Hanging out in the adoraburr meadow

I think I might be the sole target audience for this but

The Papas during Lobster Mini-Season

Primo

Designated boat driver

Really good sense of direction, helps a lot when it comes to keeping track of old hot spots

Can also cheat and just magic his way into figuring out where all the lobster are hiding. Don’t tell the regulars, they’ll be pissed

Enjoys singing along to the radio while his brothers do most of the actual catching

Goes out again when the rest have their fill to his own secret spots. Enjoys some peace and quiet, taking his time catching his limit. He refuses to tell his brothers where he goes and it pisses them off to no end lol

Secondo

Beach! Bum! Secondo! My! Beloved!

More of a Vegas guy but still LOVES him some ocean time, especially in The Keys. Viva La Conch Republic babyyyyyy!

Gets day drunk while he’s on the boat but then has ruthless efficiency in the water. Soon as he’s out again, the buzz comes back. No one has any idea how the fuck that works.

Is the one that makes sure they adhere to the legal limit. “I refuse to get our asses arrested and have the Ministry deal with that PR issue just because we got greedy with some sea roaches. I’m on thin ice as is, that would just be embarrassing.”

Puts the lobsters he catches in his own personal cooler. This also happens to be where he keeps his drinks. He doesn’t seem to mind so no one questions it.

Insists on listening to Jimmy Buffett when he’s in charge of the boat and at any other opportunity.

Terzo

Weirdly competitive about it, has this inherent need to be The Best at lobster catching. Probably the Middle Sibling Instinct kicking in.

Him and Secondo go head to head every year over who can get more over the mini-season. They’re about evenly matched skill-wise so it tends to go back and forth every year.

Will sometimes start arguments in the water over a catch

“That one was mine! I chased it out of the hole when your bald ass got in the way and stole it!” “I found that lobster fair and square and you know it, fuck off” “Right sure, and Nihil loves us. I hope you sunburn your skull, stronzo.”

There have been slap fights between two grown men in 4 feet of water.

Was the one to figure out that the lobster are calmer and taste better when you keep them on ice. It took. An embarrassing amount of time for them to figure that out. They started this tradition before Google, alright? Give them a break.

Likes to sing along to the radio as well, but makes up new lyrics when Secondo gets on his nerves.

Copia

New to this whole thing cause he was scared of getting in the water and having to pick the lobsters up by hand. Mostly just slept on the boat in years prior

Now that he’s Papa though the others made him participate with them.

He is. Very nervous. First time he scared a lobster out of a hole he somehow scared out a second that was faced the other way and it swam directly at his face, scaring the absolute shit out of him.

His snorkel keeps falling over his ear :(

Lost his net and his tickle stick in water with 4 feet of visibility, managed beyond all odds to find them again, then lost his looper in the process of catching something.

Somehow still managed to get the biggest lobster of the day. Like cartoonishly so. It was his big trophy. They cooked it for him for dinner as a reward for his first outing.

Nihil

Just here so the brothers can increase their legal limit.

He’s become one with the sea grass

Sleeping with the fishies

Don’t worry he’ll wake up when a crab tries to bite his ass

monday's child legacy challenge

judging by the influx of addams on the gallery lately, by now i'm sure ~everyone~ has seen the new WEDNESDAY series.. i loved seeing all the creations, be it households, builds or cc - but what i was inspired to do was create my first game challenge; it's not particularly inspiring and i'm unsure if it's doable at all, i suspect i'm mostly putting it on proverbial paper to direct this nursery rhyme somewhere concrete, since it insists on lingering in my mind

i know in the ocean of challenges there is a days-of-the-week challenge already but i don't think their similiar, feel free to check for yourself

i considered making GEN 1:MONDAY > GEN2:MONDAY'S-CHILD/TUESDAY and so on, to extend it to one more generation, but prefered to keep it faithful to it's origins instead

s o   w i t h o u t   f u r t h e r   a d o....

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RULES standart legacy rules apply; play in extreme if you'd like succession laws: gender - strict equality preferences and trait discovery: spin wheel for yes or no

NOTES this hasn't been play tested - yet ; so for now I sugest playing at the normal or long time span - change it with mccc if you'd like, the goal is to have fun, even tho it's a challenge i really have no concept of how doable it was designed to be since i usually drag out my sims lifes for pretty long

REQUIREMENTS Spa Day | Parenthood | Seasons | Island Living | Discover Uni | Snowy Escape | High School Years

SUGESTED MODS more traits in cas chingyu traits {100-traits, seasons-traits} & holiday tradition override {for said traits} kuttoe traits & PIZZA PREFERENCE :D {the pizza is just me missing favourite dishes} more odd jobs I use simrealist's SNB mod that overhauls the bill system but I've heard lot 51 also has some mods that bring more realism to services like plumbing & internet; I haven't tried them because I'm afraid they'd conflict I also love love love lumpinou's relationship and pregnancy overhaul, check it out !!

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GEN 1 | MONDAY "monday's child is fair of face" self-assured + family-oriented {chingyu's pretty trait if you have this mod} aspiration: soulmate reach level 7 in any career max out cooking skill + complete 2 collections at some point be a part of coffe fanatic OR health food nut lifestyle

GEN 2 | TUESDAY "tuesday's child is full of grace" proper + loyal max out manners + conflict resolution values close nit lifestyle {adhere to and maintain} maintain a good rep {if you have Get Famous}

GEN 3 | WEDNESDAY "wednesday's child is full of woe" gloomy + loner or socially awkward aspirtation: inner peace self-employed artist

GEN 4 | THURSDAY "thurday's child has far to go" perfectionist + overachiever complete 5 aspirations {1 in childhood, 1 as a teen, 1 as YA - must relate to uni, 2 after that - one of which must be big happy family OR successful lineage}

GEN 5 | FRIDAY "friday's child is loving and giving" good + romantic voluteering {5x if playing short life span, otherwise once per season} max out empathy value / achieve compassionate trait have {at least} 2 children, maintain a positive relationship with them

GEN 6 | SATURDAY "saturday's child works hard for a living" ambitious + materialistic aspiration: fortune {pick one} workaholic lifestyle {adhere to and maintain} achieve 3+ stars in odd jobs

GEN 7 | SUNDAY "and the child born on the sabbath day is bonny and blithe, good and gay" cheerful + non-commital people person lifestyle {adhere to and maintain} max out charisma skill + achieve level 5 in 5 creative skills {3 if playing short lifespan}

10 Ways a Triathlon Coach Can Enhance Your Triathlon Performance

Participating in a triathlon is a test of physical and mental endurance, requiring a balance of strength, stamina, and strategy. Whether you're a novice or a seasoned triathlete, the guidance of a triathlon coach can make a world of difference in your performance. In this article, we'll explore the invaluable ways a triathlon coach can help you excel in the sport of triathlon.

1. Tailored Training Plans

One of the primary benefits of hiring a triathlon coach is access to customized training plans. A coach will assess your current fitness level, goals, and schedule to create a training program specifically tailored to your needs. This individualized approach ensures that you train efficiently and effectively.

2. Technique Improvement

Triathlon involves three distinct disciplines: swimming, cycling, and running. A coach will analyze your technique in each discipline, identifying areas for improvement. From refining your swim strokes to optimizing your running form, these adjustments can lead to significant performance enhancements.

3. Goal Setting and Progress Tracking

Setting clear and achievable goals is essential for triathletes. A coach will work with you to establish short-term and long-term objectives, providing motivation and direction throughout your training journey. Regular progress assessments allow for adjustments to keep you on the path to success.

4. Mental Conditioning

Triathlons are not only physically demanding but mentally challenging as well. A coach can provide mental conditioning techniques to help you manage race-day anxiety, stay focused, and overcome mental hurdles during training and competition.

5. Nutrition Guidance

Nutrition plays a vital role in triathlon performance. A coach can advise you on proper pre-race fueling, hydration strategies, and post-race recovery nutrition. Optimal nutrition can boost your energy levels and reduce the risk of fatigue.

6. Race Strategy

Triathlon coaches possess in-depth knowledge of race strategies and tactics. They can help you develop a personalized race plan, including pacing, transitions, and decision-making during the event. A well-executed race strategy can lead to improved results.

7. Injury Prevention

Triathlon training can put strain on your body, increasing the risk of injuries. A coach can design training plans that prioritize injury prevention, including proper rest, recovery, and strength training exercises to enhance resilience and reduce injury risks.

8. Motivation and Accountability

Staying motivated during rigorous training can be challenging. A tri coach serves as your motivator and accountability partner, ensuring that you adhere to your training schedule, maintain consistency, and stay committed to your goals.

9. Equipment Guidance

Selecting the right gear and equipment is crucial in triathlon. A coach can offer advice on choosing the most suitable equipment for your budget and needs, from bikes and wetsuits to running shoes and accessories.

10. Performance Analysis

Coaches often employ advanced technology, such as heart rate monitors, power meters, and video analysis, to assess your performance. This data-driven approach allows for precise performance analysis, helping you identify areas that require improvement.

Conclusion

In the demanding world of triathlon, the guidance of a triathlon coach can make all the difference in achieving your performance goals. From tailored training plans to technique refinement, mental conditioning, and injury prevention, a coach provides invaluable support. Moreover, they keep you motivated, hold you accountable, and help you make informed decisions regarding equipment and nutrition.

Whether you're aiming for a personal best or striving to conquer your first triathlon, the expertise of a triathlon coach can be the catalyst for your success. With their guidance, you can unlock your full potential, elevate your performance, and embrace the thrill of triathlon racing. So, consider enlisting the assistance of a triathlon coach and embark on a journey toward triathlon excellence.

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Collaboration globally has grown to be less difficult due to this. Match participation is now lucrative. There are numerous gadgets in recreation that may be bought by the use of digital currency. Global competitions offer prizes well worth tens of thousands and thousands of dollars. Champions League and Europa League activities also are famous amongst gamers. In addition to the competitions, the Europa Conference is new. Is a completely famous model. A dream squad may be constructed from hundreds of gamers from around the arena. An entire Stadium permits you to position your stamp to your membership. There is a network wherein gamers can interact. Players which include Messi and Ronaldo may also be found in Heroes. Soccer legends can be present. A sizable quantity of recreation modes, each unmarried and multiplayer. The participant can play unmarried suits take part in competitions and substantiate himself in web-primarily based seasons. Inside the holiday mode, you could play the manager of a designated member or lead a solitary participant. On the off threat that we select out the process of a mentor, the recreation, other than gambling suits, will likewise allow us to ship gamers for preparing. Arranging actions and selecting techniques and the correct putting of the organization earlier than the match. There is also a community in which game enthusiasts can interact. Players which consist of Messi and Ronaldo will also be discovered in Heroes. Football legends may be present. A massive amount of pastime modes. The player can play single fits participate in competitions and substantiate himself in web-based totally seasons. The excursion mode, you can play the supervisor of a delegated member. On the off danger that we pick out the manner of a mentor, the pastime, aside from playing fits, will likewise permit us to deliver game enthusiasts for preparing. Arranging movements and deciding on strategies and an appropriate placing of the business enterprise in advance of the match. I know that EA Sports understands that fans are alarmed to find the new changes really outside the plastic that they have wrapped with the latest differentiation in their soccer game, both when they have data in doubt and in the modes most loved by the fanatics. FIFA 22 Crack establishment to play and appreciate as we grew and got more organized. That has changed these days is the wider and less complicated use of the internet, which has linked people starting with one side of the world and then accompanying them in a web novel. FIFA 22 Crack can experience all the thrills and exhilaration of an actual recreation gambling digital soccer. When gamers play video games, they may be frequently packed. A diver who broadcasts harm for the duration of talent execution can be responsible for a judgment. It is going past beauty manipulation. A range of bodily confrontations and remarkable tackles also can be observed in this match. Football video games are often developed. We prevail at reaching the pinnacle via competing in tournaments and suits. Data from the actual global is blanketed with inside the recreation, along. A diver who pronounces damage throughout expertise execution may be liable for a judgment. It goes beyond splendor manipulation. A variety of physical confrontations and terrific tackles may be discovered in this match. Football video games are frequently developed. We are successful at accomplishing the top through competing in tournaments and fits. Data from the real world is covered. We discovered out that this foundation changed into the key. There is an international network of internet receives admission to that allows people to connect. Security is now more to be had than ever in advance. Those days are prolonged gone. Internet accessibility has progressed exponentially. Globally has grown to be much less tough because of this. There are several devices in a pastime that can be offered the usage of virtual currency. Global competitions provide prizes properly well worth tens of hundreds and hundreds of dollars. Champions League and Europa League sports are also well-known among game enthusiasts. The Europa Conference is new. Is a totally well-known model. A dream squad can be made from loads of game enthusiasts from across the area. I will irrefutably hold it together for a sensible piece, certainly until the new year, to buy this set. You have to pay a different cost than the central game to see the total value of the game. They are not adding new parts to every new methodology. FIFA 22 Crack Latest, the improvement is in the one-on-one battles, with those obvious minutes winning matches. 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Uncover Loewe's Iconic Puzzle Bag Hawaii

This has been designed to go throughout the highest of the dupe handbag preserving all your belongings firmly in your bag. Crafted using top quality leather-based as the next best different to the calfskin of the branded objects, the leather ensures a long-lasting piece to resist all weather sorts, even within the depth of winter! https://phoenet.tw/loewe-bag.html This selection is the finest Loewe bag look a likes you will find on the internet using prime quality materials for long-lasting quality. The Loewe Puzzle Dupe Handbag is the perfect luxury to have this season providing the identical great style as the designer item for a fraction of the worth. In the image with the pretend vs real Loewe Puzzle bags above, we have pointed out how the pretend Loewe bag has its stitching all around the extra label at the incorrect thickness. To authenticate the mannequin you need to start by checking its cuboid form and the puzzle sample that is so iconic. Take a extra in-depth take a glance at the zipper and its chain, leather-based high quality and deal with shapes, stitching, and anagram brand. Don’t skip the label method as properly as the serial number step as you would possibly find some very important differences between the luggage. This Loewe Puzzle Bag Leather Medium, crafted in blue leather-based, features rolled top handle, exterior zip pocket and gold-tone hardware. Once the return request has been initiated, you will receive a pre-paid return label that you're requested to utilized when returning your parcel again to Dora Maar. Dora Maar isn't responsible for any items returned back outdoors of return coverage or make use of a unique return label. Additionally, Dora Maar isn't answerable for any parcels that don't seem as scanned by UPS. Please make sure your items are returned in unused condition and with all Dora Maar tags nonetheless attached. 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In truth, the pretend logo is that this thick as a result of it is match too deep contained in the leather, whereas the authentic bag has its emblem fit much less deep contained in the bag, and so, it looks thinner. In the image with the faux vs actual Loewe Puzzle luggage above, we have pointed out how the fake jacket has its engravings at the mistaken thickness.

6 Shopfitting Mistakes You Should Avoid

Do you want to build a business, renovate your current store, or relocate to a new commercial space? Congratulations! Whether you're selling apparel, food, products, recreational equipment, or even decorative items, opening or refurbishing a store is usually an exciting experience. But beware of the hazards that can cost you!

Here are six shop fittings pitfalls to avoid while opening or remodeling a store.

1.  The Shop Window Layout Isn't Making the Most of It

The best method to transmit the DNA of your business, attract passers-by, and persuade them to visit is to stage your vitrines and set up the best shop display equipment. Then, when visiting your store, your clients will come into touch with your store's brand image and structure, employing efficient displays.

You don't have to be a fantastic designer to build shop fittings that appeal to customers and entice them to make purchases!

Keep your target customers in mind, and learn from the industry's best practices or concepts from other company disciplines that jumped out to you for their uniqueness and efficacy. Finally, stimulate visitors' senses by grouping things with the help of your shopfitting suppliers that make sense together and paying particular attention to light and balance.

2.  Not dividing the sales floor into distinct areas and failing to develop a traffic plan.

Customers that go through a store value a sense of logic in their journey. For example, in an athletic accessories store, the shop fittings should make it easy to identify the shoe area from the camping area.

They leave the shoe section to go to the cashier? What a great venue to show off high-performance socks!

When developing your store, keep your consumers' wants and purchasing habits in mind and list the same to your shopfitting suppliers. The average buyer basket will increase, but questions about the store's orientation will diminish.

 3.  Failing to create a furniture placement plan and selecting the incorrect floor displays for your area of industry

Make a furniture per-use plan and research the best type of showcases and shop display equipment for the kind of business you intend to ensure consistency in your choice of floor displays.

4.  Not Evaluating Product Placement and Making a Detailed Plan for Each Item's Layout

Make a planogram to identify the best placement for every item in your business and adhere to it when physically arranging the products.

Displaying products effectively based on their demand and if they are seasonal or specialized items takes some forethought, but it pays off in the end.

5.  Fitting Rooms Do Not Provide the Necessary Comfort

You want your customers to feel good about themselves when purchasing your clothes. That is why they must have a happy impression when trying them on!

