I saw others doing this and I couldn't resist lol this is just for fun ngl 💪

Let Me In - Part 2

Prompt: “If I knock politely will you let me in? I’ll make it worth your while”

Pairing: Baekhyun x Reader

Word Count: 4,950

Warnings: Vampire AU, smut, blood, mentions of death, murder & torture.

A/N: Part 1 was in my Halloween drabbles from a long ass time ago. I continuously got requests for a second part so it finally came into being today. Let me know what you think, comments help me greatly given the large breaks between posting for me, they help me work out if I’m still any good at this writing business.

“S-so, a-are you g-gonna k-kill me?” You stutter out, your fear making it hard for you to get the words out.

He smirks and steps back, freeing you from the wall. Before you can even think about regaining some semblance of composure he kneels on the floor and sinks his fangs into the dead man’s neck. Your eyes widen as you stand frozen to the spot, unable to blink, run, anything. It takes all you have just to remember to breathe.

He drops the corpse back to the floor when he’s finished feeding, licking his blood-stained lips as he sets his eyes on you again. “I think you’ve bought yourself some time.” He steps closer to you, caging your body between his arms, your back pressed back against the wall. “Convince me to let you live, but your case had better be compelling since you wasted my time earlier.” His dark gaze feels like its searing lines into your flesh as you feel it travel from your eyes to your lips, throat, & chest before raking back up to your eyes. “You still haven’t let me in.” He smirks.

What was that stupid saying that you used to say to your friends? Mark me down as scared and horny. That’s pretty much where you were right now. Terrified for multiple reasons (vampires were real, one sent a madman to kill you then killed said madman in front of you and was maybe, probably, most definitely doing to kill you) but also horny. It was impossible to deny how attractive Baekhyun was, both before when you thought he was human and now as he pinned you to the wall. Your mind is racing, jumping between freaking out about your impending death and lewd comments about his lips, hands, hips. If it had the capacity to take on anything else it might also be disgusted with itself for allowing lust to creep in at a time like this. 

Somewhere deep down in your psyche a thought sparks. Draw this out, stay alive as long as you possibly can. The longer you are alive, the closer you are to sunrise. Make it to sunrise and escape. It wasn’t much to go on but it was the best you could think of. There was no way that you would overpower him with strength. If you wanted to win here then you were going to need to be smart and bide your time. Use every advantage that you could and the sun was a powerful one. His ego might just be another.

“I want to know more about you.” He raises one brow in response.

“Why?” 

You inhale, steeling your nerves as you say the words that will change your life forever. “In the bar before, we talked. I liked that, liked getting to know you -” the words were not untrue. The bar had been nice. You’d captured the attention of the man every person, men and women alike, desired but he had only had eyes for you. You had been sitting at the bar enjoying your Old Fashioned when Baekhyun had first approached you. At the time it was immensely flattering but in hindsight you were probably just easy prey. You were alone and no one else had been paying much attention to you. “- but now that I know that you’re well, not human, I feel like that was all lies. Tell me about you first. Then I’ll let you in.” 

He shifts back and considers your words. “Why should I tell you anything at all? I could just compel you to let me in and use you until I’m bored of your body.” His tone betrays him. He might be impatient and used to getting what he wants but from the way his tone shifted when he said he could compel you, you could tell that doing so would ruin the fun for him. 

So you played with fire, figuratively speaking of course. Standard negotiating probably wouldn’t work here because a) you were terrified and b) impatient vampire. You weren’t trying to get out of sleeping with him either. You were attracted to him even through your fear and there was no denying that you wanted him. All you were trying to gain was time. The closer it got to sunrise, the higher your chances of survival were. 

So you tried to match his ego to unnerve him.“Where is the fun in that?” You shrug. “If all you want is a body to fuck, then why ask me to convince you to let me live? Surely it’s better for you with a willing participant.” You take a step forward, avoiding the dead body on the floor, and advance on Baekhyun as you continue to speak. “One that wants you, that begs for you, that needs you.” You lick your lips as you finish, your words affecting you more than you thought they would. “Why put it all of the effort at the bar when you could have simply locked eyes and told me what you wanted me to do? I think you enjoy the hunt so why spoil it now? What harm is there in telling me about yourself when I’m just going to die anyway?” You shrug. 

Baekhyun takes a few steps back and looks at you, really looks at you. His eyes narrow as he takes you in and tries to work out your ploy. “Interesting tactic little one. Futile though.” He smirks and turns away from you, heading off towards your kitchen. 

Left with the corpse just behind you, you decide to follow him rather than rush out the front door. Baekhyun has already proved that he is faster than you so you probably wouldn’t get very far and even if you got to a neighbour in time there is the very real possibility that they’d die and it would be your fault. 

As you enter the kitchen you spot Baekhyun mixing drinks. He points at the two armchairs you have in your makeshift reading nook, a place that has brought you comfort over the years. If there was ever a place for you to fight for your life then this would be the one place that would bring you strength. You make your way over to one of the armchairs and sink into its comforting embrace while you wait for Baekhyun to finish making drinks.

“I’ll play your game for now little one but don’t push your luck.” He says as he carries two drinks over, handing you one once he is close enough. You notice that he’s made the same drink that you were having at the bar. “You’re not wrong, compelling a mark kind of ruins the vibe but if I have to do it, I will.”

“Noted.”

“Asking me to tell you about myself is a bit vague given my lengthy existence so why don’t you try something more specific? I’ll let you ask as many questions as you want but there is a price for my answers.” He smirks.

“Name it.”

“Each time I answer you, you must remove an article of clothing. Once removed I’m free to touch the unclothed area. When you run out of clothing, your question time ceases and you submit yourself to me to have you as I please.”

You gulp as you try not to let on how appealing his price sounds. The logical part of your brain tries to yell over the burning lust that is taking over your senses about the dangers involved here but as far as you see it your options are die in pain or die in pleasure. Given the choice, you will avoid pain at almost any cost. He thinks he has you trapped, like a cat cornering a mouse but you aren’t so sure that you’ve been beaten yet. Not that he needs to know that.

“I accept your terms.” You say before taking a sip of your drink. The whiskey soothing any errant nerves. 

You see Baekhyun’s eyes darken with desire as he sits opposite you, a smug look on his face now that he thinks he’s won. “I’ll give you a point for not forcing an unnecessary negotiation or rebuttal upon hearing my price.”

“You said not to waste your time. Your terms are not unsurprising and it did not seem like it was up for negotiation when you delivered it.”

“Smart woman.” He relaxed into the armchair, swirling his drink in one hand as the other beckoned for you to begin your questioning.

“How much of what you told me about yourself at the bar was true?”

“All of it.” He states bluntly, chuckling at the surprised look on your face. “I do work at a law firm in town with 8 others, it’s how we exist in human society. I don’t have traditional family as such anymore as I’ve long outlived them. I do prefer to go out at night for obvious reasons beyond my control and I find great beauty in the night.” 

Baekhyun was right, he had told you the truth, just a very short version of it. Should that make you trust him any more? Probably not, but it did instil a small amount of something in you about him. He could have just lied about everything in order to lure you away but he chose the truth. In some weird way that counted for something. 

“No lies, you just never bothered to dig deeper at the time.” He purred, eyes roaming your body as he waited to see what you would remove.

You slipped out of your leather jacket and draped it over the back of your seat. Baekhyun groaned impatiently when he saw the long sleeves that remained covering your arms. Victory, it would seem, was not yet within his grasp. Begrudgingly he took another sip of his drink as you laughed internally at his reaction.

“Is your normal pattern to trick someone into letting you into their home then you kill them?”

“No. My clan and I have tried many things over the years. Let’s see. There was compelling which was just too easy and made our existence dull, posing as missionaries which weirdly enough worked better than it should have… not that I’ll ever let Suho know that. Next was outright frenzy where we razed a town, feasted and moved on - that was one of the early ones.” He grins as he reminisces. “Where was I, oh yes. We told people we were vampires - that one was particularly popular in the 2000’s, we’ve pretended to be injured or dead then attacked the person who was kind enough to try and help us, also too easy in my opinion but effective. You humans are gullible.” He chuckles. “We also tried to use blood banks but supplies could not sustain our hunger without detection, so then we tried setting up our own donor systems but that was a logistical nightmare and more red tape than you should ever have to deal with as an immortal. Roleplay was a fun one, biting is a real kink for so many people - who knew? - and now the current approach which is an amalgamation of past methods - seduction and pleasure followed by feeding.” He finishes his account of vampiric blood sourcing by licking his lips, his fangs hidden from your view. 

If you hadn’t seen them plunged into the neck of the now deceased man in your entryway you could be fooled into thinking that the man sitting across from you was just that, a man. But you had seen them and you knew they were real. You also knew the telltale signs of an impatient man and Baekhyun was most definitely impatient. 

For an immortal being who could remain as still at the night he was fidgeting and tapping his glass more than any vampire should. Whether it was hunger or something else causing it you didn’t know. The erratic movements were unsettling and causing your nerves to return. His gaze pierces yours as he waits.

You set your drink on the floor and stand, moving your arms behind you as you unzip your skirt, letting it fall to the floor, revealing a small amount of flesh at the top of your thighs, your garter belt and stockings covering most of the unveiled skin.

You hear him inhale, something he does not need to do. “You’re just going to leave it on the floor like that? Little one, it will crumple.” His voice is rough as he chides you.

You smirk and turn away from him before giving him what he wants. You step out of the skirt, bend at the hips and collect the discarded piece from the floor. You can feel his eyes on your ass as you bend forward, leaving little to the imagination. Only a small strip of fabric prevents him from your sex.

After you place your skirt on the back of the chair, on top of the jacket, you sit. Your brain doesn’t register the movement but before you can cross one leg over the other Baekhyun is there, kneeling between them, his hands on the uppermost part of your thighs where the skin is exposed. 

“You,” He growls. “do not know the fire with which you are playing with.” You can see the tips of his fangs now. Your body betrays you as you feel heat and want rushing to your core and your eyes close. His fingers trace patterns into your thighs, ghosting near the edge of your panties and down your inner thighs which only builds your arousal. 

“You’ll beg for me to fuck you before you’re fully undressed little one. Why deny yourself what we both know you desire?” He grazes his fangs along the column of your neck as your core clenches around nothing. 

When you open your eyes he is back in his seat swirling his drink like he had never moved. The absence of his touch left you wanting. Your stubbornness is the only thing keeping you from rushing through your questions because Baekhyun is not wrong, you want him - badly. “Are you going to kill me?”

He cocks his head as he ponders your question. “Honestly haven’t made my mind up yet. Before this current bargain I was just going to fuck you and drain you, the only variable there being if I let you enjoy it or if I let you feel pain. Now… I’m not sure. You might be interesting enough to keep alive for now. It all depends really.”

Your fingers expertly undo the buttons of your blouse and you shrug out of its sleeves, leaving you clad only in your underwear and heels. “On what?” You ask. The lines of this little ruse are starting to blur for you. The original plan to keep Baekhyun talking in order to reach sunrise is fading, leaving only images on the vampire taking you every which way, giving you pleasure you could only dream of. 

“On you little one.” Baekhyun’s voice comes from directly behind you. You feel his hands moving down your sides, one snaking between your legs and gripping your inner thigh and the other splayed over your stomach. You feel his fangs drag over your throat and you shudder. “You might just convince me.” You feel his presence disappear and know without turning around that he is no longer standing behind you. You can feel where his hands were on your body, the ghost of his touch remaining. 

As you look around you can’t spot him anywhere. You know he’s still in the house because why would he leave now? You make your way to the various rooms in your home as you search for the vampire but he is nowhere. You start to feel frustration overtaking your lust as you call out. “Baekhyun! Where are you?” 

His voice sounds from a room that you had already checked, your bedroom. “This game needs to continue in another room little one.” You make your way back upstairs to your room as he speaks again, his voice closer this time. “You are far too indecently clothed to be in a sitting room.” 

As you enter the room you see him leaning against your bedpost, his eyes roaming your body. Your ears register the sound of him moving past you but your eyes do not. The door closes behind you and he appears to have not moved. The fear inside you spikes back up as you witness a modicum of his power. You’ve been toying with him when all along he could just snap you like a twig.the thought terrifies you but you try to push your fear down. It will not help you now.

You saunter towards the bed only for him to hold up a hand and stop you. “I believe you asked a question little one. You know the rules.” Left with only a few options you step out of your heels and continue towards the bed.

By your count you have three questions left before this little game ends and you plan to use them to ensure that whatever happens after doesn’t hurt you and might just lead to you keeping your life. You aren’t going to bother with asking more about his past. You are pretty sure you know enough, he’s been undead for quite some time but from looking at him you would guess that he was in his 20’s when he was turned. He can be cruel - you have not forgotten the madman he compelled earlier - he is determined, overconfident, smug, impatient and alluring and he has made you crazed with lust. 

“How do you want me?” you ask sultrily as you reach the foot of your bed.

Out of the corner of your eye you see him remove his jacket and place it over the chair at your dresser. His shoes and socks are next, then he starts to unbutton his shirt as he moves behind you. You can feel him standing behind you but he does not touch you. He lets the anticipation build, he knows this game has almost reached its end, he is one step closer to getting what he wants from you.

“Naked and wanting.” He confesses. “Reveling in the pleasure I give you, begging for more.”

Your bra drops to the floor, making him groan. “And what will you do to me?” You ask, before he can say anything to alter your train of thought. Your mind is set on one path and one path only now. You want him. You want him to make you forget that you were ever afraid of him, that he ever posed a danger to you, that he is anything more than an incredibly attractive man with eyes only for you.

“Everything.” He whispers in your ear. His hands cup your breasts, fingers lightly pinching your nipples. “I’ll make you feel pleasure like you’ve never felt before. Make you beg for me to never stop fucking you, for me to bite you. And I will, once you beg for it.”

A moan escapes your throat, giving away just how aroused you are. Your hand brushes against his crotch as you move to undo your garter belt and you feel how hard he is for you. He stops your hand and completes the action for you, sliding the stockings down your legs and off your feet. He spins you and pushes you down onto the bed, removing the shirt from his shoulders and undoing his pants as he kneels at your feet. 

“Why me?” you manage to say as you watch him undress, your eyes taking in the lean planes of his body. He wasn’t wearing underwear you muse as your eyes are drawn to his cock, hard and waiting to enter you. His eyes follow yours and he grins when he realises where their gaze has not wavered. Shuffling back of the bed far gracefully than he has any right to, he moves back into a standing position so that he can remove his pants. 

Fully naked, he moves back to his position between your legs. “What’s the point of being immortal if you deny yourself the simple pleasures in life?” he responds as he kisses your ankle, before moving up your calf, to your thigh, hip, breast, neck before finally reaching your lips. “I find beauty in the night and I take what I want. Right now, that is you.”

His lips crash into yours in a kiss that is so desperate that you don’t register the ripping of your panties until you can feel him, all of him flush against your skin. His body doesn’t emit heat, rather it is cool to the touch but it isn’t a bad feeling. Rather it is refreshing in comparison to how hot you feel. His mouth works against yours, the lip ring providing a new sensation for the kiss.

When he breaks the kiss to allow you to breathe you see the dark fire in his eyes, his desire palpable. “You’re mine now little one. I told you your game was futile, that you would give in to me and here we are, your wet little cunt begging for my cock. Do you think you deserve pleasure after how long you made me wait?”

“Yes.” you breathe.

He looks amused. “Oh? And why is that?”

“I was scared of you. There was no desire to let you in before we talked more but now, now I want you even though I know part of the truth about you. You said it was better if the other person was willing, well, now I am.” You laid out the truth for him. You were no longer scared of him even though you knew he could still inflict the worst pain imaginable on you and kill you. What you felt now was desire so strong that nothing, not even fear of death, could break through.

He grinned, baring his fangs to you. “You, my dear, have proven to be far more interesting than I gave you credit for. There is one thing I didn’t tell you though, something that will make what is about to happen much more pleasurable for you. Vampires can direct the blood flow of any body that they are in contact with. You think you want me now? Wait until you feel as though you’re on fire, your skin burning with need as I taste you. You’ll beg me to drink your blood from wherever I please. And I will.” 

You shuddered at his words. Desire pouring through you, making you feel as though you were drugged. “Kiss me.” The words left your mouth without any thought. Baekhyun leaned down and his lips closed over yours gently, seeing if you were going to try and get away from him. When he realised that you weren’t going anywhere he intensified the kiss, increasing the pressure and igniting your senses. 

He ran his tongue along the seam of your lips until you opened your mouth, allowing your tongues to work against each other. You could feel his fangs grazing your lip but it did not scare you, rather it made you want more. His hands roamed your body as the two of you kissed, teasing your nipples and brushing near your core, never where you wanted the friction the most. 

“Please” you moan.

“What do you want little one?” he teases.

“Touch me.” His hands grip your thighs, spreading your legs wide for him. You try to roll your hips, desperate for any sort of friction but you don’t achieve the contact you’re after. You whimper as the frustration builds. You want him to touch you so badly, you need your release and soon.

“Patience little one.” He chuckles. “As flattering as it is to see just how badly you want me, I want to savour this. His eyes drift down. “You look delectable.” He shifts his body down the bed so that his face is level with your dripping centre. 

He slowly drags his fangs from your thigh, up your leg, and moves over your centre, to the other thigh. The sensation makes you whimper as you try to grind your hips, but he holds you down with his hands as you try to find some friction to help you along. “Please” You breathe.

Smirking he moves back to where you need him the most, flicking his tongue against your clit. Your mind goes blank at the sensation as he repeats the motion, deepening the pressure he’s applying until you moan loudly. If anything, it only serves to spur him on, attaching his lips to your clit as his tongue presses and swirls around it. Your hips would have been bucking into his face if he wasn’t holding you down.

