#i love the inspirations Alan wake 2 took from it but I also love how remedy made its own rich story | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

moretinyideas · 6 years

Text

Sparkles On The Water [.5] | Do Kyungsoo

[5] Lunar Myths Saga Story Two

genre: wolf!kyungsoo x mermaid!female reader (oc - wang inhui) (ft male oc - wang junhui)

chapter summary: (PART ONE) The events over the past day effects the whole pack, should Euina be allowed to know the truth? hat would happen if she’s not? Kyungsoo has always been more observant than others but then again, he’s always away... visiting you in his dreams.

words: 2055

SO HERE IS THE NEXT INSTALMENT AND IT”S A PART ONE. I decided a long time ago that I would have several stories intertwine into one big one - like a tv show (the reason why it’s called Season One) AND IT’S KYUNGSOO!! I hope it wasn’t too hard to understand, but i’m in one with this y/n (inhui) simply because she’s a mermaid and I love mermaids.

edit: this is a part one, I felt bad for not updating sooner because it was taking me forever to finish so... here? :)

Songs for the chapter? Young by Baekhyun and Loco, Sheep Relift by Yixing and Alan Walker and the entire Daft Punk discography :D edit: and Redbone by Childish Gambino. Also shoutout to the three 45 minute nail art videos I watched at 5am when I got it by inspiration and needed something in the background to sooth my aural mind.

tags; @marshmallow-phd @bri-ne @high-on-food @asslikegilinsky @chanyeolol aand @xingminded is the newest addition to the tag fam :D - let me know if you’d like to be tagged!! although I'm sure Tumblr hates me and never actually sends the motifs to anyone!

[ml] - bc it’s getting a lil confusing I decided to just link the master list | part 2

Hello

KYUNGSOO

It was a strange thing, having an actual child in the house – since Euina was a child and not a hyperactive wolf like Baekhyun or Chanyeol. It had been a few centuries since they themselves were children and, it wasn’t like they didn’t like children, the pack just weren’t particularly used to them anymore. The sisters, Sehun’s mate Yuna and her thirteen-year-old sister Euina, had been at the pack house for a total of four hours. Both girls asleep on one another on one of the couches in the pain room.

Kyungsoo had always been an early riser, even as a young boy he would be awake by eight in the morning at most and had been awake when the members who had gone out, came back. He hadn’t slept yet, but he noticed straight away that Sehun wasn’t with them – also that Baekhyun wasn’t wearing the sweatpants he had left in anymore – and simply assumed something bad had happened.

He was right, as per usual. Although none of them expected it to be another hour before they even heard the sound of a car coming up the driveway. Danbi, especially, had been biting at her nails in worry for their youngest member. When they came through the door, Sehun’s mate entering first – holding two bags of her back and something furry in her hands – while Sehun wandered in not long after her, Kyungsoo’s first thought was: who is he carrying?

And then, is that a cat?

Apparently, the sleeping child Sehun carried on his back was the sister of his mate, whom wouldn’t leave her alone overnight. Kyungsoo admired Yuna’s sense of loyalty, he had to admit, even if the young girl shouldn’t know of the existence of Were’s. Sehun had laid her down of a couch, her small frame unmoving apart from the steady rise and fall of her rhythmic breathing.

“So, you must be Yuna.” Was the first thing Kyungsoo had said to the newest mate. Yuna simply nodded, holding the steel-grey cat to her chest in what Kyungsoo assumed to be a calming tick for her nervousness.

“I don’t know you rules? Or whatever, about telling people about werewolves but we, I, haven’t told her anything yet.” Yuna spoke, before Sehun could open his mouth. “I don’t even know what I’d tell her.”

“Usually it’s only mates, for humans that is.” Junmyeon began, as Yuna took a seat next to her sister.

“Although there are always exceptions.” Sehun chipped in before any other word can be said. Kyungsoo assumed it was to reassure his mate, his wolf having spoken the words for him as a reflex. He watched as Sehun sat next to Yuna; as Euina curled herself into her sister’s side; as Yuna seemed to relax a little when Sehun’s hand landed on her knee. It was what he did. He observed, listened, understood. He had not yet experienced the full pull of the mate bond – for he and his mate had not officially met – but, he understood Sehun’s need to cut their ‘leader’ off.

Junmyeon, unfazed, pulled Danbi closer to his chest and nodded. “Danbi’s mother was an exception, we know that sometimes it’s necessary.” He smiled. “However, she did have to get approved through the voting, and we’ll have to wait until everyone is awake.”

“And when Yixing is back.” Kyungsoo added.

And so, Yuna decided that she would get some sleep, telling Sehun to wake her up later, when more people were awake. Kyungsoo decided to try and sleep as well, departing to his bedroom with a quiet “goodnight.” He faintly heard Junmyeon tell Sehun to sleep as well. That he was injured, and they would wake him up later.

His room wasn’t the biggest, but it also wasn’t the smallest. It was a part of the newest section of the house – one wall had been replaced with a wall of windows. Kyungsoo liked it, he could view the surrounding forest and when the sky was clear he could see the ocean. He had always liked the ocean, the water had always given him a sense of comfort – which had always confused him, given his affinity for earth. When they had moved to the coast line (almost 100 years ago) Kyungsoo designed this room specifically because it faced the ocean. He didn’t give the others a reason. When they had moved, the building they bought (that Junmyeon, Yifan and Minah bought) wasn’t nearly as big as it stood now, with only five bedrooms, a kitchen, two dining rooms and two parlour rooms. So, when they expanded, Kyungsoo and Luhan decided they’d take care of it. Luhan’s gift of telepathy helped the design of each different members room to fit their personalities quicker than it would have been if they asked them – everyone knows that Tao, Sehun and Baekhyun could talk for decades.

Additionally, when they moved Kyungsoo met his mate. Given he thought he was going delirious for a solid year, dreaming of mermaids – or one mermaid in particular. He had never tried to talk to her, or maybe he had and was always woken up, but when she finally turned to look at him – he knew. This mermaid was his mate and he found out during a dream. Only Luhan knows (so consequently so does Minseok and Sehun but they can keep a secret) of his ‘visits’ with her.

He fell asleep quicker than he thought.

He learnt very quickly why he saw you in his dreams. It was the first time the two of you talked. You said “hello”and so did he, and the next sentences were to acknowledge the other as mates and then, you told him one of the secrets of the merfolk.

“Mermaids don’t call them ‘mates’. We call them our ‘fated one’.” You smiled at him, a dimple appearing on your left cheek. In thisdream state you were sat on what looked like a giant jellyfish. Kyungsoo remembered you telling him that while you had control of these dreams, they were normally based on what your actual surroundings were. You told him that you fell asleep on a smack of moon jellies, small translucent and bioluminescent bells that could never sting you (a perk of being a mermaid) but didn’t want to overwhelm him the sheer amount of jellyfish you were around. You told him that Moon Jellies were your favourite, that you loved sleeping on them and that they let you because you were a great conversationalist. That made him smile.

You always made him smile.

“-and mermaids can always visit their fated one during shared dreams.” You explained. “It happens when we’re asleep at the same time. We’ll fall out of it when either of us wakes up.” Kyungsoo believed he could listen to you talk for a millennium and never get jaded.

He was surprised when he saw you, considering it was almost seven in the morning and the two of you usually met in the dreams during the middle of the night. You must not have risen with the change of tides like you normally do. When your form became more visible and Kyungsoo could see your beautiful smile his own face formed a smile too. However, when he took note of your tired eyes and how your smile wasn’t real his expression dropped. The two of you were surrounded by darkness, not having the energy to conjure up a visual.

“Are you okay?” He asked.

“Why are you only just sleeping now?” You asked him back. He noted that you had deflected his question.

“Something happened with the pack when I was about to head to bed. Junmyeon called at around four to say Sehun had been in an altercation. He wanted someone to be awake when they got back, just in case. I was already awake, so I just stayed up.” He explained. You nodded. The two of you fell into a short silence. Looking at you he could tell you were stressing over something. Your tail, long and shimmery fading from a teal blue to a teal green (with pale pink accents in your fins), wasn’t shining as bright as usual and the smaller blue scales that lined your neck were darker than usual.

