#found a blog that makes these for p5 and i used to use those kinds of blogs for materials before so it was a little nostalgic weirdly | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

mysticdragon3md3 · 1 year

Text

I think one of my favorite fanartists blocked me.

I can't reblog their fanart post. And though the Tumblr algorithm suggests their blog to me and suggests other posts which have reblogged their art, whenever I try to go to their blog or their original posts, Tumblr says there's nothing there. Google says this is one of the few ways to tell if you've been blocked on Tumblr.

Feel sad, but I can't blame them. I am a weirdo, and post some very strange rants and reactions. I've even disagreed with a lot of the fanon in my current OTP. They _should_ protect themselves from my weirdness.

Trying not to dwell on it. Many times, my anxiety has made me paranoid that a fandom community I loved/respected was shunning me. Thankfully, time proved my anxiety and paranoia wrong. But now it looks like I've found a case where it was true. It's just fortunate that by now, I've already felt so disconnected from my OTP's fandom that I don't feel as sad as I've felt before when I was simply paranoid about these same things. Odd. But i guess it's easier to take being blocked, vs finding angry posts about me.

But this once again makes me sad that I got out of Persona 5 fandom and into FE3H instead. P5 fandom was so nice and felt like a community. ...But it's probably my whiney posts like this, complaining about being caught into FE3H fandom, that would likely make anyone block me.

But how would anyone even find my whiney posts anyway? I don't use common tags. And I'm fairly certain almost all my Followers are bots. I've always treated my blog like no one was Following. The one time someone went through my blog to read posts with uncommon tags, it was after we had gotten into a back and forth reblog conversation. But I've never chatted with the fanartist who likely blocked me.

I wonder what I did wrong. Maybe I said something stupid in my reblog tag posts. Sometimes I forget that they can be read and I write tag comments mostly for me alone. Then I remember other people can read them and I quickly change it, hoping no one saw it. I still regret that time I rambled about some random personal memory of mine, in reblog tags on andrew's adorable dimiclaude fanart. I started ranting about how my cousin would always complain to me about how he ended up making an elaborate drawing on lined paper instead of nice sketch paper, because he thought he was just doodling, each time he started. Then I would always have to chide him into remembering to stop doodling on lined paper and just doodle on blank paper each time, because he'd never know when his doodles would turn elaborate. The way our conversations like this went, it seemed like my cousin was always baiting me into chiding him about it. Maybe that was "empathizing/sharing his frustration with himself", by hearing it externalized through me too. Then I realized that maybe if andrew saw my reminiscing tag comments, he might think I was chiding him for not drawing on nicer paper or something. Even though his paper doodles were just as lively and beautiful as his digital art! ;o;! I quickly changed those tag comments and hoped he didn't see them or thought they were addressed to him. I still wonder if I should DM an apology to andrew. I haven't seen him post to the OTP tag in a long time. ;_; I do say a lot of dumb stuff that would get me understandably blocked. ;_;

Everyday, I am reminded why I purposefully avoided having friends in real life. I just screw up every single interaction. ;_;

But practically speaking, I really should stop posting my every thought and reaction, at least in tag comments. I'd feel kind of wrong if I didn't post whatever I wanted, even my stupid reactionary thoughts, to my own blog, after for so long I advocated for making your blog for you, vs being too self-conscious about your Followers. I definitely have become more wary of stopping myself from writing long comments in reblog tags, like I used to. I've taken steps already. But maybe I should scale back a little bit on using my blog like my private journal. I've been writing my every thought as a post through Tumblr mobile, ever since my laptops have had problems, and I couldn't journal on them. But the thing is, I'm posting about things related to my experience of my fandoms, and recording all that is what my Tumblr blog is for. At least, for me. Again, if Windows Explorer was better at searching files, maybe I'd keep more of my thoughts in my private offline journals, like I used to. But Tumblr's search is just too good and it seems like a much more complete record of my fandom experience. I don't want to give up writing what I want on my blog. If Tumblr could search Private posts, I'd make more of my posts Private. Until then, I am doing what I can: I use unique tags now; I hide most text under a cut. I've done what I can. If someone is going to search through my blog anyway and feel off-put by my weirdness, blocking is all they can do too.

It really is weird that I'm not more broken up about this. Previous fandom experiences have had so much of my emotion invested in it, and my anxiety had my paranoia into overdrive, and any negativity set off my over-sensitivity to the extreme. Well, at least there's this one advantage to the fandom disconnection I've been lamenting for a while.

Maybe it's good to be reminded to not be so dependent on fandom community. Fandom community is really nice and it's fun, but all my enjoyment shouldn't be dependent and so fragile as to fall apart at any slight disagreement. After all, my experience of FE3H fandom has almost reverted back to how I used to experience fandom, back when I'd enjoy a series by myself and never interact with anyone about it. I'd write fanfics for myself and draw fanart for myself, and never show anyone. And I was having fun. I can't really lament feeling disconnected in FE3H fandom, when even enjoying it virtually by myself, is still fun in those same old lone ways. (With the exception of a few regular positive interactors from the fandom, and enjoying everyone's fanart, fics, and discussions, as a lurker. Thanks, everybody. You're so nice. ^_^ )

#wandering in the dark #processing thoughts #fandom #fe3hfuukasetsugetsu #KhalidMitya #social anxiety #tags #blog #personal fandom records #reactions #in this edition of gawd do i ever need therapy #lrb~lrt #fandomfrictionfracas

2 notes · View notes

veebs-hates-video-games · 7 months

Text

I was expecting to talk about 13 Sentinels next because that's what I played next (short version: it's great), but I can't resist complaining about my quickly aborted attempt at playing Persona 5 Royal first. Finally something that lives up to this blog's name for a change after a string of games I really liked for the most part.

I was really excited about finally getting to play it after how many people have kept saying it's one of the best games of the past few years. Oh boy. Nope.

I have limited experience with MegaTen games, but it's mostly been in the slightly to very positive range. I played several hours of Persona 3 a while back and did genuinely like a bunch of stuff about it, and I probably would've even finished it if it'd had some more modern QoL features or the pacing were a bit quicker. It just felt like it was taking forever for the story to go anywhere, but I was enjoying it for the most part.

I also played a bit of Shin Megami Tensei 4 and was really surprised how compelling the first couple hours were when it was a tone/vibe I don't usually go for. Everything about it felt so incredibly deliberate in the way it established the world and premise and pacing. It felt unreasonably hard in an unfair way just in the starting area though, so I quit fairly quickly. It would've been fine if I felt like I had the information I needed to make proper decisions, but if it was available to me I sure never found any of it out.

And my favorite so far that I'm still pretending I'll go back to and finish one of these days has been Tokyo Mirage Sessions, which I apparently really like for most of the reasons a lot of people dislike it. The only reason I took an extended break from it was that some of the boss fights were starting to get increasingly annoying, and I have an aversion to using consumables, and that is not very compatible with this series from what I can tell.

Anyway I was hoping P5 would be a more modern and polished version of what I liked from those, and then it just really wasn't. Well, it started out really strong. The animated opening when I first turned the game on was great, and I spent like a minute or two just flipping back and forth between options on the main menu because the silhouette animations are great. The game even let me choose to deliberately fail almost immediately after starting a new game, which is something I've always appreciated at least since TTYD.

And then basically everything after that except for the music was disappointing.

The characters and early story just weren't really grabbing my interest, the voice acting was surprisingly meh compared to a lot of what I've been playing recently, the starting areas weren't very visually interesting (and look surprisingly bad on the Switch compared to the screenshots and videos I looked at before deciding it would be fine on there instead of my computer), and just running around the world interacting with stuff doesn't feel great.

Like I said on Discord after the first hour, "It feels kind of ridiculous to say with how many people have said it's one of the best games of the past few years, but so far it's probably my least favorite game I've played recently."

I gave it another hour after that and it's just not doing it for me. I'm surprised how bad moving around and interacting with the world feels in such a big and recent game, but if that were it I could get past that. It also just doesn't feel like a good use of my time in general.