He pauses for a moment to confess “You are fucking delectable, I could do this all night.” before resuming his feast. You bite your lip as he rolls his tongue against you, his fangs lightly grazing your clit and sending a whole new wave of pleasure flowing through you. You never expected his fangs to draw such a response from you but you felt yourself moan louder every time they grazed over your clit. You could feel his eyes watching you as he pleasured you, taking in every reaction and building his actions on that. Your arousal builds as he alternates the pace and pressure of his tongue, and increases the feel of his fangs against you. 

“Fuck” you whimper. The sensations are building too quickly and you can feel your release approaching with haste when he detaches his mouth from you. You look down at him and he smirks at you before you can utter a complaint, not breaking eye contact as he pushes one then two fingers into your wet heat. 

You can’t stop yourself from moaning his name as he starts to move his fingers back and forth in a steady rhythm. “You like that?” he growls as you clench around his fingers. “Little one, you are so wonderfully wet. Just for me. You love it don’t you? You love how my fingers feel, how my tongue feels and most of all you love how my fangs feel against your clit. Don’t you?” His pupils are so dark and blown out with lust as he lowers his skilled mouth back to your bundle of nerves.

The combined sensation of his long fingers, skilled tongue and sharp fangs become too much for you. He moans against you as he works, curling his fingers inside you and fluttering his tongue against your clit. You writhe on the bed as he increases his speed to a level that a mere human could never achieve and right before your orgasm hits, he sinks his fangs into you. The pleasure was so intense, so overwhelming that you sobbed his name as he helped you ride out your high. You were too far gone to realise that he was tasting you, really tasting you now that his fangs penetrated your flesh. You felt no pain, only white hot pleasure. 

When he released you he looked up at you, mouth and fangs dripping with a mixture of your juices and blood. Your body still tingles with aftershocks of your orgasm and you feel like you’re on fire. You should be spent but you only want him more. 

God you wanted to him to fuck you.

He flips you over, positioning you on your knees. He grunts as he enters you in one fluid motion. He meets no resistance given how ready you were for his cock. He grips your waist tightly as he sets a brutal pace, the only sounds in the room are of skin hitting skin and cries of pleasure. 

“You fit my cock perfectly. Look at how much you want this, at how badly you want a vamp to fuck the life out of you.” He grunts in between thrusts. 

“Baekhyun. Fuck” You moan when he hits your g spot. 

You had never felt pleasure like this before. You’d had great sex before but this was on a level of its own. Baekhyun had had an unknown amount of time to perfect this act and hone his skills and he was not disappointing. He moved between a pace that felt more like what you were used to and then a pace faster than you could have ever imagined. 

“This.” He growled, “Is how a vampire fucks you.” and lifted your body up so that it was flush with his, tilting your head so that your throat was exposed for him. He ran his tongue along your neck, making you moan deeply as you recalled the feeling of his fangs.

“You want it don’t you?” He asked as he pounded into you. “Want me to sink my fangs back into your flesh as I fuck you?” You couldn’t form words to respond to him, only moans of want and pleasure. He grazed his fangs along your neck and you writhed against the touch.

His fangs pierced the skin of your neck and the sensation barreled you over the edge. Everything was heightened and a feeling that you had never experienced before flooded your system. You felt full, alive, and like you were about to explode. You shuddered and cried out as your orgasm ripped through you harder than last time as Baekhyun chased his. 

The last thing you saw before you blacked out were his eyes, now a deep red as he stared down at your form and smiled. “I think I’ll keep you.”

2000: “Ghetto Qu’ran (Forgive Me)” 50 Cent (Trackmaster Ent./Columbia)

It’s been over a year since I teased the idea of doing a post about my favorite 50 Cent tracks, so I guess now is as good a time as ever to get around to it! 

With the exception of maybe Kanye, I can’t think of another rapper with more raw talent whose career has been more disappointing. Obviously both Ye and Fiddy have been monstrously successful, but IMO they either burned brightly before descending into white supremacy apologia (Kanye) or never achieved their best possible trajectory (50). It’s not an accident to put them together in this way, either; just 12 years ago next month they faced off in what turned out to be a very underwhelming battle over whose album would sell better (this was back when album sales, not streaming numbers, still meant something). In many ways, it was a crossroads for each artist: Kanye dropped what I believe was his magnum opus, then followed it up with his fourth-best album, third-best album, and second-best album, before dropping off a cliff, while 50′s release basically removed him from the conversation about who was relevant in rap (“My Gun Go Off” and “I Get Money” are honorable mentions for the list below, but otherwise Curtis is entirely forgettable). 

These days, 50 has gone the Ice Cube route and is probably more recognizable as an actor than as a rapper. So, it’s hard to remember that once upon a time he was the savior of gangsta rap and (co-)author of one of the 25 greatest albums of all time. He beat the odds to survive a shooting, link up with the two heaviest hitters (at the time) in the rap game, and even be included on some GOAT lists. He also essentially established the “flood the streets with mixtapes before your album drops” strategy of self-promotion that Gucci, Weezy, and even Drake would follow in the days before Soundcloud was the go-to resource for building a rep. He singlehandedly destroyed a rival’s career, launched a clothing line, video game, and music label, and made a halfway-decent biopic. And then... he just sort of petered out. 

But! 50 is also responsible for some of my all-time favorite raps, which is why it’s so frustrating to me that he never lived up to the buzz surrounding him back in 2003. These are my five favorites, listed chronologically, with some commentary:

1) “Ghetto Qu’ran (Forgive Me)” (2000) Before the G-Unit days and before Eminem and Dre helped launch him to superstardom, Curtis Jackson was an up and coming rapper from Queens who had attracted the attention of another rap legend, Run-DMC’s Jam Master Jay. A mutual friend introduced 19 year-old 50 to Jay back in 1996, and the veteran producer/DJ gave him a crash course in how to write songs and signed him to his fledgling label. The business relationship didn’t work out, but it helped lead 50 to Columbia Records’ Trackmasters imprint where he recorded Power of the Dollar in 1999. However, this debut album would never see the light of day after 50 was shot nine times while sitting in a friend’s car and subsequently dropped by Columbia. In the wake of the shooting--and then later, after 50 blew the fuck up in 2003--it became a sort of “lost cult classic” among rap fans. “How To Rob” got the most attention at the time, a funny-yet-vicious song demonstrating 50′s hunger through fantasies about sticking up famous rappers and R&B stars (the song was also clearly an homage to Biggie’s unreleased “Dreams,” and provoked an oblique diss from Ghostface). But “Ghetto Qu’ran” has had a more lasting impact, primarily because of how it was rumored to be the source of 50′s shooting, Jam Master Jay’s murder, and the Ja Rule/Murder Inc. beef. While all of that intrigue is important to rap lore, it distracts from the fact that it’s a near perfect rap song from a technical perspective: a catchy hook, a fantastic beat and sample, an effortless flow, and a well-crafted story that is equal parts celebration of the Queens underworld and subtle shots at street legends. Seriously, this is akin to what traveling bards used to do in medieval Europe, what poets in Ancient Greece wrote, what west African griots did/do, and what narcocorrido artists do now. If you want to learn about the Supreme Team, Pappy Mason, the Corley Family, and the Rich Porter/Alpo crew in Harlem, then this is a good place to start; as 50 puts it, “consider this the first chapter of the ghetto’s Qu’ran.” The secondary title to this track--“Forgive Me”--has a double meaning now. It was initially a plea to forgive 50 for the pain he caused in his criminal life but in retrospect an appeal to the figures whose names he drops. Also, it’s interesting to listen to this first and then compare 50′s voice with the next four tracks: this was recorded before the shooting, which left a bullet fragment lodged in his tongue that affected his speech and gave him his now-distinctive flow.    

2) “Heat” (2003) There are several standouts on Get Rich or Die Tryin’ (“Many Men,” “Back Down,” “What Up Gangsta,” “Patiently Waiting,” and “Poor Lil’ Rich” spring to mind, and I will always love “21 Questions” for the “I love you like a fat kid loves cake” line alone) but this one has always been my fave. It’s a perfect distillation of the image that 50 was trying to project when he burst onto the scene: a hood-hardened gangster who wouldn’t hesitate to do his enemies harm. And given his recent history, you could believe him, too! There’s really nothing about this song that should be praised in any way, but I’ve been thinking about the gravity of the following line a lot in the past month or so: “The summertime is a killing season/ It’s hot out this bitch, that’s a good enough reason.” Also, 50′s boast “the DA can play this motherfucking tape in court” *has* to be one of the inspirations behind this great Key & Peele sketch, right? 

3) “A Baltimore Love Thing” (2005) The Massacre was incredibly disappointing on the whole. I can remember clearly sitting around with my friends in a dorm room at the Shoreland listening to it all the way through the day that it dropped, wanting to love it but slowly realizing that it wasn’t going to live up to our expectations. “Ski Mask Way” could be an honorable mention on this list, and “Piggy Bank” is kind of funny, but otherwise it’s a steaming pile of shit. “Baltimore Love Thing,” though, is a masterpiece. It’s incredibly dark, rapped from the perspective of heroin itself (sort of like what Nas’s “I Gave You Power” does for guns) in order to detail the destruction that addiction--and, by extension, drug trafficking--leaves in its wake. Even more fucked up, 50-as-heroin voices an abusive partner addressing a woman, threatening her should she ever try to leave him. For my money, “You broke my heart, you dirty bitch, I won’t forget what you did/ If you give birth, I’ll already be in love with your kids” is one of the coldest lines in the annals of rap, full stop. In the second verse, he switches to the flip side of an abuser’s mindset: “I never steer you wrong, if you hyper I make you calm/ I’ll be your incentive, your reason for you to move forward.” All in all, it’s a great concept song that shows off 50′s range as a rapper... and is a testament to what he could have been.

4) “Hustler’s Ambition” (2005) Goddamn, I fucking love everything about this song! The beat is fantastic (great sample, btw), prefiguring the sound on a future great mixtape from the G-Unit crew. 50′s flow here is flawless, arguably the best, smoothest he’s ever been. This was basically the “theme” for 2005′s Get Rich or Die Tryin’ film, and tells the story of his come up in the drug game (or, at least, 50′s version of his carefully constructed hagiography). The lyrics are the true gems here, so I’ll just let a few of the standouts speak for themselves:

“Check my logic: fiends don’t like seeds in they weed, shit/ Send me them seeds, I’ll grow ‘em what they need”

“I sell anything, I’m a hustler, I know how to grind/ Step on grapes, put it in water, and tell you it’s wine”

“I made plans to make it, a prisoner of the state/ Now I can invite your ass out to my estate”

“Pour Cristal in the blender, make a protein shake”

and finally

“The feds watch me, icy, they can’t stop me/ Racists pointing at me, ‘Look at *****race’: Hello!”   

5) “Ghetto Like A Motherfucker” (2011) I remember first encountering this track on a Tumblr compilation (I think?) called Don’t Fuck This Up, Curtis! and allowing myself to get excited that the old 50 was back! As the compilation’s name implies, around that time 50 had been releasing a string of online-only singles that were better than anything he’d put out in five or so years, and so there was some hope that he’d soon be making a triumphant return to the rap game. Sadly, this was not to be. But I still bang this track every month or so. The idea here was that 50 had written something, set it to a very sparse, stripped-down beat, and posted it online as an invitation for DIY rap producers to play with it and layer their own compositions on top of it. In that sense, it represented a melange of rap’s earliest roots--dudes spitting over vinyl cuts in basements and parks, just fucking around and having fun--and the possibilities afforded by the digital age and rap’s embrace of online platforms for mixing and remixing material (on a side note, I like to think of this as part of 21st century rap’s “punk rock” aesthetic, and would argue that this genre has done it better than any other). As with “Hustler’s Ambition,” “Baltimore Love Thing,” and “Ghetto Qu’ran,” this track gives 50 a chance to really showcase his talents as a writer and a rapper. The lyrics are as grimy as the beat, painting a picture of urban poverty and pre-fame 50, and 50 switches up his flow at multiple points throughout. Here are some of my favorite lines:

“Slim chance I’ma go back to killing roaches/ Be quiet, you can hear the rats in the wall/ Make you wanna pump crack ‘til you stack racks”

“Dice game, shake ‘em up, praying’ for a 6/ The wolves out there hungry, they lookin’ for a lick”

“****** pissed on the staircase, in the elevator/ Now I’m pissed cuz I’m starting to smell like piss, player”

and

“All a ***** need is a block and a connect/ And a box of 9 MMs to load in the TEC.”

50′s last two studio albums--Before I Self Destruct and Animal Ambition--honestly weren’t half-bad; I would venture so far as to say that they were both better than The Massacre and Curtis. But for 50 it was too little, too late, really. Too many rappers had come along since then doing what he did, only better and fresher. This is a Migos world now; we’re just living in it. And so, I’m left to ponder what could have been. 

A “Kind of serious” UtaPri Q

“If there was one thing you would change about UtaPri what would it be?” Content distribution Allow me to explain this for you UtaPri ,as we know it, as almost been around for 10 years.  Its official “start date” was back in 2010 on June 24th and in that time there was a lot of content that came for the STARISH members and also later for QUARTET NIGHT especially when you consider they have now been in a game since the Debut and All-Star. Now you think about THAT and then you think about where this post is about to go and I promise you some people are gonna get mad...not my intention but let’s discuss this

So Uta no Prince-Sama started as a franchise officially in 2010 and as an Anime in 2011 when Maji Love 1000 came out (Henceforth called “ML1K”) and it was basically the season long story of how STARISH was formed and then later in 2013 they were given Maji Love 2000 basically where they again were the main focus (and that’s fine) but we also met the trio that would gum up things for the STARISH in HEAVENS and we know their story.  They were a “Trio of Amateurs” as Shining put it that would face off against STARISH at the UtaPri awards and there would be more on the line than JUST an award as Shining and Raging put up the futures of the groups in which STARISH wins but as we know HEAVENS gets saved and comes back as a 7 person group at the end of Season 3. NOW...here is where we start to talk about the idea of “content distribution” By the time that Season 2 came out there had been (and I checked this) 2 games that featured QN in some way:  Debut (which was their intro into the series) and then All-Star Now I have stated before that I think if you wanted to do the idea of a “rivalry” with STARISH and QN it should have been around here (considering at this point there was at least a game or two of content for QN) so the idea of having to “create” the group to be the rival for STARISH from a “Made up” Agency (i.e. one not in the game canon) to me was kind of “Huh?” (and this mind you comes from me when I never read the stories for any character in any of the actual games). But alright now STARISH is going to beat HEAVENS the first time...fine and as some might not be aware I was happy about that cos I assumed (and I found out I was wrong seconds later) that HEAVENS was going to go away and then NOW we would get on with the STARISH/QN rivalry. Looking back on this here is what I was kind of hoping would have happened Okay you want to give an OVA for the Shining Agency..I’m fine with that.  The issue comes with HEAVENS For some reason after they wrote it where HEAVENS would lose the thought enters your mind (or it does mine anyways) “What did HEAVENS losing accomplish?” Here is why I say that HEAVENS losing makes sense IF  - They are going to disband OR  - We are going to get an OVA or some kind of content chronicling them on the road to going to face off against STARISH again.  I think I once made the suggestion of an idea where what you would do is have STARISH win but HEAVENS gets saved and then simultaneously have something where they have an OVA/Season to chronicle the formation of the 7 person group for HEAVENS.  The issue if you did a season for it would be I dunno how many people (especially those on the STARISH side) would have watched it BUT it could have made them very sympathetic characters for Season 4 (not that Season 4 didn’t succeed on some level but it also caused a great divide too). This is where I get a little bothered What I would like to know is this How many people in the fandom AFTER the UtaPri Awards season wanted to see something related to the content to develop HEAVENS as characters?  I’m not saying your a “bad person” if you didn’t care one way or the other but it would have helped if you had a way to get to know at least the Trio BEFORE Season 4 started so that you had them and then we could intro the other 4 characters...would work right? The other thing that could have been done was to create a Drama CD just of the Trio so that you could really get behind HEAVENS and start to cheer them on if you wanted to...it wouldn’t have been a bad idea and it would have worked out I think..they didn’t though and that is kind of a bother. Like the point I am getting at as far as getting to Season 4 is that HEAVENS could have had some content wrote for them to make them more appealing and likable and I know that might not have been financially viable but it could have been a very interesting revenue stream if they just THOUGHT about it! NOW...I’ll hear this argument (and its not wrong) “Broccoli didn’t know what they were going to do with HEAVENS at this time” This isn’t wrong because you ARE right!  Broccoli didn’t know they were going to add HEAVENS into Revolutions or Legend Star so their loss in ML2K would have been a perfect ending and then if you wanted to go with STARISH and QN then its perfect! NOW...I’m going to tell you the biggest flaw about not just the content distribution but also the way the story was wrote. I have heard this argument when it comes to HEAVENS “Their role was to make STARISH better” Here is why I have had an issue with this logic Putting QN to the side for a second...in the context of the timeline between STARISH and HEAVENS whom is the senior group? While you are pondering that allow me to then bring this into the equation QN is the Senior group of all three of them in storyline.  No matter how you write it or want to believe it QN’s role should be (and kind of was) to make STARISH better.  THAT made sense because they (again in theory) are the Senior group to STARISH NOW...get back to the question How the hell is a group of Amateurs (”HEAVENS”) supposed to be in the position to “Make STARISH better”?  It doesn’t make sense from a STORY perspective because of the fact that HEAVENS became the “up and comers” but for some reason Broccoli panicked come Season 4 and didn’t want to tell that story.  That is why most of the Duet singles really sold like s**t because they didn’t do the job to make BOTH PARTIES in the duet likable and they REALLY F***ED IT when they botched the Mighty Aura episode which was the first one in the set!  How the hell do you get one part of the fanbase to like HEAVENS when you take arguably the most popular Seiyuu in STARISH and f**k the story so damn bad to make it look like something that DIDN’T FUCKING HAPPEN! Like I have ranted about this before but the story SHOULD have been wrote so that STARISH helped get HEAVENS to look better in the public eye (both in the Anime and in the real world) so what I would have done is okay you have the drama parts for each episode and that’s fine BUT if the HEAVENS member went to the STARISH member (or vice versa) to find out what was going on with them that would have helped greatly...it also would have made it to where I wouldn’t have literally had my blood pressure go up every week wondering how the STARISH fans were going to take to each member.  Eiji ,Shion ,Kira...they were gonna be the easy ones in my head...Van was a wild card (turned out to be a dork) and then you had Nagi ,Yama and Eiichi...we know how the last one went! Going back to the original point of this post “Would more content have made HEAVENS more sympathetic to STARISH fans?” I think yes because...especially with Eiichi we could have SEEN that there was not a lot of happy times going on with that household and Raging being a shithead to Eiichi...I can only imagine what he was like to Eiji! We would have gotten to SEE the struggle between Kira and his family in a flashback and we might have gotten to see why Nagi had the complex he had...now sadly if we were to get THAT someone would accuse the series of biting off of another idol series everyone knows (And I’ll say this now...I have no issue with Tenn as much as I did but I’ll still take Nagi over him if you pressed me). Like I could list the # of things that Broc could do but trust me that would take me for fucking ever!  Okay NOW they are getting a radio show and NOW they are being put in as “side characters” to the STARISH/QN show but what is that going to accomplish for the western fans? When it comes to Dolce they’ll be the “forgotten group” because we know when they were announced to be in the game I can PROMISE you that I was more hype than probably a lot of people on this site!  Fine but try to act like you are happy for those that might not fall into the “Main 2″ fandoms (and I say this with me also being a QN fan). People wonder why some of us get annoyed with Broccoli and I will repeat it that its a whole thing about “content”. Whenever Broccoli announces most new goods or when show some art it HAS to be HEAVENS attached to QN and STARISH.  They COULDN’T have done just something for HEAVENS for Halloween it HAD to be with those two for promotional stuff that had to do with the Movie that no one knows fuck all about yet!  You want me to get happy about the Halloween art cos...why?! Then you just have to face this reality} STARISH fan will never get why HEAVENS fan is pissed off and some (not all) don’t give a f**k...you’re lying if you claim you do. You don’t HAVE to worry because you got the ENTIRE story basically to be centered around you and you got your two big wins...meanwhile you want to claim HEAVENS are equals?  HOW?! HEAVENS will NEVER be equals to STARISH or even QN as long as they are tied to them...FACT!  If QUARTET NIGHT wants to do the job that STARISH should have done I will be all for it but I can’t see Broccoli allowing QN to do that because they (Broccoli) still plug their ears and act like everything is fine.  Maybe for STARISH and QN fans because they got their cute little MVs...anyone remember what the fuck they did to promote HEAVEN SKY? THEY DID A STILL FUCKING IMAGE! You mean to tell me the company that has a franchise that probably prints the most money for them right now COULDN’T AFFORD TO ANIMATE SOMETHING FOR HEAVENS TO NOT MAKE THEM LOOK SECOND F****ING RATE?!  HOW THE F**K DO YOU ACCEPT THAT?! It just blows my mind on a personal level and people can say I make a mountain out of a molehill...I just care alright?  I care about as much about HEAVENS if not more than most people would THINK to put out content on here for UtaPri and that is a FACT!  I probably get more people pissed off and annoyed because I go off like this but you know why you get mad at me?  Cos you know deep down there is a little bit of truth in what I say and in gnaws at you that someone that has only been around the franchise for 4 years is more annoyed with HEAVENS treatment than most that have been around for the entire eight and that pisses you the f**k off! To that I say this GOOD...now you can know what its like for someone like me and also what it was like for me to watch Eiichi get snatched up by his daddy and no one in the UtaPri fandom on the STARISH side gave two shits! If you’re mad its cos I got through to you...if you aren’t then maybe you SHOULD BE!

