Heh

Nice

re: Trek: I was hit with a lot of the same feelings when I finally went and watched TOS a couple of years ago. There's a brand of Star Trek fan who really believe in what the show wants or at least claims it wants to be--a progressive vision of the future--but are incapable of seeing it for what it was lest they cede ground to the fans on the reactionary end of the spectrum who like it for pew pew guns and sexy green ladies. For what it's worth, the Federation isn't portrayed as a post-scarcity post-money society until TNG but it's not something they do more than pay lip service to

I think this gets into the limitations with individual character representation as a metric for “good” politics in a show. It has a comparatively diverse cast and that is historically significant, I understand that it’s groundbreaking, and I’m not downplaying that or saying those things don’t matter or had no impact culturally. but those individual representations are imbedded within the undergirding logic of the show, which is that the Enterprise is a ship meant to make contact with “new” “undiscovered” civilisations, measure their “development” on a singular scale that is premised on settler colonial ideas of land development & capitalist logics of expansion and growth, and then force those societies to fit into that particularly colonial mould. Multiple times the resolution to the plot of an episode is destroying any unique aspects of a culture that cannot be captured by those development metrics, and this is unambiguously presented as a good thing. This show is deeply invested in the maintenance of racial hierarchy and western hegemony, and its diversity and progressive elements must always be placed within that context. It’s racially progressive in some ways yes, but only narrowly, and in fact the necessity for good racial representation is the fault of those undergirding logics! We wouldn’t need good racial representation in the first place if those systems did not exist. “Good intentions” on the part of the writers do not negate the fact that the final product uncritically reproduces a western vision of culture, one that sees the west as manager, mother, teacher, and policeman to the rest of humanity.

I think Said’s discussion of Orientalism is once again very instructive: it’s not just that the show might be individually racist or sexist to particular characters or groups of people in a given episode. These things are bad yes, but they are surface level bad, and focusing only on them obscures the larger issue at hand. The deeper problem is that it operates on an orientalist epistemology, a way of knowing and seeing the world, one that necessarily excludes the basic conclusion that, like, the measure of a civilisation does not need to be premised on economic growth or European cultural modes, & in fact the idea that you can “measure” a culture unilaterally is itself a western construction. that scale is a tool of colonial development, one that is backed by a system of racial hierarchy that must be violently enforced to be realised in the world. Star Trek is by no means unique or special in this regard; this is the state of western media in total. I’m just uncomfortable with how uncritically fawning people are about it.

I’m also not privy to the discourse around this show, I’m an outsider encountering Star Trek for the first time as an adult and I’m largely ignorant of the 8-odd decades of discussion about it. But like, you don’t have to allow the reactionary crowd to control your understanding of the show! Saying it’s a fundamentally colonial narrative does not dismiss or diminish claims about racial diversity or representation in other areas, nor does it mean a reactionary interpretation of the show holds more weight. Those people are not worth considering, they have nothing of value to contribute to the discussion of the show’s politics. Like you can accuse me of having high standards or that my demands are ridiculous given the show is old, but I’m being bombarded (and have been bombarded) with claims that Star Trek is socialist, is progressive, is better than Star Wars politically, etc. and I don’t think those claims stand up to basic scrutiny unless you are willing to downplay or dismiss how deeply racist, ableist, misogynist, etc the show is, and further you have to ignore the basic fact that the show does not work if you reject or take umbridge with its imperial framework

a quick look back at january 2024

This year, I've decided to start keeping record of what matches I watch/what my reactions to them are, something that I'd done previously but had dropped for 2023. I'm trying out using a spreadsheet instead of a purely text document for this one. Beyond being much more pleasant for me to scroll through, this has the added benefit of letting me crunch numbers. While I don't think a lot of the nitty-gritty statistics will be of interest to anyone but myself, I thought it might be fun to do some kind of end-of-the-month write-up. Maybe I'll do one for each month, who's to say.

Anyway!

BROAD NUMBERS I ended up watching 64 matches this month, 50 of which took place this month. A large portion of those were from ittenyon week. I was kind of worn out after that and had other things I wanted to focus on, so I haven't been keeping up with anything consistently other than DDT, which made up a third of what I viewed this month. This will probably continue into the future; I have some backwatching plans. Tied for second place are NOAH and Dragongate, which also tracks. I really need to catch up on NOAH, I've barely seen anything from it since The New Year. I've also been pretty hit-or-miss with Dragongate, but I've really been enjoying getting more into it. It's fun! There are plots going on that I'm kind of invested in! Shun Skywalker is there, being the most normal man who's ever lived! Good times.

MOST APPEARANCES THROUGHOUT THE MONTH In terms of "matches that I watched this month," Danshoku Dieno and HARASHIMA tied for first place with five appearances each; for "matches that took place this month," Dieno and Hideki Okatani tied with four. As he made it to first place in both categories, that makes Danshoku Dieno the inaugural Spreadsheet Champ!

I think this is going to be one of the more interesting things to keep track of throughout the year- based on the metrics for this month, I'm going to guess that it's going to bias heavily towards people who appear often in undercard multi-mans.

MATCHES THIS MONTH I don't consider myself much of a writer nor someone with taste, so this isn't a "best of the month" list or a collection of thought-out analysis. I'm just going back through the month's viewing and picking a few things to chat about.

ULKA SASAKI VS TAKASHI SUGIURA (NOAH, JAN 1st) Spent the entire match being wildly jealous of Ulka Sasaki's hair. I have actual thoughts about the match itself—I thought it was a pretty solid showing considering it was Sasaki's first singles match and I'm definitely interested in seeing how he grows from here—but my most substantial takeaway was "Maybe I should dip-dye my hair."

KENOH VS MANABU SOYA (NOAH, JAN 1st) I've tried typing something up about this multiple times, but I feel I can't articulate my feelings properly. I'm just going to leave it at "go watch Kenoh vs Soya." Amazing performance from them both.

KAZUCHIKA OKADA VS BRYAN DANIELSON (NJPW, JAN 4th) Worked for me in all of the ways their first singles encounter didn't.

SHINGO TAKAGI VS MASAAKI MOCHIZUKI (DRAGONGATE, JAN 10th)

LUIS MANTE VS JACKY"FUNKY"KAMEI (DRAGONGATE, JAN 11th) Mante apologizing to the audience for the violence he's inflicting on Kamei and not to Kamei himself…fascinating.

HARASHIMA VS TORU OWASHI VS KAZUKI HIRATA (DDT, JAN 14th)

MAO VS BRYAN KEITH (DDT, JAN 21st)

I'm sure that Okatani vs Sakaguchi will also make this list, but I missed seeing it live and have been saving it for when I can really sit down with it. Maybe I'll watch it tonight. Additionally, while I've limited the formal list to matches that took place this January, I'd also like to recommend Tanahashi's two appearances in DDT. Very fun, very interesting to see how strongly the audience reacts to asshole heel Tanahashi.

That's it from me for now. If there are any matches you particularly enjoyed this January, let me know! I love hearing about what stuck with people. See you next month!

i just really need Jodie Whittaker to know that most of us know that it wasn’t her that made her seasons of Doctor Who tank - it was the absolute shit writing from Chibnall

idc if you liked the new seasons or not - the metrics speak for themselves. 

a large majority of viewers did not like it. a very small amount of them were the sexist ones. but most doctor who fans are actually very forward thinking about the whole gender of the doctor. what they didn’t like was the writing

the fact that Chibnall came in with Jodie’s first season & said that there would be nothing from the previous seasons/iterations of Doctor Who (villains/companions/etc) was dooming it from the beginning because New Who has been nothing but based on Old Who & banking on the old fans to come back & bring new fans with them

so much so that Chibnall had to reverse it so fucking fast they brought Daleks back in the Christmas special 

Jodie’s second season got better but only a few episodes. i also noticed this. it was incredibly strange. it felt like they filmed the episodes that were essential to the seasons plot & then read the fans feedback that they wanted more random adventures & scrambled to film more episodes to address some of the feedback & then shoved them in every other episode. it made those episodes feel completely out of place against the other ones

some of the episodes never even showed the TARDIS or them arriving with it - which made it feel incredibly weird. i’m sure that some other (new) Doctor Who seasons had episodes like that but never so many all jammed together that i can remember

not to mention the very controversial episode Fugitive of the Judoon which now rewrites Old Who lore/canon. which a lot of old fans aren’t okay with. personally i don’t mind it. what i didn’t like was the fact that they technically took the mantle of being the first female doctor from Jodie??? like??? was that really necessary??? don’t get me wrong. the actress - Jo Martin was great & the chemistry between the two was phenomenal but like??? really???

the most current season has been much better in my opinion but it’s too little too late. Jodie has said she’s leaving. Chibnall is going as well (thank god) but we didn’t get from this season what i was hoping for -

a scene with the level of Matt Smith’s rage, sorrow & happiness during A Good Man Goes to War or something like Peter Capaldi’s epic performance during Heaven Sent or maybe a two-parter as tense & heartbreaking as David Tennant’s - Human Nature & The Family of Blood. i’d even have taken a moment similar to the Christopher Eccleston episode The Doctor Dances where “Just this once - everybody lives”

but there hasn’t been a single moment during these seasons where i’ve been brought to tears or moved emotionally like the past doctors have done. Thirteen has made me smile & yes i have laughed. but a good story can do both & it can tell you the difference between right & wrong without pointing at the bad & going “see. see that right there. bad. we bad humans need to stop. so bad.” which is exactly what Chibnall did during most of his run

most people watch sci-fi or fantasy as a form of escapism from daily life. this doesn’t mean it can’t have some form of message in it. but that does mean you have to be more careful with how you deliver it. because otherwise people won’t digest it well - hell they won’t even swallow it. they’ll just spit it right out & call it propaganda. that’s the difference between good writing & bad writing. getting people to empathize with your point of view without them even realizing it.

but anyway. i’ve ranted long enough! TLDR -

REBLOG THIS if you NEED Jodie to know that WE KNOW it wasn’t her

also that we would love for her to stay on for another season if she’s up for it now that they have a new head writer planned. because i’ve watched Broadchurch - she has the range. they just never gave her the chance

I spent three months working on my fic. The art is also amazing. And just 7 kudos. Shortly after, a fic appeared, that was literally a copy of MY fic and badly written, and just 1000 words, and this fic have more kudos now. I really want to cry

I’m sorry Anon. This may sound like impossible advice and is really just random words from a stranger on the internet that doesn’t know anything about you, but the best thing I would encourage you to do is to stop comparing your worth to others.

We live in a world of numbers where “value” is measured by views, likes, clicks, and any other metric companies can think up and put on a UI. In a world of Instagram influencers, Big Name Fans, and the Twitter-famous, we’re being told that bigger is better, more likes means more love, and the more interactions you have, the more important you are.

Do not do this with your writing. I get it. The AO3 stats are Right There. Front and center. Unignorable. Writing is lonely. It feels like screaming into the void, and after all that work, surely someone will give you the validation you deserve, right? After all, that other writer and their work got it. So why not me?

It’s not wrong to want that, Anon. It’s not wrong to love and share and want that love reciprocated. I would argue that it is very very human, and a very beautiful thing that you are reaching out, labouring over something you love, putting a bit (a lot) of yourself out there, hoping for some of that love back.

But as long as you’re always looking over your shoulder, always wondering why them and not you, why do they have more more more, why why why...you’re never going to be happy. And if this is the situation you find yourself in with your writing, I’m afraid that it will destroy your love of writing.

I’ve seen it happen. Writers turning bitter. They get angry. They get disappointed. They start asking questions. “Why can’t readers comment?” “Why don’t readers say anything?” “How do I get more kudos/comments/hits?” And sometimes they stop writing. They stop doing the thing they love. They stop creating. Why write and post when no one is going to appreciate it?

There’s really only one person whose answer matters: You.

When it comes down to it, You, the author, are the only person that should matter. How do you feel about your writing? Did you tell the story you wanted to tell? What did you learn?

No one is going to love your story more than you. No one knows your story better than you. No one knows the bits that made it in, and the bits that didn’t. No one really knows which parts you struggled with, which one caused you the most tears, which ones you’re the most proud of because it was so hard for you to write.

Every time I see a fic I’m in awe. Because it’s a labor of love. It’s something someone tried, something someone wanted to do, regardless of the writer’s skill, experience, or English proficiency. It’s something someone created, for fun or as a way to heal. It’s part of them and their own personal journey in this funny thing we call life. It’s something they decided to spend what precious time we all have in this world on and it’s what they’ll leave behind. It’s beautiful because it exists and You made it. And if you are the only one who sees and appreciates that. So be it. It’s your writing. It’s a bit of you. Will you really be happy if everyone else loves it except you?

So find your reason to write. Try not to let it be something that is dependent on things you cannot control and the numbers attached to it. Aren’t you a little tired of being constantly measured, compared, and criticized because what you did isn’t big enough or loved enough or good enough? Why can’t the pure act of writing just be enough?

If you’re still reading this and are thinking to yourself, “easier said than done” or “it’s all very well for me to say these things, but what can you actually do about this” then maybe here are some things you can try to distance yourself from the addicting pull of the numbers popularity game:

1. Take a step back - Try to be self-aware and realize what your expectations and goals are when you post a fic. I would refrain from an outcome that you cannot control. Number of hits/kudos/comments are things you cannot control. Who reads your fic and what they say are largely things you cannot control. What other writers post and what their readers say are things you cannot control. Realize that there’s always going to be a “bigger” and “better” fic by the numbers. There’s always a bigger fish. Don’t fall into the trap of measuring the worth of a fic, and by extension yourself, by numbers that you cannot control.

2. Find a friend - Someone whose feedback you cherish and who can laugh and cry with you and give you that feel good feeling we get when we share things, the communal creatures that we are. Share your love with them and have fun!

3. Participate in an exchange - Much easier to feel happy about a response to a fic when it’s specifically made and targeted to one single person. As long as that person likes it, mission accomplished! Also, exchanges usually have a community (fellow participants, mods, betas) for the event who can give you feedback as well. It’s a pretty good way to make some new fandom friends too!

4. Get feedback from the right people - If you are looking for feedback to improve on your writing, try to find someone whose opinion you respect and who you can build a relationship with. Constructive criticism is often very personal and takes a lot of trust between the giver and the recipient. It will take some time to build enough trust with a beta/friend/reader, so be patient with them, yourself, and the process. If you are able to build enough trust with someone you want feedback from, I find it helpful to be specific when you ask for feedback: “The pacing feels off here. What do you think?” “Can you help me show XYZ? I want it to feel like ABC.” “Does A seem to be too childish here?” “Is B acting out of character?” “Is there too much description on this page and did you lose interest?” Take their feedback at face value and try to keep an open mind. Communication is key to any relationship and it is no different with something like this.

5. Write, but do not post - Write your fic. Create. Put it down in words. But if you can’t stop yourself from constantly comparing yourself to others, don’t put yourself in that position. Just don’t post your fic. Let it sit in google docs, Word, or whatever word processor you used to bring your thought to life. Don’t gamble your happiness on things you can’t control. Find another reason to write.

Be honest with yourself about why you write. Try to stop comparing yourself and your fic to others. Don’t let something that should bring you joy be a source of sorrow.