“Are you okay?” He repeated his earlier question. In this dream state he was able to hold you, to feel you and soon you were in his arms. It was a weird sensation as he never felt like he was submerged in water, but he could quite clearly feel the thinness of your tail fins when they brushed against his legs. He could feel the juxtaposition between the coolness of your tail and the heat you radiated. He hadn’t asked yet, but he often wondered what sensations you felt when wrapped up around him.

You sighed. “Things have…” You paused, laying your head on his shoulder. “Things have become complicated.” There have been many times over the past hundred years where you have explained your situation to Kyungsoo. Your ambition and drive to be a good daughter, your loyalty towards your mother and father always contradicting your own personal wants to get away. You wanted to explore. You wanted to have your legs for more than one day during the Lunar Moon. You wanted to find him, to be with him and love him with your whole being. You told him how it was unheard of to have a fated one be one of the ‘landfolk’(as your father ever-so-lovingly told you) and how you were scared of leaving your family behind and not being accepted back in.

You shared your status as a part of one of the royal lines of your kingdom. How your parents would take over after the current king passed. You told him that while you had no siblings of your own, you thought of JunHui, your mother’s sister’s son, as one. Junhui wasn’t much younger than you and often shared your desire to leave for land.

“My desire to come to you, to land, is higher than ever.” You finally whispered. “My father has betrayed my mother, with her sister.” Your words were slow. “Junhui is my brother. By blood.

“Mother is livid, she and father have been yelling for a day now. Junhui is distraught, it took a few hours to calm him down enough for him to sleep. Our home has been ringing for hours on end – mothers’ affinity for sonar is truly something. She banished my aunt from the castle, told her she wasn’t to set ‘one inch of a fin within the outer boarders of the kelp that lines our plot’ or she’ll curse her. I don’t know how she’d curse her own sister. I’ve never seen my mother so mad.” You finished your small rant. “I’m scared.”

Kyungsoo pulled you closer, your head tucked underneath his. “Then come.” He whispered. Maybe he was being selfish and maybe what you needed to do was stay but, you were scared more than ever before, and it had been one hundred years. He was probably one of, if not the, most patient wolfs of the pack but even his patience could wear thin.

“It’s been on my mind since the news came out. I don’t want to be here anymore.” You mumbled against his collar. “But I can’t leave Junhui, especially not now.”

“Then bring him as well.” Kyungsoo didn’t like how quickly his words spilled from his lips but, he couldn’t come to regret saying them. You pulled away from him slightly, just enough to look into his eyes. A bet of silence surrounded you. You nodded.

“Tell me where on Earth you are. I’ll find you in no time.”

A flare of hope raised in his chest as he told you. Even down to the geological co-ordinates he had memorised for this specific reason. He saw your eyes widen in surprise, mouth drop open to reply but, he was torn away from the dream as he was shaken awake. When he opened his eyes, the face of Jongin stood above him.

“Junmyeon-hyung sent me to wake you.” The younger boy smiled in apology, seeing the glare Kyungsoo had sent his awakener. He wouldn’t know that you were shocked as to how close the two of you really were.

part 2

53 notes · View notes

bellafadiploma · 5 years

Text

UNIT 2: The Truth About Everything

To start off this project, we talked to local poet and performer Jonny Fluffypunk, who gave us our brief. We were sent the transcripts from conversations between Jonny and his team and the people of a residential home. I read through all of the transcripts individually and underlined certian quotes I really enjoyed. Most of these turned out to be from the resident Della. I thought she had very interesting memories and insights, especially into things I’m interested such as ghosts and gender and such. Here’s a selection of the quotes i particularly liked.

DELLA: My father had a rat up his trousers once.

DELLA: Yes. I used to say ‘sweet things come in small packets’. And my husband says ‘So does poison’

JULIEN: A rat is a pirate. A mouse is a civilised animal but a rat is a real pirate.

DELLA: ‘Did you often get in trouble?’ Not often. But I did do things I shouldn’t do. Climb trees for a start. I loved climbing trees. I remember lying on the branch of a tree, it must’ve been half an hour, before the policeman went. He came to the playing fields and was looking around and I don’t know why but he suddenly decided to stay around. So I lay along the branch and waited for him to go. It seemed an awful long time

DELLA: I’ve seen a ghost. In Long Sutton. A man in a grey mac.

DELLA: My cousin did… but it turned out that it wasn’t a ghost. It was a goat. In those days the toilet was outside, and Fred went out and he saw this white thing, and he reckoned it was a ghost.

DELLA: I saw my husband, when he was at sea. I woke up, and I could see my husband standing at the end of the kids’ cot. He stood there, and I said What’s the matter, Eric? Oh don’t worry, he said, it’ll be alright. And then he vanished.

DELLA: Frankenstein never came to our church. But you just think; if spiders were bigger than what they are… Like a tarantula? No. If they were six foot. Six foot in length. They’d be scary then. Absolutely.

EDNA: I always thought I was more beautiful than anybody else. I wasn’t.

What Piece Of Advice Would You Give Us For Life? EDNA: Shut up.

DELLA: She used to pull me along the road on roller skates. Tie a scarf around my middle, say here y’are, give it to the dog, and she’d take off up the road, pull me along. I fell over a few times.

DELLA:Well, our dog Sandy always sat in front of the fire with a budgie on his head. Every day. He’d sit there for hours, asleep... But Sandy knew the time. He could tell the time.

JS: You’ve always dreamed a lot? DELLA: One of my first dreams was when I was tiny; [...] I put the purse in one of the draws in the bedroom, and in my dreams the drawer opened and the little elephant popped out, and I was so afraid I ran, and the elephant run after me. So by the time I was finished dreaming, I’d got the whole house waking up…

JS: Is there any places you would go? Well, in 1963, as a student I went to Lourdes, to the village of St Bernadette. I had acne rather badly. [...] but that day, when I was in Lourdes, there was a storm, I got drenched, then as I say, from that point on, the spots started to disappear. But I didn’t go back.

DELLA: I can’t remember how old he was. He was in the navy, in one of the destroyers, the arctic convoys. It was so cold, if you touched any metal without your gloves, it took your skin off.

_________________________________________

Here I have put the specific lines I liked in bold.

After deciding which resonated with me the most, I created some sketches

I also had a risograph induction the same day, and tested one of my ideas, which was the image of Della being pulled along the road on her rollerblades. It was just a two colour print but I really enjoyed how it turned out. The vividness of the colours and the sweetness of the blue and pink really helps push the narrative of a childhood memory.

I decided after this that I wanted to do all of my pieces in risograph after a failed digital illustration attempt. I decided upon this after getting feedback that the story was not clear enough due to the composition of the policeman within the scene. I also think this piece didn’t work due to it looking to flat. I put everything in the foreground, giving the piece no sense of depth or space.

I did some research into different graphic styles for each poster, the ‘policeman’ story, I took inspiration from Enid Blyton illustrations and Tintin. I really like the very cute style of drawing eyes in Tintin, and so I took that into my illustration. I also really liked the look of the callipgraphy pens, so part of the lines are thicker than others, which can be seen in both Blyton’s and Herge’s work. The risograph, I decided should be as many colours as I could do, which is blue, black, yellow and pink. I used gradients and opacity to mix new colours which i think was very effective in the end, especially the sunset sky. I also reflected on my earlier statements about my first attempt at this illustration and added things into the background to create a sense of space.

