#the violence between engineering and physics is absurd | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

rafeandonlyrafe · 6 months

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who did this to you?

words: 1.4k

warnings: parental abuse!, drinking, physical violence, cursing, kind of allusions to sex?? but its pretty vague imo, reader has a bruise and its briefly described

taglist: @drewstarkeysbae @thelomlisrafecameron @f4ll-for-you @dilvcv @winterrrnight @slut4drudy @drewsbabygirll @jjmaybankswifes-blog @rafescokenostril @jjsmarijuana @jjmaybankisbae @seeingstarks @angelofcigs @cece45450

you groan hearing the engine roar behind you, being able to tell exactly whose truck it was from the sound alone. and just like normal, rafe cameron had spectacularly bad timing.

“where you going, princess?” rafe calls out the window, of course pulling to the side of the road when he sees you walking.

“piss off, cameron.” you call, not turning to look at him. “im not in the fucking mood for it today.”

“such dirty words for a princess to be using.” rafe tsks, using the ironic nickname that somehow shifted from pogue princess from when you first moved to town, to now just princess.

“not that i ever want to see you rafe, but especially not today.” you simply keep walking, hoping that rafe would piss off or get bored and drive away, but he stays rolling slowly along next to you.

“okay, cut it out.” rafe shouts. “it’s starting to get dark, just get in so i can give you a ride home.”

“not going home.” you shrug, finally looking over to rafe.

upon making eye contact, you can see his eyebrows rise, and he immediately slams on the trucks breaks and puts it into park, not caring that he’s stopped in the middle of the road. he gets out of the truck with a harsh slam of his door, his chest heaving as he rounds the bonnet to join you on the sidewalk.

“what happened?” his hand comes to cup your jaw gently, turning your face into the streetlight to give him a better view of the purple bruise forming around your temple. “who did this to you?”

“it’s nothing rafe.” you shove his hand away. “don’t act like you fucking care about me now.”

you try to push past him, continue your walk in the general direction of popes house, hoping his parents wouldn’t mind you crashing there for the night, but rafe stops you with firm hands on both your shoulders. “i may give you shit for being a pogue, but that doesn’t mean i want to see you hurt, princess. now tell me who did this to you. was it jj?”

tears well in your eyes at the very thought of your good friend putting his hands on you, and it just further exemplifies the differences between the kooks and pogues for rafe to not even realize how absurd it is to mention jj. he sees him as violent and dangerous, nothing more.

“no, it wasn’t jj, you dick.”

“then tell me who!” rafe shouts, shaking your shoulders slightly, making you cower back when his voice raises.

“fuck.” rafe sighs out, hands instantly dropping to his sides. “i’m sorry- i’m so sorry princess, i didn’t mean to scare you.”

“stop it.” you plead, letting your tears flow freely down your cheeks, an intense build up from since you started holding them back hours ago. “stop treating me like this, just go back to being a jerk and calling me a dirty pogue.”

“y/n.” rafe states your name firmly, and it almost shocks you. you know he knows it, but he always goes for calling you princess rather than what everyone else calls you. “tell me what happened, please. i do care.”

“it was my dad.” you blurt out. “there? are you fucking happy? that my dad got drunk and threw a fucking beer bottle at me. i was lucky it didn’t break and cut my eye. is that what you wanted to know? my fucking sob story so you can use it against me next time?”

“princess…” rafe sighs, letting you collapse into his chest, no longer able to hold back the sobs racking your body, shoulders shaking at the intensity.

your knees give out, and rafe lowers to the ground with you, effortlessly scooping you onto his lap as your hands grasp at his shirt, keeping your face pressed against his chest, making a mess of snot and tears on the fabric, but you’re far too emotional to care.

“breathe, princess, please. you’re gonna pass out.” rafe strokes over your back, trying to encourage you to get some sort of control on your sobs, but the sweetness of his touch, so counter to what you’ve felt from him before, has you choking on your breath.

“hey-fuck, your lips are turning blue. calm down, please.” rafe says after pulling your head away from his chest once you stopped making noises, your body still shaking with tears pouring down your face.

“fuck.” rafe groans, not knowing what to do to make you relax enough to breath, so he does the only thing he can think of and presses his mouth against yours, moving his lips until you kiss him back, taking a deep breath through your nose as you slide your lips against his, gasping and getting more air in your lungs with he licks his tongue out against your bottom lip, asking for permission.

“rafe, what the fuck?” you ask, but your voice is soft and mumbled, still recovering.

“i needed some way to calm you down.” rafe shrugs, acting far too casual for someone who just made out with you on the side of the road, sat on the sidewalk.

“this doesn’t mean i like you now.” you state, although you are thankful for the kiss, it pulled you very quickly of whatever spiral you were going down.

“of course not.” rafe nods. “even if i was a good kisser.”

“i never said that.” you frown, looking down to realize that you’re still sitting on rafes lap. you stand on shaky legs, annoyed that rafe so effortlessly stands up next to you, like he is completely unaffected.

“come on, you can stay at my house. or i can give you a ride to popes or kiaras. just… i’m not leaving you out here.”

“you can take me to popes.” you say, noting how dark its gotten and really not wanting to walk the rest of the way.

rafe opens the passenger side door, and you climb up into his truck, resisting the word to insult the stupidity of the height, considering rafe did just save you from a panic attack and is now giving you a ride.

“where do you live? is it that blue cottage?” rafe asks once he starts the car and begins the drive, leaving you to recover for a few minutes before questioning you.

“yeah, why?” you question.

“just going to have a chat with your dad.” rafe says, his hands gripping the steering wheel tightly.

“rafe-” you turn to him. “please don’t do anything. i can take care of it on my own, i don’t need some kook coming into my business-” “fucking stop with the kooks and pogues!” rafe shouts, not caring that you flinch this time, wanting the words to hurt. “i don’t fucking care about that when it comes to you, why can’t you see that princess?”

“stop the car.” you tell rafe.

“no, i’m taking you to popes.” rafe argues back.

“no, stop the car because i want to fucking kiss you again!” you say, body pressing forward against your seatbelt when rafe quickly presses the brake to the floor. he undoes his seatbelt as you undo yours, meeting in the middle as your lips crash together, and the kiss is anything but soft, an epic meeting of teeth and tongue as you both fight for dominance.

rafe wraps an arm around your waist, pulling you in closer until you have to move one leg over his lap to straddle him, letting your bodies mold together as you moan into his mouth, your hands grabbing at his hair, and then gliding down to feel the cords of muscle on his neck, the firmness of his shoulders.

“you drive me fucking wild, princess.” rafe says against your lips, taking your bottom lip into his teeth and giving it a tug.

“i take it back, rafe. take me to your house.” rafe smiles, giving you another quick peck before you separate, but this time you stay in the center seat, rafes hand firmly on your thigh as he speeds towards tanneyhill.

“don’t think this means i’m not going to talk to your dad.” rafe says as he gets closer.

“it’s fine, really.” you say. “he was just drunk, he doesn’t drink very often.”

“princess, he hurt you. you deserve to feel safe in your own home.” rafe explains as he puts the car into park, quickly shutting off the engine. “or i can just kidnap you and keep you here with me. turn you full kook.” he smirks, hands gripping your waist and bringing your lips together.

“never gonna happen, cameron.” you smile against his mouth. “pogue for life.”

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wolffyluna · 5 months

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So... sapphic steppe atrocities and death game streamers? :O

I'm going to start with Death Game Streamers, because that's a bit easier to explain succinctly.

Death Game Streamers

20 minutes into the future, full dive VR exists. You can feel pain, feel the touch of objects, and generally really fuck about with the physics engine. One of the most popular games to play and watch is a game that gives you a lot of creative tools to build and make things, including other games. Think if Minecraft, Gary's Mod, and Second Life had a weird VR baby.

And of course, there's lots of streamers for this game, and a big audience too, for every plausible way to play this game.

There's a big subculture for Hunger Games-esque games, where if you die in the game-- you don't die in real life. That would be absurd. But dying hurts like hell, because audiences for that really love it when the pain sim is turned up to high.

And the story is about the blossoming romance of two streamers invited to such a game-- and the way it goes Very Weird because it is happening while they have a constant audience and can't easily communicate about it-- between a pvp sweat and someone who is usually a builder and infamously bad at pvp. ("Hey, that sounds like--" NO IT DOESN'T. SHUT.)

Sapphic Steppe Atrocities

I love it, I have so much worldbuilding for it. It doesn't have a first draft yet. The plot is broken and I have to fix it.

A long time ago, humanity devoloped faster than light travel. You could travel to other worlds! But you couldn't travel back in your life time. Still, plenty of people sailed out to the stars, and colonised new planets. And this mostly went fine!

Except, a significant minority of planets had something, somewhere Go Wrong, and they lost the science fictional technology and and ended up varyingly in an Ancient/Medieval/Early Modern equilibrium.

Like the poor planet of Unnamed, where the use of Mega Smallpox as a bioweapon kind of took out everyone who knew how to run the power plants and the pharmaceutical plants, and also a lot of the survivors came from one of the several High Control Low Tech religious groups that moved to the planet? It's pretty medieval, in both technology and society (because well. a lot of the way modern society can be so modern is because we have consistently plentiful food and energy and access to birth control, etc.)

Faster faster than light travel has been invented, and so now all the human planets can be in contact again! Yay! ...and now people need to work out how to deal with The Bad Planets.

Staying out of the ring, we have: The Space UN! Who have regulations against giving technology or assistance to any society that is not a democracy, so no one, like, gives a tyrant a nuke.

In the blue corner, we have: Future! A representative of a semi-criminal group that believes that "no, what the fuck, the people living in medieval dictatorships deserve medical assistance, and we are giving it?" Her nom de crime is from a quote from Benjamin Franklin to Edward Jenner about how "future nations will now [how cool smallpox vaccination is]" because she is so strongly on Team We Made This Fucker Extinct Once and We Will Do It Again. This is planet is her first assignment, and it is Going Poorly!

In the red corner, we have: Sabina! A representative of Pax Imperia, that believes that these planets can be fixed by Just Authority With The Power To Enforce Itself Through Violence, and are as imperialist as their name implies! Sabina is a romanaboo who on all levels except physical has a greek statue as an icon, and who annoyingly put a lot of her points into Charisma.

Thrown into the ring against their will, we have: Alit and Ngaya! Two warrior women from steppe pastoralist groups at war. They had to flee a battle into the enemies-to-lovers wilderness, thanks to Pax Imperia interfering with lazer guns. They're respective cultures have very different opinions about women fighting. Ngaya has tied herself to an idea of the Ideal Warrior that is eating her alive. Alit is going "'on a journey of revenge, dig two graves?' Oh, no, we're going to be needing a lot more graves than that."

And it's a lot about how technology shapes society, and about gender, and about [wiggles hands] how to reshape a world full of suffering. And Alit and Ngaya are going to kiss, damnit. (And maybe Future will get involved, too, everyone has two hands.) (There are also plans for a fucked up Sabina/Ngaya flirtation, because they are Worryingly Similar People.)

#wolffy writes fic

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wthtorke · 4 years

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💚Ko-fi ask by @gokyacetakal !

They asked:

‘How they’d react to a human s/o of our current time. What humans would draw them in the most, in a general sense considering most of the engineer’s would-be scientists of some sort? Like would one be more drawn to anthropologists while another is more drawn to an actor?

As a person, would they be more drawn to the outspoken or the more quiet observer? I have more ideas on the human than anything, honestly. Mostly because I like a bit of comedy thrown into mild chaos, though I don’t mind drama at all.’

I feel like Engineers would be most drawn to wise people more than anything. And when I say wise, I don’t mean ‘the nation’s leaders’ or ‘who has the most Nobel prizes’ or ‘who published more books’. Wisdom comes in endless ways, perceived in just as many ways. Being wise might be weighing alternatives before making a decision, even if it’s when baking a pie. Now, Engineers appreciate wisdom, but I’m sure they’d also love pies lmao.

Engineers, just as humans (and Yautjas), differ between each other, so while some may prefer someone who does all the talking, others feel attracted to more reserved people, be it romantically or not.

Overall, I like to think that some of them might not be keen on humans at first. It’s hard to get over so many centuries of bitterness and mistrust, but meet a human that lights up that spark of hope that maybe not all is lost for humanity. Sadly, the other way around is also possible.

An engineer changing their minds about humans feels like a human that doesn’t like cats.

Until they rescue one, then they’re gone for.

Human children are especially strange to them. Not that they don’t have children, they do, just rarely. It’s the human children’s temperament that shocks them at first. Watching kids rolling around and screaming while their parents have no idea what to do is...An experience. Just like seeing a bold child for the first time, one that walks or wobbles their way up to them despite their towering height, curious and innocent.

Regarding romantic relationships, Engineers naturally feel attracted to the open-minded. Not that any narrow-minded people could date an alien, but you know? The fact that humans are curious is both nice and irritating (in the best way possible). The human that stimulates an engineer into actually thinking about things is the one they’re going for. Routines and such is not a thing (again, everyone’s different, so take that into count) for Engineers (Yautjas too) in general. Their people are galaxy travelers, they’ve seen a lot and lived for a long time, so it does take quite a special someone to catch an Engineer’s attention.

Though when I say special I don’t mean you have to look or be a certain way, for example: have your bones showing or no bones showing at all, be ‘thicc’ or have blue eyes or freckles, or come from a certain country or heritage, being special has nothing to do with that. Special also does not equal ‘quirky’ either. Being special or having something special about you is what makes you, you. And (in my opinion) I think that’s what would most draw an Engineer’s attention to you.

Engineers hate any form of unnecessary displays of violence.

Oh wow, but didn’t an engineer kill everyone in Prometheus? Yeah, but that wasn’t the original script, and even then, in the bits we were left with, the engineer reacted the way he did because of Weyland’s absurd arrogance and ignorance PLUS expressly ordering one of his men to physically harm Shaw, so we could say he was t r i g g e r e d.

Any human that displays any behavior like the ones I just said is, well, done for. Not that you can’t have an ‘aggressive’ personality and whatnot, but as soon and you lose your reason and start clowning, you’re out of the game.

I feel like they’re all drawn to science in a way or another, given what they’re known for and whatnot, even their military forces had to have a certain knowledge of things to be able to both transport and yield the weapons they had. Not that an artsy or mathematician won’t make an Engineer’s heart beat faster as well, again, you being you, the best bet you could have with these guys.

Thanks for coming to my ted talk lmao

And thank you Goky for supporting me 💚 it means the world to me

#engineers #Alien #Aliens #alien engineer #prometheus #alien covenant #alien relationship #request #Headcanon #Kofi #reader #gender neutral reader #male reader #engineer x reader

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youngneemleaves · 5 years

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“There’s no need to play the reluctant ingénue with me.” - Killing Eve episodes 2.01 and 2.02 in retrospect

Based on a discussion with @onaperduamedee that drove us both slightly crazy, LOL

Espionage stories are inherently all about fixed spaces and boundaries - nations and borders, centres and their entry and exit points - all very clearly defined systems operating on a specific language. Agents - rogues, spies, carriers of information, currency, weaponry - serve as the connective tissue in this framework. It’s a far, far more chaotic intersection of worlds than most agencies would have anyone believe, and being in control and in power is the best and most crucial spectacle that one can manage.

How does this work with women, who have, traditionally, never been considered a part of essential frameworks, be it morality or politics?

youtube

I don’t pretend to know the ways of the world.

A means to an end seems a way.

Whoever’s got the most of whatever’s best -

All the better,

May the best man win.

