#No full transcript but I DID want to include the full clip

[royalarchivist]

Cucurucho (?): The power given to you decades ago is going to be revoked. You will go back to the world of the mortals.

#Rubius #Cucurucho #AAAAAAAAAAAAAA #QSMP #AAAAAAAAAAAAA #IVE WAITED YEARS FOR THIS MOMENT #IT FINALLY HAPPENED #He at one point wanted to become a human so he could interact with other Islanders more #YOU GOT WHAT YA WISHED FOR BOY #No full transcript but I DID want to include the full clip #November 4 2023

[castle-dominion]

castle 7x6 time of our lives

the it's a wonderful life episode liveblog

holy crap I haven't watched a castle in like two weeks bc my days off from work are spent at school... at least i finished writing that fic. Now I just need to edit & post. I was actually hoping to watch an ep tonight but lil bro skipped his evening activity so my bros & I watched Monk instead of me watching Castle & finally catching up. Well since I only have an hour until bed (it's fucking 7pm) I'll spend some of that liveblogging off the transcript. Not doing schoolwork, not exercising, not watching castle for real, not showering, not doing chores, actually I cooked supper today & am doing laundry but otherwise I'm not doing what needs to be dne I'm doing what I fucking WANT to.

Mathias Gensler. Wow briefcase cuff, typical. (I can't believe I'm in s7, that's so late! That's the last quarter!) My man is so tired

Nooo renzo! I totally thought he was in on it {there is a reason} & he just fLAILeD when he died! It was great!

Lol smash cut chopping veg. Pi vibes. haven't slept WELL, becks. He has slept, just crappy. Or is this the one abt nightmares? Martha! I feel like sometimes fasting can make you woozy not clear headed... Wait martha u can do it! & I realized this is the AU episode! Yessss! They mention Will Sorenson! We don't get to see him but he is mentioned & inviting becks to the wedding! She's kinda mad lol {I actually saw this episode & thought that all the fanfictions about captain beckett were referencing this episode, until I got to s8.} UwU I love it, KB: So we’re bad for each other, huh? RC: The worst. [They kiss] RC: It’s like It’s A Wonderful Life. Every time your phone rings a victim gets their wings. Too accurate

Swiss Wait who are the witnesses Ryan nice tie RC, in typical Castle way not the smart s1 castle way: So what was in the case? Nuclear launch codes? Deadly virus?

spoiler parenthesis {THE MANIFEST ONLY LISTS THE PICKUP} NOOOOO RENZO MY BELOVED, kr: Uh … there’s no one to call. (he points to the other body) The driver, Renzo Conrad, owned the service. He was a one man band. KB: Speaking of one man band, where’s your partner? KR: *mouth opens comically* RC: Yeah. (suggestively) And Lanie? They're adults, not horny teens! Adults prioritize being on time! XD romeo (wow I'm only this far in during my watch watch & now I need to effing go) (watch blog: wow it's my day off again & I need to go to school cook supper & go to a .. basically a band practice. a troupe meeting. life is awful we need a 4 hour work day & a four day work week as full time.) That look ryan gives esposito XD

... Castle? LP: Castle, what are you doing with my body? KB: Just pretend that you don’t know him. I love rocks & geology but even I'm not that good. Castle smart moments & early derrick storm <3 (mmm I love rocks. & coal. Reminds me of that city in canada where they have coal & dinosaurs) She humours him! To the coal plant!

oh noooo I'm so excited for this ep but so scared I'll talk too much. I'm so excited I'm so afraid. I will have thoughts. Marcus Lark(us) I've seen sstaacks like that on my bike ride home from school; my marker for where to turn. No wedding is a perfect day. & u should rly go visit him.

RC: You know I’d give anything to change what happened, right? This ep: *takes it too far, sort of like that shrek movie where rumplestiltskin is retconned into a different character* But also according to the later ret-con mess to figure it out, he kind of did have a choice, including the moment when he paid vinny the scar to crush the car. Castle did have a choice, & he made that choice.

Coal bucket. (she calls for backup castle)

Castle just fricking opens it? Wait she asks him to... lmao artifact? KB: Why do you always have to touch everything? RC: I thought you liked that about me! (not clipping)

Flashbang

Heeheehee & now it's where the wonderful life part begins!!! thing is gone love the dirt on his face

wait why would the case be gone in this scene? well ig caskett was there to interrupt them & they were at the coal plant Right Now to take the briefcase, & thats why they were present to start shooting at em... Good zoom there!

Insane insane insane (I wish ryan was wearing less fancy suits, make him look a little more like how he did in s1, make him look the way he did pre-jenny, or make him look the way he did by the end of s3 but no later bc that's when monty died & becks probably became captain idk) the lighting "Cap'm" But she WOULD recognize him from book jackets & stuff, & she HAS met him before, didn't they meet at a book signing? *pokes esposito* (could clip for my gifs) describing scene aaaHHHHH (the aah was written in my transcript blog but I was literally laughing & quietly screaming & doing the adhd stim with my hair right now bc of that scene & esposito's look & jahskdjfh) esposito fricking grabs him XD

The musical bweyeng when ryan says "tell us the story" In bed with Beckett *high five* XD XD (could clip putting his hand down ig) (also esposito totally slept with beckett at some point, yes even like seven years ago or more) this is a dream *me stimming* *steals the file* "Hey!" (won't clip bu tLove that face) JE: You had me worried there. For a second there I thought I didn’t exist. Esposito threatens to restrain him yet ryan is the one to manhandle him back down

RC: It was adorable KB:

FUN FACT DETECTIVE MCNULTY WAS THE NAME OF THE OTHER DETECTIVE IN THE PILOT, HE WAS THERE IN 1X1 BUT IN THE ORIGINAL PILOT THERE WAS NO RYAN & THERE WAS JUST MCNULTY.

Except u did meet at a book signing

Martha <3 I don't remember what I was thinking when I first watched this. But yeah martha <3. & ofc ryan is a fan. I love martha sm (& esposito pushing castle)

She bailed him out a little while ago, s1e1.

Ryan & martha together <3 MAME! Preggo lanie! (mad at esposito ig?) Sad esposito. I think when I first watched this I thought they were together. Music sounds like meet the medic. *ryan looks up & puts his hand over his mouth* *esposito facing his paper but watching lanie* also they are using beckett's desk I think. Castle says it can't be good but I think it IS good. To these ppl your universe is horror. Imagine a world where lanie isn't happily married & pregnant, she's still on-&-off with that detective. or imagine a world where martha is not acting anymore.

The loft! Oh babey! Mortgage! The painting behind castle's desk is not stairs it is giant martha. (imagine a world where martha hasn't decorated the apartment to look nicer & instead it's rick's boring or rich person crap /neg) Life savings mr rich man! Blondes & racehorses! Bad novel!

Alexis is hot af omg, she was hot before but dang. & moved to LA & she's saving the world & like... wow. (Imagine a world where Alexis isn't off saving the world she's some post-secondary student who doesn't know what she wants to do with life & still has her boring hair & lives with her daddy /neg) (but also wow she moved to LA in like s3)

RC: Whatever all of this is? A coma, a dream, some weird hallucination, or even just an undigested bit of pizza? (XD) I’m ending it. Ha now we have ryan beckett AND castle all stuck into ice water. We just need esposito to join the party. btw alexis has a hint of purple in her hair she is soooooo pretty

I kind of wish we could see what was going on with the detectives in our universe. I read a fic once where ryan & esposito went to tell martha her son was dead & then castle came out like "holy heck you guys I went to an au where I was friends with you two & alexis was still living at home as an adult & my mom wasn't a broadway star & lanie wasn't in a happy relationship starting a family"

Chelsea XD (brunette? can't tell) beckett o no. Lol blue pills in my purse young young woman

world wide web. Oh wow the thingamajig medallion. love the wallpaper btw

SWISS wow yay incan fucking give it back to the native owners then.

(Imagine a world where martha isn't boundlessly talented going out & doing broadway)

AC: Somehow? Implying smth happened This is why I live with mom? So which of her parents is crazier? Crazy meredith or rick? (imagine a world where alexis lives with crazy dad)

SEE SHE WAS A FAN! Thank you writers for remembering! Castle good lying rn. Good for him. & maybe he can help this world's castle write nikki heat books! RC: I eat with her, I sleep with her. But I know you are not her. ... Police scanner? (her face falls a bit) KR: Hey cap KR: *looks at caslte* KR: what's he doing here? KB: I'm not sure KR: RC: KR: KR: Ok Castle continuously interrupting ryan XD & then ryan opens his mouth & castle puts his hand on his shoulder & not clipping but this liveblog is so long I'm love. (& anout the lighting, it seems more... sepia? cool? less red? less blue? less vibrant? I can't tell but I love it & want an audio commentary of this with the person who did the ligting) *still somehow nodding with ryan lol*

Mind connection still! Ryan looking from one to the ohter (could gif but won't) (I ljust love the way he looks with his eyes & face incrementally) noooo renzo! *bites her lips a little bit, this rly reminds me of s1. She hates him but she is still a fan & attracted to him but he's soo annoying but he's also somehow helpful)

Wait they don't have the coffee machine!!! *I hear the single stomp of esposito entereing the room & it is so good yet so subtle*

Esposito <3 I feel like huertas really enjoyed playing "I hate castle this guy is so sus" esposito this ep. *takes his mug* No, say "I inferred it was coal & the most likely power plant was located here, it just made sense"

I should watch Psych. *holding his temple* Castle you could also say other stuff like I know you were in special forces, you lost your partner, (you slept with the captain,) you like jalapeǹos & olives on your pizza, (sry for the wrong n, I only have a french keyboard,) you used to watch chiquetitas growing up with your abuela... JE: Ryan has a big fat mouth. That’s how you know. Yeah he does struggle with commitment doesn't he. Remember s8 the sonia ruiz episode? yeah. (& btw I love his outfit) his facial expressions. "Yeah no we haven;t met" "why bring that up oof" "lol got u ryan tattled" "don't u come for my commitment issues" *doesn't give him back the coffee*