For my ‘Poison’ piece, I took a lot of inspiration from comics and pop art obviously, but mostly I took inspiration from Roy Lichenstein, which is why i decided to use so much halftone in these pieces. From his work I also took the composition, where he often has a man and woman facing each other in profile. The colours I ended up using in the risograph were pink and blue again, as that combination is often used in reference to candy and other sweet things. The pink is almost sickly however, which adds that threatening dimension that the quote has. Also, my accident, the pink and blue could be said to reflect the energies of the male and female I suppose, if you ascribe to that idea.

for the ‘Frankenstein’ piece, I looked into comics again, especially late 80′s/90s style, such as The Mask, which utilised thick black lines and almost neon colours. I also looked into pulp book covers and horror movie posters for the sort of composition I wanted to use. I ended up going with a classic low angle, low yellow lighting, very much reminiscent of vintage horror films; combined with the halftone to bring it back to that comic book style. I then have Della at the bottom with the quote, as I felt that this piece needed maybe a bit more context.

I also designed another one to put through the risograph, but due to thinking it was a little too simple and not that readable, plus time constraints, I didn’t finish it.

Just before the project came to end, I experimented with doing some more traditional hand coloured drawings and testing colour theories at the request of Alan, however, due to time, none of these really came to fruition.

Nonetheless, I am very pleased with the outcome of this project. I think the pieces are very striking and reflect the stories of Della faithfully, but still with a flair that means that they dont all necessarily need the context of the conversation and work as stand alone posters. I fell in love with the process of riso this project and would love to use it more in future if possible.

#Part 2 #The Truth About Everything

0 notes

entergamingxp · 4 years

Text

Let your mind wander with 40 of our best reads • Eurogamer.net

We’ve been lucky enough to publish some wonderful work on Eurogamer over the years, written by some wonderful writers, and we thought pulling some of it together at a time like this would be a nice thing to do.

If you see something you like, scroll down to the bottom of the piece and click on the author’s name to see what else they’ve written. There are some real treats I haven’t been able to include here – it’s a long enough list as it is!

Thank you everyone who contributes to Eurogamer and helps make it what it is, and thank you for reading it. Have a nice Easter weekend.

How Age of Empires 2 got some Scottish kids into RTS – Here’s a question: How do you get a bunch of disillusioned kids in the arse end of Scotland into real-time strategy games? Sam Greer remembers the 90s in Scotland and an unlikely gaming champion.

Petscop, the internet’s favourite haunted video game – Last March, a YouTube channel titled Petscop began releasing Let’s Play-style videos of what appeared to be a bargain-bin Playstation One game designed to entice undiscerning children. But things quickly took a darker turn, as Sara Elsam finds out.

An ode to video game doors – It’s easy to underestimate doors, Andreas Inderwildi writes, and yet they are also imbued with a kind of magic. If you’ve ever wanted to see a lot of lovely video game doors, now’s your chance.

After half my life, Ace Attorney’s re-release brought me full circle – Some games can have profound influences on our lives. Jay Castello grew up with the Ace Attorney series and wanted to be a lawyer – but life doesn’t always go the way it was planned.

I went Christmas carolling in Rust with a real piano, and got shot a hell of a lot – When Emma Kent heard that craftable pianos were coming to Rust (with MIDI support) and she could plug a microphone in too, there was only one thing she wanted to do. But would her fellow Rust players share in her festive spirit?

The story behind the Oblivion mod Terry Pratchett worked on – Imagine one day getting an email thanking you for the companion you made for Oblivion, signed by someone claiming to be author Terry Pratchett. Then imagine discovering, many letters later, it really was him. Cian Maher tells an unlikely story of friendship and collaboration.

The Lords of Midnight: on the legacy of a truly epic wargame – Even now, there’s little else remotely like it. Jennifer Allen remembers a cruel but magical adventure for Commodore 64. And thanks to devoted fans, there is now a way to play it.

Red Dead Redemption 2 and XCOM 2 have one crucial thing in common – companionship – From perishable squad mates to tales around a camp fire, Vivek Gohil digs into what makes companions in Red Dead Redemption 2 and XCOM 2 so special.

I was in Football Manager and I don’t know how to feel about it – Imagine our surprise when writer Chris Tapsell turns around and announces he was once in a Football Manager game, a series he loves – but as a football player. If it weren’t for a shoulder injury he may well have been a professional footballer today. But something always bothered him about his FM representation: his stats weren’t right. His height, his birthday, his eccentricity. This is the story of him getting to the bottom of it.

Roleplaying across the internet – It doesn’t have to be people sitting around a table. In its purest form, roleplaying is when a person says, “Let me tell you a story,” and the other person says, “Me too.” Giada Zavarise takes into the world of forum roleplaying.

If Ubisoft wants to cling on to Clancy, it’s time to talk politics – Tom Clancy relished a political drama so why does Ubisoft try to avoid it in his name? Is such a thing even possible? Edwin Evans-Thirlwell takes a closer look at Clancy and the legacy he left behind.

I owe everything I am to Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday – You’re in a game shop in the mid-1990s and you have £15 to spend, and that’s a lot – you’re a kid and you’re poor. Jennifer Allen had a choice on her hands. What to choose? Pele? Streets of Rage? Or how about this box with the hero and the aliens on…?

Kazunori’s War: the world of Gran Turismo’s creator – He keeps a selection of pre-packed bags by his desk so he can leave at a moment’s notice. He’s an occasional racing driver. And he spun out a car at 200km/h as a very naughty youth. He is Kazunori Yamauchi, creator of Gran Turismo, and Martin Robinson travels to Japan to meet him.

It’s not easy being green: a brief history of orcs in video games – Who invented orcs, how did they get their green colour, and when did they start being more than dumb enemies? Nic Reuben seeks answers.

Why did ancient Egypt spend 3000 years playing a game nobody else liked? – Here’s a game responsible for one of the first ever instances of trash talk, a game played by pharaohs, but even after 3000 years of play, Senet went the way of the disonaur. Christian Donlan tries to find out what happened.

The boy who stole Half-Life 2 – In May 2004, a German boy wakes to find his bed surrounded by armed police officers. Seven months earlier, the source code to the in-development-and-late Half-Life 2 leaks onto the internet. Simon Parkin tells the story of a global hacker hunt, from both sides.

The six-year story of GTA Online’s long-vacant casino – When GTA Online launched, the Vinewood Casino was there. It wasn’t open but it was “opening soon”, according to a sign on the door. One year later, still closed; two years later, still closed. Nearly six years later, still closed. Why did it take so long? Jordan Oloman digs into a troubled development.

The cult of Hideo Kojima – What is it about Hideo Kojima that has crowds turn out in their hundreds to meet him? Khee Hoon Chan waits among one such crowd in Singapore, and then all of a sudden, spotlight on, Kojima is there.

Hearts and minds – Tom Bramwell puts on his best suit for the WWE Hall of Fame ceremony, and it leaves him wondering why there aren’t more heroes in games.

The US town ruled by an AI storyteller – Great storytellers talk about creative partnerships with all kinds of things, from drugs to religion to half-awake states of mind. Can artificial intelligence now be added to the list? Emily Gera shines a light on a fascinating storytelling experiment.

The God who Peter Molyneux forgot – Do you remember Curiosity and the promise of a life-changing prize for whoever tapped the last block? Brayn Henderson does – he tapped it. But did it change his life? Wesley Yin-Poole travels to Scotland to find out.

The Wind Waker inspired me to build a boat – Ever decided to build a boat because you really liked a game about sailing around? No of course not. Nor, I bet, have you ever bought an ocarina instrument because of a game, or fashioned your hair to look like Nathan Drake. Or have you? Omar Hafeez-Bore ponders the influence of games.

Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp and the feud that keeps on running – This time he’s demanding a single coconut. Philippa Warr tells the a hilarious story of two lifelong friends falling out over a valentine.

Brando and Bowie: The amazing stories of a man you’ve never heard about – He alone witnessed Marlon Brando’s last ever performance, and David Bowie kissed him on the lips. He held high positions in the video game world and directed big games for big companies. And yet, he never quite found success as we know it. Or did he? Bertie tells a long story.

Why can’t video games get shoulders right? What an inspired question! And it turns out it’s all in the shoulder blades. Alan Wen investigates.