This song has played thrice in the show till now: the first time when Villanelle climbs the pipes into a countryside mansion in Italy to murder a mafia lord in an extraordinary display of physical vitality and witchy absurdity. The second time, when Eve defies Carolyn’s instructions to travel to Paris to meet Villanelle, helped along by an unwitting Elena - who hasn’t even been taken on the trip to Russia and simply wants to join Eve the same way Eve had once wanted to join in the thrill of a spy’s life. The third time, it’s Eve uttering her name to open the gates of her new office, entering as a professional, where she’ll be working in an enhanced capacity to apprehend secret female assassins.

It takes the bewildered confession to an absent Carolyn for Eve to realise just how horribly awry her attempts to game the rules of the intelligence mission in her favour - her single-minded goal to find Villanelle - have gone. Villanelle comes to much the same conclusion when her new handler releases his choke-hold on her - her ability to rewrite the plot to the end that she becomes its irreplaceable protagonist, shielded by Konstantin till now, has gone up in smoke. The world is suddenly far less tolerant of Villanelle’s desires, and she’s no longer in a position to just not care about the system’s insensitivity. Both Eve and Villanelle have become trapped in a snarl of their own making, where their own wishes have been revealed to be incompatible with the systems they are a part of. The System is determined to show the two women their place - in the margins, in the streets, where they are servers, workers, pawns, carrying out the will of the state.

And they feel the same pressure; the bosses and handlers in this equation aren’t gone. Carolyn is just as ruthless as Raymond, only she doesn’t resort to physical violence to compel Eve to remain with the MI6, and she isn’t a mere handler. Like Flo said, Carolyn has reevaluated Eve on her return from Paris, and she sees her in a new light now - as an asset. And, I would add, as someone who knows, and figures out, a lot more than Carolyn can always control. The only way to keep a tab on the unfiltered information that leaks out is to keep a hand on Eve’s shoulder.

With the new turn of events (series 2), Carolyn’s attitude towards Eve seems to have changed accordingly. Her body language is slightly different, somewhat more showy. She’s less deadpan and professional as she’d been earlier, and a process that began with Carolyn and Eve spending time together as part of the mission and together in the hotel in Moscow has developed into Carolyn having become used to Eve’s admiration to the point of consciously expecting it. In the scene at the end of episode 2.02, where Konstantin is revealed to be alive and currently reading a book in Carolyn’s drawing room, Carolyn smiles while scrutinising Eve’s reaction to the reveal. It’s a very confident smile, demanding a response from Eve, certain that she’d be impressed. And Eve is impressed. Carolyn expects Eve to be frightened, perhaps, intrigued, or even paranoid. She admires Eve’s roguish tendencies although they frustrate her quite often, and she likes Eve’s appreciation of a mystery, and of women who can keep them. Part of Carolyn’s control over this brilliant, emotional woman is to amplify the image Carolyn shows everyone else - as a mastermind who can do incredible things, things for Eve (linking her her moisturiser of choice, arranging a witness protection scheme for her, even a new name), things to Eve (bringing back people from the dead to keep an eye on her as well as protect her, throwing her into Villanelle’s path to be devoured as a matter of course), anything to anyone. The bigger difference here is that Carolyn, probably for the first time, is bringing Eve closer to understanding how it works.

Eve: What am I doing here, Carolyn? Going through the charade of solving your test.

Carolyn: Well, you’re proving yourself useful.

Eve: No. What’s going on? With Konstantin and Moscow, and what were you doing, talking to Villanelle in that prison? I mean, who do you even work for? Are you part of the Twelve?

Carolyn: What really happened in Paris? Why was Nadia’s note addressed particularly to you, and why are you and Villanelle so interested in each other? You see how it works?

If that necessitates revealing sensitive information to Eve in carefully considered pieces - Kenny being Carolyn’s son, Carolyn playing a part in keeping Konstantin alive - so be it. Revealing information, as Flo said, would be a test of Eve’s ability to use it, and to gauge her behaviour.

Flo, as usual, was bang on target when she said in the tags that Carolyn shouldn’t be surprised about Eve’s obsession with Villanelle; Carolyn might be just as obsessed with Eve. Eve isn’t alone in her descent into the abyss, as Bill had called it so long ago. They’re all on their way down. Eve’s particular obsessions are very much a product of the “normal” relationships in her life, their high points and their lows. It’s just that Eve doesn’t always bother to hide her desire, which, like Villanelle’s and perhaps Carolyn’s too, completely diverges from the limited spectrum allotted to women by the traditionally androcentric medical, psychological, and philosophical institutions. They literally are deranged. But Eve’s very real penchant for violence and politics is born out of her own hard work and her own psycho-spiritual crises and epiphanies.

Although she still underestimates herself, I think Eve does understand the power dynamics she's become a part of with Villanelle, Konstantin, Kenny, and Carolyn. She's taking her time to process everything because, in spite of the trap she’s found herself in after the encounter in Paris, her new position suits her. The power she has now becomes her. And she's honestly loving the fact that she's an important part of investigations without being encumbered by too many rules because she's still on the edges of The System. Eve’s status as an outside expert, a rogue agent, is her greatest weapon as well as her Achilles heel. It’s impossible for her to just “go home” now; her locus has shifted. She’d thrown away home for the sake of the world outside, The System beyond the home, and now she’s adrift. She can’t pretend anymore.

Villanelle: I know her better now. I know her better than anyone. Better than she knows herself.

Eve: You think he was murdered. You think he was.

Carolyn: Yes, so I thought I’d draft in the head of the fan club.

(Also, that last bit is hilarious. You can tell the head writer is a woman.)

An eye for an eye

Is a blind man’s rule.

I wasn’t going to follow.

I’m nobody’s fool.

So now, Eve is the one - like Villanelle in ep. 1.01 - entering and exiting government intelligence offices, palaces and parliaments of knowledge and power, who must be given protection against assassins, who’s not entirely comfortable in her marriage, who’s surrounded by people - powerful people - who want her input on Important Stuff. Eve is now the princess in the castle, and Villanelle must now play the part of the hero from the more mainstream romances, the errant knight reinterpreted, who must remain herself and journey across foreign lands and endure a Whole Lot Of Crap to reunite with the princess. The gender dynamics have been subverted and plugged to industrial-strength batteries to set the screen and our minds on fire. As Flo pointed out, Eve is at the centre of others’ attention, especially the admiration of both the government intelligence officer and the enemy assassin, the two big polarities of a spy story, but the optics is different because this triangle has nothing to do with the male gaze and the male fixation with the heroine. On the other hand, in the final scene of ep. 2.02, Konstantin sits on the sofa as simultaneously the most and the least important person in the room - the ace in the hole with some tricks of his own still left, but in the end a subject in a plot engineered by women, where the main tension is between two women negotiating the balance of power between themselves. For perhaps the first time in fiction that traditionally operates on strict gender roles, a man serves as currency here, a floating element used to reinforce the relationship between women.

Talking of home and the gender dynamics here, something in Carolyn and Eve’s exchange sticks out:

Eve: I need to go home.

Carolyn: Home? Is that really what you want? I mean, what do people do at home?

It’s the first time this season that Carolyn’s anger shows for just a second before she reins it in. But compare that with the exchange in Annihilation (2018):

Ventress: We need to come to an agreement about what to do with you.

Lena: You’re not going to let me go home?

Ventress: Is that what you want? To go home?

And then with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000):

Jade Fox: [to Jen] What good is a home? You’ve gone so far. Now we can go all the way together.

Home is an extremely fraught topic here. Just gonna quote Flo here: “This show is a dream come true when it comes to so many female narratives. We never talk about home to male characters unless as something to leave behind to live an adventurous life.” But the dynamic is so different here where the heroine and her mentor/boss are both women, and they understand on a level where the other woman is coming from. The mentors don’t want the heroine to decline the call to adventure. Carolyn certainly doesn’t want to lose Eve; she’s too powerful, too clever, too useful. Carolyn had herself given up her life and her son’s to her career long ago, to the point that her relationship with Kenny now is inextricable from her political machinations. But the female mentor here also manipulates the heroine but ever so lovingly; defining the paths they will both tread on while assuring the heroine that its all going to be okay - no, that this is the best way. It’s more subtle, but in principle, it’s not very different from Villanelle approaching Nadia in her prison cell tenderly and mockingly, and then killing Gabriel in the hospital. Villanelle here classically serves as the monster whose shocking actions mirror the twisted relationships in Eve’s world.

So just how fundamentally Eve, Villanelle, and Carolyn have already rewired The System in their favour, although it is still innately hostile to them (Villanelle is now being used brutally by the Twelve, and Eve and Carolyn are both in dangerous positions), can be seen in the overall image of them as the primary trio of the show. Flo pointed out that Carolyn is almost omniscient, but Eve is the one who brings her the information truly necessary, and Eve is the one who discovered first Villanelle and now the Ghost. It’s why both Villanelle and Carolyn find Eve so fascinating, because Eve occupies such a precarious position and is so unpredictable and impactful. The Holy Trinity here, then, is Carolyn as God, Eve as the first human (incorporating aspects of Lilith here), and Villanelle as the Devil. Carolyn, said to be always twenty steps ahead of everyone else, brings Eve back into Paradise, the secret office full of resources and speculation that’s like the inside of Eve’s brain, that lets Eve run free with her pursuit of female assassins, the landscape where she can chase Villanelle. There's a wall full of maps and images trying to establish a pattern, and Carolyn's good at spotting patterns and understanding how people tick. Her whole agenda is to capture evil so that it serves her purposes, the purpose of the good. But this is so different from her previous exercises and missions - this necessitates the use of carnal knowledge that only Eve can bring. Passionate Eve, constantly toeing the line between desire and sanity, her perceptive, intuitive heart her finest treasure. Even before Villanelle has offered Eve the apple, both Villanelle and Carolyn know that here’s someone who is truly special. And now its their game to play, their mystery to stage.

#killing eve #eve polastri #villanelle #carolyn martens #ke meta #eve polastri meta #villanelle meta #carolyn martens meta #ke 2.01 #ke 2.02 #my writing #mine: killing eve

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mzhong2014 · 5 years

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Weekly reading digest (7/28-8/3)

A break to remember: Stanford faculty reminisce about their college summers:

Reading about the faculty members whom I admire so much, this was a humanizing post that reminded me that everyone has struggled through the routine and impossible just like you have. My favorite quote from Ambassador Eikenberry about his summer learning how to jump out of an aircraft while at the US Army Airborne School. Ambassador Eikenberry is the embodiment of poise, humbleness, and courage, so I particularly enjoyed reading his blurb:

“As the aircraft rumbled toward the drop zone, one of the cadre, a very seasoned sergeant, gets in front of me, grabs my two shoulder straps, looks me in the face and because of the deafening engine noise, shouted at me: ‘Airborne,’– which is how all students are addressed – ‘are you nervous?’

And although I was nervous, I gave the answer I thought he wanted to hear.

‘No, Sergeant,’ I said. ‘I’m not nervous.’

The sergeant looked at me and very calmly said: ‘Airborne, I want you to be nervous. This is your first jump.’

I’ll never forget that expression on his face and his sincerity.

‘Every time you jump out of an airplane in the future, I want you to be nervous,’ the sergeant said to me. ‘Because when you are nervous, you are thinking hard about the challenge you are facing. In your mind, you are going through all the training you had – what is the next thing to do and what to do should something go wrong.’

And then he said: ‘What I don’t want you to do is be afraid. Be nervous, but don’t be afraid. If you let your fears control you, then you are going to make a mistake.’”

To be great, you must first be vulnerable.

The Brethren: Inside the Supreme Court

I started listening to this on audiobook when I spontaneously decided to drive to San Diego at 10;30 pm on a Saturday night and back Sunday afternoon (totaling 5 hours of driving).

The Brethren is written by Bob Woodward, yes, one of the reporters of the Wategate Scandal. Earlier this year, I grabbed coffee with a litigator in an effort to shed light on the mysterious question of what does it mean to be a lawyer. He recommended this book to help elucidate this question, and only 30 minutes into the audiobook, I understood why. It is perhaps the most intimate account of the prestigious Supreme Court, uncovering the day-to-day scenes hidden behind the white marble columns and impressive wooden bench. In contrast to my other readings that cover the intellectual origins of the judiciary branch, The Brethren shows how the justice system works in a very raw and real-life manner. Spanning 1969-1975 during Burger’s early years as Chief Justice, it shows exactly how politics mixes with the supposedly nonpartisan judiciary system, the nitty-gritty of how varying legal philosophies translate to vastly diverse approaches towards handling legal issues (especially during a very contentious period with the civil rights movement), as well as how the different personalities impacted the very tactical routines of the Supreme Court.

No specific quotes because, unfortunately, I do not have the auditory version of photographic memory, but initial reactions:

I was surprised by how the Justice’s different opinions extended beyond the question of whether something was constitutional, but also the question of how do policymakers tactically carry out a Supreme Court decision. For example, the first few chapters focused on the decision around how to issue a court order regarding Brown v Board of Education as Southern states dug their heels in to prolong the delay of integration of schools. Because of the vague phrasing used in the ruling opinion, “with all deliberate speed,” lawyers were using this language to justify these 15-year delays. The court order had to achieve and balance a number of objectives: avoid appearing submissive to the delay and admonish any attempts to prevent integration while balancing the practical concerns for allowing time to let schools create and implement a sound plan for integration to minimize the chaos / violence during this time. But should these practical considerations be up to the judiciary branch to decide?

As a junior consultant, it was interesting to see how exactly the Justices manage their clerks and how each Justice’s personality dictated their working norms -- shows how collegial the Court is but also how political it can be

It was also interesting to see the different philosophies that the Justices had towards being a judge. To grossly generalize, the Justices had very different opinions on the degree to which they cared about being legally rigorous in their opinions versus arriving at some legal conclusion with considerable political and social implications

The Brothers Karamazov: Ivan’s Rebellion

One of the most famous passages in The Brother’s Karamazov is Ivan’s rebellion, where he rejects God of his justice system. The dialogue occurs between Ivan, the intellectual of his three brothers, and Alyosha, the most spiritually pure of the three. Ivan focuses his argument on the suffering of children to illustrate the injustice of God.

“I won't speak of grown-up people is that, besides being disgusting and unworthy of love, they have a compensation—they've eaten the apple and know good and evil, and they have become 'like gods.' They go on eating it still. But the children haven't eaten anything, and are so far innocent.”

Ivan proceeds to provide anecdotes that he has collected of children suffering – which are based on true stories that Dostoevsky collected from the newspaper. Ivan recounts tales of how the Turks cut open “the unborn child from the mother’s womb,” skewering babies with their bayonets in glee. He tells another story of a five-year old girl beaten to pulp by her parents, her mouth smeared with excrement, left to sleep in the cold frost of an outhouse. With relentless momentum, Ivan recounts his last story about a serf-boy who throws a stone at a kennel of hounds, and hurts the paw of a general’s dog. The child is summoned to the general and stripped naked.

“He shivers, numb with terror, not daring to cry… 'Make him run,' commands the general. 'Run! run!' shout the dog-boys. The boy runs…'At him!' yells the general, and he sets the whole pack of hounds on the child. The hounds catch him, and tear him to pieces before his mother's eyes!”

The Bible reasons that all, including children, must suffer for man’s sin. Even the most innocent, children, “must suffer for their fathers' sins, they must be punished for their fathers, who have eaten the apple.” These damned children, Ivan continues, some may twistedly suggest that “the child would have grown up and have sinned, but you see he didn't grow up, he was torn to pieces by the dogs, at eight years old.”

Ivan concludes that he cannot accept God if his justice requires children to suffer for an “eternal harmony.”