Static Shock: Shock to the System and Aftershock Review

“You know what? 13 years ago, me and some friends sat in a restaurant all night and daydreamed about the kinds of stories we would tell if we had the chance. We wanted to expand the concept of superhero to include characters that kind of looked like us, who had some of the same background, experiences and dreams as we did. We wanted to create something fun that a new generation would respond to the same way we responded to our childhood heroes -and damn if we didn't succeed beyond my wildest dreams. Today, Static Shock is a household name with millions of fans of all ages (Is there stuff I'd do differently? Yeah, almost all of season four but why nitpick?) Static is the most successful thing I've ever helped create and I'm both proud and gratified that people have taken it into their hearts. “ 

Dwayne McDuffie, Co-Creator of Static and Writer for Static Shock

This review is dedicated to Dwayne McDuffie and Robert L. Washington III.                                                        Rest In Power Static Shock is awesome. I grew up with the show watching it both first run on the WB and second run on Cartoon Network and loved it as much as I did other large parts of my childhood courtsey of DC like Batman the Animated Series, Teen Titans and both Justice League Shows. What makes this unique among the DC Properties is that Static wasn’t really a big name when he got a show. He wasn’t even part of the DC Universe. 

See as I had no idea for probably a good decade, Static actually came from Milestone Comics, a company ran by and focused on african americans. The goal was understandable: While black heroes existed at the time, and there were some fantastic ones like Storm, Jim Rhodes and Steel... these guys weren’t the center of their universes. The big faces of the big  companies, Spider-Man, Wolverine, Hulk, Iron Man, Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, The Flash.. were white. So milestone was a shakeup of that with the main teams and heroes all being black, from Icon, an alien who’d lived among man but rather than end up in kansas like say superman ended up imprinting on a slave woman centuries ago and has been with us since, who was encouraged by an energetic teenager named Rocket to put on a costume and do something with his powers and his community, Hardware, a tech genius who had his work stolen by a white asshole and wanted to fight back and BLood Syndicate, a group of gang members all caught in the “The Big Bang”, a huge fight between all of Dakota, the midwest city where the comics take place, that ended when the police released a bunch of experimental gas that gave them all super powers. 

As most of you who have watched the show already know, this is where Static comes from. Static was the company making their own Spider-Man, i.e. a nerdy teenager who suddenly gets super powers, in this case Virgil Hawkins who at the prodding of a friend took a gun to The Big Bang to get revenge on a bully. .but ultimately couldn’t go through with it, decided it wasn’t him and got rid of the gun and ran.. and still ended up in it, becoming Static, a young hero dedicated to using his powers to fight other “Bang Babies”.. a term that dosen’t really sound that great and they really should’ve thought through. But Phrasing aside the character was great and I look forward to reading more and only haven’t because I have to buy the issues gradually, but DC is currently re-releasing the individual issues of Static, Icon, and Hardware weekly in anticipation of a reboot of Milestone Coming in May digitally on Comixology at only 2 bucks a pop, and rereleased the original print collections that were long out of print for 10 bucks each, though i’m getting static on it’s own since i’ts really not that much less expensive as it only collects four issues while Icon and Hardware both collect 8, so I can wait a bit there on Hardware and already own Icon: A Hero’s Welcome.. and really need to review it at some point. 

While Milestone’s output was good, at least from the two books i’ve read, with Robert Washinton III, who sadly not only ahs also passed but was fucking homeless for a while  in the 2000′s.. what the actual hell, writing Static alongside Dwayne McDuffie, whose later moved onto animation writing tons of Static episodes all of them classics including the school shooting episode, the first three rubberbandman episodes and both Anasazi episodes. Point is it had good writers and artists and even had a distrbution deal with DC, so they had a leg up on the glut of other comic book companies.. but happened to start at the start of the comic book crash, a huge downturn in sales in the 90′s as the speculator boom, i.e. a bunch of people assuming every number one would be worth golden and silver age money, forgetting a character has to BUILD INTREST and this stuff takes time, and whose attempts to sell fast flooded the market with comics no one wanted,, caused the roof to cave in and with a bunch of assholes pegging milestone as a “Company for black people” rather than you know, a company trying to add fucking diversity and represntation to the comics industry, and that simply wanted a unvierse that was centered around people of color instead of white guys. The company eventually had to shut down, and was left to lisencing.  This is where the show comes in. Producers HAD been trying to make shows based on Milestone for a while, as far back as the mid-90s and the company was was all for it but the closest it got was an x-men style team series using various characters whose first draft was terrible and whose second draft by Alan Burnett, a producer on various DC Animated shows who’d go on to produce Static Shock, that McDuffie and others really liked but sadly did not get picked up. eventually though with presistance Static ended up getting a series and as I said McDuffie went on to write for it though he did not develop it. Some changes went into place naturally to make it work for an early 2000′s kids show and while i’ll probably miss so since again, only read one issue as we go. But due to Milestone coming back my intrest was peaking, hence finally reading the copy of Icon I had to buy from the library years ago due to keeping it overdue but am now EXTREMLEY glad I own as i’ts incredibly rare and really damn good, and wanting to read static, doing so lately since it’s finally on digtiial and again not too expensive. So join me as I give you a shock to the system and revisit this hell of a series to see if it holds up.. which just to cut that short it does and i’m only holding off binging MORE because I want the first two eps to be fresh enough in my head to review properly.. and also go over the various voice actors because that’s a thing with me now and charcter co-creator dwayne mcduffie because he’s awesome. 

As I like to do when covering a series first episodes, let’s run down the voice cast. 

First up is an UTTER LEGEND, and I use the term voice acting legend a lot, and mean it every time and have good reason to use it when I say it, and Phil LaMarr is a GOD in the buisness, having done a metric ton of voice acting roles, and being easily the most proflific black voice actor in animation. He’s also done some acting work, mostly in pulp fiction which I have not seen, but his true staying power and talent is in animation so here’s just the roles I feel are most notable or may not be very notable but i’m bringing up anyway because it’s my list. 

His roles besides Virgil include Lester Payton the Texas Ranger who showed up for one very good episode of king of the hill to be badass and show up the hickish, stupid and very punchable local Sheriff, Gearld’s obnoxious older brother Jamie O on Hey Arnold, Hermes Conrad from futurama, Carver from the Weekenders (PUT IT ON PLUS DISNEY), Axel Foley for exactly one bit in Clerks the Animated Series, but anyone whose seen it will know exactly which one, Micheal on the Proud Family, Black Vulcan on Harvey Birdman (In His Pants), Hector Con Carne and Dracula on Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy and Evil Con Carne, Jack on Samurai Jack something I didn’t know for decades (and I didn’t know about the carver thing till today though i’ts obvious in hindsight), John Motherfucking Stewart on Justice League and later Steel and Adult Static in the Unlimited seasons, Osmosis Jones on Ozzy and Drix, Bolbi Strogofski on Jimmy Neutron (And yes i’m just as shocked as you are.), Wilt on Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends, Marcus on Life and Times of Juniper Lee, Bull Sharkowski on My Gym Partner is A Monkey and Also a Sociopath Please Help God My Life is a waking nightmare..... okay the rest of that title is implied but we all watched the same show, we all know in our hearts that was the title

Moving on, he was also, and yes there’s MORE: Maxie Zeus on The Batman, Philly Phil on Class of 3000, Both Robertsons AND Fancy Dan on the Spectacular Spider-Man, Jazz on Transformers Animated, Kit Fisto and Bail Organa on Star Wars the Clone Wars, Gambit and Bolivar Trask on Wolverine and the X-Men, Aquaman I, L-Ron and Green Beetle on Young Justice, J.A.R.V.I.S. and Wonder Man (Simon Williams) In Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, Gabe and Carny on Kaijudo: Rise of the Duel Masters (Really miss that game and have been snapping up what cards I can get lately), Baxter Stockman in the 2012 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (And there’s also an awesome photo of him with 2003 Baxter... the two best together in one place. I got chills), Dormammu (I’ve come to bargin) in various Marvel Shows, Noville in Mighty Magiswords, Zach’s dad Marcus in Milo Muprhy’s Law, Craig’s Douchey Brother Benard on Craig of the Creek, showing he’s clearly come full circle, And Mr. Scully on the Casagrndes. And given It took about two paragraphs to cover all of this, yeah, I MEANT legend. 

Next we have Kevin Micheal Richardson as Virgil’s Dad Robert, and it’s the first time since I started introducing Voice Actors on a show that i’ve overlapped. I already covered him during the second episode of legend of the three caballeros, but for the short version he’s also very acomplished, very damn good and I somehow missed he played the old blind guy in hey arnold> Needless to say the dude is awesome. 

Virgil’s Sister Sharon is played by Michele Morgan who was in the rap group BWP and did some smaller roles outside of this the one exception being Juicy on the PJ’s, which I have not watched much of but REALLY do not like, though i’ll at least give it credit for being a decently long lasted black claymation sitcom at at time when there were, and hoenstly still aren’t, many black animated shows. 

Back to long casting sheets, next up is Jason Marsden, who is one of my faviorites as i’ve realized recently as Ritchie. As I also found out only recently he started on the Sitcom Step By Step and while that show is .. ehhhhhhhhh, he is great in it because he’s great in everything. He also apparently has his own internet variety show which I have to watch now. His roles include Max Goof, ironically given I was just talking about that role a few days ago, Haku in the english dub of Spirted Away, Micheal, the kid being yelled at by a bunch of 80′s cartoons characters not to take drugs in Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue!, Nermal in the DTV Garfield movies and The Garfield Show, Tino on the Weekenders (SERIOUSLY DISNEY), Snapper Carr on Justice League, Rikochet on Mucha Lucha! for the last season (Why I do not knkow and while I love the guy he was not the right choice), Felix on Kim Possible, Chase Young on Xiaolin Showdown (WHich I did not realize was him and now I do easily his best role and I REALLY should’ve), Red Star and Billy Numerous on Teen Titans, Speedy on Batman Brave and the Bold, Impulse/Kid Flash II on Young Justice, and Fingers on Kaijudo. He hasn’t done as much lately which is a shame but hopefully i’tll pick up again. 

Next up is Hotstreak, Virgil’s brutal bully turned unhinted pyromancer played by DANIEL COOKSY, another actor i’m happy to talk about and another faviorite I haven’t seen much of lately. Daniel was an actor from childhood, playing Budnick on Salute Your Shorts, but he quickly gained a long and storied catalogue of VA Work: His first big roll was as Montana Max on Tiny Toon Adventures and if there is a god he’ll be back for the reboot, Stoop Kid on Hey Arnold, the incomprable Jack Spicer on Xiaolin Showdown, far and away his best role and part of why Chronicles sucked so bad was he was he didn’t get to reprise the role, The titular Dave the Barbarian, Django of the Dead on El Tigre (Had no idea), Kicks utterly insufferable big Brother Brad on Kick Buttowski and apparently he’s back at it again after laying low for a bit as he’s voicing Snag in Long Gone Gultch.. which I already really needed to watch but hot damn, I missed him. Sign me up. 

Frieda, Virgil’s crush and close friend who in the comics was his main confidante and love intrest but here is eventually pushed aside, is voiced by Danica Mckeller whose work didn’t seem all that familiar.. until I found out she was Ms. Martian on Young Justice. Hello, Megan. Very talented and she did get a major role in a dc show eventually so good for her. Can’t wait for season 4. 

So with our major players out of the way,  let’s talk about Dwayne. McDuffie is an AWESOME man and my respect has grown for him more and more with time. A writer and editor at Marvel, McDuffie has a decent resume doing smaller but awesome books, which I got most of for free last year when Marvel was giving out free digital collections due to the lock down, like Damage Control, a sitcom set in the marvel universe about the company that picks up after superhero battles and the logistics and antics that insue and Dethlok, about a pacfist trapped inside a cyborg zombie. He was as mentioned one of Milestone’s founders, and wrote Icon, Hardware and co-wrote the first few issues of Static. He’d go on to a pretty stacked career in animation, writing on this show and Justice League before becoming  story editor and show runner for Unlimited , even making a return to comics as a result writing the Marvel miniseries beyond and an arc of Fantastic Four in which Black Panther and Storm filled in for Reed and Sue while the two of them worked on their marriage after Reed did.. pretty much everything he did in Civil War. He also became head writer and show runner for Ben 10: Alien Force and Ultimate Alien, revamping the franchise a bit, and Alien Force, at least the first two seasons are awesome and I feel people overreacted on the changes. Ultimate Alien is okay, but has it’s problems but the finale was awesome and left the man’s legacy on a high note.. as he sadly passed in 2011 due to heart complications. He is truly missed and produced some utterly amazing stuff whlie he was alive. So on that melacholy note let’s see what happens when his creation hits the tv screen shall we?

Shock to the System:

This episode is written by Christopher Simmons, who is apparently a huge art designer guy.. but i’m not sure that’s the same chirsptoher simmons. Much more notable is the writer of the episode after this Stan Berkowitz, who was showrunner for season 1 and has done a LOT of DCAU work and is suprising talent, having written a lot of awesome Justice League episodes including Secret Society and The Royal Flush One. Point is we’re in first class hands.  Before the episode itself I want to talk about the intro and how it’s unique among DCAU shows. Like most Western Animation the intros for DCAU shows didn’t change much over the seasons with the most I can see is JLU changing up the footage to preview the current episode and later adding Hawkgirl to the intro after her return to the team. I THINK superman the animated series changed some of it’s footage too, but I can’t confrim it and may of just been imagining it. As i’ve talked about on my blog it’s normally a pet peeve of mine, mostly because shows you know, change after season 1, characters get added some one shot characters used for the intro never return, and after a while it can feel dated especially in more recent shows where the status quo is not at all set in stone and things change quite a bit. But sometimes it can be good enough that either the dated elements don’t matter or general enough that you don’t need to change it and i’ts just that good.. and given Batman the Animated Series has both in spades, you can see why i’ts probably my golden standard for intros and after superman the animated series DC mostly followed suit. But being part of the teen superhero boom of the 2000′s Static is unique in that it splits the diffrence: It’s intro gets the character across perfectly like a good intro should starting with Virgil getting out of bed and running a comb across his head before showing off to his sister to bug her and literally running into his dad who hand shim his bag and smiles, silently showing off his family. He then runs to school and runs into some trouble.. and said trouble changes for each intro, with Rubberband Man for season 1, Kanga (Whose name I only know because I happened to run across it) for season 2 and your guess is as good as mine for seasons 3 and 4, though Hotstreak is a constant. They still save some money for seasons 1 and 2 by recycling some animation.. but that’s alright with mea s it was good animation, and the improtant thing is cycling out old villians for new ones, while Season 3 is the only out and out redo to show off Richie taking on the Gear identity, adding about 10 seconds of intro to let him show off.  Seriously it’s an utterly great intro and like the other DCAU intros outside of superman, stuck in my brain. 

