#this is very long and involves a bunch of terminology that i try to explain
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Hello, i have been questioning if im a system (and if i am it seems to possibly be median/im front stuck) mainly due to my inability to remember events others stated happened or have a weird disconnect from memories i do have (more so grey-outs not black-outs) unless they’re really emotionally attached memories (seeing a movie i liked, going to a theme park, my own birthdays or Christmas) and even then some parts of those memories are ‘blurred’ or ‘missing’.
I cant tell if this could be just my ADHD (given i also forget to do chores I dislike but can easily remember when something im exited about is coming up) forgetting parts or entire memories that i just dislike or have disinterest in. Or….?
(mention of fictional infant death down below!)
I have brought this up with my therapist but i also didn’t have terminology for ‘grey-outs’ when I did, now that I do i feel ill be able to more accurately explain what’s going on in my head. [i also feel i should state I have no experiences of things that seem traumatizing. At worst I (a more sheltered than average person) read a book then watched the movie that contained a scene of a baby being euthanized (it was a book we were reading in school & the teacher showed us the movie, this was middle school) and afterwards had my first panick attack during an allergy shot. And that sent me into a fit of anxiety for about a year, but I’ve been over that for a while & dont know if that classifies as trauma?]
Im still learning about systems and such, and you seem far more educated than me. Please help. 😅
hey, so we’re not an expert at all - just a system trying to share what we know. that being said, having memory issues in and of itself doesn’t really point to plurality to us, necessarily. lots of folks have issues with short or long term memory. brains are really complex and intricate, and plurality/dissociative disorders aren’t the only ways that amnesia can manifest. maybe check out our post on dissociative amnesia for a bit of our experience with this kind of amnesia specifically along with a few resources:
if you’re curious about complex dissociative disorders specifically (which we assume you are due to your mention of trauma), we’d like to say that repeated trauma in childhood is what causes these disorders to form. so witnessing one scary event in and of itself probably wouldn’t cause someone to develop a disorder as serious as did or osdd. it’s the repetition of trauma without an opportunity for the child to escape, process, or be supported which causes something like did to happen.
that being said, it’s very possible to be a system without trauma. lots of folks find that they’re plural without an extensive trauma history. and while many folks are plural without a dissociative disorder, some of them do have a form of plurality that was influenced by trauma, even if they don’t have a dissociative disorder. we’ll link our resource post for questioning systems so you can learn more about a bunch of different kinds of plurality, including dissociative disorders like did:
overall, we’ll reiterate that poor memory alone doesn’t really sound like a dissociative disorder to us, or even plurality as a whole. dissociative disorders come with a host of other debilitating symptoms, and plurality in general involves being multiple, or more than one.
you might have headmates who you just don’t know about. or you might not. ultimately this isn’t something we can answer for you. but hopefully with enough research and self-exploration, you’ll be able to answer this yourself.
sorry if this answer is weird or not quite what you were hoping to hear. we’re wishing you the best of luck with everything though, regardless of whether or not you’re plural.
🐢 kip and 🦇 kandi
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okay heres that post i promised
heres a real life account of what “violent alters” in DID systems are actually like, their purpose and the psychological aspects behind them so you can perhaps understand them better, whether for your own system needs or so you can better represent DID in your fiction
note: information is taken both from my experience, experiences of others (both people i know and people i dont, from various walks of life) and general psychology. ofc this info isnt true for everyone but is generally helpful in my experience helping them
also this post might be a little roundabout because tfw language disabilities but bear with me
okay so to begin with, “violent alters” as most people know them are more commonly referred to as persecutors in DID terminology so thats the term ill be using for the rest of this post
i should explain the understanding of DID i’ll be writing this post under. dissociative identity disorder, or DID, is a dissociative mental disorder centered around the ‘splitting’ of one individual into two or more (usually more) ‘parts’ or ‘alters’. DID is almost always a response to trauma, generally during childhood, and is a coping method, if rather extreme at times, for a person who’s undergone trauma to be able to continue life normally by offloading responsibilities and traumatic experiences onto other people. alters in a ‘system’ (the collective term for a set of alters in one headspace), while their own identities and people, are psychologically several parts of a whole. for this reason, no alter is truly independent of one another, and this info is important for the discussion of persecutor alters
a persecutor alter, is an alter who often takes the form of something monstrous or scary to their host (the ‘default’, day-to-day alter in a system). they represent something a host does not want to face, whether it be self insecurity, trauma, anger issues, or any number of things. they come across as rude, dangerous, even violent. many will attempt to kill/hurt their hosts or other alters in a system during their ‘active period’ (we will call it that).
it’s not actually common for persecutors to harm people outside the system unless those people directly provoke them, they are preoccupied with their duties in system and often could care less about outside people. they are more dangerous to their hosts than they will ever be to you, some persecutors will even be docile to outsiders while still being violent to their hosts
however, persecutor alters are just as important to their hosts as protectors, caretakers, littles, etc. some persecutors are even protectors in their own right. they have something they want or need to tell the host, and for whatever reason, the only way they know how to get their host’s attention is by acting out violently and putting them and others at risk. it is often true that the more you ignore or think badly of a persecutor, the more violent they will get. they NEED to be noticed, they NEED the validation of their host and for their host to listen to the message they have for them
they are people just like any other alter, and they respond to understanding and being listened to and validated, even if they dont know exactly what is the appropriate response
real life account time. one of my ex-persecutors, named Mars, split when i was around 13-14. i was currently suffering institutional abuse on account of my autism diagnosis. i was adjusting to the confirmation while at the same time being belittled and treated like an object by the adults around me for this knowledge. i was also being abused by my mother for this specific thing. i sufferred a lot of meltdowns and fucked up my social interactions a lot, i was confused and angry. Mars started to come around during my meltdowns, and he would parrot what i was thinking about myself but didn’t want to admit. he was belittling me, calling me words i couldn’t stand to face such as the r-slur, and any number of things. this was, in fact , how i thought of myself but on account of being multiple, it was offloaded onto Mars so i could face it. it’s easier to face these things when they don’t present as yourself
as the years went by i started to adjust, i broke free of the abusive situations, i found support groups and friends with autism and came to better understand myself and my symptoms and how to continue with my teenage life. after a few attempts to kill me and then some other alters, i finally faced Mars and told him i wasn’t scared of him. i’m autistic, i’m proud, and nothing he or anyone else ever said to me was going to change it. he ‘mellowed out’ after that, since his mission was complete and i had faced the fears which he represented.
now at this point, persecutor alters will either integrate (where they ‘reverse’ the splitting process and fuse back with the member they split from, usually the host) OR they will become an ex-persecutor, and move onto a different role. often a protector, or even a host. they tend to keep their rude, sometimes apathetic attitudes but with their concern for their host channeled into something not so violent. Mars is currently a sort of protector/defender hybrid who will take control if things get SERIOUSLY dire, because he has no concern for anything outside the system and it can’t get past him. he has some friends in system and though he doesn’t show his face as much as he used to, he’s welcome whenever he does now that he’s mellow/docile
a lot of persecutors express frustration that they are misunderstood, it’s not their fault that all they know is anger and violence, they are made that way, so to speak. representing persecutors as being violent killing machines in fiction often serves to fuel their anger, causing more damage to their hosts at times. in a sort of “if thats what they think of me, that’s what ill be” kind of way. but behind the violence they are just as valid as any alter, and have something very very important to teach the host, they are not to be ignored and not to be demonized, it never ever helps when dealing with them
of course, it’s completely valid for a host to hate and be hurt by their persecutors, often is the point. but if you are an outsider, it’s often not helpful and can worsen the situation, and strengthen tension between a host and their persecutor. ESPECIALLY any sort of “i hate you for taking (host) away” sentiment. lowkey its really annoying dont do that
so for those who have persecutors and are trying to deal, keep yourself safe and keep your protectors close by, but try to talk to your persecutors, try to understand where theyre coming from, potentially let them front with supervision to see if they can express their message through art, music, writing, or their actions. they are trying to help you even if they’re doing it in a very unorthodox way
for those who’s friends and loved ones have persecutors and you want to help, honestly follow the same advice above. sometimes persecutors will threaten to harm the host to get a rise out of you, unless you believe the host to be in serious danger, try not to respond in any meaningful way. sometimes persecutors will mellow out if they have someone to talk to, their hosts rarely understand them and you can potentially be a mediator to help the process go faster and benefit them both
if you are a singlet (that’s someone without a system) writing DID into fiction, or writing DID headcanons, great! hopefully this sort of rambling of information can help you better understand persecutors and what they represent and how they behave, so we can see less and less “OO SCARY VIOLENT PERSECUTOR MURDERING EVERYONE OOOO!” shit like split and everything. positive DID representation is very important, even that including persecutors. systems require every single alter to run smoothly, including persecutors, and they are just as important as any other
thank you for reading if you did and if anything needs clarification let me know. obviously this is very emotion based, theres no way it couldnt be, but i have handled several persecutors in my own system, mellowed out persecutors in my close friends’ systems, and read up and studied a lot on real life accounts of them besides my own. i dont believe in “bad” alters, i believe in misguided alters
#ss.txt#ref#this is very long and involves a bunch of terminology that i try to explain#but hopefully it can be helpful to you#whether you have a persecutor#ur friend has a persecutor#or youre writing a persecutor#ok
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Hey, I just read your post on ADHD/EFDD and was just wondering if you have read any research articles on this and if you have, could you tell me which ones because it all sounds super interesting and I need to choose a topic for my psych lit review and I’m thinking about doing something to do with all the stigma around and misconceptions about different mental health disorders.. it’s totally okay if not tho, I know it’s a big ask, but thanks anyway
That sounds like such a great topic!!! I would be HONORED to help :D
The first person I think of when discussing the term EFDD is Dr. Russell Barkley. He’s one of the leading ADHD experts, and has been a spearhead for studying executive dysfunction in people with ADHD for decades. Very much ahead of his time compared to the DSM. I’ve had his book “Taking Charge of Adult ADHD” recommended to me so many times, but have yet to read it.
Here’s some free stuff, though!
[reblogs appreciated because Tumblr hates posts with links and I wanna make sure this anon sees it!]
I tried to include some short stuff and longer stuff, some articles, images, videos, and comic recs, so you can choose based on your current energy and focus level :) I’ve also bolded links and key points of each source if you like skimming. Let’s go!
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Here’s an interesting article/study on EFDD! They found that “ADHD [is] associated with deficits in inhibition, managing one’s attention, self-directed speech and rule-following, self-motivation, and even self-awareness [...] ADHD therefore involves deficits in self-restraint, [...] selfsensing and imagery, self-control of emotion, and self-directed play for problem-solving.”
Thank you for motivating me to look up some articles, because I learned some new things, too! For instance, they assert that ADHD could also be called SRDD (Self-Regulation Deficit Disorder), but conclude the article by saying either SRDD or EFDD fits better than ADHD, and that the terms could be used interchangeably, because SR (self-regulation) and EF (executive function) are effectively talking about the same things. So his assertion is that even if the name ADHD never changes, it can still be scientifically classified as either of the other terms. I believe in recent years he’s preferred EFDD more and more.
[note that the above article/study is from 2011, back when we were on the DSM-IV, so a lot of research has been done since then]
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If that article’s a bit wordy or you want something more visual and up-to-date, here’s a really detailed PowerPoint presentation used during the 2018 ADHD Symposium! It’s long but well-organized so you can just read the big headers or you can read all the bullet points explaining it. Keep in mind this was a lecture, so some of it probably made more sense in person. I’m glad I read this, because I realize the terminology I’ve used is slightly off: according to the Symposium, there aren’t “subtypes” of ADHD, but the different names (ADHD-PI, ADHD-PH, and ADHD-C) are really just used to show the prevalence of certain symptoms in that individual. So they’re all terms for ADHD, but “subtype” was poor word choice on my part.
Oh! I just found a video of him giving a lecture in 2012 using many of the same PowerPoint slides! Here ya go! It’s a bit longer than the other videos I’ve linked below (13min), but it might make the slides easier to interpret :)
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If you want a really short and basic overview, here’s a video explaining 5 main ways executive functions affect the brain and how they work differently in people with ADHD. [I put the video below as well if you wanna stay on tumblr] It’s from 2010, but it holds up. It only covers 5 big ones, so remember (if you can) that executive function affects EVERYTHING and the symptoms will affect everyone differently and at different levels.
This is just the most basic overview and a good place to start:
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Here’s one where he talks about our Time-Blindness! (below) I was going to pick a couple favorite quotes to give you an idea, but that’d wind up being a transcript of the whole video because HE GETS IT. This is from 2014, but I CANNOT recommend it enough!!! He mentions that ADHD doesn’t have a deficit of attention, but rather a deficit of intention. He describes us as having a near-sighted sense of time, and talks about deadlines, “laziness,” etc.
ALSO he talks about how our brains DON’T CONNECT our knowledge to our performance (back of brain to front) like everyone else’s, so we have the same level of knowledge and intelligence, but can’t access and use it the way others can. This is why teaching skills and organization/memory/time-management tips isn’t helpful -- we can learn them, but our knowledge and action centers are separated, so actually doing them/sticking with them is just as hard as before.
If you don’t watch the whole thing, at least skip to 3:29 cause that part’s really funny and relatable (ok the whole thing is relatable):
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And of course, I highly recommend the YouTube channel How to ADHD! I have a couple friends who work on it, and they REALLY know their stuff! (They’re the ones who taught me during a game night that RSD isn’t a real term and it should be called “rejection-sensitivity” as part of the emotional dysregulation umbrella)
I went looking and found this video (below) has the BEST explanation of it that I’ve seen in such a concise, entertaining way. I hadn’t seen this one before, but it even covers some of the things I mentioned in that post your ask is about! Especially the Internal Restlessness that I mentioned as the true “hyperactivity” we all share; even though some of us also express outward hyperactivity, both presentations come from the same restlessness in our brains.
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^^^This has some great examples, visuals, animations, and different ways of explaining and thinking about our symptoms! If you want more about this, the description has a bunch of links to their sources! Jessica and everyone else who works on this channel is great at making the videos watchable for people with ADHD (even if we have to rewind sometimes)
Here's Jessica's official Twitter @HowtoADHD! (I was today years old when I found out that she follows me)
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And if you want something REALLY short and simple, here’s a 2 minute animation comparing living with ADHD to trying to film a movie with a director who keeps falling asleep [below]
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If you like comics:
My favorite ADHD comic artists are: ADHD Alien [@ADHD_Alien on Twitter and @adhd-alien on Tumblr]; Dani Donovan [@danidonovan on Twitter and @danidonovan on Tumblr -- we’re somehow twitter mutuals and she is such a sweetheart. She has some really good infographics, too!!]; ADHD Bri [@AdhdBri on Twitter and @adhdbri on Tumblr]; and dreamadept [@yume_dango on Twitter and @yume-dango on Tumblr]
They’re all well-researched, funny, genuine, intelligent, insightful, talented artists who depict ADHD in a very accurate and relatable way. Go check ‘em out and support them! :D
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I’m gonna stop there for now, but PLEASE feel free to add on to this with other sources, questions, videos, thoughts, comic artists, etc.!!! Hope this helps someone out there!