I understand that the train station and school are probably deliberately confusing so you can feel like your character does in an unfamiliar location where he doesn't know where he's going or what he's doing, but stuff like that just makes the game not fun. It's just silly that not only does the game not mark anything about where I'm supposed to go on the map or give me useful information to find it myself, it also doesn't tell me which things in the environment I can interact with unless I manually rub against every object in the world like I'm marking my territory.

Oh, you want me to go to a specific room in the school, and it's on the second floor? Where on the second floor? Which wing of the building? Which of the two dozen random doors on the walls are rooms I can go into and which are just going to give me the exact same message about how the second floor has classrooms for second years but I should probably go to the place I already know I'm supposed to instead? Luckily for me I only had to check every single one of them by hand, and more than once because the first time I went past the correct door I was apparently like three pixels off and it didn't give me a prompt to interact with it.

And that's when I decided to just stop playing the game. If even the tutorial is making put up with that nonsense, I am not going to survive another hundred hours. Maybe there's a great game in there somewhere, but I'm not going to find out if you make my starting experience unpleasant and also don't do much to get me invested in pushing past that.

At this point I'm probably going to give TMS#FEE another shot at some point to see if I can get over the increasingly annoying boss fights because I'm more than halfway through it and otherwise having a good time, but beyond that I'm probably permanently done with MegaTen games. They are clearly just not my thing.

#persona 5 #persona 5 royal #persona

0 notes

oliviapas · 1 year

Text

Writing Initiative #7

You have now had a chance to present your finalized body of work (2D, 3D, 4D, Reflective) to the class for feedback and discussion. As we conclude the semester, please write a summary of your experience as a final blog post, including responses to the following:

What have you learned about yourself doing this self-directed assignment?

What did you find to be the most difficult aspect of your chosen assignment? Creativity? Research? Connecting design to research? Craft? Organizational skills? Time management? Something else entirely?

What did you enjoy about this opportunity?

How would you rate your performance over the course of the semester?

Hindsight is 20/20. What would you do differently, now that you've had this opportunity to work this way?

I really enjoyed this class. I found I do fairly well without forced deadlines and I got some good practice in for creating my own deadlines and mostly being able to stick to them. I also experienced some pretty brutal setbacks so I learned I need to be able to give myself grace as well and space to figure those kind of issues out. I’m not super surprised that I did okay with time management, but I think given the issues I had with coding problems and then struggling to come up with an idea at the end, I am impressed I got everything done in time and to a level of execution I’m satisfied with.

I think creativity and leaving time for learning were probably the two things I struggled the most with. At first, I did pretty well with generating ideas, but then I had some snags for coming up with a full idea for 4D and then even more for 3D. At the beginning of the semester, I made some solid goals for deadlines for myself, but I did not leave myself time to learn, because I had several new programs to learn for my projects. Blender and p5.play were brand new to me and I set myself up with way too high expectations for what I could learn to do in the time we had.

Still, I’m really happy I actually was able to learn some new things for this course. I really appreciated the chance to see what workshop would be like next year, because I came out of this knowing that even though I could do and would enjoy workshop, I’d like to use the rest of my time at OCAD to keep learning. We had to focus on things we were passionate about for this course so I did a lot of computer stuff and coding, but that meant I used mostly things I already know, and I think there are a lot more aspects of design I’d like to learn more about to get a diverse education.

But overall, I think I did well this semester. I got everything done on time and consistently worked on this course every week, and I’m happy with the projects I made. SUPER proud that I finished the game! I think if I were to do it again, I’d try and be more experimental, since I did go fairly literal in some ways for my word. I’d consider myself a practical thinker and I like making things that do something and have a direct purpose, so I’m not sure I’m wired to make more experimentally, but this would have been a good opportunity to try it.

1 note · View note

c-is-for-circinate · 3 years

Note

I'd love to hear more of your thoughts about why P5R didn't quite land for you. I had the same reaction to it, but I've never quite been able to properly articulate why the last section fell so flat.

God okay so I've tried several times to answer this, and it seems like the answer is 'I still have way too many feelings, personally, to say this in anything less than thirty pages and fifteen hours of work', because Persona 5 the original is a game I loved a lot and care about a great deal. And most of the reasons I disliked Royal feel, in my head, like a list of ways it broke some of the things I liked best about P5--which means explaining them feels like I need to explain everything I loved about the original game, which is a book in itself, complete with referents to P3, P4, Jungian psychology, the Joseph Campbell mytharc, and fuck all even knows what. And that is too much.

But today I realized that I could instead describe it from an angle of, Persona 5 Strikers succeeds really well at doing the thing I think Royal was trying to do but failed at. And that I think I can talk about in a reasonable amount of wordspace, hopefully, behind this cut because I have at least one friend who hasn't played Royal yet.

Note for reblogs/comments: I HAVE NOT FINISHED STRIKERS YET. I got through the jail that pretended to be the final jail and have not yet gone into the obviously inevitable 'ohshit wait, you mean there's something more than simple human machinations behind all of this?' dungeon. (I got stuck on a really frustrating side quest, put the game down, and then dived into Hades to avoid throwing the Switch across the room for a while--and anyone around this blog lately knows how THAT'S been going.) Please no spoilers past Okinawa!

So, one of the many, many things I really appreciated about Persona 5 was its straightforward and unashamed attitude towards abusers and their acts of violence. Because, while yes P5 is a story about the use of power and control to make others suffer, it fundamentally isn't about those abusers themselves. It's about their victims, those that survive their crimes. And this shows up repeatedly over the course of the game.

We do not give a shit why Kamoshida wanted to beat and rape his students. We really don't. Kamoshida does not deserve our attention one moment longer than it takes to make him stop. Because, ultimately, that's the goal of P5, start to end. We don't know for sure if what we're doing is fair, if it's justice, if it's questionable. What we know is that people are being hurt, badly, actively, right now this second. What we know is that victims are suffering. What we know is that we, personally, us-the-protag and us the Phantom Thieves at large, are in danger. And in those circumstances, we don't care about the abuser's side any more. We don't. We don't have the space or time or capacity to care, because that is not the point.

The point is to help the weak. To save the people who need saving, right here and now. To give others the courage to stand up on their own behalf. We're not even out to change society, not really--that's a byproduct. We are reactions. We are triage. We are important.

There's something so empowering and validating about that as a theme, y'know? In a media landscape so full of "sympathetic villains", the idea that, you know, maybe sometimes you don't have to break yourself to show compassion that might possibly heal the bad guy--that sometimes you can just make the bad guy stop hurting people--feels both refreshing and satisfying. I really appreciate it as a message! I liked it a lot!

And yes, there's nuance to that theme, and the game is not without compassion. We save Futaba, because 'make the bad guy stop hurting people', in that case, means 'make this person stop hurting herself'. We give Sae a path forwards, help her fix her own heart. Yet it's worth pointing out that in both of those cases, while we were very glad to do those things, to save those people, we also went into both of those palaces for extremely practical reasons to begin with. We needed Futaba's help. We needed Sae's help. The fact that we chose to talk Sae into a change of heart rather than simply stealing her treasure, while ultimately a very good thing for her, was absolutely a practical choice predicated on the need for her palace to still exist to save our life. And yes, we wanted to save her, for Makoto's sake--yes, we wanted desperately to save Futaba. But Sae and Futaba let themselves be helped, too, and that doesn't change the overarching themes of the story itself.

Akechi (and to some extent Okumura) would not let himself be helped. Akechi's another interesting nuance to this theme, because of all our villains, we do learn the most about what drove him to the cruelties and crimes he's committed. He's at that intersection of victim and villain, and we want to help him, as a victim--but we also know that stopping him as a villain is more important. We'd like to save him from himself if we could, because we save people from their sources of trauma, it's what we do. We regret being unable to do so. But in the end, what matters to the story is not that Akechi refused to be saved--it's that Shido and Yaldabaoth need to be stopped, for the sakes of everyone else they're hurting now and may continue to hurt in the future.