The other change that’s ENTIRELY diffrent from the rest of htem is that the music changes each time. The first two have the same formula just with a difrent vocalist and backing track: a superhero theme but with some hip hop beat boxing over it. The first intro is fine enough, not specattcular but stilll god. The second song.. is eh. Not really great and feels like a marked downgrade from season 1 and just dosen’t blend an ocrehstiral superhero theme with the beatbox elements NEARLY as well. The third song though is my faviorite.. even if I HATED Little Romeo as a  kid because I really did not like his nick show, it’s more a straight up rap song, but it has a faster beat that fits the intro better, and Romeo’s bragging fits Virgil’s character and penchant for Spidey quips perfectly. I also find it ironic that the theme that blends in with the dcau the most, the first season’s, is the one from BEFORE they decided to put it in the same universe. Still this season’s intro slaps, I just like the LIttle Romeo one a bit more.  The opening scene is picture perfect. Some masked crooks looting a warehouse are loading some stolen TV’s into a van when suddenly the lights come on one by one above one of the crooks before his tv switches to various channels before going haywire. Cue our heroes’ entrance. Let’s tak ea good look at him

Static’s Costume is awesome. While I prefer the season 3 redesign, and clearly DC agrees as the redeisgn was used for both pre and post new-52 when they used him, and while he’s getting a fresh design for the reboot, said design takes a lot of cures from said outfit. As for how the outfit differs from the comics itself  this is the design he had in the comics

It didn’t change much from the first issue, with the exception of his now iconic big puffy jacket which was added pretty early into the character’s history but I was unaware of that and just assumed he had the bodysuit the whole time. The more you know. But as you can see outside of the cool puffy jacket over a costume the two couldn’t be more diffrent. While the Dakotaverse outfit is more a standard superhero outfit, with some regular clothes touches on top the first cartoon outfit comes off more realistic, looking fantastic, but still coming off as something two teenagers could realistically have thrown together with what clothes they could buy, while still looking awesomely superheroy. IN short it’s perfect and only topped by the season 3 onward look...

But the slicker look, with an even cooler jakcet and the new colors all fitting the lighting ascetic better, but fits: not only has Virgil come along farther since he started, but with Richie now having a genius brain as Gear, he can provide a far slicker, far more professional superhero outfit on the budget the two have.  This show is just great  at costume design. 

So getting back to the episode at hand, Static puts up a huge sign in elecrticy saying “Bad guys here”, PFFFT, and then hides away and narrates that a few days ago he’d be the last person anyone would’ve expected to be a hero. Cue Flashback. 

We meet Virgil Hawkins on an average day: rapping into his razor, getting into a petty argument with his older sister Sharon, as a younger brother myself I relate to this, and talking to his dad who tries to get them to cut that out. We find out his mom has passed via his sister making really terrible eggs and saying that’s how mom made them. Exposition! Though we do get a great bit through this as when his sister gets distracted by her boyfriend calling, he uses the opportunity of her leaving the room to dump the eggs.. after having earlier jokingly prayed to his mom for a way out of breakfast. “Thanks for looking out for me mom” That’s both very sweet and very hilarious. 

This is a change from the comics it turns out as I was utterly flored to find Virgil’s mom alive and well when reading the first issue of Static. Turns out this was a change made during development and one Dwane McDuffie admitted in the interview I got the tribute quote from to not liking as he had a good reason for having Virgil have a nuclear family, as most black families in media at the time were just one single parent and a kid or two with the other having either left or died. He wasn’t too bothered by it as while he preferred what he came up with in the first place, the show DID get some really good stories out of her being gone and didn’t just have her be absent because shut up. Virgil is still working over her death and the way HOW she died ends up playing an important role in this episode and gives Virgil a dislike of guns, as she died to gang violence. So the change wasn’t for stupid or racist reasons, but likely both to keep the character count down while giving them something to work with for storylines. Or it could’ve been for stupid reasons and the writers simpily made lemonade out of that very dumb lemon, either way it ended up working.  Virgil also plans to ask his friend Frieda out. Frieda was a bigger deal in the comics, being Virgil’s friend and confidante as well as his ocasional love intrest, but here while she was inteded to at least be his love intrest here, that sorta fizzled out. As for the best friend role we meet her replacement in Richie, which McDuffie conceded was the kind of change a studio would make swapping out a female character for a male one. That being said the crew made the best of it and Richie is awesome, a bit of an overcompensating dipstick at times, but a good sounding board and pal for virgil and funny as hell too. He was also gay, something only revealed post series by McDuffie.. but unlike say Dumbledore, it’s a bit easier to swallow here: The early 2000′s were an even worse time for gay characters in tv let alone cartoons, and if they couldn’t kiss or have sex scenes on regular tv, there was no way we were getting any representation in a children’s show. So it was largely just hinted at by Richie overcompensating in how “into girls” he was and i’m once again fine with this being word of god as it was literally the best they could do and his counterpart in the comics was also gay, if not as relevant.  Ritch encourages Virgil to work on his opening to ask her out as it’s awkward as heck, hits a bit close to home.. but I do appricate the show just .. having him try and ask her out from the first episode. They likely would’ve drug thigns out a bit granted had they used Frieda more, i’m not blind to the convetions of the time. .but as someone who got the very wrong idea from tv that just waiting around meant a girl would like you eventually, when no you need to actually try even if rejection happens, I honestly wish we had more of this in media than the other garbage morals at the time. 

So he prepares to , not helped by her mentioning guy after guy is asking her out.... but before he can F-Stop, the future hotstreak, shows up.  F-STOP

That being said...... it’s not as bad as the original gangster name for the comic’s version, Biz Money B. Yes BIZ MONEY B

So yeah while F-Stop is no more intimidating, it at least means I can stop laughing. Francis, because I can’t type F-Stop without laughing and this review is already behind, shoves Virgil out of the way and agressively hits on Frieda, even saying “you smell good”, the international sign your a douchebag and also to call the police. Virgil steps up to the guy and gets PAINFULLY slammed into the lockers, something I give the animation team a lot of credit for, as you can FEEL how fucking painful that was. Virgil is saved by Wade, another local gangbanger who in the comics was a close friend of Virgils but here saves him seemingly just because.. seemingly. 

On the way home though Virg’s problems don’t end as naturally, the giant sized asshole with nothing better to do has his goons corner virgil before VIOLENTLY beating him.. off screen but the noises, and the clear brusies including a black eye, on virgil afterwords.. just holy damn i’m suprsied they got away with this but it shows just how horrifing it was and that this is a step above regular bullying, which make no mistake is absoluttley terrible and the series would later do an episode on it and school shootings, into straight up gang violence. Wade shows up again and gets the bastards to flee.. but also makes it clear he can’t keep doing this.. and forces Virgil to meet him at his base under the bridge. And it’s a tense sequence, with Virgil KNOWING this is a bad idea but having no real choice and Wade making it abundantly clear that he wants Virgil to join his crew, and makes a chilling point: while Virgils dad RIGHTFULLY dosen’t want his son to join a gang as Virgil points out.. he can’t be there for him all the time and eventually one of those times, Francis will be around. And he may not surivive that. Virgil nods noncomittaly.  At home it gets even more grim as he dosen’t open up to his family, understandably as his dad would jsut say to call the police and well.. we’ve seen how the police treat black people. At best they’d just try and use Virgil as an informant and that likely wouldn’t end fucking well for Virgil. Ritchie points out he can’t join a gang, virgil’s mom died that way.. see told you it’d be important to the plot.. but I like how the story dosen’t offer an easy answer.. well okay he gets electric powers soon enough but without the fantastic element this is just an innocent kid caught between either joining the very thing his mom hated or hoping a system not built to protect him will keep him alive. It’s utterly saddening and chilling and holy shit is it amazing a cartoon in the early 2000′s was able to get away with.. ANY OF THIS, and they handle it great, paired down a bit from the comics but even then it’s still incredibly balsy they got THIS much in. 

Naturally Wade calls in his favor and our hero is forced to come running.. and soon finds out Wade’s brought him in for a massive gang war. Welcome to the big bang, baby. He hands Virgil a gun as things get started and Virgil.. drops the thing and tries to escape, in a harrowing sequence.. and runs into Francis because god apparently REALLY hates this kid today. As if to prove that the police show up and while that prevents a beating, they demand they disassemble. then release untested gas on them because of course they do. 

As a result the big bang truly begins, with the various gang members getting mutated.. and naturally so does virgil. Though he wakes up the next day seemingly fine. How’d he get home? Does his dad know where he was?

I don’t know and we’re not getting any answers, but Virgil soon finds weird stuff happening like his clock shorting out, change being attracted to him and his razor going wild. It’s only once he get sback to his room he gets an inkling of what’s going on and calls Ritchie to meet him at the Junk yard.. though it is a bit of a dick move as he dosen’t you know, tell him anything about Wade or Francis right away. He does at the yard though.. and that he has powers, having finally figured out how to use them to a point. And the series does provide a decent justification later as to why he’d get this so quickly: Virgil is a smart kid, gets great grades at school and apparnetly there’s even an episode later where he gets a scholarship to a fancy genius school. So him getting how elctromagntisim works or being a quick study on it makes perfect sense. 

Richie suggest the obvious.. to become a superhero. And the thought.. hadn’t occured to Virgil. It’s honestly a nice twist on the old trope. That he hadn’t thought of it, not because he’s selfish or any of that or needs to learn a hard lesson, those have been done.. simply because the rush of getting his powers, and implicitly of having a way out of his current predciament, a way to keep Francis off his back and keep Wade from pulling him in further. His own path. But once i’ts brought up.. he jumps on it. Part of it is being a nerd like you or I, of course he wants to.. and being a good intetioned one, he knows this is the right thing to do. It’s waht makes a superhero a hero: Anyone can get powers in a universe like this, esepcailly the dcau, but it takes true courage and heart to use them selflessly and knowing you’ll be in danger. It’s why I love surperheroes: they often didn’t ask for this but they do it anyway because somebody’s gotta. We also get an intresting wrinkle is superman is, at least I think in this episode I could’ve missed it or misremembered things, mentioned as a fictional character. That’s because originally like the comics this wasn’t part of the DCAU.. but eventually the crew decided it shared staff from it, shared a network, both first run and on reruns, why not just make it part of the DCAU proper. I fully support this decisionf: While i’m midly annoyed unlimited never really used anything from static shock outside of Static himself in the time travel episode, despite you know Static and Gear having BEEN to the tower and not being much younger than Kara and defintely older than Courtney, I chalk it up to weird rights issues or something like that. But having Batman, Batman Beyond, Superman, Green Lantern and the Justice League itself all guest star was a good idea, and expanded both static’s universe and gave the DCAU something differnt as most heroes in it were older and more experinced in contrast to the up and coming virgil. Again really would’ve been nice if he and gear could’ve been a part of the expanded league but production might of just been too far ahead or, given he had his own series, they might just have wanted to stick to toher characters. Also begs the question why Icon or Hardware wasn’t adapted for the expanded League but hey, questions for later and the tricky logisitics of the milestone rights might’ve been the issue. I don’t know I wasn’t in the room. 

So we get a costume montage, including Black Vulcan from Superfriends, who again ironically would be voiced by Lamarr not too long after this, though weirdly they DON’T use his outfit from the comics for this montage. I mean why not? It fits the gag and would’ve been a good second to last choice.But what could’ve been aside we get our winner and cut back to present day...

Thanks boys. Static finds out one of the things in the warehouse is a shipment of computers for the school and can’t help but show off, showing up to the school, where Frieda and Richie are setting up for the dance, and dropping off the computers, and even saying his catchphrase for the first time “I’ll put a shock to your system” (Which Richie chimes in with awesome line and I agree, great catcphrase), before helping set up and flirting with frieda. 

Though as Richtie says he’s a natural. He’s not wrong as he can work a crowd. .but back it up too as his first run out had him easily taking out the crooks, and as many teen superheros and fans of heroes of hte type, myself included will tell you, getting it right in one is not easy. Not even Miles MOrales was immune. All Static needs now is a villian. 

And the end of the episode provides one as we see, in horrifc and once again damn suprising detail most of hte new metas aren’t doing so good and are melting and other stuff and we catch up with Francis whose burning up.. and naturally given that hair, though given he named himself F-Stop it’s the least of his problems, he’s got fire powers and escapes to “Have me some fun”

So with that we end episode 1. And it’s excellent, a great way to introduce the hero and while the warehouse opening is a bit superflous, it is a decent addition, showing our heroes first outing in costume and giving us a bit of an action scene to get us through the very heavy rest of the episode. But the rest of the episode is no less grippping, telling the tale of a teen caught in an unwinnable scenario who suddenly finds a way out. And speaking of which waht of Wade? Will we see him again? Is he perhaps Ebon, the series big bad as I thought when I was a kid? What comes of the man who directly caused static’s origin?

Yeahhh that’s the one mistep I think the pilot makes. Frieda is understandable as that was likely a simple change in creative direction. This though? Why build this guy up if your not going to bring him back. I mean where he went was probably the grave, as he probably did due to his mutation, but it’s still VERY weird to spend a whole episode focusing on this guy, building him up as a big personal threat to our hero.. and NOT have him become the series big bad. And maybe he WAS supposed to be ebon and they just changed their mind. I don’t know but it bothers me it bothers me a lot. Otherwise though flawless. ONe more to go. 

Aftershock: We open outside an electronics store, as our heroes watch the news reacap what happened in the first episode, with the media dubbing it the Big Bang and revealing their could be hundreds of “Metahumans”, as Virgil dubs after deciding the media’s term “Mutant” dosen’t fit, a nice wink to the fact that that’s the term used in dc comics and I believe milestone but could be wrong there. Me I like the term, has a nice ring to it. 

At the store while Richie mulls over waht this means Static finds out he’s a human CD player.... this was before mp3 players and streaming on your phone made them horribly obsolete mind you and if you don’t know what one is congradualtions you live in some sort of bubble and you made me feel really old junior. 

Frieda happens to be there and Virgil quips “What’s the matter they run out of britney cds”. Dude she’s not bad. Also be careful what you wish for man. Nickeback returned the year after this. You have not truly suffered through bad music yet my young friend. They spot a kid looking feverish, and he soon turns into a purple werewolf, as you do. It’s a bang baby.. those are richie’s exact word and you may not want to start a panic there bud. Just saying your best friend is one. THeir not all like this. Our heroes book it only to run into Francis who naturally refuses to let them leave and only doesn’t try to beat up Virgil because Virgil points otu the werewolf and nonplussed, he goes to fight it, scarring it off by revealing his own powers. He’s now dubbed himself Hotstreak which points for getting an actually good name kid. No points for what happens next as unsuprisingly getting powers did NOT mak ehim a better person and he attacks Virgil who blocks with a garbage can lid and thankfully is blasted into an ally. Richie tries to guard frieda for damn obvious reasons but gets hsi shirt burnt up because shut up Thankfully Static shows up, and we get our firsdt full on superhuman fight as both fight each other with aplomb, and it’s a damn good fight.. and one that goes pear shaped for Virg as he’s caught off guard when he finds out Hotstreak can use his powers to fly, and tackles him and his previous trauma causes him to freeze up. Thankfully , as Frieda put in a call earlier, the fire department arrive and HOt streak has to retreat, though Virgil is bummed that he “Choked”. And I love this as it not only shows Virgil’s inepxerince, as this is his first time fighting a bad guy but that just because he HAS power now dosen’t mean trauma and his previous fear of Hotstreak goes away or you won’t freeze up from time to time. It dosen’t make him weak or anything like some assholes would call it .. it makes him human. Humans make mistakes, and it makes him all the more relatable that he’s not pefect and that he did freeze up as I know I certainly would at last once in the circumstances. 

Things don’t get better at dinner as Sharon and Pops argue over the bang babies with Pops calling them a meance and Sharon pointing out Static exists so they can’t all be bad. See assuming a group of superhumans are bad because a handful of them ar edick sis why the x-men had to get their own island nation. You can only save an ungreatful populous so many times before you say “fuck it i’m getting my own island, pay me for life saving drugs, save your damn selves and stop doing genocides on us. Kay thanks”. But he does bring up a valid point that rattles his son: We don’t know anything about the Bang Babies or their biological structures and it’s likely they might further mutate into monsters, Static included. 