“I must have justice, or I will destroy myself. And not justice in some remote infinite time and space, but here on earth, and that I could see myself. I have believed in it. I want to see it, and if I am dead by then, let me rise again, for if it all happens without me, it will be too unfair. Surely I haven't suffered simply that I, my crimes and my sufferings, may manure the soil of the future harmony for somebody else. I want to see with my own eyes the hind lie down with the lion and the victim rise up and embrace his murderer. I want to be there when everyone suddenly understands what it has all been for. All the religions of the world are built on this longing, and I am a believer. But then there are the children, and what am I to do about them? That's a question I can't answer.

[…]

While there is still time, I hasten to protect myself, and so I renounce the higher harmony altogether. It's not worth the tears of that one tortured child who beat itself on the breast with its little fist and prayed in its stinking outhouse, with its unexpiated tears to 'dear, kind God'! It's not worth it, because those tears are unatoned for. They must be atoned for, or there can be no harmony. But how? How are you going to atone for them? Is it possible? By their being avenged? But what do I care for avenging them? What do I care for a hell for oppressors? What good can hell do, since those children have already been tortured? And what becomes of harmony, if there is hell? I want to forgive. I want to embrace. I don't want more suffering. And if the sufferings of children go to swell the sum of sufferings which was necessary to pay for truth, then I protest that the truth is not worth such a price.”

And that is the crux of the passage – the prospect of an eternal harmony is not worth the suffering of the innocent to repent for the Sin of Man.

In face of our inability to find the meaning of seemingly meaningless suffering in the empirical and physical world, we are faced with two options: 1) consult the transcendental for truths that lie outside of our physical world or 2) turn inwards to provide meaning ourselves. Both are fairly unsatisfactory frameworks, in my opinion. An argument against the first is well illustrated above, and there is little that I can add of intellectual value to Dostoevsky’s work.

As for the second point, everyone tells you during intense moments of suffering that you will always learn something in hindsight -- in an attempt to imbue seemingly meaningless suffering with meaning. After all, the human mind cannot fathom the possibility of meaningless suffering -- that all of this pain is for nothing; that there is no such thing as karma or justness in the world. This seems equally absurd because why does learning have to require so much suffering? Are humans just too dumb to learn from happy experiences?

For the meantime, I’m not sure what exactly sure why there is so much suffering in life and whether it is justified by some external or internal truths. For now, all that I know is that a lot of terrible things in life happen, and all that humans can do is simply react to them.

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comicsinkcorporated-blog · 6 years

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Interview with Screaming Villains, developer of Night Trap 25th anniversary.

CI: So how did development for Night Trap 25th anniversary first come about?

SV: It honestly started out as sort of a joke. Sometime after the failed Kickstarter, hardcore fans started attempting to recreate their own remake of Night Trap and some gaming sites were writing articles about it which I found kind of odd especially since they either didn't work or barely worked. I was already messing around with FMV stuff as a hobby and a friend of mine came up with the idea of myself making a working version running on a phone.

I threw it together in about 3-4 days, posted a video of myself playing it on Youtube and sort of remained anonymous about it. I got a local arcade owner that I know to post the video on his Facebook account since he was friends with an absurd amount of retro gamers and it started to spread and got about 5000 views within the first 24 hours.

The website fmvworld.com found it too and decided to contact Rob Fulop (one of the creators of Night Trap) to get his opinion on it. Another website called segabits.com also contacted Tom Zito (producer of Night Trap) to find out if he had any involvement so that sort of put me on their radar. After that I figured "what the hell?" and sent an email to Tom at about 3am and got a response in about 15 minutes. He just asked a couple of questions about it and asked for my phone number. The next day, he called me and 20 minutes into the conversation he asked if I would like to do an official version and I said yes.

CI: Limited Run Games PS4 version of Night Trap remains their fastest selling game, while the Nintendo Switch version may end up being their best selling game. Were you surprised by the popularity of this remaster?

SV: I don't think anyone was expecting that. It just came out of nowhere which I think helped a lot so thank god my friends were able to keep their mouth shut while I was working on it. Originally, there was only going to be 5000 copies of the game available. Once the announcement was made Josh Fairhurst from Limited Run Games and myself were pretty much stuck on Twitter the entire day so we definitely wasn't expecting the reaction it got.

After that, Josh said something like "We might need to increase the quantity" which at the time I don't think they ever exceeded 5000 on a game so it got bumped up to 6000. After that, he came back again and said "Maybe we should add a collectors edition" so now we're at 8000 for PS4. Then it was "Let's release a big box version for PC" so now there's another 2000. It just kept growing and growing and still didn't meet demand. What's funny is the guy that made the announcement trailer and myself was constantly googling Night Trap that day just to see what was being said but then we went to the trending section on Youtube and we're like "Oh my god! The trailer is trending higher than Gucci Mane!" For a brief moment a game that a lot of people considered terrible was all of a sudden popular and I think that's rad.

CI: What do you think it is about Night Trap that has made it so beloved amongst fans?

SV: It has a b-movie feel to it and doesn't take itself seriously. A lot of hate that it gets is sort of undeserving. The popular ones are usually "this is barely a game" or "this has bad acting". NT was made 5 years before it was finally released and intended for a console that used VHS tapes and the acting is very similar to 80's horror/thriller films. Unfortunately, it was the wrong time period when it was finally released in 1992 and at that point nobody was really reminiscing about the 80's like they do today. The fans that are super hardcore about Night Trap are usually gamers that have a great interest in movies in general. What surprised me was the number of people that I've talked to that said Digital Pictures influenced them to pursue a career in the film or tv industry.

CI: Were there any notable, unforeseen difficulties during development?

SV: Engine restrictions was the biggest issue. I figured out pretty quickly that a lot of the gaming engines available weren't really designed with FMV in mind so because of this I think the video quality suffered more than I would've liked. Luckily, this is no longer an issue with future releases.

CI: How did the Limited Run Games physical release come about?

SV: The dudes from My Life In Gaming actually brought it up. One of those guys lives down the street from me and very early in the development process I told him I was working on Night Trap and wanted a documentary to go along with it since it has a crazy history and I thought it'd be a cool promotional tool. He immediately suggested that I work with Limited Run Games. Over the next several months I kept telling him that I'd think about it whenever he brought it up.

About a month before the game was announced, Coury came to my house to film my interview for the documentary. After we were finished he brought up Limited Run again so I told him to go ahead and tell them what I was working on. Ten minutes later, I got an email from Josh Fairhurst. Limited Run is super rad and I honestly can't imagine doing any game without their involvement so I'll most likely harrass them with each release that I do. They actually ported Night Trap to Nintendo Switch. I can't say anything bad about those dudes. They've helped me tremendously.

CI: So the Nintendo Switch version of the game comes with Japanese & French audio, was this something Screaming Villains commissioned themselves? Did Night Trap have an original Japanese and French release? And what was the reasoning behind including the new audio?

SV: The Japanese and French audio actually came from previous releases. I got ahold of copies of the game that were originally released in Europe and Japan and just ripped the audio from the disks. Before it was released I started getting messages and emails asking for additional language options so that's where that idea came from.

CI: So Night Trap as a copious history with Nintendo, when the company called out the game out in court, vowing it would never appear on a Nintendo system, which lead to some bad blood between the original Devs and Nintendo. How did it feel to finally put Night Trap on a Nintendo System?

SV: I think it's cool. Digital Pictures always released their games on Sega consoles and 3DO so it's super rad that one of them finally ended up on a Nintendo console. Definitely long overdue. With Night Trap getting released on there with a Teen rating without cutting any content might hopefully stop people from claiming that the game uses violence against women to move the story further which is absolultely ridiculous along with everything else that people claim is in there that doesn't even exist.

CI: What was the decision to go with Double Switch as the next FMV game to remaster?

SV: Double Switch just seemed like the obvious choice since it's the same type of game as Night Trap but everything is improved on. You could I guess call it the spiritual successor to Night Trap. It's also my favorite game from Digital Pictures. I think it was expected too. Back in February, I met a lot of the people that worked on Friday The 13th The Game. When I was introduced to the Executive Director Randy Greenback the first thing he said to me was "Are you doing Double Switch next?!" Josh from Limited Run was campaigning for it pretty hard too since his aunt is a childhood friend of Debbie Harry who appears in the game. A very short teaser for it was showng during the Limited Run E3 conference. While watching the conference there were people leaving comments like "Just announce Double Switch already!"

CI: Night Trap special editions in the past have come with cassette tapes, patches, and even a VHS tape. Can you tell us if Double Switch special edition will come with anything like that?

SV: It most likely will but I have no idea what since I haven't really talked to Limited Run about those options yet. Usually what happens is they throw an idea at me and I pretty much agree to all of them. They're huge Sega nerds like I am so I trust them with their ideas. The idea of pogs came up for Night Trap but we ran out of time so it wouldn't surprise me if that happened with Double Switch.

I'm sure it'll come in a Sega CD jewel case too since Limited Run ordered about 15,000 of those. I will say that it's getting a completely new cover since the original ones are kind of lame and don't really fit with the type of game that it is.

It looks super rad! DS also has a super rad soundtrack that was done by Thomas Dolby, who wrote and performed the hit song "She Blinded Me With Science" so I was hoping that a stereo version of the soundtrack existed so we could release that but sadly it's all mono.

CI: There was some rumors that Screaming Villains have been working on bringing, Marky Mark: Make My Video to the PS4. Can you confirm this?

SV: Oh dear....that was a joke that went too far. What happened was Josh Fairhurst and I kept getting our tweets captured and used as news articles for very minor stuff. I hated it because I wasn't used to this sort of thing since Night Trap was my first console release and Josh was beyond frustrated with it because of a random person making a negative comment about Nintendo, which led to a gaming site writing an article claiming that Josh spoke negatively about Nintendo when it wasn't even him or even anyone affiliated with LR.

They were forced to update the article and admit that they were wrong. After that, we started tweeting each other about a re-release of Marky Mark but making it sound official like it was an actual thing that was happening just to see if anyone would start turning that into articles.

One night, I took it a step further and made a working version of the game running on a PS4 in about an hour and then the next day we both posted a link to a video showing it. That got yanked from Youtube within the first 20 minutes. We used to talk about it all the time trying to figure out how to make it happen since the idea is too ridiculous to ignore but no. No remake of Marky Mark Make My Video.CI: What other FMV games do you want to bring to modern consoles?

CI: What other FMV games do you want to bring to modern consoles?

SV: My original goal was to get as many games from Digital Pictures as I can which is pretty much happening now. Night Trap and Double Switch aren't the only ones coming. Outside of DP releases the goal is D which was originally released back in 1995. I feel like there's a ton of different things you can do with that one.

CI: Lastly is there anything you would like to say to the readers?

The obvious thing would be thank you to everyone that played NT25. It was a stressful process so it made me happy to see that people that were fans of the original enjoyed it. Also, if you're a fan of Digital Pictures releases then stick around because some super rad stuff is coming!

#Night Trap #nintendo #Sega #horror #playstation #interview

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infamouslydorky · 6 years

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Y’all asked for my BS essay so here ya go..

Absurdity of Violence

Absurdity of Violence is a gallery assembly of six works from the 2007 online class-based first-person shooter video game Team Fortress 2 developed by Valve and curated around Hannah Arendt’s quote:

"Violence is by nature instrumental; like all means, it always stands in need of guidance and justification through the end it pursues. And what needs justification through something else cannot be the essence of anything."

To break down Arendt’s quote in relation to this game: "Violence is by nature instrumental" meaning violence in itself is a tool or device made to carry out a particular function, that function being to maintain control over people allowing a person or government to have power. Violence “…always stands in need of guidance and justification through the end it pursues." The words "guidance" and "justification" are brought up referring back to how violence is an instrument or "tool" and tools are designed with a purpose preceding its conception. A hammer is designed to put a nail in a wall. Essence precedes existence. What makes this quote distinctive, however, is the last sentence: "And what needs justification through something else cannot be the essence of anything." Ardent is saying how using the purpose of something else to make an action or use of a tool right or reasonable means the tool inherently has no reason so violence is a tool without a reasonable purpose. Violence is therefore absurd. There are times when the existence of violence precedes the essence and is justified by senseless means. It becomes important to consider the idea of "when is violence reasonable" when applied to any day and age as violence is something that comes up perpetually throughout human history and even in entertainment like video games.

Hannah Arendt wrote extensively about the philosophy of violence applying it to Enlightenment ideas of “reason above all” resulting in the thought of “when is violence ever reasonable?” She focused primarily on physical violence and how the balance of violence versus power dynamic would operate in more governmental or, more accurately, political facets. Power, by her definition, was in the “polis” or “the people”, “assembly”, and so on. Violence is an implement to maintain the assembly so that they follow obediently, allowing governments or people in high positions to maintain their status of control, for power is control over the “polis”.

There have been many instances where art is political or philosophical in its visual statement. However, it is not often that people consider video games art, let alone a form of art with political or philosophical undertones. Video games began with Pong, A game where the objective was to pass a “ball” into the opposing player’s goal, replicating actions much like tennis in a pixelated form. Video games have since become a more and more elaborate as an interactive art medium. The conception of a video game begins around a central idea, usually a game mechanic, especially in earlier games, and elaborates on it via the controls. Over the years, more types of video games have come forward. Some examples of types of video games include retro (like Pac Man or Pong), platformer, racing, survival horror, and first-person shooter.

FPS, or first-person shooters, are a type of video game that innately come with a sense of violence as the primary objective of this game type centers around the killing of players on the opposing team to reach an end goal, be it a payload, capture the flag, or other game modes. Being that Team Fortress 2 is a class-based FPS, the gameplay fluctuates depending on which character or class the player chooses in order to balance gameplay. Each class has an opposing class that is a complete foil to them. On top of that comes the dynamic of weapon choice for any of the nine classes in what is the most efficient choice in weaponry to eliminate an opposing player. Online servers can hold up to fifteen players on both the RED and BLU teams leading to simultaneously the most violent and absurd battles to ever come to fruition as cartoon violence is a staple of the game.

Arendt details how in some cases, a certain level of violence can be necessary such as in the civil rights movement, though she says violent acts like Mutually Assured Destruction (M.A.D.) is insanity. M.A.D. is the concept that both sides have the equal threat of weaponry guaranteed to destroy each other worlds over, so it stagnates the fight in an ultimate stalemate as no one wants to die. Even the idea of perpetuating war to make a need for weapons development (the military-industrial complex) could be considered insanity. In a humorous happenstance, TF2 (Team Fortress 2) reflects both aspects of M.A.D. and the military-industrial complex within its lore and gameplay.

Team Fortress 2, while it is an FPS game like Call of Duty, Overwatch, or Battlefront, the latter three games at most may have humorous elements sprinkled in game. TF2 does not take itself seriously in tone whatsoever, opting for complete absurdity within both its lore and game mechanics. As an example, game mechanics wise, whenever a character is killed, they “ragdoll” causing the character to be laid out in a ridiculous manner as if they have no bones whatsoever. More specific mechanics like “rocket jumping” is applied to the soldier class, where the character aims at the floor with his rocket launcher and jumps across the game map via explosions. It is the ultimate Michael Bay Experience.

Arendt wrote her article for a New York periodical in a time when revolution was all around, the year 1969. Around this time was the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., The rise of the Black Power Movement, the communist threat, the assassination of Robert “Bobby” Kennedy, the French revolution with university students, and the Vietnam war, to name a few hectic events. In conjunction to the historical hot mess of wars and revolution in the late 60s, the game TF2 takes place within the same time period, capitalizing on the high tension of the political tides of the time, especially in relation to protests against war as the entire game is centered around nine mercenaries hired to fight a senseless war.

