanese. But overall I find Cranston’s translations more direct/flavourful than how they were rendered in the Tyler translation, partly because of how Tyler chose to juggle his set of translator’s challenges for rendering not only meaning but also more technical aspects of the poetic form. So the imagery ends up being, to me, a lot more vivid. The overall effect usually ends up more colourful, more emotional, more erotic, more cutting, more entertaining, and whatnot.

For example, Kashiwagi’s suitor’s poem in the Kocho/Butterflies chapter. When reading the novel, I was like, uh-huh, yah, OK. When I read it here, I was like whoa, dude, that’s a little intense lol. Cranston’s translation amps up the connotation of the heat of the water based on the rest of the line. For comparison:

(The original non-romaji Japanese in the samples following are thanks to the Japanese Text Initiative from the University of Virginia Library Etext Centre and the University of Pittsburgh East Asian Library. Their Tale of Genji page has a FREAKING AMAZING side-by-side comparison of the novel in original Japanese, modern Japanese and romaji. Bless them and the people who had to organize and wrangle that text together.)

Original Japanese: 思ふとも君は知らじなわきかへり岩漏る水に色し見えねば Omou to mo / Kimi wa shiraji na / Wakikaeri Iwa moru misu ni / Iro shi mieneba

Tyler version: You can hardly know that my thoughts are all of you, for the stealthy spring welling from the rocks leaves no colour to be seen.

Cranston version: Hardly can you know / Of the longing that I feel, / For the boiling wave / Is merely colorless water / As it drains away from the rock.

Here’s another example. Oigimi (Agemaki in the book, as Cranston used Wayley’s names for the sisters) telling Kaoru that he’s the only one who’s been actually visiting them and Kaoru is like all riiiight :Db! From Shii ga Moto / Beneath the Oak chapter:

Oigimi’s poem 雪深き山のかけはし君ならでまたふみかよふ跡を見ぬかな Yuki fukaki / Yama no kakehashi / Kimi narade Mata fumikayou / Ato o minu kana

Tyler: No brush but your own has marked the steep mountain trails buried deep in snow / with footprints, while back and forth letters go across the hills.

Cranston: Over the bridges / Clinging to the cliffs along / Our deep-snow mountains / No letter-bearer leaves his trace: / Those footprints are yours alone.

Kaoru’s reply つららとぢ駒ふみしだく山川をしるべしがてらまづや渡らむ Tsurara toji / Koma fumishidaku / Yamakawa o Shirube shigatera / Mazu ya wataramu

Tyler: Then let it be I who firsts ride across these hills, though on his mission, / where ice under my horse’s hooves crackles along frozen streams.

Cranston: In the sheets of ice / Covering the mountain streams / My steed crushes / Such letters as form my reason, / My first, to cross as a guide.

In other examples, Genji’s “*throws hands in the air* I give up” poetic reply to Suetsumuhana about how she keeps using Robes of Cathay/Chinese cloak imagery in her poems in the original Japanese alongside the translation cracked me up even more. And one of my favourites is a pair of poems between the future Akashi Empress (as a child) and her birth-mother the Akashi lady. It’s really sad, sweet and cute all at the same time and completely flew under my radar when I read the novel originally.

The poetry analysis for the Uji chapters is especially intriguing. The plot pointedly pits Niou against Kaoru as opposing personalities with particular similarities and contrasts that drive their relationship with each other and with the woman they’re competing for. Especially in the latter half of the story, a lot of their poems, even ones written independently (i.e., to Ukifune), are specifically composed to highlight those attributes and play off of each other.

Finally, it’s also super interesting to see my experience with the narrative changes through the lens of the poems. Obviously, as I mentioned, some things I easily missed without paying as much attention to the poems in between the rest of the story. But also, some prominent characters have very few poems, so the narrative shifts away from them. Meanwhile, a number of otherwise very minor or usually overlooked characters stand out even more, thanks to the fineness, loveliness, resonance, and sometimes just sheer consistent presence of their poetry. This book definitely gave me a lot of additional perspective on the Tale of Genji, and enhanced my appreciation of the novel and the skill behind its crafting!

#tale of genji #genji monogatary #waka poetry #a waka anthology #grasses of remembrance #edwin a. cranston #royall tyler #japanese #translation #japanese tranlation #heian period #kaoru chujo #oigimi #agemaki #kashiwagi

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dramaplustautology · 6 years

Text

Lost Time Part 2/???

Siegfried goes after the kidnapped Captain.

No warnings and that’s going to be the last you’ll see those two words.

I want to split the first part into at least 2 and this one used to be part of an even bigger one but it was so weird so I had to break it up. I feel like my pacing is much better but now, “chapter” cuts are confusing. like there’s several climaxes in the original but when you cut them up, there’s just no climax. AAAAAAAA

Ok and also, I have so much trouble going through Siegfried’s thoughts. Just so much even when I reread those events, his fate eps, everything, but I’m trying ajdhalskg.

Waaaay shorter this time, still with tons of talking and thinking instead of actions orz

whatever, I’m tapping my watch @ me like where’s the kink???

Barely paying attention to what his students were talking about, Siegfried began drifting, toying with his helmet when Cagliostro spoke up.

“Is it the island or Utala’s god father that’s strange?” Cagliostro toyed with her hair ornament. It hadn’t been sitting right on her head after her couch flipped over. “I was hoping a more sensitive nose could sniff it out.”

“Go ahead and call me a dog, it doesn’t matter anymore,” Vane said, genuinely guilty about almost killing Cagliostro. He glanced at the other crew members returning to the ship, whispering amongst themselves about the newcomer and the strangely silent forest. “But now that you mention it, I didn’t see any animals while we were here.”

“We arrived so soon after the storm and if those happen often, we assumed the animals were used to taking cover,” Lancelot added, looking to his former teacher. “Siegfried, you were deeper in the mansion. Was there anything strange?”

Siegfried had nothing to say. He was sure that he did, after sneaking ahead and scouting the second floor of the abandoned mansion but it had been cut short. Overhearing the conversation about Utala’s lost sibling wasn’t his intention and yet, he had become enraptured by a footnote of the past.

Of course, this wasn’t the sort of topic that come up in casual conversation, which Siegfried was also unused to handling. Still, he knew enough that despite Utala saying that the scars from growing up as a different person were small, talking about such a thing would be deeply uncomfortable for all participants.