The layout of your store's fitting rooms should create a fluid fit, encouraging consumers to take their time and try on more garments with the assistance of a sales adviser. This can be one when you make sure to get the most suitable shop display equipment from your shopfitting suppliers.

Choose cabins with a full-length mirror and multiple hooks for hanging clothing. After all, who hasn't tried on clothes and divided them into "Yes," "No," and "Maybe" piles?

Remember to have chairs both inside and outside the fitting rooms. Your customers may not be alone, and you don't want their discomfort, or the suffering of their companions, to hasten the end of their visit to your store.

6.  Failure to Consider the Cashier's Strategic Positioning

The location of the cash register is another essential factor to consider when designing a shop. You must think about the strategy behind the counter's placement in the store, not only in terms of the customer's trip but also in the counter's numerous roles.

Aside from being the client's final stop at the point of purchase, the cash desk can also function as a reception desk. Before making a final selection on its placement, consider your plan.

Conclusion

It is not wise to leave shop fittings to chance. It entails significant strategic planning that will significantly impact your company's revenue. So consider it carefully, avoid the traps, and enlist the assistance of the best shopfitting professionals to help you develop a professional and unique layout that will highlight your merchandise, whatever it may be.

Spring Anime 2021: Embarrassment of Riches

So this current anime season absolutely stinks, which just makes the last one look even more impressive. Well, maybe not all of it...

Zombieland Saga Revenge

First off, you don't need to tell me that the following is a severe outlier opinion. We good? Ok. ZLSR is, in a word, subpar. I liked S1 back in the day, but it was already in the process of getting lazy towards the end. S2 continues this trend and is basically just another idol show. And as someone who actually does watch other idol shows I have to say that it's not a particularly good one of those either. The zombie gimmick has mostly stopped mattering and we're just doing what every idol show does, only with the odd occasional sight gag. The alleged subversive qualities mostly amount to a flashback for Yuugiri, which is admittedly the best part of the show but feels like it barely has anything to do with anything. Apart from that, it's a bunch of generic idol plots, rehashed character beats, shoddy attempts at twists (while not connecting to any setups from S1), and the obligatory "idols give us hope" ending, which is terribly hackneyed and flat out bad. Tae gets further memed into the ground, because of course she does. And there's stuff that was simply never good to begin with, like Kotarou and his comedy schtick, which gets truly insufferable now that there's no qualities to distract from it. It really makes me think that S1 wasn't even all that good to begin with and seems like an attempt to turn this surprise success into an easy money longrunner with no edge and no ambitions. "The idol show for people who don't watch idol shows" indeed, but not the way you mean it. 4/10

Bakuten

But not to dwell on the failures, with the second show we're already above the cut — barely. This one got my attention with its really impressive performance scenes early on and it totally sticks to that, which is even more impressive. But besides that? Well, this is by far the most predictable show in a season where I watched an unambitious Kiraralike and put ZLS on blast for having no ideas. The characters are a mixed bag, some are cool (Shida, Asawo), some are very annoying (Mashiro), but those are the supports. The main cast is extremely one-dimensional, which is fine until they try to heap a ton of pathos on their lead, which doesn't go well. But I guess execution matters, and Bakuten is slick enough to get by. Writing this down in stark daylight I feel like I overrated this show somewhat (I actually put it over the next one originally, which definitely doesn't hold up when thinking about it), but I was indeed mostly entertained. 6/10

Yakunara Mug Cup mo

Yeah. Of course Mug Cup definitely doesn't invent or subvert anything either, but it's a pretty good Kiraralike that's always entertaining to watch. Explaining the qualities of such a nothing genre is as difficult as ever, but it mostly comes down to me liking the characters and it having nothing to annoy me. It's shorter than normal, which is a plus for slim shows like this. And yeah, you can make an excessive amount of dick jokes with the clay fondling. That helps too. Looks are just fine, pleasant but nothing out of the ordinary. Comfy low-effort anime. 6/10

Vivy: Fluorite Eye's Song

This one is decent, but sadly still a major letdown. Because the first few episodes of Vivy were excellent and kicked ass, but then it became increasingly clear that the writing can't cash the checks the ideas wrote while the action starts running into severely diminishing returns. Vivy just keeps slowly getting worse and worse as it goes on, not by a huge amount each episode but by the end there's a pretty sizeable gulf between potential and result. Going into detail would probably be a little much for this venue because there's a lot, but from the top level view the issue is that while Vivy has good fundamental ideas and steals at the right places, it just isn't a smart show — it's schlock, and by the end, poorly thought out schlock that tries to smooth out every problem with liberal application of the big feels hammer and le epic twist at that. Yeah, couldn't tell that the Re:Zero dude was aboard here, for sure. That said, it still works pretty well as entertaining schlock that is not to be taken too seriously, and the characters are generally just very fun to watch even when they're doing stupid things. Still, I can't in good conscience rate this higher than Beatless, a show that looks like butt but properly executes on its ideas. 6/10

Super Cub

So this is 100% a Honda commercial, and I got really mad a Yuru Camp last season for being a blatant shill. Yet I'm feeling this, what gives? I think the main difference is that Super Cub is specifically a commercial for one product (and a very iconic product at that), while Yuru Camp is so all over the place that it ends up mostly a commercial for consumerism in general. And when Super Cub goes too hard on the product (which it does), it's at least pretty entertaining. That's something about Super Cub in general: It goes hard. Your regular Kiraralike this is not, because it's uncommonly slow, focused and moody - yes, it almost measures up to Yuru Camp at its best and demolishes it at its worst. Also, it's just extremely amusing to see sadblob Koguma grow a huge grizzly biker beard and become a badass outlaw dad to her goofy wife and cute daughter, all thanks to the power of afforable personal transportation. Needless to say, that can get unintentionally silly, but Super Cub has so much charm that it doesn't matter — it's great when it's good and still funny when it's not. 7/10

Shadows House

Shadows House turned up with a lot of potential, and I have to say it at least delivered on most of it. It has some problems; notably I'm not a fan of how the entire middle turned out to be a tournament arc of sorts that seems curiously inspired by Resident Evil memes, crest-shaped intentations and boulder punching included. I also think that this is a show that would be perfectly fine without explaining much, but I guess it is a shounen manga after all so we got dumped on eventually anyway. At least that came late - close relative Promised Neverland didn't show that much restraint. Shadows House is generally well written though, with great characters, interesting interactions and a great hook. But what really makes it memorable is that it's exceptionally good at the cute/creepy contrast, something that is often tried but rarely works as well as here, with great character designs and very appropriate production. I hope this gets a sequel, because it seems like it's just getting started. 7/10

SSSS.Dynazenon

Coming in with a fondness for Gridman, Dynazenon didn't have to do much to convince me. The surprise though is that it's not a rehash even if it's basically the same show, a character drama where occasionally huge and goofy fights break out. Dynazenon is Gridman done better, and the interesting part is how it accomplishes this - mainly by being far more conventional. I do appreciate that Gridman went for something weird and almost experimental, but that only really paid off towards the end while most of the show was a distraction/holding pattern. It just didn't feel like there was enough material for a full series there, more like a movie maybe, if even that. Dynazenon fixes this by just being a TV show, with an actual cast of characters that each have their own arc. And by spreading the material this way, Dynazenon ends up having a lot more nuance than its intensely focused predecessor, while having the same themes and not actually being any deeper. In a way, Gridman ends up looking like the spinoff in retrospect, while Dynazenon is the full package. 8/10

Thunderbolt Fantasy S3

So how good was this season? So good that Thunderbolt Fantasy doesn't end up at the top, that's how. And all the elements that made Tbolt such a sure thing are still there, big hammy puppets doing stunts and scheming never gets old. However, I do have to note that at this point, the writing appears to have gotten too comfortable. I don't expect it to ever top the amazing S1 ending, but at this point it's like Tbolt has stopped trying to deliver on endings at all and seems in the process of retooling itself into a longrunner instead. Barely anything gets resolved in S3 (the climax is that the climax of S2 is resolved again, for good this time... maybe), and everything else is just setting up plotpoints for the next season. Tbolt is truly lucky that it doesn't actually need to resolve anything to be a great time, but at this point I have to say that I'd appreciate it if they wrapped it up with S4. 8/10

Nomad: Megalobox 2

Speaking of sequels to shows I liked, Nomad doesn't so much improve upon its predecessor but steamrolls right over it. This is a tall order, since Megalobox was surprisingly good for a sports shounen and had a real nice, heartwarming ending that Nomad instantly negates for purposes of drama and everyone being extremely miserable. That sounds like a pretty terrible idea - and it would be, if Nomad wasn't as excellent as it is. To call it not the same show would be an understatement, because it's a true sequel, not just the same characters doing their thing some more, or new characters doing the same thing as the old ones did. Indeed my biggest problem with Megalobox was that it still closely adhered to its genre template and was very predictable; Nomad fixes this issue thoroughly. Nomad is about questioning what being a hotblooded shounen protagonist eventually leads you to, and how to fix everything you screwed up by being one. You could call it a deconstruction, but that term has been so abused for cynical, edgy "thing you like actually sucks" takes that I feel like it doesn't really fit here. Nomad isn't cynical at all, it's just a character drama about some boxers past their prime, and it being a sequel to a show that is indeed rather formulaic just enhances the experience. My biggest issue with it was that I really like what they did with Joe in this story, so the big focus on Mac's backstory felt like a distraction for a long time. But in the end that turned out to be absolutely necessary to make the ending work. The ending's just great, by the way, and I shall say not more about it. 9/10

Odd Taxi

Yeah boy, here's the show that has apparently become somewhat of a "greatest show you didn't watch" meme, which I can feel smug about because I don't need YouTubers to tell me what's good and followed this from day one. Anyway, Odd Taxi is indeed great, the greatest show in a few years even. What starts out as seemingly a relaxed hangout show in the vein of Midnight Diners quickly turns into a psychological murder mystery while never losing its quirky humor. The character writing is outstanding, with even small bit players being on a level that the average anime wishes it could have for leads. And the rollout of the mystery is exemplary, with answers given and new questions raised every episode with a satisfying and logical payoff in the end. This is also the rare anime that has rock solid production from the first to the last second; it's never really flashy but excellently done and highly consistent nonetheless. And the music just owns. I have a few complaints, mainly that there's a few logical weaknesses in the story (which wouldn't even register in a lesser show, but sticks out here since the rest is so immaculately constructed) and that the ending overextends on the emotions when the rest of the show is so reserved and dry in comparison. But those are only the reasons why I didn't give it perfect marks, and I almost did that anyway. 9/10

Tri-C business program elevates little companies to new levels of success

Solon clothes developer and business owner Rose Corrick entered into the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program at Cuyahoga Community College two years ago with a model for development she thought would raise earnings for her handmade artisan clothing line. As usually takes place in the tiny service realm, nevertheless, things didn't work out exactly as planned. Corrick's original principle for an on-line retail service that used a different name from her existing Art of Cloth line was eventually integrated right into the main firm, a relocation that led to a 23 percent uptick in sales. Corrick had to modify her strategy, it was 10,000 Small Businesses at Tri-C that educated her the importance of entrepreneurial versatility, she keeps in mind. "I discovered to believe, examine, evaluate as well as make the adjustments that set us on a changed training course for growth," she claims. "I wound up making use of all the devices I would certainly acquired." The Tri-C-affiliated campaign, which shepherds little business nationwide through workshops, individually suggestions, networking, funding and also mentoring, has been elevating participants to new degrees of success considering that its 2012 launch, supporters claim. The free program has actually graduated 334 companies since its beginning, standing for sectors including production, innovation, building and construction, health care as well as friendliness. These companies presently employ more than 4,500 individuals and have actually combined incomes in unwanted of $300 million. Breaking down these numbers even more, 63 percent of grads have experienced profits growth, with one more 47 percent including work because completing the 11-week program designed to help company owner foster economic chances, says Joe Gross, supervisor of Tri-C's Goldman Sachs initiative. These earnings as well as job development numbers contrast favorably with nationwide averages, program backers claim. According to the National Small Business Association, 45 percent of like-sized companies nationally added earnings and another 22 percent added tasks over the last 12 months. " The impact has been rather dramatic," says Gross. "We have a 99 percent program conclusion price in Cleveland, so these are entrepreneur who are seeing the program as a major benefit." Jobs occurring from the effort are straightening with Northeast Ohio's sector requirements, authorities state. Proficient production placements, programmers, web developers as well as even more are being counted into the regional work rankings. " The key point appearing of this is including tasks and growing companies," claims William Gary, executive vice president of Tri-C's Workforce as well as Economic Development Division (WEDD), which runs the program on part of the college.

Organisations experiencing impact

Via the venture, business-minded participants are fast-tracked via an administration educational program developed by Babson College, a top-ranked school for business education. Participants learn just how to handle cash as well as employees while likewise gleaning critical expertise concerning marketing and management from Goldman Sachs' professionals. Martina Moore is CEO of Moore Counseling & Mediation Services, Inc., an outpatient as well as mental health therapy center she cofounded with her hubby 15 years ago. Moore became interested in 10,000 Small Business in very early 2013 upon acknowledging the need to develop her duty within the company. " We began talking (with program administrators), as well as I understood I was running as a worker and not a proprietor," Moore claims. "I remained in the trenches doing everyday job rather than developing and also maintaining." The seasoned behavior wellness care executive joined 10,000 Small Businesses during its 2nd "associate" in 2013. Adhering to the program's verdict, Moore "terminated" herself as professional supervisor and also employed another person to load the setting. She also spent 3 days at the workplace as opposed to five, investing her off-site time networking, hunting down brand-new agreements, and immersing herself in balancing the company books. The endgame of this supervisory change was 75 percent growth in staff, and a budget plan that increased from about $350,000 every year to $2.2. million. The enhanced dollar number has actually allowed Moore to supply indigent look after clients in addition to open 4 extra places, including 2 in Greater Cleveland. A pleased negative effects of 10,000 Small Business has actually been utilizing friend associates as company resources. Moore got an accounting professional and an attorney via the program's ranks.

I rewrote the most infamous Transformers comic of all time.

I wanna give fair warning here. See, when I started working on this comic, I wasn’t really expecting it to turn out quite as dark as it did, and I suspect neither are you. After all, this is The Beast Within, right? The story where Grimlock goes crazy and talks in Comic Sans? How bad can things get? It turns out that - with just a few decisions made in poor taste - the answer is “very”, to the point where I feel the need to stick some kinda content warning at the top of this post. Unfortunately, I also feel like I’ve got a responsibility to the story, and there’s no way for me to do so without ruining it, so this is the best you’re gonna get.

This isn’t the first time I’ve made a comic like this. All the way back in 2016, I made “its christmas... so what??”, a kinda-bad re-lettering of a four-page ‘80s Marvel comic called “The Night the Transformers Saved Christmas”. I wasn’t too happy with the result, so half a year later I tried again - producing “PASS”, a re-lettered version of an obscure six-page UK-exclusive Marvel comic originally titled “Peace”.

“The Beast Within (My Pants)” is quite a different, uh, beast.

Each of the three comics I’ve produced was intended to be the last of its kind - standalone, yet fitting into the same overarching continuity. You can read any one of them alone, or you can read all of them in the order I made them. They’re individually available as albums on Imgur at the following links:

“its christmas... so what??”

“PASS”

“The Beast Within (My Pants)”

Alternatively, you can download the whole set as .cbz files - renamed .zip archives of images which you can open with a standard comic book reader.

It’s not too late to turn back.

Still with me? All caught up? Good. You’re probably wondering what the hell I was thinking...

I. I Have Summoned You Here For A Reason

Our story begins all the way back in 2004. The UK company Metrodome, looking to spice up their DVD box-set releases of the original ‘80s The Transformers cartoon, hired some local talent in the form of Mr. Jamieson (owner of a then-notable fansite) to write up some bonus features. They also commissioned him to write a mini-comic to be packed in with the set - with art by Mr. Gibson, a self-proclaimed fan since childhood with seemingly no other ties to the franchise.

The comic wound up being published in two parts (the second being subtitled “Consequences”) across the “Season 2 Part 2″ and “Seasons 3 and 4″ box sets. As a kid, I actually owned the latter of those box sets, and would watch it almost religiously - to what I can only assume must’ve been great annoyance from my poor parents - but I have no memory of it including a comic of any kind. Maybe it did, but it got separated at some point, and is lying around in some forgotten folder. A damn shame, that is. No, seriously.

I’m sure some record of the fan response at the time exists out there, in the doldrums of one of the many hard-to-search often-defunct forums which existed back then. I can’t really be bothered looking for it, sorry. You’ll have to content yourself with this TFWiki talk page for “The Beast Within” from mid-2007, which speaks of “Consequences” in hushed tones - as though it is a fabled artifact, prophesied to bring about Armageddon.