2Fort, Valve, Game map/interactive media, 2007

2Fort is a map centered around the “capture the flag” game mode. This particular game mode is based around the two teams (RED and BLU) trying to seize the opposing team’s intelligence or “flag” and returning it to their own team’s base until the team has “captured the flag” three times. Each team has their own designated side of the map where their home base exists, be it RED or BLU. There are modified variants of this game mode where the cap score or endgame score can be virtually endless so in-game it becomes senseless to even bother with attempting to win. It adds to the absurdity of the violence as the violent actions that players commit on opposing team members no longer has a purpose as the game mode is completely changed making the purpose of the original game mode become irrelevant and quite literally pointless. The objective of the game, therefore, becomes one of strictly eliminating the enemy team, removing the justification for the violence. Some players choose to embrace the idea of senseless slaughter simply to aggravate opposing team members as some find extreme joy in other’s frustration. In other cases, players may choose to recognize the senselessness of the modified game mode and make peace with opposing team members via mutual in-game taunts that cause their virtual characters to interact in a peaceful manner. Either way, it becomes relevant on a personal scale whether or not a player chooses to act on the irrelevant justification of violence in the modified game mode and partake in senseless violence.

Hightower, Valve, Game map/ interactive media, 2010

Hightower, like the aforementioned 2Fort, is a game map that players can play against each other on. Again, each team’s home base is set on opposite sides of the map, however, Hightower does not operate on a “capture the flag” game mode. Hightower is a “double payload” map. “Payload” is a game mode where one team (usually RED) defends against the opposing team (usually BLU) attempting to blow up the RED team’s home base by pushing a bomb-cart across the map and destroying the enemy’s base. “Double payload” is when both teams must push a bomb-cart into the opposing team’s base and defend their own base simultaneously. In most conventional maps that follow the “payload” game mode, the enemy team’s base is on the polar opposite side of the map, having a huge skirmish area in between the ends of the map. This map, however, has both opposing team bases directly next to each other, so, realistically speaking, the bomb is probably going to blow up one’s own home base as well, making it an act of mutual deterrence. The objective behind the violence is once again completely senseless. In the end, there is no true victory. Only destruction.

TF2 Comics: Loose Canon, Valve, Web-comic, 13 pages, 2010

As far as the game’s lore goes: a British industrialist and weapons manufacturer, Zephaniah Mann, during the mid-1800s, is convinced by his twin sons Redmond and Blutarch Mann to purchase land in the American Southwest as his sons believe that the land is abundant in an invaluable resource known as gravel, yet they do not know that gravel is completely useless rocks that cannot be used to run steam-powered engines or formulate gasoline as they believe. Angered by his wasted purchase of land, in his will, Zephaniah sentences his sons to have to share the land while his fortune went to his maidservant, Elizabeth and his company (Mann Co.) went to his aide, Barnabas Hale. Unable to settle their differences over the land, the two brothers each hired a set of nine mercenaries to completely take over the other’s portion of land and thus began the senseless gravel war. Blutarch Mann hired Rattigan Conagher (The grandfather to the engineer class character, Dell Conagher in-game) to make a life to extend machine so that he could outlive his brother Redmond and gain the land by default. Elizabeth’s granddaughter, Helen, then hires Rattigan to extend Redmond’s life too via a second life-extending machine so the war between the two truly will never end. The machines run on the rare and valuable element “Australium”, which has life-enhancing and giving properties and is only found in Australia. Redmond and Blutarch Mann wage war, ravaging the natural land and destroying the local town for their petty squabble. The violence does no one good as no brother will win in this endless stalemate.

Mann Vs. Machine, Valve, Animated Short, 3 min 1 sec, 2012 TF2 is a game that has been around for ten years. How could it stay relevant for so long? Answer: the game has updates that adjust gameplay, add lore, and add game modes. In this particular case, there was the Mann Vs. Machine update which added a new game mode where any six players at a time could face off with a swarm of robots that attack one’s team in waves. One brings up the aspect of robots as Hannah Arendt mentions

“…that ‘within a very few years’ robot soldiers will have made ‘human soldiers completely obsolete,’ and that, finally, in conventional warfare the poor countries are much less vulnerable than the great powers precisely because they are ‘underdeveloped’ and because technical superiority can ‘be much more of a liability than an asset’ in guerrilla wars.”

What remains canon according to the comics accompanying the update is that the nine mercenaries defeat the army of robots made by Redmond and Blutarch’s estranged genius third brother Gray Mann. The mercenaries’ personal motivation for defeating them at all is within their job description: being paid to kill, be it human or machine, so long as the payroll comes in. Generally speaking, it could be argued as an unreasonable purpose to act violently since they end up with so much money at one point that they end up using it as fuel for a fireplace so their original purpose to act out in violence becomes absurd and “...cannot be the essence of anything.”

TF Comics #6: The Naked and the Dead, Valve, Web-comic, 274 pages, 2017 Team Fortress 2 is considered a sequel to Valve’s Team Fortress Classic which came out 1997 (ten years before TF2’s release) though they bear little resemblance to each other. Valve ties together its previous game with its sequel via the comics as the second group of nine mercenaries Redmond and Blutarch hired from the 1930s (the TFC mercenaries) come into play when the events of TF2 take place in the 1970s. The Team Fortress Classic (TFC) members now work under Gray Mann to eliminate the TF2 Mercenaries as well as track down as much Australium as possible by finding Helen, “the Administrator”-a woman who watches all the actions of the mercenaries of TF2 and disembodied voice that narrates the status of each team in game, playing both the RED and BLU teams. The TFC mercenaries figure out the value in Australium and betray Gray Mann, killing him. In this issue, it details how in every way the TFC mercenaries are more advanced and competent than the TF2 mercenaries though the TF2 mercenaries win in the end. In Arendt’s words: “…All violence harbors within itself an element of arbitrariness; nowhere does Fortuna, good or ill luck, play a more important role in human affairs than on the battlefield …” One brings this up as there is a literal “Deus ex Machina” scene with God, as an actual character in the story, reviving one of the TF2 mercenaries. Even if the tool of violence is used against the TF2 members, there is no point as they canonically are much like roaches and simply will not expire. There is usually some round-about way throughout the comics that they come back regardless of what happens to them.

Meet the Medic, Valve, Animated Short, 4 min 10 sec, 2011 As no stranger to animated shorts, Valve produced a series of Meet the Team videos introducing the different mercenary classes one can play as. Most of the series came out in 2007 with the game’s debut, though some of the series has been added as later installments. The Meet the Medic short, being released in 2011, emphasizes on not only the mechanics of the healer class but the character’s distinct personality. The Medic could easily be mistaken for a benevolent figure given the bias associated with most healer class personalities, however, the Medic chooses more so to heal as a byproduct of his sick curiosity. It is his job to heal teammates, though it brings him more pleasure to do harm to others than good, generally. An example of this is the existence of a live disembodied head of the Spy class character within his refrigerator. Is there a reasonable purpose for the Medic’s actions? No, though to answer the question of “what if” takes precedence over any standard of Modernist Enlightenment “reason”. “Violence by nature is instrumental…” and in this case, is used as an instrument for discovery as opposed to maintaining power or control. The Medic is not “constrained” by moral standards or the Hippocratic oath for that matter. There is irony in that the character has a bust of Hippocrates, “the father of medicine” and famed inventor of the “do no harm” oath; opting to use the bust as a weapon to bludgeon opposing team members in-game.

#Team Fortress 2 #team fortress two #tf2 #I had to pull it off in one night.

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timespakistan · 3 years

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The art of satire | Art & Culture “You can’t make up anything anymore. The world itself is a satire. All you’re doing is recording it.” — Art Buchwald Throughout history, satirists have reflected on the society that surrounds them. To be a satirist is to have a moral calling: to highlight the hypocrisies of a time. Works of satirical artists like Hogarth, Honore Daumier and Francico Goya have lived in history. The Georgian era marked the golden age for caricature in England. Through their work, artists have been illuminating and ridiculing the absurdities and follies of human beings. Using exaggeration as a tool, they have addressed pressing problems affecting their societies, including subjects that are usually taboo. The exhibition titled Diasporic Rhizome is a joint venture of satirical expression and clever mockery on display virtually. A project of 21 South Asian artists, it delves into topics like arrest of artists, journalist, writers and social workers; false accusations; women’s suffering; oppression; colonialism; killing of Muslims with the rise of Islamophobia; political unrest and racism in America that focuses exclusively on the voices of women of colour. The works are cryptic, surreal, disturbing and provocative. Sofia Karim’s Tribune Bagh is a stark satire against injustice and inequality. She and some fellow artists, poets and thinkers had organised Turbine Bagh, a protest at the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern Museum, London, as a gesture of solidarity by the diaspora. Tribune Bagh is a reference to Shaheen Bagh, the women-led protest in New Delhi that was the epicentre of the resistance prior to Covid-19 lockdown. The global protest is designed in the form of “samosa packets to show solidarity with Shaheen Bagh protest in India. The work highlights the anti-Muslim citizenship laws in Delhi, human rights situation (across India and Bangladesh), imprisoned artists, fascism and authoritarianism. A packet titled Release Abdul Kalam was a satire against the arrest of the photographer who photographed the refugees of Bashan Char island. The packet shows a photograph taken by Kalam, himself. In his collaborative project with Tariq Ali, Amin Rehman uses word art installation as his mode of expression. His work is a commentary on the effect of aggressive globalisation and decolonisation. The artist writes in his exhibition catalogue: “The installation is deep-rooted in rhizomatic thoughts and diasporas’ identity that serves as the pictorial content and interests in the phraseology of aggressive globalisation, colonisation and decolonisation. The installation challenges us to decipher the text layers through a shared interactional technique, like the palimpsest technique and plays with the cultural meaning embedded in superimposed or layered meaning typography. The work is suggestive of graphic and informational strategies reused in American pop art in the 1960s.” Rehman’s word art is a commentary on what appears to be truth on the surface, projected by modern media and lobbyists in global politics and social surroundings. The viewer is compelled to find the message hidden in the layers of his word installation. He provokes critical thinking and paints a picture through words. In an email interview, Amin says: “The pandemic and the necessary safety protocols have heavily affected the art community as it has taken away a large component of being able to show work in physical spaces. On the other hand, online discussions are more accessible… On a personal note, seeing the lives of others going through hard time, rising rates of poverty and death is mentally hurting.” Amin resides in Toronto. His upcoming exhibition The Bleeding Borders will be held at Art Gallery of Grande Prairie, Alberta, in the fall of 2021. Mapping Memory by Saba Karim and Shaheen Ahmad is about solidarity amongst global artists. Both are hopeful that artists will work towards more sustainable online collaborations during the pandemic. Through their work, they are “understanding transnational movements, migrations and friendship of artists in the three regions of Bangladesh, Pakistan and the UK”. Anamika Singh is an artist and designer based in New York. Her installation addresses the demolition of Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad. She writes in her catalogue: “As our landscapes are populated by military monuments, militarised urban infrastructure and networks of surveillance. How are our personal and shared histories folding themselves within dense entanglements of violent legacies? What grows in the voids left by methodical demolitions, site-less shrines and continually mutating and mediated memories?” Asma Kazmi’s Building the City of Exiles refers to the incident when a construction crane fell down on pilgrims in Makkah. She says humans around the globe are living under the shadow of idyllic skyscrapers, amongst health crises and inequality. “Uban space seems beholden to the aspirations of builders and planners who erect skyscrapers at alarming rates. Who and what is marginalised in this process? What is the toll on the environment?” Nitin Mukul, born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, is based in Queens, New York City. Her installation titled Blue Lake, With Live Performance can be experienced as a durational event. He begins his work with layers of paints placed in sheets of ice, freezing each layer of acrylic and oil so that they accumulate layers of color and texture. Placing the frozen mass outdoors, he allows it to melt according to weather conditions, filming the process with a tight zoom. Maryam Hina Hussain, born and raised in Karachi, now lives in London. She uses materials like textiles for her work. She enjoys using pigments to create the images. Spandita Malik, a New York-based artist from India, criticises the current global socio-political state of affairs with an emphasis on women’s rights and gendered violence. Her Nari comprises embroidered photographic portraits made in collaboration with women artisans from India. Her work documents the sacrifices of women confined in the so-called “safe spaces” of their homes , working day and night to embroider the cloth. Melissa Joseph’s Pocket Brass satirises the ‘pockets’ – metaphorically political spaces. Her work, a collection of animations and videos, focuses on her own experiences and imagination as a second generation Indian American. Pockets symbolise secrets, ownership, privacy and hidden sentiments. Once stolen, they lose value. Mara Ahmad, a US-based Pakistani artist, is interested in dialogue through physical and psychological borders. Showcasing the film titled: Le Mot Juste [Part One], she focuses on the languages she has learned and the concreteness of the syntaxes. Being able to speak three languages, she enjoys connecting the borders. Jaret Vadera’s Ascending to Outer Space to Find Another Race is influenced by Rorchtests, FMRI’s, info graphics kinetic science, science fiction, Buddhist philosophy and study of the impossible. It explores parallels between the internet and neural networks – search engines and memory. The viewer has to examine and experience the work in order to interactively manufacture the meaning. Diasporic Rhizome will remain on virtual display till May 15 at www.diasporicrhizome.com. The writer is an artist and educationist based in Lahore https://timespakistan.com/the-art-of-satire-art-culture/16433/?wpwautoposter=1618714827

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marctugonon · 3 years

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REFLECTION PAPER

Land Reform, Land Grabbing, and Land Conversion in Calabarzon have some serious threats to our environment and to our people. Though these land uses have a lot of negative effects on our agricultural lands, it can actually adequately meet our needs at the same time. Yes, it may be adequate for our needs, but that does not cover the fact that this project is leading more to the negative side and can do more harm than good. Not only this affects the people within the Calabarzon provinces, but the whole country itself. This issue can worsen our country’s ‘reputation’. This subject is crucial because it will affect so many lives especially to those who depend on agriculture as their occupation. This heavily matters to them in the view of the fact that this is only their source of income, if taken away from them, the gap between the rich and poor will progressively worsen; The rich get richer and the poor get poorer (Matthew Effect). Mass evictions of poor families are also included in the process. If one does not abide by the rule, force eviction will be applied, or worse, violence will be applied. This issue started commencing when the Philippine government started getting hesitant about which path can benefit the country’s manifold economic, social, political, and environmental problems. One thing that the past government officials wanted to implement was the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP), a social justice government program that claims to help landless farmers and to those who cultivate the soil or farmworkers to give them ownership of agricultural lands. While on the other hand, the Ramos administration convinced that the Philippines can join the ranks of the Newly Industrialized Countries (NIC) by the year 2000. The Ramos regime focuses on transforming the Philippines into a newly industrialized country by the year 2000.