Virgil, understandably, wants to check this and thus he and richie compare blood samples in science, to no real conclusion. She he checks out with his doctor who assumes he’s sexually active in a great getting crap past the radar bit and a bit of realisim, but he agrees to the test though if something came up he would have to tell Virgil’s dsad and is up front about this. Nice dose of realisim.

That night City Council has a meeting and the Mayor TRIES to deflect Papa Hawkins questions about the bang babies which again, while being a judgmental ass as not every person hit was a gang member (Virgil, and as we discover later some others), and not every gang member is there by choice, some by circumstnace some, like virgil almost was, because they HAD no other option. Again years of reading x-men may of just made me a bit touchy on assholes admitely assuming superpower people bad. But it’s clear the public is upset and while she says an investigation is underway... Virgil and Richie are not only not convinced, but figure she’s actively covering it up. And unlike everyone else there who probably suspects the same, they can do something about it and tail her.  It’s during this, and cleverly as I didn’t realie till writing this using similar skills to his human cd player act, Virgil listens in and discovers whose behind it: Edwin Alva, whose apparently richer than bill gates and a beloved phinarophist Alva, as it turns out, was actually the arch enemy of Hardware in the comics, taking advantage of the guy in his civiliian idtentiy and thus casuing him to launch a war on the asshole. He does transition into this series well though, being the one behind the gas that caused it and with the mayor agreeing to back off, planning to simply dump the info about the big bang on a disc then destroy everything for now till the heat dies down. Yup sounds like a corprate douchebag. 

Static tails him, finds the lab and infiltrates it, stealing the disc.. but getting caught by Alva’s goon, and trapped in a glass prison, forced to use ALL his power to escape and barely getting out alive, but not before bouncing off alva’s car. Still he now has the proof.. and meanwhile Hotstreak, who I was wrong did get captured, is forced to take pill sbut spits them out once the orderly is gone. Dude.. WHY DIDN’T YOU WATCH HIM. Make sure he swallows that shit especially since, as he has no powers right now and can’t harm you. 

Hotstreak escapes off screen and our heroes discuss the disc before he shows up, and we get a REALLY fucking amazing scene: Virgil ducks into an Alleway and ritchie is worried.. and Virgil disarms him with just one word responses Ritchie: Virg you can’t take him.  Virgil: Gotta. Ritchie: Well at least wait for the fire department Virgil: Can’t.  It’s simpile but it gets the point across: This is his fight, he can’t wait for help, and people need him. And this is what makes a true hero: It’s easy to be a hero when everythings going well.. but it’s the true ones who stick it out against the odds and fight anyway. And he’s going to.  So we get one hell of a fight, though naturally Hotstreak burns up the disc. And I do like this as it dosen’t feel contrived.. yes Static could’ve left it with ritchie.. but he wasn’t thinking in the moment and dind’t really have time to think abotu the disc, only that people were being hurt and he was all they had between them and Hotstreak. It was no choice at all. Still that pisses Virgil off that the last night’s work is now worthless, and he fully charges up and curbstomps francis who retreats into a clearing. Hostreak brags when static follows, as even he’s figured out Static needs to be around metal, as he’s usually on his disc or the street, and in the park there suppodsidly isn’t any. But he’s not THAT smart as Virgil points out two things: one, he hoped to do this on PURPOSE so they wouldn’t be around people and no on e would get hurt and 2).. this is a city, there’s metal everywhere.. and he awesomely and cleverly proves it by unlodging a sewage pipe with his powers and dousing his foe, winning and proving his stuff. I love this solution, it’s a clever spider-man type way to disarm him, using smarts and the einvroment instead of just brute forcing it. Though the sewage part wasn’t intetional our hero still won and gets praise from the people dumb enough to follow the fight. 

However at home Virgil points out it was  Pyrrhic Victory and shows off his smarts by telling the tale behind it, which I didn’t know,because tv tropes didn’t exist yet: king pyrhus fought the romans and WON.. but had so little armies left that he still lost overall. That’s what this feels like to Virgil: he beat hotstreak but any chance at a cure for Bang Babies and Alva going to jail for causing them is gone. His mood does get a boost though as the doctor calls and reveals he’s fine, he just has a bit too much elctrolytes and just needs to lay off teh salt. He celebrates, we get a quick gag and the episode ends

Aftershock is another stellar episoe, giving us Virgil’s first super foe and a personal one at that, while showing some growth. As richie tells him he’s not virgil anymore he’s static and he can’t let his past get to him.. and he does’nt going from cowering in fear to easily beating his foe with simple logic. It’s a good followup that answers questions you may have from the first ep, like what does this do to virgil’s body, who supplied the gas, and why has no one done anything about this, and sets up another villian for Static in Alva. Great stuff. I highly recommend these episodes and the show as a whole: it’s fast paced, grounded and enjoyable, having just enough levity to not be too dour but just enough tension and stakes to be intresting. A throughly fantastic superhero show and one that i’d certainly love to revisit on this blog If you have an episode of static or the dcau in general you’d want me to cover, my comissions are open and details are on a tab on my blog or can be gotten simply by asking me via ask or dm. Tommorow we’re going deeper underground, there’s too much damage in this town as the Lena Retrospective continues. So expect gay ducks, straight ducks and some terrfirmains. See you next rainbow. 

We need to talk...

I knew that this topic of interactions will come up again, because it has never been talked all the way through, so I had this drafted for a while. So much of this old draft still resonated with this permanently unfinished discussion that I just had to edit it and post it, because I feel like it has to be said and put into one post. We can’t keep starting this conversation and then make it so dramatic that there is no conclusion or compromise. The only reason this time is more mellow is because people have better standards for this stuff due to a pandemic going on. This is written for the MCU fandom, but I’ve seen this go down in different fandoms, so here we go:

Things that are NOT at fault for readers not interacting:

The Readers. Should be clear after asking them again and again. And nothing changing. The readers at large are not at fault for a couple people being demanding or hateful. Neither are they at fault for this website and other social medias automatically putting writers at a disadvantage. They do their best with the time they have in their life (just like writers). And after asking them over months to try and reblog more and not much changing, it should be obvious that it isn’t where the problem lies. At least not 95% of it. NOW:

Things that ARE at fault for readers not interacting:

Pushing them, thinking they owe you stuff, while you tear other writers down saying that nobody owes them stuff. That happens time and time again. To me, to friends, to writers I check in with. Don't expect community to come to you when you don't come to them.

Not putting anon asks off when demands and hate get too much. It’s literally THAT easy when people get nasty. It’s sad for the nice anons, but they will understand. Save your mental health! Save the mental health of people reading that hate on their dash. I don’t know how many people constantly answering to hate I have unfollowed and I’m sure people have unfollowed me for doing the same.

Ego and hypocrisy. You can't say numbers aren't a problem and then say they are. In the same post. AND then also deny it later in some of the cases we’ve seen in recent months. Yes, that happened. In several fandoms where this topic comes up semi-regularly. And that might also be the reason people are tired of this stuff and speak out against it.

The fact Tumblr is only used approximately twice a year by most people. And has a shitty tag system. And a shitty algorithm. You are at an automatic disadvantage.

The fact some of you can't understand that 3-5% of your following interacting is a good and normal rate on pretty much all social media. The bigger you get in followers, the bigger the gap gets between followers and interaction (and demand and hate). There are literal statistics on that. 1% interaction at 10k is still good for a platform you have no power over!

The fact some of the people here call anons *haters* for pointing out that you interact w the same 10 people, making that speace seem excluding, when it's literally true what those people say!? Nothing wrong with only support the same 10 people on your blog, but then don't say that you practice what you preach (cause you don’t). You can’t demand more interaction when you don’t interact more yourself. That is how it works, for anyone, not just people of a certain follower count. If I reblog more fics, my blog gets more clout. Logical conclusion. Works for everyone. You have no time for that? Then don’t expect more back. It’s called SOCIAL media for a damn reason.

Telling people asking for Tumblr advice to interact more to make new friends but being the most defensive/indifferent person once they talk to you in DMs. Yes, that keeps happening and I know it from either my own experience or from others sharing their experiences with me. It’s kinda sad. It’s more of a minor factor in people not interacting, but I’ve seen it enough to mention it.

Making shitposts and personal posts all day and then saying you don't have the time in your life to interact w peoples' writings. Like, drabbles exist on almost anyone's masterlist. 5 minute read, easy support for a writer that might be losing motivation. Not every work has to be written like a novel to be great as hell or “quality proven.”

Oh, and there hasn't been a MCU movie in a while, making most of our readership probably currently not care about the fandom as much. Especially after Endgame ended up being a total opinion splitter.

Bonus: The misunderstanding that pushing shy readers to interact does the exact opposite. Not to start about the fact that we are in the middle of a pandemic at the moment. That means they may not have time to read and you may not have time to write. Normal. Logical. The same reason lots of people currently don’t publish. Don’t expect anything predictable and controlable out of current times.

Bonus: Check how you connect interactions to self worth and worth/fun of your writing hobby. Define what success means for you in this space, otherwise you will never be satisfied. It won’t matter if a post has 1k reblogs, you’ll always want more, because you chase an infinite metric.

Bonus: Maybe take a month to concentrate on community, getting outside of your bubble that you deny but very likely have (I’m not excluding myself from this), and actually improve interactions. Some people seem to have forgotten that when you interact with other writers, they probably interact back. Surprise! Your followers already know your tried and true fanfic friends, they want some new stuff without searching for it. Basic Marketing knowledge, know what your audience wants. If you do this for the interactions you gotta look at it from a marketing standpoint and not a pure passion standpoint. Oh: And maybe they find you interacting in the notes of someone else’s post and become an active follower. Win-Win-Win situation.

Bonus: Community is a loop, a net of interactions. Some people here have clique behavior, sound defensive and/or simply don't practice what they preach. That is not me or anyone else hating on specific blogs (I’m also no complete exception), it’s people trying to tell you that you can’t ask for shit you don’t practice yourself. Nothing wrong with supporting your friends only, but then don’t go around expecting new people to find your stuff. It’s literally THAT simple. You can’t have both!

Bonus: Ignoring some of the ride or die readers that are already there. Some of the people on here wish they had that and it’s deadass taken it for granted by some. Meanwhile I'm sitting here with Serotonin levels like christmas when someone I know reblogs my stuff and my fic gets some clout. Imma repeat myself: If you do it for the numbers, you gotta look at it more like marketing and less like pure passion.

And again: You are on a social media platform that will always put you at a disatvantage. That is not the readers' fault. It's how social media works at this point. If you want as much interaction as you can without putting in more interaction work yourself, simply share your works on here, AO3 and Wattpad simultaneously. Problem solved.

Bottomline: If you want more love on your work you gotta go beyond what you currently do, since it’s clearly not working for you. Reblog stuff from people you don't know. I don't give a sh*t if it's a 5k or a 100 follower blog. Hell, there is the whole 366 reblog challenge and some of you deadass went on reblogging the same people when that’s not really what this was made for. I, personally, haven't run out of new people to reblog, so this shouldn't be hard. Actually take time to talk to people in DM's, it takes 10 minutes in the evening to write a few people a message asking how they are or sending a cute gif. If you want stuff, you have to give it. Not leave it. People have come to me before, telling me "the community doesn't owe you stuff", no, they don't, but they do owe if they wanna be owed something back or even demand to be owed something back. Community is about back and forth. You give, you get. It's work, cause it's a big hobby. If you don't have time, that's cool, but then don't be sad about lower interaction. It’s logical that low activity from you leads to low activity from others in the long run, unless you do something worldshakingly new. You don't wanna look beyond a circle of friends or your go-to writers much? That's fine, but don't be upset about barely new people interacting cause they feel excluded or simply don’t find your work because of the same people seeing the same people reblogging the same works. What's not fine is not seeing how readers are NOT THE PROBLEM.

I haven’t talked to a single person about this that DIDN’T find the posts surrounding it demanding and completely ignoring the arguments some others had...repeatedly. Every single time it came up. Not just once but time and time again, whenever this topic comes up. You want interaction? Interact. You don’t want hate? Don’t give it a platform. As harsh as that sounds, I’ve never felt better on this platform since I put anon asks off, even when I miss the nice anons. They probably understand. PS: Again, this was written a while ago and edited to fit into a more general context now. I hope people can discuss this in a civil, non-judgmental way, because that is how I tried to write this. This is not again a specific person or group, it’s pinpointing what I see repeating for two years on this platform now, in all corners. I’d also like to mention that we are still in a pandemic and lives have never looked so vastly different, so you can’t demand anything normal in this very not normal time. Even if you do it all right, your interactions dropped in the pandemic cause people likely stay away form this platform for mental health reasons. There is so many layers to look at, these clearly aren’t all, but I hope it makes some people think about what and when they complain. Numbers will never satisfy you, they will always leave you wanting more if you don’t know why you do what you do and for what. Anyway: Be nice to each other and me in the notes in case this gets shared! No drama please! Ignore any grammar and typo mistakes, lol. Love ya!