That was similar to how, during discussions about Siegfried’s time as a fugitive, pain would flash in Lancelot and Percival’s, sometimes Vane’s, expressions.

“They really care about you,” Sara had noted to him one day. “They’re afraid that you still hold it against them for doubting you for all those years.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Is it bad to say that I’m a bit jealous?”

Did they think that he would hold a grudge? He hoped that the way he acted didn’t give the impression that he did.

In all honesty, he didn’t remember those feelings. He knew that they had existed but they were so hazy now.

Siegfried hadn’t thought about that until Utala brought up the subject. The knight couldn’t make a good comparison between something as subjective as how much spite a person could hold for others wishing that they were someone else and spite for being framed for a crime.

The closest he had returned to those dark, wriggling emotions were from Alex embracing Utala and dragging her away. But that was only because Alex’s mannerisms were somewhat off-putting, to put it politely.

Utala said that it didn’t bother her, however, Siegfried was also sure that he had only heard a part of the story. Cagliostro on the other hand, who had recognized who Rio was…

“I’ll give you the details. Most of them. The rest has to come from the Captain herself.”

That implied that Cagliostro knew the rest of the details, intimately knew them if she was so confident about separating what should be said and what shouldn’t.

The more Siegfried try to ascertain why Cagliostro knew before Utala decided to tell him, the more questions it brought up about himself. Utala had always been jumpy around him, having to calm herself down before he felt it was safe to touch her.

As opposed to Cagliostro, who could drop out of a tree, disguised as a snake but be embraced wholeheartedly anyways.

“Am I so adorable that you can’t help but stare?” Cagliostro asked, winking at Siegfried with a finger pressed to her lips. Lancelot’s wrist twitched, like he had been about to shove her over the edge of the rail.

“Ah, apologies,” Siegfried came back to reality, refocusing on the actual topic at hand. “While I was in the mansion, I didn’t come across any sign of life except for Alexander and his maid. After putting more thought into the observation, it’s strange that such a structure wouldn’t be used as shelter by the wildlife.”

“Uuu, don’t say that after staring at me for a solid five minutes.” Cagliostro playful smile sharpened into a smirk.

“Which leads me to my other observation,” Siegfried, thinking fast, continued. “You wanted to know if we smelled anything amiss. Should we be smelling anything amiss?”

Crossing her arms, Cagliostro huffed and made a big scene about her pouting. Percival, who had been staring at Alex and Utala hugging for the entire conversation, didn’t notice and spoke over her.

“The incident with my brother was fresh on my mind today. That man’s dilapidated home was similar to the depths of my home. I thought that I was imagining the smell because of my memories being stirred but, did any of you feel the same?”

“Is that why you were so uptight today?” Vane asked, like Percival wasn’t high maintenance at all hours of the week. “I thought you were just being jealous.”

That got Percival looking, sputtering angrily trying to find a dignified way to reply.

“Jealous of that vulgar display?” The crease of Percival’s brow was so deep that it must have been burrowing into his skull. “If I saw a father handle their child in such a way, I would turn him to ash on the spot!”

“Haha! Tell us how you really feel, Percy!” Vane laughed but it didn’t get Percival riled in the normal way.

“I’m serious.” Percival shot a scathing look at the way Alex was practically spooning Utala where she stood. “There’s a difference between a ‘fatherly’ hug and harassment. No wonder Lyria and Vryn were pushed aboard first.”

“I can see it,” Lancelot agreed. “I didn’t want to bring it up since she seemed happy but there really is a difference between the way he’s been touching her and say, how Siegfried touches her.”

“Is that so…” Siegfried trailed off, a part of him wanting to correct him but he didn’t know why and in what way. Somehow, Cagliostro also knew how to correct that.

“Yes there is but not in the way you’re thinking.” Cagliostro snorted. “Come now, pat my head like you do with Utala.”

Lancelot and Vane were shaking their heads at Siegfried and Percival was looking at him like they were meeting for the first time.

Curious, Siegfried patted Cagliostro’s head and the alchemist rolled her eyes.

“How are you as clueless as my niece? Pretend that I am the Captain, and I mean really pretend that I’m your Captain.”

Hearing Percival tighten his crossed arms, straining the straps of his armor at Cagliostro’s intonation, made Siegfried cautious. Did Percival see a trap that Siegfried couldn’t?

Either way, there was nothing that hinted at harm so Siegfried closed his eyes and reached back out. He ran his hand over Utala’s forehead, weaving his fingers into her hair until his palm cupped her temple.

Feeling Cagliostro lean into the touch, Siegfried opened his eyes and found that the alchemist was batting her eyelashes at him, lips pursed. Jerking his hand away like he’d been bitten, he realised that Lancelot and Vane had lost the ability to speak and Percival’s confusion had turned to clenched teeth behind pressed lips.

In such awkward mishaps, Siegfried would look to Lancelot to keep them on base but his eyes darted to Utala down on the island. Her god father’s hand was splayed over her chest, thumbing at the collar of her dress as she gazed up at him.

An ugly emotion writhed inside him, boring into his chest as Alex rested his chin on Utala. Siegfried turned his back and started for the way under the deck.

“Siegfried?” Lancelot tried to go after him and expected the other knights to do the same.

Lyria began to scream.

All at once, everyone was on the move. Percival was the first on the gangplank with Katalina at his flank. Lyria held her hands out to the air as Vryn clung to her shoulder to brace for what was to come.

Then, the deck of the Grandcypher tilted ninety degrees. Siegfried stabbed his greatsword into the deck and grabbed Lancelot’s arm before he was swept into the nightmarish wind.

Another storm had picked up with vicious speed, forcing the summoned Tiamat to right the Grandcypher instead of coming to their Captain’s rescue. She couldn’t stop them from being thrown so high into the thundering clouds that Lancelot’s nose was bleeding from the sharp change in atmosphere.

The pouring rain washed it away and all around Siegfried was the chaos of his crewmates struggling to understand what had happened. Katalina had been forced back on deck, shielding Lyria and Vryn as they shouted for the Captain.

Thrown to the other end of the ship, Vane had his arm curled around the rail and the other curled around Percival, trying to keep him from thrashing out of it. He was shouting and the lightning crashing all around them made it impossible for Siegfried to hear him.