Thoughts on the comic book industry, Part 5

In my last rant about the state of the comic book industry, I talked about how completely out of touch the Big 2 publishers are with reality, both creatively and politically. And naturally, it's going to beg the question: "Why not support other publishers?"

It's not an invalid question on its face. But it is a very difficult question to answer, because of the way the industry has changed over the last 26 years. Again, the Big 2 are acting like it's still 1992-1993, when the industry was at its peak thanks to the '90s comic book boom. And at that time, the industry had expanded to such a point that smaller publishers were growing in prominence and new publishers were showing up in droves. But over the last two decades, the industry has massively atrophied, with many smaller publishers dying out, distribution channels shrinking to a monopoly benefitting DC and Marvel, entry into the industry perversely becoming harder at a time when digital media should be leveling the playing field, and the remaining other publishers making their living on wares that have a limited shelf life.

Simply put, it's not so easy to ignore DC and Marvel when the current comics market doesn't allow for any true competition to emerge.

Let's go back to the early '90s and see what was going on at the time. DC and Marvel were obviously still the market leaders. But you also had Image, founded by several of Marvel's biggest and most popular artists, launching their own creator-owned properties and making a huge splash based on star power alone. You had Valiant, founded by former Marvel editor Jim Shooter, which relaunched several vintage comic book properties in addition to their own, more modern superhero/vigilante books. You had Dark Horse Comics, which made its name with both high-profile creator-owned material (Hellboy, Sin City, The Mask), classic mnaga books, and high-end licensed comics (The Shadow, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Alien, Predator). You had Topps Comics, which did licensed books like Zorro (and its spinoff Lady Rawhide) and Bram Stoker's Dracula. You had Defiant, another Jim Shooter company. You had Malibu, a superhero-themed outfit that eventually became a Marvel brand. You had special imprints from the major publishers, like DC's Vertigo, Helix, and Paradox Press and Rob Liefeld's Maximum Press. You had Fantagraphics doing everything from classics like Usagi Yojimbo to off-the-cuff indie material. You had Penthouse, of all people, launching their own comics line that included fully-painted adaptations of Bible stories. And tons and tons of indie publishers were available, with long-standing cult books like Zen: Intergalactic Ninja getting new attention (and movie deals, too).

There was a lot to choose from at the time, and much of that was due to their being a big range of distributors. I recall one of my all-time favorite catalogs, Advance Comics, whose parent company used to be my local comic shops' distributor of choice until 1996 or so. Every issue of that catalog was like a comic book adventure in its own right, because there was so much to see, so much that I was unaware of previously. The comic book industry at that time was so much bigger than I could have imagined, and to see it all brought together in one monthly catalog with news articles was always a treat. And because there were still a lot of distributors to work with at the time, the barrier for entry to the comics industry was wide open for anyone who had the talent...and admittedly, for some who probably shouldn't have been let in. One of Wizard Magazine's Top 20 best-selling comics of 1994 was Double Impact, an indie comic ripoff of Andy Sidaris' tits-and-guns flicks. So yeah, there was definitely some drek that slipped thru the cracks. But that aside, the state of the industry was that of a wide playing field where anybody and everybody could be part of it.

But to the surprise of absolutely nobody, the greed of the Big 2 was what brought it all crashing down. Marvel was at a high at the time not just because they were a breeding ground for the hottest artists in the industry, but because they had the #1 comic book franchise in the world: the X-Men books were always Top 10 sellers. So they not only bought their own toy company (Toy Biz), but they also bought their own distributor – Heroes' World – and went exclusive thru them. Not to be outdone, DC went exclusive thru Diamond not long afterward. This obviously impacted the other distributors, who now had to deal with losing a ton of business as a consequence. Gradually, the other larger publishers joined up with Diamond as well, killing off all the other distributors completely. And when Marvel suffered financial problems near the end of the '90s, they too joined up with Diamond.

Thus we ended up with the distribution monopoly we have now, and it was a sad thing to see play out. Not only was it a shame to see things like Advance Comics slowly lose more and more content before finally being snuffed out, but it also led to (a) comic book fans and shops having to deal with a single distributor they had problems with and (b) a greatly increased barrier for entry into the industry. If you don't get into Diamond's Previews catalog, you're screwed. And in an age where digital media dominates, for the comic book industry to be so closed off not only limits your choices for what's available, but it also cuts off any real chance for there to be legitimate challengers to DC and Marvel.

Again, let's look at what's changed between 1992-1993 and 2018. Image, which initially looked to be a real competitor to the Big 2, has splintered and shrunken. Jim Lee sold out his portion of the company to DC (and is currently helping to run DC into the muck), several of its artists have returned to DC and Marvel, Todd McFarlane doesn't draw anymore, and the properties it was hyping so hard died out with the '90s. (Seriously, does anyone even remember Spawn anymore, much less care about it?) Most of Image's output now is small creator-owned projects, with The Walking Dead being known far more for its TV incarnation than for the comic it originally was. Dark Horse lost many of its licensed properites to Disney-Marvel as a result of Disney acquiring Lucasfilm and the 20th Century Fox library, and many of its big creator-owned properties have ended. It's a shadow of what it once was. Valiant got bought out by Acclaim Entertainment and suffered financial issues that shuttered it for years, and has only been making a comeback in recent times. Malibu got shut down after Marvel bought it out. DC shut down all of their imprints besides Vertigo, which went from being one of their crown jewels to being a non-entity. Topps, Warren, Defiant, NOW Comics, Maximum Press, Awesome Entertainment, and countless other publishers have bitten the dust over the years. CrossGen, the Florida-based publisher that tried to take on DC and Marvel in the early 2000s, died a swift death a few years later and got bought out by Disney (and their artists picked up by Marvel). Really, the only publishers of note that have shown any real endurance are three fairly recent ones: Zenoscope, Dynamite and IDW. Beyond that, it's gotten much, much harder for new companies to get any traction or really develop into powerhouses in the current market.

It should also be mentioned that companies like Zenoscope, IDW, and Dynamite are getting by in large part by emulating what made Dark Horse such a force in the '90s. Creator-owned material. Licensed comics. And in Zenoscope's case, reinventions of public domain fairy tales. All of this is well and good in and of itself, but it's not really the stuff of major players in today's market. Don't get me wrong: properties like Star Trek, He-Man (currently split between DC and Dark Horse), Transformers, GI Joe, My Little Pony, Flash Gordon, The Shadow, The Lone Ranger, Zorro, and The Green Hornet are deservedly iconic and long-lived, and I'm all in favor of them being comic book staples. But those properties frequently go into periods of hibernation from version to version, and no one version lasts indefinitely. It's all well and good that IDW's made its fame with My Little Pony, but what happens when it's time for that property to go back to sleep? What happens to Dynamite when their versions of The Shadow and The Green Hornet run their course? You can't build your brand purely on licensed material. It's partly why Dark Horse got hit so hard by Disney buying out Lucasfilm and the Fox library. And in today's smaller, more monopolistic comics landscape, the '90s Dark Horse model isn't enough to make you a powerhouse on par with the Big 2.

(And if current rumors of IDW possibly shuttering its comic book operations and going full Hollywood end up coming true, it'll be yet another publisher going down...and again, more attrition for the comic book industry.)

Now, it can be argued that part of the reason Image and so many other companies fell off when the comic book boom ended is that they'd banked themselves too much on popular trends of the era. Big Titty Bad Girls, Big Gun Pouch-Wearing Vigilantes, trading on flashy art over quality writing, attempting DC/Marvel-style event-gimmicks with characters nobody knew or cared about...all of that's true. I can't and won't make excuses for that. But in an age where digital and social media dominate, there's no excuse for comics to be so closed off, so hard to find, or so hard to break into. The equal parts country-club-and-echo-chamber setup of the current comics industry certainly benefits the major publishers and their major players of choice, but it also curtails any real chance of new blood making a splash and reinventing the game. It's not uncommon for indie or small-press creators to make their living hustling on social media and on the convention circuit. And sometimes it pays off; husband-and-wife team Adam Withers and Comfort Love (The Uniques, Rainbow in the Dark) have been very successful at that, even racking up Harvey Award nominations. But again, it's the artificially high barrier to entry imposed by the Diamond monopoly that's the issue. Not everyone can get in, and unless you can get into Diamond's Previews, you're going to have a hell of a time getting your comics out there. And since the industry is still staunchly brick-and-mortar, that's another added hurdle.

And it's not just small-press or indie creators who face these problems. Established industry talent who've been shed by DC and Marvel often have trouble getting their books published, often turning to crowdfunding instead. Sometimes it pays off handsomely (Tom Grummett's upcoming Section Zero, Steven Butler's John Aman: Amazing Man), sometimes it hits the skids (Kieron Dwyer's proposed West Portal). Unless you're the current flavor of the moment, it's far from a given that long-standing comics creators can see their projects to fruition. Again, that's down to the atrophy of the comics industry and the impact of the distribution monopoly. Because it's shrunken so much, become so biased in favor of the major publishers, and abandoned any notion of being accessible to a wider audience, even industry talent with years – hell, decades – of work to their name have a difficult time getting a green-light for their projects, and have to rely on the crapshoot that is crowdfunding. And even at that, while you might get some really good individual works, it's still not going to be nearly enough to challenge the Diamond monopoly, much less present an alternative to the dominance of the Big 2.

So much of the state of the industry makes little sense when viewed in context of today's digital age. There shouldn't be such a huge barrier to entry for new creators. It shouldn't be so hard for established talent to get their projects green-lit. It shouldn't be so damn hard, especially in the age of digital media, for indie and small-press works to find wide distribution. And it definitely shouldn't be impossible for a new comics company to rise up and take the industry into the future, since DC and Marvel won't. But that's where we're at. Even the distribution model is over two decades out of date, and as a monopoly it's unfairly stacked against anything but entrenched industry players. No real opportunity for growth, no real opportunity for change, just the prolonging of an ever-shrinking echo chamber stuck decades in the past.

Host Director’s Dashcam Takes Pandemic Horror to Scarier Place

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

Creating an interesting protagonist in a horror movie is a difficult thing. Conventional wisdom suggests they should be blandly appealing, and thereby a surrogate for any viewer to insert themselves into the nightmare. More often than not though, they are treated as disposable. Interchangeable faces who eventually become pieces of meat, lambs to the slaughter. Whether by fluke or design, the “heroes” of entire popular movements in the genre—slasher flicks in the ‘80s, torture porn in the 2000s—eventually devolved into figures of ridicule: victims who the audience would root against, sometimes uncomfortably so.

All of which is a long way to note the uniquely diabolical nature of Rob Savage’s Dashcam and its hero Annie (played by Annie Hardy). Following in the footsteps of Savage’s Zoom shocker from last year, Host, Dashcam is a relentless found footage chiller that is more scary for how it reflects our status quo in a post-COVID world than its use of any demons, witches, or whatever else is rattling up there inside Savage’s imagination. Indeed, one could argue the biggest monster of Dashcam is its main character herself.

Vividly played with a total fearlessness by Hardy, who apparently improvised much of Annie’s dialogue and her penchant for sick rhymes with an even sicker lack of political correctness, Annie is a COVID denying, racial stereotyping, anti-masker who’s spent her quarantine cultivating minor internet fame by being an online troll who is game for any laugh. She’s the type of strident personality who’d be run off most college campuses on a rail. She’s also a very difficult character to like and an even harder one to cheer for when creatures in the woods descend on her head. Which makes her self-made predicaments fascinating as a narrative, as well as a potential test for the viewer’s threshold for empathy.

Set and filmed during the tail-end of 2020 lockdowns, Dashcam finds Annie at a moment of extreme boredom. Constantly streaming her daily activities and off-the-cuff vitriol in some nether region of the web, she’s a person who would now say her best friends are fellow trolls and malcontents that egg on her diatribes about rejecting masks and CDC guidelines. Their anonymous and often gleefully offensive banter is visible in a near constant stream of text on the side of the screen for the whole film. We watch Annie’s experiences through their bitter eyes. They delight when she ignores State Department recommendations and flies to the UK in that surreal pre-vaccine era where airports resembled ghost towns; and they’re frothing with blood in the mouth when she reunites with a former band mate from back in the day, Stretch (Amar Chadha-Patel), and his mask-wearing, sanitizer-using girlfriend.

At first, Stretch is amused that his riotous old chum has showed up at his flat unannounced, even taking her around London as he makes deliveries as a driver and spits some rhymes for Annie’s fans. But things quickly get too toxic after Annie refuses to wear masks inside of restaurants and leaves a “Make America Great Again” hat out for Stretch’s progressive girlfriend to find. That’s small potatoes though when compared to Annie taking Stretch’s car and also his gig as an on-demand driver. When she picks up one passenger who doesn’t seem well (Angela Enahoro) and agrees to drive her to a strange house in the woods, abstract dangers become a lot more immediate for both Annie and any friends who bother to come looking for her.

Dashcam clearly follows in the footsteps of Host, wherein a group of bored friends spend their quarantine summoning a demon on Zoom. But whereas that horror film used modern technology to tell an old-fashioned haunted house yarn, Savage attempts to tell a distinctly current thriller that could only be made in this exact moment with Dashcam. During a time of extreme polarization and tribalism, a woman vomiting blood in the backseat is almost relieving—here is something we can all agree is screwed up, right?

The irony of Dashcam is the perpetual flood of abusive text and edgelord flippancy on the side of the screen suggests otherwise. It’s clear that Annie’s let her online life drive her toward performative levels of toxicity, but of course that digital space is no help to her when shit gets real. The question then is once she finds herself in a pseudo-Blair Witch Project or Paranormal Activity situation, complete with running in the forest from unseen spooky forces, will anyone care? And that goes for the audience at home as much as it does for Stretch or any of her online kindred spirits.

This pseudo-ethical dilemma has made Dashcam an already more polarizing film than Host. To be sure, Host is the stronger and more coherent experience, with its events all occurring in one digital space (and a handful of physical places), which also doesn’t need to have the audience suspend so much disbelief about why the characters keep recording. By contrast, Annie and other characters have no reason to keep streaming the events of Dashcam after about the halfway mark of the movie. However, for all its chaotic and eventually impenetrable weirdness that reaches a  bonkers crescendo in the third act, I suspect the real reason Dashcam is a more divisive film has everything to do with its inkblot test of a heroine.