Viva Piñata places a brutal lens on late-stage capitalism – Don’t be fooled by its cutesy looks. Viva Piñata is, as Hazel Southwell tells us, maybe the only game where the kind of business psychopathy preached on Huel-based wellness retreats outside San Francisco will actually work.

The promise of a game world you can touch – James Holland puts his hands in front of him and as the on-screen bubbles start to pop, he feels them popping on his skin, on his bare skin – he’s not wearing gloves or equipment of any kind. Is this the tech of the future?

Inside Tomb of Horrors, the hardest D&D module ever made – Just getting inside can be an ordeal, as two of the entrances lead to certain death, and losing a character level 10 or higher – all that time invested – really hurts. Why would someone make something like that? Malindy Hetfield takes a closer look.

PS2: The Insiders’ Story – The PlayStation 2 is still the best-selling console in the world. It was a landmark machine and its success made Sony feel invincible. Ellie Gibson takes us back to a time of David Lynch adverts and wild parties.

VR has already taken people with dementia to the seaside, and now video games are exploring neurological disease itself – Watching a participant literally cry with happiness as they remove the headset is not a sight writer Luke Kemp will soon forget.

Decoding Shenzhen: The Chinese city that makes the world’s tech – Known as the mecca of manufacturing, Shenzhen is a fishing city turned megatropolis, where an idea can be made a reality and sold in a market stall in two weeks. Arshiya Khullar investigates.

The human cost of Red Dead Redemption 2 – In October 2018, Red Dead Redemption set a new benchmark for the kind of production values a video game could reach. Technically, it was a marvel. But at what cost?

The folklore roots of Sekiro’s anus-ball snatching enemies – Why does an enemy in Sekiro grab a pale fleshy thing from your behind, hold it up like a trophy, then devour it in its own behind? It’s all to do with some disturbing monsters in Japanese folklore, as Ewan Wilson finds out.

Why I play video games – Dr Omar Hafeez-Bore believes a good part of why he chose to pursue medicine was because of video games, and not for the reasons you may think.

Stories with dice: the thrill of old-school D&D – Even 40 years on, video games have a lot to learn from Dungeons & Dragons. Oli Welsh discovers the joy of pen-and-paper role-playing games.

A horse named Gizmondo: The inside story of the world’s greatest failed console – It’s like it never existed now, but for a while Gizmondo – a handheld gaming machine – was going to conquer the world. The 2005 launch party even featured Pharrell Williams and Sting. But less than a year later, the company behind Gizmondo collapsed into bankruptcy. Ellie Gibson hears the whole shady story from the people who were there.

Passing on the gift of games – Have you ever passed the gift of gaming on and watched someone come to terms with it like you once did? Oh the tantrums I used to throw playing Street Fighter! Emad Ahmed has a niece and nephew to pass the gift onto, with surprising effects.

After I stepped into Yakuza’s world, Yakuza’s world seeped into mine – Wish you were there, in Japan? Well, there are few games better than the Yakuza series for taking you there. They helped Malindy remember happy years studying there, and overcome a painful memory.

The quest for Shadow of the Colossus’ last big secret – What if everything in Fumito Ueda’s renowned game had not been found? Could there be a 17th colossi hidden somewhere, waiting to be discovered? Craig Owens takes us into a world of unsolved mysteries and secret hunters.

The secrets of Dark Souls lore explained and explored – It’s not easy to get at the story in Dark Souls because unlike in other games, it’s scattered and hidden away. Richard Stanton connects the dots for us.

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2020/04/let-your-mind-wander-with-40-of-our-best-reads-%e2%80%a2-eurogamer-net/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=let-your-mind-wander-with-40-of-our-best-reads-%25e2%2580%25a2-eurogamer-net

0 notes

sydneyemotionalfitness-blog · 5 years

Text

"Forrest Gump" Teaches Many Lessons, and Tom Hanks Earns Best Actor Oscar

Forrest Gump - 4 Stars (Excellent)

"Forrest Gump" begins with a feather being lifted through the air by a breeze that brings it to the feet of visit here (Tom Hanks), who is sitting at a bus stop in Savannah (GA). Gump picks it up and puts it in a "Curious George" children's book. He then begins to tell the story of his life to the first of several people who are waiting with him for the next bus.

Some of the people are great listeners and others are not, but make no mistake about it, Gump is a master storyteller. He is simple, unpretentious, honest, not bright and full of integrity. For such a humble person, his story is almost unbelievable.

Forrest wears braces on his legs to walk in childhood, eludes the bullies who taunt him, makes friends with Jenny (Robin Wright Penn) who he will pursue his entire life, meets Elvis Presley, meets three Presidents-John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, and receives the Congressional Medal of Honor for service in Vietnam, where he saves Lieutenant Dan (Gary Sinise) and loses his friend, Private "Bubba" (Mykelti Williamson).

At an anti-war rally in Washington, DC he briefly reunites with Jenny, whose life is a mess after searching for fame and pursuing a hippie lifestyle. Forrest starts a table tennis craze and becomes a nationally-known ping-pong whiz, using the money he earns to start a very successful shrimp boat business with Lt. Dan, who invests their money in Apple stock and both become wealthy in the process.

He then inspires people to jog, helps an entrepreneur create the smiley face stickers, and faces the loss of his mother (Sally Field), who tells him he must work out his own destiny. Through it all, Jenny and love eludes him. Forrest lived in turbulent times.

If you are dizzy just imagining all of this, so was I. After seeing Forrest Gump the first time I was appreciative of the film's merit, but overwhelmed by how one person could accomplish so much and be around so many famous people. After watching Forrest Gump 3 more times, I got over it and now only sing its praises.

Eventually Jenny sees Forrest running on television and writes him a letter to come see her. When he does, he discovers that Jenny has a son and is very sick. She asks Forrest to marry her, and soon after he does, she dies. He learns that he is the father of her child, and commits to raising him. When young Forrest gets on the bus for his first day of school, the white feather falls from the Curious George book he is carrying, is caught in the breeze and drifts skyward.

If you are wondering about the feather, it was real, but its performance in the movie was computer-based. The feather is important because it raises the question of whether we are all floating around accidental-like on a breeze, or if we each actually have a destiny. Forrest surmises that perhaps it is both.

Everything that happens to Forrest Gump is worth seeing, and much of what happens teaches us important lessons in life. This is a love story, a story of relationships and the story of one person in a very big world that is sometimes almost impossible to understand. All that is good and much that is bad is covered in the film.

To appreciate where Forrest Gump is coming from, learn from these memorable lines in the film:

1) Lieutenant Daniel Taylor: "Have you found Jesus yet, Gump?" Forrest Gump: "I didn't know I was supposed to be looking for him, sir."

2) Forrrest Gump: (describing Vietnam) "We was always taking long walks, and we was always looking for a guy named Charlie."

3) Jenny Curran: "Have you ever been with a girl, Forrest?" Forrest Gump: (nervously) "I sit next to them in my Home Economics class . . ."

4) Jenny Curran: "His name's Forrest." Forrest Gump: "Like me." Jenny Curran: "I named him after his daddy." Forrest Gump: "He got a daddy named Forrest, too?" Jenny Curran: "You're his daddy, Forrest."

5) Jenny Curran: "Do you ever dream, Forrest, about who you're gonna be?" Forrest Gump: "Who I'm gonna be?" Jenny Curran: "Yeah." Forrest Gump: "Aren't-aren't I going to be me?"

6) Forrest Gump: "I'm not a smart man . . . but I know what love is."

7) Forrest Gump: "Mama always said life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get." This line was voted 40th among the Top 100 Movie Quotes by the American Film Institute. In 2007, The AFI rated Forrest Gump as the 76th Greatest Movie of All Time.

8) Forrest Gump: "Stupid is as stupid does."

Tom Hanks patterned his accent after young Forrest (Michael Conner Humphreys, who actually talked that way).

Forrest Gump was an immensely successful film, with a production cost of $55 million and a worldwide gross of $677+ million. After its release in 1994, it became the fastest grossing Paramount film to reach the $100 million, $150 million and $200 million marks, and passed $250 million in 66 days.