#adhd#actuallyadhd#efdd#executive function deficit disorder#how to adhd#dr. russell barkley#I hope you see this in time for your essay!!!#tried to give you a variety of sources and places to start#quinpost#quinanswer#oof I'm sure I forgot some adhd comic artists I love but maybe I'll remember later lol#Anonymous
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my problems with the tone of post-season-1 Dream SMP
Here are some things I often see in Dream SMP post-season-1, which I do not see so much in season 1. Take all of this with a grain of salt, in light of how (1) I am not nearly as familiar with the seasons 2&3 material as I am with season 1 material (so there may be some or many parts of seasons 2&3 which do not have these problems, and which I am failing to give due credit to), and (2) I often cannot pin down why I feel differently about season 1 than about seasons 2&3, so I am not certain how much of my claims stem from objective differences between them vs. subjective biases on my part.
I hope this post can present some topics of further discussion, investigation, friendly debate, and/or analysis.
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Problem #1. Excessive emphasis on making a clear distinction between “canon” and “non-canon.”
It seems that now players often talking about “canonically” doing X and “not canonically” doing Y. I don’t like this much. Back in season 1, people almost never used the word “canonically.” The line was blurrier, and I liked that better. This is a block-game role-play, and given this format, there are many features of the story which really cannot be pinned down with much precision.
As one example (among many), L’Manberg was a “nation” but it also seems to have consisted of only a few people. There’s arguably no way to make much sense of this within any tightly defined “canon,” and I think it’s good that the story has not tried much to do so. The canon should remain loose in some ways.
The blurriness of the canon/non-canon distinction is also good for the intertextual elements discussed in @lucemferto’s video about Philza (which is fantastic, and I highly recommend watching it). This sort of intertextuality is one of my favorite things about Dream SMP-- and I have my own theories as well, which I will write about at a later time-- but I suspect some of these cool elements may require keeping the canon/non-canon distinction at least somewhat blurry.
Of course, I totally grant there is a need for a "role-playing / not role-playing” distinction, or something along these lines. Many of the characters dislike each other in the story, but are friends in real life. Occasionally some of the younger fans get confused about this, and will become angry at content-creators under the false impression that the content-creators are mistreating each other. I fully recognize that some kind of explicit distinction is needed in order to avert these confusions, and to keep everyone on the same page of realizing it’s all in good fun. But the necessary distinction should be sensitive to the loosey-goosey nature of the storytelling format.
Back in season 1, I think content-creators would often correct young viewers’ confusion by saying “It’s a bit” i.e. a skit or game (rather than using words like “canon”). I like this “bit” terminology, because it seems appropriately loose-- instead of using the word “canonically” which seems inappropriately strict.
(Admittedly the term “bit” may be more appropriate to the very early period where there was little to no scripting. I’ll briefly return to the “scripting vs. improvising” distinction a few times. It is related to these other distinctions, but not identical to them.)
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Problem #2. Some dialogue scenes are too long.
Let’s take a bunch of the one-on-one scenes between Dream in prison talking to other characters such as TommyInnit, like in this VOD and following ones. These scenes involve a lot of interesting story details, but they go on for a frankly very long time. To me they feel incredibly drawn out. They’d be better at half the length. They seem to have a lot of needless repetition, among other issues.
I’m not certain of the cause of the problem, but it seems to be stemming partially from the particular kind of combination of scripting and improvising which they involve. It isn’t always a great combination. It’s like the players have a checklist of story points to cover, but they aren’t sure how to pull it off in a way that sounds natural without taking too long.
I’m not sure how to solve it. Scripting the dialogue more thoroughly might help make them more concise-- but at the cost of sounding less natural, and losing the charm which Dream SMP’s improvisation often holds.
But further analysis would be needed to say exactly how or why the problem is happening. And not everyone might agree me that it’s happening at all. So I’ll be curious to hear other people’s assessments of the problem (if there is one) and what’s causing it.
In any case, I’ll contrast it to season 1. I believe season 1 did not have many scenes that dragged out for a long time. Season 1 has serious moments as well, and it has dramatic weight. But it does not often have the feeling of dragged out scenes. Again I think further analysis is needed to figure out whether I’m right about this or not-- and if I’m right, further analysis will be needed to figure out why the seasons feel so different, because I can’t really say for sure or in detail why it feels this way. So again I’m curious what other people will think about this.
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Problem #3. Too serious.
This problem seems to be part of the cause of the first two problems. Excessive seriousness may contribute to dragged-out scenes which aren’t fun to watch, and it may contribute to taking the “canon vs. non-canon” distinction too seriously, with an excess tendency to put “serious” stuff on the “canon” side of the divide and put “non-serious” stuff on the “non-canon” side of the divide.
In any case, the storyline after season 1, or at least some parts of it (probably not other parts), seem to have a puffed up air of “seriousness” which really feels off to me.
This does not mean it never succeeds at being serious in the right way. For instance I think serious parts of the Quackity VOD “Quackity Visits Dream in Prison” actually work very well-- even the one-on-one scene between Quackity and Dream, which is one of the best prison scenes. Crucially, this specific prison scene does not seem to have the problems that I’ve complained about for other prison scenes, or at least not nearly as severely. But a lot of seasons 2 and 3, from what I’ve seen of them, appear to have the problem of feeling like they’re “trying too hard” to be taken seriously, and it doesn’t work for me.
Another strength of that Quackity VOD is that the scene with Schlatt at the afterlife gym had a combination of seriousness and levity which I thought was very strong. Whatever one may think of Schlatt’s style of comedy outside DSMP (i’m aware of the myriad controversies), I think Schlatt is incredibly skillful at pulling off an effective combination of seriousness and levity, and I think his chemistry tends to enhance other players’ ability to pull it off too.
And to be clear, season 1 has serious moments as well. But the mixture of seriousness and levity in season 1 seems stronger to me. When Schlatt wins the election, this is a dramatic moment, but it also seems to have a degree of campiness which makes it work well. When Wilbur goes through various scenes of planning to blow up Manberg, this is dramatic and a serious character arc in some ways, but it does not seem to me that it has the air of over-seriousness which parts of seasons 2 and onward seem to have.
However, I can’t really articulate why this is. Some of it may be a nostalgic bias toward the earlier material, and/or the fact that the earlier material had more novelty. And I was in a very particular kind of emotional place when I watched a lot of season 1, due to the pandemic and various other factors, which has strongly impacted how I feel about it today.
However, I think this does not account for everything. I maintain that, most likely, there are also objective differences between the seasons in their style or tone, even though I cannot really pin down what they are in detail or with much assurance.
I also want to add another disclaimer that I’m not sure how consistent this is. For instance, there are plots like the Butcher Army where I simply haven’t watched enough to get a sense of how serious or non-serious it comes across as.
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Possible diagnoses?
There may be a bunch of possibilities for what causes these issues, but for now I only have the faintest speculations.
One possibility is that seasons 2&3 are more scripted, whereas season 1 was more improvised. This would explain some of the issues, if true. However, I am not sure whether it is actually true that seasons 2&3 are more scripted than season 1.
I can’t find citations offhand right now, but I recall Schlatt once said (at least a lot of) season 1 was heavily scripted, and I think that Wilbur once said season 2 is not as scripted as many people think it is. Now, I grant Schlatt and Wilbur may be using different standards of what counts as “heavily scripted,” and it’s not clear to me whether they agree or not. So there may be some ambiguity. But in any case, the combination of these two statements leads me to think season 2 is probably not significantly more scripted than season 1. And if that’s true, then the degree of scripting is not the key to understanding the problems.
Another possibility is that the difference stems from whether Wilbur or someone else is the main writer. This is most likely a big part of it. However, I am not sure of the details, as I have not researched it enough. I also do not know whether Wilbur has returned to being the lead writer yet (as of late March 2021), or if that is still upcoming.
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THE COLOUR OF MAGIC (1983) [DISC. #1; RINCEWIND #1]
Rating: 5/10
Standalone Okay: Yes
Read First: NO.
Discworld Books Masterpost: [x]
* * * * * * * * * *
Ask any Discworld fan, and we’ll all pretty much universally agree that The Colour of Magic isn’t the pinnacle of the Discworld experience. Nobody really recommends that new readers should start here, even if it is the first book in the series chronologically. I’m pretty much a writing-order-equals-reading-order purist, for reasons best discussed elsewhere, and even I would absolutely never start people off with this one. (I tend to go for Going Postal or Wee Free Men—again, for reasons best discussed elsewhere.)
It’s not Pratchett’s best work. It’s not even his tenth best work. If I have to rate it (and I do, because that’s kind of the point, here), compared to the rest of Discworld, it’s down at the bottom of my list.
It’s pretty damn good, though, for what it is.
For me, it’s a genuine joy to read the early Rincewind books. This is because, in my head at least, it makes total sense that everything involved in them is baffling and strange when compared to the settled absurdism you get from other Discworld novels. Further into the series, it all feels a lot more comfortable and fleshed-out: yes, the things Pratchett writes about are often genuinely ridiculous, but usually the setting explains those things and packages them up neatly enough to make them acceptable. And the characters treat everything as perfectly normal, business as usual, so the reader is gently encouraged to do the same.
Thinking about it, I would argue that a lot of the Discworld shenanigans aren’t all that different from a lot of the real-world nonsense that we all just accept as totally normal. Discworld nonsense and our nonsense just come from different places. For us, it’s stuff like the fact that some cops still ride horses for absolutely no good reason, or that tipping is part of a server’s pay in an American restaurant, or that water is usually free but we all let movie theaters charge us like $5 for a bottle, and what’s that even about? In the Discworld, the thieves and assassins have unionized, and if you slip up, it’s entirely possible to just fall right off the edge of the world. It’s weird, and it’s not exactly fine, but it’s not about to kill us right this second, so we all just let it happen. We accept it.
This is not at all the case for our unwilling protagonist, the original Discworld hero-who-is-absolutely-not-a-hero, Rincewind. He’s scared of everything. He is a genuine, bona fide coward. Absolutely everything that happens leaves him baffled, terrified, and/or dismayed, and to tell the truth I unconditionally respect all of this about him, because most of the absolute bullshit nonsense going down around him is baffling, terrifying, and/or simply Not Good, and he and the reader have to learn to live with that together.
Over the course of this one novel, failed-wizard-slash-reluctant-guide Rincewind is:
Involved in burning down large parts of the city of Ankh-Morpork, because he left his friend unsupervised and the city really wasn’t ready for the invention of ‘insurance’ without the accompanying understanding of ‘insurance fraud.’
Chased, threatened, and variously menaced by a sentient suitcase known as the Luggage, which canonically has huge teeth, a mahogany tongue, hundreds of little legs, and an insatiable hunger for the flesh of its owner’s enemies. Also, it does your laundry if you leave it inside. Isn’t that nice?
Forced into a duel by dragon riders, where he must fight upside-down while wearing boots that basically Velcro-attach their wearers to the ceiling.
Captured, imprisoned, and scheduled to be sacrificed to the anthropomorphic personification of Fate in exchange for success in a scientific endeavor—specifically, checking the biological sex of the giant turtle carrying the Discworld on its back through the universe.
Dropped over the Rimfall, the waterfall at the edge of the Disc, which in Roundworld terminology is something like tripping and falling off the surface of the Earth and flying into the abyss of space.
Repeatedly almost forced to speak one of the Eight Great Spells that created the universe, which will do…something, possibly catastrophic, when spoken. No one knows exactly what it does. Rincewind certainly doesn’t. This spell attached itself parasitically to his brain years ago, and, in the meantime, has shoved all the other wizard-y type things he could have been doing right on out of there.
So, basically, he’s going through a lot. And this list isn’t everything, just the bits I pulled out by opening my book at random spots and reading a couple of lines. It kind of makes sense, in my opinion, that things feel a little topsy-turvy. Shit’s wild.
On top of that, I’d also argue that Pratchett is playing pretty fast and loose with plot and story structure in this book. It can feel sloppy at times, more like a bunch of little vignettes that have been strung together than a single, coherent storyline. The plot loosely wobbles along the tightrope strung between Rincewind’s uncanny luck, good and bad, and cheerfully-blockheaded-tourist Twoflower’s unstoppable ability to trample through the middle of every single situation that could possibly try to kill him. Very bad things happen, but somehow, they miraculously fail to die, and so Rincewind is still stuck shepherding Twoflower along through the next incident of someone or something trying to brutally murder them both. There’s no real greater plot or driving need, just Twoflower with his little camera, wanting to take pictures of every beautiful and dangerous part of the Disc.
If a rabid wolf the size of a bus came up and tried to eat him, Twoflower would take pictures of the inside of its mouth and say, “Oh, wow, I’ve never seen teeth that big before! Rincewind, won’t you take a picture of me with this magnificent beast?” And Rincewind wouldn’t answer, because he’d be half a mile away already and still moving fast, with nothing but a cartoon cloud of dust left behind to mark where he’d been.
[Here’s the boys, Rincewind and Twoflower, just doing their best. From the BBC two-part miniseries called The Colour of Magic, which actually spans the plot of both The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic. Yes, that is Samwise Gamgee playing Twoflower, and yes, I did get distracted by that a lot while watching. Twoflower has all of Sam’s earnest faith and absolutely none of his common sense.]
Fun!
The whole thing actually is pretty fun, though. It’s witty. It’s got something to say, even if that something is just “hey, aren’t all these identical High Fantasy Adventure books all overdramatic and ridiculous in the exact same ways?” Pratchett is writing this book as one massive joke he’s telling about the genre, the tropes, and the archetypes, and he does a pretty decent job even by today’s cultural standards, let alone the standards of 1983. Chances are that any point he’s making here in The Colour of Magic is something he’s going to make again, better, in a later book, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have the seeds of something here.
As a main example, I’ll point out Liessa Dragonlady, who has arguably the biggest role in one of the major conflicts of this book. Liessa is initially presented as the quintessential High Fantasy barbarian warrior lady, which would typically be more about sex appeal than any actual skill—except that Liessa is actually highly intelligent, 110% more talented and qualified as a leader and warrior than her brothers or literally anyone on the protagonists’ team, and is aware the whole time that she’s struggling against the patriarchy and her society (and the tropes) in trying to take what should be her rightful place as leader of the Wyrmberg. The sexism exists in the Discworld, not in the writing.
[Liessa from the BBC’s The Colour of Magic, wearing—no joke—a crop top armor chest piece. Actually, I think it’s technically a bikini, based on the bottom half of the armor. Or should I say the lack thereof? Classic.]
Liessa is a decent example of Pratchett’s ability to look at the tropes and the reader’s expectations, and then go and take his writing somewhere else. But even so, I’d absolutely point to Monstrous Regiment or even Equal Rites first for anyone wanting to read a really solid exploration of femininity and what it means to be a woman in a traditionally ‘masculine’ field. Or I’d suggest just about any book starring the senior witches or Tiffany Aching for examples of well-rounded female characters that demand respect in a world specifically designed to not want to give it to them.