Can you have empathy with someone who doesn’t care if she spreads a plague that you (hopefully) are still concerned about right now? And can you root for her to survive a genuinely grueling experience? That might be the most interesting thing about Dashcam’s reception when Blumhouse releases it to a wide audience down the road. Personally, I cheered on some of the side characters in this film, but found my relationship to Annie and her struggles constantly evolving, which in turn led me to question my own more horrific instincts in These Times™.

For Dashcam to invite that kind of interior interrogation, and likely a vast array of reactions—especially when the bifurcated realm of social media discourse gets its hands on this—is a bold choice by bold storytellers. More, please.

Dashcam premiered Sept. 11 at the Toronto International Film Festival. It currently has no release date.

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from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/2VNC222

[TRANSLATION: DUeT 07.2021]

7 MEN SAMURAI

Proofread by aji10647731 (Twitter)/ @janiappend

Scans not mine

Neither an English nor a Japanese native speaker

Feel free to correct me, thanks

7 MEN 侍

6 members, 6 individuals, their thoughts and real feelings are written in a page...

You and Our Diary

In the official site 「Johnny's Web」, 7 MEN 侍's blog 「Itanji Nippou~Samuraifu.~」has started! With the expectations on the diary project that the members write on daily except during Fridays, the motivation and energy of 6 people were told. (Interview was done during the first 10 days of May.)

Nakamura Reia

[Diary] I am really happy that 「Itanji Nippou~Samuraifu.~」has started! I only have written a few times, but there were only few chances where we could convey our feelings with written compositions to the fans until now, so it is really a fresh experience. In the diary, I want to show more of real me. The diary I have written so far is the class journal during my elementary days. I remember that I was really looking forward to the comments of my teacher. After all, receiving a reply makes me happy.

[Recent Happening] I suddenly wanted to play a game at night, I started playing a car racing game, but it was not fun playing it alone so I tried to call Yabana (LOL). I thought that the other members are definitely already sleeping, but just as I thought, Yabana, who is nocturnal, was awake and we played together. Moreover, we got excited and played until near early morning! Even when I invite him all of a sudden, he often plays with me (T/N: Lit. He often matches with my mood), Yabana, who stirs up the excitement, is a really good friend. I want him to stay nocturnal as he is now (LOL).

Sugeta Rinne

[Diary] 「Itanji Nippou~Samuraifu.~」has finally started.  I talked about it in my first entry, then I talked about radio show for my next entry, then when I put my spirit into writing an inside story from Johnny's Jr. Channel, I don't know anymore which topic would be good for my next entry...(LOL). But, the blog is a long-awaited chance, so I want to properly write what I thought at that time. I want to write in detail about the beauty regimen I am into right now. Recently, I finally decided to get a facial care device, and I started doing a skin care. I still don't know its effectiveness, but I am aiming for a more beautiful skin!

[Recent Happening] The sunlight are now stronger since it's going to be summer soon, so I am looking for a good sunscreen. I heard that the effect of cosmetics changes with the cotton being used, so I tried to choose a good cotton. I am searching for a skin care regimen where one can be prettier without spending much & with simple steps as much as possible. My goal now is to share it to more people! The more you do the beauty regimen, that more effective it is, and it is a "swamp" where the more you know, the deeper you'll get into it, and it is fun.

Yabana Rei

[Diary] 「Itanji Nippou~Samuraifu.~」just started, and I am looking forward to writing for it♪While I'm on the train or during my spare time, I can write about the content with my "off" state, so it feels like it is close to one of my hobbies. That's why, the tension may be lower than when I'm in videos, but I want people to think that that is "the real Yabana Rei." Also, with the way of writing and emoticons, the personalities of 6 of us show, I hope people can also enjoy that. The fans too, if you take this opportunity to start a diary or blog, we can enjoy writing together (LOL).

[Recent Happening] I broke a guitar. I put the guitar on my shoulder and played without checking if the guitar strap was properly attached, then the main body came off and fell. The cable that is connected to the part of a guitar was broken and the repair cost was 7,500 yen! Neglecting what I usually always do lead to a great disaster. It was an unnecessary expense more than I had imagined~ I was sad when the remaining money in my wallet was only 2000 yen. Please be careful of carelessness, everyone!

Konno Taiki

[Diary] Since the fans read 「Itanji Nippou~Samuraifu.~」, that's why in a manner of being close to my real self, I want to write about something that is close to me. Taking turns with the members, we each update once a week, so recently, I take a memo of the everyday events and thoughts, and I try to do a detailed report to everyone. Since it is lonely to not have replies, I will be happy if everyone tells me what they thought about my blog entries.

[Recent Happening] Since my time at home has increased, I am looking for a hobby that I can do at home. What I want to try is craftsmanship! When I was a middle school student, making radio during our industrial art class was super fun. If I am going to create something now, candle and glasswork would be great. I think one's sense is tested more when the materials are prepared and the craft is created from scratch. Instead of trying to make one by following the sample while being taught by the teacher who is a pro, I want to try doing it by myself through trial and error so that I can show my personality! I wonder if I should suggest for 7 MEN 侍 to have a craftmanship project in the Johnny's Jr. Channel. It looks super interesting, right?

Sasaki Taiko

[Diary] I am happy that the platforms, other than videos in ISLAND TV and Johnny's Jr. Channel, where 7 MEN 侍 can be seen has increased! In the blog, I write just like the way I speak (LOL). I want for people to accept that my sentences are short because that is my character. I plan to write "one line diary". I will deliver my behavior and feelings at that time. Even in my summer diary, I am the type of person who finishes my entry with just a single line each day, so please do not hope that much for a long entry (LOL). What I want to convey to the fans is that, "Read my blogs if you want to know me!"

[Recent Happening] I often stroll during my day off. I want to move my body once a day so I walk 10,000 steps around within an hour. Since I am often being told, "You are fast," so I might be walking briskly. I concentrate in walking near the riverbed while listening to music, and I observe people too...I get healed by looking at the children playing, and when I see couples that are students, I enviously think, "They're enjoying the youth~" (LOL). Thanks to strolling, my lack of exercise is also solved!

Motodaka Katsuki

[Diary] Since before, I like expressing things through writing, so there are a lot of things that I want to write about in 「Itanji Nippou~Samuraifu.~」. It would be nice to be able to share about my thoughts and things that I am thinking of on that day. I want to cherish the blog since I can directly deliver my opinions and my feelings. It would be nice if there will be a valued place for us and the fans. When I was a high school student, I read various books like business books, and from there, I took down notes of the things that looked helpful and my thoughts. Even when I read those notes again now, I still gain informations and I can check that, "I thought like this back then," and I thought that records are important.

[Recent Happening] I had the opportunity to appear in the reenactment in the special program「Aishi no Appeal-chan」that is broadcasted at the end of May. But, my role is an unlikable guy who unconsciously puts himself above other people! I did my best and planned to look like someone who really is like that, but what should I do to people who saw me in the show for the first time and misunderstood that I am really like that, it's a little complicated...(LOL).

The Crypto Daily – Movers and Shakers – January 17th, 2021

InvestorPlace

10 Smart Stocks to Buy With $5,000

If you’re looking to build a portfolio of stocks to buy with just $5,000, the advent of fractional share ownership has made it a whole lot easier. Google the words “fractional share portfolios,” and you get 527,000 results with everything from reviews on seven of the best fractional share investing brokerages to links to some of the leading players in this burgeoning area of the markets. Many think of Robinhood when they think fractional, but the truth is almost every major online broker in this country’s got some offering or service.InvestorPlace – Stock Market News, Stock Advice & Trading Tips Heck, I can remember years ago, when FolioFN was the only game in town. Launched in 2000, it was acquired by Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS) in May 2020. FolioFN’s self-directed accounts are scheduled to be transferred to Interactive Brokers (NASDAQ:IBKR) early in 2021. In the meantime, for those who don’t want to do the work of constructing a $5,000 portfolio of stocks to buy, here are 10 recommendations to help get you started. Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG, NASDAQ:GOOGL) Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) SVB Financial (NASDAQ:SIVB) Roku (NASDAQ:ROKU) Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE:BRK.A, NYSE:BRK.B) Dollar General (NYSE:DG) Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) Williams-Sonoma (NYSE:WSM) Thor Industries (NYSE:THO) 9 Stocks That Investors Think Are the Next Amazon Their share prices will add up to $5,000 or less. To make things interesting, all 10 stocks must have share prices exceeding $100. Stocks to Buy: Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL) $1,740 Source: BigTunaOnline / Shutterstock.com It’s funny, I had intended to include Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) in my list of 10 stocks to buy, but given I was limiting my names to those companies with shares prices greater than $100, the e-commerce giant’s $3,166 share price would have made it awfully hard to fit nine more under $5,000. So I went with Alphabet, a company I didn’t write about at all in 2020, but helps me achieve my task. InvestorPlace’s Mark Hake recently suggested that rising ad sales make it an attractive investment in 2021. My colleague compares Google to the valuations of Apple, Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), and Amazon. He reckons that Google should have a similar valuation to the three companies at $1.43 trillion or 6.7 times sales. As I write this, Google’s market capitalization is $1.18 trillion, 17% below Hake’s simple calculation, which puts its share price at $2,112 per share. I like the upside. Tesla (TSLA) $845 Source: franz12 / Shutterstock.com The second-highest share price in our $5,000 portfolio, we can thank Elon Musk for doing a five-for-one stock split in August 2020. Without it, TSLA would take up 86% of our investment capital. I’m an unabashed Tesla fan, so I’m not going to give you reasons why the valuation is over-the-top, although there’s no question it puts all the other large car companies to shame with its $810 billion market cap. InvestorPlace contributor Matt McCall recently gave investors some wise advice regarding the electric vehicle (EV) maker. McCall believes that rather than griping about the price you have to pay for its shares, embrace the fact that even the mighty Tesla has corrections, so buy like crazy on the rare occasion that it happens. To illustrate his point, McCall references its pullback in September 2020, shortly after its stock split. On Aug. 31, it was trading just under $500. In a week, it fell 34% after Tesla was left off the annual additions list for the S&P 500. 7 Cheap Stocks to Buy as Democrats Gain Control Ultimately, Tesla was added to the index on Dec. 31. As money managers added TSLA to their portfolios, it moved even higher. Nvidia (NVDA) $528 Source: Hairem / Shutterstock.com If you’re one of the lucky investors who joined the Nvidia bandwagon five years ago when it was trading around $26, you’re sitting on an annualized total return of more than 79% through Jan. 13. It’s crazy to think that things can get any better for NVDA shareholders over the next five years. Still, they actually could, given the growth in gaming, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence. As my InvestorPlace colleague, Faizan Farooque, recently stated, you most certainly won’t be buying Nvidia if you’re a value investor — it trades at 45 times its forward earnings, far higher than many of its peers — but when it can grow sales at 50% a quarter and continue to beat analyst expectations, it most certainly deserves a premium valuation. In June 2019, I argued that Nvidia’s free cash flow made it a great stock to buy on dips. At the time, it had lost about half of its value over nine months — October 2018 to June 2019 — and was trading around $145. Some 18 months later, it’s up almost four-fold and generating more than $4.2 billion in 12-month free cash flow. Buy some now and wait for the next big dip. It’s bound to happen sooner or later, no matter the near-term prospects. SVB Financial (SIVB) $465 Source: Pavel Kapysh / Shutterstock.com I’m not going to say too much about SVB Financial because it’s one of those bank stocks to buy that you have to get to know for yourself to understand why it’s so special. You wouldn’t think this was the case by the analyst coverage of its stock. At the moment, 21 analysts cover SIVB, with eight rating it a buy and 12 a hold with an average price target of $424.49. Sure, it’s come a long way over the past year compared to its peers — it has a one-year total return of 74.2% — but that’s because investors recognize that the bank’s laser-like focus on providing lending, asset management, and banking services to innovators and entrepreneurs will always be in demand. Recently, it announced that it would pay $900 million to buy Boston Private Financial Holdings (NASDAQ:BPFH) for a combination of cash and stock. The Boston-based private bank specializes in wealth management and other banking services. Together, SVB Financial’s wealth management business will have almost $18 billion in assets under management. The 7 Best Marijuana Stocks on the Markets Right Now Continue to ignore SIVB at your peril. Roku (ROKU) $418 Source: JHVEPhoto / Shutterstock.com The streaming platform has gotten off to a hot start in 2021, up 26% year-to-date and more than 205% over the past 52 weeks. Roku and HBO Max parent, Warner Media, buried their longstanding disagreement recently by announcing that the streaming service would be available on Roku as of Dec. 17, 2020. By getting a spot on Roku, HBO Max is now on all the major over-the-top platforms. “We believe that all entertainment will be streamed and we are thrilled to partner with HBO Max to bring their incredible library of iconic entertainment brands and blockbuster slate of direct-to-streaming theatrical releases to the Roku households with more than 100 million people that have made Roku the No. 1 TV streaming platform in America,” Scott Rosenberg, SVP of Roku’s platform business, said in a statement. The key part of the above statement is that Roku believes that all entertainment will eventually be streamed. I couldn’t agree more. That’s why I recommended ROKU stock in December 2017 and still recommend it among stocks to buy in 2021. Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A, BRK.B) $235 Source: Jonathan Weiss / Shutterstock.com I recently read an article about the reasons why Warren Buffett failed in 2020. This kind of analysis of the Oracle of Omaha has been going on for years, possibly as long as Buffett’s been investing in stocks to buy. Yes, Berkshire Hathaway severely underperformed the S&P 500 in 2020 — up 2.5% versus 16.5% for the index — but I’ve always believed that the biggest boost to BRK stock will come when the holding company has to be methodically wound down due to the passing of Buffett and Charlie Munger. Consider that its equity portfolio, which is massive at $271 billion, represents just one-third of Berkshire’s assets at the end of September 2020. I can assure you that the true value of the $418 billion or so in privately-owned assets on its balance sheet is worth far more than this. When the time comes to wind it down, the board will do what’s necessary to ensure fair value is obtained for every business. It’s possible the process could take a decade or more. The 7 Best Startups You Can Buy on StartEngine Right Now When people say that Warren Buffett has lost his touch, they forget that the final tally has not been given. Not by a longshot. Dollar General (DG) $213 Source: Jonathan Weiss / Shutterstock.com It’s not a secret that Dollar General caters to customers that don’t have a tremendous amount of disposable income. It probably also doesn’t come as a surprise that its employees aren’t flush with cash, so the fact that it will pay those of its 157,000 employees who get a vaccine four hours of pay is noble. And smart business. “‘We do not want our employees to have to choose between receiving a vaccine or coming to work,’ Dollar General (DG) said in a press release, noting that its hourly workers face hurdles to getting vaccinated, such as travel time, gas mileage or childcare needs.” If there’s a retailer that has done well during Covid-19, Dollar General would have to be at the top of the list. In early December, Dollar General reported Q3 2020 results that included 12.2% same-store sales growth and a 62.7% increase in earnings per share. As a result, it’s passed on a total of $173 million in 2020 for employee appreciation bonuses. As it continues to open more stores while simultaneously growing its gross margins, the fact that it remembered that its employees are the ones who deliver this good fortune to shareholders is a big reason why DG stock will continue to move higher in 2021. Apple (AAPL) $130 Source: Hadrian / Shutterstock.com Most of the talk around AAPL stock right now revolves around its long-simmering Project Titan and its efforts around delivering its own autonomous electric vehicle. The Verge recently reported that Apple held discussions in 2020 with Canoo (NASDAQ:GOEV), the EV startup using a platform based on a skateboard to provide a much better cabin design for its future vehicles. Canoo apparently just wanted some investment capital. Apple, on the other hand, was thinking more about acquiring the business and integrating it into its existing work in this area. The two didn’t come to an agreement. Canoo went public and Apple’s now working with Hyundai (OTCMKTS:HYMTF) on getting a self-driving EV to market by 2024. Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives recently suggested that Apple could be worth $3 trillion by sometime in 2022 due to strong iPhone 12 sales. He projects it could sell as many as 250 million in 2021. “If Apple continues to execute at this pace, a $3 trillion market cap could be on the horizon over the 12 to 18 months,” Ives is reported to have said. 7 Dividend Stocks That Are Growing Their Payouts As I write this, it’s at $2.2 trillion. Williams-Sonoma (WSM) $125 Source: designs by Jack / Shutterstock.com Several news outlets reported that the retailer’s CEO, Laura Alber, sold some Williams-Sonoma stock just before Christmas. Don’t be alarmed; it was only 15,000 shares or 3.5% of her total holdings. And it was part of her Rule 10b5-1 trading plan started in September 2019. As I always like to say, even wealthy CEOs have bills to pay. Over the past year, Williams-Sonoma stock has delivered a total return of 61.4% for its shareholders, including Alber. That’s double the returns of the specialty retail sector as a whole and three times the entire U.S. markets’ performance. In June 2016, I called WSM one of the best retail stocks to buy due to its excellent omnichannel experience. Going on five years later, nothing’s changed about that assertion. During Covid-19, business at the retailer has been full-speed ahead. Here’s what I said about it in December: “It’s got a business that’s ideally balanced between online and brick-and-mortar sales. In the second quarter, it generated 76% of its sales online; in Q3, due to the novel coronavirus constraints, its online sales accounted for 70% of its total revenue — while growing by almost 50% over last year– and that’s during a pandemic,” I said on Dec. 9. “More importantly, its Q3 profits were through the roof — up 151% to $2.56 a share thanks to significantly higher margins — and that was only through Nov. 1. It doesn’t include Black Friday and Cyber Monday.” The world’s going digital, and that’s good news for Williams-Sonoma. Thor Industries (THO) $105 Source: Angel DiBilio / Shutterstock.com There is no question that 2020 was good for recreational vehicle manufacturers such as Thor Industries, as people young and old sought the great outdoors, away from the maddening, Covid-19 crowd. The problem for investors who’ve followed the RV industry for any length of time is that the good times never seem to last. In the case of the novel coronavirus, once vaccines make humans comfortable with packing together in large crowds, the great outdoors won’t be nearly as enticing as Paris or Australia. That being said, the latest push into RVs may be coming from a sub-set of consumers who might actually take to the open road. “All dealers are reporting a high mix of first-time buyers as evident by lack of trade-in units,” said Wells Fargo analyst Tim Conder in a July 15, 2020 note. “Dealers are saying as high as 80% of customers are first-time buyers … vs. the typical 25% mix. The pandemic is driving the purchase decision for new-entrants.” If even half of those first-time buyers stick around long enough to upgrade to a bigger or better model, Thor Industries might not have to worry about the eventual downturn. To me, THO is one of the perfect stocks to buy for the long haul, buying more whenever it corrects by more than 5-10%. On the date of publication, Will Ashworth did not have (either directly or indirectly) any positions in the securities mentioned in this article. Will Ashworth has written about investments full-time since 2008. Publications where he’s appeared include InvestorPlace, The Motley Fool Canada, Investopedia, Kiplinger, and several others in both the U.S. and Canada. He particularly enjoys creating model portfolios that stand the test of time. He lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia. At the time of this writing Will Ashworth did not hold a position in any of the aforementioned securities. More From InvestorPlace Why Everyone Is Investing in 5G All WRONG Top Stock Picker Reveals His Next 1,000% Winner It doesn’t matter if you have $500 in savings or $5 million. Do this now. The post 10 Smart Stocks to Buy With $5,000 appeared first on InvestorPlace.