Even more important, Forrest Gump won 6 Oscars at the Academy Awards-for Best Picture, Tom Hanks for Best Actor, Robert Zemeckis for Best Director, Eric Roth for Best Screenplay based on Winston Groom's novel, Arthur Schmidt for Best Film Editing, and Ken Ralston, George Murphy, Stephen Rosenbaum and Allen Hall for Best Visual Effects.

Forrest Gump also picked up another 7 Oscar nominations for Best Supporting Actor (Gary Sinise), Best Original Musical Score (Alan Silvestri), Best Set Decoration, Best Cinematography (Don Burgess), Best Makeup, Best Sound, and Best Sound Effects Editing.

Among its other 32 wins and 38 nominations were 7 Golden Globe nominations and wins for Best Actor, Best Director and Best Picture.

As is true with just about any other award-winning production, many famous professionals passed on the opportunity to be part of the success. Terry Gilliam and Barry Sonnenfeld were offered the chance to direct the film. Bill Murray was considered for the role of Forrest, Chevy Chase turned down the role of Forrest, and three others turned down the role of Bubba-David Alan Grier, Dave Chappelle and Ice Cube.

Tom Hanks said that he would make the film only if all the events that took place were historically accurate. For example, when Gump calls to report the Watergate burglary, the security guard on duty answers the phone by saying, "Security, Frank Willis." Willis was the actual guard on duty that night who discovered the break-in that led to Richard Nixon's resignation from the Presidency.

Tom Hanks is one incredible, bankable actor. While Forrest Gump grossed $677 million and is far and away his biggest box office success, he has been involved in 19 other films grossing $100+ million, and he ranks 3rd among all actors appearing in films with $3.3 billion generated.

Forrest Gump was directed by Robert Zemeckis, with the screenplay written by Eric Roth based on Winston Groom's novel. I really liked Forrest Gump and I think you will too. If you have seen it before, revisit it again and relive the magic moments of hope, courage, patience, love, understanding and compassion-all of which give special meaning to our life.

Read more of my movie reviews on families, including:

"A Christmas Story"

"My Big Fat Greek Wedding"

"Secondhand Lions"

"The Chorus (Les Choristes in French)"

"Waking Ned Devine"

These are all excellent films that can make you smile, laugh, cry and feel better for the experience. Don't just live life, experience life!

0 notes

theconservativebrief · 6 years

Link

In early July, a video game writer named Jessica Price embarked on a lengthy Twitter thread about the storytelling differences between games meant to be played as single-player experiences and games meant to be played by lots and lots of people at once, like Guild Wars 2, the massively multiplayer online role-playing game Price was a writer for.

Price’s thread received a perhaps too-haughty response from gaming YouTuber Deroir, who disagreed with some of what Price had to say. Price — who is, after all, a woman on the internet and thus is subject to a stunning amount of social media pushback and condescension — put Deroir on blast, first tweeting: “Today in being a female game dev: ‘Allow me–a person who does not work with you–explain to you how you do your job,’” and later following up with: “like, the next rando asshat who attempts to explain the concept of branching dialogue to me–as if, you know, having worked in game narrative for a fucking DECADE, I have never heard of it–is getting instablocked. PSA.”

The Guild Wars 2 community erupted in outrage at Price, who had either stuck up for herself against the endless onslaught of needling criticism that comes with being a woman online or had abused a position of authority to call a popular member of the gaming community an asshat by implication. (Price’s tweet didn’t directly call Deroir an asshat, but it was hard to miss her meaning.)

A few days later, ArenaNet, the company that makes Guild Wars 2, fired Price and her co-worker Peter Fries, who had defended Price in several Twitter threads. Price told Polygon that she was not given a chance to explain herself, or to apologize. She was simply fired, as was Fries.

The broad outlines of the controversy drew comparisons to Gamergate, the controversial movement that began in 2014 and involved a bunch of gamer and alt-right trolls using the cover of concern for ethics in video gaming as an excuse to harass women in the industry and to claim that calls for better representation and diversity within gaming were destroying video games.

Was Price’s firing a result of Gamergate’s actions? Not directly, no. Deroir was not a Gamergate adherent, and he wasn’t agitating for Price to be removed. Plus, plenty of people who found Price to be in the wrong weren’t Gamergaters.

But the answer to that question also has to be yes, because of how thoroughly the matter was discussed in Gamergate’s favored corners of the internet, which mostly jumped to Deroir’s defense, and because of how completely Gamergate changed the way games are talked about online and how women in the industry have to think about what might happen to them, something Price touches on in her Polygon interview.

In the years since 2014, Gamergate has metastasized and evolved into what feels like the entire alt-right movement, to the degree that many of the names boosted by the hyped-up controversy, names like Milo Yiannopoulos and Mike Cernovich, saw their stars only rise when they became central to online communities that backed the presidential candidacy of one Donald Trump. Gamergate went from a fringe movement that struck most people who heard about it as a weirdo curiosity to something that took over the country, as Vox’s Ezra Klein predicted it would with eerie accuracy in late 2014.

Gamergate didn’t manage to completely eliminate more diverse storytelling in games, as at least one silly controversy from this year would indicate, but it did slightly paralyze the video game industry. And that paralysis has begun to spread to other spheres of our culture.

Members of the movement have developed a tactic that they have deployed again and again to drive dissension in assorted online communities, using a mix of asymmetric warfare (in which they stage lots and lots of small strikes at giant corporations that don’t quite know what to do in response), the general lack of accountability applied to the movement’s various decentralized figures, and a tendency to turn progressive concerns inside out, in a weird attempt to reach parity. Gamergate didn’t really have anything to do with Price’s firing directly, but it also did, because Gamergate is now everywhere and everything.

The movement arguably elected a president. And just this past week, in a much higher-profile case than the firing of Jessica Price, it got director James Gunn fired from Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy franchise.

James Gunn attends the premiere of Ant-Man and the Wasp. Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images for Disney

Perhaps the above mention of “Mike Cernovich” has already pinged some part of your brain that remembers keywords from the news and headlines of the past few days; it was Cernovich who helped engineer a push to have Gunn fired from the third Guardians of the Galaxy film, by dredging up and encouraging his followers to circulate several of Gunn’s old tweets. Many of the tweets contain jokes about topics like rape and pedophilia.

Gunn’s roots are in over-the-top shlock cinema (he began his career at the famed low-budget genre movie company Troma, and his first credit is for writing Tromeo and Juliet). He directed the first two Guardians movies to general acclaim, and both his overall positivity and his general disdain for Trump have earned him more than a few left-leaning fans on social media platforms.

But that same disdain for Trump — and, of all things, the widespread pushback against a tweet in which filmmaker Mark Duplass praised conservative writer Ben Shapiro, which inspired Gunn to chime in on the fray — made Gunn a target for folks like Cernovich.

To be clear, Gunn’s past jokes are awful. They have surfaced before — most notably in 2012, when Gunn was hired to helm the first Guardians film. A blog post he had written in 2011 about which comic book characters fans would most like to have sex with drew ire from numerous left-leaning critics and social media personalities. Gunn ultimately apologized for his comments, and vowed to do better.

Later, in 2017, he told BuzzFeed that in the early days of his tenure at Marvel, he’d abandoned the persona that aimed to be a provocateur and adopted the persona that evolved into his current Twitter self. As described by BuzzFeed’s Adam B. Vary:

“I protect myself by writing scenes where people shoot people in the face,” Gunn said, chuckling. “And if I have to think around shooting someone in the face, it’s harder, but I think it’s more rewarding for me.” He cleared his throat. “I felt like Guardians forced me into a much deeper way of thinking about, you know, my relationship to people, I suppose. I was a very nasty guy on Twitter. It was a lot fucking edgy, in-your-face, dirty stuff. I suddenly was working for Marvel and Disney, and that didn’t seem like something I could do anymore. I thought that that would be a hindrance on my life. But the truth was it was a big, huge opening for me. I realized, a lot of that stuff is a way that I push away people. When I was forced into being this” — he moved his hand over his chest — “I felt more fully myself.”