Ryan: *case* Ryan: *sees castle* ??? Ryan: Beckett: *it's cool*

RC: Uh, Captain? Would it be possible for me to ride along? Strictly for research purposes. (he wants the incan doohicky) JE: Is he kidding? RC: I would just love the chance to observe. Get some details for my book. KR: Yeah, sure, Cap. We’ll take him along. JE: What the … KR: Dude, it’s Martha Rodger’s son. He can get us house seats. (to rc) You can get us house seats, right? (WAIT US? does esposito want to see martha rodgers? does he want to see martha rodgers With Ryan?) (imagine a world where rysposito isn't canon) RC: Ab … solutely. Calls him house seats XD He doesn't have his writer vest

*pops his head between them* RC: So the Captain, is she seeing anyone? JE: *kinda shocked but then mostly annoyed & keeps his eyes on the road* (they r not used to having anyone with them* KR, who IS friends with beckett: She has boyfriends. Nothing serious. (why is ryan sharing that info?) JE: Why, writer boy? What, you think you have a chance with her? (EYES ON THE ROAD MISTER) [to RYAN] And what are you doing? Telling crazy over here about everyone’s private life. (which is valid bc he just did) KR: Me? JE: Yeah. You told him about Lanie and me. All: No. No, no, no. I didn’t. No he didn't, I have a gift. What are you talking about? Personal life. Yes you did! That's-- Dont! Just a bunch of yelling I can't hear bc I'm a little hoh & the captions aren't good RC: No. Listen, I have a gift, all right? I look at people and I see things. KR: (laughs) Yeah? Uh … what do you see when you look at me? (wow voice got deep for a sec there) Me: undercover irish mob? (bc who knows if that happened in this au, oh & besides they'd keep it out of the papers so yeah castle knowing would be scary) Irish mob, several sisters, piano playing, hold on I wonder what would have happened with 3xk in this au maybe they arrested gates, narcotics, uncle abducted by aliens RC: Honey milk and freckles. (& the vampire girl ig, keep adding all the ppl u know) KR: (mouthing: what) Noo! (inconsistency in where esposito is looking but shush) JE: *shocked* JE from the other angle: *annoyed* KR: That’s Jenny O’Malley. JE: *looks away annoyed* KR: She used to … make me honey milk. (wistfully) She could’ve been the one. (I thought u said u made it for her to help her sleep. mr in-bed-by-10-pm.) (omaalley not omahlley, they pronounce things differently than me. I assumed it was deever & omolley but it's déver & omaalley) RC: Could have been? KR: Yeah. Um … when Beckett was promoted to Captain our case load doubled. I guess I never had time for her. (wow ryan really does talk abt everyone's personal life) (but how recent was jenny that this "i see when I look at you" is relevnt?) RC: Maybe you should give her a call. JE: Maybe you should mind your own business. (I read a fic once where esposito acts like this in the car ride bc rysposito is canon in this universe & like "if u r really so psychic then u should know he's mine) He shoves RC back into the backseat. The fanfic I read: canon rysposito, esposito was pissed that castle who said he sees things when he looks at people doesn't see their relationship & also don't tell my man to get a gf. (wait lol I double blogged that bc one was in my transcript liveblog & one was in my watch liveblog)

watch blog: Ok it looks like I probably need to go now. I've been spending way too much time on this liveblog mostly bc I like it & miss it partially bc I'm writing All my thoughts not the important ones (none r that important lol)

El chozo peruvian restaurant

Stay n the car or I shoot you (he hasn't signed the form yet tho lol) Wanna crack a window for me? Ha! s1 castle moments

Oh he's not so bad *castle's face in the window* s1 castle Dad dad dad! dad dad dad!

Oh I'm feeling anxious now, I messaged my teacher saying I couldn't make it to class today asking him to send me the powerpoint so I can stay on pace & my chef just called me asking about how many kilograms of cream I had (62.942) & how many kilos of egg yolks (~6 in the pail meaning he needed 11 more cartons & 650g of the last one to get 17.628kg) & ofc the sugar was already perfectly measured it's just the one litre cartons of stuff I had to empty & didn't have time to finish. Anyway seeing all the hotel pans & funnels & mixing bowls & stainless steel bowlsjust caused my heart to start racing, genuinely

Take him home! Or give it to the detectives Or maria sanchez is there. No it broke! So much happened! Or it's fake bc yeah it just looks ceramic. (evidence also broken) This is a fake :D !! This is a fake >:( lol cuff him too so valid bestie

RC: Actually, that kind of is my best behavior. JE: Oh, I’m just enjoying the show Mom & dad fighting (clipping)

Snatches it away

JE: KB: Yes, Detective Esposito? (calls him detective) JE: You’re not letting him get to you, are you? (he is her friend) KB: Don’t you have a case to close? JE: Mmhm (they totally slept together at some point in the past)

Storm fall, the last derrick storm book I just noticed, is storm fall the same as the castle title card? Jim beckett on her desk!

camera whip

(so dark) Castle went up instead of down lol, look at him sneaking back in XD & the music

Heck yeah maria Ah that's why there was a fake in a case at the chozo Ah! Three groups! Swiss legal thieves, incan peruvian righteous re-thieves, & random thieves! Tracker? What guy? What guy?

Transcript: CASTLE startles, harder than if it were GATES. I was just um... *smiles gummily*

Convict therapy. She never told him she used to read his books & met him before? (u can confirm if it was a real au by asking her this in the normal universe original reality) Ew feels like a lot longer shup but also could be the books KB: There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you. Us: it's going to be smth important RC: Anything (always) KB: *question abt his books*

Mm the bass

Whyd they wait so long after the airport? maybe waiting for a quiet location

Castle still hiding in the break room lol

Looks like a heart

She has elephants Ooh captain beckett prop! Does a 180 RC: And … if you come I will tell you why I killed Derrick Storm.

(beat gates by six weeks for detective) Paperwork & poitics? sounds like 1pp asking her to run for senator ag's office the necklace!!! Tell her! the elephants! But also in this au she is clean rn whereas in our universe she relapsed into her mom's case addiction (imagine a universe where she is again obsessed with her mother's case like why an ex-alcoholic doesn't drink) We had an australian emmigrant/canadian immigrant (possibly of french heritage) whose dad taught us rugby for gym class once in elementary or no it was jr high

I need to go to bed now yuck.

Yeah so the last time I liveblogged was supposedly sept 9 & it is now the 22nd. Well I started this yesterday on the 21st. I have abt 45 minutes at home before I need to leave. (I had work in the morning but took only a half day so I could perform violin at a mental health clinic.) Do I want to start watching this? ... Yes. I do. btw by 45 minutes I meant I got home at 2.30 & need to leave at 3.10 & I need to set my alarm ten minutes early so I have time to pull on my shoes & it is already 2.45 so... yeah maybe I won't... Maybe I will!

Or not bc my computer randomly died & now I literally have only eight minutes to watch. You know what? fuck it. I got my computer back online in about ten minutes, I can spend about ten minutes watching castle! Fuck you! /pos

watch blog: I didn't know I never finished transcript blogging. Huh. I'm skipping school for this lol.

KB: stay here: RC: *hands up-ish like yeah ok sure* KB: *turns around* RC: *immediately gets up*

*suspect checking her out* ooh music fun!

Whose desk has that frosted glass animal ball on it?

Yeah contact robbery, maybe bring demming back lol, the homiicde part of it is done Love the music My world? As in my book? Castle be careful why focus on hte lawyer's face? strong goodbye there huh

He's almost done his book & you can see how appalled he is lol

Different stairwell art! tbh I like it. I feel like I'd enjoy touching the wallpaper but also hate it. Lol alexis going back upstairs before he notices (& fails) (wow she's so pretty)

Alexis kind of joking youre stuck here with us kind of humouring him but when he asks why they fell apart she stops humouring him bc she was joking & this is serious. & like... nobody is THAT concerned over the fact that richard is basically having a psychic break.

He called THIS his magnum opus? really? really??? Or not bc he wrote it several years ago & it flunked & he tried writing other stuff which slowly got worse? & he ended up writing the brobeck dreams of betty book & it was crap according to him.

Castle family so good so god & the million impoerceptible ways & reality & all this crap & aaaaaah this is so much of a thing

Except she isn't relapsing into her mother's case addiction in this world, she made captain in this world, your mother is a star again in this world, your daugter is changing things with her nonprofit in this world, you have flings with beautiful women in this world ig...

Gets her the coffee & doesn't kate ask lucy for a coffee vanilla two splendas in future seasons? ye love this. He knows her coffee order from his O.R.

Ew yucky baarista touches money with her hands

Ok abducted at gunpoint (did the cops ever check this place out?) marcus lark the attorney WAIT MARCUS LARKUS

Wow thingamajig. Pick it up castle make the alarm go beep beep beep

this guy picks it up but no beep beep beep

there is no such thing as truth lol of course lark wants infinite possibilities, he's a real estate agent, ofc he wants multiple realities

RC: You’re rich. Successful. You have everything. Why would you want to change your destiny? *accidentally did that bc he thought he was bad for becks*

Castle maybe pick it up & wish to go home & try to make it work even tho u don't know how bc maybe it will work & you will go home. Woah beckett! smacks him in the head Luck... or fate Maybe tell her the truth...? Or don't just in case you're stuck here. (reminds me of that tumblr post "reblog if you are a safe person to come to in a time loop")

The answer for how to use it see THIS is how u jump in front of a bullet. You don't jump while the bullet is moving u don't have time, u jump before they shoot. & if u have time to jump in front, they have time to jump out of the way.

Blue light, dangerous situation, I love you, (possibly death; die in the dream die irl doesn't work here idk) (possibly also castle just immaterializing bc he was from an au)

I read a fanfic where rysposito have to go to martha's apartment to inform her that her son died & castle answers the door & says "holy crap I had a dream that I was in an alternate universe where I was friends with you guys!"

engagement ring!