The thing is, there's space and maybe even a need for a corollary discussion of those places where victim and villain intersect. It's an interesting, pertinent, and related topic. Strikers made an entire video game about it, a really good video game. It's centered in the idea that, yes, these people need to be stopped, and we will make stopping them our priority--but they're not going after us, and that gives us some space to sympathize. Even for Konoe, who specifically targets the Phantom Thieves--compare him to Shido, who actively destroyed the lives of both Joker and Futaba, who ordered Haru's father's death, who's the entire reason the team is still dealing with the trauma of Akechi's everything. Of course the game can be sympathetic to Konoe where it can't with Shido. There's enough distance to do that.

But right--Strikers is a separate game. It's a separate conversation. It's, "last time, we talked about that, so now let's take it one step further." And that's good writing. (It's something Persona has done before, too, also really well! Persona 3 is about terrible, occasionally-suicidal depression and grief. P4 is about how you can still be hurting and need some help and therapy even if things seem ok. Related ideas, but separate conversations that need to be separate in order to be respectful and do justice to either one. P5, as a follow-up to P4, is a conversation about how, ok, changing yourself is great and all, but sometimes the problem is other people so how do you deal with that? Again, still related! Still pertinent! Still alluded to in P4, with Adachi's whole thing--but it wasn't the time or place to base a quarter of the game around it.)

So one of Royal's biggest issues, to me, is that it tries to tack on this whole new angle for discussion onto a game that was originally about something else.

Adding Maruki's palace--adding it at the end, which by narrative laws suggests that it's the true point that everything else should be building up to--suddenly adds in about a hundred new dimensions at once. It wants us to engage with "what in this abuser/manipulator's life led him to act this way?" for basically the first time all game (we'll get to Akechi later). It wants us to engage with, "if the manipulator has a really good reason or good intentions, does that mean we should forgive them?" It requires us to reflect on, "what is the difference between control and cruelty?" It asks, "okay, but if people could be controlled into being happy, would that be okay?" (Which, based on the game so far, is actually a wild out-there hypothetical! Literally not a single thing we've seen in the game suggests that could ever happen. Even the people who think being controlled is safer and easier are miserable under it. Control that's able to lead to actual happiness is completely out of left field in the context of everything we've encountered all game so far.)

That's too much! We don't have time to unpack all that! We only have an eighth of the game left! Not to mention we are also being asked to bring back questions we put to bed much earlier in the game about the morality of our own actions, in a wholely unsatisfying way. Maruki attempts to justify his mass brainwashing because "it's the same as what you're doing", and we know it isn't, but the game didn't need Maruki calling it out in order for us to get that. We already faced that question when we started changing hearts, and again several times throughout the game, and again when we found our targets in Yaldabaoth's cells. The fact that we change hearts does not mean we think "changing hearts is fine and kind and should be done to everyone, actually." Changing hearts has been firmly established in this game as an act of violence, acceptable only because it prevents further systemic violence against innocents that we must prevent. The moral question has never once been about whether it's ok to change the hearts of the innocent, only about how far it's ethical to go against individuals who are actively hurting other people. Saying "you punched that guy to keep him from shooting a child, so punching people is good and I will save the world by punching everyone!" is confusing! and weird! and not actually at all helpful to the question of, how much violence is it acceptable to use to protect others! So presenting the question that way just falls really flat.

(And right, I love Strikers, because Strikers has time to unpack all that. Strikers can give us a main bad guy who wants to control the whole world for everybody's own good, because Strikers has earned that thematic climax. It has given us sympathetic bad guys who started out wanting to control the world to protect themselves and ended up going too far. It's given us Mariko Hyodo, who wanted to control the world to protect other people and went too far. It's given us a long-running thread about police, the desire to serve, and the abuse of power that can lead to. And since we are actively trying to care for the people whose hearts we're changing in Strikers, we can open the door to questions about using changes-of-heart and that level of control to make other people happy. We can even get a satisfying conclusion out of that discussion, because we have space to characterize the difference--Konoe thinks that changing peoples' hearts means confining them, but the Phantom Thieves think it means setting them free. We have seen enough sympathetic villains that we as an audience have had the space to figure out how we feel about that, and to understand the game's perspective of "stop them AND save them, if we can possibly do both." And that message STILL rests firmly on Persona 5's message of "it is Good to do what you have to do to stop an abuser so long as you don't catch innocent people in your crossfire.")

It's worth noting that the general problem of 'asking way too many new questions and then not answering them' also applies to how Royal treats its characters, too. P5 did have unanswered questions left at the end! The biggest one, and we all knew this, was Akechi, and what actually happened to him, and how we should feel about him, and how he felt about us. That was ripe for exploring in our bonus semester, and to Royal's credit they did in fact try to bring it up, but by god did they fuck up doing it.

Akechi's probable death in the boiler room was absolutely the biggest dangling mystery of the game. It was an off-screen apparent death of a key antagonist, so all of the narrative rules we know suggested that he might still be alive and would probably come back if the story went on for long enough. So when Royal brings him back on Christmas Eve, hey, great! Question answered. Except that the situation is immediately too good to be true, and immediately leads to another mystery, which leads to a flat suspicion that something must be wrong. We spend several hours of gameplay getting sly hints that, oooh, maybe he's not really alive after all, before it's finally confirmed by Maruki: yup, he really died, if we end the illusion we'll kill him too. Okay, at least we know now. Akechi is alive right now and he's going to be dead if we do this, and that doesn't make a ton of sense because every other undead person disappeared when the person who wished for them realized they were fake but at this point we'll take it. So we take down Maruki, and okay, Akechi really is dead! Probably! We're fairly sure! Aside from our lingering doubts!

And then we catch a glimpse of maybe-probably-could be him through the train window, and I just want to throw something, because come on.

Look, it is just a fact of storytelling: the more times you make an audience ask 'wait, is this character dead or aren't they?', the less they will care, until three or four reversals later you will be hard pressed to find anybody who gives a shit. Royal does this like four different times, and every iteration comes with even less certainty than the last. By the end, we somehow know even less than we did when we started! Did Akechi survive the boiler room to begin with and Maruki just didn't know? Or was Maruki lying to try and manipulate us further? Or was he actually dead and then his strength of will when Maruki's reality dissolved was enough to let him survive after all? Is that even actually him out the train window?

Where is he going! What is he doing! How did any of this happen! What is going on! We all had these questions about Akechi at the end of the original P5, and the kicker is that Royal pretends like it's going to answer them only to go LOL JK NO. It's frustrating and it's dissatisfying and it annoys me.

The one Akechi question that Royal doesn't even bother to ask, though, let alone leave ambiguous, is how does the protagonist feel about him? The entire emotional weight of the third semester rests on the protagonist caring about Akechi, Sumire, and Maruki. Maruki's the person we're supposed to sympathize with even as we try to stop him. Sumire's the person we're trying to save from herself. And Akechi is our bait--is, we are told, the one thing our protagonist wished for enough to actualize it in this world himself. Akechi's the final lure to accept Maruki's deal. Akechi's survival is meant to be tempting.

For firm Akechi fans, this probably worked out fine--the game wanted to insist that the protagonist cared for Akechi the same way the player did. For those of us who're a little more ambivalent, though (or for the many and valid people who hated him), this is a super sour note. Look, one of the Persona series' strengths is the way it lets players choose to put their time and emotional investment into an array of different characters, so the main story still has weight even if there's a couple you don't care about that much. It has always done this. The one exception, from P3 all the way through P4 to here and now, is Nanako Dojima, and by god she earned that distinction. I have never met a person who played Persona 4 who didn't love Nanako. Nanako is a neglected six-year-old child who is brave and strong enough to take care of herself and all of the housework but who still tries not to cry when her dad abandons her again and lights up like the sun when we spare her even the tiniest bit of time and attention. It is impossible not to care for Nanako. Goro Akechi is not Nanako.