Another record - this one from 2009 - comes in the form of an eight-page TFW2005 thread ominously titled “Anyone afraid of the Dinobot combiner?” If you’re reading this commentary, you’re already strapped in for the long run; I recommend reading the thread in full. Well, okay, I don’t: it made me wince throughout, and I’ll be explaining the salient bits here, so there’s really no point subjecting yourself to it.

User “Razorrider”, after reading the TFWiki article on the Beast, opened the thread, noting “I don’t feel afraid of him myself.” The reactions soon started to pour in - some agreeing that the design was in fact “awesome”, others describing it as “hideous”.

Just going off my own personal opinion here, I think it’s fair to say that effectively nobody on the first page of the thread had any idea what they were talking about - and the pages that follow fared little better.

I think the main issue stemmed from the fact that a lot of those users didn’t think to explain the metrics by which they judged a “good” design (or, indeed, a “bad” story). When one person says “I think Optimus Prime has a good design”, they might just mean “I think he looks cool”, or they might mean “I think his proportions and colours give him a heroic stature which reflects his personality”. In that sense, a “good design” is one that communicates aspects of a character visually, even if it’s ugly. The Beast is hideous, yes, misshapen, yes, and it looks like the result of a teleportation accident, fine - but those are all intentional design decisions that perfectly reflect the nature of the character. In the foreword to the first part, Mr. Gibson notes the following (you’ll have to imagine that it’s written in Comic Sans for yourself):

Creating ‘The Beast’ was probably the most interesting aspect of the project. I wanted him to be a grotesque, twisted character that contained the design elements of the Dinobots he is created from.

People proclaim that the Beast “should never have existed” - a line from the comic’s narration, note - but somehow fail to realise that this is the comic’s own intent.

(Compare the Beast’s design to that posted by one user on the second page of the thread, which - minus an admittedly-inspired Triceratops-fist - just looks like an upscaled version of Grimlock.)

Okay, the alarm bells should be ringing in your head now. This is all starting to sound disturbingly like I’m some sort of The Beast Within apologist, isn’t it? How slippery is the slope that leads from “the Beast is a good design” to “The Beast Within is a good comic?” Have the hours spent poring over this thing in MS Paint turned my brain to mush, capable of only vague all-caps-Comic-Sans-penned ponderings?

...Well, yes, but- look, just stick with me!

The most accurate recurring statement in the thread - though perhaps not in the way it is intended - is that The Beast Within reads like a work of “fanfiction”. See, Transformers is a franchise with an ever-growing history, and many of those who work on it now have been lifelong fans themselves. This is true of many franchises which have stumbled into the new millennium, finding themselves seemingly unable to die. We live in an age of fanfiction - yet some fanfictions are fanfiction-ier than others.

When compared to the likes of Star Wars and Star Trek and Marvel’s comics, one sees a marked difference in Transformers. Throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s, every story Hasbro put out seemed to fit vaguely into a single guiding narrative - each distinct strand of their multimedia barrage falling into contradiction with one another, yet still seeking to adapt some underlying premise. The 2001 series Robots in Disguise - in the West at least - saw a complete departure from that narrative. The ramifications of that strange borderline-afterthought cartoon cannot be understated, yet in retrospect feel like they’ve been a part of the franchise for as long as anyone can remember.

Almost every year since, Hasbro has effectively wiped the slate clean. Each new series tries to be its own thing. Continuity between series - if it exists - is understated, ignored, or overwritten. To date, this is still something that confuses us geeks; so used are we to the mired pits that are the canons of Star Wars and its ilk. This can be frustrating - there are only so many times one can retread the same story - but so too has this rare cycle allowed authors to really explore the concepts and themes presented by the premise of “car robots” to a level of depth which I believe is simply unattainable in franchises which adhere stringently to a single narrative.

That’s the bright side.

In practise, many Transformers stories have become increasingly myopic - existing only in service of themselves, or (more often) in service of older (better?) stories. The single most influential of these stories is almost certainly 1986′s The Transformers: The Movie, and it’s that influence which is felt most strongly in The Beast Within.

Of the countless insights offered by Terry van Feleday - if you don’t know who that is, don’t worry, I’ll explain later - I find that this one rings most true:

When Optimus Prime du jour mouths off “One shall stand, one shall fall” for the twentieth time, there is simply no longer that understanding that he will not be the one who stands.

Where so many modern Transformers stories are misguided recreations of the animated movie, The Beast Within is a reaction to it. But we’ll get to that. First, let’s talk a little about the story’s artwork.

Mr. Gibson himself, I believe, deserves almost none of the criticism he’s received over the years for his work on this comic. Though his layouts are occasionally cluttered, and he does seem to have been trying a little too hard to emulate the style of Pat Lee (the man behind Dreamwave Productions; license holder for Transformers comics at the time) in the first part, his panels have a strong sense of energy and tone.

Though he didn’t exactly get to explore a broad range of emotions over the course of the comic, he managed to keep the characters expressive - always a challenge, when dealing with visors and mouthplates - and, crucially for a cast of this size, on-model. Look at the fury on Razorclaw’s face! The way Prime’s fist flies out of the panel! Menasor, torn in two! Predaking’s sundered legs! The mishmash of heads inside the Beast! The sickly colours of the second half! While it lacks the practised ease seen from some fans-turned-creators on more recent books, it’s still impressive work.

Regardless, Mr. Gibson’s first outing with Transformers proved to be his last. He didn’t end up getting paid work from Dreamwave Productions as he’d perhaps hoped (though in retrospect, neither did most of the people who illustrated for that company, so that was probably for the best). There’s no mention of The Beast Within on his personal website, which bills him as a “children’s picture book illustrator”, amongst other things. To put it simply, the guy’s always been a talented illustrator, and his style’s come a long way since this comic - the portfolio work on his website is very impressive.

(On a whim, I went back to late 2004 on the internet archive, and did in fact find the comic’s first spread buried at the back end of his portfolio. The entire website is a product of the early-2000s - there’s a link labelled “Go to Flash site” in the sidebar, though the page it takes you to sadly seems to have been lost to time. It all seems like it was borne of another age entirely.)

Anyway, let’s get back to that TFW2005 thread. The thing that makes it particularly notable is that, on the fourth page, Mr. Jamieson himself wades in to try and set the record straight. It goes about as well as you’d expect.

For a lot of people, I think, the idea of interacting with an author might seem strange. They’re aware of J.K. Rowling’s online antics, and are becoming increasingly comfortable with celebrity interactions on Twitter, sure. But there’s a difference between those kinds of interactions and the kind that take place on forums or in chatrooms - places where everyone’s on a level playing field. I come from those corners of the internet, and am lucky enough to have had conversations with lots of people who’ve made things I like, and have seen almost the full range of approaches those people take when dealing with their audiences. It’s safe to say that Mr. Jamieson’s approach in that decade-old thread is just about the worse one there is: over the course of just five posts, he smugly lashed out at the people in the thread, whipping them into a fervour that lasted for three more pages after his departure.

Regardless of whether or not Mr. Jamieson was correct - in the attacks he levelled at the other users, in the defence he offered for his work - there can be no question that this kind of behaviour is grossly inappropriate.

(Whether it is more or less appropriate than digging up old threads and archived web pages in an attempt to justify a bastardisation of a much-maligned comic book remains to be seen, I suppose.)

The key point that Mr. Jamieson kept returning to is that he sought to avoid the dreaded “info dump” (a hallmark of early Transformers stories), and didn’t want his readers to be “spoon fed”. A recurring criticism of the story is that it seems to begin halfway through, with little explanation for what’s going on - but I, like Mr. Jamieson, don’t think that complaint holds water. The Beast Within begins “in medias res” because we already have the context: eighty issues of a comic, ninety-eight episodes of a cartoon, and - crucially - a movie. Everyone knows the story of the Transformers, because the story of the Transformers - ironically enough - never really changes. “Is it ever really over, Jetfire?”

(That’s the last line of the original version of The Beast Within, by the way. I had to add the comma in myself.)

Like the impact of Robots in Disguise, the impact of The Transformers: The Movie is kinda hard to see unless you were there at the time - and I wasn’t - but in 1986, it did something which was profoundly shocking to thousands of children: it introduced them to death.

That’s about all I’m going to say about the movie itself, because much more experienced critics than me have already mined it for every ounce of subtext. I’ve already quoted the work of Terry van Feleday, who did some excellent scene-by-scene analysis of the film in a thread all the way back in 2010 - and I’ll come back to her writings a few times in this post. This very year, sorta-famous YouTuber hbomberguy released his own long-form take on the movie - what I find interesting when comparing the two interpretations is that van Feleday struggles to find much merit in the movie outside of its opening, while hbomberguy employs a reading that allows him to be much more optimistic and charitable even towards the end of the movie.

In a way, I think Mr. Jamieson had an intuitive subconscious understanding of the subtext which both of those critics later brought to light, an understanding which directly informed the premise of The Beast Within. In the same way one can read the monster planet Unicron as a physical manifestation of death, so too can one view the Beast - and Mr. Jamieson (almost certainly unconsciously) posits that, although death does not belong in a children’s cartoon, it is an inevitability that all children must eventually face. It is the dark spectre that lurks beneath the surface of every childish thing made by an adult.

An author places some of themselves in a book - but the reader withdraws something of their own perception as well. I wondered what I might see in the book: a child believes a lie because they know no better; a grown adult sees the lie because it fails to line up with experience. In this way, a child’s story could be so many different experiences. With enough subtext, a thing made for a child becomes an entirely different world to an adult. [...] There’s no telling when subtext will defeat the facade of a thing.

(I’ll tell you what that quote’s from later.)

I wonder, perhaps, if the endless swathes of edgy reimaginings of children’s stories are something of a mass outcry from those who grew up being told - every Saturday morning - that when people got blown apart, they’d be put back together by the next week’s end. What was it like for those children, in December of ‘86, to learn that some people could never be rebuilt?

II. It Pleases Me To Be The First

It occurs to me that I never did really do a commentary on “its christmas... so what??”, although I did talk about it a little in the commentary for “PASS”. Its title is a reference to the famous (well, you know what I mean) cover of “Stargazing” (issue #145 of the original UK run), which featured a banner reading “IT’S CHRISTMAS!” over an image of Starscream, arms out, yelling “SO WHAT?”

(Side note: at first I thought that I hadn’t read that particular story, but it occurs to me that as a kid I used to borrow a lot of Titan Books’ reprints from my local library - and I do in fact have distinct memories of reading Transformers: Second Generation, which did collect “Stargazing” amongst other Christmas stories - so I guess I probably did read it, even if I don’t remember doing so.)

The Women’s Day comic is something of a curio, as explained in this excellent article (which reprints the comic - with its original text - in full). It’s basically the only US strip which was published outside of the eighty issues of the run proper. This rare, standalone nature is something I have sought across every re-lettering I’ve done - from the UK annual-exclusive not-by-the-usual-author set-in-the-future “Peace” to the UK DVD-box-set-exclusive set-in-an-ambiguous-cartoon-inspired-continuity The Beast Within. These works feel like they’ve been lost to time - and corrupting them feels like unearthing buried treasure (and smearing it in turds). But I’ll get to that.

Back to “its christmas”. As I explained last time, I just went through the comic panel-by-panel and changed stuff to whatever I thought would be funny. I didn’t edit the two-line introductory blurb (which ended up informing the backstory detailed in the new set of AtoZ profiles). I barely paid attention to established portrayals of the characters beyond Soundwave’s association with music. I had no large-scale plans.

There’s a lazy (and poorly-conceived) gag where the little girl calls Bumblebee “gay” (also note that at the time, I misinterpreted the art in the third panel of the third page - I thought it was the girl speaking, when in fact it was her mother - leading to some erroneous dialogue), which in retrospect feels like a less-drawn-out version of the excruciating opening scene from Freddery McMahon’s Combiner Wars abridged special. That spoof somehow manages to be less funny than its source material, and I sometimes think that the same holds for my own creations.

Still, that’s not to say that “its christmas” doesn’t do anything that I like. I’ll admit that lines like “lol without mustard christmas will be CANCEL suck it nerds”, “toot toot here come some flutes”, and “help me drag it to the hospital” still kinda make me laugh. I like the way Bumblebee drowns out the little girl’s insults by tooting loudly at her. The final panels - wherein the humans steal Bumblebee’s blood as the other Transformers watch impassively - have an offbeat intensity to them, and when it came to writing Bumblebee’s AtoZ profile it was those which I chose to call back to.

If I had to sum up “its christmas” in a single word, I’d pick “childish”. The jokes, the characters themselves, the entire concept behind the comic - all feel kinda immature, and that was kinda by design. Summer Meme Sundae was a terrible piece of work, but - if I had to ascribe a theme to it - that theme would be growing up; realising that you’re running out of summer holidays. “PASS” and “The Beast Within (My Pants)” kept that atmosphere, but became increasingly cynical and obscene. That was just the natural direction they had to go in.

III. Every Place Reminds You Of Some Place Else

I’ve long had an idle fascination with abridged series, and have toyed with the thought of making an abridged series of my own. Most notably, I’ve long fancied the idea of abridging Machinima’s Prime Wars Trilogy of Transformers cartoons. Here’s an extract from a message I posted in Allspark Chat (the Discord server associated with the Allspark Forums):

I'd probably try and keep Megatron mostly the same as he is in the show as it is. Optimus'd be kinda murderous - you can tell he can't wait for Rodimus and the rest of the Council to kick the bucket so he can retake unilateral control over Cybertron. I'd maybe try to go for something of a more sympathetic Starscream - he wouldn't actually have any plan, he just has Cybertron's interests at heart and ends up trying to use the Enigma solely to rid the world of Megatron and Optimus forever. Windblade'd maybe be trying to force some hero's journey stuff - picking fights with progressively bigger opponents in a misguided attempt to prove her narrative worth

As pitches go, it’s not much. It doesn’t help that, as I previously mentioned, Freddery McMahon himself - pretty much the only name in Transformers abridging - has already tackled the series; his style of parody isn’t really to my taste, but his production value is fairly impressive and would largely overshadow any improvements I made on a script level. I feel like the Prime Wars Trilogy has potential, because it’s a fascinating piece of media, but I find myself unable to answer the question of how to parody something that already feels so much like self-parody. Sound familiar?

By the time the last entry in that series - Power of the Primes - was wrapping up, I'd been posting semi-frequently in the Allspark’s threads with a borderline-apologetic tone. Takes included:

The emptiness of Cybertron lends it a Beast Machines-esque tone

The Mistress of Flame’s death is cathartic

You can see right through the script

I want to get off Machinima’s wild ride

Wow, Windblade sure screams a lot, doesn’t she

The finale of Titans Return is good, actually

Hearing Megatron say “piss me off” is an unpleasant surprise

Hey, this soundtrack’s pretty good

Wait, no it’s not, but Galvatron’s implied reversion to Megatron is

Narrative emergence gives rise to Buddhist allegories in TFTM

Grimlock acts like his cartoon self - but only around friends

Okay, for realsies, the soundtrack’s good now

They’re right to kill Sludge; he’s the least toyetic Dinobot

I’d probably describe a lot of what I saw in the Prime Wars Trilogy as a kind of narrative pareidolia - only instead of seeing faces in inanimate objects, I was seeing value and meaning in an indefensible web series.

The problem with abridged series is that they require a ridiculous amount of effort. You need to be a good writer in the traditional sense, but you need to be able to work around the visual material available - you’re gonna have to edit everything yourself, you’re probably gonna need to do custom animation, and you’re certainly gonna need to wrangle a cast of voice actors. All of that for ten minutes of animation that’s probably gonna get taken off YouTube within ten minutes of upload. It’s just not feasible - and yet there’s part of me that loves the idea: commentary and content, all rolled into one.

To pretend that it was Combiner Wars that led me to create “The Beast Within (My Pants)” is a little misleading, however. The real answer - I’m sorry to say - has more to do with ponies.

See, every now and again I get very acute nostalgia for My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, which was perhaps my first brush with fandom - or at least, proper fandom. It’s heard to measure these things, y’know? Anyway, when that happens, I realise that I don’t really want to sit and watch a cartoon for little girls, so I usually just listen to some fan-made music or - as was the case last time - rewatch one of the abridged series based on the show. I use the word “series” here in plural because there were in fact two (well, two that matter): Friendship is Witchcraft and The Mentally Advanced Series. There’s long been quiet debate over which of the two is the (soundwave) superior series, and I’ve historically believed that they’re (buy some) apples and oranges. The latter is a more thoughtful parody of the source material, while the former is more polished and standalone.

However, after blitzing through Friendship is Witchcraft once more in its entirety over the course of a couple of days, something about it clicked for me - a bigger-picture thesis - and I realised that it had much more to say about its source material than I (or, well, most people) had given it credit for. It was at that moment that I felt the awful urge to create a My Little Pony fanwork of my own.