IT IS THE EX MILITARY AUSSIE FAN & THE GUY WHO UT A GUN TO HIS BACK

KR: Hey, Castle. Missed all the excitement. We were awesome. (<3) Weren’t we, Javi? (first names) JE: As usual. (I love this joking overconfidence) & marcus lark!

evidence & fancy artifact & u'r just touching up on it?

The one where I made it to our wedding <3 love their music

We just do, I do "go down to the courthouse just do it right now"

Yay their wedding Alexis no suit learned smth GOOD from the AU!

Becks gets a third wedding dress lol but it was probably not a wedding dress it was just any white clothing she had but where is her maid of honour lanie? I mean yay at least jim is here

Oh she's wearing the earrings No music but I love love the tie on the back. Seems awful but I think it's pretty. (green screen?) Nice ring Oh I love the vows! I remember someone made a gifset for this for caskett week.

KB: The moment that I met you, my life became extraordinary. You taught me to be my best self, to look forward to tomorrow’s adventures; and when I was vulnerable, you were strong. I love you, Richard Castle; and I want to live my life in the warmth of your smile and the strength of your embrace. I promise you, I will love you. I will be your friend; and your partner in crime and in life; Always.

When she said when I was vulnerable, you were strong my first thought was roy calling castle to help protect beckett. crime^fighting

RC: The moment we met, my life became extraordinary. You taught me more about myself than I knew there was to learn. You are the joy in my heart. You’re the last person I want to see every night before I close my eyes. I love you, Katherine Beckett. And the mystery of you is the one I want to spend the rest of my life exploring. I promise to love you, to be your friend and your partner in crime and life, ‘til death do us part and for the time of our lives.

I love the parallel between the starts of the vows the rest of my life, always crime & life again parallels & until death us do part and for the time of our lives

but where is Lanie the maid of honour?

Why are the wedded couple not drinking champagne?

His phone <3

romance <3 <3 <3

Thaat was so good! I started today's liveblogging (it's the 27th) at like 11.30 or noon & now it is 14.45 or basically 3pm so that's 3 hours, I usually allot myself an hour & a half, & I already liveblog watched it a few days ago & I liveblogged the transcript twenty days ago holy crap. At least I'm off my internship now, maybe I'll have more time to liveblog & clip & finish the series & finally return them to the library w/o paying too much in late fees. & then I can finish all the fanfics I want to read & all the fics I am writing or want to write & then I'll finally put this hyperfixation to rest & be free to do normal stuff again.. Until I get a new hyperfixation.

Update: It has been four weeks, I am only now getting around to tagging & posting

#castle 7x6 #the it's a wonderful life episode #castle 7x6 spoilers #castle 7x6 quote

[avastivengrad603]

Week One

ANZAC day no class, out of class learning activities:

Examine the brief.

The Brief:

Objectives:

Assimilate, contextualise, and collate content.

Compile and organise relevant visual research.

Plan content and storyboard

Familiarise with the principles of animation.

Consider layout, typefaces, legibility, imported graphics and rhythm.

Become proficient in animating type and images, and publishing the files.

Design Task:

Using Adobe After Effects— design and create a kinetic type animation that works with, and enhances, the tone of a supplied audio clip of a historic, or public speech. Your animation should include a title at the beginning, and correct credits at the end - your name, year, and any audio credits. Final published mp4 file must be between 40 – 75 seconds in length, allowing room for a title at the beginning and credits at the end.

Digital Hand-in Deliverables:

Size – Full HD (1920 x 1080 pixels) Frame rate – 25 frames per second. Published using Adobe Media Encoder – in the mpeg-4 format. Upload final animation to the Assessments area on Canvas

URL for blog/research. (example: GRAD603.tumblr.com). This should include AT LEAST some research on speech and speaker, concept development, ideas, progress screenshots, storyboards, experimentation, and some reflection on design decisions.

Create a new blog for this module.

Listen to your randomly assigned speech.

Research your speaker.

Transcribe the text - check for spelling, slang, and stuttering.

Self-Directed Learning:

Task B 1.1 - Speeches

Task Outcomes:

Locate your randomly assigned speech.

My assigned audio speech is number 11 Benee backstage NZMA.

Research the speaker, or historic event.

Background about Benee and her audio speech backstage at the NZMA’s:

Stella Rose Bennett (born 30 January 2000), better known as Benee and formerly Bene, is a New Zealand singer and songwriter from Auckland. In both 2019 and 2020, she consecutively won Single of the Year, Best Solo Artist and Best Pop Artist at the New Zealand Music Awards at aged 19 and 20. Benee initially gained local prominence with her singles "Glitter" and "Soaked", before her 2019 single "Supalonely" saw international popularity following its success on the video-sharing platform TikTok and YouTube. Benee subsequently released her debut album, Hey U X, in November 2020.

Stella Rose Bennett was born and raised in the suburb of Grey Lynn in Auckland. She grew up in a "really musical" family with parents who would expose her to the catalogs of Radiohead, Björk and Groove Armada. From the age of eight, Benee began taking guitar lessons in primary school before starting saxophone lessons in high school. Eventually, Benee dropped all music in order to prioritise water polo. She claims it "was her life" and that she at one point hoped to represent New Zealand competitively. Benee later became interested in writing and recording music at the age of 17, after deciding that she did not want to pursue a career in water polo. Benee attended an all girls Catholic school, St Mary's College, where music was compulsory for four years.

My audio clip is of Benee backstage at the NZMA’s in 2019 at age 19 after winning Best Solo Artist and Single of the Year on the back of her incredibly popular debut single Soaked. She was also named the Best Pop Artist and Breakthrough Artist of the Year.

Transcribe the text in a word processing application (MS Word). Check for correct pronunciation, as well as the use of slang and stuttering.

Benee backstage at the NZMA’s transcription:

I feel kinda like a blank, like a blank page right now, like kinda like what the actual heck just happened to me. I’m gonna go and cry about it later. I’m a bit embarrassinggggg. I don’t know, I swore a lot, and then I was like oh my goodness it’s live I probably shouldn’t be doing that. Nah, but insane. I was like, I wanted to be a astronaut when I was 12 so like I would have no idea that I would be a musician, here, so no, nah-ah, never would’ve thought.

Task B 1.2 - Kinetic Type

Task Outcomes:

Find out how other communication designers approached similar projects. Research other kinetic type animations.

Upload examples of kinetic type that interest you to your workblog. Comment on why they interest you.

[sapphoblade]

Is This The ARG?

CONTENT WARNINGS: unreality, someone being locked outside in the dark

THIS IS POST IS ONLY DETAILING WHAT HAPPENED IN THE STREAM. I'LL MAKE A SHODDY ATTEMPT AT AN ANALYSIS LATER.

during the stream, at about 1:10:30, tommy and wilbur get on a phone call while the group (billzo, ranboo, tommy, tubbo, freddie, aimsey) were having a pumpkin carving contest.

from what i gathered watching this part of the stream myself (i haven't watched the full stream as of posting this), tommy and wil started doing a bit where tommy does whatever wil tells him to, including at one point, unplugging and replugging in all the mics and cameras (?), then placing the phone near the mic so that wil could talk to chat, wishing them a "spooky halloween" and a "happy autumnal vibe". he mentions that he his not having a good time, and billzo and tommy laugh.

billzo says "you wanna talk about it mate?" wil asks who just spoke, and tommy replies "it was william" (to which billzo replies "bro my name's not-"). wil says "i don't speak to williams".

billzo tells tommy to sit down (billzo doesn't seem mad, moreso... incredulous?) to help tubbo carve their pumpkin (they were all in teams of two— billzo + ranboo, tommy + tubbo, freddie + aimsey).

tommy asks wil what he should do, billzo says to just sit down. wil tries to get him to take the pop filter off the mic (for some reason?) but everyone tells him "no", and tommy remarks that they're trying to break the fourth wall but he won't let them.

wil then asks tommy to see if he can get outside the window behind tubbo, while most everyone at the table begins to tell him "no" again

tommy makes his way outside and stands in the window, pressing his face into the glass and acting a general fool (most notably licking?? the window?), then comes back inside.

billzo, exasperated, tells tommy (once again) to just sit down, while tommy makes a beeline for the mic, putting the phone up to it again. theres a beat of silence before wil says "i dunno why he did that, chat" causing tommy to begin laughing.

tommy tells wil "fuck you" and that he's "leaving to help carve tubbo" (he probably meant "leaving to help tubbo carve" but its tommy so??? yeah. jfgdhs) then hangs up.

tommy then says that tubbos window "tastes good" but then a few seconds later says he needs to cleanse his pallette, and asks where his coke went. tubbo replies he [tommy] left it outside, so tommy goes to retrieve it.

this is where it gets kinda weird? like arg-type weird.

ok so.

tommy goes outside, and we can once again see him in the window.

after the egging on of the rest of the group, freddie stands up and locks the door that leads out as a prank on tommy.

tommy is out there for a bit, then tubbo tells freddie to unlock the door and let him in.

tommy knocks on the window and frantically(?) tells freddie to keep the door locked and sit back down.

here is a quick transcript of what happened (and a clip link for those who want to watch it happen!)

the tommy quotes are a vague guess b/c he's outside. i had to put my ear very close to my phone to hear him, and even then it was still difficult and i had to keep rewinding.

Transcript (1:19:28 – 1:19:48)

Here's The Clip

[BEGIN TRANSCRIPT]

[TOMMY knocks on the window]

TUBBO: Okay, let 'im in. Le- This is like literally sabotaging me.

[FREDDIE stands up to go and unlock the door for TOMMY]

FREDDIE: [SIGHS] Okay.

TOMMY: [MUFFLED] No! No!

[TOMMY smacks the window once and points back at FREDDIES chair]

TOMMY: [MUFFLED] Sit down! Keep it locked!

[TOMMY smacks the window again, twice this time]

TOMMY: Go sit back down!

FREDDIE: I'm unlo- I'm unlocking.

[TOMMY smacks the window a few more times]

BILLZO: No, unlock it. Unlock it.