But that’s just one example. The Colour of Magic has the seeds of quite a few really good ideas that Pratchett will explore in more depth later on.
I think those seeds are part of what makes The Colour of Magic worth a read at some point, even if it’s never going to be anyone’s favorite Discworld book. I love seeing the foundations of Future-Discworld, that settled absurdism I was talking about earlier, in this. We’ve got our proto-Vetinari, long before he had a name, being generically threatening and Machiavellian and as close to ‘cackling evil overlord’ as it’s possible to get without actually cackling, or at least without some sort of thunderstorm rumbling in the background. Ankh-Morpork is a wonderfully scum-filled cesspit of depravity and immorality. There’s no effective City Watch to kick things into a rickety and leaking approximation of ship-shape, so it’s probably a good thing that the river Ankh is so thick with pollution that you don’t need a ship to cross it—you can just walk.
There’s even some early conceptualization of Pratchett’s special brand of everyday magic, the kind that will show up over and over again in the Discworld: the idea that even with a reality full of gods and wizards and hyper-powerful, monstrous things, there’s still a lot of power in everyday, ordinary people.
Pratchett is all about belief. He preaches the importance of the self, in terms of making reality into the place we think it should be. In Pratchett’s world, the things we believe in matter, and not just in a philosophical sense. Belief is a real, tangible form of magic—in this book, specifically, Twoflower manages to summon an entire dragon out of nothing, just because he believes strongly enough that dragons should exist the way he’s always dreamed them to be. In later books, sheer belief and willpower are shown to create and fuel gods and spirits, to contain quasi-demonic entities of vengeance and darkness, and to form the backbone of every other more ‘traditional’ type of magic.
It’s nice to see the early forms of it here. I’m not going to get too into it, because it’s going to show up a lot in later books in more significant ways (I’m thinking Hogfather, Small Gods, and even Pyramids) and I don’t want to beat that horse to death just yet, but it’s one of the foundation stones of the Discworld. It’s somehow comforting to know that it’s been here since the very beginning.
It’s also funny as hell to see the stuff that Pratchett will eventually change, soften, or drop entirely as he settles into the way the Discworld will work. Did you know there are eight seasons on the Discworld? And that in my 1985 edition of the book, the footnote where he explains these eight seasons takes up the bottom half of two entire pages?
That’s one single footnote there. The first ever footnote, even, and it’s almost a full page long and utterly ridiculous. It’s incredible, and I love it a lot. I also love that almost none of the details here are ever mentioned again, and if they are, it’s never in a significant or memorable way—and Pratchett certainly doesn’t waste a whole page on any of them ever again. Well, except for Hogswatch, because Pratchett knows when he’s got a real winner. It might have taken him thirteen years, but he wrote a whole damn book about it, and we all can agree that Hogfather is a joy and a delight.
Not so much “Autumn Prime,” “Crueltide,” “Winter Secundus,” and blah blah blah etcetera whatever. I’m not ashamed to admit that I forgot them while I was literally still in the middle of reading them. And what the hell is “Reforgule of Krull”? No clue. It’s total nonsense, never seen again, and I think we can all agree we are fine with this.
On second thought, I think Pratchett does end up using Hubward and Rimward pretty regularly as directions. But without this info-dump, when reading other books, I think that even I figured out how “Hubward” and “Rimward” work on a flat plate of a world with a Hub in the center and a Rim along the outside. And I am so bad with maps and directions that I literally get confused trying to give people directions to the parking lot outside my work.
I’m no good at wrapping these things up, so I’m ending this post the same way that Pratchett ends the book: with Rincewind abruptly falling off the edge of the Disc.
[Originally, I was going to go hunt down some fanart or something, but I don’t have permission to use any of that, so instead you get my doodles off the scrap paper I steal from work. Luckily for everyone, I’m an artistic genius. The dot representing Rincewind obviously isn’t to scale, since one human person would be much smaller than that, but if it represents the size of his body and the size of his scream, then it’s basically accurate.]
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Side Notes:
Rincewind’s insane luck, good and bad, is because he’s a favorite of the goddess referred to only as ‘the Lady,’ since invoking her true name means she has to leave. She’s the anthropomorphic personification of Luck itself, and she’s the reason Rincewind always survives whatever terrible situation he finds himself in—but also the reason he’s stuck in that situation in the first place.
Everything that goes wrong, and the dramatic escape that inevitably follows, is because the Lady likes to play dice games with Fate, using normal people on the Disc as game pieces.
Rincewind, it turns out, is the human equivalent of her favorite Monopoly token. (The iron, maybe? It has the same sort of Looney Tunes cartoon-anvil vibe as Rincewind’s whole, well, everything.)
Death as a character makes his first appearance in The Colour of Magic. However, here it’s implied he actually is involved somehow in the killing process, and his role can be filled in by apparently random low-level demons on their days off, whereas later books make it clear he just collects and shepherds the dead onward, and actually the issue of his replacement is a big deal, cosmically speaking.
Pratchett sort of avoids this issue by claiming that Rincewind’s life timer is so complicated and convoluted (because of all the weird accidents and magical incidents) that Death just can’t tell when he’s actually supposed to die.
I guess Death shows up every time it looks like Rincewind might kick the bucket, just in case? And in that case, all the threatening stuff he says to Rincewind in these early books must be because he’s so irritated that he has to keep coming out for no reason, only to find that Rincewind has, once again, managed to survive. And maybe the low-level demon showing up instead was just, uh, Death trying to scare him into actually beefing it, this time…?
Although the Unseen University Librarian exists and is human for the entirety of this book and only this book, he does not appear at any point. He’s briefly referenced—or, at least, a librarian is referenced, but this is referring back when Rincewind was young and read the grimoire that left one of the Eight Great Spells parasitically attached to his mind. There’s no guarantee it’s the same librarian, and based on the turnover (read: murder) rate of University wizards at the time, I don’t think it’s likely that anyone managed to hold onto their job that long. On Google, I did find a thing where someone cut together some shots of him in human form from The Colour of Magic BBC show, so that’s pretty fun:
Once he’s changed into an orangutan in The Light Fantastic, he’s described as still looking a bit like the human Librarian: with that beard and hair combo, I think they nailed it.
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Favorite Quotes:
“Inn-sewer-ants-polly-sea.”
“She was the Goddess Who Must Not Be Named; those who sought her never found her, yet she was known to come to the aid of those in greatest need. And, then again, sometimes she didn’t. She was like that.”
“It was all very well going on about pure logic and how the universe was ruled by logic and the harmony of numbers, but the plain fact of the matter was that the Disc was manifestly traversing space on the back of a giant turtle and the gods had a habit of going round to atheists’ houses and smashing their windows.”
“Some pirates achieved immortality by great deeds of cruelty or derring-do. Some achieved immortality by amassing great wealth. But the captain had long ago decided that he would, on the whole, prefer to achieve immortality by not dying.”
“‘I’m sure you won’t dream of trying to escape from your obligations by fleeing the city…’ ‘I assure you the thought never even crossed my mind, lord.’ ‘Indeed? Then if I were you I’d sue my face for slander.’”
“It was octarine, the colour of magic. It was alive and glowing and vibrant and it was the undisputed pigment of the imagination, because wherever it appeared it was a sign that mere matter was a servant of the powers of the magical mind. It was enchantment itself. But Rincewind always thought it looked a sort of greenish-purple.”
#the colour of magic#discworld#rincewind#I don't know why I'm doing this#and I don't think anyone will actually read this#but if you do come talk to me!!#I'm going to be going through every single discworld book this year and writing up one of these#and I want to hear what people have to say#also tell me when I'm wrong because there's forty one books of material to go through and I'm absolutely going to miss stuff and mess up
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Slightly longer incoherent post instead of five separate shorter incoherent posts
So like I wanted to point out a couple things.
1, I was in an earlier post talking about how my parents used to tell me to pull it together when I was younger. And I realise that from that post without context it might seem like they have been emotionally abusive towards me or something. And I just wanted to point out that this is not at all the case.
Basically my dad is a poster boy for undiagnosed Asperger's syndrome, he was abused and neglected as a child and he has lost 3 out of his 4 children, and my mum is a half-orphan who grew up with no mum of her own and a dad who never got over having lost the love of his life and so he couldn't really be there for my mum when she needed him most. Looking at them through this lense, yes they are two incredibly damaged people with their own respective plethora of psychological issues, but they have honest to god tried their best to raise me in as loving and caring of an environment as possible. What caused most of the troubles is that I was a special needs child and they were most likely not equipped with the skills required to fulfill those needs. Basically, no matter how hard they tried, what they could offer in terms of caregiving was not aligned with my needs as a child. Probably, someone of a different temperament would have turned out perfectly fine, and it is an unlucky coincidence that in my case, this turned out to be severely traumatising. I do have some repressed memories, so I can't speak for this with a 100% certainty, but as I remember it, our trauma didn't come from direct abuse, but from a series of way more subtle, but nonetheless traumatising events, that involved being physically sickly, having been in painful accidents in early childhood that required long periods of hospitalisation and frequent isolation, having difficulties setting and understanding my own boundaries, social isolation, cultural context (e.g. no availability of child psychiatry, obtaining a diagnosis, mental hygiene professionals etc.), the misalignment of my and my parents' love language and like a ton of other shit that one by one seems like small crap but in total it managed to fuck me up for life.
2, I keep thinking about system roles. Like, the thing is, for the past 5 years I locked myself away from all information on OSDD/DID and on other systems' experiences, because I know how suggestible I am and I didn't want to accidently make things worse for myself by adding a layer of maladaptive daydreaming and pseudo-symptoms to my preexisting condition. But by now we're relatively stable as a system, so I thought, what the heck, let's see what the literature and the people of the internet say. And while I'm still trying to figure out the popular terminology and stuff, what I've learnt so far has provided me with enough context so I could start overthinking analysing my own situation and thinking about ourselves in a whole new, systemic approach. (See what I did there? What I DID there? Holy fuck Brain, go to sleep.)
So yeah, different roles. And like, what the fuck is even going on with our other alters because ACTUALLY while we're trying to pretend that it's a very small and neat system of two people, that's very much not true and in general, we're like a fucking mess. So I guess quick system rundown follows:
The Actives
Fox - Host/primary. Xe's what we call a fighter/survivor. Fox is the product of some extreme stress and xe represents the part of us that fought xyr way through all the life-or-death crap we've gone through and that's what xe thrives on. Xe has a hard time these days because life is lovely and stable and it's kinda giving xem a full identity crisis... So I guess in a way xe could be considered a protector?
Bunny - our very own little, and an absolute cinnamon bun. She is a soother, and while she never fronts alone, she's the only one of us who can co-con and she mostly comes out when I'm in distress and she just hugs me until the world is all better.
The Dormants (these guys don't have animal aliases so I'll just use their real names)
The Demon/The Bitch - she's a terrorist, or what people call a persecutor, if I understand it correctly. She used to be able to co-con and apparently had all of our memories, and her sole role was to torture and threaten us, sometimes actually breaking into front and making a very bad job of pretending to be one of us to confuse/manipulate our loved ones, but she couldn't resist making a mock version of us, so it wasn't super effective. She's been very active for a while, but mostly dormant for the past years. Maybe we just realised she was just a scared little girl and hugged her to death...
Emily - she used to be some weird form of a protector. Like, the kind that threatens you with the coconut she wields as a weapon because that was the first object she could grab and she shuffles into the bathroom to barricade herself in just so she can call it job done and go away again. She was kinda problematic and one-dimensional, and while she has been fully dormant for the past 3 or so years, I definitely "inherited" her jumpiness and way of getting startled by literally anything and everything, so I guess we kinda fused together accidentally or something...? Like, did I eat her? Ugh...
Dylan - she was a short-lived one, and mainly a reaction to a certain life situation, where we lived in deep poverty, starvation and extreme daily stress, so her singular goal was to have fun. We basically denied her a chance to front because... Well, because that was what seemed to be the right thing to do at that moment.
Alice(?) - I actually don't know anything about her, I'm not even sure she ever really existed, I just found some clues in a journal (that's where the name is from) and some stuff none of us claimed afterwards, so I suspect someone was there at a point but I'm absolutely unclear on any of the details.
The Confusing Shit
Brain - I was recently told that not everybody's brain is talking to them and that Brain might actually be some sort of system-related stuff, but basically it's just there to entertain me with horrifying, but kinda endearing and/or absolutely hilarious shit. And to torment me with anxiety voices but you know...
The Chorus - just a bunch of jumbled internal noise that keeps screaming static at me every time I'm too stressed.
The Hollow - it describes itself as a sort of autopilot, or rather, "whatever remains when you strip all personality from the body. It's a collection of physical functions and its goal is to keep us going when noone's fronting. It keeps us fed, hydrated, safe, and periodically puts the body to sleep so maybe one of us can re-enter front.
TP (myself) - so yeah, as far as roles go, I'm like... What, part protector-part persecutor-part trauma holder-part little-part host like wtf am I even?! I know that everybody has a blind spot for themselves, but like does any alter ever know what the fuck their function is supposed to be?! I'm just so fucking confused pls someone explain my system to me?!
3, about the excessive posting today. I dunno. I really just cannot stop, but I'm also more out of it than I have been any time in the past like ever, and occasionally I'm not even sure it's me or who am I so I'm deeply sorry for the verbal diarrhea. I guess I'm partly doing this because I'm sure I won't remember any of this later, like I keep "waking up" and it's been like 50 years and it's still the SAME MOTHERFUCKING DAY AND IT'S BEEN LIKE 5 SECONDS since the last post I've written the day before yesterday, so I guess it's also like my sense of time is absolutely fucked, but seriously I've just lived a lifetime of incoherent torment this day, like, did I just die and go to hell and this is what hell is? Seems plausible.
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Dresden Files RPG GM thoughts
So as some of you might have noticed, I’ve been involved in a Dresden Files RPG game, specifically as the GM, for a good long while now. I’m definitely still learning the ins and outs with my players, who have honestly provided good feedback and have been good sports about my relative inexperience.
Still, I thought it would be interesting to share a few things I’ve picked up on during my months of providing stories and punching bags to my players.
1. Magic is extremely powerful in this game, but also a bit complicated
One thing that was pretty evident from the first adventure is that combat magic in the DFRPG is probably the most potent weapon in the game. While attacks that rely on skills such as Guns or Fists do not expend stress (basically your health and mana bars) to use, they only go so far in terms of damage they can deal. For comparison, military weapons in the game tend to be rated as Weapon:4, meaning that on a successful hit they deal an extra 4 points of damage. With magic, that weapon value can go to 7 or even 9, a massive amount in a game where you only get 4 points of physical stress unless you have supernatural powers.
Problem though: Magic in the game is also a bit complicated. With attacks using skills, its pretty much a roll of the dice and adding your skill points/stunts if they apply. With magic, you gotta choose how strong you want your spell to be, governed by one stat, roll to hit with another unrelated stat, apply specific bonuses if they’re using a focus, and see if they hit. And that’s if you’re just using regular evocation, and that’s if you manage to control the spell. There’s a bunch of rules governing the use of magic just in combat, and in honesty the book doesn’t use great terminology or explain it all that great. I essentially had to translate the book and put the steps on a bullet point list for my players, who are pretty much universally spellcasters of one kind of another, and even then we’re collectively still figuring things out.