Congress's Big Tech trustbusting smackdown

After more than a year of investigations, House Dems have produced a 450-page report on market concentration in the tech industry, with a slate of findings that are obvious and long overdue, and a slate of recommendations that are simultaneously traditional and radical. Start with the findings: the market is concentrated and the companies preserve their monopolistic standing with anitcompetitive tactics:

Apple's App Store stranglehold raises prices and transfers money from creators to the company

Google preferences its own services in search results

Facebook buys companies for predatory reasons, to snuff out potential future competition threats

Amazon rips off its sellers and engages in predatory pricing

https://www.wired.com/story/congress-unveils-plan-curb-big-tech-power/ All obvious, but it's nice to have it in the record. Then there's the traditional AND radical remedies: blocking mergers, prohibiting the creation of vertical monopolies by entering "adjacent lines of business." And then there's "structural separation" - the rule that banned rail companies from owning freight companies that competed with their customers and banks from owning businesses that competed with the businesses that borrowed money from them. There's a shifting of the default in mergers: the DoJ should presume ALL mergers and acquisitions by large firms are anticompetitive and require the companies to prove otherwise. A kind of neutrality in platforms, requiring them not to preference their own products over others. I predict this one will be the source of endless misery because it supposes that there is a "right" way to organize search results. Weirdly, this was Google's position for a long time. If you were an early web writer and you cornered a Google exec at a party to complain about your pagerank, they'd just shrug and say, "Make the page better then." The implication being that they were measuring objective quality of your page, like they'd invented a machine for taking pictures of the forms casting shadows on the wall of Plato's cave. It was an algorithm and algorithms are math and math is objective. This excited the world's governments, who started to say, "Oh, hey, if this is MATH, then it's not censorship to order you to change the math. "If we order you to keep certain things above the fold, or to downrank or banish others, that's like specifying the equations for structural steel, not like ordering the editor of the New York Times to put certain articles on the front page." Hoist on their own petard, Google started working with eminent First Amendment scholars to advance the (correct) position that the math was in service to expression: the programmers and QA teams that wrote and tuned the algorithms were making editorial judgments. These were indirect - in the way that, say, a newspaper proprietor might say, "We need more coverage of inflation" or "Let's call Qanon a 'cult' and not a 'conspiracy theory'" - but they were acts of human expression. I mean, they HAD to be. Google doesn't have a webcam in Plato's cave. There is no objective, universal quality metric. And they're not choosing sites at random, either. So it has to be judgment, and judgment is expression. All to say: "Good luck with search neutrality, Congress." But there's more! The report calls for increased budgets for antitrust enforcement and killing forced arbitration and its bans on class action suits. And finally, the report calls for overturning 40 years' worth of antitrust case-law, the decisions that depended on the doctrine of the Nixonite criminal Robert Bork, who became a court sorcerer to Ronald Reagan. Bork's doctrine was that antitrust law needed objective standards and objective standards were impossible to come by in markets - you could never hope to objectively define when a company had too much marketshare or was abusing its power. This may sound like my argument about "search neutrality" - but there's a big difference. Bork had a counsel of despair: "Because we can't identify shenanigans, we shouldn't try to prevent them." But the pre-Borkian enforcement strategy wasn't grounded only in objective correlates of shenanigans: it was also designed to make it harder for shenanigans to occur. Pre-Bork, we fought monopolies because they were bad - they had the power to distort markets and policies. Pre-Bork, we fought monopolies because they were monopolies. Post-Bork, we only fought monopolies if we caught them in the act, and even then, we could only win if we could prove shenanigans - and monopolists got really good at making it hard to prove them. For example, they perfected the idea of the "market definition" defense. You hear this with Amazon, when Bezos tells Congress that Amazon isn't a monopoly because people buy stuff at Walmart. By including "Walmart" (or every time in which goods change hands for money) in the definition of Amazon's market, Amazon can make itself out to be a bit-player. Here's an example of a Borkean giving this line just last year: "Facebook doesn't have a monopoly because I can still make phone calls." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_Jp-GJ9LM0 Returning to a pre-Borkean vision of antitrust enforcement is profound and would have far-reaching implications for telecoms, entertainment, pharma, accounting, logistics, energy, transport, aviation, etc. But while all these industries got concentrated through the same methods - predatory acquisitions, mergers to monopoly, vertical monopolies - they aren't all the same. What kind of industry they are MATTERS. Tech has two unique characteristics: First, it is foundational. Our ability to demand better policy and to collaborate to hold policymakers to account depends on tech. We're not going to organize a global movement by wheatpasting posters on telephone poles. And second, tech means computers, and computers are "universal" in a way other industries' products are not. Computers can interoperate with each other in ways that, say, cars or can-openers or beers cannot. That interoperability has been the source of enormous dynamism and a check against concentration in the history of tech: what companies thought of as walled gardens that exploited "network effects" became feeding pens for new market entrants. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability Whether that's Static Controls - a tiny Taiwanese company that refilled IBM Lexmark's toner cartridges and got to piggyback on the vast market IBM had developed, growing so large that they ACQUIRED Lexmark or... https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/felony-contempt-business-model-lexmarks-anti-competitive-legacy Apple, which defeated Microsoft's office dominance by creating Iwork, reverse-engineering the Office file-formats so that Mac users didn't need to convince their colleagues to switch OSes, they could just share documents with them. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interoperability-reviving-elegant-weapon-more-civilized-age-slay The same tech companies that rose to dominance through this Competitive Compatibility are now its worst enemies, lobbying against Right to Repair, building products around DRM, and claiming their terms of service have the force of law under CFAA. Restoring the right of new market entrants to make stuff that plugs into the existing dominant products and services would go a LONG way to restoring dynamism to tech, to making companies' survival reliant on pleasing users, rather then dominating markets. And while the Congressional report doesn't give interop the centrality it deserves, it DOES mention it and discuss its importance. https://fm.cnbc.com/applications/cnbc.com/resources/editorialfiles/2020/10/06/investigation_of_competition_in_digital_markets_majority_staff_report_and_recommendations.pdf

🖊writerly conversation tag

tagged by @j-pping to do this amazing interview/reflections tag. of course she put together one of the most amazing tags ever because she is brilliant. thank you for tagging me angel! 

questions below the cut!

2020

what was the most challenging part of writing this year?

gosh...i think for me the hardest bit was staying both motivated and inspired. a lot of my inspiration comes from being out in the world. im an introvert but i enjoy being out in the city around the noise and the people and the buildings on my own. the majority of my writing used to be done while riding the subway or on a weekend after id gone out somewhere. a lot of my fics are inspired by locations, and experiences within those locations. being inside for the majority of the year made it hard for me to remember how...people interact with or relate to the spaces around them. so i felt like a lot of the time staying inspired was coming from places within just me that felt inauthentic. i think my writing benefits from my ability to see multiple perspectives, so i felt like a lot of dialogue or writing itself was suffering just coming from me alone. it took a lot of work to ensure that it wasnt like that. 

and then, motivation was also so hard. the internet and the news and everything about america, the planet, the everything was unrelenting and draining. we as people were privy to so much trauma this year, to the collapse and fracture of communities, lives, governments. there were several weeks at the end of may and into june where i just...couldnt. i had no energy for anything. it happened again in november after the election and the windfall of it. energetic tensions were so high it just felt so hard to push out words when things were breaking everywhere. like there were more important things i needed to focus on, and healing was one of them.

what was the most enjoyable/rewarding part of writing this year?

i enjoyed the new community of writers/friends i found by writing for bts again. they challenged me and pushed me to better myself. @jamaisjoons is so inspirational in the way she generates community and encourages relationships between storytellers. doing the summer bucket list pushed me out of my hermit hole for camp nano, and i cranked out molotov cocktail and felt so proud of it. it mattered so much to me because it was the first long thing id written after a period of feeling deceased, and it was so enjoyable because there was a sense of community around it. its easy to forget how essential having a support system in your creative community is.

what piece has left the most impact on you and why?

probably ciperion. words cannot express how proud i am of that story and the direction its going in. i read it back sometimes and i realize that my writing was elevated because of that piece. tbh molotov was responsible for that lift, but ciperion was just a whole other tier. ive also never written anything like that story before and it felt so good exploring the themes of seafaring and pirates. 

what have you learned about yourself through the process of writing in the past year?

that i absolutely am someone who took for granted how inspiring the world is even if i see it as a stressor. but also that writing isnt necessarily about being inspired. its about pushing on when its hard. some of my best pieces came from that kind of push this year. 2020 felt like...a slog through most of it, but i kept pushing myself to write even when i was low and tired. i realized that some of my best writing comes from that push, when its not easy and when its difficult and i have to think harder. thats where i grow. 

how has your writing changed in the past year? how have you grown?

i think im more syntax and detailed focused than i used to be. lately ive been experimenting with making the act of reading feel like pleasure. my favourite books are the ones where i read a sentence, and im moved because it felt nice to read or it felt powerful. the sentence itself had power, not the image it was trying to convey. somehow separate, if that makes sense. theres a lot i need to learn before i could go off comfortably and try to write a book, and this is what ive been trying to master. my attention to detail has grown, and sometimes i think thats a detriment. i think sometimes im too detailed and i dont leave my reader enough power on their own. im still finding that balance, but i think im pleased right now with what im trying to push myself to master.

2021

ignoring your wips for a second, if you had all the time and energy in the world to write your magnum opus piece, what would it be about? why is that the dream story you’d write, all other things controlled for?

ive had two books in my mind forever. one was originally being written as a fanfic in a different fandom before i stopped and realized its too big and so much more important, and is worth being a book id like to write. if i wrote an opus like this it would actually be a book id submit to publishers but ~

- hundreds of years in the future, society has learned how to cure most diseases. for those we cannot, the sick person can be cryogenically frozen for a period of time until a cure is found. there is, however, a limit to the length of time they are frozen. no one has ever been frozen for over 100 years, and the main character is a scientist embarking on the experiment to do just that. it is, effectively, time travel. the main character is rash, selfish, sarcastic - not a very nice person; invested in their work and science and little else. they freeze themselves and wake up in the future. during their time in rehab they have to confront the horror theyve made of themselves, the horror people have made of the future, learn to be vulnerable. they end up falling in love with another scientist etc etc. theres so much more to this story and the world is enormous. one day ill revisit it

- a fictional play on orpheus in the underworld where a female main character’s brother was sold by their mother to the goddess of the underworld (helena instead of hades) for eternal youth. the gods all live in a hotel (the concept of this main thing is being used in elysian fields but its not remotely the same) after they were removed from the heavens. main character (ophelia) must gather several totems from the gods to prove her worth and survive her trip into the underworld to rescue him. id like to not focus on a woman finding romance, and instead a woman finding herself, her strength, her devotion to family, her power, and connecting with her history.

how do you want to grow in your writing this year?

this year id like to find balance, like i mentioned above, with my need for detail and my trust in my readers. the balance between detail and dialogue. i want to try to condense my writing again so not everything is a goddamn series. the ideas i have are huge and thats great but i need to remember how to parse things again, while still maintaining impact.

what’s one thing you’d wish to see in the fan-writing community this year?

i want more community, in general. as a multi fan, i see pockets in the kpop fandom where it exists and im well and truly aware that its recently become incredibly hard to foster on the exo side. ill just say that. maybe i dont witness it or its happening amongst blogs i havent found or have not found me. i want to see less dialogue about ‘popular blogs,’ whatever that means; less focus on notes; less worries about statistics. i want people to remember that fandom is not about numbers, and the moment you make it about that is the moment you stop having fun. i want less fear from writers regarding sharing work they read and liked, less shame around it. i want to see more vocal communication for the things people like and don’t like, more engagement and more interaction. the concept of popular blogs is so ridiculous to me, because no one has any control over the metrics. no one has control over who follows them or reads their work except the person doing the actual reading. i want people to realize they hold so much power - a person with 10k notes has as much power as a person with 2 notes because sharing is what fosters community. i want this fandom to remember to share again.

name one new thing you want to try doing in your writing this year.

gosh i really love postmodernism in writing. think like mark z danielewski, who plays with the shapes of words or the act of holding a book - the physicality of it. id like to maybe write a choose your own adventure, or do something that encompasses multiple platforms. or even, more importantly, finish as still as sound and time runner. those are more reasonable goals. time runner actually is done, i just need to stop pressuring myself about it and edit it to get it up. asas, too, is largely done i just need to get my ass together. i have so many other ideas no one has ever seen i need to finish what ive started. thats a real goal.

tagging: @yehet-me-up @jamaisjoons @kyungseokie @jenmyeons @luffles424 @yoonia @shadowsremedy @chillingkoo @onherwings @inkedtae @ninibears-erigom @imdifferentshadesofpurple @readyplayerhobi @ditzymax @sugaurora @snackhobi @yeojaa @sahmfanficbts @xjoonchildx @johobi and anyone else who wants to do this. as always please only do so if comfortable or you want to!

OK, I'LL TELL YOU YOU ABOUT FEATURE

They seemed to have lost their virginity at an average of about 14 and by college had tried more drugs than I'd even heard of. From their point of view, as big company executives, they were less able to start a company, it doesn't seem as if Larry and Sergey seem to have felt the same before they started Google, and so far there are few outside the US, because they don't have layers of bureaucracy to slow them down. It meant that a the only way to get rich.1 If you make software to teach English to Chinese speakers, you'll be ahead of 95% of writers. We arrive at adulthood with heads full of lies.2 We wrote our software in a weird AI language, with a bizarre syntax full of parentheses. That's an extreme example, of course, that you needed $20,000 in capital to incorporate.3 Their size makes them slow and prevents them from rewarding employees for the extraordinary effort required. Doing what you love in your spare time.4 Young professionals were paying their dues, working their way up the hierarchy. By giving him something he wants in return.

Once they saw that new BMW 325i, they wanted one too.5 If you simply manage to write in spoken language. Languages less powerful than Blub are obviously less powerful, because they're missing some feature he's used to. The kind of people you find in Cambridge are not there by accident.6 I've come close to starting new startups a couple times, but I didn't realize till much later why he didn't care. We'd interview people from MIT or Harvard or Stanford must be smart. Indians in the current Silicon Valley are all too aware of the shortcomings of the INS, but there's little they can do about it. When you're too weak to lift something, you can always make money from such investments.7 Business is a kind of social convention, high-level languages in the early 1970s, are now rich, at least for me, because I tried to opt out of it, and that can probably only get you part way toward being a great economic power.8 It must have seemed a safe move at the time. At the end of the summer.9

It's not merely that you need a scalable idea to grow.10 How much stock should you give him? Users love a site that's constantly improving. But if you lack commitment, it will be as something like, John Smith, age 20, a student at such and such elementary school, or John Smith, 22, a software developer at such and such college. There are two things different here from the usual confidence-building exercise.11 But it means if you made a serious effort. Bill Gates out of the third world.12 What's going on? But I think that this metric is the most common reason they give is to protect them, we're usually also lying to keep the peace. The kind of people you find in Cambridge are not there by accident.13

Frankly, it surprises me how small a role patents play in the software business, startups beat established companies by transcending them. The problem is that the cycle is slow. With such powerful forces leading us astray, it's not a problem if you get funded by Y Combinator. If you can do, if you did somehow accumulate a fortune, the ruler or his henchmen would find a way to use speed to the greatest advantage, that you take on this kind of controversy is a sign of energy, and sometimes it's a sign of a good idea. Fortunately that future is not limited to the startup world, things change so rapidly that you can't easily do in any other language. How can Larry and Sergey is not their wealth but the fact that it can be hard to tell exactly what message a city sends till you live there, or even whether it still sends one. They build Writely.14 I'm not sure that will happen, but it's the truth. Stanford students are more entrepreneurial than Yale students, but not because of some difference in their characters; the Yale students just have fewer examples.

And whatever you think of a startup. In the US things are more haphazard. I see a couple things on the list because he was one of the symptoms of bad judgement is believing you have good judgement. There are a couple catches. Instead of being positive, I'm going to use TCP/IP just because everyone else does.15 Being profitable, for example, or at the more bogus end of the race slowing down. An example of a job someone had to do.16 But actually being good. There are a lot of people were there during conventional office hours.17

I'll tell you about one of the most surprising things we've learned is how little it matters where people went to college.18 In Lisp, these programs are called macros. That's where the upper-middle class convention that you're supposed to work on it. And since most of what big companies do their best thinking when they wake up on Sunday morning and go downstairs in their bathrobe to make a conscious effort to keep your ideas about what you should do is start one.19 The most powerful wind is users. We're just finally able to measure it. And not only did everyone get the same yield. VCs need to invest in startups, at least by legal standards. Ten years ago, writing applications meant writing applications in C. If you have to operate on ridiculously incomplete information.

Notes

Foster, Richard Florida told me about several valuable sources. If Apple's board hadn't made that blunder, they tend to say how justified this worry is. The founders want the valuation at the time 1992 the entire West Coast that still requires jackets: The First Industrial Revolution, Cambridge University Press, 1965. Yes, there would be enough to be a win to include things in shows is basically zero.

Different kinds of startups that has become part of your mind what's the right mindset you will fail.

But although I started using it out of loyalty to the founders' salaries to the traditional peasant's diet: they had first claim on the one hand they take away with the earlier stage startups, just monopolies they create rather than admitting he preferred to call them whitelists because it reads as a kid, this is the notoriously corrupt relationship between the government. As the name Homer, to mean starting a business, A. The Department of English Studies. Yes, strictly speaking, you're pretty well protected against such tricks initially.