(The quote I used earlier, about subtext in children’s stories, was spoken by Princess Celestia in Rainbow Dash Presents: The Star in Yellow, a Mentally Advanced Series special inspired by a fanfiction which, fittingly enough, was written by Matt Marshall (AKA Blueshift/blue/Yartek/RockLordsRock), who was also the man behind the infamous “JaAm” relettering which effectively inspired all of these projects of mine. It’s like poetry.)

As we’ve already established, making a fancy-schmancy animation was out of the question - but a crudely-edited-in-MS-Paint comic was the next best thing, clearly. I started glancing through IDW Publishing’s official My Little Pony comics - having purchased a few in a Humble Bundle many years ago - but, aside from a couple of promising stories, quickly realised I didn’t have much hope. The comics are just, to put it frankly, not as good or as interesting as the show, and the fact that I’d need to adapt at least two issues at once (over forty pages) to tell any complete story made doing so an unappetising prospect. Furthermore, IDW’s comics are still very much in print, and (as the abridged series show) any such parody would stand on shaky legal ground.

Seeing as I wasn’t about to delve into the dark realm of prose any time soon, and the idea of messing with some other fan’s work rubbed me the wrong way, I decided to give up on my equine dreams and instead turned back to more familiar territory. I glanced over the list of old Transformers Marvel comics, but nothing like those I’d previously relettered stood out to me. I perused the short stories included in Dreamwave’s 20th Anniversary Transformers Summer Special. I even looked into some Fun Publications stuff. Nothing sparked my interest.

Perhaps my most promising lead was “An Arcee Sort of Day”, a vaguely-maligned (as in, “meh”) three-page standalone comic released mere months ago by IDW as part of an anthology - but the poor resolution of the available scan (the comic had been released in its entirety as part of the free preview for the anthology) meant that editing it would be a nightmare, and there was very little in the way of dialogue for me to mess with besides. More than that, the idea of directly mocking a comic from a compilation designed to showcase female creators (particularly one featuring Arcee, who’s been a controversial character in recent years) struck me as tasteless in the extreme. If only I had an easier target!

Oh wait, I did.

IV. Let The Slaughter Begin

If I actually ever read both parts of The Beast Within before starting work on this project, I don’t remember doing so. I do remember reading the Beast’s TFWiki page when I was much younger, and remember feeling like the wiki’s take on the concept seemed disproportionately harsh. To be honest, it was quite vindicating to read the source material and discover that I still agreed with my younger self’s assessment - the problems with the story are not on a conceptual level, but in the execution.

I barely gave myself time to digest the story before diving in and working out how exactly I could mess it up. I knew from my previous comics that the Autobots would all be unrepentant shitheads, so the natural choice was to portray the Decepticons as favourably as possible. Where the Autobots are callous, poorly-spoken, stupid, and divided, the Decepticons would be caring, articulate, intelligent, and united. In the story’s context, these traits would be weaknesses: remember, only the Beast has the killing instinct needed for decisive victory in this endless children’s story. I also knew that everybody in the story would hate Grimlock, and that - unlike with Roadbuster in “PASS” - they’d be right to do so.

That was pretty much the extent of my planning. I gathered up all the pages and started clearing out the text from the speech bubbles. Already, I had something of a problem: the use of the infamous Comic Sans MS font in the first part of The Beast Within was one of its most iconic features, and I wanted to retain that, but my own previous reletterings had canonically established Times New Roman as the “voice” of the Autobots. In fact, as far as those older comics were concerned, Times New Roman was the voice not just of the whole Cybertronian race, but also of the narrator.

The only lines which used a different font were those where I’d chosen to retain the comic’s original lettering, and with Roadbuster’s dialogue. It’s hard to articulate what exactly the joke with Roadbuster was - he seemed like the odd-one-out in the opening panels of the story, so I ran with that by having him be persistently ostracised by the other Autobots. The twist, as you find out when he finally speaks, is that he seems to be the only Autobot who’s unambiguously a good person; the rest bully him for effectively no reason.

In the commentary for “PASS” I released earlier this year, I explicitly ask:

If these are the Autobots… then what were the Decepticons like?

My own gut feeling was, I think, that they were people like Roadbuster - genuinely good individuals who never wanted a fight - and so for this comic I knew I had to give them Roadbuster’s Arial voice. I also knew that I’d have to keep the Autobots’ Times New Roman voice for the most part. The only question, then, was what to do about Grimlock, the combiners, Jetfire, and the narration.

(It’s worth noting that Soundwave and Triton were both Decepticons too, yet they both spoke in Times New Roman. The Doylist reason for this is simply that, at the time, I was happy to have everyone share a voice. In Triton’s case, the Watsonian reason is that he’s trying to mimic the Autobots’ “accent” to better fit in. If I had to make up a reason for Soundwave, I’d say that he’s only recently defected from the Autobots, as a reference to van Feleday’s insane Soundwave-as-an-ex-prisoner-of-war theory. Had Soundwave had a speaking role in the comic, I’m sure I would’ve explored that backstory in his AtoZ profile - but alas, it wasn’t to be.)

In fact, there was initially some ambiguity over who the comic’s narrator would be - if I used Times New Roman, would I have to keep the voice of the same narrator as in the previous two comics? In the end, I decided to draw from my source material: the on-panel narration would be Grimlock’s inner monologue, rendered in full Comic Sans glory, while the "Interlude” would employ a more omniscient third-person voice. That third-person voice is, I think, distinct from the narrator of the previous comics, and feels like a more solemn version of the narrator of the AtoZ profiles I released alongside the commentary for “PASS” (or, indeed, the latest batch included here). Remember, I wrote the first two comics years before all of this recent material. More on the text-only pages later.

When he speaks out loud, Grimlock uses the regular Times New Roman of the other Autobots. In fact, the only dialogue which uses Comic Sans is that of the Beast, which I view as the true externalisation of Grimlock’s feelings. You can also view it as the “real world” (as depicted in the text-only pages) leaking through into the comic’s reality, in much the same way that an aware-of-death adult perspective seeps through into a seemingly-innocent children’s cartoon. The other combiners simply use a slightly bigger font than the individual Decepticons. Oh, and all of the combiners use red text.

In the original toyline, Jetfire was something of an odd-one-out, as he was really a Macross “VF-1S Super Valkyrie” toy licensed by Hasbro from Bandai (who had in turn purchased the molds from the recently-bankrupted Takatoku toys). Both Whirl and Roadbuster have similar origins. I was under no obligation to do anything special with Jetfire’s dialogue, but because of the way he’s introduced in the comic - and as a nod to his shared real-world history with Roadbuster - it felt right to give him his own voice. Though he still uses Times New Roman, the font is scaled up and he speaks entirely in capital letters. His dialogue was a challenge to write, as most of his speech bubbles are very small, but I think this worked out in my favour: his speech often ended up butting up against the bubbles’ outlines, giving the impression that he’s always speaking just a little bit too loudly.

The lettering in the first part of the original comic - aside from being technically legible - is generally shoddy on every level. For emphasis, it alternately uses italics or inconsistent font size. Occasionally, the dialogue switches to lowercase, which kinda gives the impression that everyone’s been shouting the whole time. Most of the text is left-aligned. Some bits of text seem to have been squashed. Most of the narration boxes are parallelograms, but some are plain rectangles. Red hand-lettered text is mostly limited to the combiners’ speech, but also sees use a couple of times for Megatron and Optimus Prime. Some of the combiners’ speech just uses normal red Comic Sans MS text. Meanwhile, the second part switches entirely to black hand-lettered text - presumably from Mr. Gibson - which is a marked improvement in terms of tone and consistency, if a step down in legibility.

It’s interesting to me that, despite my version of the comic sharing the dearth of commas and full stops which plagues the original, it reads very differently. For all its stylisation, it’s my hope that each line I write for these comics comes across realistically - not in the sense that it’s something you’d hear someone say, but perhaps in the sense that it’s something you’d maybe read on the internet. More on that later - first, some miscellaneous notes on the comic’s text:

When I first wrote it, I used the style of self-censorship from “PASS” (and, by extension, the rest of Summer Meme Sundae) wherein the first letter of any curse is replaced by an asterisk. It was one of my prereaders, Tindalos, who noted that “the censoring kinda takes a bit from it”, and I decided that I agreed with him - it felt like I was holding back. You can decide for yourself; I’ve collected the pages with lines that were revised between drafts in an album.

Through pure coincidence, it’s Springer (well, Bulkhead) who gets the first line of dialogue in the comic - just like in “PASS”. In case it’s not clear, the joke is that he thinks he’s safe on the floor and berates Jazz for not doing the same thing, seconds before getting stomped by Megatron. I think this sequence perfectly encapsulates a big part of what I wanted to show about the Autobots: they all criticise one another relentlessly, despite being deeply flawed themselves. It’s a dynamic that, to me at least, actually evokes that of the Autobots in Michael Bay’s movies.

The line “thats me grimlock in the corner losing my religion” is, of course, a reference to R.E.M.’s song “Losing My Religion”, which was itself included as part of writer James Roberts’ “soundtrack” for More Than Meets The Eye. Though he did not appear in the issue for which Roberts selected the song, Grimlock was a recurring character in that series. Hopefully my depiction of the character surpasses that one - though if you ask the people I usually talk to, I wouldn’t be setting the bar particularly high with that comparison.

Optimus uses the insult “grimdick” shortly after Grimlock’s narration provides the example “grimcock”. I intended this to show that, while the dynamic between the two’s been cemented for a good while, Grimlock is always a step behind and still can’t predict Prime’s actions.

Snarl’s line was originally “hey speak for yourself swoop me and grimlock are tight as *hit”, which expresses effectively the opposite sentiment to his final line. The idea that Snarl was okay with becoming part of the Beast was intended to add a bit of brevity to the sequence - but I decided it was better to keep as much emotional impact as possible in the moment.

A more minor change a couple of pages later is Grimlock’s line “how do they do it”, which replaced “love is stupid”. I wanted to expressly draw a parallel between the Beast’s combination and Predaking’s.

The line I’m happiest with is “eat shit megatron this is what you get for being such a fucking weapon”. One of my friends occasionally cracks out the word “weapon” to describe someone - and what better application for it is there than a guy who literally turns into a gun?

Megatron’s line about the “black hole” in Optimus Prime’s spark is a twist on Megatron’s own canonical link to a black hole - an aspect of his original bio which was revisited by Roberts.

I struggled to think of Menasor’s final words. The longer I stared at the panel where he gets torn in half - from which I’d already cleared the speech bubble - the more I was struck by the emptiness of the scene. If one considers Menasor to be a symbol for the Decepticons as a whole, then his silence in that panel is my way of showing that - from this point forth - the Decepticons no longer have a voice; the second part of the comic shows naught but their corpses. Death exists, and nothing is good any more.

None of the text on the final page of the first half remained unchanged between drafts. I wan’t happy with Optimus Prime’s original line at all, and the internal monologue “don’t you deserve happiness” felt a little too serious. The phrase “no u” is the archetypical low-effort comeback, and seemed like the perfect beat to end the first part with.

Prime’s line “gotta jettison some dead weight” is a nod to Astrotrain’s iconic line in The Transformers: The Movie: “Jettison some weight, or I’ll never make it to Cybertron.” I had to check for the exact quote just now and found “jettison transformers the movie” in my search history, so obviously I’d done the same when writing the panel. More than just being a trite reference, I was hoping to draw an obvious parallel and to contrast the unilateral decision Optimus Prime makes on the following page against the more shall-we-call-it-democratic process the Decepticons used in the movie.

I’m probably a little too proud of “big red irredeemable fucking monster of a robot semi fuck”, which is a line that could absolutely only exist in this travesty of a comic.

Jetfire’s use of the phrase “GOTTA BLAST” is a reference to a line spoken by the titular character of the early-2000s CGI cartoon Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, one which has turned into something of a meme. When I wrote the panel, I intended to imply that Jetfire was aiming to crash into the city - but I think it ended up doubling as foreshadowing for the fact that Jetfire flies his passengers into the sun. Additionally, the meme often sees use as innuendo, which shines through in the following panel: Jetfire expels propellant into the Beast’s face while Bumblebee remarks “gah okay i did not want to see that”. The less said about the sound effect “CHOOOM!”, the better.

Remember how all the text in the first part of the original comic was left-aligned? So’s the text in my version! MS Paint simply doesn’t have the option to change the alignment of your text - I actually had to throw in extra spaces at the start of each new line, eyeballing things until I had an approximation of centre alignment. This is something I never did with “PASS”, and I found that doing so gave me more freedom to squeeze more stuff into the speech bubbles.

As immortalised by countless memes, you can’t rotate text in MS Paint either. I tried to use this to my advantage on the comic’s first page, where the steps between the words in Grimlock’s narration give them a faltering quality.

Grimlock’s narration actually ended up being one of the most challenging parts of the comic to write. I wrote a draft of the first page pretty quickly, but decided I wasn’t happy with it and that I’d have to replace it later - which I did, but only after having written pretty much every single other bit of dialogue.

I think the central conceit of “PASS” - that somebody’s farted and the Autobots are trying to find out who dealt it - didn’t solidify until I reached the second page and looked at Rodimus Prime’s body language. In much the same way, the crux of “The Beast Within (My Pants)” didn’t solidify until it came to writing Swoop’s line.

V. Me Grimlock Not Nice Dino

At some point during the creation of “The Beast Within (My Pants)”, I started thinking a lot about incels.

(To be clear, this is the part of the commentary where things get a bit weird, and I start talking about storytelling decisions which I think were made in poor taste but which I don’t think come across overtly in the comic itself. Feel free to skip ahead to the next section. Or, y’know, stop reading entirely.)

Grimlock is childish, despite his age, and is desperate to be liked - no, respected - at any cost. His only asset is his BRUTE STRENGTH. He hates Prime, but wishes he was Prime. He has trouble treating any of the other Autobots like people. He rages against an outgroup whose ideals are - at least ostensibly - rooted in empathy.

I wouldn’t say “I wrote a comic where Grimlock is an incel”, because that’d be a pretty stupid thing to write and I’d feel pretty stupid saying it.

Looking back at a lot of my previous work on this blog, some things do crop up again and again. In abstract, I’d say that the idea of a character seeking friendship and/or respect - and failing to understand why they can’t find those things - is one that I’ve revisited a couple of times. This was a strong theme in the latter half of Another Son - a story which dealt heavily in misanthropy - which featured a character inspired by Sam Witwicky from Michael Bay’s Transformers. The protagonist of Retrace Steps spent the whole story unable to even ask the question “why am I alone”. Many of the characters in Are You Happy - particularly Mr. Hernandez - deal with similar problems to varying extents.

So this makes, what, practically four stories in a row? I didn’t set out to approach things this way again with this comic, but from the moment I wrote Swoop’s line I knew I didn’t have a choice. When people talk about the Beast’s combination sequence, they talk about how violative it appears. Metal tentacles spring from Grimlock like one of Alien’s chestbursters, penetrating or melding with the other Dinobots’ bodies. After that, the resulting monstrosity ambles around, horrifically murdering its former peers. As much as I can have the characters in the story play this stuff off for laughs, I’ll never be able to erase the undercurrent.

This isn’t supposed to be a direct mapping - a perfect metaphor - and by the time this commentary’s done I hope I’ll have pointed in the direction of some alternate perspectives. It just seems important to put my cards on the table and say that, when I was working on this comic, this is the kinda thing I was thinking about. We thought children were safe with Transformers, and then a gun came and shot people they cared about, and for some reason we were surprised to see that they got upset.

With all of that in mind, I take some solace in the fact that I actually found getting into Grimlock’s head to be extremely difficult. His dialogue was a breeze to write, sure - that’s the outsider’s perspective - but actually trying to construct his thoughts in anything approximating a convincing manner was very difficult. The first draft of his narration literally included the phrase “we live in a society”.

VI. Such Heroic Nonsense

I’ve already touched on Terry van Feleday’s opus a couple of times, but I think it’s worth delving a little deeper into how exactly her analysis influenced this comic. For some reason the idea that nearly five-hundred pages of borderline-conspiracy-theorist-level ramblings about perhaps the most maligned movie franchise of the 21st century might be a tough sell is one which I can’t quite wrap my head around. I’d say that it’s because I’ve read the thing and already know that it’s good, but in truth I was pretty much sold from the moment I found out it existed.

Anyway, I frequently get into not-quite-arguments with internet strangers about Transformers, and during those discussions I frequently find myself saying “a good Transformers story should do X”, and then I have to resist the urge to add “like Michael Bay’s movies” because doing so would completely delegitimise the point I’m trying to make. The problem is that, because I’m deliberately omitting the context of my opinions, they come across as being even more bizarre.

I think that same problem exists in some capacity with this comic, where I’m drawing on sources which are intuitive to me but completely alien even to a typical Transformers fan. I’ve yet to even mention the other primary inspiration for this story, which is even more arcane.