TOMMY: No! Go back!

[TOMMY vanishes from view, seeming to either duck down or be pulled.]

TUBBO: [Laughing] What the fuck is he doing?

[END TRANSCRIPT]

after this, tommy isn't seen for a while.

at about 1:24:30—tommy'd been gone for about five minutes then— aimsey stands up to see if tommy had walked around the house to get back in through the front. she returns a small while later, and tubbo asks if she's found him. she says no, but she found rocky (tubbos cat(who is quite old/ref)). then we see tommy pass the window, and aimsey points him out("there he is!").

she goes and unlocks the door and lets him in, and we hear her say "what the hell have you done", and a second later, everyone else looks to him and asks what he did.

a second later, tommy comes into view and sits in aimseys seat. he looks visibly disheveled, covered in dirt, with sticks and leaves in his hair. he also seems to have a hollow-ish look in his eyes. (though he does seem to be trying not to smile, which is probably just from him trying not to react to his friends being funny as he's trying to act.)

aimsey starts picking things out of his hair, and tries to turn his head so she can get to things on the other side, but tommy pushes her off, saying "it's fine, it's fine." then goes to take his seat next to tubbo.

once in his seat, he folds his arms on the table and looks off with a faraway look, almost as if he's dissociating(?). the others try to ask him questions, joking about the "tree demon" getting him, to which he doesn't reply. tubbo asks about the pumpkin carving and what they should do, but he gives a vague non-answer. tommy remains in this "faraway" state for a while.

again, i haven't watched the full vod yet, but i will be after i post this! any inconsistencies are purely by accident. shoot me an ask if i got something wrong, or if you just wanna talk about this! but be nice or i'll ignore you/delete your ask 🧡

i might be completely off the mark with this and it might just be a bit that tommy and wil did to fuck with us lol. either way this was.... yeah. jdhsksg

#WilburSoot ARG #ARG #Unreality #yip yapping

[thepriceofbeingaroseisloneliness]

Kaoru at  Joe Yokomizo Channel 10th Dec Translation/Notes

Joe Yokomizo Channel Special program

Guest: Kaoru (Dir en grey)

Notes before reading: This is a translation/summary of the livestream on Joe’s Niconico channel with Kaoru as a guest last 10th December. I wanted to do a full translation of it, but I messed up some of my files and the program isn’t available anymore so, in the end, I could just transcript the first 30-40 min of the program approx. and some bits. Besides that, I included some interesting parts from the notes I took.

Feel free to correct me if you spot any mistake or any confusing parts. Links or credits to this post when the content is reposted or captured in other SNS are appreciated :)

-----

Joe:  Hello everyone, welcome to Joe Yokomizo’s channel live program in Niconico, I’m the MC, Joe. Thank you for watching! (Joe makes a brief description of how the program is going to be structured and encourages people to write comments during it!) Joe: Let’s introduce our guest for tonight…. Tonight’s guest is…. should I introduce him? Tonight’s guest is…. this person here! Kaoru: Hello, I’m Dir en grey’s guitarist Kaoru. Joe: Thank you for being here! Kaoru: Thank you! Joe: Are you feeling shy?  Being just the two of us…makes you feel shy? Kaoru: No, not at all. Joe: That’s good. Some people may have realized and other may didn’t but…. the clothes we are wearing…. (Joe and Kaoru open their jackets a bit to fully shown the Tokyo Sports’ hoodie) Kaoru: It’s Tokyo Sports’ (hoodie)… Joe says he didn’t know if Kaoru would be wearing the hoodie or not, so it’s good he brought his hoodie so they both can wear it. Joe: It was a good that I brought mine….

Kaoru: (You brought it) Just in case…. Joe: Have you being wearing it?

Kaoru: Today it’s the first time….

Joe: I have been wearing it even at my house…. Kaoru: Ah, I wore it at the program (The Freedom of Expression) for a picture we took after recording…. Joe asks for comments or questions for Kaoru at the chat. Then, He asks Kaoru about how he is doing if something has changed or not…. Kaoru says he is doing as always, making songs as usual. Joe cuts him reading a comment about the beer (you can see one beer on their table, Kaoru’s beer is behind the tablet they have on the table). Joe: Beer…. the staff brought us beer before …. Let’s drink…. let’s drink our beers…. we are going be chatting for two hours more or less. They open their can and toast. Joe: This year due to Corona as we couldn’t go somewhere and eat something, at least we can toast with everyone, if you have a beer or a drink, please toast with us….. Kaoru: Yes…. Joe: So, what could we talk about now? Ah…. what did you do today? Kaoru: Today.....well….I was recording in the morning….so it was really busy …. Joe: Really busy…. what time do you get up usually in the morning? Kaoru: About 10/ 10:30…. Joe: Is that so? Sometimes, we chat through Line at 2 am in the morning….do you like doing that at that time? Kaoru: That’s possible (laughs) It’s feels rather calm at that time…. Joe: Is that so? I feel the same. Doing that before going to sleep…. sending emails and so, thinking about this or that...…..so, you said you were recording today… Kaoru: Yes. Joe: What were you recording? Kaoru: Ah, for Zaza (TheTheyday, Kaoru’s blog) Joe: Ah for Zaza, you were recording for Zaza….so I guess one day it will be uploaded there…. Today, I’m here drinking and chatting with Kaoru, spending some time with you all, so your comments are welcome……As we talked about UFOs before, should we do a survey? Like we could ask everyone if they think UFOs exists or not in a survey…. maybe we could ask them if they have seen a UFO or not. Kaoru: That’s it…. Joe: We are going to do a survey about if you guys have seen a UFO or not….is it ok for the staff, to do one?....Ah, ok, it’s going to take a bit….meanwhile….have you ever seen a UFO, Kaoru? Kaoru: There was something (I saw) that looked like one…. Joe: You had?  When was it? Kaoru: When was it?.....I was overseas at the time I saw it… (People in the comments point out he told this story before and it seems that it happened in China, when they were touring there for the first time?) Joe: Overseas? Ehhhhh! It wasn’t in Japan… Kaoru: It was Toshiya who spotted it…. a stranger thing that was moving around at the sky….*Kaoru reproduces the movement of the thing with his finger* Joe: Something that was moving… Kaoru: So, I looked up and saw it……I don’t know what it was…. Joe: So clearly, it wasn’t something like a plane or so…. Kaoru: No, because of the way it was moving….. Joe: So, it clearly wasn’t something that you recognize… something like that… Kaoru: It was at night…. Joe: So, it wasn’t a living thing…. More like physical object moving for sure…. Kaoru: I think so… Joe: I see….a UFO spotted by Toshiya (laughs)…. Kaoru: There were more people there…. Joe: It wasn’t jus the two of you….. but talking about Tokyo sports, Tasai appears at your YouTube channel, right? He is at the program with us…..usually Tokyo sports covers stories about UFOs, Kappas(Japanese folklore creature)…. What else....that kind of things…. Kaoru: Fantasy stuff, right? Joe: That’s it, they usually cover that kind of fantasy things…..Do you read Tokyo Sports? Kaoru: Sometimes…. when there is something that I’m interested in….but in the past…..I would always read it… Joe: What did you like to read? Kaoru: Those kinds of things (fantasy stuff)….. They both laugh. Joe starts reading comments. Joe: The comments……”I just joined the livestream”…..ohhh welcome!, we are having a drink while chatting so, if you who are watching us want to drink with us, please join us!.....about the survey….can we go….? *Joe looks at the staff waiting for indications*......oh can we?....so, we want to take a survey about if you have seen an UFO or not….*Joe looks at the comments*….”I’m getting ready to drink”….everyone, if you want to watch the full program and the contents, you have to subscribe to the channel….you can still do it so please….also you can send us gifts (a function in Niconico, similar to Youtube)…..let’s check the comments…..Kaoru please…. Kaoru: I feel like reading comments…. there are a few… Joe: Everyone, write more comments! For Kaoru…..*Joe starts reading some comments* “I just subscribed” ohhh thank you…..”Kaoru, you are so handsome!”….”I haven’t seen a UFO or a ghost”…. Kaoru: A ghost…. I haven’t seen any…. Joe: You haven’t? I haven’t seen any ghost either but I experienced sleep paralysis once ….when I was in middle school….at home we had a prefabricated shed at the garden, I lived there ….so when I was at that shed, the door suddenly opened, a person came in and jumped over me…..grabbed me by my neck….it was a woman….I got scared but my body didn’t move…..I was internally screaming for help….”help me, help me”…. It was like that for like 10 min or at least that how I remember it….it felt like 10 min….then, I thought that she had killed me….but she was still there, she left, closed the door….I was like….what have just happened?..... Kaoru: Sleep paralysis? Joe: Sleep paralysis….I think that ghost was due to sleep paralysis….that girl that I remember….*Joe mumbles something* Sorry, just…..*he hands the tablet they have on the table to the staff, Joe is offscreen, leaving Kaoru alone for a few seconds* It’s hot here *Joe I mumbling something to the staff offscreen and then comes back taking his jacket off* Kaoru: I’m thinking about this…. the ability to sense supernatural things….I don’t think I have it…. Joe: You don’t? Kaoru: But maybe I talked about this before but, in the past, something weird happened when we were doing a shooting a clip overseas…. Joe: Something strange happened… Kaoru talks about an episode of after recording, when he got into the room, he felt as if his head was spinning in a weird way?.