He couldn’t hear anything, only the white noise and the Captain’s absence telling him to make a mistake.

“What are you doing?” Lancelot yelled as Siegfried donned his helmet and began to run.

The Grancypher’s rail came at him fast and he jumped on the wood divider, and off the side of the ship.

“Siegfried!” He heard Percival call out, the monstrous wind devouring what might be the last voice he’d ever hear.

He dove into the flashing storm and its freezing torrential rain, fearing nothing but what he would find on an island that had disappeared from view.

That long winding conversation that had led nowhere had taken a little more than twenty minutes, and they had lost Utala and Siegfried in under twenty seconds.

“I should have known he was lying about knowing Utala’s father!” Vryn wrung his hands as Lyria hugged him, wincing at Percival slamming his fist on the railing. “All of those sketches and those stories fooled me. I should have waited for Rosetta to wake up.”

“No, he probably wasn’t lying,” Cagliostro, sitting in the corner of the deck with her knees against her chest, pressed her palms against her eyes. “If Utala’s father is anything like her, history’s just repeating.”

“What are you talking about?” Katalina asked, arms still shielding Lyria and Vryn long after the storm had gone, taking the island with it.

“I knew the smell inside that mansion but I wasn’t sure until now. Maybe I was blocking it out,” Cagliostro dragged her hands down her cheeks as the others approached. “It’s the same way I smelled after you freed me from my prison.”

“Then, does that mean—“Lyria coughed, clutching her side.

“Are you alright.” Katalina knelt, holding Lyria’s shoulders as coughs wracked her body with trembles.

They grew louder until everyone on deck turned their heads, just in time for her to collapse.

There were limits to what humans could do. Surviving a four hundred foot fall was a stretch that even some primals couldn’t reach.

But, as the puddle he lay in rippled from his stirring, Siegfried had discovered that a dragon could.

Fafnir’s blood had saved him a second time.

He awoke to a dimming violet sky, the stars twinkling above the gap in the forest canopy. Siegfried’s fall had been broken by branches that lay shredded to pieces around him, floating in the remnants of a storm’s rain.

There was no telling how long he had been asleep. Being stabbed by Hagan had taken days to recover the blood lost. He didn’t know how long it took for shattered bones to heal and if they did so correctly.

Raising his arm, Siegfried flexed his fist. The test yielded piercing pain but he held his breath, enduring. Slowly sitting up, the water flowing from the gaps in his freezing armor, he checked his surroundings as his spine creaked in protest.

The woods were so thick that it felt like he was sitting at the bottom of a well where the light leaking into the hole he had punched into the branches was fast disappearing. Water was still dripping from the branches, either meaning that the storm that attacked the Grandcypher had just ended or Siegfried had slept through a different one.

And during his time asleep, something could have happened to Utala.

Siegfried forced himself to calm, spying his greatsword stuck into the base of a tree trunk nearby. It had struck the middle, sinking until the half the blade was sheathed, and gravity had helped the weighty weapon slide further until it touched the ground.

Utala had deflected that sword, the first time they met and the numerous times they sparred. Alexander wouldn’t be facing a helpless child.

He ignored the ugly crackling his legs made when he stood. Finding his stride, Siegfried tugged his sword from the tree, hefting it on his shoulder, and found himself in a familiar landscape.

Like back then, there was no time to dwell on fears. The likeliest place for Utala to take shelter as in the mansion and in the worst case scenario, Alexander would have her imprisoned there. Siegfried just needed to know which direction it was.

As if a higher power was sending him a sign, the bitter smell of something burning reached his nose. He looked up and saw thin wisps of smoke wafting over the gap. Judging from the way it moved and the thickness of the plume, the knight knew which direction he needed to go and estimated that it wasn’t going to be a far walk.

Beginning slow, Siegfried went from a walk to a sprint, clearing distances that would’ve taken much longer with the uneven ground and foliage obstructing the way. He traversed the sodden landscape, snaking around the trees and the rotting husks of the ones that had fallen to the storm.

The blanketing darkness barely did much in slowing him down. It would have done a lot less several years ago. It had been a long time since he had to move through this kind of terrain with such urgency. Ironically, he was running towards a fire instead of away from it.

Being able to go so far, his shadow moving through the night, he supposed he hadn’t stopped being an inhuman beast.

“Leave it!” He heard a man hiss, coming to an abrupt stop.

It came from up ahead, where Siegfried could see the trees stop at a craggily wall of stone. He sped towards it, beginning to climb up the slick moss covered rocks.

“It never stops raining on this godsforsaken chunk of hell. If the fire spreads, it’s not going to go far.” Siegfried heard the sound of a window slamming shut and waited at the edge of the wall’s top. Footsteps scurried into the distance, and a door creaked open and shut before Siegfried thought it safe to pull himself over the ledge.

He had reached a barren terrace, the looming figure of the mansion standing beyond it. There were lights glowing in the third floor windows, and below in the corner of the terrace farthest from the mansion, was a brick incinerator.

Alexander had his maid burn garbage.

A deep sense of dread filled Siegfried’s stomach; an overwhelming creeping dread that had only taken him over a single instance in Feendrache Castle.

He approached the incinerator, reaching for the iron door like he had when Isabella had summoned him to the King’s chambers.

The fire inside was already dying down and a memory of Utala from outside Fafnir’s cave, shaking in fright and awe of Siegfried, edged into his mind. Hand shaking, he opened the incinerator hatch.

Laying on scattered ashes away from the small flames were patches of Utala’s dress, singed bits of her gloves, and what remained of her charred bones.

#Utala (S)#Alex (S)#maid's name still a spoiler

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pastpassages · 3 years

Video

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This isn’t particularly a “me and natsuki” song so much as a “this seems to capture some of the way I experience love and also the world” song but. I wanted to put it here and some thinky thoughts bc it’s late and I feel like pontificating I guess. Properties/fandoms/people I mention but do not want to draw the attention of have been censored, if you can’t figure out what they are and really want to know feel free to message me.

Cw: exploration of like. The inevitability of death, and change, and facing the vast universe. Tl;dr this song is macabre and its speaker knows that wishing for things to stay as they are is in vain, but does it anyway. That fuckin gets me bro.