And what’s “this”?

”Sensitive, I guess?” he said. “Positive. I mean, I really do love people. And by not having jokes to make about whatever was that offensive topic of the week, that forced me into just being who I really was, which was a pretty positive person. It felt like a relief.”

Yet all those old tweets remained on Twitter. Considering both Gunn’s 2011 blog post and the way he talks about his old tweets, it seems hard to believe that neither Marvel Studios nor its parent company, Disney, knew of their existence.

But when Cernovich surfaced a whole bunch of them last week in a graphic designed to strip them of as much context as possible, more and more conservative and alt-right personalities started passing them around, and Disney’s Alan Horn finally announced on Friday that Gunn would no longer be working for the company. (Gunn, for his part, made one of the better, “Yeah, I fucked up!” statements in a decade that seems to provide a new one every other week.)

Then Cernovich and his friends turned their sights on other comedy figures with provocative jokes in their past, like Michael Ian Black, Patton Oswalt, and Dan Harmon. Few of these men suffered consequences as severe as Gunn did for past jokes. But all were hounded endlessly on social media. Harmon even left Twitter.

I don’t particularly want to defend Gunn here. A lot of his old Twitter material is truly awful. It often takes the shape of a joke without actually being funny, which is deadly to anybody playing with comedic land mines like gags about child molestation and rape. Meanwhile, it’s also hard to believe that a white dude who directed two of the biggest movies of all time won’t get another chance in Hollywood, even if he has to step back and spend a year or two making indie movies.

But the way Gunn was fired sticks in my craw, just a little bit. It’s the biggest example yet of Gamergate and its ilk forcing a major public figure out of the job that made them a major public figure. By stripping events like this of their context, Cernovich and company might think they’re forcing the left to confront its own hypocrisies, or winning smaller battles in a larger culture war, or simply driving critics of the president off social media.

But make no mistake, they’re also destabilizing reality.

The cancellation of Roseanne in the wake of Roseanne Barr’s offensive tweet has been compared to Gunn’s firing. It shouldn’t be. ABC

The recent event that Gunn’s dismissal has drawn the most comparison to is ABC’s firing of Roseanne Barr from the now-canceled TV show that bore her name. (The series will live on as a spinoff titled The Conners, sans Barr.)

In that case, too, an awful tweet (in this case, a racist remark about former Obama staffer Valerie Jarrett) led to somebody who seemed protected by recent success being removed from the franchise that had yielded said success. And in that case, too, the person fired had worked for the Walt Disney Company, the biggest behemoth in the entertainment industry, one that’s about to swallow another behemoth like it’s a tiny little goldfish.

But pull back some of the layers and the two events couldn’t be more dissimilar. The most obvious difference is the timing. Gunn wrote his tweets in the late 2000s and early 2010s, before he was hired by Marvel and long before he became a critic of Trump. Barr’s tweet was published the morning she was fired.

This is not to say that Gunn’s tweets are excusable but, instead, to point to all the instances in which Barr posted horrible tweets shortly before ABC picked up a new season of Roseanne, only for Disney and ABC officials to laugh them off. If Disney meant to establish a precedent with what happened with Barr, it was essentially, “If you have skeletons in your closet, whatever. Just don’t add any new ones.” Gunn, if nothing else, had seemed scrupulous about the “not adding any new ones” part (that we know of so far, at least).

An even bigger difference between Gunn’s and Barr’s tweets concerns the context of the tweets and the intention behind them. Most of us might judge Gunn’s tweets as bad jokes, sure, but they’re mostly recognizable as jokes, and jokes in the style of 2000s Gen-X comedians trying like hell to provoke a reaction by being as “edgy” and offensive as possible.

What’s been interesting, too, is watching many of the comedians in question — including Gunn and Black but also folks like Sarah Silverman, Sacha Baron Cohen, and South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone — try to figure out how to navigate an era when the ironic offensiveness they trafficked in has been co-opted by a movement that insists they always meant it, deep down. Most have become vocal Trump critics. But few have managed the transition very easily.

This is the danger in making jokes rooted in ironic offensiveness, even when you’re a master of the form (like Silverman is). At a certain point, somebody is always laughing right alongside you and taking from the joke the message that racism is okay if it’s funny, or that provoking a reaction from someone by joking about rape is funnier than the joke itself.

Ironic offensiveness is far too easy to twist into the idea that nothing is worth caring about, and that getting those who do care to lash out is the funniest thing possible. That idea is now the basis of an entire internet culture that kept splintering, with one of those splinters becoming dedicated to trolling above all else. It eventually got to a point where nobody was sure who was serious and who was joking, or if there was even a difference.

Start to unpack the comedy of the figures listed above, or of their modern comedic descendants and fellow travelers like the terrifically funny hosts of the leftist podcast Chapo Trap House, and you’ll find that somewhere, deep down, they care deeply. The ironic offensiveness and shocking humor is meant to spur a reaction that hopefully guides you to a similar sense of caring and sincerity. But that requires genuine engagement and thought, and it’s easy to opt out of genuine engagement and thought when you’re laughing, in favor of taking the joke at face value.

This, I think, is what happened to Barr, who went from being an incisive comedian to being a millionaire many times over to being someone who promoted some of the same conspiracy theory nonsense that Cernovich peddles. (It’s no mistake that many of the tweets Cernovich surfaced to try to tank Michael Ian Black’s career involved him simply talking about pizza — in the worldview of Cernovich and Barr, there is a massive left-wing conspiracy to engage in pedophilia and protect fellow pedophiles, often using “pizza” as a code word for child sex.) Gunn didn’t really believe what he was saying; Barr did.

But does that context matter? Or does the statement itself matter? The fact is, both Barr and Gunn said horrible things. If we draw hard moral lines in the sand, if we insist that certain things matter to us and are important to uphold as ethical guidelines, does it ever matter that somebody might genuinely move past something bad they did in the past, might become a better person? Or are we all, always, defined by our darkest, worst moments?

Gamergate briefly devoured the internet in 2014. But it never really went away. Shutterstock

A little over a week ago, the most popular Gamergate subreddit, Kotaku in Action, briefly went offline. The user who had created the subreddit in the first place, david-me, then posted to r/Drama (a subreddit dedicated to tracing internal Reddit action and excitement) saying that he had shut down KIA. Explaining his logic, he wrote, in part:

KiA is one of the many cancerous growths that have infiltrated reddit. The internet. The world. I did this. Now I am undoing it. This abomination should have always been aborted.

So in this moment with years of contemplation, I am Stopping it. I’m closing shop and I can’t allow anyone to exploit my handicap. I’ve watched and read every day. Every single day. The mods are good at what they do, but they are moderating over a sub that should not exist. The users have created content that should not be. Topics that do not require debate. And often times molded by outside forces.

We are better than this. I should have been better than this. Just look at the comment history of any users history. The hate is spread by very few, but very often. Overwhelmingly so.

Reddit and it’s Admins are Me. They are the stewards of hate and divisiveness and they let it go. They go so far as to even claim there is nothing they can do about it. Those with upvotes could have been stopped by others with equally powerful downvotes. Fallacy. 100 evil people with 100,000 upvotes can not be defeated by 100,000 with 100 downvotes.

Reddit stepped in. It restored Kotaku in Action, and by extension restored one of Gamergate’s most prominent platforms. The subreddit hadn’t directly violated Reddit’s hate speech rules, even if it was constantly dancing on the very edge of them. If Kotaku in Action is a cancer, as its founder alleges, then it is one that remains free to spread unchecked.

When I was covering the early days of Gamergate, I believed the core of its argument was, in essence, that caring is a waste of time — that wanting video games to have more diverse characters and the industry that makes them to have better representation across the board was a pointless exercise. Gamergate adherents seemed to believe the focus of the industry should be making better games, an argument that ignored that for many, having more diverse games was necessary for having better games.