And yet third semester Royal doesn't make sense if your protagonist doesn't feel linked to Akechi. The one question, out of all the brand new questions Royal throws out there, that it decides to answer all by itself--and it's how you as a player and your protagonist ought to feel about an extremely complex and controversial character. What the fuck, Royal. What the fuck.

In conclusion, I'll leave you with this. I played the original Persona 5 in March and April of 2017, as an American, a few months after the 2016 election and into the term of our then president. It felt painfully timely. A quick calendar google early on indicated that the game's 20XX was almost certainly 2016, and the closer our plot got to the in-game November leadup to an election destined to be dominated by a foul and charming man full of corruption and buoyed up by his own cult of personality, the more I wanted to laugh/cry. It felt timely. It felt important. It felt right.

I went through Royal (in LP form on youtube, not having a platform to play it on) in summer of 2020, with a hook full of face masks by my front door and protests about racial tension and local policing that occasionally turned into not-quite-riots close enough to hear at night if I opened the windows of my apartment. The parts of the game that I remembered felt as prescient and meaningful as ever, if not even more so. The new parts felt baffling. Every single evil in the game felt utterly, painfully real, from the opening moments of police brutality to the idea of a country led by a guy who probably would use his secret illegitimate teenage son as a magical assassin if the opportunity presented itself and he thought he could get away with it. Yaldabaoth as the cumulative despair of an entire population who just wanted somebody to take over and make things be okay--yes, yes, god, in summer of 2020? With streets full of people refusing to wear masks and streets full of people desperate for change? Of course. Of course that holy grail of safety should be enticing. Of course it should be terrifying.

And then Maruki. Maruki, who was just so far outside the scope of anything I could relate to the rest of the game or my own life. Because every single other villain in the rest of Persona is real. From the petty pandering principal to the human-trafficking mob boss. The corrupt politicians and the manmade god of cultural desire for stability. And this game was trying to tell me that the very biggest threat of all of them, the thing that was worse than the collective force of all society agreeing to let this happen because succumbing was easier than fighting back--that the very biggest threat of all was that the world could be taken over by some random nobody's misguided attempts to help?

No. Fuck no. I don't buy it. Because god, yes, I have seen the pain and damage done on a tiny and personal and very real level by the tight-fisted control of someone trying to help, it never looked like this. Not some ascended god of a bad therapist. All the threats to the world, and that's the one I'm supposed to take seriously? This one man is more of a threat than the fundamental human willingness to be controlled?

Sorry, but no. Not for me. Not in this game. Not in this real-life cyberpunk dystopian apocalypse.

#c plays persona #driveby meta attack #p5 royal spoilers #p5 strikers spoilers #holy crap I did it #I actually wrote a semicoherent essay of a length I'm willing to put on Tumblr #about my problems with this game #I have been trying on and off for MONTHS #I wanted to like Royal SO BADLY #it makes me SO UPSET #anyway #now back to your regularly scheduled Hades blogging #asked and answered #Anonymous

27 notes · View notes

mbtiofwhys · 4 years

Text

How Ni and Ne (don't) binge watch

Premise

MBTI is a serious topic for us mods and we always put our best effort writing articles for this blog. However, we also find entertaining to write in a more light way about how MBTI shows off in real life. This article is one of those: we won’t discuss deeply about theory, but we’ll rather talk about our experiences with binging works of various media, be them books, videogames or tv shows. We love typing fictional characters since we also love works of fiction. Listening to other high Ni and Ne users we found an interesting correlation between those two function and media consumption, especially regarding the topic of binging. So, this isn’t hard science, it's simply a light reflection that 200% comes from our experiences. That being said, we hope this article will be relatable and intriguing.

Ni dom and binge

INFJ mod here. This may sound counterintuitive, but even if Ni is known to be a function about searching for deeper meanings, discarding options and focusing on the few remaining, I approach works of fictions with a “multitasking” method. What do I mean? Well, I’m not the kind of person who will just sit down and watch an entire season of a tv show, even if it’s the best I ever seen (there are few exception to this rule, works like Persona 5 Royal which I heavily binged. With no regrets). I simply prefer to watch a little amount of episodes, or read few chapters of a book, for example, and then stop, thus having time to reflect on what I saw or read. I just need time to process all of the data and feelings, otherwise I’ll just hit the wall of information overload.

Even if they’re just my attempt to find a correlation between high Ni and all those aspects, I’d like to talk about what the causes of this behaviours may be, with a MBTi perspective.

Binging may be hard for Ni users since they need time to analyze things, putting them in their abstract subjective system. This means, in other words, that the higher the level of complexity is, the longer will be the time needed to absorb it. For example, I can read mindlessly a novel for a mere entertaining value, but if I really like it I’ll just take my time to enjoy the journey, reflecting and talking about my feelings and first impressions to my friends (this is my auxiliary Fe showing, I know).

Ni operates by discarding elements, thus Ni users may reach a point where they simply prefer to stop. This process allows them to elaborate those information, be them characters, facts or emotions (based on personal preferences, for example feelers may tend toward the emotional aspect and T users toward puzzles, mysteries, logical consistency). As I stated above, if I absorb too much data and feelings I’ll just freeze, submerged by the information overload. With works of fiction, I have an underlying fear of missing important aspects of it and the more I read, watch or play, the more I’ll need time to stop and see how all the new things make sense, be them theories, feelings, or simply understanding what’s going on. Even while I’m actively reading/watching/playing I process all the informations as a way to put them into perspective, constantly elaborating them in the back of my mind.

Another personal consideration is: high Ni implies low Se. Low Se may find binging as a form of overstimulation. Moreover Se, in lower positions, requires little stimuli, allowing Ni users to organize the environment (rationally or emotionally through Te or Fe), since high Ni users are J and need a certain amount of control over the environment (Te or Fe) and their feelings or internal logic (Fi or Ti) .

Finally, I think there’s a tendency in high Ni user to consume multiple media, but in small amounts. This isn’t supported by hard evidences, it’s just a trend I noticed talking to friends about the subject. Ni users may prefer to approach different media rather than a single one, splitting their attention and energies through them. So, this is the opposite of binging. Personally, except for few works of fiction which I blindly burned with my passion, I usually switch from a medium to another, a sort of “media multitasking” as a way to “cool down” from one by simultaneously approach another one and still being engaged.

Ne dom and binge

ENFP mod here. I fear I’ll have to repeat the same premise as INFJ mod: This may sound counterintuitive, but even if Ne is known to be a function that works with multitasking and jumps from one topic to the other very quickly, I tend to approach works of fiction by shamelessly binging one and proceeding to be obsessed with it for months (or years.)

This happens especially for the works that end up being my favorites once I finish them - paired with the fact that I usually go through them again at least a second time after I’m finished. It almost feels like that if I’m not binging, I’m not interested/invested enough to care. I binge so much, in fact, that I’ve come to distinguish the ‘soft binge’ from the ‘hard binge’ - where ‘soft’ means a 12 episodes anime in 2-4 days and ‘hard’ means 145 hours of Persona 5 Royal in 3 weeks.

So, how might this work?

Firstly, Ne dom needs stimuli. Constantly. The more, the better. Because external stimuli means more prompts from something that isn’t one’s mind, which causes further reflection, connections and a ton of brainstorming. Ne can connect dots scaringly quickly, and even though proper reflection is appreciated to deepen the subject, connections are often made on the spot. I think it’s very difficult for me to reach a point of information overload - it usually happens with very complex topics and study subjects, for which I need to take a break and write things down into diagrams and lists in order to make proper sense of what I learned. But even in the case of works with heavy and intricate worldbuilding/plot (e.g. Stein’s;Gate, but I’m a sucker for time travel fiction so whichever is fine) I rarely stop watching if something doesn’t add up - I usually understand it later on, or wait for everything to end and search on the internet or talk about it with friends. My only time off is the one between OP/ED (which I NEVER skip and my friends hate me for that.) In that time, I disconnect my brain for 1 minute and 20-ish seconds to recharge.