While this dilemma is occurring, the Calabarzon Project somehow managed itself to become a hurdle that has stood in the government’s way. The Calabarzon project covers 5 big provinces of the Southern Tagalog Region which some of the most productive rice lands in The Philippines is located and where some of the lands are controlled by the 1998 Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law (CARL). CARL focuses on bettering our country’s infrastructure investment and turn some regions into an engine of growth for Philippine industrialization. As time went by, the government realized some flaws under CARL which have caused it to change slowly by giving DAR the opportunity to decide whenever or the land not to be converted, not the landlords. Though a big part of agricultural land still exists in our country, it’s still possible for us to face some major problems in the future such as difficulty to produce the amount of food needed to feed the growing human population. Major health problems may also occur due to this project. More infrastructures mean less oxygen present in that area. Since trees, which require a large amount of soil, land, and space, are being taken down, people are now more prone to a lot of health issues. Plants are very important for maintaining oxygen in the atmosphere. Loss of animal habitats is also a major problem that we may face during the process. This can cause species mass extinction, which we are already facing. This is very crucial since most people are not on a plant-based diet and depend more on livestock. In addition to this, pollution would be more noticeable. Infrastructures have great significance in pollution since they use dangerous substances that are harmful to us, humans, and our environment. If CARL will be implemented, our risk of having and surviving natural calamities and phenomenons will definitely aggravate. Nature can help lessen the probability of having floods and tsunamis since trees absorb and store rainwater. Overcrowding in particular areas in the region/city is also concerning because people contribute to pollution almost 90% most of the time. Take New York City as an example, a beautiful city where skyscrapers, amazing amenities, and rats running everywhere in the city are present. Their pollution is one of the worst, making them rank in most polluted cities in the nation. Overcrowding in New York City heavily contributed to their pollution; Land pollution and air pollution. Beautiful infrastructures deceive people into thinking their chance of finding a job will increase, but the truth is, they’re all corrupt and some are just using you for money. This leads us to the next problem, Economic Failure. Since agriculture plays an important role in our country’s economy, loss of agricultural lands will greatly affect our economy. Many working Filipino’s, 40% specifically, classify agriculture as their occupation and contribute about 20% of the country’s GDP and is gradually decreasing. If they’re neglected, the country’s economy will continue to suffer. This project also participates in a problem the earth is facing, depleting of the ozone layer. Ozone layer depletion is caused by human activities; Manufacturing of chemicals, consumption of dangerous gases, and many more. Buildings use numerous materials that are very dangerous to our environment, it is possible that they’re also contributing to the depletion of the ozone layer. Ozone is very important because it protects the Earth’s surface from the sun’s harmful ultraviolet radiation. If the ozone will continuously getting destroyed, humans would be more prone to health problems, such as skin cancers, cataracts, and immune deficiency disorders. The CARL project in the Calabarzon region will continue to be a problem for many landowners, farmworkers, the government, and the country itself because it has so many negative effects on the economy and citizens. Examples of why this will continue being a problem are families are being forced away from their land. This act is considered as trespassing on someone’s private property. It is their private property and no one else has the right to touch it and force the family living in that area to move and demolish their place for industrial growth purposes. Secondly, farmers were being forced to switch crops, even though most of them did not have the facilities to keep up with that lifestyle. In addition to that, atmospheric pollution is also getting worse caused by a lot of coal dust particles. If not monitored, our environment will continue to deteriorate and soon will struggle to give the people the healthy and clean air and oxygen they need. Furthermore, About 100,000 rural families will lose their farmlands to schemes connected with the Calabarzon Project. The Matthew effect is very much applied in this situation because the people in the province who rely on agriculture will struggle more to support their family’s needs. While on the other hand, the government and the rich get richer because they get to construct infrastructures and build businesses that could benefit them. It is very selfish of them to do such thing and that just shows how absurd, incompetent, and egotistical the government and some business owners are towards its people. Lastly, the country may possibly face scarcity of land when the project would be implemented. It would be hard for the government as well for the farmworkers to find for another land where they could grow crops and supplies to satisfy the people’s needs and wants. Overall, I am very disappointed about this issue because they could’ve thought of a better idea where they will not touch or ruin someone’s life in order for them to satisfy their wants. Moreover, I think it is very unnecessary to implement this project right now because we are facing a pandemic where everyone is panicking and lives are at risk and millions of people are dying. Many Filipinos are also struggling mentally, physically, and emotionally, and I think the government should focus more on its people’s situation and needs. But this does not mean people should stop voicing out their opinions and speaking up on this matter because, at the end of the day, this is still a crucial issue that our country is facing and people should also be educated about this to show nationalism. If this was thought of thoroughly, this could have been a great and beneficial project. They should’ve thought of better things to implement. Plans that could have helped the future, which is now, and plans that could have helped develop our country into a better nation. Instead, the government should implement a law where they offer sustainable homes to the homeless and give proper education to those who are underprivileged. They could also find ways on how to lessen natural calamities and phenomena's damages on our lands and infrastructures.

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togglesbloggle · 6 years

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At the risk of wading into The Discourse, I must admit that I find the ideal of ‘negative liberty’ pretty confusing/alienating.

(Here ‘negative liberty’ is understood to mean the general category of ‘freedom from’, as distinct from ‘freedom to’. It’s the idea that human freedom is defined not by the ability to actualize one’s preferences, but by the absence of coercion. So basically this is a criticism of libertarians. I assume all of this has already been said by better people using more excellent language.)

Put simply, my objections come down to the fact that we’re born in to very elaborate systems of coercion from day one, and only a small fraction of them were invented by humans. Breathe constantly, or we’re gonna kill you. Drink fluids several times a day, or we’re gonna kill you. Maintain a stable body temperature, digest complex carbons, avoid large concentrations of electrical charge... or we’re gonna kill you.

The primary distinction between ‘drink water or die’ and ‘pay taxes or die’ is culpability. That is, somebody did the taxes thing on purpose, whereas it’s nobody’s fault that we have to stay hydrated. Thus, negative liberty and the moral philosophy of libertarianism are primarily interested in limiting specifically human sources of coercion; ending the ‘coercions of nature’ are consistent with libertarianism (as long as the solutions don’t involve using force to make people do things), but it’s not a specifically libertarian project.

But this is kind of a weird distinction to make. Let’s take an absurd scenario that will hopefully illustrate my point. Let’s suppose that we were born in to a universe where swarms of bees followed humans around all the time. And in this universe, whenever humans engage in jaywalking, the bees attack and sting them with lethal poison. Because this is being caused by an unintelligent natural process, negative liberty tells us that we are entirely ‘free’ and that this accidental enforcement of traffic laws is not a restriction of liberty.

New wrinkle: a scientist tells you that she has discovered tentative evidence that the bees are actually a secret government engineering project designed to make law enforcement cheaper. Are you now less free?

Libertarians oppose the initiation of force pretty much axiomatically. But if we accept this prohibition as a thing in itself, without concern for consequences, then it’s not clear why we should adopt that moral imperative in the first place. What makes ‘do not initiate violence’ any more meaningful than ‘do not wear fuzzy socks’? Why should we choose one and not the other? Contrariwise, if we *do* care about consequences, and aren’t just interested in following some vacuous set of directives, then shouldn’t we be willing to bite the bullet and do [bad thing] if it’s the only way to net reduce the amount of [bad thing] that happens to people? Where [bad thing] could stand in for “risks of physical harm contingent on some action” or whatever else you like. It seems to me that a government ethos of absolute negative liberty is either a system of arbitrary virtue ethics with no connection to actual human flourishing, or a straightforward “I do not pull the lever” answer on the trolley problem.

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origami-goblin · 7 years

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Starfinder Theme Focus - Ace Pilots and Bounty Hunters

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This week I’m going back to the scene of the crime to revisit the themes in Starfinder and offer some possible avenues down which you can direct your creative character-building energies. In case you’re completely in the dark on this topic, Starfinder introduces the concept of themes that you can use as a small puzzle piece in sculpting your character. In addition to providing some RP definition, each theme will give your character a boost to a specific stat and bonuses at 1st, 6th, 12th, and 18th level. As an aside, Paizo’s choice to have the theme progression remain identical throughout the possible selections helps to limit the min-maxing a bit, by ensuring that players aren’t choosing themes based on whichever ones grant them bonuses the soonest. Of course, the bonuses that each theme provides inherently enable some level of power-gaming, but that is going to be the case with nearly any pen-and-paper PRG.

Last time, as a part of my deeper dive into themes, I specifically touched on the Icon and listed several examples of character concepts that a player could use when creating a Startfinder character kissed by the Icon theme. The point of the post was to show that themes aren’t meant to limit creativity; they foster it. Just as there’s no wrong way to eat a Reese’s, there are countless interpretations to each theme and the characters that can be molded into existence. Today, I’ll be firing up my brain engine to offer some different charger ideas for the Ace Pilot and Bounty Hunter themes. Buckle up, we’re making the jump!

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Ace Pilot Character Concepts

“You are most comfortable at the controls of a vehicle, whether it’s a starship racing through the inky void of space or a ground vehicle zooming between trees, around boulders, and across dusty badlands. You might be a member of an elite military force, the recipient of intense courses of training. Alternatively, you might be a total amateur with innate skills that make you a much-admired hotshot.” – Starfinder CRB

Cargo Transport Pilot – You’ve been on the open road…er…space your whole life. Maybe you enjoy the solitude that comes with transporting outrageous quantities of goods across planets or star systems. These goods could be anything – weapons, construction materials, medical devices. Or maybe it’s a grab bag and half of the excitement stems from wondering what the next shipment will contain. The many laws governing tariffs & import/export taxes come second-nature, and your expertise in maneuvering an unruly behemoth transport ship is unrivaled. I’m sure you have some fantastic stories about the characters that you’ve met at depots and docks along the way. Have you operated with a crew or are you more of a lone wolf? Are you ‘by the book’ or are you known to bend the rules when regulations aren’t being followed? And hey, I’m not going to judge if you smuggle something every now and again – that’s completely up to you.

Mining Rig Operator – A specialist when it comes to operating heavy machinery, and someone who’s not afraid to get their hands dirty. Whether it be a massive drill, asteroid borer, front-end loader, or excavator, you have the honed precision required of someone who could easily level a structure or cause a fatality with a minor slip of the controls. You might harbor a deep love of geology, wealth, or the smell of space-diesel. If you’ve seen Disney’s Atlantis, Gaetan ‘The Mole’ comes to mind here, in all his grimy glory. Has mining been in your family for generations, or were you trying to make some credits in whatever profession was available? Have you pocketed any of your unearthed materials and sold them on the sly? What sort of role would you have on a starship that isn’t a dedicated mining vessel?

Stunt Driver – Inhabitants of the Pact Worlds crave entertainment, and you know how to deliver. From hologram tapes to over-capacity arenas, the lengths you go to appease your audiences is unmatched. How do you prepare yourself mentally to be fearless? Is there any stunt that you won’t do? Huge flames, steep jumps, free-falling acrobatics – you’ve done it all! Have you become an adventurer to satisfy a new craving that’s suddenly emerged deep inside? Are you an adrenaline junky with no care for your personal safety? Or are you THAT confident in your abilities that you simply must show them off at every opportunity?

Military Training Pilot – You’ve risen through the ranks of a military sect, but you figured that you’re done with combat missions. Instead, you are now responsible for grooming the fresh batch of hot-heads in the Academy to ensure that engagements end favorably at the minimal loss of life and equipment. You could be highly decorated and revered by all, or maybe you’ve never actually seen combat but have a brilliant mind for tactics and strategy. Did you develop a sophisticated training module for recruits? Are you a master of physics and can perform complex equations regarding acceleration, drag, and gravity on the fly? Maybe you’re not pleased about being given a non-combative assignment and yearn to be back in the fight, wherever that might be.

Getaway Driver – You’ll ‘wait in the car.’ You know the best nooks and crannies to hide in after a successful operation, be it a heist or a GTA. Apart from having nerves of steel, your ability to handle any vehicle makes you highly coveted in the high-stakes game of evading the authorities. Perhaps you have a catchy pseudonym, like “Leadfoot” or “Afterburner” that adds an edge of mystery to your growing legend. Are you available for hire depending on the highest bidder, or are you loyal to a dedicated group of criminals? Or maybe you’re not a criminal at all, and you’re an undercover agent networking to root out the top dogs of the criminal world. What drives you (pun intended) and keeps your foot on the accelerator? I haven’t seen Baby Driver, but I imagine that he would make for a fun Starfinder character.

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Bounty Hunter Character Concepts

“You track people down for money. It is a dangerous profession, as most of your targets understandably don’t wish to be caught. You wouldn’t have it any other way. You might have a code of ethics, never taking jobs that, say, target children or members of your own race. You might hunt down only escaped criminals. Or you might be completely amoral, taking any job that comes along—for the right price.” – Starfinder CRB

Great Mouse Detective – Maybe I’m getting a little ahead of myself on this one, but a Ysoki Detective? Come on! Okay, we can drop the ‘mouse’ portion of this to generalize it a bit, but a detective makes for a great Bounty Hunter. Searching for clues? Check. Interrogating witnesses? Check. An independent free-lancer? Check, check, check. Now all we need is a mahogany pipe that functions while wearing an airtight, pressurized helmet. Are you a Private Investigator, helping people track down lost relatives? Do you offer your services on a contract basis, assisting the local authorities when your services are required? Maybe you’re exceptional at finding clues, or adept at making accurate deductions based on the information on-hand. Or perhaps your forte involves the canvassing of a crime scene to gather the word on the street, or you could be skilled at poring over historical documents and ancestry lineages.

Gung-Ho Repo-Man – It’s time to pay the piper. Whether it be collecting vehicles or ships that have defaulted loans, or shaking down debtors who are skipping town without paying back the credits owed, there are plenty of avenues to venture down as a repo-man (or woman). Are you employed by a roving band of outlaws or by a seedy brand of space mafia? Do you find honor in returning to others what is rightfully theirs? You can be cold and calculated, or a wild child with a smoking gun. Do you believe in using violence to get the job done, by obtaining the required items by whatever means necessary? Or do you have a strict code of conduct and will only resort to fighting if it is absolutely necessary and all other accessible routes have been exhausted? Either way, you get the job done and collect that paycheck, because if someone is going to get paid, it might as well be you.

Corporate Headhunter – Everybody’s looking for that perfect candidate to fill the shoes and help their company prosper. Sure, you’re a bounty hunter, but you aren’t collecting the reward on some beat-up Toyota Star-is or trying to bring in a fugitive; you are trying to find the right people and put them in the right seats. Corporations pay you top dollar (after six months) when you track down someone with the appropriate skillset and convince them to accept a position at their firms. You have an absurd eye for noticing talent, even when it isn’t a skill that people recognize themselves as having. These aren’t rush jobs; you know that the only way to scout ability is to dig in beyond the resume and get to know the person behind the paper. Whittling down long lists of candidates to a select few and engaging them in social situations is your true calling, and you truly want them to succeed. If they’re not a fit, it’s on to the next one until you find that diamond in the rough.

Pre-Gap Antiquarian – Not much is known about the Gap (that’s why it’s called ‘the Gap’), but you recognize that there is much to be learned about the past, and that the key to unlocking the secrets of what we’ve collectively forgotten lies in the relics that remain. You seek out machinery, trinkets, baubles, clothing – any odds and ends whose origins have long since been forgotten. Perhaps you scour through old histories and manuscripts, trying to locate legendary items of extraordinary power. Do you have magic at your disposal to aid you in your search, ala a dowsing rod? Do you gravitate towards items of a certain kind, like ancient weapons? What draws you to these items in the first place? Maybe there have been stories passed down through your family and you became attached to them, bringing nostalgia into the mix. Or maybe you believe that the way technology is progressing leaves people disconnected with nature or causes us to lack the stronger bond that comes in a slower-moving culture. You probably hoard some of your treasures and keep an exceptionally special item on your person. You could be a hoarder, or run a shop that deals in the sale and acquisition of oddities and antiques.

Zealous Proselytizer – Instead of being driven by the promise of gold or riches, you seek out the good fortune that comes from your deity looking favorably upon you. Whether it be Talavet, Weydan or any deity in between, you seek out others in attempt to show them the enlightenment that comes with becoming a follower. In a way, you are a bounty hunter of souls. Maybe you preach openly in front of large crowds and then try to personally recruit the ones who come up to your afterwards who show interest and promise. Or perhaps you spend more time watching and listening, following people whose dispositions align best with your deity’s tenets. You don’t necessarily have to be pushy, but you certainly could get aggressive if you become frustrated with your efforts. What if they don’t see the world as you see it? You might not be terribly high on the totem pole, either; you could be passing out leaflets in hopes that you ascend the ranks if you make your quota. Do you have a quota? If so, is it more of a personal goal or an appointed goal? What if you’re not aligned with a deity at all, but you hop between them depending on the one that grants the most benefits? After all, nobody’s perfect.