Perhaps it’s important to stress that van Feleday doesn’t offer a typical "theres actually zero difference between good & bad things. you imbecile. you fucking moron" take. Rather - and I realise I’m about to butcher this - she shows how the humans in Bay’s movies give increasing amounts of power to an alien cult leader because their only alternative is to get wiped out by an alien warlord. So in terms of this comic, “Autobots bad” is very much rooted in her reading of those movies, while “Decepticons good” is just something I thought would be funny.

Well, not exactly. I’ve already mentioned Combiner Wars; something that continues to baffle pretty much everyone who watched that show (and its sequels) is that, while it seems to have no idea what it’s doing most of the time, its portrayal of Megatron is an absolute riot. He is absolutely the protagonist of that series, the Only Sane Man in a world of bizarre psychotic caricatures. I think the same kinda holds in the continuity of my comic, only he’s had more time to bring the people he takes in around to his way of thinking.

Let’s not forget the official “good-is-bad” continuity of Shattered Glass, which - while heavily compromised - was the source of many interesting reinterpretations of popular characters. Effective reinterpretations require you to forget what you know about a character and strip them back to the core signifiers, which you can then put to different use. One of the posters in Terry van Feleday’s thread, “Lobok”, observes:

I like the idea that Bay or the writers looked at Optimus Prime and thought "What would a guy who calls himself that really act like?" Imagine you knew or heard of someone, a human, who called themselves the equivalent of "The #1 Bestest Superior" or "King Supreme Ultimate" - do you not picture either a 7-year old boy or a mentally deficient oo-rah alpha male? Maybe the two combined? Seems much more apt than a wise, noble father figure.

Of the course, I don’t for a second think that Michael Bay had any such thought - but the connection still exists for the audience to make. Therein lies one of the greatest unspoken strengths of Transformers storytelling: the sheer breadth and depth of the signifiers at play. Much of what van Feleday did in her thread was to boil down the concepts found in Transformers stories to reveal those core signifiers.

(Almost a year ago, I wrote a piece for the Refined Robot Co. blog which explored some of her findings by delving into the subtextual meanings of the countless alternate modes worn by Megatron over the years.)

By the same token, I think there’s something to be said for the way Grimlock’s alternate mode ties into his portrayal in my take on The Beast Within. He turns into a dinosaur - something which is rooted in the past, extinct, unable to develop - while most of the other Autobots turn into modern vehicles. Kids may love dinosaurs, but they’ll likely grow up to have a stronger interest in cars or tanks. Grimlock is immature almost to the point of childishness; his beast mode is the lizard king, and he doesn’t understand why you won’t bow.

(Obviously I’m making some big generalisations here for the sake of a point - the other Dinobots have their own prehistoric disguises, and kids’ interests develop in varied enough ways that perhaps this link is only noticeable to those who experienced the transition I describe. When I was much younger, I was obsessed with dinosaurs, and would consume all the dinosaur-related media I could get my hands on. Eventually, however, my crippling fear of sea monsters led me to stop reading books about them - I'd turn the page, see a full-spread painting of a pliosaur taking a bite out of a pterodactyl, and shit my pants. Okay, no, that’s a huge exaggeration: more likely it just got to the point where I knew basically all of the cool dinosaur facts already, and suddenly the deep lore of the grim darkness of the 41st millennium or whatever seemed way cooler. I just find it funnier to imagine that my prosperous future in paleontology was averted for fear that I’d discover the last living specimen of a plesiosaur.)

VII. Where’d You Learn To Talk Like That

Back in “PASS”, I think there was some question as to who exactly was the coolest dude; the biggest guy. Rodimus was in charge, but the others didn’t really respect his authority in the end. Although Triton was an underdog in that story, he wasn’t at the bottom of the pack - no, that role went to Roadbuster. Everyone seems to like Ultra Magnus, but it’s never really made clear as to why that is.

Grimlock’s personality and role within the Autobots was pretty much the first thing I solidified when it came to writing “The Beast Within (My Pants)”. I knew that he was the lowest of the low; the nail in every Autobot’s tyre. As Grimlock evolved, so too did Optimus Prime - the second-most-prominent character in the comic. "The #1 Bestest Superior" became a murderous jock, and the Autobots became his cult of personality.

Speaking of cults of personality, I’ve been posting regularly in the Homestuck Discord server since November of last year. There’s no other place like it on the internet, and - truth be told - I’m not sure any explanation of it I could provide would suffice. The server was created by some guy called Makin - at least, we're pretty sure he’s a guy - who nobody’s ever met but who seems to have an uncanny knack for managing online communities.

Major events in that server have been comprehensively catalogued since July of 2017 by long-standing moderator “Drew Linky” in his journal Several People Are Typing. Between the entries and the related materials, it’s probably around half a million words in length. There’s no other document like it on the internet.

For the first fifty or so pages, Drew had no intention of making his document public. Apparently, one of the reasons he wrote it in the first place was as a way of holding Makin accountable - the guy used to be (and sometimes still is) a bit of an ass. Now, I wasn’t around in 2017, so I can’t really comment on the accuracy of the document’s early entries - but as a newcomer I was struck by how different Drew’s depiction of the server was to my own experience there. If I had to guess, I’d say his style of prose and the cherry-picked nature of the document make it seem like a much more hostile place than it actually is.

In particular, Makin effectively starts out as journal’s main villain (alongside various problem users and Homestuck creators) - a capricious and unknowable entity with absolute power over the server - and many of the entries deal in some way with what users jokingly refer to as his “redemption arc”. Of course, in reality, he’s just some guy, and everyone knows that real people don’t have character arcs.

I still haven’t finished reading SPAT, but I was doing so around the time when I was working on the comic. At some point I started to draw parallels between my bizarro version of Optimus Prime and the journal’s bizarro version of Makin, and I decided to play them up. Much of Prime’s dialogue is inspired by Makin’s style of speech, using phrases like “shut the fuck up”, “nobody cares”, “holy shit”, “get fucked”, “lmao”, “literally”, “literally [...] who”, “guys”, “rational” and “you’re welcome”. I just checked and at the time of writing, with the exception of “literally who” and “you’re welcome”, he’s used every one of those phrases within the last week. Oh, and while the word “suckers” isn’t really a Makin quote, in Homestuck it’s associated with the not-quite-biggest-bad evil empress. It bears mentioning again that the complete lack of punctuation in the comic’s dialogue mirrors the most common style of typing I see online, where people drop their capital letters and full stops.

(In fairness, a lot of us kinda talk the same way in that server. I remember one time Makin said “I also need to worry about lmao becoming some kind of anime catchphrase for me”, which cut pretty deep as I’ve been overusing that phrase instead of “lol” or “haha” or whatever for ages. Look, it’s just a funny word to me: in my head I pronounce it “luh-mayo” instead of “el-em-ay-oh”. Like “I throw my sandwich in the air sometimes / saying aaay-oh / I ordered maaayo...”)

In the comic, the self-aggrandising Optimus Prime is hostile and dismissive to those around him. It might all be a front, but it might not. Even though Grimlock hates Optimus, the Dinobot seems to agree with him a lot of the time, and the narrative itself never really manages to conclusively condemn his actions. The name “Optimus” echoes the word “optimise”; so frequently thrown around in rationalist circles. One could even go so far as to say that Optimus Prime’s ultimate goal in the comic is to kill death-in-the-form-of-a-shitposter.

In seriousness, I’m drawing these comparisons in a pretty tongue-in-cheek way. I don’t actually think that the Homestuck Discord server is a cult of personality - even if, to check the user-contributed “SPAT Epilogues”, some of its populace seem determined to behave like it is. Even if this section of this commentary exists. At the end of the day, I’m gonna write what I know, and I like to think that I know a little about online communities and what happens when they go wrong. I wish I could say that “The Beast Within (My Pants)” is a cautionary tale to that effect, but in truth I don’t think it offers any conclusive answers in the same way that “PASS” perhaps did. “Only worry about the opinions of people who actually care about you,” maybe? “Death is an abomination and we shouldn’t let it anywhere near our kids”, perhaps? “You can’t force other people to like you”?

“You can’t force other people to like the things you made”?

VIII. Burnt-Out Toaster Ovens

In the re-released version of “PASS”, it seemed right to throw in something in the way of extra content. I had fond memories of the Seacon profiles published alongside the original “Peace”, and lifted the format to create short bios for all sixteen characters who appeared in the comic. These fitted neatly on a four-by-four spread (though I ended up merging Topspin and Twin Twist’s profiles and throwing in an extra one for Computron, who did not appear in the comic proper).

From the start, I knew I wanted to do something similar for “The Beast Within (My Pants)”. In fact, I already had two text-only pages to work with; each part of the original comic was prefaced with a prose introduction and a note from Mr. Gibson. I decided that I could rework the text-only pages and add another spread of profiles, using the freedom granted by prose to explain away many of the comic’s oddities.

It took me some time to carefully erase the existing text from the scans that I had, using nothing but the brush tool in MS Paint. It took me even more time to work out some potential approaches to take with the text itself. Eventually, I came up with the following ideas:

A flashback depicting Grimlock and Swoop’s breakup.

A conversation between Grimlock and Jazz (or, perhaps, Slash).

“How Ratchet Got His Head Back”, the interlude which I ended up using.

A synopsis of events between “its christmas... so what??” and “The Beast Within (My Pants)”, which ended up being my first stab at the introduction.

Some in-character commentary as Mr. Gibson, which I did end up including.

From the moment I conceived it, I was pretty set on “How Ratchet Got His Head Back”, and it ended up being a breeze to write. I didn’t end up getting a chance to squeeze in the title - a reference to an issue of More than Meets the Eye - as it didn’t really fit the original format of the page. The introduction, on the other hand, proved much more challenging. My main problem was that, were I to preface the story with a text page, I’d be asking them to read a bunch of probably-mostly-serious words before allowing them to read the comic proper. Not the best first impression!

Nonetheless, I gave it a go - you can read my first attempt in the album of the draft pages. It mostly served to lay out the continuity between my three comics. Rodimus Prime’s crew were abandoned on Cybertron by Optimus Prime (presumably Hot Rod changed his name in Optimus’ absence). Megatron, Optimus and their crews crash-landed on Earth, and millions of years later the events of “its christmas... so what??” occurred. Meanwhile on Cybertron, it took a few million years for the other Autobots to wipe out the remaining Decepticons, as seen in “PASS”. Humanity was wiped out by Optimus in retribution for their transgression (a nod to Mr. Gibson’s depiction of Earth as an empty wasteland), prompting the conflict seen in “The Beast Within (My Pants)”. Much of this timeline remains implicit in the final version of the comic.

When I wrote it, I was pretty happy with the way this information was conveyed in the first draft. It was the ever-ardent Gitaxian - one of my long-time prereaders - who made me realise just what a mistake I’d made:

Something was rubbing me the wrong way about that first prose page and I finally realized what it is / Expositing that Optimus is horrible right off the bat takes away a good chunk of the impact the comic had before you added it

He was right. My prereaders’ initial response to the comic was that Optimus Prime’s motivations were completely opaque, and I overcorrected, not realising that his inscrutability was one of the things that made him interesting. You kinda want him to behave like the Optimus Prime you know and love, but he keeps doing weird things and you never really find out why.

Suddenly, I was back at square one - no closer to having a clear idea of how to introduce the comic. Another of my prereaders, gearshift, had the solution:

It's Transformers or some shit. You've seen the cartoon right? The one with the tape guy? Yeah, the tape guy is barely in this one. What do you mean no sale? Look, fuck, it's got the dinosaur guy. He's right on the goddamn cover, you like the dinosaur guy right? Yeah, that's what I thought.

Bitch.

I liked her pitch because it seemed like it’d do a good job of filtering out readers who wouldn’t enjoy the comic. To quote Alexander Wales, author of Worth the Candle:

I kind of hate blurbs and taglines, especially for something so large and varied as Worth the Candle / My ideal synopsis would tell people what kind of story it was without actually telling them that much about the story; it would select for all the people who would fall in love with the story, and select against all the people who would find it a waste of time. / How to actually write that ... I've got no idea.

(Side note: I’m one of the people who fell in love with that story, to the point where I’ll use any opportunity to recommend it to others. It’s maybe my favourite thing written by anyone ever.)

A closely-related issue is that of content warnings: so far as I’ve been able to work out, there is no warning which I can give for “The Beast Within (My Pants)” which adequately selects against people who won’t like it while also preserving its conceptual twists and avoiding colouring the audience’s interpretation.

Getting back to the actual content of the introduction - I wound up writing less than I would’ve liked, leaving the page looking a little sparse, but hopefully making things easier for the reader. There’s relatively little to talk about in the way of trivia here. When I wrote the phrase “cut right to the spectacles” I was probably thinking of Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Cut To The Feeling”. When I mentioned “moist towelettes” I was probably thinking of Hawthorne Wipes. The phrase “truth time” was an iconic - to me, and literally no-one else in existence - line spoken by the trolling narrator of a crack story written by a high school friend of mine, the energy of which I feel like I’ve always been channelling with these comics.

The interlude, on the other hand, is crammed full of references and was a breeze to write. It was the first piece of prose I completed for the project. In general, I was trying to write in a verbose style that would be simultaneously at odds with the bulk of the issue and reminiscent of the prose of veteran Transformers scribe Simon Furman. He was known for using certain distinctive phrases repeatedly in his writing - one such phrase being “like some vast, predatory bird”. The phrase “neither sufficient inclination nor wingspan” is supposed to subtly evoke another Furmanism: “CANNOT, WILL NOT”.

In all likelihood, the interlude would not have existed had I not noticed that Ratchet’s head was in its cartoon colours in the first part of the story, but in its Marvel colours for the second. I had the idea to explain that error away in story - tying into the general schtick of “correcting” the comic - and did so by way of a reference to Ratchet’s original toy, which had a sticker with a face on it behind the windshield rather than a proper head. I was also determined to highlight the fact that Predaking’s legs remain standing for like three pages; I think this minor detail in the artwork is pretty indicative of the fact that Mr. Gibson did a good job.

The way Swoop’s contribution to the combiner is described as “puny” ties nicely to the history established between him and Grimlock in his profile. I like the way the Beast tries to hit Optimus Prime with a “truck-sized fist”. The “antimemetic shielding” was my attempt to explain the recurring disappearances of Optimus Prime’s trailer in a novel way - I did so by namedropping the key phrase from qntm’s There Is No Antimemetics Division; the trailer’s there, you just can’t perceive it and forget that it exists. Finally, “dull surprise” refers to the vague expressions that characterised Dreamwave’s house style.

For the most part, I was able to retain the ordering of the pages as in the original comic, to keep things print-friendly. The one exception to this is the prose page for the second part, which I unfortunately had to move forward so that its cover could fall across a spread. The original comics must’ve included something in the way of backmatter - art cards, perhaps, or adverts - which made up the space.

The huge cast of The Beast Within made creating a profile for every character an impossible task (especially when so many are just crowd-fillers like some of the Technobots were in “PASS”) - but it was perfectly possible to provide one for each non-combiner character with a speaking role.

(If you’ll indulge me in one last barely-relevant tangent as we head into the final stretch of this commentary, there are some rather odd inclusions/omissions in The Beast Within. On the Autobot side, pretty much every 1984-1985 character appears, with the exceptions of Trailbreaker, Hoist, Tracks, Smokescreen, Grapple, Beachcomber, Seaspray, Perceptor and Omega Supreme. The Autobot combiner teams are absent with the odd exception of Silverbolt. Twin Twist - who had been pretty much entirely absent from the original US fiction - makes an odd appearance without his partner Topspin. Steeljaw is the only one of the four 1986 Autobot cassettes to appear. Meanwhile, on the Decepticon side, oddities include the toy-inspired versions of Viewfinder and Spectro (most of the rest of the cast use cartoon-inspired character models) and the omissions of Spyglass and Buzzsaw. Some Decepticon combiner team members - Motormaster, Wildrider, Breakdown, Blast Off and Swindle - only appear in combined form. Just two of the four 1986 triple changers - Springer and Octane - appear in the comic, looking slightly out-of-place in a cast consisting mostly of characters present in the first two seasons of the cartoon. Oh, and the Deluxe Vehicles and Deluxe Insecticons are absent, but that’s to be expected in a cartoon-inspired setting.)

Here’s the first draft of Optimus Prime’s profile:

Unpredictable. Unstoppable. Unrepentant. Many words have been used to describe OPTIMUS PRIME, yet the abrasive leader of the Autobots remains something of an enigma even amongst his followers. He has ruled Cybertron for many millenia, by dint of the fact that he's apparently the only Cybertronian with a shred of competence.

It’s a product of the time where I wanted to really flesh out Optimus Prime and communicate his thoughts clearly to the audience, and as such is pretty blunt with how it characterises him. The final version is a little more subtle, drawing in elements of the scrapped introduction. I figure I may as well go through the other profiles one-by-one to give a sense for what I was thinking:

Megatron initially had a much more personal bio - which seems to have been lost to time - but I wound up cutting much of it to make space for elements of the story’s scrapped introduction.