Ideally the read more will work. I apologize if it doesn’t. I’m on mobile and not sure that tumblr will let me edit posts on desktop that I started on mobile. I literally copy and pasted this freaking post onto desktop so it would have a read more bc no one fucking deserves to scroll through my late night mile long thoroughly existential ramblings. At least I’m posting this fuck off late at night so hopefully it won’t bother anyone

The simple instrumentation, first off. It’s p much the same…one? Two? Maybe three measures? Repeated throughout the song, but I think it works very well with the themes and meaning and doesn’t annoy me like other acoustic-style music with so much repetition (*cough* M*mf*rd and S*ns *cough*). This is partially I think bc there’s changes in the notes etc between different parts of the song; the measure of silence between the intro and the first main stanza of the song, the change in. I think it’s key? Over the course of repeating the chorus. (It’s been so long since I’ve done music, stanza isn’t the right word and key probably isn’t either hELP)

But the main thing that seems to get me: the lyrics.

“How lucky / I ever was to see / The way that / You smiled at me / Your little moon face / Shining bright at me / One day soon, there’ll be nothing left of you and me / Two coffins for sleep” (I may have put too many line breaks in there lol but that’s how it Feels so I’m keeping it)

There’s this constant awareness of the inevitability of loss (specifically death in this case), and how. Mm, how to put it. The randomness of the universe can so often work against us, and being aware of that makes you incredibly thankful for the times when things do go in your favor. Very similar vibes to TWRP’s Life Party, though definitely more macabre in tone.

Going back to the first stanza in the song:

“Two coffins for sleep / One for you, one for me / We’ll get there eventually / In the dark of our graves, our bodies will decay / I wish you’d never change”

Something I find interesting about this portion is that, despite ending with “I wish you’d never change,” acknowledging that this change, death, is inevitable, there’s still this. Hope? I guess might be the right word? Or maybe faith. That the speaker and the person addressed in the song will be together in death. They will be in separate coffins, but “we’ll” get there; “in the dark of our graves, our bodies will decay. Plural. They may be separated physically but they are undergoing the same process, and perhaps there is some measure of togetherness in that. It may just be economical phrasing to fit the rhythm of the song, but it still implies a togetherness to me. It could have been phrased "I’ll get there and you’ll get there,” “in the dark of the graves, our bodies,” or similar. Again, that probably wouldn’t work with the rhythm and there is probably not an inherent meaning to it, but still! I was an English major, reading more into things that aren’t necessarily there is like My Job lol.

Anyway, before I got sidetracked by that thought I was going to say that the main point of this portion of the song is this sort of impossible wish for the speaker and the person addressed to not be separated. Yes, this is inevitable, yes, there is no fighting it, but…wouldn’t it be nice? Wouldn’t it be nice to have a small kindness from the universe like that, to not be separated in the end. It won’t happen, but let’s take a moment to imagine it anyway.

Another side note, this is kind of a similar thought process to why I like the way st*vens *niverses handles its villains. Yes, talking and emotional connection with those you’re in conflict with doesn’t always work. But isn’t it nice to imagine a world where it does? And if we do imagine that, maybe we can find a few ways to be more compassionate in our world, to extend grace and kindness where we might not have thought to otherwise. And perhaps that will make the world just a tiny bit better.

Anyway. Moving forward:

“All the things that I have yet to lose will someday be gone too / Back into annihilation / All things will fade, maybe it’s better off that way / I wish you’d stay with me”

First off, the phrasing “back into annihilation.” We come from nothingness, we will return to nothingness. This is not a religious song. There is not an afterlife waiting for us, nothing that created us. There is the life we have, here and now, and then it’s gone.

Otherwise, this stanza continues the overall theme: we inevitably march on towards death, and separation. We will lose all that we have. Perhaps that is good, ultimately; would it truly make you happy in the long run to never experience pain or loss? This is a sentiment that I’m sure has been expressed many times by many people, but that I remember first hearing from st*r tr*k, though I cannot currently find a clip of the moment I’m thinking of. Not that human life is inherently bad or painful, but that pain is a necessary part of life to balance the good. If there was not pain of some kind in your life, you would not appreciate your happiness so much. Obviously, this line of thinking only goes so far; it is not, for example, a good thing that marginalized people tend to experience outsized pain in comparison with the nice things they receive from society. Happiness for marginalized people is more often forged and seized, stolen from life rather than given freely by it. No, poverty does not “make you appreciate the virtues of life” more, it makes you hungry and tired and frustrated, can you please just take some action against it. Conversely, j*ff b*z*s could probably use a bit more pain in his life! ….I got sidetracked again. Wish tumblr had a footnotes feature. Anyway. The speaker acknowledges the inevitability of death/loss, but once again expresses that vain wish to not lose the person addressed in the song, to keep what they have in this moment. Once again, this will never happen. Let’s imagine it anyway. Perhaps it will be a comfort, despite its improbability.

After this, the chorus is repeated, eventually shifting into a repetition of the phrase “Two coffins for sleep,” finishing the song. To return to the instrumentation, the guitar and drums follow a consistent, simple rhythm, mimicking that of walking. Constantly moving forward, even when we don’t want to. We will die, eventually, “one day soon,” far off and yet much closer than we hope or want. Change is inevitable. Death is inevitable.

And yet. That small, vain hope remains. “I wish you’d stay with me.” “I wish you’d never change.” Maybe, in a kinder world, we could keep this moment as more than a memory. “How lucky / I ever was to see / The way that / You smiled at me.” In all the cold randomness of the universe, against all improbability, we did meet. We brought each other joy. “Your little moon face / Shining bright at me.” We reflect the good, the kindness in each other. “One day soon, there’ll be nothing left of you and me.” And yet. And yet. “Two coffins for sleep / Two coffins for sleep.” Separated, and yet together, even if it’s just an illusion.

To explain why this means so much to me….I’m not sure I can do it succinctly lol. But hey, this post is a mile long already, so why not. No one’s obligated to read this lol.

When I was younger I was more religious. (This is not a “religion/spirituality is a childish thing and I have put that behind me” point, don’t worry.) When I was a teenager I was an atheist for like. Edgy points, idk. I was starting to see some of the worse parts of the world, starting to wonder what gods who truly cared about the world would let it get so horrid for so many. I’m still fairly young (mid-20s is not old, I must keep reminding myself), but now my view is…somewhere in the middle of those two points. Or maybe it’s more that I took a left turn?