Joe: Ah, the survey is ready….so, everyone, have you ever seen a UFO? Today we both are wearing the original Tokyo Sports’ hoodie…..it’s an original hoodie by Tokyo Sports in collaboration with Don quijote… Kaoru: That’s it… Joe: That’s why we both are wearing it right now…..asking you all if you have ever seen a UFO or not….we should do a research in the next The Freedom of Expression along with that Tokyo Sports person (Tasai)… Kaoru: Is he watching us? Tasai…. Joe: Ah, Tasai….I wonder if he is watching us….let’s go with the survey…..*The options for the survey appear on screen* I think he is watching us but I don’t know for sure…. People started to write “Tasaiiii Tasaiii” at the comments Kaoru: I talked to him (by phone) a while ago… Joe: Oh you did? It’s being a while since I saw him so I want to meet him soon….so, have you ever seen an UFO? We are asking this while wearing the Tokyo Sports’ UFO hoodie…..what results do you think we are going to get, Kaoru? Kaoru: I think the “No” is going to have a huge percentage…. Joe: As expected… Kaoru: Like a 70%(no)-30%(yes) Joe: Between having seen one or not, I would say “no” is going to be the most voted answer….Hiranabe…..*Joe is reading comments* He couldn’t come today….so, Kaoru’s prediction was a 30% for people who have seen a UFO and 70% for the opposite…so, let’s see it in one,two, three… *(Hiranabe used to appear in The Freedom of Expression when it was a radio program)* *The options on screen disappear and suddenly they are back with a 100% for yes, 0% for no* Joe: A 100% for yes? Ah, it seems that there was some mistake…..let’s do it again…I got scared with the results…..is everyone a fan of Tokyo Sports?....*Kaoru laughs* Have you seen a UFO or not? Kaoru saw one once when he was at overseas…. Kaoru: That’s true… Joe: Spotted by Toshiya…. why was Toshiya looking at it… Kaoru: I have no idea…. Joe: I wonder why…..the survey is again at the screen…..I’m sorry that it didn’t work before but now you can vote again…..let’s see the results…..*the results don’t appear* Ok…..OK?.....*the results appear, 23% yes, 77%no* Ohhhh…. Kaoru: That’s it…a big percentage… Joe: But a 23% of the voters have seen one….that’s good for Tokyo Sports…..that’s their target market…. Kaoru: But surely among the people who haven’t seen one, there are people who are interested in them…. Joe: That’s true, that’s true…. Kaoru: Maybe they are interested in them… Joe: By the way, I want that 23% of people who voted that say they saw a UFO, tell us where did they see it….so we can, with The Freedom of Expression, go there to check…. Kaoru: Yeah but, we can go there but having to wait for it, that’s  bad…. Joe: That’s right, there is a chance that the three of us come there and nothing appears…. Oh, someone said they saw it at Chiba…..”I saw one once I was walking back from work”…..Oh,where is your workplace?....”I saw one in Miyagi”…..Miyagi….In Okinawa, Shinga….there is no one that has seen one in Tokyo?....if there is someone that has seen one in Tokyo, the two of us can go….”At Sapporo when I was going from the airport to the hotel because I was attending a Dir concert there”……”At Saitama”…..ehhhh….Saitama…where? please give us more details….there are a lot of people that saw one, but not on Tokyo…. Kaoru: There aren’t….. Joe: “Sendai”…..”Kagoshima”…..please if you have seen one, please us at the comments….So, let’s change the topic to music….this year….due to Corona, a lot of plans had to be cancelled….*Kaoru nods* Kaoru: That’s right… Joe: As expected….we are going to put on screen Dir’s schedule of this year….you will see it on screen….*Dir’s events from this year appear on screen*….In January/February, Corona wasn’t still around, it was before Corona became big…..you had an overseas tour…. Kaoru:Yes Joe: Which countries did you visit? Kaoru: Countries?  Well, it was in Europe…it was about 10 days…. Joe: At that time, I heard from a interview you did that you said it but…..masks were still strange/weird at that time even at airports…. Kaoru: Yes, no one was wearing masks…. Joe: No masks at Europe at that time….but, how were the lives?, thinking about it now….it was a live with audience….and since that time…. Kaoru: It was the last one…. Joe: That’s it….how was it for you?.... Kaoru: They were good…. Joe: Berlin’s live was really good….that country especially…. Kaoru: The previous tour to this one (2018), we did a tour with lots of troubles at the lives….like the songs would have to be stopped in the middle of it and we couldn’t finish them properly….so, what we wanted to play or express at that time, couldn’t be done….so this time we did it with the feeling of revenge…we wanted that this feeling reached the people who came to see us ….so this time it was good… *Joe’s mic seems to not be working properly* Joe: So, you guys played at London one more time…. Kaoru: Yes. Joe: So, you guys could complete your revenge there this time….so, is there any episode or something interesting that happened overseas? If there is any, this time at Europe…. Kaoru: Something interesting? Joe: Like when you were drinking or so…I want to hear it…. Kaoru: Mmm…..is there any?.....mmmm…. Joe: You don’t remember? Kaoru: I remember but something that was interesting…..mmm….I don’t know if it is interesting or not….but sometimes the staff of the venue we are playing in takes a pic when it’s the rehearsal or so and upload it to the Instagram of that venue…. Joe: Yes, yes…. Kaoru: So, when I’m checking my Instagram, the pic appears and I see it….so, when I saw it…..Toshiya is in the picture!....*Joe laughs*….I was like “Eh??” when I saw it, “Is he aware of that?”…that he is in the picture…so, we got them to deleted it and then, we were in the rehearsal again, and thought  isn’t it careless?.....didn’t they know he was part of the band?....like, they saw him rehearsing…. did they think he was part of the Japanese staff?.... Joe: They didn’t know that! Kaoru: They didn’t…. Joe: It’s really careless…that episode….is there any episode with Takabayashi?... Kaoru: With him?....what could it be?.... Kaoru says something they did to him? But I can get it. Joe gets shocked and asks if it’s ok to tell it, but Kaoru said it was 10 years ago, when he was a roadie. Kaoru explains he became a manager before Inoeu left. Joe: “Is Fujieda ok?” *Joe reads a comment* Kaoru: He is fine…..*Joe points at where Fujieda is, behind cameras*…. The talk about the European tour is over, and they show again the Dir’s schedule of this year on screen. Joe: Next is something all of you saw…..in March?.....yes, it was the 27th of March….a livestream of a concert….a concert without audience….what do you think about it now? Kaoru: It’s something we wouldn’t have done if it wasn’t for these circumstances….we never have done it and we wanted to try….but due to these circumstances, it became part of our memories, part of the history of Dir en grey….we felt that way… Joe’s mic has fallen but he didn’t realize it, so his voice sounds so low and far away. He asks Kaoru about the reasons to do a livestream, Kaoru answers again that due to the circumstances. He says that looking at a screen while playing is tiresome even if he knew that there were people watching it, also he was nervous about it but not as nervous as when they played live cause its not the same.  They (dir) want to think about interesting things they can do during these times, but not being able to do lives as they want, and create the atmosphere they want,  it’s what make them not playing lives. Joe: So, in other words,  when it comes to expression,as long as you can’t create the world of Dir en grey, you don’t want to play lives. A part of me, misses that sound and emotion but also knowing it can’t be done in its complete form… Kaoru: But we keep thinking about things we can do in these circumstances…. Joe realizes his mic has fallen, finally. Joe: Oh, my mic has fallen…..*puts it again properly* Can you hear me now?, the staff just told me…..well…..Tasai….are you watching us?.... Kaoru: He is! Joe: Yes, is there something you want to tell him? *laughs* Kaoru: Are you working out? Joe:  Do you work out? Kaoru: I don’t… Joe: I did after a long time….I didn’t for two weeks….I didn’t train with my personal trainer for two weeks and today….he told me today to do some exercises that…..*grabs his backs and then his chest*….”Tasai, Tasai” *Joe reads the comments* Tasai is really popular….