There are also the 11% most susceptible to charisma. Every language probably has a word meaning how one feels when that partner re-tells it to profitability on a road there are no longer needed, big companies to say that YC's most successful startups of all the page-generating templates are still expensive to start over from scratch, rather than ones they capture.

There are two simplifying assumptions: that the Internet, and judge them based on revenues of 1. If the company goes public. This is one resource patent trolls need: lawyers. When that happens.

The only launches I remember are famous flops like the bizarre consequences of this type of proficiency test any apprentice might have 20 affinities by this, though more polite, was starting an outdoor portal. The Duty of Genius, Penguin, 1991, p. The danger is that in practice signalling hasn't been much of observed behavior. When I say in principle is that intelligence doesn't matter in startups tend to be when I was genuinely worried that Airbnb, for example, the startup after you buy it despite having no evidence it's for sale.

Another thing I learned from this experiment: set aside an option pool. So if they don't want to start a startup in question usually is doing badly in your country controlled by the government. But in a company grew at 1% a week for 4 years.

We added two more investors. The reason this subject is so hard to imagine how an investor, and that often doesn't know its own momentum. We think. I'm talking here about everyday tagging.

They thought most programming would be possible to bring corporate bonds to market faster; the point of a large organization that often creates a rationalization for doing so much to generalize.

Many people feel good. So instead of being interrupted deters hackers from starting hard projects. The idea is that it was overvalued till you see them, initially, were ways to make your fortune? In fact the decade preceding the war.

One father told me about a form that would appeal to investors.

Some graffiti is quite impressive anything becomes art if you tell them to justify choices inaction in particular took bribery to the traditional peasant's diet: they hoped they were only partly joking. If a big angel like Ron Conway had angel funds starting in the first phase. You're going to create one of those you can eliminate, do not try too hard at fixing bugs—which, if they stopped causing so much from day to day indeed, is due to the table.

The hardest kind of gestures you use the wrong ISP. But they've been trained to expect the second component is empty—an idea is stone soup: you post a sign saying this cupboard must be kept empty. The two guys were Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston. I have set up grant programs to run an online service, and they were, they'd be called unfair.

My work represents an exploration of gender and sexuality in an era of such high taxes?

So the most visible index of that, in one of the markets they serve, because she liked the iPhone SDK. For example, because a it's too hard to pick the former, because it is.

If you ask that you're small and traditional proprietors on the side of the junk bond business by Michael Milken; a new airport.

The biggest exits are the only audience for your side project. You're not one of their portfolio companies. He did eventually graduate at about 26.

A lot of time on schleps, but he doesn't remember which.

When I talk about startups. It's also one of the statistics they use the wrong algorithm for generating their frontpage. The reason Y Combinator only got 38 cents on the other: the source of food.

Ok, so, just... since the “ao3 is bad for asking for donations” bs is going around again, theres a bit of new stuff mixed in, but it seems to largely be the same “why dont they pay the authors” type stuff, with the usual insinuations of the people running the site just pocketing the money and doing nothing.

they made a bit over $700k in donations last year, but let’s bump that up to $750k for estimation purposes.

As of several years ago, they were running with about 750 volunteers, on ao3 alone.

there’s also 18 committees that they run, which are headed by a total of about 30 people, and let’s say there are 3 or 4 other people on each committee on average.

on top of that, they’re one of the most visited and active sites in the world, with almost 6 million fics stored there, and they regularly hit in the region of 250,000,000 distinct visitors a month. these numbers are very significant, because to operate smoothly servers need to be able to quickly access the data for a page, and then pass that data to you. 

lets say there are... hm. about 60kb of data that they need to pass to you in order to generate a page. at 250 million visitors, if each person loads a single page and does nothing else, that’s 15TB a month, easily, since i’m taking that estimate from directly loading a single short chapter, no searching or browsing or visiting different author pages or looking through bookmarks. which most people will probably do to some degree each time they visit, each of which is another system that needs to be queried, and is reliable and fast about it.

for reference, i can’t get an estimate on how much this must cost, because i havent been able to find any hosts to compare against that even have hosting schemes that allow numbers as high as ao3 delivers reliably and efficiently.

i work with databases for my job, and i frankly have no idea how the fuck ao3 manages to be what it is on the budget that it gets, im half-convinced there are fucking wizards back there or something.

purchasing the kinds of servers that they need to be using must be costing them well into the tens of thousands on the up-front price, server maintanence costs can run well into the thousands per month, and their reliability must mean they have sufficient redudancy to take them out of commission on the regular.

anyway. let’s say that the hosting, maintanence, and replacement costs for all this only cost them $150k a year. based on everything i know, this is an absolutely absurd underestimate to the extent that it’s frankly laughable.

anyway, that then leaves $600k. 

no matter where you assume that goes into the pockets of people behind the scenes, this would require complete complicity of everyone behind the scenes to keep under cover, as well as passing their false financial statements through audits and such. by and large, conspiracies like this don’t work very well!

so, that $600k should go to the people who “actually” bring value to ao3, the writers, then?

does everyone just get an even share of it? in that case, as there are about 2.6 million accounts- everybody gets about 23 cents a year. sound worth it? 

no? ok then, what about for each fic someone writes, they get an even share of it? after all, there were “only” about a million fics published in 2019. that’s about 60, maybe 70 cents per fic, doesn’t that sound good to you?

im guessing you think that’s still a bit low. in that case, should it be based on "quality” of fics? how should that quality be determined? kudos, hits, reader interaction? should that be an ongoing thing, or assessed at a particular time since publication? what about very long-running fics, how should that be assessed? should people just get paid a flat amount per chapter?

if the metrics to determine how much a fic is “worth” are transparent, then they’ll be abused- how should that be be determined? poor language quality? short chapter length? if they’re not transparent, how do you justify to authors why they aren’t paid more?

what about disputes regarding fanfics being “stolen”? right now, i dont think many people care much about if someone else writes a very similar fic to theirs. but would they feel the same way if someone else writes something inspired by, or with the same premise, or generally similar, to one of yours? what about if someone writes a story and incorporates someone elses OC? should the person who created that OC get a cut? 

if you want to increase funds to pay authors, how should you approach that? ask for donations? if payment metrics are transparent, then that means that anybody who performs well on them are likely to actively drive away donors. make it a subscription site? would you pay a monthly subscription fee just to access the site?

and so on, and so on. and that’s before any issues with backlog and such should be resolved. tbh, there are so many precedents that’d need to be set and potential issues that this would raise that even if ao3 responded with “fuck you” to every person who currently aren’t happy with the system, it would still probably be less unpopular than literally any change to allow them to pay authors.

honestly, at the end of the day, most people who are actually interested in financial support and who write fanfic? generally have a blog with a donation button. or a patreon. or something similar, along those lines. and there’s nothing stopping you from just going and doing that directly if you’re actually interested in supporting them.

it’s worth noting that there’s also a legal aspect to this, which im not particularly familiar with, but, for starters- a commercial aspect to works can make a big difference in whether or not something is considered “fair use”. whether or not something is, indeed, fair use, can also be pretty subjective. do you want to toss that litigational coin? and do you have the money and lawyers to press the issue? 

Have you played Fallout 4? What did you think of it?

Joseph Anderson had a phenomenal video on Fallout 4. Although it is enormous, so be careful. Overall, there were things to like and things not to like about Fallout 4. I’ll start with what I liked first. Throwing a cut in here because it’s long.

Combat in the first-person Fallout games has always been clunky, and enemy AI relatively largely consisted of straight charging or shooting from as maximum range as possible. Difficulty came primarily from enemy quantity, high damage output, or incredibly enemy hitpoints. The last of these has been a particular Bethesda problem in their games, with enemies being incredible damage sponges, making late-game fights a boring slog as you slowly whittle down their health while being impossible to damage in any meaningful capacity. While enemy variations aren’t nearly as high as the game’s fans would have you believe if you conceive of them as AI patterns, the AI activity did have some nice variations. Human enemies used cover, ghouls bobbed and weaved as you shot them, mole rats tried to ambush you. It’s got nothing on games with fully realized combat system, but it does make the combat that you do engage in much more enjoyable. 

All of the random crap you can pick up in a Bethesda game having a purpose is another positive. It is a true nuisance to find out when playing a game that I hit my encumbrance limit only to find out it’s because I’ve picked up a bunch of brooms, bowls, and other garbage accidentally while grabbing coin and other worthwhile treasures. Actually having these things mean an object is worthy mechanically, aside from level design; typewriters are useful as items as opposed to something that shows you that the ruined building you’re in was formerly a newspaper. As crafting is a big portion of the game, having these things provide component parts that you use for crafting on their own creates more utility in these elements of clutter which still require modeling, rendering, placement, etc. Now if you need aluminum, you’ll try to raid something like a cannery because it will have aluminum cans, which is an excellent way to create player-generated initiative. It also reinforces one of the primary themes of the game which is crafting and design, where even the trailers of the game suggest building as a key idea of the game. Certainly sensible for a post-apocalyptic game to focus on building a new society upon the ruins of the older one, and given what the game was trying to do with their four factions mechanic, it’s clear that this was their intent, and good job for trying to ensure that things factor back into their principal intent. 

Deathclaws look properly scary, the animations with Vault Boy were funny, there’s some pretty window dressing. The voice work wasn’t bad, the notable standout being Nick Valentine. The Brotherhood airship was an impressive visual. I had a little fun creating some basic settlements, particularly in Hangman’s Alley where I tried to create a network of suspended buildings and Spectacle Island where I had room to grant every prospective settler a shack. Bethesda clearly looked to create a game with mass market appeal, and I believe the metrics bears out that they succeeded in that regard. The robots in the USS Constitution quest were very funny, the writers were able to make the absolute ridiculousness of the situation work (curse you Weatherby Savings and Loan!) and framed it well as a comedic sidequest, with a final impressive visual if you side with the bots and the ship takes flight.

Now that this is out of the way, I think that a lot of what Fallout 4 did was not the right move. 

The quest design was particularly atrocious in this regard. Most of the radiant quests boiled them down to a simple formula - go to the dungeon, get to the final room where you need to either kill the boss or get an item from the boss chest, return. In this game though, the main story quests often were boiled down to just this simple formula. You need to find a doodad from a Courser to complete your teleporter? Go to the dungeon, kill the boss, recover the item. The Railroad needs you to help an escaped synth! Do it by going to the dungeon and getting to the final room. This really hampers the enjoyment of games because the expressiveness of the setting and elements of an RPG is often explored through quests. Quests are meant to get you out into the world and give you an objective, but they are also meant to connect you to the people that you’re dealing with. If every quest is boiled down to the same procedure, that hurts the immersion, but the bigger sin is that when you return you have another quest waiting for you. That robs the player of the sense of accomplishment because there is no permanent solution to problems, even for a minute. There is no different end-state for the player to see the transition from one to the other and feel accomplished that they were the ones who did it. Other RPG’s always understood this - a D&D game might have a party save a town investigate an illness dealing with a town, take out an evil druid who has charmed the wildlife into attacking supply and trade shipments, slay goblins who are raiding cattle, there are a lot of possibilities that might even feel samey: if you’re killing charmed dire wolves or goblin cattle thieves, you’re still going to the dungeon and fighting the boss, the usual flair and variation came from encounter design. After you’d do that though, the NPC’s might say “Hey, Mom is feeling better after you cured that disease, she’s starting to walk again,” “Hey, we were able to send a shipment of wine from the vineyards out to the capital, here’s some coin for the shipment as reward for your service,” or even just a simple “Hey, thanks for taking out those cattle thieves.” There’s a sense of accomplishment even if it’s a fleeting “we did a cool thing.” Computer RPG’s are tougher in this regard, part of the sense of accomplishment in tabletop gaming is also with your friends, it’s a shared activity, but usually in that the reward was some experience and character growth and going to new content. There isn’t new content here in Fallout 4 though, because of the samey quest design and lack of progression.

The conversational depth was also ruined, with so much of the voice choices mangled by the system of conversation they designed. By demanding a four-choice system, they limited themselves to always requiring four options which completely mangled interactivity. The previous menu design allowed for as many lines as you wanted, even if the choices were usually beads on a string. The depth and variation, however, are even lower than what could be found in games like Mass Effect 3, and the small word descriptions were often so inaccurate that it created a massive disconnect between myself the player and the Sole Survivor, because they weren’t saying what I thought they would be saying. That prevented me from feeling immersed, because a “Sarcastic” option could be a witty joke or a threat that sounds like it should come out of a bouncer. The character options were already limited, with Nate being a veteran and Nora being a lawyer, but this lack of depth prevents me from feeling the character even moreso than a scripted backstory. You get those in games, but being unable to predict how I’m reacting is something that kills character. 

Bethesda needs to end the “find (x) loved one” as a means to get people motivated to do a quest, or if they don’t want to rid themselves of that tool in their toolbox, they need to do a better job getting me to like them. More linear games can get away with this, but open world games encourage the sort of idle dicking around that doesn’t make any sense for a person who is attempting to find a family member. Morrowind did this much better, where your main task was to be an Imperial agent, and you were encouraged to join other factions and do quests as a means to establish a cover identity and get more acquainted with combat. Folks who didn’t usually ended up going to Hasphat Antabolius and getting their face kicked in by Snowy Granius. Here though, what sort of parent am I if instead of pursuing a lead to find my infant son I’m wandering over east because I saw what looked like a cool ruin, and I need XP to get my next perk (another gripe, perks that are simple percentage increases because they slow down advancement and make combat a slog if you don’t take them, depressing what should be a sense of accomplishment). By making us try to feel close with a character but by refusing to give us the players time with them, there is no sense of bonding. I felt more connection to James in Fallout 3 than I did for Sean, but even then, I felt more connection to him because he was voiced by Liam Neeson than because of any sense of fatherly affection. The same goes for the spouse and baby Sean, I feel little for them because I see them only a little. I know that I should care more, but I also know that I the player don’t because all that I was given is “you should care about them.” You need time to get to know characters in game, along with good writing and voicework. I like Nick because he quoted “The Raven” when seeing the Brotherhood airship and I thought that was excellent writing, I didn’t have any experiences with Sean to give me that same sense of bonding. 

They’ve also ruined the worldbuilding. The first-person Fallout games have always had a problem with this, with Fallout 3 recycling Super Mutants, the Brotherhood of Steel, and other iconic Fallout things into Washington D.C. Part of this is almost certainly the same reason that The Force Awakens was such a dull rehash of the plot of A New Hope, they wanted to establish some sort of continuity with a new director to not frighten off old fans who they relied on to provide a significant majority of the sales. The problem of course, is that this runs into significant continuity problems, now needing Vault 87 to have a strain of FEV and having a joint Vault-Tec/US Government experiment program there on the East Coast, so we can have Super Mutants. Jackson’s chameleon isn’t native to Washington D.C., but we need to have Deathclaws because they’re the iconic scary Fallout enemy, as opposed to creating something new with the local fauna, which is only made worse because they did do that with the yao guai formed from the American black bear (the black bear doesn’t typically range in the Chesapeake Basin near DC these days, but it’s close enough and given the loss of humans to force them back they could easily return to their old pre-human rangings). Some creatures are functions of the overall setting and can be global, ghouls are the big one here since radiation would be a global thing and fitting considering Fallout is a post-apocalypse specifically destroyed by nuclear war. Others though, are clearly mutated creatures and so they would be more localized. Centaurs and floaters were designed by FEV experiments and collared by Super Mutants, they should really only be around Super Mutants. Radscorpions shouldn’t be around, there would probably be instead be mutated spiders. Making things worse are that the monster designers do develop some excellent enemies when they think about it. Far Harbor has a mutant hermit crab that uses a truck as a shell (a lobster restaurant truck, which is passable enough for a visual joke even if it falls apart when you think about other trucks that they might use) and a monster that uses an angler lure that resembles a crafting component - these are good ideas but the developers needed to awkwardly shoehorn in iconic Fallout things that have no place there. This isn’t to say that I’m in love with a lot of Fallout’s worldbuilding, a lot of the stuff in Fallout 2 I found to be kind of dumb particularly the talking deathclaws, but as the series went on it took objects without meaning. The G.E.C.K in Fallout 3 was pretty much a magic recombinator which makes no sense as a technology in a world devastated by resource collapse, something similar can be said about the Sierra Madre vending machines. 