On the first point, be very aware of how strong your enemies are if your group is loaded with spellcasters. Most of the time low to mid level foes from the book are gonna be mincemeat unless there’s some massively unlucky rolls on their end or yours (one of the toughest fights my players have had so far is a horde of confederate zombies, pretty much completely on accident).
On the second point, not every use of magic needs to be set up the way its written in the books (I think one of the supplementary books even points this out). A lot of times if my players are slinging magic and they’re not in regular combat, I abstract the spell down to a dice roll. Same thing with certain simple rituals. This way the game gets much more streamlined and the players feel like they aren’t bogged down by their magic powers.
2. Use a player’s opposites, not their mirrors
This is a big tempting one that I quickly learned to try and avoid. Everyone wants to see the big wizard’s duel, or the clash of the swordsmen, or the shootout between the gunslingers. The way that skills and combat work in this game though, those fights tend to be far more long and tedious than you would actually think. If you’ve got two similar characters in a dukeout, their skills more often than not cancel out, leaving them with nickel and diming each other till one drops, which honestly isn’t that fun to GM and I would guess not too fun to play through. Unless its maybe the dramatic culmination of a campaign, in which case elongating it makes sense, it just makes combat more tedious.
A good way to try and counteract this is trying to pair up your players against dissimilar opponents, or at least have a decent mix of different opponents. While there’s never a guarantee that the group will target their opposite, what with free will and all, it at least makes the combat less one note and at times far more dynamic. It also makes the players think about how to approach certain opponents differently.
3. Pay attention to group dynamic in “social combat”
So here’s an admission: I’ve pretty much abstracted social combat in the way its presented in the books. One of my earliest adventures featured an attempt at a social combat encounter, and it quickly devolved into essentially an interrogation with dice rolls. The idea of attack order in a conversation quickly felt like it was unnatural, and on top of that it was often very confusing as to which stats offered “attacks” or “defense” for each conversation option. While I may try to phase aspects of it back in, specifically so those characters that picked social skills don’t feel left out, I think it’s very important to know your group dynamic for social combat to know if it’ll work the way it’s written or not. Is there one or two smooth talkers in the group that people will turn to in social combat, or is everyone gonna join in? Do they want the “combat” to feel more like regular combat or do they want it to be more like a normal conversation? Are they the type to hold on to their thoughts till their opportunity or will they just kind of unleash their thoughts and opinions as soon as they think of them? These are the questions you have to ask before implementing this (in my opinion) very odd form of “combat”.
4. Keep track of mental stress for spellcasters
This one I still get hung up on. While out of combat I tend not to care much about stress unless the spell they’re making is objectively massive or dramatic, I do try to keep track of the mental stress my players accrue in combat when they spellcast.
I say try because it’s very easy to overlook when you’re wrapped up in a combat session. Every spell a player casts in that scenario expends at least one point of mental stress, effectively limiting the most powerful weapons in the game. Considering how OP magic is, this is extremely crucial to keep track of as combat wears on so that your players don’t just end up laying down 12 point damage spells for 10 rounds straight. There’s a limit to magic, even in this game, and it shouldn’t be something the players solely rely on in combat.
5. Remind them of their options (occasionally)
I can understand not being hold-hands Mcgee when GMing, but considering there’s about 3 major books of crunch to go through in the DFRPG, it can occasionally be advantageous to remind players of what they can do with their skills or powers. Crafting, for instance: magic isn’t just for blasting foes with lightning or summoning eldritch creatures, it can be used to craft potions or magical items, something unfortunately often overlooked in the wake of calling down fire from the heavens or tracking down magical murderers. Alternatively, skills like Resources or Scholarship can be useful in their own way, like getting certain bits of information normally inaccessible. While you don’t need to re-read the rules every session, it can be good to remind players of exactly what they can do with the spells and skills they have on their character sheet, giving their characters and the game more of a three dimensional feel.
6. Don’t be afraid to build from scratch
No question, the “monster manual” for the game and the supplement Paranet Papers give a large number of foes for players to fight and NPCs to interact with, usually those either directly from the books or speculated from mythology/folklore. Thing is though, I feel like there’s a major danger in getting too complacent in the existing templates and things getting repetitive. In the books it unfortunately seems like opponents tend to either fall into the categories of vampire, undead, fae, denarian, fomor, or wizard, with things like ghouls and shapeshifters as minor categories seldom used. Don’t be afraid to change things up into more obscure deals like cryptids or local legends and give them unique spins to separate them from the usual suspects. Throw in different spirits, elementals, nymphs, sea/ monsters, boogeymen, there’s a whole supernatural world out there beyond the stuff usually cited for fighting fodder.
Hell, for one adventure my players were fighting what was essentially an undead construct made of reanimated bees. A zom-bee zombie, as it were. Get creative!
7. Don’t let them compel themselves into an early grave
This one’s connected to probably my biggest dumbass move as a GM. I had a very difficult adventure for my players lined up, something to really challenge them after several adventures where they pretty much breezed through the encounters.
The metaphorical storming of the castle required some planning, and in the process one of the players ended up compelling themselves, basically using a set of pre-assigned roleplaying attributes to move the story along, into acting as a distraction. I honestly should have put my foot down and made it clear that the person would die if they did that, but I think for some reason I was trying to be overly challenging on purpose. The character ended up getting taken out, which caused another player to compel their character into jumping out into the open to save them. That got their character taken out too. Before they even get to the bad guy’s lair they’re down two characters. A party split later and they’re all down for the count.
Compels are a very good friend of the GM in this game, especially if the players take to compelling themselves to get fate points. It saves you a bunch of trouble in the roleplaying department and its great fun. What isn’t great fun is having characters waltz into a situation that you know is completely deadly and just watching as they get slaughtered.
I could’ve cried “Well its your own fault for getting your characters taken out”, but you know what, no, it was my fault. I screwed over my own campaign and had to pull out a completely fresh one simply because I wanted a tough campaign for the sake of being tough. I apologized to my players in the next session and I learned something: tough for the sake of tough kneecaps the story, and being unforgiving just lands you in a story that isn’t fun for anyone. If someone is deep in their roleplaying and they do something that will immediately get them killed without their knowing, give them a second chance if its a genuine mistake. Your characters and their players are there to tell a story with you, not to be targets to make you feel like a badass GM. Compels are meant to make a story interesting, and its hard to have an interesting story when two characters immediately drop before the action even begins.
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New Post has been published on https://otakudome.com/burn-the-witch-anime-film-review/
Burn the Witch Anime Film Review
Sometime following the series finale of renown series Bleach, mangaka Tite Kubo began work on a series that he’d hope would expand the franchise’s world into new territories. This would end up being a one-shot under the title of “Burn the Witch” about two witches named Ninny Spangcole and Noel Niihashi living in an alternative version of London where humans and dragons struggle to co-exist. Though initially promoted as it’s own thing, the ending of the one shot revealed it’s connection to Kubo’s previous work with crossover potential down the line. An anime film continuing the story is out now on Crunchyroll.
Burn the Witch is a 2020 shounen anime film, it is produced by Studio Colorido and licensed by Crunchyroll. It currently streams in English and Japanese audio.
Editor’s Note: This review may contain near complete to complete spoilers for Burn the Witch’s anime film and source material.
Bleach has a new cousin by mangaka Tite Kubo.
Having read the near 70 page one-shot I was excited to learn that it’d be adapted into a film. A couple of things to note for those who haven’t experienced it yet. Tite Kubo makes it very clear that while Bleach and Burn the Witch are within the shame universe he wants Burn the Witch to be different from it. So much so that it features different terminologies, weaponry, enemy types, and character abilities. If that’s something you’re not quite ready for from Kubo then it may be tough getting into even more so with Bleach’s upcoming anime sequel. So if you’re curious try to keep an open mind when going in. Another thing to keep in mind is that the film is NOT a panel to panel adaptation of the one-shot. In fact it actually seems as though they’re treating it as a direct continuation of the source. Which, while a good way to keep fans of the source invested could be confusing to newcomers. I should also note that the first chapter of the now serialized manga is just a retelling of the film.
Shinigami and deadly spirits are changed to witches and dragons.
THE GOOD: The film opens sometime following the one-shot with Ninny giving a narration of her disdain for fairytales calling them fake while also avoiding the paparazzi. She later meets with Noel who’s attempting to capture a deer-like dragon on her own. After disposing of the dragon they collect their earnings while debating over the way compensation for pay works which involves two systems; points and actual monetary earnings. These are seemingly split depending on how the job was performed. They encounter Balgo Parks who’s being flown around by his dog-like dragon Osushi. Meanwhile the higher ups of the organization Wing Bind who Ninny & Noel work for are conversing on what to do about Balgo who is a Dragonclad; a person with a unique ability to attract dragons. Viewing him as a danger they ultimately plan to kill him with Bruno Bangnyfe volunteering for the job being the most outspoken of the bunch over it. After retrieving Osushi and Balgo upon being tasked with watching over him by Bill Blanx Jr., Noel & Ninny scold Balgo about not being more careful with Osushi considering his status as a Dragonclad. Balgo also seemingly causes Osushi to transform if he displays a high amount of emotion.
A huge dragon suddenly appears due to being attracted to Balgo and begins destroying London. Noel seemingly kills it with her gun slicing it’s face in half while Ninny blocks off civilians. The dragon still alive attacks again revealed to be a powerful Dark Dragon and Ninny is able to defeat it with a powerful spell. Later that night Ninny’s old bandmate Macy Baljure & her pet dragon Elly are watching a news report by tabloids discussing Ninny defecting from their band making it seem as Ninny abandoned Macy. Macy’s dragon responding to her emotions destroys the TV. Back at Wing Bind Ninny and Noel are informed of someone who may be keeping a dragon in London and are given the mission to dispose of it. Ninny announces her displeasure of having to babysit Balgo comparing it to looking after the class frog. Nearing the reported location of the dragon Ninny attempts to use Balgo to find the dragon’s whereabouts, but he reminds her that dragons are merely attracted to him and that he can’t communicate with them. Just as Ninny is about to yell at Balgo an explosion is seen taking place at the HQ of the tabloid that ran the story on Ninny & Macy. Ninny and Noel debate whether or not to check out the explosion due to terrorism being out of their jurisdiction.
Noel ends up going anyways with Ninny following behind who is stunned to find Macy there accompanied by her dragon Elly. Ninny asks why Macy is there and she explains that she came to attack the tabloids for the false stories made about her and Ninny. Noel appears and Macy attempts to attack her believing she & Ninny to be a couple. Noel subdues Macy’s dragon Elly before it also attacks. Ninny asks Macy to hand over Elly promising to keep quiet about her involvement. Macy refuses as Ninny & Noel come up with a plan to subdue her, but an explosion occurs on the top of the building. Bruno (who caused the explosion) appears and orders his men to capture Balgo. At HQ Billy encounters Sullivan Squire who converses with him about her transfer. She warns him of Bruno’s attack on Noel, Ninny, and Balgo.
Balgo is annoyed that Noel doesn’t know his identity with Ninny informing her. He makes a false claim that Balgo is the person behind the terrorist attacks as part of his plan to capture him. He also reveals the order of Balgo’s execution and blocks off citizens as he orders his men to take Balgo. Bruno warns Noel & Ninny not to interfere over Balgo who now has a bounty on his head or he’ll be forced to kill them. After Noel insults his hair Bruno gets angry and decides to kill her & Ninny as well, but they run surprising him until he realizes they’re going to Balgo rescuing him. Ninny threatening Bruno with her weapon questions him about Macy who reveals that she is a Watcher; a person born with strong magic and the ability to see dragons. Noel catches Ninny’s weapon and fires it along with her own at Bruno causing a powerful explosion that allows them to escape with Balgo & Macy. Bruno summons his dragon and gives chase as night begins to fall.
The group hide on a construction crane as Noel casts an invisibility spell. Macy gets Ninny to confirm that she never enjoyed being apart of their band. Macy states that had Ninny not joined she would have quit a long time ago while recalling her first encounter with Elly initially believing her to be a drug induced hallucination. After taking care of Elly, Macy thought she was meant to take her some place special. As Macy begins to talk to Ninny again Bruno appears and breaks the invisibility spell. Bruno runs down the group’s crimes stating that Balgo’s bounty was finalized, but Elly attacks and reveals her stealth abilities. Elly lands a successful attack on Bruno’s dragon and transforms into her true form Cinderella a powerful dragon with high threat levels. Bruno and his dragon fight Cinderella but are beaten. He forms a truce with Noel & Ninny and the three work together to fight Cinderella. Macy attempts to stop Cinderella, but ultimate fails. Cinderella proves to be too powerful for the combined forces of Bruno, Ninny, and Noel. As she nearly destroys Reverse London with a powerful attack Macy calls out to her one last time. Cinderella reacts, but she’s killed by a long range beam fired from Billy’s finger. The next day Billy’s involvement goes unrecognized and Bruno takes credit for the defeat of Cinderella. He has Wing Bind call off the bounty and execution of Balgo surprising his coworkers. Ninny argues with Billy over her and Noel not receiving compensation for the Cinderella job. Macy enters suddenly with Billy informing Noel & Ninny that they’ll be watching over her like Balgo from now on. Squire investigates the scene of Billy’s attack insinuating that she knows he killed Cinderella. Noel meets up with Balgo and hugs him saying something good happened. She starts chasing Osushi after he asks to see her panties. Ninny and Macy watch a damaged sign being repaired revealing Wing Bind to be apart of the Western Branch of Soul Society. Noel damages the sign again during her chase of Osushi.
Burn the Witch expands the Bleach franchise with a Western flavor.
Something viewers may find enjoyable about Burn the Witch is that it’s not a particularly long film clocking in at about an hour and three minutes. Crunchyroll has made it even easier to watch by splitting it into three parts amounting to upwards of twentyish minutes each. It packs in quite a bit of storytelling and world building to be an hour. The film mention the laws concerning dragons, the fact that people receive insurance for dragon attacks, as well as other tidbits like how witches are compensated for job completions. There’s even hints of corruption within Wing Bind. The focus of the film is mostly given to Noel, Ninny, Balgo, Bruno, Macy, and Billy but also introduces more for a bigger spotlight down the line. The characters with the most focus get fleshed out well enough for such a short amount of time. We know that Noel & Ninny just want compensation, Bruno wants recognition, Macy wants Ninny, Balgo wants Noel, and Billy wants Noel & Ninny to be more noble with their roles. The animation uses brighter colors that contrast with Bleach’s usually darker coat of paint. And it does give the sensation that Burn the Witch is much more light-hearted than Bleach. Not to say Bleach avoided light-hearted moments, but when it wanted to go dark with the tone it could really go there. The Espada & Fullbringer arcs come to mind in this regard.
At an hour and three minutes runtime Burn the Witch is an excellent pitch for a serialized anime.