Kaoru: The opposite of you…. Joe: That’s true….He is for sure the most popular….because everyone is typing “Tasai, Tasai”….if you have any question for Tasai….but how can I ask him?, I can message him through Line…. Joe says, then, they are going to talk about the digital release of the single. ------ People started asking in the comments if “Yamo-chan” is watching the livestream. After many comments like that, Joe looks confused and asks, “who is Yamo-chan?”, making Kaoru laugh. He explains that “Yamo-chan” is Shinya and that they started calling Shinya like that in a previous band. Kaoru adds Shinya usually watches everything so that’s why ppl are commenting that. They talk about Shinya more, mentioning the fax story Kaoru told in the livestream of May. Joe remembers that Shinya is really into board games, and suggests that they could do a board game special or something like that. People start writing in the comments that they should do it with Shinya, and others, that they should do it with “the whole band”. Joe says it would be complicated to do it with the 5 members. D.T.S appears in a comment and people starts commenting “D.T.S” “Do it with D.T.S”. Joe looks again confused and ask who is “D.T.S”. Kaoru explains that it’s Die, Toshiya and Shinya and it was something they did for the fanclub magazine.  Some people start commenting D.T.S.K, adding Kaoru’s to the name lol  ----- Joe and Kaoru start talking about “The Freedom of Expression”.  They do a survey asking if the people watching the live stream watch it/have ever watched it. Kaoru says he thinks that “a 80% is going to say no”. The results are really good, more than 90% (I think it was 96%?) say that they watch it. Later, they do another survey asking if they are subscribed to the channel or not. There are 3 options; “Yes” “No” and “No, but I’m going to subscribe right now”.  Results are again quite good, about a 85% say they are subscribed, “no” gets around almost a 9% and  “no, but I’m going to subscribe right now” gets almost a 6%. Joe asks Kaoru to say some encouraging words to that people who said “no”, so they finally subscribe. Kaoru just say in a plain voice, “subscribe to the channel”, making Joe laugh. ------ Joe talks about the Kaoru interview he did for his site, “Kimi ni tou”. He says he realized how international Dir en grey was a band, cause it’s the interview on the site with more visits from overseas and the English version is the most visited on the site. The interview is also in Chinese, and of course, in Japanese, but he was really surprised of how many people read the English version as well ---- At some point, Joe leaves for the toilet, leaving Kaoru alone. Kaoru is just staring at the screen reading comments and mumbling some answers. Someone ask him to show his hands, or ask him about his haircut, very random stuff. He looks kind of awkward , like not knowing what to do. He is also watching when Joe is about to come back, and when you can hear Joe’s footsteps: Kaoru: So, that was my Top 5, yeeeeeehhh *and starts clapping, the staff joins him clapping as well* Joe: No, no…..you are lying….you are lying….*Joe is still not on screen* You didn’t do it now, I’m sure…. Kaoru: I just did it…..look at the comments…. Joe: What are they writing?.....*Joe starts reading the comments* Is that so?....I couldn’t hear it….People clapping at the comments….it can’t be….*Joe points at some comment saying “evil”* See? You didn’t do it…. Kaoru: They are talking about you…. Joe: Me?.....* he mumbles a bit and keeps reading comments*….”What an amazing Top 5”….Really???.... Kaoru: See? Joe: “Amazing songs”….is that so?....what does that mean?....*Kaoru laughs*….”Amazing”….”I expected these songs”….Did you really tell them?.... Kaoru: I told you (I did). Joe: ”I’m sorry for you, Joe”…. Am I the only one who didn’t hear them?.....”Only great songs”….”great choice”…..Could he really tell them in such a short time?....*Joe looks at the staff looking for a confirmation* He did? the staff just nodded….  ----- After Kaoru played this prank on Joe about revealing his TOP 5, now it’s his turn to go to the toilet, leaving a drunk Joe alone. Joe: Everyone, before he gets back, let’s write “sing Rokkouoroshi” (Hashin tiger’s song, Kaoru favourite baseball team)….everyone say “sing Rokkouorsohi” for me, please….I couldn’t hear it….at Tora no Ana (Kaoru’s event for his birthday)…I told him to sing it…but he didn’t….so today….using everyone’s power…..using the power of alcohol….let’s write “rokkouroshii”….this year, it seems that Haishin tigers are not doing well, also there are no events to sing it but….let’s write rokkouoroshi!!!....”Joe, you are the best”…..don’t say those things at me….this is our power….*Joe looks at the staff* I received a question at line…thank you for it….thank you everyone for sending questions to my Line….ohh someone sent a gift *a function in niconico*…..Let’s make him sing it!!!:….let’s make this wish….if he receives this request from you all…..he is about to come back so let’s make this wish…rokkouoroshiii…rokkouroshiii…..ROKKOUOROSHIIII……why did I scream?....let’s do it together…*Joe realizes Kaoru has prob heard him, so he whispering encourages everyone to write the request* Ok, let’s go….*Kaoru is still not in screen but he is coming back* Well, let’s see what do you want to ask Kaoru….your requests…I just asked everyone what they want Kaoru to do….let’s see…..Oh oh oh!....what is that?.....Everyone wants you to do that….they are writing “rokkouoroshi”!!!!! Kaoru, they are writing “rokkouoroshi”!! Kaoru: Because you told them…. Joe: I didn’t! Oh! This is amazing! Check! Everyone is saying it… .Kaoru: Because of you….it’s not the first time… Joe: Me?....oh….Beer…..*Joe holds Kaoru’s beer and checks it’s empty* He doesn’t have a beer….please bring one!!! Kaoru: This is not the first time (you tried this)…. Joe: No,no no….let’s sing Rokkouoroshi… Kaoru: Should I tell them my Top 5? Do you want to hear it?       Joe: I don’t want to hear your Top 5....Rokkouoroshi…Rokkouoroshi…. *The staff brings Kaoru a beer* Joe: This year the Hashin tigers didn’t do well so that’s why you didn’t sing it but….next year?.... Kaoru: Next year….let’s sing it next year…. Joe: Next year….is that a promise?.... *They are about to toast, but Kaoru stops* Kaoru: If they win the competition….that’s what I told you at that time…. Joe: I see, so if next year, Hashin tigers win the competition, you are going to sing the full song… Kaoru: *makes a face *The full song? That’s imposible….*he turns to the other side* Joe: Well, well….wait wait….don’t turn your back to me….if they win the competition….sing just one phrase…. Kaoru: No, that’s imposible… Joe: Wait wait… Kaoru: I’m not going to sing it…. Joe: If they win the competition, just one phrase… Kaoru: I’m not going to sing it… Joe: Let’s toooooasttt…….*like toseal the deal lol* Kaoru: I’m not going to toast…..*turns his back on Joe* Joe: Just wait a bit… Kaoru: I don’t sing…. Joe: Then, what can we do?....let’s dance to Rokkouoroshi… .Kaoru: I’m not going to do that…. Joe: *with a pitiful voice* but they are asking for “Rokkouoroshi”…..*pouts* Kaoru: I’m not going to do it…. Joe puts a sad face like a small child and start making noises of complaint as if he was having a tamtrum…. Joe: But you have to do it!....somehow….in some way….next year, if they win the competition….let’s do it… Kaoru: Maybe we could do an event and gather with everyone…. Joe: *reading a comment* “Play it with the guitar”….. Kaoru: Playing it with the guitar is really tiresome…. *Joe is drinking his beer and almost spills it due to the laugh* Joe: Right now…..*reads a comment* everyone is with me, saying “ganbatte Joe!”…. “kaoru is so cute”….”in an event…”, that’s it, let’s do it at an event….next year, if it’s possible… Kaoru starts to mumble in a low voice. Joe makes gestures of dancing. He keeps trying to get a commitment from Kaoru to do it but Kaoru doesn’t accept. Joe: I’m sorry everyone, the negotiations failed.  ------ After the pranks and teasing, Joe says it’s about time for Kaoru to reveal his Top 5 songs of 2020 according to Spotify. 5. X-Japan “Without You” (Unplugged) Kaoru says he has been listening to it recently and mentions that this song is part of the soundtrack of the documentary of X japan. Joe talks about Hide, and how important was his existence to Kaoru’s life. Kaoru mentions the first concert of them he went. Joe asks Kaoru what he thinks that Hide would think of him if he was alive. Kaoru doesn’t seem to want to give a proper answer and says he doesn’t know. Joe says he thinks Hide would be like “you are cute” and happy/ proud of him.  Kaoru talks about when he met Hide at a restaurant (ikinari steak?) while he was eating with his manager. He talked about this in his book “Dokugen”. People starts commenting “that story is so sad”, “I read it at Dokugen”. Finally, Joe asks Kaoru what he would say to Hide if he was alive, Kaoru just says that he is not a person that it’s good at making conversation so probably nothing. 4. Merry “Fukurou (梟) Next song is from Merry. Kaoru says he heard it live and he liked it. Joe asks the name but Kaoru doesn’t know how to read the kanji and he struggles for while. He shows it to Joe but he doesn’t know either. Kaoru tries to describe it, but someone for the staff comes and tells him the title. After the description of the kanji, people were already commenting “it’s Fukurou!” and Joe reads it.  Kaoru says the name of the song and apologizes for not knowing how to read it. Kaoru: I’m sorry I didn’t know the reading (of the kanji)  3. Dir en grey “Downfall” Third position comes for a Dir en grey song, which surprises Joe. Kaoru says he usually listens to their songs to remember some parts/riffs. Joe says that having so many songs must be hard to remember all of them and ask Kaoru if he does (remember all of them). Kaoru answers he obviously knows the songs but not every part.  2. Dir en grey “Rinkaku” Kaoru says he was rehearsing this song and when he was about to play it, he realized he had forgotten most of it, so he had to listen to it several times and copy it to remember.  1. Dir en grey “Sustain the Untruth ”Before announcing #1, Joe asks the viewers which song we think is it. Kaoru kind of teases about it, not saying it waiting to someone to guess it right. Most people think is going to be “The World of Mercy”, as Kaoru says he listens to the songs to practice. Joe: Why does everybody think it’s “The world of mercy?” Other comments say “Ochita no koto ga aru sora” Joe: But you haven’t played that song live yet, right? Someone in the comments gets it right. Kaoru: Yes, it’s “Sustain the Untruth” ---- One of the last things they talk about, it’s a “unexpected”/” surprising” picture that Kaoru has in his phone. In the end, it’s a picture of the Mike Tyson energetic drink “Black”, with his face and the line “Empower yourself”.   And that’s all ;)

#dir en grey #kaoru #joe yokomizo channel #Joe Yokomizo #translation

[hoidn]

tree Explains Things 01: SnapMotion

In this tutorial I talk about using SnapMotion to create caps from video clips for the purpose of making gifs. (I recommend viewing this on YouTube for better quality and a larger video size.)

Please note that I'm not affiliated with SnapMotion or its creator in any way and there's nothing in it for me if you choose to purchase SnapMotion for yourself. Obviously, I recommend it, but do investigate your options, as there may be something out there that's better suited to you.

(This transcript is approximately 60% accurate to the tutorial and 40% me condensing my waffle into more sensible narration.)

--

SnapMotion is a Mac OS X program available to buy at the App Store. (As far as I'm aware, there are no releases for any other operating system.) It's fairly inexpensive: AUD $7.99 when I bought it two years ago. (In the video I said $12, from memory, but then I looked up the receipt email to confirm and found myself $4.01 wrong.) Considering that I've made thousands and thousands of caps in the couple of years I've been using it, I've definitely gotten my money's worth.

SnapMotion has two modes: what I call photo mode and then batch mode. Photo mode is good for one or two caps, but to extract caps in bulk you'll be using batch mode. (Something I forgot to mention in the video is that dragging your file to the SnapMotion icon will open it in photo mode by default. In order to access batch mode, you have to open the program and select it.)

Selecting Show Batch Mode takes you to the batch mode work space. Here you can drag and drop your clip or click the plus sign to add it. Once you've loaded a clip, select it in order to access the Add Batch Tasks menu.

One of the things that I particularly like about this program is that all the information you need about the file is clearly set out. In particular, it shows you how many frames per second you're working with. This is important because the fps rate determines how many frames you want to extract from a clip.

--

Why? Because math.

All the sources I've worked with have an fps rate of either 24 or 60. That number tells you how many individual images are contained in one second of video. Obviously, there's a considerable difference between 24 and 60, and that affects how many frames you choose to extract.