Starscream draws inspiration from van Feleday’s interpretation of the character - she posited that Michael Bay’s version of the character was actually the Decepticon most loyal to Megatron. The contrast between that interpretation and pretty much every other in the franchise’s history (excluding Shattered Glass Starscream, of course) is pretty funny to me. I tried to use the phrase “fools errands” in as benign a way as possible, which I felt evoked a more traditional relationship between him and Megatron. “Starscream, you fool!”

Razorclaw has little in the way of characterisation in the comic beyond “noble warrior”, and his profile is a wholesale reference to The Chronicles of Narnia: he stands in for Aslan; the rest of the Predacons for the Pevensie siblings. So yes, this version of Razorclaw is a Christ-like figure. As for the witch... maybe Blackarachnia? Eh, who cares. Oh, and the idea of combining with a dead bot was one which cropped up a few times in IDW’s comics, most notably with the Combaticons in Mairghread Scott’s Till All Are One.

Onslaught was in a similar boat to Razorclaw. I found myself drawing from Till All Are One once more, hinting at a (complicated?) romance between him and another teammate.

Blitzwing has only one speaking role in the comic - a shared line with Megatron and Starscream - but I decided to count it for the sake of having a nice set of sixteen characters once more. In Transformers Animated, Blitzwing had multiple personalities, and would change forms depending on which was in control. This interpretation of the character has seen plenty of criticism, so I deliberately tried to come up with something new. I quickly settled upon the idea of tying his vehicle forms to his mood, a metaphor which seemed to dovetail nicely with the way aerial alternate forms were treated in “PASS” and which also allowed me to cement the Decepticons’ supportiveness.

Bulkhead was borne of the realisation that Springer appears prominently in both “Peace” and The Beast Within. This inconsistency is entirely the product of my decision to place my versions of those comics in the same continuity, and I decided to correct it in the tradition of “Bluster” and “Firster Aid” by having them be two separate (but related) characters. I named the new Springer after Energon Bulkhead, who was inspired by “Generation 1″ Springer - the name’s since been used more prominently by an Animated-original character and variations thereof, and is effectively fair game for “Generation 1″ stories. His actual characterisation was inspired by Springer’s behaviour in “PASS” - I liked the idea that Bulkhead bullied Springer, and Springer bullied everyone else in turn. Oh, and I wanted to tie their helicopter modes back to Blitzwing’s profile on a thematic level.

Bumblebee is the only character from “its christmas... so what??” to recur with a speaking role in “The Beast Within (My Pants)”. After scrapping the original introduction I’d planned for the comic, I was left with a single profile to bridge the gap between the two stories. My original idea was that, for their negligence in allowing the humans to steal Bumblebee’s blood, Prowl, Tracks, and Hoist would have been executed by Optimus Prime - though I’m sure he didn’t pull the trigger himself, it’s safe to assume that he didn’t warn them before setting off the nukes.

Ratchet has a characterisation inspired by something “Jonny Angel” posted in van Feleday’s thread: “Ratchet is an ambulance who practices no medicine”.

Jazz is an extremely prominent character in the comic, despite the fact that his only line is a scream in the opening panel. The comic relies on the wider context of the brand to let the audience be invested in him, but in a vacuum it’s kinda funny to see the Autobots fret so much over an effective nobody. Pretty much the entire joke in my version is just a reference to Ryan Gosling’s misguided quest to “save jazz” in La La Land - some of his character’s lines are lifted wholesale to comprise Jazz’s profile, which takes pains to avoid using any kind of pronouns (thereby maintaining the confusion over whether or not “Jazz” refers to the character or the music genre). His profile was the first I wrote.

Ironhide has a role amongst the Autobots loosely inspired by that of Drew Linky (or at least, the version of Drew Linky presented by SPAT) in the Homestuck Discord. I thought there was some symmetry there with Ironhide’s history in IDW Publishing’s comics.

Skids was a tricky character to portray, but ultimately his profile turned out to be one of the ones I’m happiest with. It’s kind of a loose riff on his portrayal towards the back end of James Roberts’ stories, where much of his arc revolved around his relationship with Nautica. According to Word of God, he had unrequited feelings for her - I decided to amp this up by giving him unrequited feelings for everyone. To tie this back to Homestuck, think Eridan/Cronus. Oh, and in terms of the Homestuck Discord server, think your typical hornyposter (and then follow the implications through in terms of Optimus Prime/Makin). The actual name “Skids Maximus” is a play on the way the suffix “Maximus” has historically been used for some combiners, “Optimus Maximus” in particular. I’m convinced I’m not the first person to do a joke like that, but nobody I asked could think of any older examples.

Grimlock was fleshed out pretty well by the comic itself, so I took his profile as an opportunity to expand upon the history of the Dinobots. I saw them as being akin to a group of friends who stuck together throughout school, winding up as an impenetrably toxic and incestuous mess with a ton of deep lore. In a way, there was a time when I was the Grimlock of my group of friends... but we all grew up.

Swoop is Grimlock’s ex-partner, a concept inspired by the other Dinobot combiner we all wish we could forget about. I’m pretty happy with the use of the word “bottom” in this context.

Snarl is based on a combination of various people I’ve known in real life - people who are perfectly nice and reasonable but have zero patience around certain other individuals. From the outside, it’s behaviour that comes across as pretty damn harsh, but - and please note that this is not an endorsement of such behaviour - it’s usually the product of a long period of aggravations.

Jetfire was the last character introduced in the comic, so it felt fitting to save his profile until last. His biography is effectively a mashup of his portrayals in the original cartoon (where he gets frozen in the Arctic Circle) and in Revenge of the Fallen (where he was a Seeker who wound up on Earth), a combination which neatly parallels Bay’s Megatron’s origins. It also references J.J. Abram’s infamous “mystery box” storytelling device, which I intended to mirror the offbeat lack of closure in the comic itself.

The final challenge I faced - one which had hounded me throughout the development of the comic - was what exactly to title it. Titles considered included:

“The BEE” (Tindalos’ suggestion)

“The BEE Within”

“The REEEE Within”

“SHIT” (Gitaxian’s suggestion)

“IM THE BEAST”

“AWWW SHIT” (Fear or Courage’s suggestion)

“AW SHIT ITS THE BEAST”

None of these resonated. Then, almost a whole month later, out of nowhere:

This was the entirety of Daniel111111222222’s contribution to the story - and what a contribution it was.

There were several reasons why I loved his idea. Firstly, it was easy to edit: most of the other suggestions would’ve required me to move lots of letters around, while this one would simply require me to append a few. More importantly, it felt like the title of a Chuck Tingle novel.

The subtitle for the second part - “No Pants” - seemed like a natural choice after that, the idea being that it evokes Grimlock’s inhibitions falling away with his transformation into the Beast. It narrowly edged out “Pants Off”, which I managed to squeeze into the final version of the introduction.

The parentheses in the comic’s title were my own addition, and in retrospect I kinda regret them. They seemed like a good idea at the time, but I’m not sure why. I was wrong to try and improve upon perfection.

IX. Why Throw Away Your Life So Recklessly

So far, the bulk of this commentary has mostly focused on the aspects of this project which I think went pretty well. In a way, that's probably fair enough, because - on balance - I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.

At the same time, I can't help feeling that “PASS” - a comic which I probably threw together in the space of one day two years ago - is both funnier and more meaningful than the one which I spent a couple of weeks on.

When I started working on “The Beast Within (My Pants)” towards the beginning of May, I expected to have the project finished and out of the door by the end of the month. If you glance at the release dates of the various things I made, you'll see that I like to put out major projects on the last day of a month - it's a way of setting myself a deadline and it lets me associate a given project with a given period of time.

My first draft of the dialogue was released to prereaders on the 11th of May; my second on the 13th. Around that point, exam season started to kick in and I decided to prioritise to other projects - the Retrace Steps commentary and the Are You Happy retrospective - which both ballooned out into much longer pieces than I'd planned. I successfully met my self-imposed deadline for those projects and pushed back the release date for the comic to the end of June. I released the first drafts of the text-only pages on the 9th, but the profiles didn't follow until the 24th. By the time you read this, I'll have been working on the project on-and-off for over three months; despite the fact that I was ostensibly on vacation for most of that time, I was somehow busier than I tend to be at university.

For context, it took me just four months to adapt Retrace Steps from a short film script to a webcomic (well, “webcomic”), and that was a process which actually required original artwork. At the time I noted that I needed to re-evaluate the way I approached commentaries, as the amount of time required to produce one of a high standard seemed only to increase - they're extremely valuable to me, and seem to be well-received by the few who read them, but are they justifiable if they take longer to create than the things they comment on?

All of this is my long-winded way of saying that I've probably spent more time thinking about The Beast Within than the vast majority of people who know about it, and that I kinda regret that. See, in the sense that The Beast Within provokes a visceral emotional reaction, it’s a “good comic” - but so too does a punch to the face. The Beast Within is not a good comic. It’s mean and deconstructive and poorly-done. My version is borne of contrarianism and hubris, and softens the blow not one bit.

At the time when I was writing Grimlock's dialogue, I found that my own typing style was becoming increasingly acidic.

The truth is that “PASS” is probably the most successful thing I have ever made, and I wanted to make a comic which would put it to shame, and I failed miserably. In fact, I feel like I’ve made something which only I could ever enjoy. It’s derivative in the extreme. As my deadline for this project drew closer, I resorted to drafting bits of the commentary on my phone in public, and at one point somebody idly asked me what I was writing, and - after failing to think of a convincing lie - I said something along the lines of “it’s kinda a long story, and I wouldn’t enjoy telling it, and you wouldn’t enjoy hearing about it”. They seemed perfectly satisfied by that answer, but I wasn’t.

Must we justify the things we create? Mr. Jamieson’s attitude seemed to be to say “screw you, I don’t have to justify myself to stupid people” (while pointing at everybody else in the room). My attitude, as evinced by this commentary, has been to justify every aspect of everything I make in excruciating detail, so that if you tell me “I don’t like X” I can say “I already explained why I thought X was a good idea” and you can say “well you were wrong” and I can say “maybe”.

You’ve probably twigged that, throughout this commentary, I’ve referred to the creators of The Beast Within only by second name. At first, perhaps, it came across as some mark of mocking respect - like citing a scientific source - but the real reason is cowardice, not confidence. Some people occasionally put their own names into Google. There’s a couple of people to whom I really don’t want to have to justify myself.

Over a decade after the release of the The Beast Within, Hasbro released a brand new set of Dinobot toys which combined to form Volcanicus. The creators of the Prime Wars Trilogy and of the Earth Wars mobile game gleefully included the new combiner in their stories, and the fandom at large embraced it wholeheartedly.

As her thread drew to a close, Terry van Feleday wrote something which I think about often:

Of course [...] let’s not forget that no matter the amount of earnest work put into something, sometimes it just turns out shit. There’s a strange perception I noticed in critical response where people seem to find it difficult to consider something both earnest or satirical and, well, not very well made. Sucker Punch can’t be an honest indictment of cinematic objectification and a somewhat poorly conceived, almost hypocritical attempt at being more clever than you should. Transformers can’t be an inversion of the traditional hero/villain narrative showcasing the effects of authoritarian propaganda and a meandering, under-focused, often poorly communicated, destructive mess. Maybe it’s a strange entertainment-version of the Just World Fallacy where lacking results must necessarily result from lacking effort, or maybe it’s modern audiences’ strange worship of subversiveness, where a work critical of old tropes must by default be better than the works it’s commenting on throwing to the dustbin of history, but either way, people are extremely resistant to the idea that films they found emotionally dissatisfying could express depth and meaning and tend to dismiss them as another ‘genre film’.

Mr. Gibson is a children’s picture book illustrator. The Beast has no place on his website.

X. Proceed On Your Way To Oblivion

TFNation - the UK’s biggest Transformers convention - has become something of an annual pilgrimage for me, and (as of the time of writing) I’ll be making that pilgrimage in a matter of days. If you see me there, feel free to come over and punch me. Or, y’know, just say hi. I’ll have some limited-edition printed copies of “PASS” to give out. For more information on that - and for infrequent Transformers-related musings and updates on future projects - wander on over to my twitter!

What are those future projects? Well, after the convention I’m planning to release an original short story. It’s not very good, but it’s got a few stylistic similarities to this comic (read: lots of swearing). I might have a little bit in the way of Transformers prose coming out down the line, but can’t really elaborate further on the form that’ll take. I’ve been planning to get back to Huskyquest for ages, and hopefully I’ll finally be able to do so once I settle back down at university. After that, I plan to focus my efforts on prose, so you may as well expect more radio silence from me.

If you’ve made it to the end of this almost-fifteen-thousand-word monstrosity, you, uhh... win all my internet points? Sorry, that’s all I have.

Remind me never to do this again.

10 Live Action Adaptations of Anime You Might Not Know About

Anime is no stranger to the formula of live-action adaptations. Filmmakers and showrunners in both Hollywood and Japan have been bringing classic and popular anime stories to life for years. Whether you love them or hate them, they’ve been around for longer than you might think, and will continue to make their way to the big and small screens.

But outside of the recent hit Detective Pikachu movie, a Ghost in the Shell adaptation that received tepid critical and fan response, and the upcoming continuation of the Rurouni Kenshin films, there are plenty of adaptations of anime that you might not know about. These include plenty of Japan-only TV series, movie franchises, and even some dramas that you can view on Crunchyroll right now! Without further ado, here's a list of live-action anime adaptations that you may be surprised actually exist!

Mob Psycho 100 (2018 Netflix series)

The wildly-popular psychic action anime has a 12-episode series on Netflix. It tells the same story of Shigeo “Mob” Kageyama, a young boy trying to live a normal life and learning to understand his emotions while keeping his immense psychic powers at bay.

Though the show takes a few narrative liberties with some characters, including involving Ritsu in Mob’s fights with Dimple and Teru, the drama remains largely faithful to the entire first season of the anime. It even features some flashy effects-driven fights that benefited from impressive stunt coordination rather than traditional animation.

One of the more notable aspects of this adaptation is its cast, which is comprised largely of alumni actors in tokusatsu franchises such as Kamen Rider, Super Sentai, and Ultraman. The eponymous Mob is played by Tatsuomi Hamada, who played the titular main protagonist in 2017’s Ultraman Geed, which you can watch on Crunchyroll now! His self-proclaimed master and conman Reigen Arataka is played by Kazuki Namioka, who portrayed a villain in Kamen Rider Gaim in 2013. Kasumi Yamaya, who played president of the school Telepathy Club Tome Kurata, had a major role as Kasumi Momochi/MomoNinger, the pink ranger in 2015’s Shuriken Sentai Ninninger. Anyone who dabbles in tokusatsu may want to take a second look at most anyone else in the cast, because chances are you’ve seen them using fancy toys to transform into superheroes before!

Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable (2017 film)

  Right as part 4 of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure was airing, Warner Bros. and Toho announced a live-action adaptation of Josuke Higashikata’s adventures. The first movie was released in August in Japan and was planned to kick off a series of films that would adapt the whole story. The film told a largely abridged version of the original story, either splicing together various plot points or removing them altogether for the sake of brevity. These included placing Koichi’s Stand awakening during one of the original arc’s earliest fights with Keicho Nijimura, and Sheer Heart Attack replacing Red Hot Chili Pepper’s debut. The film was highly anticipated, but mixed reception left the future of the series in question.

The film stars award-winning Japanese actor Kento Yamazaki as Josuke, who coincidentally stars in several live-action adaptations. But more on him later. The true hero of the film might be Yusuke Iseya, who portrayed Jotaro Kujo in the film. A short-lived meme that emerged during the film's promotion revolved around just how Iseya achieved Jotaro’s signature hat-hair blend. The meme, which showed actor Asano Tadenobu with a large shaven bald spot in the middle of his head, suggested that Iseya might have had to do the same for his own hair in order for the hat to form around it. If true, that would make him one dedicated actor!

Death Note (2015 drama series)

You might have heard of the series of live-action movies in Japan from 2006 that adapted the Death Note story. Perhaps you also caught wind the Netflix adaptation, a movie that sparked casting controversy and received some negative critical response. But did you also know about the 11-episode drama in 2015 that you can stream on Crunchyroll right now! This show tells a shortened version of Light Yagami’s story, but still adheres to his goal of using a magic death-dealing notebook to save the world.

In trying to condense a 37-episode story into 11 hour-long segments, the drama trimmed the narrative and made several interesting changes. This included introducing Near as a detective and L’s protege in the very first episode, making Mello into Near’s violent alternate personality, and a drastically different ending for L. A few changes were made with other pre-existing characters as well, such as making Misa Amane a pop idol instead of a model.

Already a noteworthy actor in his own right, the aforementioned Kento Yamazaki received praise for his role as fan favorite L. In 2016, Kento Yamazaki won the 39th Japan Academy Prize for Newcomer of the Year for his role in Orange, a film adaptation of a slice-of-life romance manga. Shortly after his work on Death Note, he coincidentally found roles in other live-action adaptations. Aside from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure and Death Note, these include a lead role in Saiki K., a starring role in a 2020 adaptation in Wotakoi, and a certain piano-playing high school student who we’ll talk about in just a bit.