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And there you have it! Since I’ve already done the Icon in a previous post, our next stop will be the Mercenary and Outlaw themes. I’m really looking forward to these two, as they both have a negative connotation and I want to see if we can’t shrug off those predispositions and put a positive spin on them! The main problem I have with posts like these is that I want to start putting together a bunch of characters, most of which will never see the light of day. So, please - create! I shall live through your characters!

Until next time – the stars aren’t the limit; they’re only the beginning.

#Starfinder #PCs #Character Building #Character Creation #Themes #Paizo #Pathfinder #RPGs #Tabletop #Gaming #Concepts

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elarawritingtrash · 5 years

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Fandom: One Piece

Written in 2016/2018

Summary: A girl from our world literally falls into the One Piece world. Seventeen years old, without the usual One Piece absurd physical capabilities, she... does her best.

Warnings: Canon-typical violence, implied/threatened sexual assault

Part 1

Crap, crap, crap, crap, crap.

In a horrifically anime-esque beginning, I was late. Not to school, though; to my part-time after-school-and-on-the-weekends volunteering job at the hospital. Because I was gonna be a doctor. Yeah. In ten years once I’d finished all of the schooling and my residency, anyway. Volunteering at the hospital was practically a requirement, because, with all of the competition I knew I’d have getting into medical school, I needed my résumé to be the best it could be.

But it had been storming hard last night, which had knocked out the power at my house, which had reset my alarm clock, which had caused the alarm to not go off. So it was obscenely early on Saturday, I was late, and I was running through the rain to get to the train because I didn’t have a car. I was going to be soaked when I got to the hospital – at least I wasn’t wearing my scrubs yet, so I could change when I got there.

That was about the only even marginally good thing about the day so far. And, ugh, there was a puddle in the way. It was in a large dip in the ground, far too wide for me to go around and too long for me to jump. I’d have to go through it. It didn’t look too deep, but it was probably deep enough to submerge the entirety of my feet, which would make my shoes and socks all soggy. I didn’t even have any replacements.

Ughhh.

There was a certain way it was supposed to go: I slosh my way through the irritating puddle, continue to the hospital, and have to deal with squishy socks and shoes for the rest of the day.

Because karma hates me, that was not what happened.

Instead, my first step landed in the supposedly shallow puddle – and kept going. With me unable to stop without steady footing – which, with one of my feet still falling, I certainly didn’t have – my momentum carried me face-first into the puddle. What might have been a very painful meeting between face and ground instead found me fully submerged in the dirty rainwater.

Down, down, down, I went. It must have been more than my own height deep. I knew that these were a thing, ‘puddles’ that were actually water-filled holes deep enough for people to disappear into them – there were videos of it happening on the Internet, after all. I just hadn’t expected it to ever happen to me.

Keeping my eyes closed to avoid getting who-knew-what in them, I thrashed my way to the surface. Once I broke the surface of the water, I took a deep, grateful breath of fresh air, then, my eyes still closed, flailed around in the puddle in the hopes of finding an edge. Half a minute, far more swimming than the relatively small in diameter sinkhole should have allowed me, and the realization that I was being moved around by a current later, I opened my eyes regardless of whatever might be in the water.

What I saw was definitely not the city I had been in previously. It wasn’t even a city. It wasn’t even land!

There was water as far as I could see. It was stormy and raining like it had been before, but I was in a much larger body of water. There were large waves splashing around me, dragging me around inside them. It was a miracle I hadn’t been submerged by one of them while my eyes were closed.

What?

I spun from side to side frantically, confused and bewildered and panicking and all of those other synonyms to the same thing: I had no idea what was going on. In most directions, there was just more of the same, more wave-filled water.

Finally, after spinning around almost completely, I saw something different: a ship, sailing towards me, and land behind it. The ship was kind of odd, wood instead of metal, and it had actual sails. A small, distant, oddly calm part of my mind wondered if there were actually still ships with sails. I had thought that we’d mostly moved on to engines, but apparently not.

Too relieved to question it further and too confused to care, I swam in the direction of the approaching boat, keeping a tight grasp on my messenger bag as I did. Everything I’d had in it was probably ruined, but I didn’t want to lose it. After a couple of minutes of swimming towards the ship as it sailed towards me, wherein it was doing the majority of the getting-closer, I noticed something… odd. Well, odder; it was already pretty odd. The ship was flying a black flag.

But isn’t that…?

Once I got a little closer, I was able to distinguish the flag a little better. It was, in fact, a black flag…

…with a skull and crossbones on it.

I stopped swimming, startled.

Pirates?

But that was ridiculous; even if pirates were still a thing, the skull and crossbones flag (a Jolly Roger?) hadn’t been used in hundreds of years. It couldn’t be real pirates.

…That was a lot of work to go to for a cosplay, though.

As I got even closer to the (pirate?) ship, I noticed that there was a weird, white line around the skull. Kind of like the outline of a half-circle, disappearing off the bottom of the flag.

That was weird, too. Not an important kind of weird, but weird.

Well and truly wigged out, I stayed where I was instead of continuing in the direction of the ship. To my chagrin, however, it continued getting closer at about the same speed. My swimming had apparently not been effective at all.

As freaked out as I was by the weird ship, I didn’t actually have a choice. It was either the ship or the land I could see behind it, which, judging by how quickly I’d been swimming before, would take quite a while to get to. Plus, I’d just fallen into a puddle and ended up in the ocean. The weirdness of the ship was nothing compared to that.

It turned out that I didn’t have much choice either way, though. The pirate ship continued sailing in my direction – very perfectly in my direction, and I scrambled to get out of the way before it hit me. I didn’t know what would happen to something hit by a ship in water, but I didn’t want to find out.

I did manage to get out of its path, thankfully. As I’d moved, the sailors on the ship had apparently noticed me, and a giant uproar started on the ship. Somebody dove off the ship into the water and swam up to me.

He didn’t bother with words or anything, merely grabbed me around the waist with one arm and started swimming back to his ship. His one-armed, dragging-a-person speed was faster than my alone, using-both-arms speed.

Too overwhelmed by the WTF-ery of the situation, however, I couldn’t handle his brusque, potentially pirate-y behavior. A small, logical, calm part of my brain noted that his briskness could only be because we were in the water, I probably seemed to have been drowning, and he wanted to get back to his ship quickly. All logical reasons.

The majority of my brain, illogical and far from calm, screamed that this was a kidnapping, he was kidnapping me, I should be freaking out, freak out!

So I… freaked out.

“What – what are you doing?” I asked, well aware that I was being loud and shrill and unable to help it. I started squirming and thrashing, kicking and shoving at him in an attempt to get free. “Let me go!”

But the (pirate!) man just ignored me, not responding to my words or my actions. His one arm was apparently stronger than all of me, as my attempts to get free accomplished exactly nothing.

Relatively quickly, we made it to his ship, and the others threw down a rope. Rather than scale it one-handed while carrying me as I’d been a little afraid of, the man tied the rope around my waist. Still ignoring my verbal and physical protests while doing so, of course. As soon as the rope was secure, I found myself being lifted out of the water.

I yelped despite myself and stopped trying to untie the rope in favor of holding on to it for dear life. As it turned out, the weird, wooden, old-timey, Jolly Roger-flying, actual-cannon-possessing ship was actually rather tall. Being lifted that high by nothing but a rope was really scary, okay.

The men on the ship dragged me on board and untied the rope from my waist. There were a lot of men on deck, all of them big, muscular, grimy, and particularly ugly. Seriously, they all had disproportionate limbs and other features; they were ugly in a way I’d never seen before. I was dimly aware of them dropping the rope back over the side as one man, as ugly as the rest and with a relatively impressive, unkempt, beard stepped right up into my space. He grabbed my chin with one hand before I could back away.

“Well, well, well, what have we here?” he said, disgusting, rancid breath right in my face.

The man didn’t seem to expect a response, continuing, “An attempted escapee, hmm? Hah!” With that sharp bark of laughter, which caused me to flinch, he stepped back. “I, Captain Getsu of the New Moon Pirates, have never allowed anyone to escape, and that has not changed! This little drowned rat will meet the same fate as the other inhabitants of Royal Peaks Island!”

The crew cheered as Getsu drew a sword from his waist and pointed it at me. The tip of it brushed against my throat, opening a thin cut. Ow! I clapped my hands against the wound instinctively.

Wait, what?

I shrieked and stumbled backwards away from him. Heck no! I was not going to get stabbed. I’d rather take my chances with the ocean despite my crappy swimming ability. I didn’t make it very far, though, before I bumped into the guy who’d retrieved me from the water.

He grabbed me before I could flinch away. Even with one hand, he was stronger than I was – annoyingly enough.

“You know, Captain,” he said idly, drawing a hand through my still-wet, scraggly hair. I tried and failed to squirm away because wow creepy. “She’s not too bad lookin’ underneath all that drowned rat.”

Oh no. No, no, nope.

He was a creep. I felt severely creeped on.

“Let me go!” I said again, thrashing and fighting to get away from him. It was to no avail, however, as his grip didn’t budge in the slightest. “Let me go!”

Getsu gave me a contemplative look, sweeping his eyes down and up my body lecherously. I was suddenly glad I was wearing a pair of jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt rather than anything more revealing. “That’s true, hmm,” he murmured, lowering his sword. “It’s not too common to find a looker like this ‘un in East Blue.”

East Blue? He’d said it like it was a place, but I’d never – wait. I had heard of it; it was just… fictional. It was one of the oceans of the One Piece world. But that was ridiculous; One Piece was an anime/manga. I couldn’t be in the East Blue of One Piece.

But then again… puddle-portal. Plus it would explain the pirates and their old-timey pirate ship.

Well. All right then.

It didn’t even matter what I was in anyway; whether I was in my world or the One Piece world didn’t change the fact that I’d been captured by pirates. Even worse, pirates who were apparently actual bad guys, rather than the mostly-good-guyness of, say, Luffy’s crew.

What do I do? I wondered silently, panicking.

And ohhh, crap, crap crap I hadn’t been paying attention and I’d missed the end of their conversation. Now I had no idea what was going on because I was an idiot. My attempts to get away failed utterly as one of the other crew members tied my hands together at the wrists with rope.

“Stop it! Let me go!” My continued protests fell on deaf ears as they tied my ankles together. I couldn’t protest anymore after that, however, as they shoved a piece of horrifically dirty cloth in my mouth and tied it around my head, effectively gagging me.

The guy who’d retrieved me shoved me forward, and, my ankles tied together and unable to separate, I had to hop a couple awkward steps forward to stay standing. Thankfully (?), rather than spend the time forcing me to do that to get wherever he wanted me, the guy just picked me up under one arm. He then dropped me into a corner made by the design of the cabin, where I collapsed unceremoniously onto my side.

The crew then proceeded to ignore me.

What the…?

I struggled to get upright. With my hands and legs tied as they were, however, the best I could manage was to get to my knees. But, since it was more dignified than being on my side, I stayed in that position. Surprisingly well-protected by the walls of the cabin as I was, at least I wasn’t getting sprayed with sea water anymore.

But I was far from safe. The pirates had just been planning to kill me, had just been commenting on my physical attributes; I didn’t trust for a second that they’d suddenly had a change of heart. Plus, the fact that I was tied up made it rather obvious I was a prisoner.

Since I had the time, I quietly had a panic attack. Because what was going on how had I fallen into a puddle and landed in a different world why was I kidnapped by pirates what.

When I could breathe again, I forced myself to think. There was no point in freaking out; I needed to figure out how I was going to get out of this. With my arms and legs bound, I couldn’t exactly just jump off the ship. I could probably make it to the edge, true; however, since I wouldn’t be able to swim, I’d just drown. If they didn’t fish me back out first.

Belatedly, I realized that I still had my messenger bag. They’d never taken it.

…

Idiots.

Not that I was complaining, of course. I had a knife in my bag. Of course, I still needed a plan for after I cut the rope tying my hands and legs. It wouldn’t help anything if I couldn’t actually get away. But at the same time, I really didn’t like being unable to fight back. Not that I could with my hands and legs free either, though…

I was pretty close to the cabin door. It might be possible for me to hide in there and lock them out. Except that wouldn’t really help; it was more of a stalling method. And stalling for what, exactly? I had no guarantee anyone would come. But, even so, it might be better to have something to do when they stopped ignoring me, even if it wasn’t quite an exit strategy.

With that in mind, I maneuvered my bag into my lap so it hid my hands, then went hunting through it for the switchblade I knew was in there. Once I found it, I flipped it open. The locking gear to hold it open clicked loudly into place, and I froze for a moment. None of them seemed to have heard it, so I continued.

I awkwardly twisted the knife around so that I could slide the blade against the ropes around my wrist. Hopefully I wouldn’t accidentally cut myself, since I couldn’t see it. The rope was very thick, it turned out after a couple minutes of attempting fruitlessly to saw through it. I couldn’t even tell if I was making any progress at all.

“A ship!” came the sudden shout from the – what was it called? Eagle nest? Hawk nest? Whatever, the lookout position. “There’s a ship coming this way!”

The pirates all snapped to attention.

“They’re flying a Jolly Roger!” the lookout reported.

“A pirate crew, hmm,” Getsu muttered to himself. Then, louder, “Prepare for battle!”

Well, okay. That seemed rude. I hoped the other crew won. And were nicer. It would be just awesome to be saved from my captors only to be captured again.

The pirates all retrieved weapons – mostly guns and swords – and some of them got to work loading canons. Once everything was finished, there was a long period of waiting. To make sure the other ship was in range, probably.

After what felt like a long time, they started firing their cannons. Cannons were, it seemed, actually very loud in reality. By now, our ship and theirs were apparently close enough that I could hear the other crew shouting even over the cannons. I couldn’t see what was going on, though.

The first round of cannon fire ceased, and confused, angry muttering started up in the crew.

“What the f –“

“What just ha –“

“Did they just –“

Then Getsu spoke, sounding weirdly unnerved himself. “Don’t get discouraged! Keep firing! The New Moon Pirates have never lost before, hmm? We won’t start now!”

The pirates cheered in response, though it was much weaker than the last time.

The cannon fire resumed.

I wondered idly what had freaked out the pirates so much. Knowing the One Piece world, the other crew had probably knocked all of the cannons out of the air before they could be hit. Luffy’s crew loved doing that.

I kept sawing at the ropes with my knife. Hopefully, whoever won, I could get away while they were distracted. Unfortunately, I didn’t seem to be making progress very quickly, and I didn’t know how long this battle would go on for; it wouldn’t do much good if the battle ended before I could get free.

Finally, the other ship came into view. It was smaller than the New Moon Pirates’ ship, but newer-looking and cleaner-looking. It didn’t have a figurehead (that was what they were called, right?), and its flag was, obviously, a skull and crossbones. Theirs was apparently overlaid on a… spade? Like the card suit? And had a weird line horizontally across the skull, right above its eyes, with two blue… balls? Right above the line.

Well. That was possibly even stranger than the New Moon Pirates’ Jolly Roger – which, I now realized, was supposed to represent a new moon. It just didn’t work very well.

The ship continued its steady approach. The New Moon Pirates reloaded their cannons and fired yet again. At least I’d get to see how the ship was completely undamaged despite the barrage of cannonballs.

The cannonballs flew towards the other ship. People started jumping off the ship to attack the cannonballs, causing them to blow up midair and somehow not getting hurt as they did – not to mention the insane, impossible heights they had to be jumping to manage it. They did it at different times and places, so I couldn’t tell how many there were total. A couple cannonballs blew up without any visible interference. A long-range member, maybe? Or just faulty cannonballs – I didn’t know enough about them to know if that was possible.