I've found I get the best results by extracting every other frame from 24 fps sources and every fifth frame from 60 fps sources. So:

24 fps = 2 (or 1/2 ← why does Tumblr do that?? I hate that!) 60 fps = 5 (or 1/5)

(That gives you roughly 12 caps per second for both sources. I say 'roughly' because, as you can see on my screen, the fps rate is rounded to the nearest whole number. 24 fps is actually 23.7 fps, so that missing .03 can have a cumulative effect.)

I find this is the best compromise between having smooth, natural looking motion in your gifs and keeping your file size within Tumblr's constraints. (I'll talk more about that in the next tutorial.)

--

Tools

The green bar is obviously your clip timeline. The cursor defaults to being in the centre for some reason. You have start and end caps (or whatever you call them) that define the start and end points of your extraction. The left and right arrow|bar buttons move your cursor to the start or end cap respectively, and between them is the play button. To the left are the transformation options. I've never used them, so I don't know what they do. (If you decide to experiment, please report back about your results!) To the right of that is the volume icon, which allows you to hear sound from your clip during playback. I don't find it useful, so I don't bother. The tortoise icon allows you to adjust the speed of your playback (left is slower, right is faster in case that’s not obvious). The arrowheads on the far right move your playback cursor to the start and end caps respectively.

Add Batch Tasks

This is where you specify the parameters for the batch.

Mode: there are four options. I primarily use Every X Frames. As this is a 24 fps source, I want to extract every 2 frames, so I use the value 2. When I type my value in and then press tab, the bottom of the panel shows the number of frames that will be generated from my selection. If I process this selection, SnapMotion will create twenty-five images. But because I moved the start and end caps earlier, and I actually want to extract frames from the whole clip, I need to adjust them. When I tab through my X value again, I see an updated number of generated frames.

I always include the Starting and Ending frames because I trim my clips to the exact frames I want (unless I'm being lazy).

Max size: This refers to the width of the image in pixels. (Technically, it refers to the maximum size of the largest dimension, but since video sources are universally landscape oriented, for our purposes this number will always refer to the width.) The default setting is 4,000 pixels and since the source clip is 1920 pixels wide my caps are going to remain 1920 pixels wide. However, if you know what width you want your eventual gif to be and you don't want to go through the extra step of resizing it in Photoshop, you can use this setting to do that for you. For example, if you want your gif to be 540 pixels wide you would enter 540 in this field. When you process this batch, SnapMotion will resize each frame it extracts to a width of 540 pixels with a proportional height. (Yeah, I said width at first and then I had trouble getting out the word height. Talking is hard!)

I don't use this feature simply because sometimes I change my mind, and I would have to rerun the batch if I did. (This isn't a big deal for a single shot like this, but if you're working with a whole scene that contains hundreds of frames, it's a hassle.) I also reuse caps sometimes. As you probably know, if you follow my Longmire gifs, sometimes I do a full scene using small gifs and then I go back and do large versions of some of the Vic shots. (Because I love her so.) And sometimes I make other graphics. In those situations, I want the image at its original size, so that I can resize or crop it the way I want.

Format: I prefer PNG.

Override: this tells the program what to do when a file with the same name already exists in the destination folder. The options are Replace existing files or Use alternative name. They're probably fairly self-explanatory (but just in case, I included a note).

Errors: I don't think I've ever had an error in this program. You can choose to generate a log file with each batch, but I kept getting logs that said "no errors" every time I ran one and it was annoying having to constantly delete them, so I switched to No error handling.

Headline/Credit: I believe this is like watermarking your images. If you want to watermark your gifs (I honestly don't see the point but some people do it), I think it'd be a lot easier to do it in Photoshop (or whatever program you use for image editing).

Export: this is where you specify the destination for your extracted image files. Click Choose to open the menu from here. Alternatively, when you're ready to process a batch, click the red button (aka the "Do the Thing" button according to me when I recorded this), and if there is no destination already specified, it will prompt you for a location.

Once you've clicked the Do the Thing button (yeah, I'm just leaning into it now), SnapMotion will display Task Added. If you look at the top of the window, you'll see a progress bar showing the percentage of completion as it processes.

When the images are fully exported, you'll see All Tasks Done and also an alert if you've selected that in your preferences (which I haven't gotten to yet but it's coming up). If you go to the destination folder, you'll find all the images that have been extracted. That's it!

--

I want to address the syntax for how files are named because I found the options very confusing to begin with. The default syntax made no sense to me and it took me a while to configure something that did. File names are defined in the program preferences, so go to the SnapMotion menu, select Preferences, then select the Batch tab.

Number of concurrent snaps: how many frames should be extracted at the same time. This has an impact on your RAM usage and also impacts how long it takes a batch to run.

Alert users with: this is where you choose whether or not you want a notification outside the program. It's useful if you're running a larger batch in the background and therefore don't see the All Tasks Done message.

Output name format:  these are the elements I use:

<movie_name> = the title of your clip file

hyphen

<time_seconds> = the actual second position of the frame within the clip; for example, a frame that was extracted at 14s would be numbered beginning with 14. This parameter converts durations of 1 minute+ into seconds, e.g. 60, 61, etc.

<frame _index> = the running number of the frames extracted in the batch, beginning at 1. The position of this number depends on the total number of frames you're extracting. From 1 to 99 frames, the number will be 01; from 100 to 999 frames, the number will be 001. I've never extracted more than 1,000 frames, but I assume in that situation you'd begin with 0001.

If I were extracting 40 frames from my clip beginning at 14s, then the numerical portion of my file names would start at 1401. If I were extracting 120 frames, then the numerical portion of my file names would start at 14001.

<image_extension> = the file format you've specified

So, my file names are constructed like this: 

<movie_name>-<time_seconds><frame _index>.<image_extension>

And the files from the batch I've just run look like this if you separate the elements: 

1x05_2206 - 0 01 . png

In this batch, the seconds run from 0 to 3 and there are 34 frames in total. The first number column represents <time_seconds>, while columns two and three combined represent <frame_index>. You can see that the numbers in columns two and three are sequential from 1-34, whereas the numbers in column one aren't. That's because I've extracted multiple frames per second. Caps 1-7 were extracted from the first second of the clip, caps 8-18 from the second, caps 19-31 from the third, and caps 32-34 from the fraction of the fourth second.

This naming system is what works for me, but you should experiment with the options so that you can construct file names that work best for you.

--

The last couple of things:

You can import multiple clips either individually or at the same time. 

You can delete a clip by selecting it and clicking the minus button.

--

And that's SnapMotion!

If anything is unclear or I've omitted something that you wanted to know about, please let me know. Thanks for watching and listening (and reading). Next up, I’ll be explaining the process of importing your caps into Photoshop and creating your gif file.

#tree explains things #snapmotion #tutorial

[go-redgirl]

FNC’s Carlson: What Was It About Joe Biden’s Shaky Monotone That Inspired CNN’s Talking Heads?

Friday, FNC’s Tucker Carlson reacted to President Joe Biden’s address to the nation a night earlier, which according to Carlson left much to be desired.

After comparing Biden’s address to former Soviet Union dictator Leonid Brezhnev, the Fox News host questioned the fawning approval from CNN hosts and talking heads.

Transcript as follows:

CARLSON: Tons going on, as always. So, there are a lot of stories we could have opened with tonight and we talked about it. But in the end, we couldn’t get our minds off of Joe Biden’s COVID speech.

Did you see that last night? The one where he seems so sad about the lockdowns that have crushed businesses and kept kids out of school, an entire generation, he said, had driven so many to suicide, yet never once mentioned or even hinted that he and his party were the very forces behind those lockdowns.

I’m really sorry about your black eye, he says, as he punches you in the face.

It was bizarre. The whole speech was like that. It had a hallucinogenic quality like it wasn’t quite real.

But then Joe Biden himself isn’t quite real. Maybe that’s the reason he talks that way. Biden has been living in utter seclusion for more than a year. He hasn’t spoken to anyone but his own lackeys.

He hasn’t driven a car or sat on the grass and looked up at the sky or been anywhere or done anything except in the most controlled possible environment. What an incredibly weird life that is.

Joe Biden must imagine that everyone in America is as terrified of corona as he is and is living in the same kind of bunker. Joe Biden is totally cut off.

Alex Berenson described last night speech as late Soviet. The more we thought about it, the more perfect that seemed.

Here’s a clip of Russia’s own Joe Biden, the late Leonid Brezhnev. Like Biden, Brezhnev was very clearly fading in his later years after a series of health problems. Also, like Biden despite his frailty and confusion, Brezhnev never lost his enthusiasm for pointless wars.

He is the one who ordered the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. In late December of that year, Brezhnev addressed the Soviet youth in a televised speech. As you watch this, see if you can spot the similarities to what you saw last night, and keep in mind when this was shot, Brezhnev was a full five years younger than Joe Biden is today.

[VIDEO CLIP PLAYS]

CARLSON: Now, they are trying to tell him how the teleprompter works. He harrumphs a bit and looks vacant, he doesn’t quite get it.

Brezhnev didn’t actually lead Russia by this point, and you can see why. He remained the country’s figurehead, but it was the ideologues behind the scenes who ran the show.

Brezhnev had his own Susan Rice and Barack Obama to make the real decisions. The similarities, as we said, are pretty amazing.

Over at CNN, however, they didn’t see it, or maybe they did see it and they didn’t care. CNN always did love Brezhnev.

In any case, the usual chorus of toadies strained for a high note last night. Watch them tell you how wonderful the speech was, as if you didn’t have a TV and didn’t see it for yourself.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DON LEMON, CNN ANCHOR: How refreshing. How human. How compassionate. How American.

CHRIS CUOMO, CNN ANCHOR: Biden tried to lift our spirits with a medicinal message about recovering our sense of collective cause. Certainly, it was healing.

VAN JONES, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: He didn’t say, you need me. He said, I need you. I need you. I mean, my God that is — isn’t that it?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: People always talk about the feeling of the relief hey have hearing Biden, but what he’s doing now soars above that.

LEMON: What the President is saying his help is on the way. We’re all in this together. I need your help. We’re all Americans. Whoo. Hallelujah.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Hallelujah, says Don Lemon. Can I get an amen? Clear the aisles. It’s time for an altar call. Brother Biden is preaching the word. Preach, Brother Biden, preach. Speak. What are these people talking about?