Ne dom doesn’t have the patience to wait. If it wants answers, it wants them now. Binging is great because it offers both stimuli, questions and answers in a short amount of time. Also, (but maybe this is more of an F thing and for Ti aux might be different) I’m not one to make theories and speculations over fictional works - I might do that, but later, once I’m finished. While I’m enjoying a work, I’m usually so involved that all the theorising is limited to hunches and intuitions. Proper theorising needs time, needs one to stop and reflect on one’s knowledge in order to find hidden meanings and try to predict the outcome. I don’t have the patience to do that. I’m not interested in doing that - I want to know what’s going on, period. The few times I happened to reflect and speculate on a work of fiction were when I watched/read/played the thing simultaneously with some friends and talked to them about it constantly.

Which brings us to: discussing with people. Knowing a work means you’re able to discuss it with others, read reviews and watch video essays and analysis, of course Ne dom wants to devour it as quickly as possible. I literally watched the whole Evangelion (and I mean: the anime, EoE and the 3 rebuilds) in two weeks in order to finally enjoy those sweet, sweet video essays and parody and abridged YouTube wouldn’t stop to suggest me. This may sound silly, but searching discussion topics of the works I went through -even the ones I disliked- is very important to me, because listening to other people’s opinions and prompts is a way to further feed my Ne with different perspectives, viewpoints, things I might have missed while binging.

The problem: the quicker the binge, the more it’s difficult for me to remember details about plot, characters etc that, yet minor, can be important or interesting. Which is kind of the main struggle of having low Si: you know something, but you don’t remember everything you’d need precisely. You can’t pinpoint the scene where a thing happened, you feel you might have already seen a detail but you can’t recollect when and in what circumstances, and the list goes on. And this doesn’t stop once you’ve finished, obviously - it can only get worse. Typing the main Persona 5 cast was such a pain that, during my second playthrough of vanilla P5, I literally had to open a document and write down every single line or detail or plot point that could’ve helped me later. Otherwise, the situation would be: “damn, I know [character] said something alongside the line of [thing that could help me with typing] but I can’t remember what exactly! Let’s spend hours on YT watching walkthrough in order to find by chance the exact scene I’m thinking about.” This may also be why I periodically feel the need to go through my favourite works again: I may know them by heart, but there will always be things that I missed.

#mbti of whys #mbti #personality types #myers briggs #typology #binging #ni #ne #introverted intuition #extroverted intuition #works of fiction

20 notes · View notes

fandomssalt · 5 years

Text

Yesterday was a ride for sure. Today's more chill. Then it's time to bring some positivity into this blog? With a bit of salt but anyway.

Persona 5 Royal hype is real. It is real and there's much less salt than I expected.

First of all... MY BOI GORO HAS HIS CHANCE TO BE SAVED! His lines in the beginning of the first PV sound like it's when he's defeated as Black Mask and Joker is sparing him. Also in one anime cutscene behind Haru there's something suspiciously striped and with the same color scheme as Goro's Black Mask suit. So I hope they'll give us choice to save him at least. He deserves better.

New events! Thank god we're going to have some group hangouts. Even tho it might be golden-style with zero actual impact on the plot I would love to see more of my kids and I hope we'll see more screen time for everyone. Just give Haru attention and don't forget about the first half of the team please.

New sprites, new double attacks (reminds me of unison in PQ2) and Futaba's All Out Attack, I've waited for this one for so long. Also new mechanics would've be enough to make me play this game after clearing original P5 if I had PS4.

Now, time for spicy info.

THERE WAS WAKABA??? THERE LITERALLY IS A NEW SCREENSHOT DURING WINTER THAT SHOWS US BACK OF SOMEONE WHO LOOKS LIKE WAKABA, WHAT THE FUCK???

THE IKEMEN/HANDSOME GUY SPEAKS JUST LIKE MORGANA. HE SAYS WAGAHAI AND ANN-DONO. IS IT HIS REAL FORM OR IS IT SOME KIND OF FAKE pls don't be another god pls don't be another god

SINCE WE'LL GET NEW EVENTS FOR JANUARY-APRIL AND EVEN CONFIRMED 1/1 DOES THAT MEAN THAT REN ISN'T IN JAIL??? AND WITH GORO BEING ALIVE IS THAT POSSIBLE THAT HE'S ARRESTED INSTEAD OF REN???

Now a little bit of salt. Kasumi.

While I speculated her to be FeMC/confidant/new_character_for_a_spinoff she's a new thief. I'm neutral with her normal design. I'm worried about her being kinda forced into the plot and/or stealing possible screen time of others. Also I kinda don't want to see her as hinted canon love interest. While I miss canon hints on OTPs I just don't want her to be like Marie. I just hope that she's not Aeon, human and some normal girl. Also I hope she won't join during Kamoshida's arc (even tho it would make sense). Her outfit as thief is too similar to Joker for me and that's worrying.

On a positive note I love this outfit to death, new favourite PT suit found! That's totally my style and I would kill for that costume. Also it fits well with her gymnastics theme so if anyone will say "sexualisation/objectifying" I would fight you.

P5S is causing mixed feelings. While I'm glad that it's not just a port of P5 to Switch, I'm a bit concerned about playable characters. It heavily reminds me of One Piece Pirate Warriors series, while gameplay there can get old really fast what kept me playing was huge amount of characters. And while I want them to get P3 and P4 kids for this game I don't want to see their adult versions and make those games part of a canon timeline. I'll be fine with just P5 cast if it's different from One Piece. So it's better than just Switch port but I have a few questions.

So while I still don't trust Kasumi (but I really want her to be good) other aspects of the game make me so excited that I can't wait for P5R and more info about P5S, time to make time machine using microwave and a phone.

#Persona 5 #P5 #P5R #P5S #Kasumi Yoshizawa #Positive #Persona 5 Royal #Persona 5 Scramble

20 notes · View notes

velvetroom--imagines · 7 years

Note

First off, it's nice to see another imagine blog. I really enjoy your writing so far and wanted to tell you good luck with your blog ^^!! Can I ask for a imagine of the protags from P3, 4, and 5 in a love square with the same crush? Thought that would look pretty funny since they all would be trying to social link them.

I took way too long with this because so many ideas for this imagine came up.I was halfway through writing an actual oneshot when I realized I may never finish it. I probably wrote way too far than intended. I seriously love this idea too much ;-; Please send more asks about P3/P4/P5 mashing in together. I could’ve gone on and on about this, but I’m afraid it would be too long and this would’ve been overdue.

Minato/Yu/Akira in love with the Same Person HC

Mentions of Spoilers of all 3 Games

Goodness, just what kind ofmess did you get into?

Being the center of these boys isgoing to be a hassle. It’s just a recipe for either disaster or a veryfulfilling relationship.

For a quick backstory, you werefirst involved in the world of Personas during P3. For the sake of this story,Minato just falls into a coma. Through the previous games,you knew that Shadows existed but didn’t have the right circumstances to fightwith them.

Initially, you were in Tokyo forschooling and by then, you had become fairly acquainted with Akira Kurusu. Itwas no secret to you that he was the Phantom Thief ever since you foundyourself in the Metaverse. You never did tell him how you managed to survive inthere for a long time. Months passed, and it was still left unexplained.

You were having a quick snack with Akira in the morning, waiting for him to finish brewing coffee. He had been itching to ask you for a date at the Seaside Park for ages, and he finally had enough charm to do it. Looking at you straight in the eyes, he took in a breath. “Hey, S/O, what do you think about going to the Seaside Park with—”

Suddenly, some kid with a silver bowl haircut comes into Leblanc. ”How may I help you–”

“S/O, is that you?”

just who interrupted my proposal?

That was exactly how this little started, quietly and dangerously.