I was wrong. The core argument of Gamergate, and of the alt-right more generally, has always been that caring is hypocritical. Deep down, both movements believe that everybody is racist and sexist and homophobic, that the left, especially, is simply trying to lord a moral superiority over everybody else when, in secret cabals, they kidnap babies and run child molestation rings out of the basements of pizza restaurants. This idea is referred to as “virtue signaling,” meaning that there is no such thing as real virtue, only a pretend virtue that people deploy to try to win points with mainstream society, when everybody would be better off dropping the pretense and letting their most offensive freak flags fly.

And it’s tricky to combat the idea of virtue signaling, because of course we all virtue-signal all the time. Parents virtue-signal to teach their children, and corporations virtue-signal to make their products seem more palatable to a rapidly diversifying America, and I virtue-signal every time I tweet something that says I’m supportive of, say, the Black Lives Matter movement without joining affiliated protests.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t want the broader goals of BLM to be realized immediately, or that corporations won’t take your money regardless of color or creed, or that parents shouldn’t teach their children not to resort to violence when others say or do something they don’t like.

Virtue signaling is still virtue, even if in your heart, you’re so angry or upset that you feel like punching someone. Cynicism about the motivations behind good acts doesn’t erase that the acts are good. We all do all sorts of things for a variety of complicated reasons. It doesn’t erase the fact that the net result of those actions ultimately has very little to do with our motivations.

The argument of Cernovich and his cronies is, ultimately, that none of us is actually good, that we are all venal and horrible, and that we live in a world where we should all, always, be pitted against each other, defined only by our worst selves. And because nobody is ever going to fire Cernovich for all the times he’s tweeted about rape, because he’s a self-made media personality, the war becomes ever more asymmetric. The only people who can hold Gamergate and its adherents accountable are members of the movement, who will occasionally toss someone out but almost always do so under the pretense of a game or, worse, a joke.

There are real people whose lives are ruined, each and every day, by Cernovich and his ilk, and our modern corporate media climate continues to have no idea what to do about it, because the battles are deliberately constructed to strip away context and to predetermine their outcomes from the first.

Twitter isn’t actually everywhere, but it feels like it can be everywhere. Andrew Burton/Getty

I began this article with the story of Jessica Price instead of the story of James Gunn for a reason. It’s entirely possible you haven’t heard of either, but if you’ve only heard of one, it’s almost certainly James Gunn. Yet the devastation to Price’s career will be much more substantial than whatever happens to Gunn, who will at least be collecting residuals from the Guardians movies for the rest of time.

Price’s situation is a valuable lesson in how so much of this works because the circumstances of her firing are muddier and harder to prosecute. Yes, the representative of a corporation that sells a service probably shouldn’t be calling her customers asshats. But any woman with a large enough social media profile knows just how quickly a seemingly innocuous, “Actually…” can turn into a massive dogpile of Twitter yahoos with nothing better to do. What happened to Price ostensibly has nothing to do with Gamergate. But its shadow lurks nonetheless, because it is now everywhere.

Could Price have handled things better? Probably. Should she have been fired for how she did handle them? I find that a lot harder to argue. It suggests that every employee of every organization with a vaguely public-facing persona has to be 100 percent perfect all of the time across all platforms, or else. And if you remove enough context from just about anything, you can make somebody look as bad as you want, unless they’re anodyne and milquetoast all of the time, which leads to sitting US senators suggesting that perhaps James Gunn should be investigated for pedophilia “if the tweets are true.”

The idea, I guess, is that we should all just turn off the internet and step away from social media when things get too hairy. But I would hope we all realize how impossible that is most of the time, and it’s in that imbalance that Cernovich and his pals forever create dissension and uncertainty.

I said above that what Cernovich wants to do is destabilize reality; that might seem like a big leap, but think about it. We’ve already gone from “these are bad jokes” to “if the tweets are true,” from carefully examining the thing in context to quickly glancing at the thing with as little context as possible, so that it looks as bad as it could possibly be. And when you’re fighting a culture war, and grasping for requital, I suppose that’s fair. Culture wars, too, have their victims.

But this still leaves us with a world where the terms of the game are set by a bunch of people who argue not in good faith, but in a way designed to force everybody into the same bad-faith basket. They are interested not in finding a deeper truth but in the easy cynicism of believing that everybody is as dark-hearted and frightened as them, that the world is a place that can never be made better, so why even try? Flood the zone with enough bad information and turn reality into enough of a game and you can make anything you want seem believable, until bad jokes become a dark harbinger of a horrific reality looming just over the horizon.

I’ve never believed that approach can win in the long run. I’ve always believed that in the end, some sort of truth will hold fast, and the fever will break. But sometimes, of late, I wonder if I’m wrong — and the only thing that stops me from convincing myself is the fear that accepting even guarded optimism as futile would only turn me into one of them, forever spiraling and never reaching bottom.

Original Source -> James Gunn’s firing shows we’re still living in the Gamergate era

via The Conservative Brief

#IFTTT #The Conservative Brief

0 notes

llantrisantscc · 6 years

Text

Classic GT Round 3 - 16th May 2018

Scientific fact * - if you want to get on the podium of Classic GT at Llany, you need to get a white car with a red stripe down the centre line.

Quieter this week, two bods on hols and one prepping for a race the next night. I think we are all running a bit thin on passes out this week, South Manchester for Wales and West last Sunday, Lanny tonight, Abergavenny tomorrow and the Slot Festival on the coming weekend. On the plus side, nobody mentioned the incident on Sunday where a certain member blunted another member’s challenge in the Open GT class by callously punting said members car onto the floor during the heat of battle. So that kept things civil. But we did have a really long serious talk about the new track at South Mancs – I don’t know if they guys have named it, but it was a thing of beauty from the construction point of view. The majority o us really enjoyed racing on it too.

It was Yellow’s turn to host quali this week – a few members thought it was a bit flat, power-wise, tonight, but I’m pretty inept so couldn’t tell the difference. Craig gave us muggles a glimmer of hope by having a poor opening brace of laps, but normal service was resumed on his final lap – us lot would not have been able to cope with the pressure ☹ Steve, meanwhile, built lap on lap to take a well-earned Pole. Martyn’s interval to Craig and Leon’s to Martyn were both 0.084 – I love that sort of trivia.

H1 saw Seb and Alan pair up in Yellow and Blue, whilst Karl and Lee did likewise in Green and Red. The latter pairing had a right old destruction derby on the outlap, but soon calmed down to have a good dice all the way to the flag. Lee had let Karl get away early in P3 but got the hammer down and chased hard until L23, when Karl had an off, Lee was close enough to move ahead. Karl’s turn to keep cool and chase. Karl had an off on L28, but Lee outdid him with a double off – Karl finished the lap under a second ahead! Then disaster – Karl had an off on L29 and Lee was a full second up. On the last lap, more drama – Lee was in the ditch with only 3 corners to go – zoom, there goes Karl taking P3 at the flag. Meanwhile, Seb was having a great run in Yellow, with just the one off to pause the charge, and Alan wasn’t doing too bad in Blue either. The Scuderia coming home in formation for P1 and P2.

Alan had a good start in Green in H3 and proceeded to amble away from the pack a they had a right old scrap in his wake. Lee held the upper hand of the chasing pack in Yellow for the first 18 laps, but a brace of poor laps saw the other two close in. Of which, Seb had the better first lap in Blue compared to Karl in Green, but L2 went the other way with Karl slipping up to 3rd as Seb was relegated to the tail of the field. L18 was an odd affair – Lee slipped from 2nd to the rear, as Seb swapped places with him, and Karl sandwiched in 3rd – you could cover them with the proverbial pit cloth. Seb took a tumble on L26, putting him right next to Lee, as Karl was promoted to 2nd. Karl made a dash for the line as Lee chased Seb – a hiccup for Seb on L26 saw Lee pinch 3rd spot. Good thing Seb didn’t give up, Lee had two stinkers to finish his heat – Seb slipping up to third, then on the last lap for Karl deslotted, but Seb couldn’t quite get close enough to take second from him. Frantic stuff, eh?