His co-star and lead actor Masataka Kubota, who played Light Yagami, has also seen work in live-action versions of Rurouni Kenshin, Tokyo Ghoul, and Gintama to name a few. He also won Best Actor in the 86th The Television Drama Academy Awards for his role as Light.

Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon (2003 series)

As a worldwide cultural phenomenon, Sailor Moon has seen three movies, an anime remake in Sailor Moon Crystal, re-releases, stage musicals, and yes, a tokusatsu series in 2003. While it remains faithful to the overall plot of Usagi Tsukino and her friends transforming into Sailor Soldiers to fight evil, this 49+ episode show featured several plot points that are distinct from both the manga and the original anime, becoming its own unique story in the long run.

While originally, Minako Aino is a regular girl who dreams of fame, the live-action Minako balances an idol life, a school life, and being a Sailor Soldier. As Sailor Venus and a veteran Soldier, she’s notably harsher on her fellow Soldiers as she tries to make them understand their duties. Sailor Moon also has an exclusive super form called “Princess Sailor Moon,” a powerful yet dangerous form that combines Usagi and her past self.

The show also introduced two completely new characters in the form of Dark Mercury and Sailor Luna. A short arc in the show saw Ami Mizuno being brainwashed by the Dark Kingdom and turning against her friends. This caused her to take on a new, more evil Sailor Soldier form. Sailor Luna, on the other hand, came about after Luna gained the ability to become a young human girl (albeit with her feline nature still intact). Designed by Naoko Takeuchi herself, Luna replaces Chibusa/Sailor Chibi Moon in the story, as she starts living with Usagi as a human and transforms into a childish Sailor Soldier. Her design takes cues from both Sailor Chibi Moon and Luna's original human form as depicted in the manga and the Sailor Moon S film.

  An amusing footnote of the series was Luna and Artemis often being portrayed with cute plushies during various scenes!

Your Lie in April (2016 film)

Kento Yamazaki continued his trend of working on live-action adaptations by portraying Kosei Arima in an adaptation of everyone’s favorite tear-inducing piano drama. This rendition came hot off the heels of the successful anime that ended in March of 2015.

    Though certain characters were omitted from the adaptation, the movie was able to tell the same dramatic and emotional story in its entirety. The film placed at number 3 in the Japanese box office during its initial release, trailing after the Japanese release of Warner Bros. Suicide Squad and the infamous Makoto Shinkai film, Your Name, which maintained its number 1 spot in its third week in theaters. The theme song for the film, “Last Scene,” was performed by Ikimono-gakari, who are known for their work on Bleach and Naruto: Shippuden theme songs.

Tonari no Seki-kun (2015 mini-series)

A hilarious short form anime in its own right, Tonari no Seki-kun saw an eight-episode mini-series. It stayed true to its original story of a schoolgirl sitting next to a classmate who does all manner of ridiculous activities on his desk except pay attention in class. The series stars the actress formerly known as Fumika Shimizu, who previously appeared in 2011's Kamen Rider Fourze and in the first Tokyo Ghoul live action film.

The short segments aired alongside another comedy called Rumi-chan no Jishou. Coincidentally enough, both shows starred girls named “Rumi” as main protagonists.

Ouran High School Host Club (2011 drama)

The popular romantic comedy about an androgynous young girl who gets caught up with the handsome and flamboyant boys who run her school’s host club was adapted into a live action series in 2011. The adaptation's popularity earned it a feature length movie in 2012 that took place after its broadcast, as well as a spin-off miniseries.

This 11-episode drama adapts a number of the anime episodes faithfully, with each character remaining true to the source material. But the show actually goes a step further to include plotlines from the original manga. Characters like Ayame Jounouchi are featured more prominently than they were in the anime, and the show’s final episode more closely adheres to the manga than the anime did. The 2012 film also uses a manga-only arc as its plot, while also taking creative liberties with its characters. If you wanted to check out the show for yourself, you'd be in for a fresh Ouran experience!

Much like the live-action Mob Psycho 100, this adaptation also included a considerable number of Kamen Rider and Super Sentai alumni actors in its main cast, as well as one who would move on to Sentai. Tamaki Suou was portrayed by Yusuke Yamamoto, who was previously known for his role in 2006’s Kamen Rider Kabuto as Tsurugi Kamishiro/Kamen Rider Sasword. Yamamoto also had a role in a 2012 live-action version of Great Teacher Onizuka.

The Hitachiin siblings were played by twin brothers Shinpei and Manpei Takagi, the latter of whom played Retsu Fukami/GekiBlue in 2007’s Juken Sentai Gekiranger. Shinpei Takagi had brief roles in Super Sentai history as well! The bunny-hugging Mitsukuni “Honey” Haninozuka and the gothic, photophobic Umehito Nekozawa were played by Yudai Chiba and Ryo Ryusei respectively, each of whom portrayed red Sentai rangers in their careers. 

Future Diary: Another World (2012 drama series)

This version of the violent survival game anime is a vastly different take on the source material. While it borrows a few details from the original story, there are notable alterations throughout. Seven people (as opposed to 12) are given cellphones that predict the future and are thrust into a dangerous game where the last person standing can create a new future.

The protagonists of the original series have counterparts in the live-action characters, but with different names and personalities. A major example includes Yuno Furusaki, the counterpart to yandere mascot Yuno Gasai. Furusaki retains her stalker-like affection for protagonist Arata Hoshino and immediately resolves to defeat anyone who would do him harm, but she does not initially display any of the hyper-violent tendencies that her anime portrayal is infamous for. As its own original narrative, it's certainly worth checking out to see how unique it is from its predecessor.

Gegege no Kitaro (2007-2008 film series)

Gegege no Kitaro has seen several anime revivals and films over more than 50 years, including its most recent weekly-airing adaptation. It should come as no surprise that two live-action films came about in 2007 and 2008 (not to mention a live action drama in 1985). Portrayed as a young man rather than a boy as he is traditionally shown, Kitaro works with his yokai friends to defend the human world from evil yokai that would do them harm. Using this “monster-of-the-week” format, the live action movies were able to tell noticeably original stories, albeit borrowing from some of the franchise’s classic arcs. The first film reportedly earned more than 23.4 billion yen throughout its theatrical run.

Kitaro was portayed by Eiji Wentz, an American Japanese singer who also performed the theme song for the first film. Kitaro's father, Daddy Eyeball, was voiced by Isamu Tanonaka, who had voiced the character since 1968. He is known for voicing the character in almost every Gegege no Kitaro adaptation throughout his lifetime!

Black Butler (2014 film)

The demonic butler, Sebastian Michaelis, made a silver screen debut in 2014 with a live-action cast. He was portrayed Hiro Mizushima, who also co-wrote and co-produced the film. He is best known for his starring role in 2006’s Kamen Rider Kabuto. He also starred in the live action adaptations of Gokusen and Beck.

The overall plot remains the same, wherein a young child’s soul is bound to a demon in exchange for its eternal servitude, but it diverges from the source material in multiple respects. The film is set in a modern nation in the year 2020, a far cry from the anime’s original setting in Victorian-era London. Main protagonist Ciel Phantomhive became Shiori Genpou, a female descendant of the Phantomhives who disguises herself as a male descendant to retain her stake in the Phantomhive legacy. Characters like Angelina Dalles and Mey-Rin see Japanese name changes in their live-action counterparts. The film debuted at number 3 in the Japanese box office during its weekend premiere.

Live action adaptations are something of an institution in the anime world. The adaptations listed here are far from the only ones out there, and they'll likely be around for years to come. With adaptations Cowboy Bebop and Your Name on the horizon, it'll be interesting to see how they'll stack up to the original works!

Have you checked out any of the live action anime adaptations listed here? What anime would you want to see receive the live-action treatment? Let us know in the comments!

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Carlos is a freelance features writer for Crunchyroll. Their favorite genres range from magical girls to over-the-top robot action, yet their favorite characters are always the obscure ones. Check out some of their satirical work on The Hard Times.

Do you love writing? Do you love anime? If you have an idea for a features story, pitch it to Crunchyroll Features

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The 12 Groups That Could possibly Get Tremendous Bowl LVI

A number of months back again, even though filling within just for colleague Albert Breers weekly mailbag column, I was questioned through editor Mitch Goldich what the worst prediction Ive at any time designed was. Upon my aged podcast, The Poor-Aspect Podcast with Jenny Vrentas, I performed a persona that was experienced inside the artwork of prognostication, and we experienced finish episodes centered upon the horrendous predictions Identification manufactured for the duration of the yr Raheem Mostert Jersey. Nonetheless seeking again upon it, my worst task could possibly contain been an definitely earnest exertion. Inside August of remaining yr, I wrote a piece upon the 12 groups that could possibly realistically earn the Tremendous Bowl. The moment it arrives toward the artwork of the prediction, this is an great write-up for the reason that it incorporates a extensive runway and the options of currently being immediately anytime yourself record a 3rd of the league are charming positive! Of program, I still left the Buccaneersand Tom Bradyoff the record. By yourself dont acquire specifics for taking the supreme 3 seeds inside of every single convention While, at some point, your self go away the Tremendous Bowl winner out of the blend. Lesson found. Hardly ever question Brady. That, thanks towards the sheer amount of money of guesses I experienced, was the worst prediction Ive at any time designed. This calendar year, Ive reformulated my strategy a minor little bit and incorporate tried using in the direction of tuck all my ingrained biases apart. Together with within just the NBA this yr, I appear to be which include there is a broader all round variety of groups that may well get the Tremendous Bowl, hence nicely adhere with 12. There are 2 quarterbacks within just considerable refreshing areas. Dak Prescott incorporates returned towards hurt https://www.sf4gear.com/youth, in all probability healthy than at any time. Theres a good deal of solution below, which is, sooner or later, why we indication up in direction of spend our life towards this 12 months following yr. Makes it possible for split the comprehensive issue down, workers as a result of employees.Mark J. Rebilas/United states Currently Sporting activities ; Joseph Maiorana/United states of america These days Sports activities ; Jamie Germano/Rochester Democrat and Chronicle/United states At present Community 1. Kansas Town ChiefsLast decades end: 142, AFC West winner, shed in the direction of Buccaneers within the Tremendous BowlWhy they can gain it all inside 2021: This one particular doesnt will need a long reason. The Chiefs include the least complicated and greatest flexible quarterback within the NFL, a participant who can punish oneself within plethora methods, and the utmost artistic enjoy-caller within just the league. That reported, I believe we can securely predict a little bit extra having difficulties this 12 months. The Chiefs significantly outperformed their Pythagorean acquire-reduction standards in opposition to 2020, due inside of higher aspect towards a pandemic that throttled the offseason and weighted gains upon present-day, rewarding QB-practice mixtures. This calendar year, theyll be in just a a great deal harder office, giving Vic Fangios utmost gifted safety toward day and Brandon Staley, who, even though defensive coordinator of the Rams, practically broke a heritage for fewest instant-fifty percent specifics permitted within NFL record.2. Tampa Bay BuccaneersLast a long time conclude: 115, wild card, received Tremendous Bowl Why they can get it all within just 2021: It is just about extremely hard in direction of repeat within just todays NFL, When Tom Brady was the past quarterback toward do it and, once again, we are finished stating any kind of question inside the largest participant the league is made up of at any time discovered. Tampas hard, duo-laden function plan punished competitors late in just the period and borrowed properly in opposition to a typical Belichick-ian system that always noticed his groups morph into ability punchers late in just the year. At the moment that theyve held their finish roster, they can acquire upon some of their largest positive aspects and assault the business with a even more different mix of the Brady and Bruce Arians offenses. 3. Cleveland BrownsLast several years total: 115, wild card, shed in the direction of Chiefs inside the divisional roundWhy they can earn it all in just 2021: The Browns have been one particular of the far more healthy groups in just the NFL remaining calendar year, regardless of some evident holes upon the defensive facet of the ball. Whilst its normally not possible in direction of destination as well a lot of specifications upon the shoulders of novice corners and hybrid linebackers, the additions of Greg Newsome II, Jeremiah Owusu-Koramoah and Tony Fields II developed them much harder and additional flexible inside of a department that desires thickness in the direction of fend off severe downhill managing, versatility in the direction of activity cell quarterbacks and superior restricted finish engage in, and multifaceted insurance policy expertise for the broad wide range of deep-hazard receivers. Their jogging match is beneath the treatment of Monthly bill Callahan, just one of the most significant offensive line coaches and operate-recreation coordinators within NFL heritage, and functions a deep strong of backs who preserve tension off Baker Mayfield . If Cleveland can produce upon its results in opposition to a 12 months in the past and discover alone as a a little even further competent personnel shielding the go, it could possibly surge in the direction of the meeting championship. 4. Buffalo BillsLast several years total: 133, AFC East winner, misplaced in the direction of Chiefs inside of the meeting championshipWhy they can get it all inside of 2021: Even though the Expenditures may perhaps include at some point forgotten their window Trent Sherfield Jersey, they are even now a significantly very well-coached staff with a stable security and a person of the excellent matchup-dependent offensive coordinators inside of the NFL. Allens power toward scare groups as the two a deep passer and electrical power runner produced Buffalo a constant hazard inside 2020 and will heading do thus once more this yr. Their energy toward opt for aside competition may possibly be observed within the real truth that they had been even now logging a league-most straightforward 0.14 EPA for each engage in ranking upon performs that did not aspect backfield action or any type of presnap window dressing. Allen lets yourself toward quickly line up and engage in challenging soccer. With the addition of both of those Gregory Rousseau and Carlos Basham Jr., the Charges comprise indicated in the direction of all of us that getting a middling stress personnel is unacceptable, specially within the ho-hum AFC East. Immediately after the Buccaneers blueprint, their anticipate is that an overload of trained rushers can enhance a gifted secondary. 5. Environmentally friendly Bay PackersLast many years end: 133, NFC North winner, missing towards Buccaneers inside of meeting championshipWhy they can acquire it all within just 2021: The Packers, together with the 49ers, consist of mastered the Mike ShanahanAlex Gibbs outdoors zone process that properly marries the operate and move video games alongside one another. At the time a course of action such as this is perfected and the roster is created more than it, on your own come to be more robust with the a long time every teach and quarterback fork out inside the offense. However, Aaron Rodgerss lack consists of triggered a little bit of a standstill upon the growth entrance, nevertheless that wont avoid train Matt LaFleur and offensive coordinator Nathaniel Hackett versus proceeding in direction of recognize significant mismatches towards exploit throughout a inclined department. When the Packers would not create this checklist if Jordan Enjoy have been their total-season rookie within 2021 D.J. Jones Jersey, I believe that they may possibly however be Wonderful plenty of towards contend for, and likely eke out, a department gain if aspects received NFC Eaststyle sloppy. 6. Los Angeles RamsLast many years conclude: 106, wild card, shed toward Packers inside of divisional roundWhy they can get it all within just 2021: Were being advised the addition of Matthew Stafford will generate the Rams a totally choice staff this calendar year, while that continues to be toward be observed. Curiously more than enough, the Rams had been a powerful offensive employees Even though Sean McVay was pulling the puppet strings in just Jared Goffs helmet in advance of the snap https://www.sf4gear.com/elijah-mitchell-jersey. What takes place at the moment, once there is added autonomy and, theoretically, creativeness at the level? At most straightforward, Stafford hits all the throws Goff couldnt, or didnt realize were being there. And that is sufficient in direction of get over the decline of an high-quality defensive coordinator and the perfect basic safety within just soccer past yr. Possibly route, the Rams are all in just, and soon after Tampa Bays surprising Tremendous Bowl surge, its a technique just one is made up of in direction of take pleasure in at the time the prepare and quarterback are equally best-notch. 7. San Francisco 49ersLast yrs stop: 610, ultimate vacation spot inside of the NFC WestWhy they can get it all within just 2021: This is nonetheless a personnel that bullied its course in the direction of a Tremendous Bowl with Jimmy Garoppolo below heart 2 yrs back. The 49ers had been decimated as a result of damage closing 12 months and, as a result of the center of the year, had been extensively unrecognizable against the juggernaut that looked towards be forming the calendar year ahead of. Kyle Shanahan is continue to a sharp head, and even though he dropped a large amount of head electricity upon the training employees this offseason with the departures of Robert Saleh, John Benton and Mike LaFleur, he continue to consists of the proficient Mike McDaniel at his aspect, alongside with offensive line expert Chris Foerster. When some us citizens may well cock their heads at this choose, Garoppolo is sure impressed towards engage in his direction into a further setting up position somewhere else within 2022 and the 49ers far too include the remedy, when they hence decide, toward pull the rip wire upon Trey Lance and introduce a minimal chaos into defensive conference rooms everywhere you go. 8. Dallas CowboysLast a long time conclusion: 610, 3rd position inside the NFC East Why they can earn it all within 2021: With Prescott back again and wholesome, all aspects are prospective. Although the jury is continue to out upon Mike McCarthy sans Brett Favre or Rodgers within phrases of his energy in direction of function an medical procedures and read through a place, the Cowboys include manufactured crucial strides this offseason towards shore up obvious complications. The choosing of Dan Quinn as defensive coordinator may well be instrumental in just lifting the bitter temper still left powering a 12 months in the past. The Cowboys contain a single of the deepest linebacking corps within just soccer, which will support them climate a convention that will verify their electricity in the direction of safeguard the function versus a number of techniques with gifted backs.9. Indianapolis ColtsLast many years end: 115, wild card, dropped towards Payments inside of the divisional roundWhy they can earn it all in just 2021: This is one particular of the greatest thorough groups within just soccer. Need to Rock Ya-Sin choose a stage ahead, aiding the Colts spherical out their secondary as a substitute of basically covering it, Indianapolis might not simply just cruise in direction of an AFC South name however produce some sounds in just the playoffs. The main marvel mark below would appear to be in the direction of be Carson Wentz, however pairing him with Frank Reich yet again guarantees that there will be an offense with further more good tests and balances. Whenever Reich fled in direction of Indianapolis back again inside of 2018, therefore did Wentzs requirements of a somewhat digestible established of progressions driving centre. That triggered negative practices and poor blood, possibly of which are long gone at the moment. 10. Baltimore RavensLast several years complete: 115, wild card, misplaced toward Charges within just divisional roundWhy they can gain it all in just 2021: Taking a talented playmaker including Lamar Jackson assures youll be within the combination no matter of how conditions drop above him https://www.sf4gear.com/terrell-owens-jersey. Very last year was a aggravation, primarily a reflection of some monetary selections the Ravens almost certainly need they might incorporate again, as effectively as some essential roster happenings out of their handle. The additions of 2 skilled large receivers into the plan need to be adequate toward reinforce an offense that uncovered by itself prone in direction of strain , specified the groups inclination in direction of function the ball. Jackson specifications towards big difference his warm map inside obtain towards be seriously thriving over and above what the plan is advertising, and bringing inside of both equally Sammy Watkins and Rashod Bateman will be a necessary phase inside of that guidance. The Ravens are certainly attempting toward extend the market further this yr, which delivers us in direction of a appealing analysis interval for Jackson, who contains by now stated us thus a great deal. 11. Seattle SeahawksLast decades comprehensive: 124, NFC West winner, misplaced toward Rams in just the wild-card spherical Why they can gain it all in just 2021: This is type of a legacy reward toward Russell Wilson, who, alongside with his cadre of gifted receivers, is with regards to the simply just issue well worth eating religion inside of. Wilsons sizzling get started within just 2020 was stymied at the time the Seahawks receded their programs toward operate a total-throttle passing offense. The addition of Shane Waldron as offensive coordinator demonstrates an focus inside of either melding the move and function game titles which includes the 49ers, Rams and Packers incorporate performed inside the further than, despite the fact that its a prolonged and occasionally challenging technique anytime the offensive line ability lags within some parts. Right until Pete Carrolls safety keeps some of its enamel, although, its challenging in the direction of imagine Seattle virtually profitable the Tremendous Bowl outdoors of some correct Wilson hero ball. 12. Los Angeles ChargersLast decades entire: 79, 3rd desired destination within just the AFC WestWhy they can earn it all within 2021: If there is just one practice who can incorporate a Kevin Stefanskitype impression upon his roster inside Calendar year 1, its Brandon Staley. The safety, which unsuccessful in direction of produce substantially worry and was gouged towards sure dashing offenses in just 2020, will eventually be much better. The quarterback, reigning novice of the 12 months Justin Herbert, is one more tale. Staley is a preceding quarterback who naturally knows the point intimately, despite the fact that his conclusion of offensive coordinator was a little bit underwhelming. Joe Lombardi, inside less than 2 several years as the Lions offensive coordinator in just 2014 and 15, was 19th and 18th within internet yards for every test, respectively. There was no greatest 10 total inside of information, and Lombardi was overlooked when 7 days 7 of that minute year. There are moving in direction of be some not possible things of Anthony Lynns tenure with the Chargers in direction of substitute. For instance, the Chargers were being 8th inside experiencing stress ultimate 12 months because of in direction of a porous offensive line .