I don’t know why I’m surprised, I thought. I really didn’t. At least it was all but confirmed, now, that I was in One Piece.

As their cannonballs continued getting destroyed, the New Moon Pirates got more and more freaked out and worried. The other ship continued approaching.

“Keep at it!” Getsu ordered. “They’ll make a mistake eventually!”

Spitefully, I hoped that they didn’t. Maybe the other crew would be worse and I’d regret it, but I wanted them to win.

In the meantime, I continued making no progress on cutting through my ropes. And my legs were starting to hurt from the way I was half-kneeling half-sitting on them.

The New Moon Pirates, for their part, continued getting more and more frantic.

“What the f –“

“What kind of monsters –“

“No way they’re human!”

“This is getting ridiculous, fu –“

In a climactic turn of events, three people from the other crew jumped off their ship, deflected the most recent batch of cannonballs – and landed on this ship instead of their own. They were all men: a huge man sporting impressive sideburns and, in place of a left arm, a machine gun; a relatively normal sized man wearing a domino mask and an open jacket with no shirt, revealing his not unimpressive abs; and another normal sized man, this one somewhat younger than the others, wearing a bright orange hat and a button-up shirt with none of the buttons done.

I squinted at the youngest, sure that I recognized him. He looked incredibly familiar, but I couldn’t quite place him.

The New Moon Pirates got off a couple more cannon shots before catching up and turning to fight the three men. The cannonballs, however, all exploded mid-air; this time, I thought I caught bullets traveling through the air to hit them.

Horrifyingly quickly, the three men obliterated the forces of the New Moon Pirates. Within ten minutes – probably even less – all of the New Moon Pirates, with the exception of Getsu, were on the floor, the luckiest of them still conscious to groan in pain. Or maybe they were unluckiest?

Getsu and the youngest man started fighting; although it was definitely the longest fight any of the New Moon Pirates had put up, it seemed obvious that the young man was better. He had a wide, cheerful grin on his face as he dodged around Getsu’s sword strikes, occasionally dancing close enough to throw a punch. So far, Getsu had managed to block all of the punches with the side of his blade, but he was being overwhelmed quickly. Every time the younger man landed a hit on his sword, Getsu’s arms buckled, implying that the other man was a lot stronger than he looked.

The other two men didn’t interfere, instead standing back and watching. Both looked apathetic, and maybe a bit exasperated, as though tired of their crew member's antics.

Sideburns, apparently bored with watching the fight, glanced around and met eyes with me. He looked surprised, the first expression I’d seen on him, and hurried in my direction with surprising speed, skirting the edge of Getsu and the other man’s fight.

I panicked, stupidly and without reason. As Sideburns got close, remaining hand (not the gun) already reaching towards me, I reared backwards – ow, my legs – and dragged my hands from my bag, brandishing my knife threateningly at him.

He stopped in his tracks, switching to holding his hands out in front of himself harmlessly and backing away a couple of steps.

Belatedly, I flipped the knife around in my hands so that it actually pointed at him. My hands, I noticed, were already shaking, because I was a weak seventeen-year-old with too few muscles to hold the weight of my arms up this long. Or maybe it was because I was freaking out. Heck if I knew.

Also, the rope was actually most of the way cut. If I’d had a couple more minutes, I would have been able to cut it completely.

Behind Sideburns, Getsu went flying backwards as the other man finally landed a punch straight to his face. Getsu didn’t get up again, apparently out for the count after a single hit. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know exactly how strong the young man was.

“Hey, Aggie 68, what’s up –“ the young man started as he turned towards us. Once he saw, well, the situation, he cut himself off. “Oh,” he uttered.

The man with the domino mask turned too, and his eyebrows shot up into his hairline.

It was stupid to hold a knife on Sideburns, I knew; I didn’t even know if they were bad guys or not yet. Plus, if they were, it would probably just annoy them… It wasn’t like I actually had a chance of fighting them, anyway.

Yet I still couldn’t get my shaking arms to lower the knife.

The youngest man and Domino-Mask-Guy both approached. Domino-Mask-Guy stopped a couple of steps behind Sideburns, while the youngest continued a couple of steps closer than him. Almost without my doing, my arms turned to point the knife at him instead.

He crouched, holding his hands, open and empty, out harmlessly. “Hey there,” he said softly, carefully. I resented the treatment a little, but, well. With the way I was acting, it made sense. “I’m Ace. We’re not gonna hurt you, okay? You’re safe now.”

…Huh?

I stared blankly at him for a moment, the epiphany smacking me in the face that he was Portgas D. Ace. Luffy’s older brother! Well, adoptive – whatever. No wonder he looked familiar. So. One Piece universe. Definitely confirmed.

After another moment of glancing back and forth between Ace’s patient, expectant face and my knife, I forced my arms to curl in, lowering the knife. Ace beamed at me, looking unreasonably happy about something so small. He leaned forward, dorkily scooting closer without standing up straight when he couldn’t reach, and carefully took my knife. That – well. That was fair.

Then, still ever-so-careful – I was a little amazed the other two men hadn’t said anything yet – Ace reached to untie the cloth from around my head one handed, still holding my knife in the other. Once it was untied, I let it drop from my mouth – tossing my head so that it would land to the side of me.

Ace grabbed the rope around my wrists, his eyebrows raising a little for a moment before he cut straight through what was left, using my knife. I was a little jealous – he’d managed the same amount of progress in, like, a second, that had taken me several minutes. He gave my knife a funny look, then ran his thumb along the blade.

After examining his perfectly uninjured thumb, he turned back to me. “This knife sucks,” he said.

I let out a startled laugh. “Well –“ I coughed, realizing very abruptly how dry my mouth and throat were, and had to take a moment. “Well, I wasn’t really planning to have to use it, I guess.”

Ace grinned at me for a moment, apparently pleased with the pathetic retort. “What's your name?” he asked.

"Alyssa," I said honestly. My name didn't matter much. Hopefully it didn't, like, stand out as a name that didn't actually exist or something. That would be horrible.

Ace nodded. "Nice to meet you," he said politely. Somehow, it came across as rote, something he'd learned to say.

I supposed that made sense, given his backstory; hadn't Makino had to teach him to be polite?

"I wish I could say the same, but, well," I said awkwardly.

Fortunately, it seemed to surprise another laugh out of Ace.

"Yeah, no, I can see that," he said. He sobered. "What happened? Is there somewhere we can take you?"

I faltered for a moment. I flailed mentally - which direction did people supposedly look when they were lying? I didn't remember, so I just looked down. I couldn’t exactly tell him the truth, after all. But then, Getsu had given me the perfect lie, hadn’t he?

Thankfully, Ace spent a moment cutting through the rope around my ankles with enviable ease despite still using my knife, giving me time to get my story straight.

“I’m from Royal Peaks Island,” I said – lied, shifting into a more comfortable position. Ace nodded, and I continued, indicating the fallen crewmembers, “They… attacked us.” Horribly guilty about lying and just wanting to get the false story over with, I spoke quickly, “I – I tried to get away, but I couldn’t get to any of the ships in the port without going past them, so I – stupidly, I guess – just tried to hide in the ocean, but I guess I was unlucky, and they passed by me when they were leaving and they must have seen me, and…”

I took a breath, aware that I was rambling, and finished awkwardly, guiltily, “I don’t even know what happened to anybody else.”

That was true, at least. I really didn’t know what had happened to the real inhabitants of Royal Peaks Island. Getsu had implied that they were all dead, which was horrible. I didn’t want an entire island of people to be dead, but… if any of them were alive, they would know that I was lying. That just made me feel worse.

Ace nodded again, looking solemn. He stood and stepped back, offering me a hand. When I took his hand, he pulled me to my feet and calmly let me use his hand to steady myself when I stumbled.

“Well, we have to go check it out,” he said authoritatively.

Domino-Mask-Guy smirked. “And that has nothing to do with the fact that that’s where we were going anyway, right?”

“Of course not,” Ace sniffed with a baleful look at him. He turned to me. “Want to come with?”

Well, it was either go with them or stay with the New Moon Pirates. Huh. Hard choice, that.

“Yeah,” I said, nodding.

Ace nodded back, then turned and walked away without another word, obviously expecting me – and his crewmembers – to follow. We did.

Their ship had sidled up beside the New Moon Pirates’ in the meantime, and the fourth man I’d seen was standing at the edge of it. Ace and the two others jumped across the gap to it easily – which made sense; they’d jumped a lot further before. But it was a big gap, maybe ten or fifteen feet. There was no way I could jump it.

“Umm. I can’t… really jump that far?” I called to them, twisting the strap of my bag awkwardly. Ace never had given my knife back, I noted.

They turned back, looking comically surprised.

“Oh, really?” Ace asked.

He jumped back across easily. “Is it okay if I…” he trailed off, holding his arms out towards me in an obvious message.

I glanced from him to the gap and back. I sighed.

“It’s fine,” I said.

Ace grabbed me around the waist, and the next moment I found myself midair. I very carefully didn’t make any embarrassing noises.

We landed more lightly on the other side than I would have expected. I let out a quiet breath of relief for that as Ace stepped away to a more respectable distance.

I got my first look at the fourth member of the crew, the one who'd stayed to protect their ship. Another man, of course; that wasn't even a surprise, although I was personally disappointed by the lack of bad-A pirate women. He was very tall and thin and carried an awful, old-timey rifle.

He gave me a curious look, and I shrunk automatically to hide behind Ace. It seemed these ones were actually kind-of-good-guys like the Straw Hats, since I doubted Ace would have been the captain of ordinary evil pirates, but they were scary, okay. Except for Ace himself, who had a pretty normal character design thanks to being main character adjacent, they kind of had typical minor bad guy one-off pirate designs.

"What's going on, Captain?" he asked

Ace glanced at me. I didn't know what I looked like, maybe like a sad drowned kitten, but Ace looked surprisingly sympathetic.

"It seems that those pirates--" he jerked his head to indicate the ship of the New Moon Pirates, "-- attacked Royal Peaks Island. This is Alyssa, who they... abducted instead of killing."

I couldn't help but look down at my feet, unable to meet any of their eyes as my lie was repeated. Even though I had no other choice, I found myself wishing I hadn't agreed to go with them to the island. There, we would either find people who would contradict my story or we would find an entire massacred island.

It was awful, but I found myself selfishly hoping for the latter.

The tall man frowned. "How horrible," he murmured. He circled around Ace to get to me, but stayed a respectful distance away. "My name is Mihar."

"Oh yeah," Ace said as though just realizing something. I stepped away from him as he turned to face me. That was a little too close to bare chest for me. He gestured to Domino-Mask-Guy. "That's Masked Deuce--" a gesture towards Sideburns, "-- and that's Aggie 68. And I'm Portgas D. Ace!"

It was a little weird, he introduced himself last name first, which was the Japanese order, but everybody had spoken English so far. I would have thought the name order was just because the One Piece series was originally in Japanese.

Still, I couldn't help but smile. "You already introduced yourself," I pointed out.

"Well, yeah, but not my full name," Ace said with a shrug. "Is Alyssa your full name?"

I really had to think about that one. Obviously, I did have a last name, and usually I would introduce myself with my full name, including my middle initial, like Ace had, but. Did it really matter in this world if my last name was the same? It wasn't like any of my family was around for me to be related to.

Not to mention that, while it was fine in my original world, my middle name was Diane... which did, actually, make my middle initial 'D'. Here, that meant something, supposedly, which it didn't in my old world. So, I decided, might as well just leave it at first name.

"Well, it's the only name that matters," I said belatedly.

For some reason, they all looked very sad about it.

"Well, we should go to Royal Peaks Island to check it out," Ace said authoritatively. He sent me a softer look. "There might still be some people there."

That was very true. There could be. It didn't seem all that likely that a pirate crew would kill an entire island for no reason. If it was true, I was doomed.

So all I could do was clutch my bag close to me and give a short nod.

Fortunately, they didn't seem to think it was all that odd. They went about their business, surprisingly good at managing such a big ship with only four people. Before long, we were sailing closer to Royal Peaks Island. As we got closer, I noticed that it was aptly named; it did in fact have several tall mountains.

I stayed off to the side, as out of the way as I could get. Fortunately, they left me alone. I could practically feel them talking about me, but they kept it out of my hearing range.

We were on the correct side to land at the port town, but once we got close enough, it became apparent that it was on fire. Not the town itself, but the port. The dock, I thought it might be called? In any case, since we couldn't exactly dock (?) at the... dock, the others dropped anchor (?) off to the side, far enough from the flames to be safe.

I eyed the distance to the ground. It was... far. And scary. I was already getting premonitions of falling and dying.

Meanwhile, Masked Deuce, Aggie 68, and Mihar jumped casually off the side of the ship, landing easily. I was extremely envious.

Without so much as a by-your-leave, Ace scooped me up practically bridal-style and dropped to the ground. Startled, I could not restrain a shriek as the wind blew past me on the way down, wrapping my arms around Ace's neck in a death grip. Even carrying me, though, Ace landed just as easily as the others, smoothly enough that I hardly felt a bump at all.

I self-consciously unwound my arms from Ace's neck as he let me down.

Before I could apologize or anything, I noticed some bodies that were visible even from here, sufficiently distracting me. Horror rose up in my throat, but the instincts that had led me to want to be a doctor in the first place wouldn't allow me to leave them. I hurried over, checking each person.

They were all dead.

That led me closer to the main road through the town, revealing even more bodies further in. I started making my way through. In between checking bloody corpses for life, I noticed that the town was very pretty. It was all blues and feathers and other decorations. According to some signs, it was a tourist-y party town. A lot of the decorations reminded me of New Orleans and Mardi Gras.

It was marred, however, by the bodies and blood seemingly coating the town. There was a somber air as I walked through, Ace and the others trailing behind respectfully. That made me feel bad, too; they were giving me allowances I didn't deserve under the belief that I knew these people.

As we got further, it seemed less likely that we would come across any survivors.

There didn't seem to be any form of police station, I noted. A small island like this probably relied on the World Government, and therefore the Marines, for protection. But there was no Marine base, leaving them vulnerable.

This was my world now, too. What a horrible world it was.

Whether it was the thought of all of the people who'd died or the thought that I was stuck here, I felt tears prickling at my eyes. Unable to stand this horrid funeral march, I got faster and faster until I was all but running between each body. Finally, I'd made it through the entire town and circled around to be near the burning dock.

I was in front of a small doctor's office. Inside, visible through a broken window, there was an old man with a kindly face and a white doctor's coat lying on the ground, covered in blood.

Suddenly, the tears overwhelmed me and I choked and started crying quietly. It was so stupid, I didn't even know these people. At the same time, though, their entire town was dead. Possibly everyone any of them had ever known. Didn't they deserve to have someone, anyone, cry for them?

And maybe I was crying for myself, too. My home, my family and friends, all my aspirations to be a doctor, were gone.

The others were still there behind me, I could tell. Probably, they were keeping their distance now less out of respect and more out of awkwardness. After a while, Ace, brave man, approached. After a moment of visibly struggling for something to say, he patted me on the back gently.

"I was going to be a doctor, you know," I said for no reason. It just kind of fell out.

I couldn't help staring at the dead old doctor in the building. Had he had an apprentice? Were they dead, too?

"Was that guy your teacher?" Ace asked hesitantly.

I wouldn't have thought that Ace did hesitation.

Still, I had to hesitate, then. He wasn't, of course, but I couldn't exactly say no now. There likely wasn't another doctor on the island.

"Yes," I lied, shoving down the guilt. "I was apprenticed to him, but."

But he was dead. But now any hope I had of going to my world's medical school was gone.

I swallowed around a lump in my throat. I hated crying.

"Now I have nothing," I said quietly.