I’m glad to say, a restorative cup of rosie calmed things down for H5 – no, wait, it didn’t. H5 was a frantic affair, Seb leading away in Green with Karl next in Yellow, Lee 3rd in Blue and Alan at the rear in Red. Lee and Alan swapped positions on L2, just on speed. Karl rocketed to the rear with problems on LLs 3&4, inspiring Alan to continue his meteoric rise of a place per lap, going rear to front in four laps. The Birchmores squared up and had a right old ding-dong, swapping places 5 more times before an off on L21 scuppered Alan’s charge. A great recovery saw him close to within 1/10th of Junior, but an adventurous lunge to pass Seb on the last lap came to naught and Alan found himself in the stingies. His place was safe though, as Karl and Lee scrapped all the way to the line, there was enough gap between Alan and third placed Karl for him not to panic too much.

I think the excitement of H5 was a bit too much for the boys, H7 started Seb red, Alan Yellow, Lee Green and Karl Blue. It also finished that way without a single overtake. Seb and Alan had one poor lap apiece -would have been great to finish with a clean sheet, and Karl wasn’t making life easy for Lee in the earlier laps, but still, it ended as it begun. Not a bad night of racing for these four.

The guys running the even heats stepped up for H2, Craig leading off in Yellow, Martyn following in Red, with Leon Green and Steve Blue. L2 saw Craig off – everyone stepping up a place. Next lap saw Leon crash to the back of the field. Craig was circulating at a far old pace, so predictably, on L5 his superior lap times saw him swap places with Dad as he eased his way into second. Craig furiously hunted Martyn down, the latter getting respectable laps in Red, but Craig was flying in Yellow. An off for Craig on L17 thwarted that comeback, and again 5 laps later saw Craig once more in the gravel. This excursion blunting his assault on the lead. So that’s how they rolled out at the end of L30. “Three offs for Craig in Yellow with a superb car” I hear you say – well you’ll have to wait till tea break before I reveal the cause.

And sure enough, out they toddle for H4, kettles on, watch the lights – Martyn is away I Yellow, Leon behind him Red, followed by Steve in Green and Craig in Blue. L2 saw both Craig and Leon off – Mr Gibbons being careful not to wantonly and with malice aforethought clout a Jones onto the floor like he did on Sunday (damn, promised not to mention that too often). These two separate incidents allowed Martyn and Steve to leg it. Steve really was leaning on Martyn, putting loads of pressure on him as he circulated a few tenths off his tailpipe. Luckily for Martyn, Steve had an off on L13, also allowing Leon to step up to P2. Apart from the early off and the good fortune in passing Steve, Leon had run a fairly uneventful heat – rather playing a canny long game of keeping out of trouble and being Mr Very Consistent. Martyn’s only slipup of the heat came on L24, which saw Leon close to within two seconds of the lead. Uncharacteristically, Martyn managed to keep it in the slot for the short sprint to the line to maintain a 100% record. Since ceding 2nd place, Steve drove a very aggressive heat to close to within 3/10 sec of Leon at the line. All the while, Craig had adapted his styling and got his car home with some very controlled laps, not losing any more time out of the slot. Not surprisingly, Martyn declared the rest of the night abandoned and proceeded to take photos of the score sheets – it’s not very often the cocky little oik is in front of the two Jones’ after two heats, so probably a long time before he can bask in that false glory again.

And the secret of Craig’s woes? A clerical error back at Jones Racing’s state of the art headquarters in Pontypandy saw Jones junior have to race with a faulty throttle – the wrong throttle had gone into his box after the last event on Sunday. An internal investigation concluded it was either due to Jones junior’s euphoria at his result in South Mancs, on the upset of Jones senior after his event was ruined by (oh there I go again!). H6 saw it really start to play up, sadly, which ruined Craig’s attack.

H6 saw Leon out front in yellow for the opening six laps, before he hit the back after a derailment. Steve started in P” in Red, with Craig P3 in Green and Martyn at the rear in Blue. Craig passed Steve on L2, but L3 saw him loose 2 places. Martyn enjoyed three laps in P3, then got passed by Craig on L6, Craig moving to P2 a lap later as Steve inherited the lead and Martyn followed Craig up to P3. Craig again lost 2 places on L8, but 3 laps later managed to pass Leon. Martyn then lst 2 places to hit the rear. L17 Craig lost 2 places to hit the back once more, Martyn moved up to P3 and Leon to P2. From L17, Leon started to open a gap, lap by lap, on Martyn, but Jones snr was way out in front. A double off 5 laps from home gave Leon a bit of a twitchy moment as Martyn got back to within less than a second. T the flag, Steve was well ahead, Leon next, Martyn a second and a quarter adrift and Craig a few seconds back.

Going into the last heat, if Steve could use the broken controller, Martyn might just have an outside chance of making up the 7 and bit seconds he needed to beat Steve. The chances of that happening with Steve in Yellow and Martyn in Green were about nil – still, you can’t knock a lad for dreaming, eh? Craig started beautifully in Red, but the wonky controller stuffed him on H2, Steve took to the fore in Yellow, never to be bested again tonight. Almost flag to flag Steve, but Craig’s gunfighter reflexes off the line dd for you. Martyn got away 3rd in Green, but also tripped up on L2 thus giving Leon a leg up in Blue, just as Craig passed him going the other way. P4 to P2 in one lap – nice one big guy! P2 was short lived though, Craig was back there a lap later. Martyn managed to squeeze into P3 on L12, just on speed, as he and Leon had some fun circulating together, teasing each other that they were going to whack the other’s car off the track. Decorum was maintained, and by dint of Green being a lot easier (and a bit shorter) than Blue, Martyn was able to edge away. The controller bit Craig again on L19, and Martyn was able to slip into P2. Craig got some significantly faster laps in over the closing stages, but the controller was throwing the odd wobbler, so Martyn was lucky to hold P2 to the end. A great run by Steve extended his lead from just over 7secs to just over 20 – storming drive. What might have been for Craig? He was driving like a demon when the throttle was behaving, but the unpredictability was a variable you can’t cope with at the speed we were running tonight. Needless to say, the offending throttle is off to Italy for a repair under warranty.

And seeing as it was only two groups, we were finished nice and early allowing a bit of testing to go ahead. Oh yeah, and we discussed the South Mancs new track for quite a while too!

(* Scientific fact = sample study of one instance, 16th May 2018)

#Classic GT #Round 3 #2018 #llantrisant slotcar club

0 notes

martens-movie-reviews · 7 years

Text

Released: July 22, 2011 Running Time: 2 hours 4 minutes

“It is 1941 and the world is in the throes of war. Steve Rogers wants to do his part and join America’s armed forces, but the military rejects him because of his small stature. Finally, Steve gets his chance when he is accepted into an experimental program that turns him into a supersoldier called Captain America. Joining forces with Bucky Barnes and Peggy Carter, Captain America leads the fight against the Nazi-backed HYDRA organization.”

In honour of the latest movie from the Marvel Cinematic Universe being released on November 3, 2017, I decided that I wanted to review all of the previous MCU films, and it was also a wonderful excuse to rewatch all the movies again. My girlfriend and I wanted to watch it with a group of friends, however there was no time that we could all agree on, and to space it all out didn’t work, so we watched the MCU movies during the month of September and October so that we would be ‘all caught up’ for Thor Ragnarok.

Marvel Cinematic Universe – Source – Marvel

You can find all of the reviews for the Marvel Cinematic Universe at the link here. At that link, you can also find the dates that the other reviews for the Marvel Cinematic Universe will be posted. My plan is to release one every single day, and because I’ve already reviewed Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 here, and Spider – Man: Homecoming here, they will not be included in the two weeks leading up to Thor Ragnarok.

As such, I will now move onto the actual review of the film, and I hope you enjoy!

Captain America: The First Avenger Trailer – Source: Paramount Pictures & Marvel Studios

Cast and Crew

This film was directed by Joe Johnston,

written by Stephen McFeely & Christopher Markus,