My second review will, without a doubt, make some people mad; not just because what I’m going to say about this piece will fiercely disagree with what many people had to say about it, but because Mass Effect 3 had such a large and passionate following, that it would be impossible not to offend someone.

So without further ado, here’s:

Why Mass Effect 3′s Ending Was Actually Good and Those Who Complained About It Are Being Babies (Spoilers)

(People are allowed their opinions, I don’t think they are actually babies, just that they expected too much and they had a huge overreaction to what essentially ends up being about 10-20 minutes of a 30 hour game. I want to acknowledge I’ve seen some arguments saying that the ending isn’t what people wanted. People wanted Shepard to win and to live happily ever after with his love interest with a happy family. The end. And I will admit, I wanted that for my Shepard too, but I can accept that it didn’t happen. Because what we want, isn’t always what we get. And even if you do everything right, things may not turn out the way we had wanted or expected. That’s were the emotion comes in. When Shepard fails to survive even when he made all the right calls. That’s just how it happens/happened. So if you say the ending is bad for this reason, I have no sympathy for you, and you are, in fact, a baby.)

I’m going to start by saying this is not a review of Mass Effect 3. I will review Mass Effect as a series later, but for now let’s focus on the point of contention that most people had with the game: The ending.

So being a huge Mass Effect nerd I’ve spend a lot of time in this universe (I counted it up the other day, I’ve played over 2000 hours of the Mass Effect series) which has allowed me to fully grasp and understand what goes on in these games. This also gives me a huge bias towards the game that I will fully acknowledge. However, I propose that from a writing and programing standpoint, this game (and the ending) is pretty good, not perfect, but good.

Alright legitimacy established, hypothesis stated, let’s get into the nitty-gritty. So we have 2 characters, the Illusive Man and Admiral Anderson plus a Shepard (your male/female projection of yourself that allows you to interact with the world, i.e. not actually a character). The Illusive Man is a master manipulator running a splinter military organization in order to further humanity’s status in the galaxy, at any cost necessary. He has been implanted and indoctrinated by the Reapers, but not directly controlled by them, just influenced. Opposing him, you and Anderson stand, in a trance induced by the Illusive Man via Reaper tech. Anderson is a leader of the Alliance forces, proud and humble all a the same time. He’s been friends with/mentor to Shepard for years, and has been a large part of stopping the Reapers thus far. These two characters are foils, exact opposites that highlight each others strengths and weaknesses. However this scene plays out, Anderson and the Illusive Man end up dead and Shep near death. BUT not before each character has had a chance to make an appeal to you. Illusive Man wants to control the Reapers and use their tech to make the galaxy a better place, great idea, but how is one supposed to control the Reapers? Anderson says to destroy the Reapers, anything less will be damnation of the sapient races of the galaxy, and he has a point, the Reapers are the antagonists after all. But how do we do that? They are just so powerful it has been impossible up to this point.

That’s where the MacGuffin comes in. That’s right, the Crucible, a giant space device passed down throughout millions of years of development has just been activated and Shep can die in peace knowing he kills the Reapers. But wait,  what through yonder window breaks, tis a message that it doesn’t work. Shep passes out and then we see him ascend via unknown force into the Crucible.

This is the point in which I see people getting mad.

Shepard wakes inside the Crucible approached by a semi translucent little boy, that has all the answers in the universe. He says, I offer 3 different color solutions to the problem, and because you are space Jesus you get to pick which one happens by sacrificing yourself, the end. Okay, I understand that sounds dumb, and that’s why people don’t like it. There is an out of left field, totally unexpected thing happening, that boils down to a color-coded trinary choice that ends the magnificent series about the consequences of choice, right?

Wrong. Let’s unpack everything we know, and make an effort to understand before we start to judge.

First the child. Everyone seems to criticize Bioware for making the “Star Child”, as the community refers to him, a significant part of the story. The “Star Child” is based off of a child in the intro of the game. Shepard looks out of his office on Earth (that’s important) down on the child (the first young child we’ve seen in the games to this point, i.e. important), who is playing with a toy in the garden. The Reapers then launch the invasion of Earth and Shepard soon after encounters the boy in a small vent that Shep can’t fit into (also important) and tries to help him. The boy replies, “You can’t help me” (IMPORTANT!). He then disappears. Later, Shepard is about to leave Earth to unite the rest of the galaxy and beat the Reapers. There is a touching scene where Anderson gives his spiel about staying at home and fighting the good fight for the citizens of Earth. I can’t do it justice in this review, but it’s been decided that Shep will leave despite not wanting to. As his ship begins to take off, he spots the boy get into an evac shuttle. And the ship is destroyed. The boy then haunts Shep in his dreams after every major mission in the game hence forth. In each dream sequence, we an extended look at the end of the dream, where the boy sits in flames, then in the last Shepard sees himself and the boy burning. These dream sequences got labeled by fans as out-of-place, unnecessary, and stupid. These are ignorant claims, because almost everyone making these claims do not understand why the child should be important enough to haunt Shepard. They say, “Shep is a grizzled war vet who has seen atrocity after atrocity, why would one child dying haunt his dreams? Shouldn’t it be the friends he’s lost?” Now already, these people can’t understand the ending, because they’ve missed a huge themeing device, because they can only take things literally. Going back to the beginning, we start on Earth. Home. Home is associated with safety, comfort, our childhoods. Then we see the first child in the series ever, hinting that this child will be important. More than that children are considered innocent and the future. Then seeing the child in danger again in the vent, we are supposed to see that Shepard cannot reach this innocence, his future. And finally the giant walking metaphor says, “Player, you cannot help me. You cannot keep your innocence. You may never reach your future. Saving everyone is not a possibility, even thought it is your goal to save as many people as possible. Don’t expect every battle to be a victory.”

And if it wasn’t blatant enough for you, the writers decide that the child should die, AND constantly remind you of the themes via dream sequences at appropriate intervals through the story. This also builds up to a climax, in the last dream sequence when Shep and the boy perish in flames together, both foreshadowing some of the possible endings, and implying that Shepard will not see the future.

“But then how/why did the “Star Child” appear to Shepard as the boy?”

One, it’s the most ancient and advanced piece of technology in the universe with mind altering power, and you just plugged the biggest battery ever created into it. I’m sure it could have appeared as anything it wanted to. Two, themeing is important. Three, suspension of disbelief. This is sci-fi, get used to it.

Okay, so first point of contention, gone. The “Star Child” is important and now you know why. Now the Blue/Green/Red ending. I feel this was what the majority of people were mad about.

First off, I’m throwing the argument "it didn’t incorporate any of the decisions that I made previously and that’s why it’s bad” in the trash. Why? It’s not a good argument. There is no way to make a branching code that would have incorporated decisions made over the course of 3 very long games into the ending AND made it a coherent and satisfying ending to the trilogy. That’s unrealistic. Second, the decisions made did/do matter, they are what led Shepard to be in that situation. The “Star Child” literally says that in his speech. Plus the decisions matter in the much larger scale of each person’s own personal game; who lived and died, what races survive the apocalypse, the relationships forged, people affected, and everything that is and was. If you think the ending negates those decisions, you’re wrong.

Getting into each ending specifically Control, Destroy, and Synthesis; each has their own merits and affect the galaxy after Shepard. (There is also a secret fourth ending, but it isn’t quite as satisfying.) This also matters. It is a metaphor of choosing the legacy you want to leave behind. Each has its own consequences: Control is the proposition of one of your enemies, the Illusive Man. What seemed impossible is now a possibility. Can you see past the bad things that he had done and see the logic in the solution he was seeking? Or do you go with what his foil and your friend, Anderson, would have done and destroy the Reapers? It has always been your goal, but the cost is the deaths of some of your friends and allies. Or do you ignore both extremes and come to a solution never available to you before, blurring the lines between synthetic and organic. This is the most mysterious of the options, and you may not fully grasp the concept as it is foreign, but it would seem like a paradise. And yes each one had their own color, but to boil down those decisions to just the  colors, is showing your own ignorance of said consequences. And with the addition of the FREE Extended Cut ending, it fills in all of the gaps that the previous iteration neglected to mention.

The decision is up to you/Shepard, but only you have to live with the consequences of your decision. And you get to see some of those consequences, as each ending has it’s own unique narration, showing outcomes of decisions made previous to the ending and what the galaxy does with the opportunity given to them.

That is a fucking great ending.

Castle of Shikigami: An informal rant nobody asked for about my most obscure obsession to date

STOP i spent like 2 days writing this post and im only posting it on tumblr because it’s the one website i’m a member of that can hold the most text. i wanted to infodump somewhere...... read this to learn something i guess (´･ω･`)

Bad voice acting is the Peak of comedy to me, and while I was looking for something to laugh at one day, I found this game called Castle Shikigami 2 for the PS2. The US version of the game's dialogue is rife with machine translated text that makes no sense, and awkward voice acting to boot. They even have voice actors saying the wrong lines, voice actors speaking implied commands, and a few voice lines are left in Japanese. Apparently, Roger Craig Smith (Sonic the Hedgehog's current voice actor) was in this game but I don't think he's even credited?! I think I know which character he voiced but I’m not exactly sure.

The history behind this game’s localization is REALLY weird. Castle of Shikigami/Shikigami no Shiro was originally an arcade bullet hell shoot em up game. The series was created by Alfa System and it was one of Alfa System’s main IPs. There are three main shmup installments and a text adventure game for the PS2, Nanayozuki Gensoukyoku. Nanayozuki was practically fanservice for whatever number of CoS fans there were back then. Each main game in the series was originally an arcade cabinet, but they were all ported to PC and home consoles. In CoS 2′s case, it came out on the PS2, Gamecube, and Dreamcast, but only the PS2 version got localized. The western publisher, XS Games specializes in publishing quality budget titles such as “Bass Pro Shops: The Strike” for the Wii. I theorize they didn’t care too much about the actual content of CoS 2 and were more focused on selling a game quickly for a low price, so they just machine translated it and adjusted a few things. If you’re wondering if Castle of Shikigami 1 was also translated this badly, the answer is No. XS Games instead removed all the dialogue from the western release of CoS 1, and released it with the title “Mobile Light Force 2″.

“Wait, what do you mean ‘Mobile Light Force TWO’ if Castle of Shikigami 1 is the first game in the series?” If you want to know what Mobile Light Force 1 was, it’s GUNBIRD; another shmup game, but by a completely different developer than Castle of Shikigami. I don’t know why they did that. What really kills me though is that both MLF 1 and 2 use the same boxart, which is COMPLETELY unrelated to the actual contents of either game. AFJQHJFOKLJFDS look at this

There’s more hilarity behind Mobile Light Force that isn’t hard to find so you can search that up if you’re interested. But thankfully, Castle of Shikigami 3's Wii edition got more of a proper localization by Aksys Games.

Now I would bluntly say something like “stan castle of shikigami” but:

1. This series’ lore is insanely convoluted. It’s an essential part of this expansive fictional universe referred to as “Mumei Sekaikan” (I don’t know what this translates to in English) where there’s like, 7 different parallel worlds. There’s more obscure ass games and manga that are tied to this universe, and I think there’s even a tabletop RPG made based off it. Have you heard of “Gunparade March”? Most likely you haven’t; it’s an obscure video game made by Alfa System that also got adapted into an anime, and I feel it can be described as Mechas x Persona. One of the characters in CoS 2 is just one of the GPM characters going undercover to find her senpai who traveled to the CoS world. Or something like that. The 7-world universe isn’t explicitly talked about in the game but they make so many references to it without defining anything that it’s like you Must know about it. There is NO documentation in English about the Mumei Sekaikan I could find on the internet, although there is a wiki in Japanese where I got a ton of knowledge from (GOOGLE TRANSLATE IS MY TRUSTED FRIEND) I feel like I might be THE person in the United States who has the most knowledge on the Mumei Sekaikan, and I could go on another tangent talking about what I know so far (and who this one specific dude Shibamura Yuuri is) but I won’t.

2. The writing isn’t excellent and can be pretty Unwoke ™; the first game came out in 2001 and the third game came out in 2005 if that gives you a sense on what era these writers were in. As far as the games dialogue goes, the characters appear kind of flat. CoS 1 and 2 Kotaro (i refuse to use the official “Kohtaro”) is stupid and driven by JUSTICE to a point where it’s annoying. I can’t tell if Hyuga is trying to be a Ladies Man in CoS 2 and 3. Kim, a religious tae kwon do instructor, spends CoS 2 thinking about how he should atone for his sins, then he turns himself into jail at the end. Sayo’s backstory is that she was a shrine maiden raised as a “human weapon” to have no emotions and her only goal in life was to kill god and then die, something like that. However, after CoS 1, she gets a crush on Kotaro because he actually treats her like a human and Of course that’s what you’d expect from the main teen girl and boy in the series. In CoS 3, Sayo's character is mostly played out to be a major tsundere for Kotaro even though surprisingly HIS character in this game changed a ton compared to 1 and 2 (he had to kill an illusion of his older brother, who he learned actually died earlier, and now he has to kill an illusion of his childhood sweetheart... damb that shit sucks :/). He’s still stupid though

There’s a gag in CoS 2 that I can’t clearly remember where it’s like, Niigi makes Sayo and Fumiko, who are both romantically interested in Kotaro, think that he’s only into little girls? Meanwhile, Fumiko’s magic goes wrong and her appearance turns to that of a child though in response she’s like “hee hee maybe Kotaro will like this”. basically more On-Brand early 2000′s anime unwokeness than average. Speaking of Fumiko, she’s a 400+ year old militaristic witch who constantly teases Kotaro (who’s like 16 or 17) and she wants to marry him for his magical potential since he’s like one of the candidates for becoming God??? From the official CoS 3 character descriptions, “Her hobby is to steal the men from other women. Her second hobby is trampling upon people.” She canonically stole her stepmother’s husband from her stepmother (the 3rd boss of CoS 3). I don’t get how that shit would have worked

3. The game itself is HARD af but to be fair I’m a scrub gamer. I can’t get past stage 3 on easy difficulty without continuing. Yes i bought CoS 1 on Steam, Yes it has a port on steam i feel like i should have mentioned this earlier

4. Besides CoS 1 having a port on Steam, CoS 2 and 3 might be hard to obtain legally. The poorly translated CoS 2 was apparently super cheap back then, but since it’s an old game, its value might’ve increased. When I tried looking up prices for English CoS 3, all the listings were like at least $40 and being broke I wouldn’t want to spend more than $29 for a Wii game in 2019... honestly I just emulated CoS 2. shout out to PCSX2

Last month I was desperate, bored enough, and deep enough in the Shikigami rabbit hole that I tried to find the manga based off of it online. The CoS manga only tells the events of the first two games so I still don’t really get anything about CoS 3, like who Mihee, Batu, and Emilio are supposed to be. However, the plot events also differ. For example, Roger Sasuke exists as a character in CoS 3 but in the manga he literally Dies. There’s 11 total volumes of this; 3 volumes dedicated to CoS 1 and the latter 8 (the “Twisted Castle arc”) dedicated to CoS 2. Only the very first 3 chapters were scanlated to English all the way in 2011. Fortunately, I did find the entire manga uploaded though............... in CHINESE. So you know what I did? I “read” the entire thing using my phone’s Google Translate OCR app to take pictures of each page and comprehend the translations. Of course I still don’t understand CRAP because of the Mumei Sekaikan jargon + machine translation but I understood enough to get emotionally attached to some of the characters. I wish I hadn’t. At least through the manga I learned that the characters DO have some depth and pre-established relationships. For instance, the reason why Roger Sasuke became a ninja is because when he first landed in Japan as a kid, he was getting bullied or something and he didn’t know Japanese then Kotaro saw this and told the bullies to stop. Then after Roy /sorry i mean Roger learned that he was set to home-stay with the Kugas in the first place, he decided to dedicate his life to Japan in order to protect Kotaro back. I think. DO U SEE HOW ABSURD THIS SHIT IS Anyway Nanayozuki takes place between the second and third games and sets things up for CoS 3. There’s a full playthrough of it uploaded to YouTube and I think it contains a lot of juicy lore, but it’s just too much to go over with Shitty Google Translate OCR. There’s also Shikigami no Shiro novels which apparently contain the most backstory, but I have a 0% chance of finding these online for free. Not to mention that these would ALSO be too much effort to Google Translate.

in conclusion: You don’t HAVE to play Castle of Shikigami. Like, I’m not gonna recommend it for the content, but if you love shmups and are looking for a shmup game you haven’t heard of then I will recommend it for the gameplay (old touhou mutuals assemble theres a POWER-UP-BY-GRAZE MECHANIC). I’ve counted like 4 total fans outside of Japan that like this series for the story, and I don’t think that number is going to increase because I doubt CoS 2 will ever get retranslated and ported. I just want you to know that this series exists and that there’s a ton of wacky shit behind it besides the bad Castle Shikigami 2 dub. also if someone knows enough japanese or chinese and has an INKLING of interest in this series umm talk to me and help me decipher stuff

I‘m kinda sad that the series is pretty much Dead though. This is the most recent piece of official Castle of Shikigami art I could find, and this was for the 2018 New Year. The next most recent piece of official CoS art I found was also drawn by the character designer Sonoda Miku all the way in January 2008, commemorating the end of the CoS manga serialization. Alfa System released a spiritual sequel to Castle of Shikigami on the Japanese Switch eShop called Sisters Royale, with character designs I think are still by Sonoda. By “spiritual sequel” I mean that it has some of the EXACT same shot types as CoS and the same mechanic where grazing bullets increases your power and score. This is the closest we’ll get to a Shikigami no Shiro 4. I wonder what the business decision behind that game was but it actually looks like fun and I want to play it so OK Go off i guess

Which city should be the next to host an NFL franchise?