After you introduced Yu and Akira to each other, the atmosphere was already tense.

Yu wasn’t upset, but found this situation to be a challenge to your heart. Akira, on the other hand, was hoping he had enough Charm to keep himself composed. “Oh, so you’re the one who’s been looking after S/O?” Yu asked with a small smile. Mirroring his expression, Akira nodded. “I’m so glad that they have such a nice friend.”

Obviously, Akira wasn’t going to let this Inaba Guy stop him from asking you out. After regaining confidence, he looks at you. “S/O, I was wondering if you would like to come to Seaside Park with me.”

“… Of course, I’d come! Can we bring Yu with us?”

Ah, look at that little smirk on Yu’s face.

“I haven’t seen him in a long time, Akira.” The Phantom Thief couldn’t deny you with that small pout on your lips. “Fine.”

Yu was very lucky indeed. How could we not forget how confident he was after the King’s Game Incident? He had a small crush on you during his stay in Inaba. However, your paths were forced to split up at the end of the year. While you two even exchange numbers, it would never compare to being able to see you in person.

On the way to the Central Street in Shibuya, there was a large crowd. Akira and Yu would try and get you to hold hands with them, but it would often end in silent arguments between the boys. Whenever you would look back, they would always be smiling at each other. You couldn’t help but notice Akira’s lip twitch out of irritation.

Somehow, they were too busy glaring at each other to notice you got lost in the crowd.

“Well, I’ve got the Knowledge to impress her.”

“Akira, is that so? At least I have maximum Charm to win this little game of ours. What do you think, S/O? …S/O?”

This was one of the only moments when Yu and Akira would chill out. They suddenly start looking all over the street to find you. Deep down their calm faces, they were freaking out. What if you got kidnapped or hurt?

Little did they know that someone else had you in their grasp.

Sitting down on the pavement, the two boys looked at each other in desperation. They knew that they were in big trouble if they couldn’t find you. Akira glanced at Yu, seemingly apologetic. “I think we got off on the wrong foot.”

The silver haired man looked equally as apologetic. “It was partly my fault. I’m sorry.” He sighed, hanging his head low. “Man, if that guy found out I let this happen, we’ll never get out alive.” Akira looked at him in confusion. “Who’s that guy?”

“… We meet again.”

Shivers ran up the two protagonists’ spines as the chilly voice processed through their ears. Yu couldn’t help but pale, recognizing the voice.

You stood beside a shorter blue haired man, clinging onto his arm for dear life. You smiled at the two boys. “This is Minato, my friend from Iwatodai. Don’t you remember him, Yu?”

God, have mercy on Akira.

Minato looked at you with a gentle gaze before nodding. “I believe we have met before. Who is this?”

After introducing everyone to each other, Akira couldn’t help but feel a click. Something just felt odd about these people, sensing some familiar energy within them.

Introduction’s over, now with the General HCs.

Akira would be the most cautious and fidgety. Not only are they older, but they’ve known S/O way before he did. Towards Yu, he would be less tense. He sees Yu has a playful guy, sly but somewhat harmless. Minato was a different case, similarly to an overprotective brother. He wouldn’t show it, but he is a bit scared of him. Akira wouldn’t dare play an cheeky tricks on the eldest.

Yu wouldn’t be tense around these two. He takes this situation very lightly, and doesn’t really give a fuck. He’s in for the fun, and isn’t up for breaking hearts. He treats Akira as a little sibling, and treats Minato as a boss. Rather than disliking the two, he actually becomes fond of them. He loves teasing both of them, though.

Minato was somewhat aloof to this whole situation. He’s already used to Yu’s weirdness. He’s much more interested in Akira’s reasons of liking S/O, but it doesn’t matter. He’s sticking around to make sure Y/N doesn’t get hurt because of these two.

This love square would consist of a lot of rivalries. Unknowingly, they would start up ‘friendly’ arguments about their stats. Akira does the best in intelligence, Yu is good at charming others while Minato wins when it comes to Guts.

Divided, it becomes a war zone. Each of the three would never go far to using violence, but they will try to annoy each other in subtle ways.

Yu is fond of sabotaging dates with his presence, often making situations awkward. Whenever you are on dates with another Protagonist, he would pop up out of nowhere. “Me? I’m just shopping for clothes. Yes, it’s perfectly normal for people to buy clothes at a beach, thank you very much.”

Akira looks innocent on the outside, but that small smile is just a front. Luckily for him, the S/O comes to Leblanc on a regular basis. If any of the other guys came with her, he wouldn’t hesitate on adding an extra spoonful of salt or pepper into their coffee. Like Yu, he may also sabotage dates with his presence. Sometimes, he would team up with Yu to bother Minato. “Is that a bit too sweet? Oops, I thought the curry would taste better with sugar.”

Minato wasn’t as immature as the other two. Rather than focusing on sabotage, he likes to make them jealous. Since he knew you the longest, he tends to be much more touchy with you. He starts off with the small things, like holding your hand or wrapping an arm around your shoulder. Then it gets more sweeter, especially when he pulls you closer when walking in crowds, or wiping that whip cream from the side of your lip. He’s got some guts. Another way he annoys the other two, is when he purposely makes up situations to shoo them away. “Is that your friend over there? You should go and check up on them, Akira.” “That’s not my-” “Hush, I know you must go. It’s okay.”

When they realize they are Persona Users with the Wild Card ability, everything gets intense. Not many people have his ability, and it rose tensions. They still try to compare each other in this sense.

“I steal the hearts of the selfish and force the unjust to admit their crimes.”

“Oh really? I hunted down a serial killer and saved my town from turning into shadows.”

“Heh. I faced death without complaints. I saved the world from ending.”

“…”

In secrecy, these three would try to test their abilities. Yu would drag the two into the T.V world, Minato would make them stay up into the Dark Hour and Akira would take them to the farthest edges of Mementos.

At some point, they would want to challenge each other, one on one. Minato would have the greatest advantage since he was trained as a Shadow Operative and had the longest experience out of the three. Normally, Yu and Akira would have to battle it out first before taking Minato on.

They are usually neck-to-neck at the end of the battles, and often stop out of exhaustion. While they are rivals to your heart, they respect each other in terms of battle.

Being love rivals is hard, but it makes a fulfilling friendship. Whenever you are together with the Protagonists, expect them to act as your bodyguards. Yu would follow from the back, and the other two would walk with you by your side. The only people who could ever compete for you are those three, no one else.

United, they are very protective of you. Usually, it’s up to Minato to deal with anyone who bothers you. When it comes to people who are actually messing with you, Akira won’t hesitate in bringing these two to the Metaverse to deal with the problem. Yu, on the other hand, would also shield you if Minato wasn’t available.

When they’re not in the mood to bicker, they’re really sweet altogether. A favorite memory was when they went to Seaside Park together. You were always holding one of their hands, smiling at them. What mattered the most at that time was to make this a good experience for you.

It gets pretty tiring to constantly fight for your attention, but at the end of the day, they know you’d have to pick someone, whether it’s one of them or not. They will support your relationship with little complaint, and will protect you nonetheless.

That’s unless someone proposes a reverse harem. Now that’s another story. Actually, I wouldn’t mind writing something about this.

#persona 5 imagines #p5 imagines #p5 headcanons #persona 5 headcanons #persona 3 imagines #persona 4 imagines #persona 4 headcanons #persona 3 headcanons #p3 headcanons #p3 imagines #p4 imagines #p4 headcanons #akira kurusu #yu narukami #minato arisato

160 notes · View notes

mshai002 · 4 years

Text

Planning

Data can be seen as points of knowledge that we all have. How we see things is based on past experiences from which we pick up points against which we assess all that comes along. Those points can be seen as data points. The world, in many western countries, is built on a hierarchy of the white-hetero-patriarchy. How would the reverse of it look? Trevor Paglen’s Barbican’s Curve installation featured images of each category like Investor, Pizza, Apple, and so on, from a specific data set, called ImageNet, which was created by professors at Stanford University and Princeton University in the US. These professors created categories using a dictionary called WordNet created at Princeton University and used the definitions there to illustrate what was thought represented the categories.