The point is, now I kind of don’t care whether there is a god/are gods, whatever. You know how when you’re a kid (barring abusive circumstances that break this illusion much earlier etc) you believe that your parents know everything? They can fix anything, they’re your parents! They’re your whole world! And then you get older, and you realize that no. They don’t know everything. They were your whole world, perhaps, but there’s literally billions more people in the world. People that you can connect to, learn from, build things together with. The world is so much more than you and your parents. That’s the stage I’m at with my belief in a higher power. Sure, they might be out there. But they’re just one being, how could they possibly understand and control everything in this fuck off complicated world of ours? Or, if you’re going the polytheistic route, they’re just as complicated as the rest of the world. Chances are, appeasing one would anger another. One step forward, two steps back. (I should make it explicit if it wasn’t already clear, I come from a Xtian background. I default to thinking of god in the singular. Not sure how well this point holds up from a polytheistic perspective tbh!)

Anyway. It does not matter whether there is a higher power. There is more to the world than that. We are here. We have each other.

There’s a moment in night in the woods that hit me like a truck. Angus says, “so I believe in a universe that doesn’t care, and people who do.” I have essentially taken four times as many words to express that same sentiment! But like. That’s it. It doesn’t matter whether there’s a higher power. If they can fix the world, they haven’t, and if they can’t, then they can’t. We can, piece by piece. Moment by moment.

The thing about this. Is that humans. Are not, by nature, necessarily good. “People are fundamentally people,” as TPratchett and NGaiman put it. The world is infinitely complicated, and on top of that we as individual humans are infinitely complex. We do not, by default, seek out and work towards the good of others. (We do not inherently seek out hurting others either! Get that original sin shit out of here!) But like. If there isn’t a higher power that’s going to just fix our shit for us? If we’re all we’ve got?

And thus. Finally. The reason this song speaks to me. Oh my lord is it existentially horrifying to think that it comes down to silly, insignificant, flawed humans to change the world. You have to find something to give you joy. Or at least a moment of less pain. The world is so vast, and we can do so little.

But we have each other. In this vast, empty universe, I have you, and you have me. And perhaps, to soothe our fears and make things just a little easier on ourselves, we can pretend that the world will be kind. Wouldn’t it be nice? If things were kinder. Let’s take a moment to imagine it. There, that’s a nice thought, isn’t it? The world will not be kind. But for a moment, we can pretend it will.

Perhaps, if we are very lucky, we can even take a small step towards that kinder world.

Wouldn’t that be nice?

#long post #just in case the read more doesn't work #i am so sorry if it doesn't #i TRIED yall #anyway. this was originally going to be on my...other...blog #which is why i make a reference to 'me and natsuki' song #if u know what that means cool #if you don't i will not explain it #you will have to live in mystery #or fuckin. do some research to figure it out it's probably not that hard but im not giving you the answer #AN. Y. WAY.#hope yall are having a good day the past few have been an emotional roller coaster for me and i think that's why all this is going through #my head #i didn't want to have all of this swirling endlessly when i was trying to sleep #so instead i stayed up to write it all down :)#clearly. i have made a good decision /s(?)#beep boop im gonna have a snack and then go the fuck to sleep #oh also. fuckin buried way too late in the tags #but if you do read this and there's something you think i should have tagged/warned for feel free to let me know!#i'll add it to the warnings etc

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brooklyntobangalore · 6 years

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A Walk in the Park

A short while back, my classmate and I took a trip to see the Tipu Sultan’s summer palace and Cubbon Park, both located roughly in the center of Bangalore. Cubbon Park – known as the ‘lung’ of the city – is an oasis of green replete with winding trails, bamboo thickets, playground space, grassy expanses, and trees tall and dense enough to temporarily muffle the sounds of the surrounding city 1. Unfortunately, getting to the park entailed navigating traffic-congested highways and roads for extended stretches, cutting through a densely-packed commercial district, and being subjected to a constant bombardment of both air and noise pollution 2. Experiencing the tranquility of a quiet stroll through the park was an occasion for me to think about the costs of development, the importance of green space/vegetation for public health, and to draw parallels to my own concrete metropolis of NYC.

One of Bangalore’s nicknames is the “Garden City” due to its reputation for having an abundance of greenery and tree cover. Several Bangaloreans I’ve spoken to, however, have remarked that this term is now a gross misnomer, as hyper-rapid development and land use changes over the past few decades have drastically reduced the amount of vegetation and public green space in the city. Our local neighborhood of Koramangala is fortunate to have relatively bountiful tree cover, but it isn’t too hard to imagine that much of it has been sacrificed to accommodate a ballooning population and growing economy.

Article 39 of the Indian Constitution directs the State to “ensure that...the material resources of the community are so distributed as to best subserve the common good” 3. Surely, parks and public green space ought to be included in the inventory of material resources that subserve this public good. One could argue, however, that economic growth and development are also good for Bangalore. How to strike an appropriate balance?

Eminent domain laws in India allow the State to expropriate private land (much of it formerly agrarian) for ‘public purpose.’ Some scholars 4 complain, however, that loopholes in the law have enabled the State to sell off this land to private commercial interests for the purposes of development. (I imagine that these types of sales have helped catalyze the IT industry/tech boom in Bangalore) 5. The end result: land that was intended to serve as a public resource – a commons for the people – is transformed into a commodity for the profit of private industry. Some may benefit enormously from these land use changes (India’s educated IT professionals, for instance). Others, not so much 6.

To get a sense of what has been lost, I dug up this map from a study conducted by the Indian Institute of Science 7, showing the drastic changes in Bangalore’s land-use over time:

Other public resources that rightly belong to the commons but have been sacrificed in the era of rapid urban development are clean water (which I discussed in a previous post on the so-called ‘water mafia’ and which is quantified in the graph 7 below) and clean air.

As reservoirs have been drained to accommodate developmental build-up, clean water – like green space – has become commodified and sold at markup to those who can afford it. Below is an example of a private tanker truck supplying water to a restaurant near St. Johns, which I suspect is being done without any oversight from a central authority.

But what about clean air? That is every person’s birthright and can’t possibly be expropriated and commodified, right? Well peep this Fortune article from 2016, which I originally thought was an Onion article: Smog in China and India Have Given Birth to a New Industry: Bottled Air.