Los Angeles has two teams now and Las Vegas will have one soon. Who’s next?

NFL teams have never been shy about moving around. The Rams began in Cleveland, moved to Los Angeles, uprooted for Saint Louis, and then ducked back to Los Angeles in favor of a stadium that will cost more than the GDP of 35 nations. The Cardinals played second fiddle in Chicago through their first four decades, moved to Missouri for a while, and now bounce around the Phoenix metropolitan area every so often.

Even entrenched teams have been subject to temporary rehoming. The Bills have played all of their 60 seasons in Buffalo, but they’ve also experimented with home games north of the border in Toronto. The Jaguars have been in Jacksonville since 1995, but are an annual fixture in the league’s International Series in London. New markets get tested every fall.

In the past 25 years, Baltimore, Charlotte, Jacksonville, Nashville, Los Angeles, and Houston all welcomed NFL franchises within city limits. So which cultural center will join them? A cross-Atlantic market in Great Britain? One of the world’s largest cities in Mexico? The current Canadian home of the reigning NBA champions? Wilmington, Delaware?

Here are our candidates.

London, England

Foisting American sports off on the Brits has been a proud tradition that dates back to 2007. After luring fans to a packed Wembley Stadium in the late 2000s with a lineup that included recent (and even current) Super Bowl winners like the Giants (‘07), Saints (‘08), and Patriots (‘09), the league then tested England’s limits by making the Jaguars an annual fixture overseas in 2013.

And it went pretty well! Only one of the 21 games to take place at Wembley drew fewer than 80,000 fans. All three of 2018’s games at the stadium eclipsed the 84,000 mark. Anything over a 78,000 average would give a London franchise the league’s second-highest attendance behind the Cowboys — though that’s a little misleading since most teams don’t have stadiums that can hit that 80k mark.

Of course, fatigue would set in as fans adjusted to either the growing pains of an expansion team or a franchise whose performance had dropped enough to make relocation passable. That’s a concern, but this is also a city that’s averaged 84,240 fans per game while watching the Jaguars go 3-3 in London. You can argue some of those fans were lured to the stadium due to the novelty of the game and high profile halftime shows, but Wembley nearly hit 86,000 for last year’s Philadelphia-Jacksonville game that had no halftime performance. And nearly 84,000 still came out for a 2016 game that featured Robin Thicke at the break, which feels like more of a punishment than anything.

Travel plans and finding a full-time stadium are major logistical concerns, but manageable ones. West coast teams would likely have to plan an east coast game the week before heading overseas to prevent the headache of a 10+ hour flight to the isles. Whatever team, new or requisitioned, would need to work out a timeshare on a soccer pitch before working out their own plans for a(n American) football-specific stadium. But between the NFL’s stated goal of expanding the game globally and the bundles of money that would come with a greater European presence would make those headaches worthwhile.

Otherwise, let’s throw a team in Anchorage, Alaska. Give the world an outdoor stadium that can wrest the “frozen tundra” moniker away from Green Bay. The largest city in America’s largest state (by area) only has 10,000 fewer residents than Pittsburgh or Cincinnati and is has a greater population than Buffalo or AAF standbys Orlando and Salt Lake City. The west coast needs more teams to balance out those 4pm EST kickoffs — why not get weird with it? — Christian D’Andrea

Portland, Oregon

Take a cruise down the list of the largest cities in the United States and most of the top 20 or 30 consists of places that either:

A: Already have an NFL team, or B: Are boxed out by a nearby franchise or two.

It’s hard to imagine California getting another team soon after taxpayers balked at the idea of paying for new stadiums in San Diego or Oakland. That eventually resulted in two teams relocating. It’s also going to be difficult for Texas to get a third team so long as Jerry Jones keeps pushing back on a team coming to take a slice of the Lonestar State pie.

If all that means places like San Antonio, San Diego, San Jose, Austin, Fort Worth, and El Paso are scratched from the list (which it might not, but let’s assume it does), that’d leave Portland as one of the biggest cities in the country without an NFL franchise.

Portland currently sits No. 25 in the United States in population — ahead of plenty of NFL cities, including Baltimore, Atlanta, Kansas City, Miami, and Minneapolis. It’s also the 22nd largest media market, according to Nielsen.

The only major professional sports teams in Portland right now are the NBA’s Trail Blazers, MLS’s Timbers, and the NWSL’s Thorns FC. All three are well supported by the city. The Trail Blazers and Timbers both consistently sell out their venues, and the Thorns FC dominate the rest of the NWSL in attendance.

That doesn’t necessarily mean a 60,000+ seat stadium would get filled too, but it’s a really good sign. It helps too that the earthquake-inducing fans of the Seattle Seahawks have shown the Pacific Northwest has a passionate bunch of sports supporters. Portland would probably should up in a big way for a football team they could call their own. — Adam Stites

San Antonio, Texas

San Antonio isn’t the biggest market for an NFL team, but they’d be a nice spot for a new team.

Ron Nirenberg, the mayor of San Antonio, believes the city will have a team within 10 years. Here’s what Nirenberg had to say when asked about his 10-year timeline to host an NFL team:

“It’s a horizon. A fairly short horizon as it relates to the economic growth of the city. The economic growth of San Antonio and the success we are experiencing now is profound and it has been a concerted effort, a deliberate effort on my part and other city leaders to make sure that our profile in pro sports is rising.”

“Increasingly professional teams and leagues are looking to San Antonio as a place where they can find success and that’s very exciting for the San Antonio citizen in general who wants to see the economy of our city succeed, but its also great for San Antonio sports fans.”

Prior to settling down in the Oakland Coliseum for one last season, the Raiders were pondering a one year move to San Antonio prior to their relocation to Las Vegas. Nirenberg said that he wants San Antonio to remain “on the radar” in any relocation talks — permanent or temporary.

San Antonio has already showed that they can support a professional basketball team with the support they’ve shown the Spurs over the last 20 years. Admittedly, it’s easy to support a team that’s consistently good like the Spurs have been, but it does show that the potential fanbase is there for an NFL team.

San Antonio can also look at another team in their own state to rapidly build a fanbase in the Houston Texans. Houston joined the NFL in 2002 and has already cultivated a passionate group of fans — the Texans ranked 11th in attendance last season.

Football reigns supreme in Texas. Given the longtime success of the Cowboys and the recent success of the Texans, San Antonio should be confident they can sustain a professional team if they received one. — Charles McDonald

Memphis, Tennessee

Memphis almost had an NFL franchise back in the 1990’s but could only watch as Carolina and Jacksonville were awarded expansion teams. The team was to be called the Memphis Hound Dogs, which sounds pretty cool. That franchise came to exist anyway in a bizarre 9-9 season playing in the Canadian Football League.

All that drama led to Memphis having a tense relationship with the NFL. But there is reason why they should (again) be a candidate for expansion.

For starters, they already have a stadium in the city. The Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium is already the home for the Memphis Tigers football team and hosted the Houston Oilers for a couple of games in 1997. For a team that’s new to a city, already having a place to call their own is huge. It’s one of the major hurdles for any city looking to woo a franchise — even if it’s only a temporary home while an NFL-quality stadium is built.

The AutoZone Liberty Bowl, which is hosted every year in Memphis, had the 11th highest attendance of all the bowl games last season and has averaged over 50,000 fans since 1998. The market for football is there in Memphis.

Memphis already has the Grizzlies (granted, they’ve had a recent attendance decline), but the city should be looked at if the NFL is hunting for a viable city. Plus who wouldn’t want to hear the Hound Dogs called out on their TV on Sundays? - Vijay Vemu

Mexico City, Mexico

The NFL wants to get international, but a team in London, eight hours ahead of the Pacific time zone, is a tall ask. In North America, they have some real options, including Mexico City. Not only is Mexico City closer to teams in Texas and Florida than those teams are to, say, California’s teams, but the potential market size is enormous.

Not only is the population huge, it would largely be comprised of extremely passionate fans. I’m not here to knock the fans of any American teams, but sports fans in Mexico bleed for the teams they support. I don’t know how well an NFL team will be embraced right out of the gate, but the market is large enough to support them.

Plus, if the team is actually good, the potential fanbase is even larger. They’ll immediately be some of the most passionate fans in the sport. Mexico City is also a very nice place, if you weren’t aware. You should go sometime.

It’s worth noting (well, it’s worth it to me, you probably don’t care, but you’re reading this anyway) that when I relocate a team in Madden, I always relocate to Mexico City, which the game gives top grades to in market size and fan dedication. I’m nearly 20 years into my Madden 19 franchise in Mexico City, and it would be rad if that team (mine are the Mexico City Diablos) became a reality. — James Brady

A Canadian City

As stated above, the NFL has been trying to go international for years. The NFL is the only one of America’s major sports leagues without a team in Canada. Even the MLS has three Canadian teams. It’s time to expand the NFL past the northern border.

Toronto would be the obvious choice here — especially with the recent success of the NBA champion Toronto Raptors — but they haven’t exactly shown dedication to American football. The Buffalo Bills’ played six regular season games in Toronto from 2008-13 and averaged a little more than 47,000 in attendance. The Toronto Argonauts also have one of the lowest average attendance in the Canadian Football League.

The city does seem dedicated to increasing the popularity of the CFL as a road to an NFL franchise, but have yet to be successful. Other major Canadian cities like Montreal or Edmonton could be just as successful or more so than Toronto, though

Edmonton’s stadium — Commonwealth Stadium — is the second largest in the country with a seating capacity of 55,819. The MLB’s Montreal Expos were successful and were supported by the city and fans for decades before their relocation.

Hockey is always going to come first in Canada, but the NFL should be able to capitalize on whatever success the CFL has and make a franchise all of Canada can root for. — Kennedi Landry

Seth’s House

It’s nice! — Seth Rosenthal

Not for Us (or, the righteous butthurt of an intelligent female fan)

As a kid, it happened with masturbation, cartoons, comic books, then sci-fi. I’d be totally into it, but then I’d feel like an interloper in a secret world of pleasure, so I’d drop it and try to find something more ‘appropriate’.

I was never into dolls or the Babysitter’s Club, though, so I just read horror fiction and tread water.

Cut to 2000-something, when the uproar about New Who began. I love love LOVE sci-fi, but I eschewed watching it because...I might like it too much. I didn’t want to commit.

I never really asked myself why this summary dismissal was a thing with me.

The steady influx of Moffat indignation on my timeline, then a little research into the writer and his work, helped me to see the big picture more clearly.

These shows -Sherlock and Doctor Who - just like GI Joe, He-Man, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and most comic books - were not written for girls/women. In the 60′s, 70′s, 80′s and 90′s, that was okay. We had our own entertainment in Barbie dream houses, Dream Date board games, and My Little Pony, right?

Spider-Man, Spawn and Constantine is for the boys, as us girls don’t do grisly or nerdy or understatedly heroic. 

Why would I want to look through the hero’s eyes, when I could lust after him at the appropriate, ego-boosting time? That’s the only way my female gaze would fit into the narrative. 

Sexually. 

A thirst for adventure, or even the non-sexual curiosity about the trials and tribulations of the everyday Marvel superhero or extraordinary gumshoe are not relevant.

I’m a lady. Ostensibly, I should be content with spiky hair, an eyebrow raise or a smexy bowtie while the boys play how they may. The companions, and therefore us women, are just incarnations of the Madonna/whore complex, reduced to on/off buttons of emotion.

Buttons, ha! Men complain that we’re too complex, but maddeningly, it doesn’t show where it should - in their written depictions of us. Case in point: 

1) Rose flirts, simpers and giggles much to the young handsome Doctor’s delight, but never clearly states her feelings...except when she’s willing to internalize the time vortex which forces Nine to absorb it and die to save her, then later, risk ripping the universe apart and let every living thing in it die to see the Doctor. 

She saved the Earth, but was willing to watch Nine, then the Universe burn for another snog. 

Rose is young, foolish, and extraordinarily selfish, and she’s written to be the Doctor’s one and only. It speaks volumes about what the writer thinks about women.

2) Martha’s written thirsty because if there isn’t a beautiful woman lusting after Ten, the ‘dashing doctor’ trope is fucked. The fact that it makes her into a farce of herself although she’s far more intelligent and empathetic than The One Who Came Before is unimportant. She’s just the current companion after the hallowed Rose, and guess what?

She saves the Doctor, full stop. Ten gave up nothing, and she gave up everything to save his freckly hide. But, again, she’s written as a placeholder. Rose is still the thing.

3) Donna is a thirty-something redhead who is stridently Not Attracted to the Doctor(r), but the visible, straining effort to make Catherine Tate a frump makes me want to extricate my brain and throw it at the wall. It’s obviously written after the fan uproar about Martha, and it backfired a bit.  And Rose is still around, still fucking things up.

Why, oh why did you do that to the lovely Billie?!

And don’t get me started on Tentoo. That is a hairpulling, indignant screed all its own.

And that’s the RTD era, which I love. On to Moffat:

Amy’s perplexingly pointless.

Clara’s irritatingly irritating.

River is....fuck.

And what about femaleMaster!? Jesus.

And speaking about Sherlock, what about Molly? 

A lovely, fragile dumpster blossom (as she’s written, as scientists can’t be sexy) who’s just as useful as what she can do for Sherlock. How many times has she..ahem...saved him?

And Mary - she’s strong, so she naturally has to be shockingly callous. Again, a clever, strong woman can’t be empathetic, or unselfish. That’s not the way it goes, since such a women wouldn’t fit the on/off button paradigm. 

The actresses are brilliant. This is metric fucktons of talent wasted on retarded writing.

And so, the male characters suffer for the writer’s lack of nuance in writing the women as people.

Let that sink in a while. Yeah, it’s deep.

This was passable 30 years ago, when women ‘weren’t paying attention’. The boys could feed their egos on the hero and their eyes on the dimepiece, nodding indulgently at how silly them girls is actin’. Sadly for the boy’s club, it’s not the case any longer.

Guess what, boys - bitches can have empathy. Funny women can be devastatingly sexy. Beautiful women can be selfless. Strong women can be gentle, and not be out to denigrate every male in sight. Impulsive, foolish women can have the best of intentions. Our primary function as women isn’t to save you, emotionally or physically, and any relationship based on that is emotionally draining and breeds resentment.

Fair is fair, so same goes for men.

I don’t need to see men systematically emasculated to prove the show is ‘pro-woman’ -  I love dashing, clever men. That’s why DW became so popular, so don’t castrate the Doctor and make him a bumbling second to a woman who is his equal. Don’t pander to women, thinking we’re so foolish we won’t see it and be put off.

The game needs to be upped. Get more clever, funny, sympathetic female writers in the crew to create some checks and balances. Match your heroes to complex, fully-developed female characters worthy to be their equals.

Don’t cheat yourself, treat yourself.

Us women are watching.