THE BAD: Burn the Witch’s biggest problem is that it isn’t given too much time to grow, but when you consider that this was essentially a pitch for a bigger anime adaptation that’s ok. I also think some viewers who read the one-shot may be confused by the film being a direct sequel over a panel to panel film adaptation. However, the first chapter of the serialized manga adapts the film if they do get interested in the source beyond the one-shot.
Burn the Witch opens a number of doors and possibilities for the Bleach universe.
OVERALL THOUGHTS: Burn the Witch explores the potential of Bleach venturing outside of it’s recognized canon. With a focus on the Western side of it’s world and magic & dragons the familiarity never strays too far without sacrificing or inconveniencing it’s own originality. Noel & Ninny make an interesting opposition to Ichigo & Rukia as selfish characters doing good things for a price and self-service. The main problem with the film is that it wants to do more to express the new world, but it isn’t given the proper time to do so. Which can of course be rectified with a full anime adaptation. Otaku Dome gives Burn the Witch a 75 out of 100.
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Search Engine Optimization 101: The Ultimate Guide To Backlinks
So, you’ve got a website and you’re wondering how to generate traffic. A few searches have led you to the fact that search engine optimization and digital marketing are the way to go.
Now all you have to do is get ahold of all those terms and strategies that professionals talk about so casually. It might seem tough to understand what everything means, but we’re here to help.
We’re going to explore some fundamental SEO today, giving you the full scoop on backlinking. What are backlinks? Why are they important?
Most importantly, how can you generate backlinks and improve your Google ranking? We’re going to explore all of those questions and more in this article.
A Quick Crash Course in Search Engine Optimization
You probably have a general idea of what SEO is and how it works. That said, you’re just starting out and a little refresher probably wouldn’t hurt. Plus, having some general SEO fresh in your mind will help you contextualize backlinking and all that goes along with it.
Search engine optimization is the painstaking process of fitting your website into the specifications of the search engine algorithm. In most cases, that means you’re catering specifically to Google.
Google uses something like 200 ranking factors to decide which sites are most relevant to the keyword search. Different factors hold more weight than others, and it’s important to keep that in mind as you design your campaign.
Angles of Optimization
It’s key to remember that “all rivers lead to the ocean.” That metaphor might seem strange when talking about digital marketing, but hear us out.
Some ranking factors take into account the popularity or trustworthiness of a site, while others have importance only on the page in question. For example, your keyword optimization will put a particular post in the running for a search, but the number of business reviews you have will tell Google if people respect what you have to say.
The ocean metaphor above is meant to show that both kinds of factors benefit the others. The “ocean” stands for lasting success in the rankings. As one of your pages succeeds, your site will gain more respect.
As you gain more respect, all of your pages will see a little uptick in rankings. Professionals call these “on-page” and “off-page” ranking factors.
On-page factors relate mostly to the page you’re trying to optimize, specifically. Off-page factors pertain more to your website, its credibility, and how well-suited you are to rank. There are a lot of factors that cross those lines and serve both angles, but it’s good to have some terminology to frame how things work.
Now that you’ve got a little refresher, we can start our discussion of backlinks.
The Ins and Outs of Backlinks
In an algorithm with hundreds of factors, backlinks rise somewhere near the top. They’re an important metric because they reflect a lot about your site.
Keep in mind that Google’s primary goal is to provide search results that are relevant to user keyword phrases. Not only do the results have to be related to the search, but they have to be the most useful. There are over 130 trillion pages on Google, so there are bound to be a lot of related pages to every search.
A big factor in determining what people want to see is social proof. Social proof is the presence of another person’s recommendation or the understanding that other people have had a good experience with something. Reviews and comments are good examples of this.
Comments and reviews are direct explanations of experiences, while there are other ways for Google to sus out the attitudes of people online. The main indirect reflection of social proof that Google uses is backlinking.
What are Backlinks?
It’s probably about time that we explain what backlinks actually are.
Backlinks are links to your site from other websites. There are a whole bunch of different kinds of backlinks that hold different amounts of importance to Google. It’s not always the easiest thing to accumulate backlinks, either.
They’re important, though, because each link to your site is a nod to your credibility. You can think of rankings as elections, people as voters, and backlinks as the electoral college (the analogy isn’t perfect, but you get the idea). Backlinks have the potential to hold the weight of a number of votes.
A backlink is a vote given to you by a site. It’s an acknowledgment that your content is valuable enough for a competitor to use you as a reference in their writing. When you think about it, the person linking to you is likely competing for rankings, so it means quite a bit.
Further, depending on how influential the site is, the backlink could really help a lot in your success in the search results.
Site Influence and Value in Search Results
Let’s say, for example, that you’re a small car company.
Your rankings aren’t going to jump too significantly if you get a backlink from the toilet store that your uncle owns. You won’t get too much help from businesses or websites that aren’t in your niche. That said, you could see significant results from extremely popular websites outside of your niche.
A nod from The New York Times or Forbes is certain to be helpful. The goal is to get high-quality from influential companies in your niche, though. If you’re a car company, a backlink from Ford’s website will be really beneficial.
As we mentioned earlier, not all links are created equal.
Exploring Link Value
A quick look around almost any website will make it clear that there are a lot of links everywhere on the page.
Some links are generated by users and others are placed on the page by site owners. Backlinks would be meaningless to SEO if links to sites in comment sections were as important as links in the body text. There is some merit to a discussion of your brand in different comment sections, but links to your site through comments aren’t too important.
The same goes for links back to your site in business listing pages. You might think that creating an account on a business listing site and linking back to your site will do you some good. Unfortunately, that won’t work the way you want it too.
The value in that scenario is that users will have an outlet to get to your website, but Google won’t give you any points for it. What you’re looking for is backlinks placed in the body text of articles.
Gathering Backlinks
You’re probably wondering how in the world you’re supposed to start getting these coveted links.
It’s absolutely one of those “I can’t get the job without experience, but I have no experience without the job” types of situations. Websites won’t start linking to you out of the blue, unfortunately, so we have to find ways to get the ball rolling.
The nice thing is that once you do become an influential site, you’ll rank higher and have more exposure. That exposure naturally leads you toward more backlinks. When someone searches a simple question in your niche and your site is first, they’re very likely to link to your site when the time comes.
Before that time, though, you’ll have to get crafty. To make things even more complicated, your craftiness has to fall into Google’s best SEO practices.
This essentially means that you can’t try to cheat the system. Paying for backlinks is sort of akin to paying for votes. It’s frowned upon and there are penalties for it.
Black-Hat SEO
When we think about the ethical side of SEO, we use the terms “black-hat” and “white-hat.”
White-hat optimization is the process of gaining popularity the hard way. It’s understanding the algorithm, taking time to build up your credibility, and working on all of the things that lead to organic results.
Black-hat SEO involves a little less work and might work really well for a short time. It’s anything that Google frowns upon. Google frowns upon black-hat optimization because it seeks to cheat the algorithm or hack the process.
One example of hacking the system is filling the background of your page with invisible keywords to amp up your relevance. That trick, by the way, will absolutely get you flagged.
Another example is paying for backlinks or trying to cultivate your backlinks in a way that will give you some kind of unusual advantage. That doesn’t mean you can’t influence others to provide you with links, though.
This kind of thing is frowned upon because it taints the search results. It allows less-valuable sites to rank higher than quality sites. Ultimately, users that find these low-quality sites will start to associate Google with poor results.
If that happens, that user could shift over to Bing or Yahoo to do their searching. So long as the results are accurate, though, users are sure to stay on Google.
Black-hat SEO can get you unindexed from Google. It can also send you down to the bottom of the search results. It’s just best to understand it and avoid using it.
Methods of Linkbuilding
So, if you can’t pay for links, how are you supposed to get started?’
The first thing to do is to explore your business network with backlinks in mind. You have suppliers, partners, associates, and friends with websites. Ask those individuals to link to your site if there’s a natural connection from their business to yours.
This is especially important when it comes to your suppliers. Your relationship with whoever provides you with your product is a great one to utilize in backlinks. It’s likely that suppliers are a little more influential than you, and a simple link from their site could do a lot of good.
Suppliers are great, too, because there’s a really natural connection from their business to yours.
Ask for Interviews
Whether you’re participating in local interviews or business interviews from forums or sites in your niche, seek out as much exposure as you can.
There are always opportunities to get mentioned in an article. When that happens, make sure that you ask the interviewer to link to your site in the text. Your odds are good anyway, but a reminder to link seals the deal.
There’s a great website called HARO that puts journalists in touch with businesses to get information for stories. You can utilize this platform to get a lot of exposure and backlinks.
Use Your Expertise
Another way to generate links is to write guest posts.
A guest post is just an article written by someone who doesn’t belong to the organization of the website. These are excellent options because most businesses with knowledge of SEO understand that more content is better.
Writing a post about something you’re steeped in is a good way to get your name out there and generate a link from a site that wouldn’t otherwise support you. It’s also a great idea because you can typically get guest spots on websites that are far more influential than your own.
Online influence isn’t a direct correlate to expertise or authority in your niche, so chances are your skill set is applicable to relevant websites across the board. The only thing is, you have to dedicate some time to write an article.
Reaching out for guest posts is something of an art, too. You should send the pitch without seeming like you’re just trying to plug your website. The receiving party wants to know that they’ll be getting some legitimate value from you.
It could help to write a sample article and run it by them so they know that you can provide something with legitimate worth to their business.
Want to Dig a Little Deeper?
The process of search engine optimization is a complicated one, and you can get a whole lot of results if you work hard. The thing is, you have to work hard and have a little understanding. We’re here to help.
Explore our site for more insights into SEO and how you can make it work for your business.
Source: https://riserr.com/search-engine-optimization-101-the-ultimate-guide-to-backlinks/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=search-engine-optimization-101-the-ultimate-guide-to-backlinks
from Riserr https://riserr.wordpress.com/2020/09/23/search-engine-optimization-101-the-ultimate-guide-to-backlinks/
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Embarrassing admission: I’m a savant. Stick with me and I’ll explain, but it’ll take awhile.
Understand that I’m not saying this to brag. This is not easy for me to admit to myself, let alone anybody else. It’s taken me over a year to write this.It’s actually as difficult for me to discuss this as it is for me to discuss the fact that I actually have coprolalic vocal tics. In fact autistic people’s discussions of savant skills often resemble Touretters’ discussion of coprolalia: There’s a tendency to try to make out like they’re much rarer than they are.
About 10% of Touretters are thought to have coprolalia, that is vocal tics that sometimes involve involve swearing or other offensive words (like slurs). It’s embarrassing to Touretters as a whole because to a lot of people Tourette’s is like a punchline to a joke about cussing. Similarly, about 10% of autistic people are thought to have savant skills (I suspect the number is higher), and autistic people are just as embarrassed by the fact that savant skills have become a stereotype. 10% is one in ten people. That’s not actually the tiny minority that people would have you think it is. And I do believe savant skills are under-reported for reasons I’ll get into later.
Some background about myself
I was first recognized as being autistic at the age of fourteen. I was in a mental institution following a suicide attempt, at the psychiatrist I got was randomly assigned. In other words, he had no reason to be specifically looking for or expecting autism when I first became his patient. I would remain his patient until his retirement and subsequent death in my twenties.
Anyway, after he met me, he asked to meet with my parents. My mother describes him interviewing her extensively about my early development, asking pointed questions about certain things. She said he very quickly said of me, “Your daughter sounds like an idiot savant.”
A note on terminology
Idiot savant sounds outdated or downright rude, depending on your take on things. Even in 1995 when this was taking place. To understand what he was saying, you have to understand the history of terminology around savant skills as well as his own personal history.
So first off -- my doctor was old. He was trained and did his residency at a time when Southern mental institutions were still fully and officially segregated by race. His age and specialty in child psychiatry meant that he had met a lot of children over the years, including a lot of autistic children. It also meant that he used a lot of terminology that would at best be considered quite old-fashioned today, because he learned his clinical vocabulary in probably the early sixties.
Idiot savant does not mean a specific type of savant. It has nothing to do with the outdated classification of idiot which usually meant what today would be referred to as a severe and/or profound intellectual disability. There was never an IQ cutoff for being an idiot savant. Idiot savant meant “wise idiot” and was meant to cover the unevenness of cognitive skills that was characteristic of cognitively disabled people with savant skills.
So him saying I was an “idiot savant” would be the same way that someone today would say “Your daughter has savant syndrome.” He was not making a judgement about my IQ, which at the time had only tested as high, at the age of five, largely due to the effects of hyperlexia, a learning disability involving early reading ability usually combined with comprehension issues, that is in some contexts itself considered a form of savant skill.
People talked about idiot savants, and then it became autistic savants (except that this term would only be applied to autistic people, who are not the only people with savant skills), and these days it’s savant syndrome. You don’t need a cognitive impairment of any kind (such as autism or intellectual disability) to be a savant: There are a lot of blind savants, for instance. Today people mostly just say savant or savant syndrome.
But definitely understand that idiot savant was its own term, separate from both low IQ/intellectual disability in general and the classification of idiot in particular. In fact, very few people identified as savants throughout history, including when the term idiot savant existed, have ever fallen into the official classification of idiot or any of the terms that replaced it.
The confusion people have about the technical term idiot savant (mistakenly relating it to idiot in particular or intellectual disability in general) is very similar to the confusion over the term psychomotor retardation. Psychomotor retardation refers to a mental and physical slowing associated with certain medication side effects as well as a number of conditions such as depression. It has absolutely nothing to do with the category called mental retardation, a recent but now outdated term for intellectual disability. They both have the word retardation in them because it means slow, but they refer to entirely different types of (purported) slowness.
Back to my own history
So he called me an idiot savant before he even used the word autistic to describe me. Both words came up in the first few sentences of that conversation, but idiot savant was the term that came up first. Savant skills were the first unusual thing he recognized in me. Within a month, after further interviews, conversations, interaction, observation, and formal testing, as well as consultation with a team of psychiatric and neurologic professionals, he diagnosed me with autism. Within the description of my diagnosis, he mentioned idiot savant qualities.
The actual autism diagnosis happened in a way that was extremely common in the nineties. He knew that I met the full criteria for autism. He told my mother I was simply autistic. But in the nineties, saying someone was autistic was equivalent to saying “This person will never improve, all therapy is wasted, don’t spend any more money on them than it takes to permanently institutionalize them.” He knew it would be terrible if the insurance company took this take on me -- which they were already trying to do without that encouragement. So on paper, he alternated between saying I had a complex and diagnostically confusing developmental disability, and saying I specifically had PDDNOS or atypical autism. Using PDDNOS/atypical autism as a substitute for a flat-out autism diagnosis was extremely common in the 1990s and had nothing to do with whether you actually met full criteria for autism.
My diagnosis was changed to autistic disorder later on by the same doctor, after the danger had passed and an autism expert had suggested making the change but suggested I go back to the psychiatrist who knew me the best to confirm that this was an accurate thing to do, since the expert in question did not know my family or have years of observation and testing to go on, whereas my psychiatrist did. This was after a bunch of misdiagnoses that would take way too long to explain but that were also quite common in the nineties, in fact some of them were among the most common psychiatric misdiagnoses of autistic people.