“In May, a Canadian company that claims to sell “100% Pure Rocky Mountain Air” announced that it would start distributing its product in twin packs of 3 and 8-liter bottles to the Indian market, for around $20 and $40 respectively.”

Writer and cultural critic Matthew Crawford has argued that even our very sense of mental peace and calm – relatively abundant, coincidentally, in places like parks – are things that we increasingly have to pay for. He uses the example of airports: the wealthy pay for the privilege of enjoying the quietude and privacy of the business-class lounge, while the rest of us are forced to contend with the noise and the constant stimulation of the airport proper 8. Another example: in the hospital, if you want the privacy and quiet of your own room, it will come at a steep price – a situation that has many parallels to ‘VIP suites’ in American hospitals.

One of the attendings I met during my first week in Bangalore described the city colorfully as a ‘sensory assault.’ Public parks like Cubbon are great because they are reservoirs of peace and tranquility – respites from the daily sensory onslaught that everyone ought to be able to enjoy (for free!). Whilst walking through Cubbon, I was reminded of how lucky I was to grow up across the street from a park and playground in NYC and how fortunate I’ll be to be steps away from Central Park during my residency. I was so glad to learn, via Wikipedia, that “the roads around [Cubbon Park] are closed for traffic from 5:00 to 8:00 am every day to provide more safety and fresh environment for morning walkers and exercisers” 9. Finally, a victory for Bangalore’s pedestrians (who I feel are generally shafted in favor of drivers/cars...)!

One last note about the environmental consequences of destroying urban green space – it tends to make a city hotter. Check out the below map 10 of NYC, showing a pretty direct correlation between areas of denser vegetation and lower average temperatures. Some life-long Bangaloreans I’ve chatted with have noted wistfully that when they were kids, the temperatures in the city were significantly cooler, to the point where they would need to put on a sweater in the morning to stave off the a.m. chill. Those days, it seems, are long gone.

To place things in perspective, here is a comparison of green space/vegetation in Bangalore vs. NYC:

Speculating on why preservation of public resources/the commons has been under-prioritized as a political issue, Dr. Koshy noted – quite provocatively, I thought – that “Indians… do not understand the nature of societal or social responsibility which is not just taking care of yourself and your family…We have to put the cart before the horse. This means enough water, food, shelter, clothing, education, jobs, power, transport, etc., for everyone, not just for some” 4 11. I thought his assessment of the Indian public was perhaps a bit harsh, and didn’t adequately account for the sometimes difficult tradeoffs between acquiring things like ‘jobs’ and ‘power’ (often attained via economic growth) and securing resources like water (often achieved via responsible environmental stewardship and conservation). His sentiment did, however, seem to be consistent with the overall spirit of Article 39, which defends a sense of collective responsibility and collective destiny in India.

+++++++++++

[1] St. John’s is a similar oasis, as I’ve mentioned previously. ↩︎

[2] This of course exists in NYC too, to a lesser degree. ↩︎

[3] See: https://indiankanoon.org/doc/555882/ ↩︎

[4] From: Wake Up, India! Essays For Our Times by Dr. Koshy A.V. and Dr. Bina Biswas ↩︎ ↩︎

[5] See: https://www.commonfloor.com/guide/no-letting-out-land-to-industries-kiadbs-latest-move-31494.html ↩︎

[6] The loss of vegetation/green space – and the environmental degradation that it signifies – can thus be considered an externality whose costs are borne collectively by Bangalore’s citizens. ↩︎

[7] See: http://wgbis.ces.iisc.ernet.in/energy/water/paper/urbanfloods_bangalore/city_infrastructure.htm ↩︎ ↩︎

[8] See: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/08/opinion/sunday/the-cost-of-paying-attention.html ↩︎

[9] See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubbon_Park ↩︎

[10] From: https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=6800 ↩︎

[11] I have heard similar accusations levied against China in its own parallel quest for rapid economic development vis-a-vis unfettered capitalist investment/growth. ↩︎

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willidleaway · 7 years

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In case you thought I’d forgotten about classic computers, classic Infocom interactive fiction, or both—rest assured, it’s just that in the spare time I’ve had to play with either, I’ve mostly been stuck on Planetfall for a while and trying to get a mouse for my IIc at a reasonable price, and neither of those are particularly exciting to write about.

In the meantime, though, I had a quick burst of excitement because I finally managed to produce a physical backup diskette of Trinity! I know I said it was nigh impossible to duplicate with the tools on hand, but as it turns out the solution was to just kind of deal with it and be extremely patient.

Trinity, as some of you may recall, is a little bit difficult to copy. In fact it’s the most difficult to copy out of the four Infocom games I own, and possibly out of any Infocom text adventure (i.e. excluding the three Infocom IF works that actually have graphics). Wishbringer (or at least my copy of it) isn’t even superficially copy-protected, and both Planetfall and H2G2 can be copied pretty easily with a patched RWTS, through the ever-reliable workhorse that is Copy II Plus. [0]

Side 1 of Trinity is a standard DOS 3.3 diskette like Wishbringer, but then we have side 2, which has 18 sectors per track barely accommodating Trinity’s astounding size. Since Trinity is the only game taking full advantage of this 16-sector/18-sector hybrid format, it’s one of the trickier ones to deprotect. [1] Seriously dedicated readers of this tumblelog (so, no one) will remember that I dabbled with making a 16-sector version of the story diskette, and failed. Badly.

Since I can’t program in assembly to save my life, the only option left to me was to carefully duplicate the 18-sector side 2. The typical bit/nibble copiers of choice here are programs like Copy II Plus and Locksmith, and both have served me quite well in various contexts. But after a bit of a scare when the original diskette failed to verify after one particular attempt, I realised I had to be able to read in side 2 just once, and attempt many writes of that data until I had a working copy.

This left me with one option: Saltine’s Super Transcopy (SST), which packs arbitrary diskette data into two sides of a standard 16-sector diskette, to be read and unpacked later. So I booted up SST, threw side 2 of Trinity into my internal drive, and packed it onto two sides of a diskette in the external drive, which I then transferred to my laptop via ADTPro for good measure. Then I could repeatedly unpack this to a blank diskette (with the unprotected side 1 of Trinity copied to the other side, of course), boot up the backup, and ask the interpreter to verify the game data.