Fallout 4 though, had a lot of worldbuilding inconsistencies that really took an axe to the setting. The boy in the fridge outlasts the entire Great War, but apparently never needed to eat or drink water. This is, of course, stupid, because ghouls have always been shown to need to eat and drink - Fallout 1′s Necropolis section has a Water Chip but if you take it without finding an alternate source of clean water, the ghouls will die. Ghoul settler NPC’s that flock to your player-crafted towns require food and water. The entire thing was ruined from a complete lack of care, to build a quest where you reunite a lost boy with his still-alive ghoulified parents. I think this one bothers me not simply because of the egregious worldbuilding which isn’t even consistent in the very game it’s written it, but it’s done so frivolously for a boring escort quest. It feels scattershot, and that’s the problem I think with a lot of Fallout 4′s quests. They feel disconnected, like every writer worked in a cubicle without talking to any of the other writers. Same with things like the Lady in the Fog.

Are we done with that? Good, because now we’re going into the parts that I really dislike - the main quest and the factions. These are just awful. The developers took what folks really liked when it came to Fallout 2 and Fallout: New Vegas (Fallout 1 did have interesting factions but they were largely self-contained, more towns than anything else) and completely botched it. New Vegas was the clear inspiration for these factions, with the four faction model of NCR, Legion, House, and Indepenedent meaning that there were four different ways to go forward into the future, so we get three factions that fight each other and a fourth more player friendly faction that roughly resembles the Independent Vegas where you can pick and choose which factions you bring in with you and which you get rid of. Thematically, this fits in with the core of the game, crafting is a big portion of what you do and so crafting what sort of world the Commonwealth would be is simply a logical extension of it. The factions aren’t presented well though. The Railroad are impossibly naive and don’t demonstrate any rougher edges like denying supplies to humans in order to fuel their synth effort, even though such a thing should be evident if the post-apocalypse of the Commonwealth is to be believed. The Institute are sinister murderers and replacers without bringing any of the advanced technology that could provide some benefit such as the gigantic orange gourd that can grow. So much of their kill-and-replace mentality seems to be done for no great overarching purpose. The Minutemen are basically blank, pretty much just a catch-all for the player-built settlements, though the player as the leader of the Minutemen ends up getting bossed around by Preston to the point of the faction rejecting your commands to proceed with the main quest, a significant problem with Bethesda factions where you are the leader but never get any actual sense of leadership. There doesn’t appear to be any addressing of the failures of the previous Minutemen whether that be the previous summit, or new problems such as settlements feuding with each other requiring the general to intervene and mediate. The Brotherhood come the closest to a real faction with advantages and drawbacks if you squint, they are feudal overlords with the firepower to fight Super Mutants and other mutated nasties, but also violently reject ghouls and synths as part of their violent dogma except for seemingly not caring when you bring a companion around or killing ghoul settlers in settlements they control. But even then, we don’t really see the Brotherhood providing protection to the settlements that they demand for food, the typical radiant quest to destroy a pack of feral ghouls or super mutants is directed from a Brotherhood quest giver to a randomly determined location, hardly a good way to illustrate whether or not the Brotherhood is actually protecting settlements that they administer. We see little change in the way of the Commonwealth save that certain factions are alive or not because the game needs to stay active in order to perform radiant quests, so not even the signature ending slideshows can give us the illusion of effects building off of our actions. This is contrary to the theme of building a better world in the Commonwealth because there is no building. 

Special notice must be given to the Nuka-World raiders because they show the big problems with the factions. You can be a Raider in Nuka-World but only after becoming the Overboss, which is fair enough. But you’re already a Minuteman, but the Minutemen don’t activate any kill-on-sight order and Preston still helps you out. The game is so terrified of people losing out on content that they make permanent consequences rare, and when you do something like order an attack, it can be rescinded automatically if one of your companions is there. As an Overboss, you do grunt work in the Commonwealth, and the factions get mad and pissy if you don’t give them things despite even if you only give one section of the park to one of the factions, that’s more than they got from Colter. It’s like they don’t exist until the player shows up, which is exactly how a lot of modern Bethesda character and faction building seems to be. While in most computer games a sort of uneasy status quo is the desired beginning state because it gives the protagonist the chance to make ripples while justifying the existence of a status that allows the player to change it, it has to be applied consistently. 

The main quest itself is silly. There’s a decent twist with Sean becoming Father that sort of works, which would have worked much better if we had actually gotten a chance to bond with him, although the continuity of everything gets wiggy quick. When he said that he looked over the world and saw nothing but despair, I was wondering if they were going to actually bring a big question up and a debate between Father and the Player, the idea of what worth the people on the surface have, but it goes nowhere, it’s a missed opportunity. The main quest is just a means to meet all four factions and it’s a barebones skeleton at best. There are some interesting concepts they try, but what they do often falls flat. They try to establish some sort of empathy for Kellogg in the memory den, but it’s lazy and cheap because he kidnaps a baby and wastes your spouse, a wasted effort of empathy only made worse when you get criticized for not showing any sympathy. Kellogg then shows up in Nick’s memory for one second and then that little story nugget is ignored. The half-baked nature of the story keeps being brought back up, which is a pity because we actually saw them do a competent job in Far Harbor. The Followers of Atom are crazy and they really aren’t sympathetic in any way, but some of the folks inside the sub aren’t so bad that it might prevent you from wanting to detonate the sub, or at least you might think enough that you look for another solution. DiMA did some monstrous things, and if you bring him to justice, the game actually takes the time to evaluate whether or not you helped out Far Harbor, with meaningful consequences being taken if you took the time to do the sidequests which imparts far more meaning to them. 

While there’s a lot of problems that show up in terms of binary completion, the question of whether to replace Tektus and turn the Children of Atom to a more moderate path is a good question, it actually gives a lot more merit to the Institute if they were ever to have been shown to enact the same level of care. That only makes the Fallout problems stand out more, because it shows that they were capable of it but didn’t. This isn’t the only missed opportunity, synths themselves become a big problem. The goal was to create a very paranoid feeling but it was so sorely under-utilized that I never grew suspicious of folks because the game never gave me enough incentive to be suspicious of them. I didn’t think that Bethesda made synths that would give you false information or ambush you because that would have been potentially missed content. The idea of whether you are a synth or not is clearly an attempt to give the game more depth than it is presenting. You’re not a synth, Father’s actions make no sense if you are one, and DiMA attempting to make you think you are is silly because you know you aren’t one.

I think the game would have been much better if they had dropped the notion of Fallout entirely. If they had instead looked to create an open-world post-apocalyptic game focusing on crafting and building towns, perhaps with an eventual goal state of building many towns, establishing transportation networks, and rebuilding a junkyard society as a decent place (or going full Mad Max Bartertown complete with a Thunderdome for players looking for an evil and over-the-top option). That might have been an interesting game for Bethesda to potentially develop a new IP, even contracting with smaller studios for those who wish to tell story-heavy games in the setting. Instead, they applied Fallout like a bad paint job, cobbling together weak RP elements and story that made the game feel like a hydra that couldn’t recognize it was one being with multiple heads, constantly tearing the other parts of itself to ribbons. 

If I wanted to further improve it, I think I would have instead made the spouse a synth. It would require some serious reworking, but I would have made it so that Sean did believe that synths were people, or that they were real enough that the difference was negligible, they had free will. During the initial grab, the Institute took the entire cryopod where Sean was, baby and parent both. They used Sean to create the next generation of synths, but something happened with the parent, and they died during defrost. Sean hates the Institute for what they did, but what happened was truly a medical complication, not malicious in any way. When he learns that the player character is active, he creates a synth programmed to believe they are the spouse. He believes that exposing who he really is to the surviving parent would be traumatic, and as he hears that the player character is thriving, he wants to give them a chance at a normal life, and to alleviate the loss that he had in his life with the loss of his own parents. So the spouse is sent to you, and for a long time, you and the spouse have no idea. You adventure together, you build settlements together, the game encourages you to have a good relationship. It doesn’t have to be hunky dory, and I’d argue it’s actually better if it’s not. Have the spouse be programmed with some rough experiences in the Wasteland, so they’re nervous, skittish, maybe even a little resentful that the player character snoozed their way through everything, but slowly rebuild the relationship. That way, when the quest eventually comes where you find the truth, the player character has to confront that reality. Then when you confront Sean, Sean explains himself and the player is given the choice to forgive him, be understanding but still angry, or be hugely pissed at the manipulation. That’s drama that uses the core theme of what synths are about with the whole kill-and-replace motif the Institute does. There’s a plot twist that batters the player, there’s one that’s just messy and gross and tough to reconcile. There’s one where the conclusion the player comes to is valid because it’s the player themselves deciding what the meaning of it is.

So overall, I see Fallout 4 as a bunch of missed opportunities and clumsy writing wrapped up in the popular shallow open-worlds that triple-A games end up having. 

Thanks for the question, Jackie.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King

FanFiction:

Laughable or Legitimate?

For anyone who’s spent more than 15 minutes at a time on the internet, the concept and practice of fanfiction is all too familiar. And, depending entirely upon prior experience, the assumptions that word summons can be vastly different. Some view fanfiction as nothing more than pathetic self-insert smut for the perverse satisfaction of lonely teens and incredibly disturbed adults, while others view it as an introductory exercise in creative writing with the generous boost of being handed preexisting characters and an already established world. Both of these assumptions have strong arguments behind them, but first I feel like I need to define by what I’ll be referring to when I use the term ‘fanfiction.’

Fanfiction is, by commonly accepted definition, written content directly based on an established work of fiction. Fanmade animations, animatics, art, short films and songs do not qualify as fanfiction through this definition, despite being functionally identical. Fanfiction is explicitly limited to the writing, occasionally also being represented through readings, an on even rarer instanes being portrayed through audio dramas (a critically underrated medium, though that’s a topic for another time).

With that established, let’s dive into addressing the negative connotations that the term ‘fanfiction’ brings up in a lot of people’s minds.

Starting with the mindlessly lewd (is there any other kind?) content that is pushed out by the metric ton online. No matter how vehemently you defend fanfiction, there is absolutely no denying how oversaturated the medium is with the perverse imitation of romance. Though a minute number of ‘adult’ works can and have been written as a joke to varying degrees of success, an overwhelming majority are disturbingly unironic. If two or more characters have shared as much as a glance, for some psychological reason that probably hints at a cry for help more than anything, the hormonal teenagers and touch-starved adults of the internet will put them in bed together. Sometimes all it takes is for two characters from completely separate multiverses to glint across the same computer screen and people will attempt to combine them sexually as quickly and as passionately as possible.

However, it is a fallacy to blame this phenomenon primarily on fanfiction. Appealing to the lowest common denominator of human nature is unfortunately a staple of the romance genre in general, and is such an infectious practice that you’ll find examples of it in every nation that has produced a large amount of fiction. Sexualization in general is heavily linked to this practice, and is part of why I heavily and vehemently advocate for minimum sexualization of any character regardless of gender. Combine that with the freedom to mash two characters from separate IPs together in the same story, and is it any wonder that we end up with so many bizarre and disturbing fanfictions?

Another commonly raised criticism against fanfiction is the low quality of writing, which is one I myself have raised a lot and have had leveled against me. For good reason, because once again the vast majority of fanfictions are written by the same generations that decided Harry Potter was the peak of cinema. Needless to say most stories’ grasp on the English language, proper story structure, objective writing quality, prose and human dialogue is about as firm as the soil in a swamp. And, just as in the previous example, this is not something limited to fanfiction. Anyone who has spent any amount of time reading more than 5 books (or has watched more than 2 movies) will know that the problem of poor grammar and talentless attempts at constructing anything resembling a coherent narrative is something that plagues the writing industry. I won’t throw stones from glass houses either; a lot of my previous and current attempts at writing are disgusting to read, and I imagine I’ve made several punctuation errors in this post alone. But my point still stands, and I hold myself to the exact same standards I hold others to. Bad writing is bad writing, and it has nothing to do with genre or medium. It is entirely dependant upon the skill, drive and passion of the writer.

Something that should also be taken into account is that fanfiction is most often written by inexperienced and/or young authors. That is not to say that criticism against fanfictions are immediately rendered invalid because of this, which they aren’t, my sole reason in pointing that out is to temper the expectations acordingly. These aren’t aspiring young adults fresh out of college with an English major, these are kids and adults that do it for fun. Constructive criticism can and should be offered, but only if it’s genuinely constructive and tailored to its intended purpose. Take as much care in crafting your criticism as you expect them to put into crafting their stories.

The one drawback I feel is inherent to fanfiction is that a large portion of it relies upon you being at least casually familiar with the source material it’s based off of. A lot of the times it will contain references to events that people outside a specific fanbase will not know about, or it will be laced with in-jokes and labelled a comedy where to an outsider it’s only a passable slice of life. This is one of the primary reasons I ceased writing fanfiction, since I feel it inherently limits your growth once you reach a high enough skill level. At some point you have to branch out and attempt to define your own characters and worlds, expanding into writing your own original tales.

In conclusion, fanfiction is no worse or better than any other writing medium. It fosters the same amount of creativity and talent as anything else, as well as falls victim to the same number of shortcomings and human errors. It’s great for writers new and old to experiment with characters and worlds they know, while at the same time enabling the worst of the worst when it comes to smut and incoherent stories. I’ve read phenomenally moving fanfictions as much as I’ve seen the English language be grotesquely mutilated in officially published books, and vice versa.

23 Of The Best Fantasy Books Everyone Should Read|Fantasy Books

The first Dark Tower book, The Gunslinger, is a faulty book - although the much older, much wiser, much better author Stephen King released an upgraded version. Keep in mind that the original was published over 30 decades back, in 1982. The Dark Tower is clearly a story along with a theory that King has been pursuing his writings for many, many years. In fact, several of his novels indirectly tie to the Dark Tower. The father of contemporary fantasy and only an enjoyable novel to read. The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant has to go on the list too. For me personally, Abercrombie is in the top 5, best served cold. Also, not many men and women know her, however, Patricia A. McKillip has written some of the best fantasy books I've ever read. These are fantasy novels which don't discriminate between teens and adults and are perfect and precede lots of the novels on this listing. I've just started reading dream so I'm excited about reading those on this list. I have to urge'The Last Wish' by Andrez Sapkosky as it is the book that got me hooked on fantasy books.

Gemmell was a successful writer, and a great one at that. His novels are always intrigued by the idea of heroism and the individual sacrifice needed to be a fanatic.