Figure 1: Trevor Paglen's Curve installation at the Barbican

My project will look at what if intersectionally subordinated groups of people—with subordination by the intersection of racism, classism, ableism, (skin-) colorism, agism…— created the categories instead of middle- and upper-class white-hetero-patriarchal people. (White in terms of traditional structures built by white men.) what if the conception of these subordinated groups defined what shaped the world?

Final product research and plan

I looked extensively into most of Trevor Paglen’s work, elaborated in this blog earlier. His work is in the form of mostly eerie photography of the arcane intelligence outposts of the US. He tracks the places through thousands of censored documents released by his Govt. and finds the locations where they carry out their covert operations; alternatively, through satellite data, the location of other covert operations where the US is the dominant power, like the UK.

Figure 2: NSA GCHQ, Surveillance Base, Cornwall, UK, 2015 by Trevor Paglen

In the above image, we see one of Paglen’s spectacular images of a US surveillance base in the UK.

Figure 3: untitled, Reaper Drone, 2010 by Trevor Paglen

In figure 3, is another work that looks at surveillance drones, but again the image itself does not exclaim what it is about, an evocative photograph that conceptually is based on drones. Paglen’s is one way to present the work visually that I want to make. It can be coded and conceptually presented in a way that is entirely arcane to the viewer. However, I looked at other artists who work with data in their work too.

Figure 4: In The Shadow of Giants, 2013 by Nathalie Miebach

In Figure 4 above, we have the work of Nathalie Miebach. In her work, she uses weather data’s interactions to form sculptures. The sculptures are made out of basket material, but she does not design them; they are dictated by her weather data itself, giving it its bizarre abstract form. So it is more a scientific rendition than purely artistic.

I also found interesting the work of Hal Abelson, who printed out code on sheets of Fax paper as can be seen in figure 5.

Figure 5: Turtle Geometry, 1969 by Hal Abelson

The works explored above were my most favorite of all the works I looked at, including the ‘non-tech’ art explored further in this blog earlier. Using elements of all the above artworks, I can produce something more pertinent to my idea. My work in previous years has been very straightforward, inspired by the instructionists. However, after speaking to audience members, I am not sure how memorable it was. I realize that I need to have a more enhanced experience to make sure of memorability as I do aim to have a lasting effect on my audience. I am thus planning to have a kind of installation that explores all the above forms of presentation. I will look into photography of the intersectional groups, or the data they produce. I will also print out their data sets as something the audience can interact with within the space. I will most likely have a computer in which the audience can also explore the data digitally. I will have sound as well to give a new sensorial experience.

Figure 6: Untitled, work from Year 2, Mehroz Shaikh

In figure 6 is my previous year’s work, where I explored experiential installation. The audience could wear headphones and hear the voices of Goldsmiths Anti-Racist Action’s Occupation’s women’s frustration with racism, sexism, and ableism at the institution. I will have a table again, which I also had in my year one final piece. A table immediately invites a person to come sit down and see what is presented. The minimalism is similar to Halson’s printed work. I will play the voices of the intersectional groups aloud in the space which will read out their definitions of categories they defined. I will also print out the ideas that are explored by these groups of people, which will mainly be their redefinition of the concepts explored by the white-hetero-patriarchal men in the US. Print, Sound and then a computer screen that will allow them to explore the data on their own. I believe through the visual, tangible, and audible experience, they will remember the definitions that the people in question proposition better.

Figure 7: Sketch of the potential work’s core aspects

Knowledge, skills, and techniques needed

The existing knowledge I have is the concept of intersectionality and the groups of people of interest. The task is to collect data from them and then render them in data sets. For rendering in data sets, I will have to learn the use of python in machine learning and data science, a course I am now taking as my other module of study. I will need to learn how to convert the definitions I get from the intersectional groups of people into numbers that can be computed for predictive output. The predictive output is important, however, the classification is key, which comes before. The former is a potential output, whereas the latter is fundamental to the basic prototype of this piece. I am already learning classifications in data mining, and through my research and talking to various coders I found an online tool called Wekinator, which is a real-time software to convert the classifications into meaningful forms, which is exactly what I will be doing. I am also learning the fundamentals of data sets in machine learning via a Goldsmiths online course called: Machine Learning for Artists and Musicians.

Basic prototype

The basic prototype will have a data set collected from the intersectional groups of people in python. It will be rendered via an interface that people can use, a list of categories that are defined and to be used in various machine learning programs. The data could be visualized in a number of ways, however, my presentation will be minimalistic and straightforward as has always been. The interface will be rendered with p5.js live on the web.

Figure 8 Potential appearance of the categories found

The basic prototype in terms of code on the computer from figure 7 will look similar to the image above, listing the categories of terms that will predict images based on what the code has learned from my data sets, though I am going to explore towards the end what I can do more with the visual aspect.

Timeline & Milestones

I will divide the timeline into three phases. Since the knowledge I need for the course relies on learning how to apply my existing knowledge in data mining and machine learning:

- The first week from now, I will focus on what can be classified from a data set and what kind of data I need and how I will collect it and from whom. - In the second week, I will start implementing the knowledge of data processing and its application in practice from my Data Mining course with some sample data I will create on my own. - In the third week, I will finalize the kinds of data I will need for this project, the various categories, and how to get them. I will also start approaching various intersectional identity people to participate in my data collection. I will also computationally implement my sample data algorithmically through machine learning once classifiable. - In the fourth week, I will continue to collect data, as it will not happen in a week, by finding more people and getting them to help me out. I will now be able to not only classify data sets but also start to apply machine learning models on it via Wekinator. - In the fifth week, I will continue to collect data and modeling machine learning algorithms on it. - In the sixth week, I will continue to collect data and continue to implement classification on them with more models that I will learn and experiment with. - In the seventh week, I will continue to collect data and not only implement classification but also start algorithmically applying models on them for various purposes. - In the eighth week, I will finalize the collected data and classify all of it, making sure it is running well and then begin to create an interface for the visualization of this data which I will also learn at the machine learning course. I will also see what can be done about the audio as a form of output through it. - In the ninth week, I will assess all the interface and data sets with the teachers and be ready to go off and do the final embellishments over the next month. Depending on the application, the timeframe may vary for the tasks planned at this point

0 notes

never-relaxed · 7 years

Text

On the Persona 5 translation

I’ve read a lot of extremely hot takes on the Persona 5 translation today. So many, in fact, that it’s difficult to address everything wholesale. To the their credits, the critics are both thorough & well-articulated, and their arguments are strong enough to get me thinking - strong enough, even, to kickstart me pushing out this writing blog I’ve been wanting to get off the ground.

I want to respond to the myriad of issues listed on the website being currently used as a sort of rallying-cry, http://www.personaproblems.com/ . It’s well-designed, and organizes the issues well. I’ll start at the top, then:

- “Yet no other form of media would ever get away with the number of errors found in Persona 5's English script.”

This is a very minor nitpick, but actually, yes. Other forms of media would, indeed, get away with any number of similar errors; viewers of foreign films, for instance, can tell you all about how perfect-world this sentiment is. Additionally, classic books aren’t retranslated for no reason; direct translation is not actually a Thing, and any translated work is going to display the biases, quirks, and language tendencies of its writer(s). This is why people learn dead or archaic languages just to read Cicero or Plato in the original text. It’s a bizarre claim, to say grammar issues are not a problem throughout other media. (Also, try reading a novel translated from a Slavic language, if you don’t like stiff dialog. Have fun.)

- “The baseline for any translation is this: readers of the translation should receive the same experience as readers of the original, as if the original creators had written it natively in both languages.“

If this is the writer’s goal when they go about their own work, it’s admirable. It’s also completely impossible. What does a “native” English speaker sound like? Are they American? British? Australian? Here’s the short of it: by translating a work in your own native tongue, you are co-authoring the piece. It is never, ever, going to be a 1:1 situation when facing down the realities of character limits, cultural differences, & even personal backgrounds. Some works get closer, some works get further, and it’s down to the writers to decide whether a strict or a loose translation better fits the text.