8 Helpful Tips To Kick-start A Fresh Virtual Academic Year!

8 Helpful Tips To Kick-start A Fresh Virtual Academic Year!

Another year has gone by, only this time with more bittersweet memories!

A big shout out to all the parents! For successfully going through this year while beating all the odds of the academic year for your children.

Trust us, we all have been through this! You and your children deserve applause for the perseverance and calmness that you have tried to maintain. 

On the other hand, digital education can be said as one of the best breakthroughs in technology. Can we envisage the pandemic if online education wasn't available? We are still nowhere near a conventional in-school system for this and maybe, for later years too. 

The preparation for the regular start of the digital academic year of schooling differs on various fronts. Here are a few tips to start with another virtual academic year based on the profound experience we all had in 2020! 

1. Scheduling is Important

The most critical is to maintain a plan for everything happening at home. Maintaining the schedule closest to the "school time-table" is the best bet you have. Experts suggest to follow a sleep schedule and distributed hours for every activity as per regular school life is also paramount. Good predictability of what happens next will keep everyone on track for their respective responsibilities. Encourage the children to make/ write their schedule themselves or participate while making their time-table for the day. Knowing the routine beforehand will help them in adhering to it with self-discipline.

2. Offer exciting Brain Breaks

Prepare a list of brain breaks that suit your children's needs, temperament, interests and age. The kids will themselves sync their routine with the set schedule for the lucrative brain breaks. Brain breaks in post-school-hours help to perform better in terms of homework, projects and additional school work. Weekly shuffling between various brain breaks will help the kids to stay occupied and fascinated with activities. Everyone faced the same issue that left you helpless last year - how to keep the children engaged constructively and adhere to online learning? These brain breaks will not only incline them to look forward to some fun but will allow you time to do your work/job/chores without too much interruption. 

(Check our blogs for more details on brain breaks)

3. Positive feedback and Appreciation

Extracting motivation and positivity from the last academic year is equally important to start with the new digital academic year on an assertive note. Discuss the progress of your children with the teachers. Likewise, discuss the issues, opinions, interests and overall situation of home-schooling with your kids too. Bestow them with genuine and honest appreciation while keeping the appropriate checks they need to take care of. Regular teacher-parent meeting, assessments, results will encourage them to move forward and accept the new normal with an improved perspective. Rather than only correcting and chastising the kids, we need to focus, with even greater intent, on finding their strengths and play with them.

4. Observe, adapt, implement

For younger kids, parents had to be present in person while online classes were broadcasting. The parents have had the chance to closely monitor their children and their reactions to subjects, activities, topics. It's a boon to know if he/she is facing difficulty coping with the course speed or understanding any concepts. The parents now understand better about the subjects your child likes and what interests him/her over other topics. These observations can be discussed with their teacher at the beginning of the academic year. Incorporate flexibility for subject-topics that are difficult and schedule additional classes for them at later hours. For the concepts that are not clear, ask the teachers to keep the video recording to be viewed again after school hours to avoid undue pressure on the kids. For particular concepts, rearrange the classes or shift the timings to a slot when children are more attentive, preferably in the morning hours. It is all about observing and adapting, from the beginning, to get the best results out of new methods on virtual learning. 

5. Staying in touch

Not going to school should not intervene with general socializing that our children need for their generic development. Offer the best possible opportunity for your kids to meet with their friends, have play-dates, or have video calls to keep in touch with their peers. Of course, all of the socializing has to be done with safety measures in place. A few hours in the open space during mid-season breaks or holidays keep them rejuvenated for a better start to the upcoming term. Video play dates are also one of the popular options where the parents want to prevent endangering kids in the current situation. Darsh, a father of 5 yo from Chennai, said, "After this period of social distancing, our building society decided time and rules for children to play. The parents have to monitor that no kids are without a mask. The kids play games (that maintain distancing) in the slots decided for their age group and frequent sanitizing. The effect of moving out of the house on the behaviour of our daughter is so gratifying!" 

 6. Virtual classroom  

Creating a designated space for schooling is an effective way to roar-start the new virtual academic year. It is not mandatory to have a separate room for the same as Indian Households do not have the concept of a separate room for everyone. A designated table, an individual screen-device, a nook in one of the rooms is good to go. The children should feel that just like their school, they have a designated seat for their classes. The conducive environment has a conscious psychological impact on their minds about classroom discipline. It is imminent to design a place that is not the regular spot for their regular games or watching television. Just like your work-from-home set-up having a school-from-home set-up will improve their performance and concentration.

7. Impress upon Off-screen time

Digital education is synonymous with the use of screens. The villain of the life of most parents has become indispensable with the online education system. It is even more necessary to take and strategize for lesser screen time. Resisting and forcing screen-offtime would only do so good. Motivating your children to involve themselves in fun, skill-enhancing, and physical activities is the only way to cut down on additional screen-time. For school activities, and classwork try to obtain print outs and let the kids complete them physically to avoid screen use. Now with adapting to changes, teachers are sending hard copies for classwork and projects. Offering hobbies and extracurricular activities towards which the kids are naturally inclined will prompt them to avoid screen-use on their own will. 

8. Prepare like before

Prepare for the new academic session with all the arrangement like normal. New books, a few new stationery, a set of new clothes or uniform can bring the experience as close to normal as possible. Your children must understand that not attending school in person is not equivalent to vacation, and they are expected to adhere to prepare for everyday school like always. Packing books as per periods on the time table, ironing the uniform, bathing on time before the start of school, these regular activities that commensurate with the original school routine will help them to gain confidence and tune their biological clocks to this new regime!

The teachers are bearing additional efforts to bring online teaching as close as possible to traditional schooling. However, an equal responsibility has been put on the parents as their guidance and presence has become indispensable. 

The children, especially the primary class ones, are affected by this shift of base with innumerable distractions at their hands reach.These points are not magical tips that will remove the pressure in a flick of a wand but will surely help navigate through another year of online learning.

Please do share your views and experiences in the comments below. Help other parents to face their personal situations and concerns of virtual learning. 

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Key Benefits Of Reading Newspaper For Students in Day Today Life

The benefits of reading National News In Hindi for Students are talked about here in this article. Quite a long time ago papers were the best way to realize what was going on around the world. A piece of paper that advised you of everything significant that occurs around you. Media developed and improved with time. Radios, TVs, the web. Yet papers held their place. On account of custom, utility or something different, they just couldn't be disposed of from every day schedules. The print type of papers has its days numbered now obviously. It's likely going to leave its presence in 25 years or less, and that also is a result of the nostalgic worth it holds. Be that as it may, for the occasion, the Internet isn't totally unavoidable yet, paper has not out experienced it's utility and papers are as yet in play. So what is the significance of buying into and perusing this piece of paper, especially for understudies? That is the thing that is being analyzed here.

Benefits Of Reading Paper For Students

1. GENERAL KNOWLEDGE

It is essential to know the world you live in. Papers give us information about the significant happenings around there, our express, our country and our reality in a coordinated and focused way. From the dying of World Leaders to psychological militant assaults to the Best Picture victor of the Academy Awards, it discloses to us all that we require to know about as residents of the world. For understudies, a decent measure of general information is important for cutthroat tests, interviews, tests, etc. It even assists you to begin scholarly discussions with your companions. Looking for hindi newspapers  go for Bhopal News In Hindi one of the best selling newspaper in Bhopal.

2. Keeping awake To-Date

Remaining refreshed with the most recent patterns in the fields of science, innovation and business is significant for understudies. Contingent upon what you're considering, there might be various regions you need to zero in on. For designing understudies, it is of most extreme significance to know about the most recent progressions in innovations of their picked field or hazard confronting embarrassment in bunch conversations, interviews and so forth. For the board understudies, they need to stay aware of the most recent patterns in business, financial matters, the executives and so forth Not only for proficient purposes, even in friendly circumstances not remaining refreshed may cause you to feel unaware of what's going on in discussions. It's humiliating on the off chance that you don't realize that your nation got another president since you neglected to look at the features that day. Papers give every one of the current undertakings you look for coordinated into areas that are not difficult to track down, simplifying life.Indore News In Hindi will help you to keep you up to date in today's time.

3. Schedule

First thing each day you subside into a seat with the day's paper and some tea. It's a banality which is as it should be. Regardless of whether you read it in a rocker or on the latrine, a day by day paper routine does extraordinary things for you. It carries a request to a turbulent life. It encourages discipline, makes it simpler for you to adhere to plans. It's an extraordinary method to get your three day weekend to a decent beginning. Sort of removes the sluggishness and lights you up. Gives you things to consider during your regularly scheduled drive. The everyday paper routine can fill in as a reprieve from your bustling life. It assists you with loosening up, unwind, and considering things outside your life. Additionally, as referenced previously, the riddles and the crosswords are extraordinary stressbusters and assists with invigorating your cerebrum. All things considered, it's an extraordinary propensity to keep.

4. Training And Career News

Understudies should know about most recent freedoms in schooling including grants, advanced education programs, various courses being offered, subtleties of cutthroat tests and so forth Most significant papers will in general have a day by day or week by week area devoted to simply that. Instructive ads are remembered for this, ensuring understudies don't pass up anything. A one stop objective for everything instructive. It might likewise incorporate persuasive articles, tips and deceives for acing tests, stressbuster articles and such. For more seasoned understudies there are vocation areas to manage them. Occupation advertisements, training, talk with tips and more are given here. These areas focus on all round proficiency and self-improvement and are profoundly valuable for understudies.for the best news regarding training and career read Jabalpur News In Hindi.

5. Detaching

The Internet is the quickly developing monster that is taking steps to supplant the newspaper industry. The more youthful age invests the entirety of their energy connected, various concurrent discussions and data over-burden from each bearing. In any event, for the individuals who are totally reliant upon the Internet for all their news needs, it may very well be ideal to unplug now and again and return to the less difficult existence of printed words and paper. There are no interruptions of the virtual world in papers. You can zero in on engrossing and understanding the day's news and not simply swipe through features.

6. Diversion

Other than legislative issues and strategy choices and the making and breaking of governments, papers additionally report lighter themes. There is a diversion segment to most papers, zeroing in on tattle sections and trifling mattes implied uniquely for invigorating your psyche. Understudies, particularly secondary school understudies will in general follow this stuff strictly. Some significant papers likewise distribute additional enhancements on ends of the week devoted only to lighter subjects. The games segment obviously gives significant updates to those intrigued. At that point there are tests and crosswords and riddles like Sudoku. Settling down on a Sunday with a pen and a crossword is both engaging and revives the brain. For understudies, such things improve jargon, psychological reasoning, sensible thinking and mental ascertaining capacities.

7. Solid and Trustworthy

Web-based media channels are the most utilized hotspot for everyday news refreshes for many individuals these days, particularly for youthful understudies. WhatsApp advances and situations with your Instagram feed is the essential hotspot for remaining refreshed. The issue is that phony words get out so quickly thus far via online media. WhatsApp advances are known for being famously untrustworthy. No one tries to certainty check prior to hitting forward to all contacts. There had been debates during the last political race when ideological groups were blamed for getting out counterfeit words through Facebook to control political decision results. Papers are not so effortlessly controlled. Particularly the enormous papers can be trusted, or possibly the most trusted among all media stages, to report veritable news without inclination. Since they have a name to maintain and news once printed can't be withdrawn, they guarantee greatest constancy in their announcing of occasions. So it is protected to accept that out of all accessible wellsprings of information, papers are the canal solid.

8. Refined

Understudies lead an occupied, stuffed life, in every case some cutoff time to meet, some test to read for, some class you're late for. Papers give news in a refined, efficient way. Features that mention to you what the news is, most significant information on the first page, the rest arranged into areas and orchestrated by need. You can peruse just the part you're keen on, or in case you're truly in a rush, you can just peruse the features. This, particularly when contrasted with the huge data over-burdening of the Internet, could be truly useful to understudies.

9. Understanding Habit

The individuals who have made a propensity out of perusing papers commonly will in general additionally read different things more. It is a decent passage that leads you to the energizing universe of perusing. Understudies who read papers day by day, in the end likewise get into books and memoirs and other light readings. It likewise improves your understanding of velocity and core interest.The Gwalior News In Hindi will give you the best knowledge and will help you to enhance it. 

10. Language Skill

Papers improve your jargon, language, and your perusing, composing and expressive abilities. Words utilized in paper articles are perhaps extreme, new, or some kind of language. Looking into these words can contribute tremendously to your jargon over the long run. It additionally improves your composing abilities, assists you with understanding legitimate sentence structures, show, and so forth Knowing your language smoothly additionally assists you with talking it unquestionably. Particularly understudies who are not sure about their English capability, are prescribed to make a propensity for perusing English papers day by day. The distinction can be seen right away.