Top 25 Best Fantasy Books From The Magician Trilogy Series... (

Even if you think you do not like young adult novels, I think you should give this novel a go, and judging by the number of Goodreads testimonials, and therefore do a lot of other men and women. Urban Fantasy, the sister subgenre of contemporary fantasy, boomed in the 2000s and early 2010s. Since then, it's dwindled and stabilized-although I maintain that we're seeing a revival with more varied personalities and authors-but here are a couple of standout top dream books from that earlier era. Sanderson is arguably one of the most prolific fantasy authors working in the genre now. In a genre where readers are utilized to waiting years between installments in a string, this is very refreshing. It is one of the reasons he has developed a very large, dedicated fan base. If you're not acquainted with Sanderson's work, he is best known for his clear-cut, nearly scientific-looking magic systems. To compile this list, I used Goodreads and appeared in many of metrics. I took into consideration the number of reviews, the supply Of reviews, and also the year of publication. Fantasy is such an established genre and one of the most popular on Goodreads, therefore old books have a distinct advantage over recent novels. Both series have ambiguous characters which are neither black nor white. The Black Business focuses on a small group of characters rather than a massive cast, as in Malazan. The Farseer world is enormous and today spans 15 novels. Read more about digital library here. The chronological arrangement is such that two of those trilogies are TIE-IN series that do not feature the characters in The Farseer.

And now, with the fantasy genre moving in entirely new directions with the likes of Martin, Abercrombie, Lynch, Lawrence and Sanderson, Hobb's functions are still worthy of being on anybody's top fantasy publication list. It's like that good old fashioned dinner you go to, there is nothing especially new on the menu but you know what you are getting and it's always delicious. Add to that a compelling plot and excellent prose and these books become a delightful read. The novels are also home to the most hated villain to ever grace the pages of dream.

Show the Heritage Of Kushiel Series

This publication has been on several versions of the list of greatest fantasy books and it is still on the record, even in 2016. It is such a standout book that in a crowded genre with many greats, it is still one of the greatest, if often overlooked and underrated novels. The Black Business might be satisfactorily described as"sensible fantasy," a term applied to Martin's A Song of Fire and Ice and Erickson's Malazan series. Fans of Malazan Book of the Fallen in particular should feel right at home in The Black Company, as both string follow businesses of soldiers in conflict fairly tightly. Both series contain epic struggles involving magic and chaos.

CHAPTER ONE: FIRST SIGHT

AKA, blessed fucknuggets, why do these fools feel the need to put themselves through high school, my sources tell me that the US school system isn’t all that to begin with, what gives?

PREVIOUS ENTRIES

(Warning: this got long. Looooong. Hence, cut, so that I don’t murder your dash like Edward doesn’t murder Bella in this chapter.)

Welcome to the first entry of a live-read that no one asked for, in which I’ll go through the first chapter of Midnight Sun, i.e. a retelling of the first Twilight book from Edward Cullen’s POV. Not to be confused with Grey, a retelling of the first volume of a Twilight fanfic with the serial numbers filed off, or the Life and Death edition, a retelling of the first Twilight book in which Bella Swan is genderbent into a dude called Beau, who utters the immortal line “I knew I must look like a gorilla on a greyhound.” Which still tickles my humerus to this day.

I’ve waited for this novel to drop so long that at some point I’d stopped waiting. If by some freaky turn of chance you stumbled on this without knowing about the hoopla surrounding the publication, here’s a Wikipedia link. The gist is that the first few chapters of the WIP got leaked, the author got upset, the book got shelved until ??? and no further information about it was forthcoming until a while ago, when out of the blue arrive the news that it’s getting released in August.

My first thought was “Oh, yay, something actually NICE is happening this year!”

My second thought was “Please let it be good, so that I can laugh outrageously at [name redacted] for mocking my enjoyment of this series!” And. Look. I know what’s said about Twilight with regards to its literary merit and Stephenie Meyer’s abilities as a writer. A lot of it is admittedly accurate. However, the metrics by which I measure the value of a book are a) did it entertain me? and b) did I gain anything by having read it? And yeah, those are personal and subjective items, but objectivity is a lie, Jesus enjoys using toasters to take selfies, and if ten years ago I hadn’t been looking for a place to post my 50k+ epic Renesmee-centric fanfic, I wouldn’t have met the people who are currently my best friends.

Which is to say: I’m too attached to this series to give a fig what color the prose is. Deal.

And yet. Me hoping that Midnight Sun would be good, in a way that people who don’t have my level of emotional investment might acknowledge, wasn’t… that farfetched?  Because the last book Meyer released before this one, The Chemist? Is an improvement on all her previous work. A huge improvement! It’s competently written! The characters read like they were intended to be flawed, messy people.

The main romance isn’t the kind of fucked up that Bella and Edward’s is, where you can pen treatises on why they’re omg so unhealthy. It’s the kind of fucked up where five seconds after meeting her love interest, the protagonist drugs him unconscious, kidnaps him, sticks a urinary catheter up his ding dong, straps him to a table and tortures him for information until the guy’s ex-CIA identical twin drops a plane on the barn they’re in and crashes through the ceiling all “HANDS OFF MY BABY BROTHER YOU DISCOUNT MATA HARI!”

Then they all make friends and go on a road trip together because a shady government organization is after them.

That’s not a fucked-up relationship that you write an essay analyzing the fucked-up-ness of. It’s something you stare at, stunned and, if you’re me, torn between thinking “Holy shit, this is so my brand of heroine!!!” and “How much crack was Auntie Steph on when she wrote this?” And it’s beautiful. I want ten more like it. So my hopes for Midnight Sun are tempered by the knowledge that, being a retelling of an established narrative, it can’t go all-out with the batshit. But I’m still optimistic that some part of it will give me that warm “Awww, you’ve come a long way from where we first met, author! Good on you!” feeling.

Now let’s (finally!) get started on the chapter proper.

…oh wait there’s an author’s note.

…uhm. Yeah. My dreams. About those. *fixed stare at faraway bonfire* Actually, let’s not talk about those and just move on to Edward Not Liking High School, thank you. Yeah. That’s good.

Edward Cullen doesn’t like high school. Edward doesn’t like that people think. Edward doesn’t like that the human student body is beside itself with the arrival of some new chick. Edward thinks his adopted siblings are super basic. (Rosalie = shallow, Emmett = simple, Jasper = psycho two seconds away from jumping off his chair and going on a rampage.) We don’t get to hear his utterly unbiased assessment of Alice, because she butts in and starts a one-sided telepathic convo about how Jasper is two seconds away from jumping off his chair and going on a rampage. You know. Normal sibling stuff.

WHY DO YOU PUT YOURSELF THROUGH THIS HASSLE, WHY!

(Let me take this opportunity to share my pet crack theory that Carlisle Cullen is secretly the most twisted, evil vampire in all of vampiredom, and that the sending the young ones to high school bit is something he does solely because he gets his evil fix by feasting on the emotional toil it inflicts on them. Also why he’s a doctor; he can ignore the call of blood, because being surrounded by the pain of patients and their loved ones already keeps him fed. I mean. He was chilling with the Volturi way back when, and Aro gives off a handsy vibe. No way he didn’t get his mind read in every which way, and if that happened - if he were reaaaalllyyyyy that nice, why would he still ping them as a threat of any kind?)

(This has holes in it, I know. And clashes with my other pet crack theory, which posits that the whole immortal child/Let’s Catch Them All: Cullen Edition was in fact the fallout of a Very Bad Italian Breakup, with Aro being the pissy ex who wants sole custody of the kids.)

Whatever. It still makes more sense than them going through “the inert state between active periods” when. My dudes! College is right there. Some places you can even sit out 90% of lectures and still get your diploma if you don’t feel like faking one, so Jasper would be all set! And you can pick different subjects! Diversify! Why must it always be med school rehashes, there are other worthy professions! And whole fields that are useless for getting-a-job purposes, but still interesting and enriching for those who have the luxury to pursue them. Let Emmett do Viking Studies, for fuck’s sake!

This amuses me much more than it rightfully should. I’m a child.

The Cullen clan tries to pep talk Jasper into not getting his murder on. Jasper is like OMG WILL YOU GUYS LAY OFF, while Edward is busy doing his judgy Edward thing and thinking to himself that Jasper should accept his limitations, that it’s a bad idea to have him at school at all, blah blah bleh, and you know what, I’m with you there, Ed.

Although we all know that this is just setup for the irony that will ensue as soon as Bella the Delicious klutzes her way into his line of smell.

Oh yah! Enter Bella. Edward can’t hear her thoughts. Jessica Stanley is a b-word. Edward wonders whether not being able to butt into the new girl’s head may be a red flag for vampire Alzheimer. Biology class next! The teacher is a man “of no more than average intellect” and, lord. It’s lucky that Edward is the mind reader in the family, because imagine if it were one of the others and they had to put up with listening to him bitch about the world at large, nonstop, at all hours of the day. And night, since these guys don’t sleep. Angela Webber is the only soul in the whole school whose thoughts have the Edward Cullen seal of approval. I feel sorry for her. I also feel this weird sense of hey, this all seems familiar in senses other than being a retelling, have I been here before?

Wait.

WAAAIIIIIITEEEEE.

*googles for the old version*

*runs first chapters through copyleaks*

*kubrick stare* MEYER, YOU LAZY SO AND SO, HOW COULD YOU!

*slams head on desk*

Well. At least I know what I’m in for. HONESTLY! It’s been. It’s been THIS MANY YEARS since the leaked version appeared, and that was a first draft, how in the… she’s way better than this, now! Was this novel produced in a terminal state of $#%CARING#NOT?&FOUND?! Is half of it just going to be the same old thing with a thin veneer of polish? I’m.

*sigh* You know what, I’m okay. We’re just going to call this first part a re-read. It’s been ten years, so I remember not a whole lot of the specifics, so at least I won’t be bored. BUT COME CHAPTER 13 I EXPECT TO BE SWEPT OFF MY FEET, DO YOU HEAR ME?!

Biology. Bella walks in right past a fan and gives Edward a throbbing throat boner. How awkward. Then she goes and sits right next to him and saucily tosses her hair around like he’s not actively plotting her murder and that of the rest of the class. The cheek of the thing!

Fortunately, Bella’s tasty ass is momentarily saved by a stiff breeze.

…I think we may have found the solution to Jasper’s control issues. The Cullens just need to start carrying air freshener around and spray the murder out of him every time he starts looking peckish. It would look weird if anyone else did it, but since they’re all pretty and rich, it’s more likely that the trend will catch on and cause Febreze sales to skyrocket.

Anyway. We’re not done victim-blaming Bella for…

…at least another couple of pages, but at least Edward gets his head out of his ass long enough to recall that hey, vampire! Oxygen is optional! But he still spends another lot of words grumbling about what a hassle it is to be forced to hold his breath in order to dampen his murderous urges. This is why you are a virgin, Edward. No, I don’t mean the planning the assassination a classmate’s assassination, plenty of serial killers still manage to get laid heaps, consensually, even! It’s the fact that you’re this much of a buzzkill that’s the issue.

Live, laugh, love, you dumbass disco ball!

Yep, he’s still on about how he’s going to kill her, totes kill her, he feral dangerous vampire, rawr. The miracle of adequate indoor airflow only got him to railroad a quartet of brain cells into thinking up smarter ways of snuffing Bella out. Now he wants to lure her to the forest. No, he’s going to kill her at home! He hates her! No, he hates himself and is projecting!

So he flees to his car, plays some calming music, breathes in and out and thinks about his family and how disappointed they’d be in him if he were to help himself to a Swan shake. Well, I’m nobody to shit talk anyone’s self-soothing routine. I’d probably throw in a truck of food + a bath, but he’s had 100+ years to figure out what coping mechanisms work for him, so let’s just let him do his-

Edward.

EDWARD.

…do you actually think this is an appropriate time to start a ginger-off with some random desk lady? Yes, we know you’re the One True Redhead To Rule Them All. (Though Kvothe from Name of the Wind may beg to differ, and I don’t know who would win that fight.) I mean, really? You pull this crap when you just barely talked yourself out of a murder? And then you call her eyes flat! What!

One of my favorite comic book series, Y the Last Man, features a scene where two characters discuss what it is that truly binds people together. One of them presents the argument that stronger bonds are formed not by shared love, but by shared hates. By which they mean not a kiss-kiss-slap-slap, enemies-to-lovers relationship dynamic, but like… you, being someone who really hates coleslaw, having a partner who likewise hates coleslaw, with whom you can indulge in tireless verbal roastings of coleslaw and who will never get tired of your complaining, because the fire of their loathing burns every bit as hot as yours.

I’ve always felt that this concept resonated with me deeply. And if you apply it to Bella and Edward, by its standards, they have the real deal. Go through the namesake chapter in Twilight-the-book, and you find Bella thinking similarly judgy thoughts, being irked by the same shit that no one normal would bat an eye to, going “Ugh!” and “Gah!” at everything that makes Edward wince internally. So their love will be eternal for sure. Perhaps not in an epic way. They’ll live boringly ever after, until they’re ancient and onion-skinned and lurking at passerby humans through the geraniums on their windowsill, exchanging “Holy crow, I can’t believe she bought a hydrogen engine car just to show off!” / “Awful! She should know that thinning the deer population so that they produce less flatulence is the most sound way of controlling toxic emissions!” And then probably gazing at one another like idiots for an ice age or two.

Edward wants to be moved out of Biology class. Goes back and forth with the desk lady, who obviously wants to tap that, because of course she does. Every hot-blooded woman within spitting distance must crave his alluring icicle, even as he mentally eviscerates every minuscule detail of their appearance.

Except Bella, because she’s soft, translucent, deep-eyed and edible. And, I mean. You can complain all you want about “you’re different from anyone else I’ve ever met, you’re SPECIAL, better, more beautiful, more everything!” being a dead horse of a trope so old and beaten that by all rights it should have turned to smelly glue, but. That pony is still kicking. And by kicking, I mean selling. And it sells because being made to feel special, even if it’s happening by proxy while you’re immersed into the thoughts of a fictional character, is nice. Readers enjoying that experience and seeking out fiction that provides it shouldn’t be considered so… mock-worthy as I’ve seen it be, in discussion of works that feature the trope prominently.

Which doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t be nicer if Edward’s narration were focused solely on elevating Bella, instead of also viciously kicking down everyone in the vicinity. Man, we get the message, okay? You don’t need to act like you’ve swallowed a Simon Cowell before coming in for school.

I swear, it’s almost a relief when Bella interrupts, heralding the triumphant return of the throat boner. Edward’s thoughts about the people around him are actually LESS gratuitously bitchy when he’s contemplating how to best murder them.

At least this time he is able to extract himself from the situation and flee speedily. (Which… in Biology, what exactly was preventing him from asking for a bathroom break? Or just saying he was feeling poorly and getting the fuck out of there?)

He meets the sibs. Only Alice has any clue of what is going on because visions, and she doesn’t explain anything to the others, who just stand there baffled while Edward decides to get his shiny ass in his shiny Volvo and run off to Alaska. Probably because it would ruin the serious mood of the scene if she told them and Jasper started doing happy cartwheels at the prospect of no longer being the only fuckup in the family.

END CHAPTER. Same time tomorrow, hopefully, and I’ll TRY to be less longwinded. Try.