Science on a fast track is like a virus. The post COVID world is panic driven!  The scientists were expected to be more scientific! Science should not deliver its results like a magic without going through protocols. Researchers race to deliver results, academic journals race to publish, and the media races to bring new information to a scared and eager public. Openness and transparency are the hall marks of science! It should divorce in no unequivocal terms from the influence of power, privilege, finance and politics! It starts small, but if it’s shared enough times, it can cause global disruption. Science Has an Ugly, Complicated Dark Side. And the Coronavirus Is Bringing It Out. The druggists and the researchers are busy announcing results of old anti-viral drugs, anti-malarial drugs and anti AIDS drugs on corona virus with an Antibiotic here and there. They find themselves in a hurry to announce their results even if it is as low as 20% success. This is to capture the early bird advantage and clearly a one Up- Manship attitude. With confirmed COVID-19 cases worldwide surpassing 4.3 million and continuing to grow, scientists are pushing forward with efforts to develop vaccines and treatments to slow the pandemic and lessen the disease’s damage. Some of the earliest treatments will likely be drugs that are already approved for other conditions, or have been tested on other viruses. People are looking into whether existing antivirals might work or whether new drugs could be developed to try to tackle the virus. Drug development is sometimes described as a pipeline, with compounds moving from early laboratory development to laboratory and animal testing to clinical trials in people. It can take a decade or more for a new compound to go from initial discovery to the marketplace. Many compounds never even make it that far. That’s why many medications being eyed as potential treatments for COVID-19 are drugs that already exist. There are three stages of infection at which the coronavirus could be targeted: keeping the virus from entering our cells, preventing it from replicating inside the cells, and minimizing the damage that the virus does to the organs. As of now there is no success in combating COVID19 in any of the three stages! Glenmark Pharmaceuticals Ltd said on Tuesday it will begin a new clinical trial in India to test a combination of two anti-viral drugs, Favipiravir and umifenovir, as a potential COVID-19 treatment. Glenmark has received approval from the Indian regulator to initiate the study. ‘Too wise too late’. Chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine prevent coronavirus. The study, which had prompted even the World Health Organization (WHO) to pause HCQ clinical trials in Covid-19 patients last month under its giant ‘solidarity trial’, has been questioned for parsing through data in lesser-than-usual time, and has faced allegations of data fabrication too. Chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine are two prescription medications that are approved to prevent and treat malaria. In China, doctors used chloroquine to treat patients with COVID-19 and it seemed to help. But doctors elsewhere in the world say that more research is needed. A large global trial to carefully study the effectiveness of these drugs vs. the coronavirus is currently underway. WHO has studied the use of these drugs on 96000 patients worldwide and has temporarily suspended the use of these drugs in COVID19. ICMR had initiated a study on the use of these two drugs on front line corona warriors numbering around 2000 and was to publish the results in June- July. But now ICMR has also suspended the trial study after WHO decided to keep these drugs on suspension. India depending on studies and drug approval from West shows it suffers colonial hangover. Take Remdesivir, for instance. India’s drug controller approved its emergency use  only the green light given by the US’ Food and Drug Administration- The FDA Now authors of two controversial studies published in Lancet and New England journal of medicine have retracted their papers as they could not vouch for the veracity of the data sourced from a private company for their analysis. In  two open letters written to the editors of both journals on 31st may more than 100 scientists flagged major discrepancies in the quality of data from across the world Hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine can cause abnormal heart rhythms such as QT interval prolongation and a dangerously rapid heart rate called ventricular tachycardia which can result in death! FDA has stated that “We will continue to investigate risks associated with the use of hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine for COVID-19 and communicate publicly when we have more information.” The peer-reviewed Journal of the American Medical Association released a new study Friday that said researchers cut short a study testing chloroquine as a potential treatment for Covid-19 over safety concerns, citing a “primary outcome” of death The drugs have been touted by President Donald Trump as a potential “game changer” in the fight against the coronavirus. I do hope that president Trump stops promoting injections of bleach powder. Remdesivir Remdesivir is an experimental broad-spectrum antiviral drug originally designed to target Ebola virus The drug Remdesivir has been under the spotlight as a possible treatment for critical cases of COVID-19. Globally, it is one of the four possible lines of treatment being investigated in the Solidarity trials under the aegis of the World Health Organization When the virus engulfs itself around a human cell, it injects its RNA inside the cell. The RdRp enzyme causes viral replication. Remdesivir inhibits the enzyme and stops further replication . Researchers have found that Remdesivir is effective at fighting the novel coronavirus in isolated cells. Initial reports said it is 30% effective. This treatment is not yet approved in humans, but two clinical trials for this drug have been implemented in China. One clinical trial was recently also approved by the FDA in the United States. The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has said it can consider using the drug if local manufacturers are willing to procure it. Remdesivir is currently not available in India. The ICMR plans to wait and watch for the results of WHO’s Solidarity trials to make an assessment on the efficacy of Remdesivir for COVID-19 treatment. Ritonavir and lopinavir Ritonavir and lopinavir are two antiviral drugs used for treatment of HIV. These too work by inhibiting the virus;s RNA. Specifically, they target the enzyme that helps the virus split proteins. These two drugs are being used in India and several countries for seriously ill patients. In HIV patients, these two antiviral drugs work together to decrease the viral load in blood. Their use in COVID-19 patients seeks the same outcome. “But so far, it has not shown great success in viral suppression,” said Dr Pravin Amle, infectious disease expert. He relies on the antibiotic azithromycin as his first choice. whether it is safe to take ibuprofen to treat coronavirus symptoms. It began harmlessly, when the Lancet Respiratory Medicine, a respected journal, published a 400-word letter from a group of European researchers that raised some safety concerns about the drug. But much of the world treated the mere suggestion as if it were derived from the results of a clinical trial. Within a week, the French health minister, followed by a spokesperson from the World Health Organization, recommended that people with COVID-19 don’t take ibuprofen. A day later the WHO backtracked, saying it did “not recommend against” the use of ibuprofen. Good science requires time, Peer review and Reproducibility But in the past few months, the scientific process for all things related to COVID-19 has been fast-tracked!  Yes, of course, it is understandable on some level—thousands are dying worldwide every day. And, at the same time, unverified opinions circulate widely on social media and on TV from so-called experts, which makes understanding the situation all the more difficult. Conducting and communicating research without a breach of protocol during a pandemic is need of the hour!

Sensor Sweep: Battle Tech, Manly Wade Wellman, Savage Heroes, Space Force

Science Fiction (Tor.com): Anyone who has played Traveller (or even just played with online character generation sites like this one) might have noticed that a surprising number of the characters one can generate are skilled with blades. This may see as an odd choice for a game like Traveller that is set in the 57th century CE, or indeed for any game in which swords and starships co-exist. Why do game authors make these choices?  Just as games mix swords and starships, so do SFF novels. The trope goes way back, to the planetary romance novels of the Golden Age. Here are five examples.

Fiction Review (Legends of Men): Savage Heroes is a sword & sorcery anthology that’s pretty rare in the U.S. That’s because it’s a U.K. publication. The first S&S anthology I reviewed was Swords Against Darkness. It’s a great anthology that came highly recommended by an expert scholar in the field. Savage Heroes is better though. It captures very well the combination of historical adventure, lost world fiction, and cosmic horror that makes Sword and Sorcery unique.

Fiction (Wasteland & Sky): Hard-boiled noir is an interesting subgenre. It’s mostly remembered in the mainstream, if at all, for cheesy parodies that family sitcoms and cartoon used to do back in the 1990s. What it is remembered for is as a genre about hapless detectives in black and white 1930s settings having to find a killer among a cast of twelve or so shifty character archetypes. Plenty of fun is poked, but they hardly take the genre seriously.

Science Fiction (Scifi Scribe): We’ve all seen the memes, right? The minute the world started talking about the mere idea of a United States Space Force, we were all instantly greeted by “LOL, Space National Guard/Space Force Reserves!” All joking aside, the irreverent interservice banter and, shall we say, “robust,” back-and-forth on social media reflects the very real, and very important, national-level discussions about creating a new military service branch.

Cinema (Jon Mollison): The birth of Dungeons and Dragons is a strange and fascinating story of how creatives can draw forth order from the froth of chaos. I went into this film expecting a lot of defensive snark about how Gary Gygax was a Johnny-come-lately who yoinked the idea of RPGs out from under Dave Arneson’s nose.  A fraudulent Edison to Arneson’s Tesla, if you will.  And there are hints of that within this film, but only hints.

Art (Mutual Art): Theron Kabrich quietly gazes at Roger Dean’s watercolor, The Gates of Delirium. He has been Dean’s friend and representative at the San Francisco Art Exchange for thirty years, selling his paintings, drawings, and prints to an international audience of collectors. Millions of copies of the image have been made. If Tolkien’s timeless classic inspired Dean’s enduring fascination with pathways at the beginning of his career, it is Robert McFarlane’s writing about wandering journeys along the ancient tracks twisting through the British landscape that have his attention in the present.

Art (DMR Books): Stephen  Fabian, as I’ve pointed out before, is a living legend in the fantasy art community. His output from the 1970s to the 2000s—both in quality and quantity—can only be called astounding. I covered some of that in my three-part series on his Robert E. Howard-related art. However, a friend of mine recently brought Fabian’s artwork for In Lovecraft’s Shadow to my attention. That book, in some respects, may be Stephen’s greatest sustained work. In Lovecraft’s Shadow was a collection of August Derleth’s Lovecraftian fiction published in 1998 through a joint venture by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box and Mycroft & Moran.

Review (Tea at Trianon): I remember as a twenty-two-year-old being excited when I saw a new book called the The Mists of Avalon by an author called Marion Zimmer Bradley. Mists was presented as the retelling of the Arthurian legend from the point of view of the women of Camelot, which I thought was a thrilling idea. However, I found the book heavy on paganism and morbid, explicit sex scenes, but light on romance, heroism, chivalry, mystery, faith and all the qualities I had come to love in the Camelot stories. This brings us to Moira Greyland’s recent book, The Last Closet: The Dark Side of Avalon.

Fiction (Adventures Fantastic): I’m going to look at three of his stories that feature the same  character, Sergeant Jaeger. First is “Fearful Rock”.  Originally published in the February 1939 issue of Weird Tales, the central character of this novella is Lt. Lanark. He and Jaeger are leading a cavalry patrol in Missouri during the Civil War, looking for Quantrill. What they find is a young woman being sacrificed by her step-father to the Nameless One in an abandoned house under the shadow of a formation known as Fearful Rock.

Fiction (DMR Books): Tanith Lee was a force to be reckoned with in the ’70s, ’80s and on into the ’90s. She exploded onto the SFF scene with her debut novel for DAW Books, The Birthgrave. That book was labeled at the time as being “sword-and-sorcery”. I would probably call it heroic fantasy, but it remains a minor classic regardless of specific sub-category. During her forty-plus-year career, Tanith published ninety novels and a myriad of short stories. Her prolificity was on display right away. She quickly followed up The Birthgrave with more notable books like The Storm Lord and Volkhavaar, along with short stories like “Odds Against the Gods” published in Swords Against Darkness II.

Science Fiction (Men of the West): The book. Not the movie. If you can even call Verhoeven’s bastardization “Starship Troopers” at all. Robert A. Heinlein is an increasingly controversial figure in recent years, moreso than he was in his lifetime. This, of course, is due to his dubious content in his later career. But he was nothing if not influential on the genre, and his early works, such as his juvenile novels (of which this was the last), remain worth a read. We may go into Heinlein’s other works later, but the focus is not so much on the man as on the book.

D&D (Jeffro’s Space Gaming Blog): I think Gygax is pretty clear about how initiative works in the DMG. (His surprise rules do make a bit of static, though.) Here’s my take on it: 1) DM decides what the monsters will do. Check reaction and/or morale if need be. 2) Players declare their actions. If they want to win at rpgs, they will advise a high t caller who will then speak for group.

Cthulhu Mythos (Marzaat): “Bells of Horror”, Henry Kuttner, 1939. This is a fairly good bit of Lovecraftian fiction from Kuttner. He uses a typical Lovecraft structure. Our narrator opens by mentioning a weird event then gives the back story of what led up to it and concludes with a not all surprising event. (Sometimes Lovecraft managed to surprise with his last lines, sometimes not.)

Authors (Goodman Games): While all of Wellman’s oeuvre is worth reading, it is his Silver John stories that most impacted the world of fantasy role-playing. Wellman is one of the names on Gygax’s Appendix N roster of influential authors. Although no specific title is listed alongside his name, it’s been suggested that the character of Silver John influenced the bard class in D&D—a wandering troubadour who uses song, magic, and knowledge to defeat supernatural menaces. Stripped of the pseudo-medieval trappings of D&D, the bard and Silver John become almost indistinguishable from one another.

Pulp Art (Dark Worlds Quarterly): It shouldn’t be any surprise that the artists that illustrated Short Stories would appear in Weird Tales and vice versa, though to a lesser degree. Fred Humiston is a good example. For many years, he illustrated half of each issue of Short Stories along with Edgar Wittmack.

Cinema (Film School Rejects): Most movie fans associate Martin Campbell with the Bond franchise and other blockbusters. However, before he became one of Hollywood’s A-list directors, he helmed Cast a Deadly Spell, a genre-bending TV movie that originally aired on HBO back in 1991. It isn’t the most known movie in his oeuvre, but it’s easily one of his most entertaining and rewatchable efforts.

Tolkien (Monsters and Manuals): I have no idea what Tolkien had in mind for the geography of Rhun and the peoples within it. But it seems to me that, while one shouldn’t think of Middle Earth as being too closely paralleled with the real world, there is a case to be made that its character is roughly akin to the Eurasian steppe this side of the Urals – more specifically the Pontic Steppe north of the Black Sea (with the Sea of Rhun here being a bit like the Black Sea).

Gaming ( Walker’s Retreat): The other day I posted a new BattleTech lore video. I mentioned that the channel posting that video did more to promote BattleTech than anything that the current owners of the property–Catalyst Game Labs–have done. All of the other lore channels and battle report channels contribute to this effort, and it helps that Harebrained’s adaptation is very close (but not identical, which it should have been) to the tabletop game, but there’s sweet fuck-all for marketing from the company itself.

Sensor Sweep: Battle Tech, Manly Wade Wellman, Savage Heroes, Space Force published first on https://sixchexus.weebly.com/

Game 345: Challenge of the Five Realms: Spellbound in the World of Nhagardia (1992)

If you count the subtitle, I think this is the longest title so far.

         Challenge of the Five Realms: Spellbound in the World of Nhagardia

United States

MicroProse (developer and publisher, under its Microplay label) 

Released 1992 for DOS

Date Started: 2 November 2019

I’ve been looking forward to Challenge of the Five Realms for a couple of years. The team behind it, working at Paragon Software, had been responsible for the 1990-1991 spate of licensed Games Designers’ Workshop (GDW) disasters, including the two MegaTraveller games, Space 1889, and Twilight: 2000. Each of the games had its qualities, but in general, the sense was that Paragon had taken on too much too fast. The games’ poor reviews and sales led to the collapse of Paragon and its purchase by MicroProse in 1992. Now, the team, working for more competent managers, was free to develop a game without any GDW restrictions. Would it be better or worse? I’ve been anxious to find out.

It takes a while to get into Challenge. It begins with a long, unintentionally hilarious, animated opening sequence with fully-voiced dialogue, the second 1992 game to do so (after Ultima Underworld). It accompanies a long backstory in the game manual. The two don’t fully gibe with each other, but I’ll do my best to summarize below. First, we get a female voice on a black screen welcoming us to the kingdom of Alonia, one of the titular five realms, “where folklore and myth are a way of life.”             

I know this isn’t the only flat world we’re going to see this year.

            We have a brief glimpse of Nhagardia, a flat, oval world. Because it’s flat and does not rotate, the parts that support life have always known eternal sun. This revelation sent me off on a bit of Googling. I have a basic understanding of why planets are naturally spheres due to the way their formed by aggregating rotating collections of matter. I also understand how gravity favors orbs and thus works over time to turn any shape into a roughly-spherical one. What I wondered–and still wonder, since I couldn’t find enough discuss on the topic to satisfy me–was whether the slow process of gravity pulling a large amalgamation of matter into a sphere necessarily outpaced the same processes that give the same body an atmosphere and the conditions necessary for life. That is, if some weird freak of accident did result in a flat-ish “planet” (I realize the definition of “planet” presupposes a sphere, but you know what I mean) in stable orbit around a sun, would it be possible for such an object to trap an atmosphere and create complex life before the natural tendencies of gravity made a sphere out of it? How would gravity even work on such an object? Could an atmosphere truly exist? 

Discussion welcome, but back to the game. We move from planet level to Castle Ballytogue, which must be based on Ballyutogue from Leon Uris’s Trinity. It is the year 1000 “A.S.” The pompous King Clesodor is haranguing his advisors for not allocating enough funds to the New Year’s celebration. “I want this to be the greatest celebration in Alonia’s history,” he demands. The manual doesn’t have any credits for the voice actors, but I’d swear that Clesodor is voiced by Maurice LaMarche, testing out a precursor to “The Brain” voice that he’d bring to Animaniacs the following year.              

Clesodor meets with his advisors.

             Clesodor takes some time out from his party planning to yell at his son, the Prince, for idly reading a book. “I swear, the boy is just like his mother. Witches and seers and myths. What kind of king will you make if all you care about are mindless stories? A king is a ruler, not a dreamer!” The first bit about the mother is all the more harsh if you’ve read the backstory and learned that Clesodor’s wife, Queen Feya, is in fact dead, killed in a tragic accident at “the cliffs of Mahor.”

(I had to take a break from the game at this point to call Patrick, the British friend that I’ve talked about before. Back in 2007, we were traveling along the west coast of Ireland. He happened to mention that the last time he was there, a few years prior, he’d heard on the news that a British tourist had been killed while falling from the Cliffs of Moher. The same night, we got into Galway, checked into a hotel, turned on the TV, and immediately caught the opening headline from the local newswoman: “Tragedy in County Clare today as a young man fell to his death from the Cliffs of Moher.” Ever since then, we have this ongoing joke that every Irish television news broadcast begins with a report of yet another death at the Cliffs of Moher. Maybe you had to be there.)               

The idle prince idles.

          The perspective now shifts to the Prince, a complete milquetoast, who is reading a picture book that should be far below his age. It’s called The Legend of Nhagardia. Recently, the Prince, worried for his father’s health, had followed from the castle a mysterious stranger who had met with his father in private. The stranger turned out to be an ex-sorcerer named Shiliko who had been summoned to help stop the king’s recurring nightmares. Unable to do anything, Shiliko had cast a placebo spell. When confronted by the Prince, Shiliko gave the boy the book.

The book tells the story of an ancient emperor named Shamar who, seeing that the end of his life was near, set off on a quest to extend it. Before disappearing, he divided his crown and power among his five territories. Alonia, the terrestrial realm, was given to King Adama. The elf Sandro took over Fraywood, the forest realm. Oberus ascended to rule the skies in Aerius. Lorelei, the (curiously male) king of Thalassy, took over the ocean. And inside the depths of the world, the gnome Kyke became the ruler of Alveola. Over time, the portals between realms closed and the rulers lost contact with each other. Clesodor is presumably a descendant of Adama.            

The original must have been huge.

               Suddenly, there’s a disturbance by the window and a fearsome apparition appears. The cloaked, scaly, black-skinned creature introduces himself as Grimnoth. “Though I come to you now as a mere apparition, heed my warning,” he says. “I will return to your world on New Year’s Day and claim power over your kingdom. You will surrender your crown to me on that day.” He continues by warning Clesodor that even in his “astral form,” he can destroy him.           

The kingdom is menaced by Xusia.

           Clesodor of course mouths off to Grimnoth, so Grimnoth extends his hand and vaporizes Clesodor and his advisors with a ray of light.            

Grimnoth’s spell destroys two courtesans before it reaches the king.

         “Nooooooooooooo,” the Prince shouts.             

“Do not want!”