Of course, it didn’t work, but I could figure out how much of it was due to what. The nice thing about SST is that it half-works with Apple II emulators: packing data into 16-sector disks is pretty broken in every emulator I’ve tried, but unpacking disks into nibble-ised images works great. This means that, using my transferred images of the packed data diskette, I was able to figure out whether my problem was bad reading or bad writing of the diskette.

As it turns out, it was a bit of both. I tried unpacking the packed data a few times a few different ways (different drives, different SST parameters ...), all to no avail. But crucially, under Virtual ][ (a wonderful emulator that I should probably pay for at some point), the unpacked diskette still refused to verify, instead throwing internal errors at some point while reading the data in. Fortunately, Virtual ][ has got a very nice debugger, part of which allows you to see what the disk drives are doing and what track and sector of the diskette is being accessed.

Pretty soon, my workspace looked something like this:

Since I’m too lazy to properly learn how nibbles work, I wrote up some quick Python code to compare the nibble-ised image generated from my faulty backup [2] against a nibble-ised image of (pretty much) the same diskette known to work well with emulators. Then I tracked down the necessary byte edit, applied it to the bad nibble-ised image, and retried the verify procedure.

With each fix, the verify procedure got just a little bit further, and eventually the bad backup got fixed up enough that it fully verified! The SST packed diskette format is quite transparent, so I was able to edit the 16-sector disk images in the same way and overwrite the old backups. There were really only eight bad points in the data (all on the first half of the disk, too—hmm), so this wasn’t a nightmarish task, at least in 2017.

Mind you, it still took three tries to get it to work on a physical diskette. [3] What ended up working was completely initialising, certifying, and erasing the side of the diskette about to be written to. This is what you’re supposed to do with SST in the first place (or rather with Essential Data Duplicator, which is what SST is stripped down from), although it is also certainly possible that the third time is just plain lucky. Probably not the case, though.

In conclusion, non-standard disk duplication is tricky and I’m glad software publishers no longer have complete free rein on how data is read from/written on media. Also thank god I own this in 2017 because if I had tried this in 1987 I’m pretty sure I’d have thrown everything out the window from sheer impatience. Several times.

Footnotes:

[0: Well, at least it’s ever-reliable for circumventing relatively basic tomfoolery with RWTS. But it’s better than Locksmith, which is frankly just obtuse. SST documentation is also a bit sparse, but it’s basically the only way to back up copy-protected images to standard 16-sector diskettes as far as I know.]

[1: There’s a rather amusing pair of standard DOS 3.3 images on the Asimov server, a version of Trinity cracked by ‘The Sheik’ from ‘The Digital Gang’. There’s an extravagant intro screen proclaiming the cracker’s identity, followed by a wall of text calling out ‘the Bunnymen’ as a bunch of incompetent, highly conceited losers. It’s all a bit in your face and as toxic as BBS piracy groups got back in the day, which makes the irony ever so sweet when the interpreter fails with ‘Internal error 04. End of session.’

Well, at least it does on Catakig, which is my usual emulator of choice. The Digital Gang weren’t actually incompetent enough to release a non-functional crack—it just fails to work on various emulators (perhaps even some hardware configurations?) depending on fidelity. On Virtual ][ it just ... kind of freezes up midway through the intro text and refuses to work any further. And on AppleWin, it actually gets you past the intro and to an actual prompt. It even verifies! Not successfully, mind you.

Really, if you’re running Trinity on an emulator, just get Rubywand’s NIB images. They’re a faithful copy of the original clean, commercial diskette, and I should know because I had to do a nibble-level comparison of my side 2 against Rubywand’s side 2 and fix the corrupt nibbles on my end.

If for some reason you need a physical version, I should remind you that writing these sorts of disks can be quite unreliable, especially given the increased data density that comes with 18 sectors per track, which leaves no room for junk. That said, I’m hosting the SST packed disks for side 2 (and the decidedly normal side 1, too) here while my server is still alive.]

[2: I ended up using CiderPress as part of the process, as you can see. There’s a built-in function in CiderPress to unpack disk images generated via SST, which is quite nice as it automatically uses relevant bytes to synchronise the starts of tracks. This means I only have to deal with only one arbitrary offset per track when comparing against a known working image.]

[3: You know, it would probably help just a little if I set my external drive to spin at 297 rpm (and the internal at 300 rpm), but I’m too lazy/scared to shift either of them, since they seem to be in perfect working order at 298-298.5 rpm at the moment without my intervention.]

#Infocom #Apple IIc

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jodyedgarus · 6 years

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Are The Warriors Now The NBA’s Greatest Dynasty?

With three NBA championships over the past four seasons, the Golden State Warriors are a bona fide dynasty. Regardless of how you feel about its 2016 acquisition of Kevin Durant, which lifted an already historic team to an entirely new level of dominance, Golden State has done something special: Only seven NBA teams1 have ever pulled off the three-rings-in-four-years trick. Even for the most talented roster ever, that’s not an easy thing to accomplish.

The league’s history is, in many ways, defined by its dynasties in a manner that other sports aren’t, and the Warriors are nothing if not the defining team of our current era. But where do they rank in comparison with those other dynastic teams from years past? Although there’s no definitively correct answer, it’s still fun to argue. So we thought we’d fact-check Golden State’s case using our Elo ratings, which are designed to measure a team’s inherent strength at any given moment.

Let’s start with the best runs of four consecutive seasons according to the method we favor for judging historical Elo seasons: a blend2 of a team’s final, peak and full-season-average ratings.3 To ensure that a team rated highly every year, I took the harmonic mean of its blended rating from each of the four seasons. Here are the all-time rankings, excluding any duplicates from the same franchise over the same span of years:

Elo’s best four-year runs

Highest average* blended Elo across four consecutive seasons for NBA franchises, 1948-18

Team Seasons Titles 4-Year Blended Elo Golden State Warriors 2015-18 3 1789 Chicago Bulls 1995-98 3 1745 San Antonio Spurs 2013-16 1 1736 San Antonio Spurs 2003-06 2 1719 Chicago Bulls 1991-94 3 1717 Boston Celtics 1984-87 2 1716 Los Angeles Lakers 1985-88 3 1715 Los Angeles Lakers 2008-11 2 1706 Los Angeles Lakers 2000-03 3 1703 Miami Heat 2011-14 2 1702 Utah Jazz 1995-98 0 1702 Milwaukee Bucks 1971-74 1 1701 Philadelphia 76ers 1980-83 1 1698 Detroit Pistons 1987-90 2 1695 Oklahoma City Thunder 2011-14 0 1692

* Using the harmonic mean.