The tears were encroaching again, but I forced them back. My eyes were going to be uncomfortable and achy enough already.

Ace was standing in front of me now. Though I was looking down, at the ground, I saw as he looked over my shoulder at his crew, obviously communicating. I'd always thought it was cool how people (fictional ones, anyway) could do that.

"You're a doctor?" Ace said.

I flicked my gaze up to look at his face. "I was going to be a doctor," I said. It wasn't quite agreement; the difference was, in my opinion, huge. I was a year of high school and seven years of medical school away from being a proper doctor.

Ace, however, seemed to think differently.

"Okay, so, look. We can drop you off at the nearest island, which we need to go to for supplies anyway," he added this almost sheepishly. "You can... try to make a life there, I guess."

He paused long enough that I was about to agree, since that was my best bet at this point and it was actually pretty nice of them to even offer, when he started again.

"Or you can come with us," Ace finished.

I stared. That sounded... like an offer of piracy. Like something Luffy might have said if he wasn't such a rude person. It was kind of interesting to find that Ace didn't bully people into joining his crew like Luffy did.

"Come with you?" I asked, just to be sure.

Ace nodded, seeming more confident now that I was definitely not crying. "Join my crew."

The fan in me was screaming. The chance to be a pirate! On the other hand, piracy was obviously quite dangerous and I didn't actually want to die. But then, the people on Royal Peaks Island hadn't been pirates and they'd still died. Maybe it was actually safer to be on a powerful pirate crew.

Of course, Ace had to also know exactly how useless I was. Why would he offer that? I'd be dead weight.

"Why?" I said. When Ace's face crumpled a little like he'd been rejected, I hurried to add, "Why would you ask me? I'm not... I wouldn't be very helpful."

"We need a doctor," Ace said.

"I'm not actually a doctor yet," I said.

Ace shrugged. "Closer than any of us," he said, including his three crew members with a gesture.

And, the fan in me pointed out, you can keep Ace from dying.

Because he would. If I decided to become a civilian here, Ace would go on to be a pirate captain, join Whitebeard's crew - and die at Akainu's hand in three years. But I could change things. Maybe. Either way, it might be interesting.

"Okay," I said. "I'll join."

Ace was starting to look entirely too smug, so I added, "But I still think you'll be disappointed in my abilities as a doctor."

"Nah, that won't happen," Ace said with a snort. "You need to pick some stuff up?"

I thought about it. I did need clothes, which, given I didn't actually live here, I'd probably have to steal from a store (because there was no way I was going into a house and stealing a person's clothes). Plus, my lack of actual doctoral ability meant I should probably take some, or a bunch, of books with me.

"Yeah. I do. Umm." I paused, trying to think of a polite way to tell them that I didn't want them to come with me.

"We'll wait for you at the ship," Ace said.

I blinked. That was perfect. I decided not to question it. "Okay," I said.

They were already walking away. I didn't bother staring after them, turning to go into the doctor's building instead. It was an awful feeling, tiptoeing past his dead body and the blood on the floor and looking around to find all of his books, and trying to find some kind of bag to put them in.

Fortunately, I found both of those things easily, and fled back out into the street. Not that it was any better there. And I still needed clothes. I found the least tourist-y store I could and went looking for clothes (and another bag to put them in). It took some looking to avoid all of the blue, feathery, and otherwise themed clothes, but eventually I put together a fair spread. On my way out, I saw, under the broken window where the pirates had likely stolen everything on display, a mask.

It was kind of a masquerade mask, shaped almost like a butterfly with massive wings arching out to the top and bottom away from the center. It was mostly silver, with blue lining around the eyes and blue gems set in the wings of the butterfly. It bordered on gaudy, like much of the other stuff in the store and, honestly, in the town as a whole, but I liked it. On impulse, I added it to the bag.

Then I went to meet up with the others.

I hummed to myself quietly. Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate's life for me.

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republicstandard · 6 years

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Toxic Avengers: The Return of Aspirational Masculinity

“There are some things I have to do that you don’t understand. You understand wine and literature and movies . . . but you don’t understand my plight.”-Jack from Sideways (2004)

Did anyone expect, when we were hurtling toward Y2K and the late Senator Ted Stevens’s pneumatic tube-powered Information Super Highway that we would be discussing “trans women’s periods”? Instead of colonizing Mars, as the Soviet general in The Camp of the Saints lamented between sips of vodka: “We’re caught in the clutches of the great hermaphrodite, Zackaroff. We’re all its serfs. And we can’t even cut off its balls!” Yes, the neo-liberal project has given our civilization opioids and anti-depressants and a steady diet of appointments with the local psychoanalyst; it’s blessed us with hormone blockers for prepubescent children and demon-drag-queen story time and soon IUDs for first-graders. Lothrop Stoddard’s Revolt Against Civilization is in full swing:

Congenitally incapable of adjusting themselves to an advanced social order, the degenerate inevitably become its enemies—particularly those “high-grade defectives” who are the natural fomenters of social unrest. Of course, the environmentalist argues that social unrest is due to bad social conditions, but when we go into the matter more deeply we find that bad conditions are largely due to bad people. The mere presence of hordes of low-grade men and women condemned by their very natures to incompetency and failure automatically engender poverty, invite exploitation, and drag down others just above them in the social scale.

Such inequities can only be compounded by the ever-growing throngs of maladjusted and violent Third Worlders who are mostly unable and/or unwilling to adapt to the rigors of success in the West. The victim mentality creates a power vacuum that will inevitably be filled by a more self-assured group or groups; thus assuring our conquest at the hands of the Equatorials, the West will have been reduced to nothing but a bunch of ill-adjusted, genderless, species-less, trans-abled amorphous blobs incapable of lifting a finger in self-defense. Otherwise, and perhaps a more likely outcome, in these conditions of fractured tribalism the country will require the installation of a ruthlessly totalitarian government headed and staffed, of course, by the managerial “elites”—and for the few hold-outs, as Frank Carter sang on Gallows’s “The Vulture”: “If the horses won’t drink, drown them in the water.”

https://youtu.be/nNLjx1EJp-c

This idea that it’s all men, or that it’s “toxic masculinity” that is the root cause of violence in our society is preposterous. It’s pretty simple, really—despite their supposed aversion to generalities and stereotypes, the Left finds itself unable to perform even a rudimentary analysis of the perpetrators of violence. The black share of homicides nationally has actually increased while their population share remains relatively static, and of course the vast majority of those homicides are committed by black males. This simple instance of a legitimate “toxic masculinity” is not a possible explanation, however, “because racism.” Therefore, the Left twists itself in ever-more absurd contortions to explain really rather simple biological explanations (another example is the “gender pay gap”).

We know that, on average, black children hit puberty first and Asian children last, which may have something to do with the advanced physical development of many blacks, which is particularly pronounced in the teen years relative to, say, whites or Asians. The ramifications in terms of brain development and verbal acuity and spatial reasoning remain somewhat less known, but we can draw inferences based on the available science. Ignoring fundamental differences between people, not to mention the wealth of quantifiable data that show strong correlations between specific behaviors and outcomes, is not going to lessen our problems. It’s going to make them worse—as we’re witnessing.

These “debates” are absolutely drenched in Leftist moralism, to the point where even pointing out well-established science is cause for professional and social termination. Rather than bending over backwards to find “hate crimes” and “systemic racism” to explain away black underachievement, would not a consideration of cognitive difference liberate the whole nation from this ceaseless pearl-clutching? There is no white conspiracy to marginalize blacks (at least none that I’m aware of), but there are evolved differences in intelligence that exacerbate group differences in an increasingly cognitively-intensive economy. These difference are no one’s fault but Mother Nature’s, unless of course the actual mother made poor in utero or child-rearing decisions (for example, black mothers are thirty times more likely than white mothers to give birth to a child with fetal alcohol syndrome, and are much more likely to use corporal punishment on their children, which is proven to affect cognitive development). Nevertheless, Leftist dogma renders an honest discussion impossible.

Haiti has been an independent country longer than Canada, New Zealand, Australia, or Ireland —all four were products of colonialism— and they have turned out just a little different, I would say. The United States has only been independent a couple of decades longer than Haiti. Do you want to keep on blaming colonialism? How about Ethiopia, which minus five years has been an independent nation for millennia? We have been conditioned to accept equality of outcome when the biological inputs are so wildly divergent. This is patently absurd. As all populations increasingly have access to the same technologies, amenities, and advancements as everyone else, and the global economy becomes more cognitively-intensive, with an honest appraisal we can only expect the disparity in outcome between humanity’s haves and have-nots to widen ever-further without a full-bodied globalist tyranny.

Likewise, in the interests of furthering what’s mutated into the paradox that is modern feminism’s prudish Epicureanism —indeed in erasing the distinctions between man and woman by un-coupling gender from sex, which sort of defeats the purpose of feminism— the most appalling manifestations of totalitarianism are necessary to force the supremely unnatural, in the process destroying both masculinity and femininity by turning each sex into a shitty facsimile of the other and never the twain shall meet. Or is it the opposite, a melding of pregnant men and combat-ready women into the Androgynes of the Future? It’s impossible to tell as the Left is so confused and contradictory, lacking any semblance of a coherent worldview beyond defining itself against what Western civilization stands for, with the Monstrous White Male at its epicenter.

In my TACB piece “Cow Shit on the Grecian Urn,” I relayed the following, which is to my mind emblematic of the world-conquering spirit of a healthy Western Man:

In 1865, on his eighth try, Englishman Edward Whymper climbed the Matterhorn with nothing but a small flask of tea and a ham sandwich. That same year Trollope, Zola, and Dostoevsky published new works of fiction and in the six years on either end, the internal combustion engine, plastic, the bicycle, the typewriter, air brakes, the subway, traffic lights, and dynamite were invented, all by Europeans of course. Western greatness and the Faustian spirit have been driving human progress for seven hundred uninterrupted years (and intermittently for millennia); the British Empire brought English common law to the far corners of the globe and the Americans built on this tradition to create the still-unsurpassed masterpiece of self-governance in the Constitution. The Scientific and Industrial Revolutions and capitalism re-shaped the world as we know it (though admittedly in the latter two cases not always for the better, but this is a discussion for another time).

An America unconcerned with “diversity” invented flight and sixty-six years later was on the moon. Competence is clearly no longer on the agenda in this new landscape of “equality”: Blacks are nearly four times as likely as Asians and nearly three times as likely as whites to be accepted to medical school with identical MCAT scores and GPAs. Why would this be necessary if all people were “equal”?

What great monuments do people go to Africa to see? Outside of Roman ruins and the remnants of the tremendously advanced ancient Egyptian civilization, a group with far more genetic similarity to modern Europeans than to the nation’s present Arabic occupants (minus the Coptics who are the genuine genetic descendants of the ancient Egyptians and thus the only true Egyptians), there’s virtually nothing.

This is to say that there are real and realized differences between groups of people and pretending they don’t exist is, in the present climate of mass immigration and the willful ceding of power in places like Rhodesia and South Africa, suicidal. Per Henk van de Graaf: “The farmers live in fear, because being a farmer in South Africa is the most dangerous occupation in the world. The average murder ratio per 100,000 for the population in the world is nine, I believe. In South Africa, it is 54. But for the farming community it is 138, which is the highest for any occupation in the world” (Chicago is 28 per 100,000 and St. Louis is 35.3 per 100,000 residents as a point of reference). Whites are less than 9% of the South African population but are 40% of all murder victims. South Africa has a 95 percent black-on-white murder rate and the world’s highest rape rate. There are government-sanctioned policies to seize land from white farmers and re-distribute it to markedly less productive blacks. As Ilana Mercer so poignantly warned us in Into the Cannibal’s Pot, this is the future for America (and the rest of the Western world) should it continue down this suicidal path.

The multi-culti-feminist-relativist goop eagerly sucked down by the Left’s useful idiots is stripping Westerners of all of their natural defense mechanisms. Blair Cottrell neatly summed up the Left’s multi-front war —race, class, biological sex, civilizational— in one brilliant tweet:

Feminism: >Invite masses of foreign men into your country who religiously believe that women should be kept as sex slaves & killed for wearing skirts. >Vilify & ostracise your last actual line of defence against those men: The working men of your own country. 👏🏻

— Blair Cottrell 🇦🇺 (@blaircottrell89) July 11, 2018

Women like sociologist Lisa Wade are too preoccupied with President Trump’s “carpe pussy” comments from over a decade ago to understand that the immigration restrictions/overhaul he and the majority of Americans support would stop immigrants and “refugees” from intractably misogynistic cultures from coming here and bringing their regressive attitudes toward women as chattel, barbaric practices such as female genital mutilation and honor killings, and a lack of restraint from sexually assaulting women either through non-existent impulse control or cultural entitlement. Wade and others of her ilk believe that the male ego is the most repressive force on the planet, and that President Trump is its manifestation. I agree, a mis-applied male ego is the most repressive force on the planet, but it’s not manifested in President Trump, it’s manifested in the Left’s Third World bedfellows, especially Muslims. Furthermore (as I chronicle here), these cultures—including the black and Hispanic sub-cultures in America—are downright hostile toward the LGBTQ-AEIOU agenda; open borders means an end to their delicate little “boutique identities” as Mark Steyn calls them. Hell, it means the complete erasure of women’s rights, and as the biologically more egalitarian-minded whites have always viewed our women as both far more precious and, if it may be said, equal, a population sea-change will have Wade and co. in burqas or body-bags, not bitching about white men in the Huffington Post.

What passes for female empowerment these days is merely the creation and perpetuation of a set of conditions to create more disposable income and thus more consumers. As Henry Wolff says, “White women refusing to have children have instead channeled their maternal instincts into the Third World,” which reflects the feminization and effete sentimentality of what passes for “politics” in the West. The etymology of the word “politics” is derived from the Greek polis, or city, which has been used in various permutations to refer to the people of a city or state, or else to reflect the state as considered in its ideal form philosophically. Thus, politics is the governance of the people of that state, for the benefit of that state. It is meant to be a reflection of its people, not of its finance sector or whatever Israel decides its policies should be.

To expand on the red pill metaphor, it is not just an awakening from The Matrix, but the choice between red and blue pill also corresponds nicely with the Republican-Democrat split. Further, red evokes the notion of a common heritage or “shared blood,” the bonds of which, indeed, are thicker than water (typically colored or referred to as blue). Now granted the Republican establishment has been no paragon of actual conservatism in decades, but with the non-white voting share of the Democrat Party at 44% and rising, and as their white leaders are first marginalized and then purged, it is clear that the “blue wave” is that which would drown the Historic American Nation, from its nakedly Marxist policies to its support for the demographic tidal wave of non-Europeans.

The “red,” our republic’s life-blood, dries up without its founding people. The ultimate demise of the founding Roman noble families roughly corresponds to the time Caracalla extended full citizenship rights to the entire empire. “Democracy in action,” we might say, but without an aspirational core of true Roman families on which the empire could rest, the decline was not long after, for what is a Rome without Romans? Further, in the absence of expansion, the momentum of the empire ground to a halt, and its focus turned inward, both in conflict and in navel-gazing hedonism. This is not to suggest that the key to reviving the American nation is through resuscitating “54 40 or Fight,” but that after planting our flag on the moon we wasted trillions of dollars and decades of energy on “equality” and dragged (or in the case of Afghanistan and the Middle East are dragging) our military through morass after morass instead of securing the border and re-directing our eyes back to the heavens. This aspirational masculinity is at the heart of Western civilization and it drives our conquering spirit both literally and metaphorically.

It is time we stopped cowering before inferior cultures and entitled parasites and re-assert what makes us the most spectacular civilization in human history. “Man up,” indeed: there is a very powerful message here, one which we would be wise to heed.

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