The savant thing
So... at the time of my autism diagnosis, autism was an abstraction, and a word I did not understand how it applied to my life. Words like ‘underlying developmental disability’ and ‘pervasive developmental disorder’ and really anything with ‘developmental’ in it might as well have been gibberish. Even when I heard these things over and over, most of the time I ignored them. I’d occasionally read a book by Donna Williams or Temple Grandin, identify to one degree or another, but not grasp what autism was any better for having read these things. And most of the time, while others in my life apparently thought about this diagnosis a good deal, I didn’t. The savant stuff was way under my radar most of the time as well.
I was an adult before I understood why I was diagnosed with autism. I was also an adult before I really saw that I’d been labeled as having savant skills or savant qualities, and before my mother told me the story of my initial diagnosis. And to be honest, I mostly ran away from the label, inside my head, and neither said much about it nor thought about it any more than I had to.
Like many autistic people, I was conscious that the popularity of Rain Man had caused people to view autism as inevitably involving savant skills. Being a savant had become a stereotype. And Rain Man was an unusually talented savant. Most savants have neither his degree of savant skills nor his sheer number of savant skills. He was based on a small number of real people, most notably Kim Peek, who had agenesis of the corpus calosum and a huge number of highly impressive savant skills.
Like many other autistic people, I was very critical of the concept of savant skills. I thought it was just a way of passing off talents as somehow unexpected or pathological or both, when they happened in disabled people. I thought it was just a shorthand for giftedness, a concept I have a great deal of trouble accepting as real or useful, at least not as it’s currently defined. And in many cases it has been used in these ways and autistic people are correct to be suspicious and critical.
And honestly I was afraid of it. For reasons I still can’t articulate, it really terrified me to face the idea that I might be a savant for real. But as I discovered, I am.
What kinds of savant are there?
One of the things that had me confused about savant skills was that, like many people, when I think of savant skills, I think of the most extreme skills. Those are also the rarest kind of savant skills. Prodigious savants, as such people are called, are uncommon. They have never been the most common kind of savant at any stage in the development of the idea of savants in general.
So here are the modern, official classifications of savant. Remember here that I don’t make up the words for each kind of savant skills and may not like them.
Splinter skills are the least spectacular kind of savant skill. They represent talents that are highly impressive specifically when compared with the cognitive difficulties the person has in other areas. They are very common among savants.
Talented savants are savants with talents that are likewise in contrast the person’s difficulties, but they would very obviously be things the person would be considered talented for regardless of disability or lack thereof. They are also pretty common among savants.
Prodigious savants are the rarest kinds of savants. They are people who have skills that would be considered not only highly talented but well beyond the range most people even consider humanly possible for someone to have a skill in. Like the way Stephen Wiltshire can fly over a city once and then do a detailed and almost entirely accurate sketch of he entire panoramic view from memory.
Knowing these categories, I can see that I have a lot of splinter skills and sometimes veer into the realm of talented savant. This is a much better representation of my areas of talent than te concept of giftedness in general is, because the the term savant refers to a talent in a relatively narrow area surrounded by areas of great difficulty. That contrast has been a fact of life for me forever. Like back when my hyperlexia gained me a high IQ at a time when I literally didn’t know what the word test meant.
Hyperlexia is something that’s sometimes considered a savant skill and sometimes not. In my case, I feel like it is, because it’s an extreme and isolated talent that came seemingly out of nowhere and that is accompanied by extreme cognitive difficulties in areas that most people would assume to be related to the areas of talent.
I also had musical savant skills. Perfect pitch is another thing that’s considered a savant skill some of the time and not others. But the fact that I was first chair, first violin in the junior high orchestra by the age of seven, I can’t read that as anything other than an obvious foray into the realm of talented savant.
Up until I was in my early twenties, I had a spatial (not visual -- closer to kinesthetic, or the way blind people map space) map in my head of every place I had ever been, indoors or outdoors. I never got lost. Ever. I don’t know why I lost this but while I had it, I can’t see it as anything but a savant skill. My mother, who has severe spatial awareness problems (she’s very visual -- she and I are opposite kinds of proof that visual and spatial are not the same skill), has used me as a navigator since I was a small child,
I also have something that I feel like must be extremely common and not usually recognized at all. I would call it a partial savant skill. It’s a skill that isn’t quite a skill because it has no outlet. I am constantly composing detailed, complex, original cello music without even trying. But with no way to play it in realtime, and no way to write it down (translating to musical notes is a laborious, slow process for me), the music remains in my head and never shared with the world. So I don’t know that this counts as a “real”savant skill by objective measures, but it feels like a savant skill with a crucial piece missing. I wonder how many people have partial and/or unexpressed savant skills like this.
I think my art (specifically, painting in recent years) falls somewhere in the category of either splinter skill or talented savant skill. Which may always be a subjective thing, and it’s difficult to judge the quality of your own work. But this has less to do with some objective measure of quality, and more to do with the way in which the art takes place and the way the skill developed and functions. Savant skills are more than just the presence of an unexpected skill, there’s specific ways they are learned and function in a person that mark them out as different from your average talent of the same level.
And people do hide their savant skills sometimes, even when they are obvious savant skills. I am not open about all of my savant skills. Additionally, not all savant skills are in areas where people normally look for savant skills. The current savant experts focus almost entirely on certain areas for savant skills, to the exclusion of other skill areas.
Additionally, many disabled people develop skills that are entirely unknown to nondisabled people and therefore unmeasured and not accounted for in descriptions of possible savant skills. It is entirely possible, in fact probably common, for people to have savant skills in these unmeasured skill areas. I am no exception to this. I have savant skills I can’t even describe because nobody has ever acknowledged the existence of the skills in question never mind come up with language for them.
Anyway, I eventually realized it was important that I face the fact that I have savant skills. It’s more than a little embarrassing. It’s not something I wanted to admit to myself. I’ve spent over a year agonizing about how to articulate what I’d found out about myself. As well as whether to tell anyone about it at all.
I know a lot of people don’t believe savant skills are a thing. I have read several books on the topic and concluded that they are a thing. And that they apply to my life. I’m not capable of explaining all the details. And calling something a savant skill is and should be very different than just a way of saying that someone disabled has a talent or qualifies for some definitions of giftedness. (In fact, I don’t believe in any common concept of giftedness that I’ve ever heard of. I do, however, now believe in savant skills. They’re entirely different ideas.)
Anyway, I can’t explain why this was so hard to believe, herd to face up to, and hard to admit. But it was. I still can’t escape the fact that I have savant skills, and I’m better off not trying to escape or deny it any longer. I have to admit that the doctor who first categorized me as autistic was right about the savant thing as well. As I said, i’m not bragging. I’m simply publicly admitting that my combination of skills and difficulties -- both current and past, since some skills have vanished and others have appeared over time -- fits the savant pattern perfectly, both in areas that are usually widely recognized as common savant skills and in areas they would never even notice.
#actuallyautistic#actuallysavant#savant#savant skills#savant syndrome#long post#personal#difficult to admit#talents#splinter skills#talented savants#prodigious savants#actuallyDD#savants#developmental disability#cognitive disability#autism#personal history#diagnosis#psychiatrist
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Hi there. I'm not sure if you've been asked this yet so here goes. Regarding the final trial, do you believe that the events of DR1-3 were fictional or that they actually happened in the NDRV3 timeline? Since the theme of the game was truth/lies, I like to think that Tsumugi made up that lie in order to sell the idea that everything was fake in order to break down the survivors. Plus considering the improvements in technology and talent along with how this takes place 50 years in the future...
The actual status of the Hope’s Peak characters and whetherSHSL talents do or don’t exist are just a few of the many, many things leftwithin the catbox by the end of the game’s epilogue, which Saihara, Maki, andHimiko are set to check for themselves when they stand near the exit from theschool’s dome. Given how much of what Tsumugi told them was a definite mix oftruth and lies, and given how she definitely made huge, false claims in orderto break their spirits, the most we know with certainty is that she was lying about some things. Pinpointingwhich things, however, is the trickybit.
Personally, I’m inclined to believe that while talent seemsto exist in the ndrv3 universe (given the line Miu had about it in theprologue, what we can surmise about the SHSL Hunt, and the fact that in orderfor people without talent to be looked down on as much as they seem to be inndrv3, that kind of implies super-talented people do exist), the events of Hope’sPeak, and therefore dr1-3, were probably either fictional or took place farback enough that they were retconned historically into a sort of fictionallight.
Not much is really known or told about the timespan on whichthis is taking place, and if ndrv3’s universe is taken as a separate universealtogether from dr1-3’s universe, then the timing doesn’t really tell us a lot.However, we know for a fact that technology which either erases people’smemories exists (meaning brainwashing technology), or that technology which cangive a bunch of normal people talents and backstories so indistinguishable fromthe real thing that they essentially can create SHSL talents exists (meaning…well,more brainwashing technology).
Whichever answer is true, either of these things goes aboveand beyond what we would find in the real world normally, because the answer isalways leaps and bounds above reality in wacky DR terminology. Still, it has tobe one of those two answers in particular, and either one of those kind ofbrings to mind more typical DR technology and terminology.
There’s also the fact that the child we see at the beginningof Chapter 6, Makoto, specifically mentions going to “a super elite school”where “everyone around him is talented and part of the elite.” Hisself-loathing stems from the fact that he in particular is super normal inevery conceivable way: grades, sports, hobbies, etc., he just cannot keep upwith the people around him. Being normal is agonizing to him, and literallymakes him want to die, because there is so much pressure to compete, toperform, and to stand out from the norm in some way.
This sounds very similar to terminology usually associatedwith Hope’s Peak and the Reserve Course, in my own opinion. A large part of theDR franchise has always been taking aspects of Japanese society, particularlythe societal pressure to perform above and beyond the norm in high school, andcriticizing it drastically, and ndrv3 was no exception to that. Makoto’ssuicidal urges to die without either a talent of his own or a special interestto use as some form of escape highly resembles some of the previous themes we’veseen brought up in DR before, particularly those associated with Hinata.
Still, it’s true that the “world of Danganronpa” isconsidered an escape. It’s not a place where “normal people go,” it’s a placewhere people who have given up on reality and therefore cannot live in reality anymore go. To the outside world, it’s theperfect form of entertainment, providing exciting mysteries, thrillingconflicts, and memorable interactions between “characters” on-screen; for thepeople who audition for the game and perform in it, it’s (according to Tsumugianyway) something they themselves wanted because of how much they had all givenup on the real world around them. The killing game show was itself preferableto going on in reality any longer.
If we consider that the events of dr1-3 were eitherfictional propaganda specifically designed to engineer this sort ofentertainment and sentiment, including an admiration for SHSL Students and adesire to see them all perform and face off in these “hope vs. despair type”conflicts, I feel like that would make quite a lot of sense with what weactually witness, both in Tsumugi’s own trial and in other glimpses, such asthe remember lights and even the prologue.
Things would, however, also make sense if the events of theHope’s Peak clash had perhaps actually happened in the past and then becamesort of…twisted and changed into a more fictional retelling further down theline. Like a game of telephone, this would also explain the littleinconsistencies in Tsumugi’s version of events as opposed to the “real” historywritten down in the book in Ouma’s lab: people tend to gloss over and pick andchoose their favorite versions of these “real-life” events, changing them againand again to the point where they become less reliable and more fictional.Basically, it would mean that the events of dr1-3 are more like a myth, or anepic legend, based on historical fact but retold to the point where they’vebecome pretty blurry along the way.
Whichever the case, it’s very clear by the end of ndrv3 thatthe Hope’s Peak Arc and its massive, wild success with people in the outsideworld is essential to the existence of the killing game. Without things likeHope’s Peak Academy, without characters like Naegi or Junko, there would be nokilling game show. These things are the cornerstones which work as thefoundation for the show to go on, and which have raked in enough support fromthe audience that the show has continued for 53 seasons.
There’s also one reason in particular why I’m inclined tothink the Hope’s Peak characters have to be either fictional or existed so longago that they’re regarded as fictional—and it’s got a lot to do with Tsumugiherself. Even though Tsumugi’s words can definitely be doubted, her allergicreaction to cosplaying real-life people has to be pretty much taken at facevalue, in my opinion. It’s impossible to fake her particular reaction. Ratherthan just going into a mild sweat or coughing, she literally breaks out intovery visible, very painful hives.
Some people in the Japanese fanbase have speculated that perhapsTsumugi lied about her reaction and it’s actually the other way around and shecan’t cosplay fiction, meaning the Hope’s Peak cast are real while the ndrv3cast were “too fictional” for her to cosplay, since their talents andbackstories were fabricated. But I personally disagree: unlike many of Tsumugi’sother stories, her claims about her allergy have been consistent ever sinceChapter 1, and it wouldn’t fit thematically in my opinion if she weren’t ableto cosplay fiction instead of reality.
After all, Chapter 6 is full of her trying to use fiction asan escape around her, constantly. She lives through fiction entirely; it’s thereason she has absolutely no sense of self without relying on fictionalcharacters. If she were cosplaying real-life people rather than fictionalcharacters, this very essential aspect of her personality would no longer addup, or make sense. And so I think it’s far more likely that she was telling thetruth about her allergy, and that she can cosplay the Hope’s Peak charactersbecause they’re either entirely made up or else put into a fictional “mythical”scale.
I think the ndrv3 cast being “too real” for her liking wasexactly why she couldn’t cosplay them, because she undeniably would have lovedto do so if she could’ve. Cosplaying them as fictional existences in the finaltrial would have been the perfect way to break their spirits all the more, andforce them to acknowledge that they were “completely fictional” and that they “couldn’timpact reality in any way.” If she’d been able to force them to accept the “non-reality”of their existences, she definitely would’ve tried that particular cosplayingstunt, because nothing would’ve traumatized them further like seeing themselvesor their dead classmates being paraded out on display like a bunch of fictionaltoys.
These are the theories and thoughts I’ve built up on thematter for the time being, anyway. There’s still, of course, a lot ofspeculation involved, and nothing will really be set in stone until Kodakadecides to open the catbox himself and provides either side materials or anndrv3 sequel. Still, it was a lot of fun to get to theorize like this. Thankyou, anon!
#ndrv3#drv3#new danganronpa v3#tsumugi shirogane#shirogane tsumugi#ndrv3 spoilers //#my meta#okay to reblog#anonymous
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Original Post from Amazon Security
Author: Becca Crockett
Mark Ryland at the AWS Summit Berlin keynote
In the weeks leading up to re:Inforce, we’ll share conversations we’ve had with people at AWS who will be presenting at the event so you can learn more about them and some of the interesting work that they’re doing.
How long have you been at AWS and what’s your current role?
I’ve been at AWS for almost eight years. For the first six and a half years, I built the Solutions Architecture and Professional Services teams for AWS’s worldwide public sector sales organization—from five people when I joined, to many hundreds some years later. It was an amazing ride to build such a great team of cloud technology experts.