Source: Basketball-Reference.com

According to Elo, the Warriors of the past few years have snapped off what is easily the best stretch of four consecutive seasons any NBA team has ever had. By that standard, then, they absolutely belong in the conversation of the league’s greatest dynasties. But of course, they’ve also only had four dynasty-level seasons to speak of. As hard as it is to remember what things were like before the Warriors started dominating, Golden State’s reign has been brief in dynasty terms.

So how should we measure the Warriors’ four-year stretch against, say, the Chicago Bulls’ pair of three-peats in the 1990s or the Boston Celtics’ ridiculous championship monopoly of the 1960s?

To help put various dynastic runs on equal footing, I began with a thought experiment: How easily would a generic championship-caliber team be able to match a given multiyear run from NBA history? The most difficult-to-replicate stretches are, by definition, the most impressive ones — and in my conception, make for the best dynasties — because a normal contending team is so unlikely to pull them off.

As a way of quantifying this, I assigned our generic team a preseason Elo rating of 1600, aka the average preseason Elo for NBA champs since 1948. I then ran a series of regressions to determine what we’d expect its average blended Elo over the next given stretch of seasons to be and compared every possible stretch of seasons in each franchise’s history to those expected ratings. I isolated things down to NBA teams that won at least three championships in a span of 10 or fewer years and tossed out overlapping runs from the same franchise that didn’t prove to be more impressive than other, higher-ranking ones. The dynastic runs we’re left with are the most successful — i.e., the most difficult to replicate — out of all possible multiyear periods in NBA history.

As you can see in the table below, the most impressive period for one team might last only three years, while another’s could span an entire decade. For example, the current Warriors’ best period came over the 2015 to 2018 period, because their four-year mark of 1789 was 188 points higher than what we’d expect our generic contender’s average blended Elo over the next four seasons to be. Another example: The San Antonio Spurs’ best run came over 10 seasons, from 1998-99 to 2007-08,4 during which time they had a blended Elo rating of 1702 — 145 points better than we’d expect that generic championship-caliber team to do over a 10-season period. Some franchises, like the Bulls, are listed twice in rapid succession, because they had multiple short runs that were highly impressive and didn’t overlap.

Here’s Elo’s ranking of all-time NBA dynasties:

The Warriors are Elo’s most impressive NBA dynasty

Highest multiyear blended Elo rating relative to expectation for a championship-caliber team for NBA franchises that won at least three titles in a span of 10 or fewer years, 1948-2018

Team Seasons Championships Blended Elo vs. Exp. Golden State Warriors 2015-18 3 of 4 1789 +188 Chicago Bulls 1996-98 3 of 3 1793 +181 San Antonio Spurs 1999-08 4 of 10 1702 +145 Chicago Bulls 1991-93 3 of 3 1746 +134 Boston Celtics 1980-87 3 of 8 1696 +130 Los Angeles Lakers 1982-91 4 of 10 1685 +128 Boston Celtics 1959-67 8 of 9 1676 +115 Los Angeles Lakers 1998-04 3 of 7 1684 +112 Minneapolis Lakers 1949-54 5 of 6 1651 +72 Miami Heat 2005-14 3 of 10 1596 +39

A “championship-caliber” team starts out with an Elo of 1600, and dynasties are measured against what we’d project that team’s multiyear blended Elo to be after a given number of years.

For franchises that made the list multiple times in a given time period, only their highest-rated stretch during the span was included.

Source: Basketball-Reference.com

Even compared with other dynasties, the current Warriors and Michael Jordan’s second Bulls three-peat stand out. Our method says that it is slightly more difficult for a typical championship contender to replicate Golden State’s four-year run than Chicago’s three-year stretch, but that’s just splitting hairs. Either dynasty could be considered the GOAT, which is truly a testament to the impressiveness of what the Warriors are currently doing.

A few notes on the rest of the list: The Spurs dynasty is difficult to pin down — we once coined the term “Grover Cleveland” (instead of the often overused D-word) for teams like San Antonio that won multiple championships but never consecutively5 — but this approach considers their most difficult-to-duplicate period to be that aforementioned decade from 1999 to 2008. It also considers the Shaq-and-Kobe Lakers’ best run to be the seven seasons from 1997-98 to 2003-04, which includes (but is not limited to) the 1999-2000 through 2001-02 three-peat that most fans consider to be their dynastic peak.

The Russell-era Celtics strike me as surprisingly low on the list, perhaps as a consequence of only examining 10-year windows of time at a maximum (the Celtics won 11 rings in 13 seasons, from 1957 to 1969). But Elo also has never been all that high on those Boston teams, with only one — the 1965 version — even cracking the top 50 for single seasons. In some ways, those Celtics were a very early prototype for today’s superteams who pace themselves through the regular season and then peak during the playoffs: Boston won 60-plus games in only two of their 11 championship seasons during that span and won a pair of titles with fewer than 50 regular-season wins.6 However conducive that was to winning championships, it didn’t help earn the Celtics many Elo brownie points.

Finally, Dwyane Wade’s Miami Heat also qualify for this list, although they’re not necessarily a “dynasty” that many people think of when perusing the annals of NBA history. Between Wade’s Finals MVP turn in 2006 and the two rings they tacked on after LeBron James and Chris Bosh joined the team in 2010 — plus a number of solid seasons in between7 — the Heat could be considered a dynasty if you squint hard enough. If so, however, it also makes sense for them to be stashed away at the very bottom of the rankings here.

But back to the Warriors. Elo already considers them to be on par with the greatest dynasties the game has ever seen, and as my colleague Chris Herring wrote over the weekend, they also seem poised to keep their core together longer than most. Although the end does come sooner for these types of teams than we tend to think while we’re in the middle of their dominance, Golden State now has a chance to build on what it’s already accomplished and solidify itself as the clear No. 1 choice among the NBA’s all-time dynasties. Let’s see if they can take advantage of the opportunity.

from News About Sports https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/are-the-warriors-now-the-nbas-greatest-dynasty/

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