            Addressing the Prince, Grimnoth says that he’s put a plague of darkness on the world, and if the Prince brings the crown to him at Castle Thiris on New Year’s Day, he’ll lift the darkness. This seems a little unfair. Before he killed Clesodor, Grimnoth was prepared to return to the castle to collect the crown. Now he’s making the Prince trek hundreds of miles to bring it to him. Thiris is in the center of the world, the seat of the former Emperor Shamar, now abandoned and monster-ridden.

The Prince vows to avenge his father and begins by ransacking his mother’s belongings, finding among them a reference to a witch named Cagliostra, who Clesodor had banished. “Father, I know you thought I was a dreamer, but I’ll avenge your death. I’ll make you proud!” the Prince declares, just before a hand appears from off-screen, and someone clocks the Prince over the head with a mace, knocking him unconscious.          

This just isn’t his day.

           Paragon’s titles had all featured a MegaTraveller-inspired character creation process by which each character went through a career in a military branch or profession (or both) which shaped his or her skills and abilities. Since the protagonist of Challenge–the Prince–has more of a fixed background, I didn’t expect the character creation process to be quite the same. It isn’t. Instead, the game feeds you a number of situational questions and asks how you’d react to them.              

One of many, many questions in character generation.

            This is often described as Ultima IV-style character creation, but it’s not. Ultima IV‘s scenarios were about pitting one virtue against another to help determine what virtue primarily guided your moral compass. Challenge‘s questions are more about pitting various skills and abilities against each other, ultimately determining if you’re more of a fighter, mage, diplomat, or thief–or a balance among them. I lost track of how many questions the game asks–I think it is in the ballpark of one hundred thousand–but it later struck me that the “quick” option, which just rolls random numbers for your attributes and abilities, performs just as well.

There aren’t that many skills, making me hope that unlike the GDW games, this one actually uses all of them. “Stealth,” “Crime,” and “Fly” were all set to 0 when I started (the lowest score I got was otherwise 20), so perhaps it doesn’t use those.          

The game’s attributes and skills. The Prince takes a level in badass in his portrait.

          The game finally begins when the Prince wakes up in his mother’s bedchamber, head throbbing, bereft of equipment or supplies, including the crown that he’s supposed to bring to Grimnoth. He soon runs into Hastings, the dead king’s seneschal, in the next room. Hastings explains that when the king was killed, his knights looted the castle and fled with its riches to Duke Gormond of Vinazia, who despises me. Rumors are already spreading that the Prince killed his father. Hastings recommends that I forget about Cagliostra, but if I’m determined to seek her out, her old friend Sir Oldcastle hangs around the Boar’s Head Tavern. Hastings stays to guard the castle after giving the Prince a key to a chest.                       

Encountering my first NPC.

           Challenge‘s interface is axonometric with continuous movement and real-time events. A row of icons offers party options, disk options, navigation options, spell options, combat options, and speech options. Of the developers’ previous titles, it most recalls Space 1889, but with some elements tossed in from other games. For instance, if you’re trying to speak to a moving NPC, you can use the “Hail” option to get him to stop; this is from MegaTraveller 2. Most commands have redundant keyboard backups except (annoyingly) movement, which has to be done with the mouse. One key I’m using a lot is (P)ause, every time I stop to blog or something, because commenters have warned me that the game has a time limit. “Ridiculously short” is how one described it.

I naturally started exploring the castle. As Hastings said, most of the court had fled. Sir Feldoth and Sir Elault still guarded the ramparts. Imrid the Manservant was wandering the lower halls and begged me to just give Gormond the crown. A couple more servants, Horric and Horville, were in the basement. Horric told me that a thief carried of a chest with the queen’s insignia on the lid. Dialogue so far has been entirely scripted, with the Prince (or I guess, King) responding to questions on his own.           

“I do not know, but you will die for your failure!” is an option a really good RPG would have given me.

              Finally, in one room, I found a broadsword, axe, long bow, rapier, and arrows. You basically have to hover your mouse over all objects that you think you might be able to pick up. As far as I can tell, chests and wardrobes and such are just decorations, as there is no command to open them and (F)ind never seems to do anything.         

Finding some weapons at last.

           In the kitchens, Wilagon Blacklost gave me the Holy Book of Equus, which has a spell called “Truth.” I tried to learn it, but the game told me that I wasted half a day and failed. I tried again, and it told me that I destroyed the book. I reloaded and figured I’d save that for later. The kitchens also had a variety of spell components and food.

Outside the castle, some flowers and other objects joined my list of spell components. A rough character at the end of the drawbridge offered to give me a hint for 100 gold pieces. Since I started with 1,000, I paid him. He said that there are a couple of loudmouths at the local tavern who claim to have stolen the queen’s treasure chest.

I continued exploring the castle outskirts. In one shop, a man offered to sell me spells for small fees. Almost every one I chose required components that neither he nor I had, except for “Warding Spell,” “Open Lock,” “Lightning Bolt,” “Inner Noise,” and “Slow.” Paying the man didn’t actually get me the spells–just books that give me a chance of learning them.             

Some of the spell shop selections.

        Elsewhere, I found a  healer, a pawn shop, a weapon shop, a food store, an armor shop, and a tavern. At the tavern, I bought some chainmail and equipped it. The inventory system seems needlessly complex. From your character screen, you can go to “inventory” (which never seems to have anything) and separate buttons for your pouch inventory, your backpack inventory, and your chest inventory (you start with no chest). But you can also go to “garb,” a screen with a paperdoll of the character, which also has links to inventory, pouch inventory, backpack inventory, and chest inventory. Spell components seem to show up in none of those places.            

Part of the confusing inventory system.

          In the tavern, I met Sir John Oldcastle and several of his friends. Oldcastle had been a skilled swordsman, but he was banished by King Clesodor for drunkenness. He is clearly based on Shakespeare’s Falstaff, although a bit more competent. I tried to enlist him into my cause, but he mocked me by calling me “Miss P.” and said that he doubted I’d be able to stand up to Duke Gormond. He agreed to join me and help me find Cagliostra if I would bring him the Widow Frazetti’s fabled jeweled brooch.             

The tavern from the outside is a nice looking building.

          As I explored, it became clear that several houses had been looted in the chaos following the king’s death, including Frazetti’s. I ultimately tracked down the bandits, the Hammerhand brothers, to a bar in the western part of the map. They were drunk, which made the subsequent combat a little easier.             

An NPC shows a shocking lack of respect for the king and his neighbors.

           Combat appears to take place in several phases and draws heavily from the MegaTraveller system. In the first phase you place your party members on the combat map, which is the same as the regular map without the surrounding command interface. Once combat begins, you issue orders for each character–target a particular enemy, cast a spell, defend an area, or move–and then unpause the game. Characters act on their own until you pause again and issue new orders.            

The game has me fight the second Hammerhand brother as the first lies dead above me.

           In short order, I killed the brothers and looted their bodies for my mother’s chest, the Frazetti brooch, and a bracelet that they pillaged from another NPC. I returned the brooch to Oldcastle, who joined me, but it occurred to me that I should have tried returning it to the Frazettis first.

I also found the house of the wizard Shiliko. He had hung himself. A note nearby indicated that he blamed himself for the appearance of Grimnoth and all the chaos that followed, but it didn’t explain his reasoning.              

Shiliko’s hut, with Shiliko hanging in the upper-left.

       At this point, I think I’ve exhausted exploring the castle. Judging by the world map, there are a couple of other cities in Alonia to visit, and then the other realms. Oldcastle said that we’d find clues for Cagliostra in the city of Farinor, so I suppose that’s where I’ll go next.             

Oldcastle insultingly joins the party.

         It’s been a relatively promising start. Although aspects of the animated sequence were a little goofy, the backstory is strong. The interface is a little clunky but not overly so. I like that we’re already seeing side-quests–one of the few things that Paragon did well in its previous titles. Dialogue is verbose enough to actually give characterizations to the NPCs, but I wish there were more options from the PC’s side. Overall, I look forward to my next session and seeing how the game develops.

Time so far: 3 hours

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/game-345-challenge-of-the-five-realms-spellbound-in-the-world-of-nhagardia-1992/

Friday, 14th of october 2005

I'm at Milano this morning, but not Italy's Milano. I'm at the Milano movie theater in Tokyo's Shinjuku district.

The MGS4 trailer will run tomorrow at the 2005 Tokyo Fanta during the special event celebrating the film festival's tenth anniversary. I'm here today to check the MGS4 trailer's video and audio settings. Kojima Productions staff and the promotion staff from Konami are working with me early this morning.

Back in the past we shot a film commercial (in which I acted) for MGS Integral. We did all the work just before the theater opened where the commercial would run. We really had to hurry then. I feel a bit of deja vu from that experience now.

We don't often get the chance to sit inside a movie theater before it has opened. I sat in a spot where I was completely alone, and the vacant theater's ambience engraved itself onto my mind.

I prefer old-fashioned movie theaters like the Milano Theater over newer multi-cinema complexes. If the Angel of Death approached me with the ultimatum, "Where is the most peaceful location for you to spend your last moments?" I would answer either "outer space" or "a vacant movie theater just before it has opened."

I feel a spectrum of deep emotions. My MGS4 trailer will run in the Milano Theater! This building has such a long history. There was a time in 2000 when the MGS2 trailer was shown at the Tokyo International Fantastic Film Festival, just like we are running the MGS4 trailer now.

We were in the Pantheon Theater back then. The MGS2 trailer was neither high-definition nor in 5.1 Dolby Surround Sound. It didn't look as good as the films that had run before and after the trailer, which made me really uncomfortable. I felt as though MGS2 itself had been mocked.

We had used MGS2 images straight out of the PS2 hardware. We hadn't shown a pre-rendered CG trailer. Likewise, we are using real-time images straight out of the PS3 hardware now. It still looks poor compared to real movies, but that doesn't matter anymore. I'm delighted that game cinemas are treated with the same respect that films receive when shown at the Tokyo Fanta. Video games have come this far at last!

We adjusted the sound and visual settings and concluded our preparations. Now we only need to wait for show-time.

This is the best environment to get optimal output from our sound equipment. I really want our sound designer to feel the visceral experience of the full power of this work.

Korea's biggest video game expo is G-Star 2005. It will be held this year from November 10 to November 13 in Seoul. They estimate that 100,000 visitors will attend. I expect that G-Star will become as big as E3 (Los Angeles in May), GC (Leipzig in August), and TGS (Tokyo in September). In the future, they will all be known as the world's four biggest video game expos. G-Star has a lot of promise.

We met with delegates from Konami's Asian division about G-Star today. People from UNIANA are here too. (UNIANA is a Korean company that has a partnership with Konami.)

Mr. Youn (UNIANA's CEO) also attended the meeting.

I thought that it was just another in-house meeting, so I kept working after I should have left to attend. I am very sorry that I showed up so late.

Konami and UNIANA will likely collaborate on their booths at G-Star 2005. We are considering the possible directions to take during the expo.

I will probably go to Korea for G-Star. It's a busy time to leave, and I'll need to rearrange my schedule again. Nevertheless, I'm pleased at the possibility of meeting Koreans once more. I'm going to practice speaking Korean... I spoke it quite poorly the last time I was there in February.

I am in Mr. Youn's debt for his hospitality during that February visit. He escorted me through military facilities that normally require special clearance to enter. He also introduced me to many people who are hard to meet so casually.

After the meeting, I thanked Mr. Youn for the Matsutake that he gave me on his last visit to Japan during TGS. I shall see him again in November!

The meeting lasted longer than scheduled, so I had no time for lunch. I won't even be able to go to a bookstore or CD store today. I asked Mrs. Yamanaka to order me a sushi bento. I took care of some mail while I rushed to eat my food.

I have an interview with the new magazine NewWORDS, published by Kadokawa Press. The magazine has a great concept: "Cross-media Observations for Mature Adults." Mr. Yano has brought NewWORDS to life. I have personally wanted a magazine like this to appear for a while.

The generation of authentic Otaku was born in the 1960's and 1970's. They have all aged. They are working members of society, some even have families. They have other social responsibilities too. Despite all that, we continue to live as Otaku through adulthood. We want a magazine to support us as we try to establish ourselves as adult Otaku. Many mature magazines are published to satisfy sexual desires. The generation of adult Otaku still lacks a magazine suited to its tastes.

The interview will run in the first issue of NewWORDS on Friday, November 25.

I don't know why, but Mr. Shida is writing the article. The occasion feels more like a pleasant social meeting than a formal interview.

Mr. Yano says: "Let's keep the meeting going without settling answers for these questions." The interview has taken two hours. We are conducting it in my personal hide-out so we can relax. I speak pleasantly... they listen pleasantly. I feel pleased by my newly discovered self during the interview. I don't feel any apprehension at all.

The words flow naturally... no, not the words, but the feeling comes out of me. I feel as though I am in a counseling therapy session. It's a good interview.

Mr. Yano is one of the few people who truly cares about my physical and mental condition. I think he worries about me even more than the people of Konami and Kojima Productions. He regularly checks my blogs. He frequently emails when I am in a depressed mood. He doesn't write about my poor writing, but rather the blog's emotional qualities.

I take their kindness greedily and draw out the interview. Before I notice, two hours have past.

I'm excited about this magazine. The day's mood can change even under the slightest stroke of happiness.

I settled on a title for Okamura's blog. It will be published at irregular intervals, so it is more like a column than a daily blog.

The title is Confessional Man. It will start sometime next week. It will be hilarious.

Confessional Man won't be like a blog that requires a person's daily attention. It's not scheduled diary. It also isn't intended to show off his compositional prowess or his writing style. The blog is going to be about what Okamura idiosyncratically brings to the nature of the narrative. He chooses when to write, and he writes only when he chooses. His writing is more soulful because of this willfulness. The blog will be nothing less than Okamura's presence.

Okamura will decide his own subjects and writing style.

The theme of the blog is "confession." Sounds interesting, doesn't it? We adjusted the Kojima Productions website to take advantage of this opportunity.

Okamura is one of the original staff members from the Kojima Group's inception. He did the main programming for Policenauts when he was only a rookie. Afterwards he worked on some scripts for television drama series and then directed. Then he helped create Zone of the Enders (ZOE).

ZOE was a great game. Its audience received it warmly and made it popular. However, Okamura was forced to confront the truth of the matter: "A creation requires more than talent to become a reality."

Let's say that the number 0 represents the state of affairs at a project's beginning because 0% of the work is complete. When a person creates out of the absence, he gives birth to 1% of the work. He cannot give birth to his 1% without help: midwives assist him. By midwiving, each supporting person gives birth to his own creation. A sound designer supports the director and creates the special sound effects: he has given birth to his 1% out of his null.

So a lot of people work together to deliver the original creator's 1%, and in the process they give birth to their own 1%. The occasion of the birth of the creator's 1% has now created 10%. And then the 10% turns into 50%! After the promotion and marketing departments chip in, we have a whole 100% of the work required to create a game.

Okamura had delivered a hit video game but the truth tortured him. I decided to send him on an ascetic quest for enlightenment. I mercilessly sent him to the erstwhile EAST division of Konami-Japan. He may have thought that I had abandoned him. I expect that he might even have cursed me.

He devoted himself to the creation of licensed titles for four years. Okamura returned home from his journey this April, the month Kojima Productions was established.

"I'm back at last," he said.

"Welcome back!"

He has grown into a thoughtful and strong-minded man. Something shines inside Okamura that hadn't been there four years before. Without thinking twice, I entrusted both him and Shinta with MGA2.

I made the right decision. You'll see the evidence if you play MGA2. Okamura's journey was not wasted time.

Okamura now reflects upon his journey in his own words. A creator's most essential skill is to recognize and expose his weaknesses. He must have the strength not to surrender himself to the force of his own trauma. True creation only begins after we surrender control of those areas in which we are weak and rely upon the strengths of others. Okamura's "Confessions for Tomorrow" begins.

I took a newly burned copy of Existence into my booth and began checking it. Corrections were made to it yesterday. We are nearing the end. I check the promotional DVD that shows Subsistence and MGA2 while I work. This is the DVD that will run on display in stores.

I went to dinner with the people from Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE) to celebrate the 2005 TGS MGS4 Shock. They were Mr. Saoki and other promotional staff members. We went to the restaurant Kiraku-tei, which specializes in charcoal-grilled yakinuki. Kiraku-tai is so popular, they were too backed up for us to even make a reservation!

I told the taxi driver the restaurant's name to give him a general idea of where to go.

I said, "Please take me to Kiraku-tei in the Minami Azabu district." The driver always responds, "Alright, to Kiraku-tei." The restaurant seems to be really famous. This is my first time inside though.

It was delicious. "Gochisou sama deshita!" I will definitely return.

It's already been one month since TGS. Thank you everyone for your effort and your contributions.

The people work with a different company, but I still consider them war buddies who fought hard toward the same goal. As comrades we tasted success together, shared hard times, celebrated, praised each other, and now we can enjoy the tapestry of our shared experiences.

Kojima Productions staff didn't even have time to sleep during TGS.

The staff audio specialist slept in the hallway booth every night to keep watch over the 5.1 Dolby Surround Sound. Kenichiro made two round-trips between Makuhari (where TGS was held) and Yobodashi Camera (a shop in Akihabara) in one night.

The people from SCE were in the same situation. Most of them went without sleep. We were not animated by physical strength. We kept our pace toward the end by willpower alone.

We drew our strength from our desire to succeed at TGS. We could never pull off something so demanding if we had the attitude "We're doing this because it's our job." Mere workplace obligations can't contribute to success like we experienced at TGS.

Everyone felt that we wanted our booth's visitors to enjoy themselves. We had a strong sense of being on a mission to make the video game medium more successful. We did not work as a company or an organization ; we worked as a single unit and as a single person. The future of the video game industry is being tested this year. We should not behave antagonistically. We should move forward together.

We spoke about these things among each other in the evening. We grew livelier and we couldn't end our party with dinner. We had to continue our evening together.

Let's have a night on the town! Onward to the Cosplay Karaoke!

Another long autumn night continues.