About a year and a half ago, I transitioned to the AWS Security team. On the Security team, I run a much smaller team called the Office of the CISO. We help manage interaction between our customers and the leadership team for AWS Security. In addition, we have a number of internal projects that we work on to improve interaction and information flow between the Security team and various AWS service teams, and between the AWS security team and the Amazon.com security team.
Why is your team called “the Office of the CISO”?
A lot of people want to talk to Steve Schmidt, our Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) at AWS. If you want to talk to him, it’s very likely that you’re going to talk to me or to my team as a part of that process. There’s only one of him, and there are a few of us. We help Steve scale a bit, and help more customers have direct interaction with senior leadership in AWS Security.
We also provide guidance and leadership to the broader AWS security community, especially to the customer-facing side of AWS. For example, we’re leaders of the Security and Compliance Technical Field Community (TFC) for AWS. The Security TFC is made up of subject matter experts in solutions architecture, professional services, technical account management, and other technical disciplines. We help them to understand and communicate effectively with customers about important security and compliance topics, and to gather customer requirements and funnel them to the right places.
What’s your favorite part of your job?
I love communicating about technology — first diving deep to figure it out for myself, and then explaining it to others. And I love interacting with our customers, both to explain our platform and what we do, and, equally important, to get their feedback. We constantly get great input and great ideas from customers, and we try to leverage that feedback into continuous improvement of our products and services.
What does cloud security mean to you, personally? Why is it a topic you’re passionate about?
I remember being at a private conference on cybersecurity. It was government-oriented, and organized by a Washington DC-based think-tank. A number of senior government officials were talking about challenges in cybersecurity. In the middle of an intense discussion about the big challenges facing the industry, a former, very senior official in the U.S. Government intelligence community said (using a golfing colloquialism), “The great thing about the cloud is that it’s a Mulligan; it’s a do-over. When we make the cloud transition, we can finally do the right things when it comes to cybersecurity.”
There’s a lot of truth to that, just in terms of general IT modernization. The cloud simply makes security easier. Not “easy” — there are still challenges. But you’re much more equipped to do the right thing—to build automation, to build tooling, and to take full advantage of the base protections that are built into the platform. With a little bit of care, what you do is going to be better than what you did before. The responsibility that remains for you as the customer is still significant, but because everything is software-defined, you get far more visibility and control. Because everything is API-driven, you can automate just about everything.
Challenges remain; I want to reiterate that it’s never easy to do security right. But it’s so much easier when you don’t have to run the entire stack from the concrete floor up to the application, and when you can rely on the inherent visibility and control provided by a software-defined environment. In short, cloud migration represents the industry’s best opportunity for making big improvements in IT security. I love being in the center of that change for the better, and helping to make it real.
What initiatives are you currently working on that you’re particularly excited about?
Two things. First, we’re laser-focused on improving our AWS Identity and Access Management capabilities. They’re already very sophisticated and very powerful, but they are somewhat uneven across our services, and not as easy to use as they should be. I’m on the periphery of that work, but I’m actively involved in scoping out improvements. One recent example is a big advance in the capabilities of Service Control Policies (SCPs) within AWS Organizations. These now allow extremely fine-grained controls — as expressive as IAM polices—that can easily be applied globally across dozens or hundreds of AWS accounts. For example, you can express a global policy like “nobody but [some very special role] can attach an internet gateway to my VPCs, full stop.”
I’m also a networking geek, and another area I’ve been actively working on is improvements to our built-in networking security features. People have been asking for greater visibility and control over their VPCs. We have a lot of great features like security groups and network ACLs, but there’s a lot more we can and will do. For example, customers are looking for more visibility into what’s going on inside their VPCs beyond our existing VPC Flow Logs feature. We have an exciting announcement at our re:Inforce conference this week about some new capabilities in this area!
You’ll be speaking at re:Inforce about the security benefits of running EC2 instances on the AWS Nitro architecture. At a high level, what’s so innovative about Nitro, and how does it enable better security?
The EC2 Nitro architecture is a fundamental re-imagining of the best way to build a secure virtualization platform. I don’t think there’s anything else like it in the industry. We’ve taken a lot of the complicated software that’s needed for virtualization, which normally runs in a privileged copy of an operating system — the “domain 0,” or “dom0” to use Xen terminology, but present in all modern hypervisors — and we’ve completely eliminated it. All those features are now implemented by custom software and hardware in a set of powerful co-processor computers inside the same physical box as the main Intel processor system board. The Nitro computers present virtual devices to the mainboard as if they were actual hardware devices. You might say the main system board — despite its powerful Intel Xeon processor and big chunks of memory — is really the “co-processor” in these systems; I call it the “customer workload co-processor!” It’s the main Nitro controller and not the system mainboard that’s fundamentally in charge of the overall system, providing a root of trust and a secure layer between the mainboard and the outside world.
There are bunch of great security benefits that flow from this redesign. For example, with the elimination of the dom0 trusted operating system running on the mainboard, we’ve completely eliminated interactive access to these hosts. There’s no SSH, no RDP, no interactive software mechanisms that allow direct human access. I could go on and on, but I’ll stop there — you’ll have to come to my talk on Wednesday! And of course, we’ll post the video online afterward.
You’re also involved with a session to encourage customers to set up “state-of-the-art encryption.” In your view, what are some of the key elements of a “state-of-the-art” approach to encryption?
I came up with the original idea for the session, but was able to hand it off to an even better-suited speaker, so now I’ll just be there to enjoy it. Colm MacCarthaigh will be presenting. Colm is a senior principal engineer in the EC2 networking team, but he’s also the genius behind a number of important innovations in security and networking across AWS. For example, he did some of the original design work on the “shuffle sharding” techniques we use broadly, across AWS, to improve availability and resiliency for multi-tenanted services. Later, he came up with the idea, and, in a few weeks of intense coding, wrote the first version of S2N, our open source TLS implementation that provides far better security than the implementations typically used in the industry. He was also a significant contributor to the TLS 1.3 specification. I encourage everyone to follow him on Twitter, where you’ll learn all kinds of interesting things about cryptography, networking, and the like.
Now, to finally answer your question: Colm will be talking about how AWS does more and more encryption for you automatically, and how multiple layers of encryption can help address different kinds of threats. For example, without actually breaking TLS encryption, researchers have shown that they can figure out the content of an encrypted voice-over-IP (VOIP) call simply by analyzing the timing and size of the packets. So, wrapping TLS sessions inside of other encryption layers is a really good idea. Colm will talk about the importance of layered encryption, plus a bunch of other great topics: how AWS makes it easy to use encryption; where we do it automatically even if you don’t ask for it; how we’re inventing new, more secure means for key distribution; and fun stuff like that. It will be a blast!
What changes do you hope we’ll see across the global security and compliance landscape over the next 5 years?
I think that with innovations like the Nitro architecture for EC2, and with our commitment to continually improving and strengthening other security features and enabling greater automation around things like identity management and anomaly detection, we will come to a point where people will realize that the cloud, in almost every case, is more secure than an on-premises environment. I don’t mean to say that you couldn’t go outside of the cloud and build something secure (as long as you are willing to spend a ton of money). But as a general matter, cloud will become the default option for secure processing of very sensitive data.
We’re not quite there yet, in terms of widespread perception and understanding. There are still quite a few people who haven’t dug very far below the surface of “what is cloud.” There is still a common, visceral reaction to the idea of “public cloud” as being risky. People object to ideas like multitenancy, where you’re sharing physical infrastructure with other customers, as if it’s somehow inherently risky. There are risks, but they are so well mitigated, and we have so much experience controlling those risks, that they’re far outweighed by the big security benefits. Very consistently, as customers become more educated and experienced with the cloud, they tell us that they feel more secure in their cloud infrastructure than they did in their on-premises world. Still, that’s not currently the first reaction. People still start by thinking of the cloud as risky, and it takes time to educate them and change that perspective. So there’s still some important work ahead of us.
What’s your favorite way to relax?
It’s funny, now that I’m getting old, I’m reverting to some of the pursuits and hobbies of my youth. When I was a teenager I was passionate about cycling. I raced bicycles extensively at the regional and national level on both road and track from ages 14 to 18. A few minutes of my claim to 15 minutes of Warholian fame was used up by being in a two-man breakaway with 17-year-old Greg LeMond in a road race in Arizona, although he beat me and everyone else resoundingly in the end! I’ve ridden road bikes and done a bit of mountain biking over the years, but I’m getting back into it now and enjoying it immensely. Of course, there’s far more technology to play with these days, and I can’t resist. I splurged on an expensive pair of pedals with power meters built in, and so now I get detailed data from every ride that I can analyze to prove mathematically that I’m not in very good shape.
One of my other hobbies back in my teenage years was playing guitar — mostly folk-rock acoustic, but also electric and bass guitar in garage bands. That’s another activity I’ve started again. Fortunately, my kids, who are now around college-age plus or minus, all love the music from the 60s and 70s that I dust off and play, and they have great voices, so we have a lot of fun jamming and singing harmonies together.
What’s one thing that a visitor to your hometown of Washington, DC should experience?
The Washington DC area is famous for lots of great tourist attractions. But if you enjoy Michelin Guide-level dining experiences, I’d recommend a restaurant right in my neighborhood. It’s called L’Auberge Chez François, and it’s quite famous. It features Alsatian food (from the eastern region of France, along the German border). It’s an amazing restaurant that’s been there for almost 50 years, and it continues to draw a clientele from across the region and around the world. It’s always packed, so get reservations well in advance!
Want more AWS Security how-to content, news, and feature announcements? Follow us on Twitter.
Mark Ryland
Mark is the director of the Office of the CISO for AWS. He has more than 28 years of experience in the technology industry and has served in leadership roles in cybersecurity, software engineering, distributed systems, technology standardization and public policy. Prior to his current role, he served as the Director of Solution Architecture and Professional Services for the AWS World Public Sector team.
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Author: Becca Crockett AWS Security Profiles: Mark Ryland, Director, Office of the CISO Original Post from Amazon Security Author: Becca Crockett In the weeks leading up to re:Inforce, we’ll share conversations we’ve had with people at AWS who will be presenting at the event so you can learn more about them and some of the interesting work that they’re doing.
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so i just finished virtues last reward and im kinda angry because now life is strange kinda makes sense
DISCLAIMER: so its been like.... what.... two or three years since i even watched someone play it? im going off of what i remember which means POSSIBLY i didnt remember an explanation or didnt pay proper attention to it, so be warned
DISCLAIMERx2 COMBO!!!: this is probably some old ass news but even in the height of its popularity i kinda came into the story late and even then i wasnt crazy about it. it was good. i really enjoyed it. but it was easier for me to kind of passively mock it for having bullshitty trumped up time logic. the reason for this AND FOR MY FIRST DISCLAIMER MOSTLY is because the game doesnt really explain it to you or why anythings happening. which is fair i guess. max isnt really a time travel geek or a scientist and short of having mr “time guardian” come out and exposition dump there wasnt much to do. maybe if warren was our protag he wouldve figured it out but i cant really blame max for NOT. especially since it was reality for her. to us we can examine it objectively and understand the rules governing it as we observe the limitations. i mean for all she knew she couldve gone back in time three times and it be over and she could never do it again ever
for my explanation ill be referencing 999 and its sequel zero escape virtue’s last reward as well as homestuck (because for all intents and purposes it makes intelligent use of time travel and with colloquialisms that make it sort of easier to digest than just abstract names.) naturally some spoilers may apply to all three as well as life is strange (obviously)
if you boil the story of life is strange to its most core element, itll start to make sense. life is strange in its simplest form is this: “max caulfield solves a murder/kidnapping mystery.” everything else that happens is just kind of extra or a direct component to that outcome.
i would often complain about how max could get mr jefferson arrested and save kate with her time travelly powers but not chloe when she couldnt have done anything about those things without her power either. i was under the assumption that her abilities were an anomaly and the universe was trying to fix itself by voiding out her effects on the timeline (ie saving chloe). but in retrospect thats kind of really dumb!! why make a story where the protagonist can travel through time but then have the story ultimately be about the universe trying to make it so that everything was the same as before??? it’s silly!! so heres the thing: it was not about that. it was about max getting the information she needed to ultimately solve the mystery (and save kate i guess. im not sure how contingent her survival was to the timeline being “alpha” but if you want to say God or the Sentient Timespace Universe [”Skaia”] were in control of the outcomes and thus dictating maxs actions mayb u could say They wanted to reward kate for being such a devout follower??? maybe her life or death was ultimately inconsequential to the outcome and it couldve gone on with or without her and max was just a good person and saved her. its hard to tell.)
in homestuck there are doomed timelines. timelines wherein something goes wrong that was NOT preordained by skaia (the self-aware universe, essentially, trying to maintain homeostasis in itself) or that directly cause a paradox. one example is davesprite.
an action that causes a doomed timeline is john getting himself killed (with a little help from terezi) which leads to a strand where rose and dave are stranded in their game for months. dave then goes back along the timeline to the point that determined whether or not it became doomed. although incidentally, it was the act of him going back in time to stop john from killing himself that splintered the timeline between doomed and alpha (the right one)
thus the doomed timeline was necessary for the alpha timeline to be sustained. and thereafter it ceased to be. in other doomed timelines it either disappears entirely as with davesprites timeline, or everyone just DIES like in the one where vriska and gamzee collectively get everyone killed. it’s the price u pay for not playing the part the universe wrote for u
so in order for max to go along her story to figure out mr jefferson was.... who he was, she had to slip through doomed timelines. timelines that ultimately purged themselves if they went on too long by the means of the big storm. something similar happens in 999 where a certain character gets sick if the story goes in a direction that would lead to a paradox and cause them to not have existed. and if the timeline becomes too far gone, they vanish entirely. this is basically the role of the storm. its not to eradicate the stuff max had done with her powers because she “shouldnt have had them” but because that timeline shouldnt have BEEN to begin with! max was SUPPOSED to have her powers. whether it was all morphogenetic fieldy sciencey reasoning or if “skaia” gave them to her to solve this case, who knows, but its not really all that important.
i could probably explain some of this more easily by using the name of paradoxes, but i forgot most of the official names for them and my computers being kinda silly so i dont feel like taking the time to look them up srry
anyway
max alters the timeline by stopping chloe from dying. they then go on this great big adventure where chole is the ONLY person who could have possibly helped max unravel the mysteries. which i think is fair to say she was the ONLY person to be capable of it bc of her stepdad and her rebellious attitude!
so the two go on adventures and discover what i figured out within the first five minutes of story: MR JEFFERSONS A HORRIBLE PERSON
and chloe dies a bunch along the way because while shes needed to solve the mystery, shes STILL doomed. its like in final destination. you can run from death and avoid a few attempts on your life for a WHILE, but youre still slated for death and gonna die eventually. im not sure it was the universe trying to clear her out like an antibody so much as it was... she was just more susceptible to danger. it also could have been to make maxs powers stronger. the 999 series puts an emphasis on the psychic-y powers being strengthened and honed through LIFE THREATENING SCENARIOS
now in both 999 and vlr (i havent referenced the latter nearly as much as i thought i would!) the events of the games essentially unfold because certain characters figure out that... well... thats what happens!!! so they recreate the event so that it DOES happen so that they CAN have these abilities. they hone their abilities to see and interact through time so that they can avoid MAJOR DISASTERS and fix them, all the way establishing the very parameters that allow them to do so in the first place!