To a certain degree, the way we think - the actual way we formulate & process our thoughts - is influenced by language itself. If you ever communicate with folks who speak English as a second, third, fourth, or so on language - you’ll notice that, even when extremely proficient, they don’t just totally entirely lose the speech quirks that come with their parent language. Eliminating those quirks of speech already changes the context of the work. Is this a bad thing? No, not necessarily; but it’s presumptuous at best to believe yourself capable of understanding how another person would write “if only they were native” in your language.

- “Translation can be a murky concept, so first I'll define a standard to measure against: imagine if translation weren't necessary at all.”

I absolutely despise this. The assumption made is that any story could be told completely, and just as enjoyably, in any language, in any culture, without any change to structure. It is simply not how language works.

- “Translators do not convert words from one language to another: they convert ideas.”

Okay. Let’s keep this in mind.

- The entire “Why aren’t more people complaining?” section

This is one of the most bizarre, difficult-to-follow explanations I have ever seen. It makes totally weird assertions, such as the idea that people hold early, loose translations against current-day translators. That’s a really strange idea, considering the popularity of things like NA Kefka, or bounty-hunter-Samus. The truth is that if the translation was good back in the 90s, no one cared if it was inaccurate. Outside of Usenet, none of us really had a point of reference. The writer seems to have some sort of personal beef with Working Designs leaving Bill Clinton jokes in their work, or something. I am especially confused by the TV Tropes links here, and what they have to do with the point.

Cutting down on this section, we could just apply Occam’s razor: most people have no issue with the translation.

- I’m not going to go through all the examples. There are some I think are silly, some that I haven’t seen yet, some that are definitely awkward.

One thing that does frustrate me about these examples - it’s noted by the writer that the script does a fine job of getting _the idea_ across. There are few, if really any, examples of the game actually failing to convey meaning. By the author’s own definition of what a translator does, the script succeeds. No, it doesn’t flow the way it would if it were written by an American. Translate dialog this way, and it sounds weird for English speakers elsewhere in the world. It’s a give and take - we don’t all speak the same English. “But these are factual errors!” is a really silly argument here; if they are, why isn’t this an issue for everybody?

- “Unfortunately, while it's possible for a translation to be stiff but understandable, stiff but accurate translations are pretty much a myth.”

I hate this idea, too. “If it doesn’t sound right in American English, it’s incorrect, & doesn’t get the idea across.” The other thing I really don’t like about this is the vast majority of dialog in Persona 5 flows very smoothly for native English speakers! The writer even seems to be aware of that fact, as I’ll address later.

- “It's definitely great to get to experience the cultural aspect of a piece of foreign writing. However, that foreign nature should be expressed by the text's content, not by the text's awkwardness. This goes back to creator intent. If the original creator were perfectly fluent in English, would they have made their writing intentionally awkward just so readers could feel how “foreign” it is?”

I really fucking hate this! How are you ‘expressing’ the cultural aspect of a text by eliminating the speech quirks of the parent language - is the implication that you intentionally add lines to express the character’s nationality? It really feels like ‘thing that detracts from my experience by taking me out of my personal cultural & linguistic comfort zone should be removed and replaced with, y’know, something.’ And that final claim! People who write in two languages - or speak fluently two languages - will very, very often include quirks, stiffness, or other eccentricities in their own personal English. If the author means “fluent in the brand of English I speak and write,” that’s extremely irritating!

- “Consider—how would readers react if George R. R. Martin released his next book and every third sentence was awkward, with every fifth sentence containing an objective error? Writing is hard, and his novels are long, after all.“

I wish this author had simply not written this blurb, I was so much warmer on the criticism beforehand. George R. R. Martin works in an entirely different medium, in one language, with years and years between each published work. The criticisms even this writer has with Persona 5 do not extend to “every third sentence,” “with every fifth sentence” containing some sort of grand, inexcusable error. People would be far, far more upset if this were actually the case. This comparison fails in every conceivable way, & is just outright ignorant.

- “One reason someone might use this defense is that they genuinely don't see a problem, because to them those flaws aren't flaws. And that's valid, so long as they accept other people's right to believe otherwise.”

I like this. I wish the author didn’t hide this at the end, behind all of the assertions of objective “failure” and “outright errors.”

- “I haven't listed every mistake in Persona 5, or even a substantial fraction of them. I've also been forced to focus on the translation aspect of localization, which means I haven't properly addressed other failings such as bad typography, untranslated images and video, and voiced lines that are unsubbed even when Japanese audio is enabled.1 Nor have I dedicated time to the sometimes strange handling of honorifics.“

The typography complaint is valid, though one of the pettiest things I’ve seen in awhile now, and the untranslated images are a series staple, but the honorifics thing HAS bothered me since P3. Just commit or don’t, guys.. Anyway, not much to say about this chunk. I just wanted to say, man that honorifics stuff can be weird (& has been for years).

Listen: If you take nothing else from this write up, understand that I have no issue with people disliking the P5 translation. That’s totally fine. My problem is with the concept of there existing a ‘correct’ English, or a ‘correct’ translation. My problem is with the repeated emphasis this writer, and others expanding on them, place on their definition of “objective” errors. The vast majority of the moments picked out by this writer are not selections of terrible grammatical errors - and I’d argue that it’s /completely fine/ for a couple of those to exist in a fucking video game - but of what the author calls stiff language. That is to say: Neither meaning nor soul are impaired by the P5 translation.

The reverence with which this author refers to the text - referencing how the translation has ruined one of the ‘greatest RPGs of the last ten years’ for them, and so on, so forth - speaks to a kind of pedestal-hoisting that does no good for anyone. For example, in the Sae moment detailed on the site from the start of the game, with the “psychic detective”; what makes the original so good? In Japanese, the detective says “There’s been a call for you” right before she receives a call on her cell phone. Is this not silly as all fuck? Why is it so much better? Why did Sae’s boss call the detective first, why didn’t he just call her cell phone if he had it the whole time? The English script changes the moment to make the detective seem aware that she’s about to receive the call - emphasizing that the detective and Sae’s boss are working together no one in the scene can be trusted, while also positing Sae as an outsider. Watch the scene again and see if you get what I’m saying. https://youtu.be/f3bVM2mxh4k?t=876

It’s super frustrating that a changes like this get flak from this writer, while the worldview being pushed is one of ‘capturing the spirit, not the words.’ It’s also frustrating that many of the game’s legitimate, real problems (that aren’t fucking, the font used to spell out ‘hello’ on a calculator, god damn guys it’s okay most people have done that before) are ignored - such as the constant battle chatter every time you hit a weakpoint in a game centered on repeatedly exploiting weaknesses, or the intensity of the writing game’s first chapter. The writing is held in extremely high regard, & the translation is being used to try to assert the truth of controversial axioms without actually needing to discuss said assumed “truths.”

I just want to leave with one assertion: There is no “correct” English. It’s okay for a text to sound awkward (especially in visual media) _with the caveat_ that it must get the spirit of the original work across. It’s all right, for sure, for a foreign text to challenge or disrupt the expectations of a native English speaker in its translation. In some ways (and not even all), Persona 5′s translation does this. Is it a perfect translation? No, no translation is. Do you have to like it? No. Should you respect the opinion of players who do (as well as ESL players & those abroad!) enough to avoid making sweeping, generalized statements about the failure of the script to appeal to your individual sensibilities, complete with long, detailed theories as to why other people don’t seem to mind? Please. _Please_. Honestly, y’all make this game sound like it’s Chaos Wars, or Arc Rise Fantasia. The hyperbole is unreal, and it simply needs to stop.

#persona 5 #personaproblems #april 2017

31 notes · View notes