so small summary:
max gets the power to swap out her consciousness from a certain place on the timeline.
she does so to save chloe (as a good person and for sentimental purposes)
chloe proves to be the key to discovering the mystery behind the shady shit going down at the school
she was still ultimately supposed to die though so she dies a bunch along the way because thats just what she does best
by working alone doomed timelines where chloe is the only one who can help unearth the mysteries (and to be fair she deserved to be there too since it DID involve her ex-girlfriend)
max finally discovers mr jefferson is basically straight up evil and can go back and use the information from her travels to bring him to justice
chloes still supposed 2 die tho so shes either wiped out with the timeline by means of the storm that fucks up everyone elses life or she dies unceremoniously in the bathroom because one way or another: SHE WILL DIE
max then uses the information to expose jefferson. its kinda weird but i guess paradoxically makes sense that the alpha timeline dictated that for life to progress properly, max had to just MAGICALLY know it was him. (maybe it meant to import me into the game so i couldve called him out as soon as i saw him. or maybe it was only one option. like kate living or not. max can expose him and save the day OR it can go on and be terrible. but that one doesnt have any justice in it so.....)
kate lives and thats important? maybe?
basically it was not about trying to undo maxs “rulebreaking” powers
but it was about ENABLING them to do the job the universe/”skaia” (not that life is strange even.... HAS a skaia, but its easy for terminology) had planned for her. which was to fuck over jefferson HARD
the only problem is that to my memory the game never explains this is whats happening. and so when chloe dies youre like “wow nothing mattered.” but the game was never about saving chloe. it was always only ever about solving a kidnapping/murder mystery
it was ALWAYS about that
chloe was never going to stay alive. ever. the final choice was whether or not to return to the alpha timeline or not stay with her as an act of love and get wiped out along with the timeline
but the game doesnt explain this. or how the time travel powers came about or how they work or what they are AT ALL (from what i remember) so it all just seems convoluted and bullshitty
but in reality there IS something driving it. it only took me playing two other games to actually understand what that was.
which is why im not sure i can actually give the writers credit for it because i dont even know if THEY knew what was up or if they just made it up and it was just convenience i was able to apply meaning to it
the fact they (again as i remember) didnt address it in the game makes it really suspect though! and it makes it hard to support them as having done something intelligent. especially when it ended up with tons of players feeling cheated because it fell in line with popular “the illuion of choice telltale style” game lines. so when the final moment came it confused them because nothing informed them that it was ALWAYS a quest of futility and despite maxs emotions or feelings about it, it was never about saving chloe. she was only a tool to achieve the goal of outting jefferson
which i cant say i totally approve of from a general point of view! especially in light of “bury your gays.”
but from a time travel-esque mechanic point of view.... yeah it makes sense....
but it doesnt really leave a good feeling. because max and by proxy the player were always under the misunderstanding they could save chloe when in reality they never could.
and the entire game was just. a quest of futility. (in that regard)
but we didnt know. to make it proper, the game shouldve let us into the secret. even if max didnt know and felt cheated at the end, the audience wouldnt feel the same. itd be dramatic irony. wed feel bad but wed know why it had to happen.
anyway, as the Old Woman says in virtues last reward:
“Death was always inevitable.“
#well im ALMOST DONE#i cant have more than like thirty minutes of dialogue yet but as i was digesting the timeline it hit me
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Some Advice on What You Can Do When You Feel Hopeless (right now, by yourself)
Well, the first thing should be “Don’t look up lists of what to do about it.” I learned that today. Everything I found on such a search made me feel worse, somehow. No joke, one suggestion was literally “fall in love,” like that is something one can just do. Whatever, let’s move on. Coarse language warning.
Feeling like the world is just having a grand ol’ time shitting in your mouth nonstop is possibly one of the worst sensations a person can feel. Sorry for the imagery, but it’s my best way to describe it when decent-folks terminology just falls short at explaining to someone how downright insufferable everything is in that moment.
When I feel hopeless – and I mean legitimate, absolute, can’t-be-bargained-with hopeless – the only thing I want is for something, anything, just one fuck-mothering thing to go right in my life, just for a moment, and give me something to smile about without immediately kicking me in the balls afterward.
Unfortunately, that outcome is rare for me. If you’ve been drawn to this post, then I’m guessing it’s rare for you, too. I can’t say I have a miracle cure for feeling like your life is a train wreck where all the cars were filled with eggs, live ammunition, and orphans; but I do want to share the coping methods I’ve been using when Google just offers me suggestions that, were I able to act on, I wouldn’t be so hopeless in the first place.
For the record, I promise that statement does mean more than just that absurd “fall in love” tip above. It just seemed like a good note to start with. An important aspect of this post is to assume that you basically only have an internet connection and a few minutes to spend on yourself. I do list some examples with things that you might not own, but they are largely secondary to the points made. Just as well, they don’t involve anyone else.
My first suggestion might sound counter-intuitive, but it helps me for some reason or another. I have some theories on it, but we’ll get to that. The suggestion is to subject yourself to something sad on purpose, within certain “safe” boundaries. Now, what does that mean, and why on Earth would we do that? Well, hear me out.
This can be a movie scene, a story, a picture – whatever works for you. In my case, it’s a couple of songs. The key thing here is that it’s a… healthy(?) kind of sad stimuli. i.e. something that can make you feel things, spring up some (manly) tears just a bit, but not necessarily a song to cut your wrists to or whatever; or something that you’re overly emotionally invested in.
For me, one such experience is the song 1,000 Words from… from whatever Final Fantasy game it’s from. I’ve never played the game, the lyrics don’t apply to me in any way, but the song is a rubber mallet straight to the feels for me, regardless. While it might conjure up some (extremely masculine) misty eyes, it’s a different sensation than the self-loathing, hopelessness, and general give-me-one-reason-not-to-die-right-now sensations that drive me to it. I find myself in a better overall state of mind after totally-not-crying to it for a few minutes when I’m at my lowest.
The potency of this method can be diminished if you draw from the well too often, so to speak. (if it worked for you to start with, anyway.) My therapy song won’t work near as well if it’s something I listen to frequently or have heard a gazillion times already. The aforementioned tune did absolute wonders for me the first few times, but after hitting that one a few too many times, I had to move to another one to achieve the same effect. Still worked, though.
While it might seem like a “bash thumb with hammer to cure toothache” kind of solution, I think it’s a less-invasive method of self-harm. I’ve never intentionally hurt myself, so I don’t personally understand the mindset of cutters and such. Having known a couple, however, a common purpose of self-harm seems to be a sense of control. I feel that my sad-time-song has that same effect of inflicting a normally-undesirable sensation on myself; but it’s something I choose to do, something I have control of.
The thing is, it’s an emotion that doesn’t make my current situation worse, which is something sad stimuli tends to otherwise do. Hence my emphasis on it being a “safe” source of feels. My advice isn’t just “make yourself sadder on purpose,” it’s… I guess I’m saying “make yourself a different kind of sad.” I think. I don’t know.
For example, another such feels-y moment for me was the very end of the movie Logan. The thing X23 does right before the credits. You know the part. Thing is, that was a leaky-eyes moment for me, but purely on a symbolic level. I’m not specifically a fan of Wolverine, or the X-Men in general; so that bit, to me, is a “safe” sad.
In contrast, the opening minutes of the movie Arrival hit really close to home for me. Dwelling on that one doesn’t produce feels, it produces legitimate sorrow. This is an “unsafe” sad, because it makes these negative emotions worse; or adds to them.
Now, I get that not everyone can immediately think of something in the “safe-sad” category for them. If that’s you, I’d just suggest keeping an eye out for such sensations going forward. Something that can tempt your face to leak, but not because it reminds you of your own troubles or struggles.
My next suggestion is something of an extension of the first. A spinoff, if you will. While I certainly encourage you to do anything (within reason) that you feel might improve your mindset, I know a mistake I inadvertently made quite often was to indulge in things that would inadvertently make it worse.
This is meant more or less as a direct disclaimer to the common advice of ���engage in your hobbies!” or “make time to do something you enjoy!” because frankly, that can be dangerous in some cases.
To borrow terminology from myself, there are basically “safe” and “unsafe” variants to the good things as well. Identifying the difference can make a huge… difference. This part gets a bit sob-story, so I totally understand if you want to skip it.
The gist of it, though, is that when trying to distract yourself from the overwhelming shittiness of your situation, you must be mindful with what you turn to. Some things that you might think are beneficial or helpful might actually be harming you under the surface, and determining what “good” things to avoid can be the key to lessening the weight of hopelessness.
Anyway, my bit is as follows; with some examples of things that I thought were helping, but were, in fact, making it worse.
I love metal music; and on a good day, I can listen to it all I want without issue. The thing is, in my darkest hours, watching the Little V Mills cover of Heavy Day, despite essentially being my favorite thing ever, does more harm than good to my psyche. Perhaps I’m just slow, but I dug myself into that pit several times before I made the connection as to why such an otherwise feel-good endeavor would backfire on me when I needed it most.
I played guitar for a few years – it was easily one of my favorite things to do for a long while. Because of [medical] I haven’t been able to play it for many years now, and will likely never be able to play it again. Even though I love the song and Little V, listening to it in bad times is just a subconscious jackhammer to my dead guitar dreams.
“That’s the easiest connection in the world to make” you might have said just then, but please understand, my guitar dreams died long ago, and I haven’t otherwise been bitter about it. I don’t watch a musician play something and consciously think “oh, if only I could still do that!” or reminisce lovingly about all the one-man shows I used to put on in the kitchen for my mom and dogs. (shut up.)
That whole chunk of my life is honestly a non-issue at this point, as far as my conscious thoughts go. Beneath the surface, however, those wounds are quick to reopen when you’re grasping at anything to distract you from how terrible things are at the time.
I love the shows RWBY and Death Battle, but watching them in low days just hammers home my failure as an aspiring animator. I rely on ASMR videos to sleep at night; but when every last ounce of shit in life is hitting fan blades I didn’t even know existed, I find it better to deal with insomnia than for the lovely ASMRtist ladies to be a frustrating reminder of how painfully single and lonely I am.
Now, I know that when you’re in a bad enough spot, you can look at anything you do in that sort of self-defeating light and use that to make your hopelessness worse. As of writing this, I’m actually in such a spot. Fun fact: being reasonably proud of my passable grammar and wordsmanship without any tangible recoil from it is the entire reason I’m writing this tonight.
So, explore with caution, I guess. If you feel overwhelmed by finding a self-defeating aspect of everything you do, then just do nothing. I’m not saying to quit your job or whatever, but sometimes the best answer is to not seek answers, if that makes any sense.
In the “do nothing” category, I find Youtube channels like TED and TEDx Talks quite efficient at filling my brain with something neutral to listen to; depending on which subject you click on, of course. That conveniently segues into…
Third suggestion: Learn Something Irrelevant. As with the other two, this one is highly subjective; but hey, so is this entire topic. Another coping method I’ve come to rely on is to just space out with a bunch of useless trivia I have absolutely no need for.
The speeches given on those TED channels are a great example of this. They’re nice and long for maximum time absorption, while slotting neatly into the “mildly amusing” category most of the time (for me.) The big asterisk on this is to not invest yourself into something that does draw your active attention.
That probably didn’t explain much. Another example: I love reviews. I don’t know why. I can listen to a professional-sounding reviewer talk about pretty much anything and be at least marginally entertained by it. Perhaps you don’t feel that way, but give me a second.
I watch Anthony’s Customs in such circumstances. He reviews collector’s action figures and such. This is a subject I have roughly zero interest in, but that’s what makes it good for me to learn about in bad times. Watching reviews for something I do care about, say, video games I can’t afford or movies I can’t go see, just makes the crushing hopelessness worse. (I know, duh.) This ties back to the second suggestion – ingesting a review for something I desire just shines a spotlight on my inability to obtain it.
This is probably more of a simple distraction tactic than anything specifically helpful, but that’s not to say it doesn’t work. Giving the brain something else to chew, it will stop poking at the ulcers in its mouth. Imagery!
Fourth and final suggestion, to be taken with a very large grain of salt: Embrace the Bitterness… Carefully. I’ll go ahead and put that “please hate responsibly” or “scowl in moderation” disclaimer up front and center. It’s a fairly obvious tip that I’m sure many people already act on. Maybe this is more of a warning for how to do safely.
If you’re like me, raised on the idea that negative emotions and mindsets were bad for you, then the act of feeling bad in your bad situation probably makes you feel worse. I felt like being in a bad mental place was a sign of weakness on my part, like I was failing for feeling such things.
Think back on those Saturday morning cartoon moral lessons – things like how the bully is only hateful because he has a broken home. A tragic villain, but still a villain. No, being mean to others isn’t the right way to handle your stresses; but just like the other entries above, there are “safe” alternatives.
I suggest watching channels like CinemaSins, which comedically picks apart every little thing “wrong” with movies, or looking into reviews for films or products you know are bad, just to revel in someone else’s failures. An easy suggestion would also be an RPG or something where you can choose to be the bad guy.
Heartless? Probably. Healthy? Maybe – in moderation. The guideline here is to get your catharsis from something that won’t actively hurt someone. I’m not saying to find a way to justify being an asshole, I’m just saying to find a way to come as close to being an asshole as possible.
The reason I gave those examples is because they’re as close to a victimless attack as you can get, I think. When your pent up bitterness explodes in the voice chat of Overwatch and you tell your incompetent teammate the exact number and volume of bags of dicks they can eat, that dingus Genji main might have deserved it, but he or she is still a victim, and you’re still being an asshole to them.
Meanwhile, bathing yourself in the glorious misteps of something like Mass Effect Andromeda is a reasonably healthier way to throttle that hate-boner, for a number of reasons. For one, content creators know full-well the risk they take in putting their work out there, and are usually prepared for at least some level of backlash. Second, being a passive consumer of such media, such as watching a highlight reel of ME:A’s awful facial animation, is much better for you than actively calling someone mean and hurtful things.
Therein lies my warning. As my circumstances and mental state got worse, so did my already-lacking social skills. If anger and catharsis-by-proxy are solid tools for dealing with your anguish, then use them; but be mindful of their cost. Putting on a fake smile and small-talking your way through your interactions is a horrible way to live, but the alternative is letting your problems become toxic to others around you.
That’s not to discourage reaching out to friends or family for help, but a central aspect of this post was the idea that you might not have such a network. It still applies to the randoms you meet online, though. It can do wonders to vent that bitterness and resentment; but do so in a safe, controlled manner that won’t cost you existing relationships or sour the day of someone you don’t know.
Such were my suggestions for coping with hopelessness. I can’t offer much in the way of finding new hope to actually cure the underlying problem, primarily because that depends immeasurably on everyone’s individual trials; but also because I haven’t gotten my own ducks in a row, yet. All I can do is share what works for me and… well… hope that you might benefit from it.
Stay safe out there.
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