What was it about Joe Biden’s shaky monotone last night that inspired them exactly? Most people found it depressing. Maybe we’re being too literal here.

It probably doesn’t matter what Joe Biden actually said. He could have called for the bombing of Toronto and CNN’s panel of trained seals would still enthusiastically applaud it. It’s their job to enthusiastically applaud what Joe Biden says.

Our job is to try and figure out what Biden’s speech meant for the country. So let’s look at it for a minute.

The lockdowns have been tough, Biden conceded at the outset, God knows how we got them, but we did. Those restrictions will be lifted as soon as we can lift them, and we will return to some version of the country now only dimly remember, we’d really love to do that. We mean it, we’d love it.

But in order to go forward and take the boot off your neck, we’re going to need every American to listen very carefully and to obey our orders. Do what we tell you to do.

Now, that won’t be easy. But if you do it, there is a payoff for good behavior. If you’re obedient, there’s a chance not a guarantee, of course, but a distinct possibility, God-willing, that you may be able to see some of the people you love around July 4th, that could actually happen, ladies and gentlemen. Listen to this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BIDEN: If we do our part, if we do this together, by July the Fourth, there’s a good chance you, your families and friends will be able to get together in your backyard or in your neighborhood and have a cookout and a barbecue and celebrate Independence Day.

That doesn’t mean large events with lots of people together, but it does mean small groups will be able to get together.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Did you hear that America, there is a good chance, again, not a sure thing. But what is a sure thing these days? But a good chance that you might be allowed to have a modest cookout four months from now. That is as long as you obey regulations weather permitting, and assuming that current Federal projections unfold according to plan. That’s your prize.

This offer by the way does not apply to full-time employees, the radio station or their families.

But with luck, this could be your reward after a year and a half of lockdowns, a Fourth of July cookout in your very own backyard assuming you have one.

Don’t ever tell us that Joe Biden isn’t a compassionate generous man. Here he is offering you with some medically necessary caveats outlined by Dr. Anthony Fauci, the right to cook your own hotdogs. With the provision, obviously, that you do it in a small masked group seated far apart at a prescribed distance from one another.

Don’t get crazy and hug or celebrate or talk too loud or anything like that. Moderation is the key here. But still a socially distanced barbecue. What other wonders does President Biden have in store for us?

Well, you’re going to have to get vaccinated to find out. Sorry, that’s the other requirement. I should have mentioned it. Everybody needs the shot. Period. That’s what Biden said. And that’s a lot of shots.

The good news: now that we’re on what Joe Biden describes as a, quote, “war footing” with this virus, vaccinating people against it is a counterterrorism operation.

What we did to ISIS, we’re going to do to COVID. Biden didn’t mention drones, but we will need soldiers and that’s why Joe Biden is building a Vaccination Corps that will include active-duty members of the military, an army of vaccinators. Watch.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BIDEN: Two months ago, the country — this country didn’t have nearly enough vaccine supply to vaccinate all or ever near all of the American public. But soon we will.

Now because of all the work we’ve done, we’ll have enough vaccine supply for all adults in America by the end of May. That’s months ahead of schedule. And we’re mobilizing thousands of vaccinators to put the vaccine in one’s arm.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Thousands of vaccinators to vaccinate everyone. That sounds amazing, but it does raise at least one vexing question: what if you don’t want to get vaccinated? Not everyone does. Some people have religious objections, other have concerns about this specific medicines. Others simply don’t want it.

Do you need a reason to turn down the vaccine? And what happens if you do turn it down? Will we be allowed to fly on airplanes? Or go to work? Or enter the front doors of Madison Square Garden?

Joe Biden didn’t specify, but it’s pretty hard to believe he would support any kind of vaccine coercion as he has told you so often over so many years, if it’s your body, it’s your choice.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BIDEN: I support a woman’s right to choose under that constitutional guarantee provision. And quite frankly, I always will.

Folks, you know, and I am going to fight to protect a woman’s right to make her own personal decisions when it gets to your healthcare.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Quite frankly, you’ve got the absolute right to make your own personal decisions about your own personal healthcare. Period. That’s in the Constitution. Joe Biden would never violate that, right. He’s been defending that right since before you were born.

It’s your body. It’s your choice. Period.

Of course, as with everything, there are caveats. If you don’t take the shot that Joe Biden wants you to take, if you persist in making your own personal healthcare, then Joe Biden is going to have to shut the country down again, no socially distanced barbecues for you, buddy. You’re going to have to eat your hotdogs alone inside.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BIDEN: If we don’t stay vigilant, and the conditions change, and we may have to reinstate restrictions to get back on track.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: To which CNN might say, “Hallelujah,” but we’re not CNN. Instead, we’re left wondering, could there be any civil liberties implications to any of this? We don’t know the answer.

READ MORE STORIES ABOUT:

Clips Media Politics CNN Fox News Channel Joe  Biden Tucker Carlson Tucker Carlson

[nothingunrealistic]

👀 okay I'm starting to get into billions (bc of will). Can you recommend some essential episodes or something to get an understanding for what's happening? (And also I really like Asia Kate Dillon so like important episodes with them too)

the tricky thing about billions is that those of us who are into it aren’t, for the most part, actually watching the episodes in full or trying to understand all the plotlines. so if you want to know what’s happening with Everyone on the show (which is a dizzying number of characters), i can’t really pare it down to what’s important because i refuse to care about like half of them. but if, as it seems, you’re primarily here for winston and taylor (will’s and asia’s characters respectively), then good news - that’s almost all we care about too

the essential episodes for understanding winston are easy enough because he’s only shown up in five so far (3x03, 3x09, 3x11, 4x03, 4x08, and 4x11) for a couple minutes each, and all footage of him has been lovingly collated and posted on here. his first several appearances, and the context for them, are collected here; his moments from the most recent episode, which we were yelling about all day on sunday, are here. (he’ll be in this coming sunday’s episode too, which is also the season finale, so expect even more yelling about that.)

narrowing down the Essential Taylor is a little trickier because they’ve been in nearly every episode of seasons 2 3 and 4, of which i have watched exactly one episode. if billions had a decent fan wiki or anything similar, i would direct you to that, but they don’t, because they suck. the main way i keep up with the episodes/figure out what happened in previous seasons is via fan-run sites (which are superior to the recaps on Professional Media Websites usually), as follows:

fanfunwithdamianlewis has multiple recaps of every episode (including some from people who actually understand and can explain the financial stuff going on), as well as lists of all the locations shown, transcripts of cast interviews, and other fun stuff, all thoroughly tagged with actor and character names

gingesbecray has a recap of every episode as well (including gifs), always very detailed and entertainingly opinionated in ways we generally agree with

the billions companion collects and explains all the references that characters make (which is half the dialogue), sorted by episode, character, and keyword, as well as listing a wide array of other helpful sites

from these sites, the decent number of clips floating around youtube, and a collection of all taylor’s dialogue in seasons 2 & 3, we’ve pieced together the basic arc taylor’s had in the show so far. here’s my best approach at a season-by-season highlights reel (with links to relevant clips in bold) under the cut  because it’s ridiculously long

season 2: taylor arrives at axe capital as an intern. axe recognizes their talent and convinces them to stay, and they gain experience, status, and respect at axe cap over the course of the season, becoming the chief investment officer by season’s end.

2x01: taylor is an intern working for mafee (an executing trader at axe cap), and mafee wants them to stay once their internship is over.

2x02: taylor meets axe and impresses him with their insight. though taylor knows they don’t fit in at axe cap and plans to leave for grad school, axe later convinces them to stay, with a salary of a million dollars for a year.

2x03: taylor gets invited to play at a charity poker tournament (a real thing!), to the chagrin of others at axe cap. taylor has reservations but ultimately agrees to play; they win the tournament by outthinking their opponent, but are reminded of how out of place they are in hedge fund culture.

2x07: taylor is involved in figuring out what to do about a struggling small town that axe cap is heavily invested in.

2x08: taylor notices that mafee has been struggling at his job ever since he introduced them to axe, and asks wendy (who’s married to chuck [one of the main Legal Side characters], the performance coach at axe cap, and one of axe’s closest friends) if they should do anything about it. (ultimately taylor decides to assuage the guilt by giving mafee a signed wrestling poster. that’s the world of finance for you!)

2x09: axe’s birthday party, which everyone is expected to attend, is in conflict with taylor’s personal life, so they talk to him about what they should do and why they’re conflicted.

2x10: taylor is questioned by connerty (another of the characters on the legal side of things, who we don’t care about otherwise) about what happens at axe cap.

2x11: taylor is warned by connerty that this line of work might endanger their soul. they’re also given the responsibility of assessing all the analysts at axe cap and firing one - and told that it can’t be based solely on the numbers - and decide not to fire rudy, who is the worst performing analyst but is dedicated to succeeding.

2x12: axe is arrested/indicted/somehow penalized for insider trading and other hedge fund shenanigans, and he puts taylor in charge of axe cap’s investments.

season 3: taylor keeps axe capital running and thriving in axe’s absence, but once he returns, he overrules their decisions and undercuts their trust, leading them to start their own hedge fund (taylor mason capital, or tmc) by season’s end.

3x01: taylor calls a meeting at axe cap and tasks everyone with preparing for an Idea Dinner where they’ll impress other hedge funds with a new and exciting plan for making money. ultimately taylor comes up with a plan that involves reverse engineering microchips, and it goes over well.

3x02: taylor struggles with making the right choices of investments after a tsunami hits brazil, confronts axe when he shows up at the office despite being banned from trading, and talks with him later about how the day has gone and how to move forward.

3x03: taylor interviews quantitative analysts (”quants”) for axe cap, much to the chagrin of analysts who are worried about losing their jobs and traders who don’t trust computers. ultimately none are hired because wags (the COO of axe cap and the epitome of everything absolutely wild about billions), who conducted the interview with taylor, doesn’t trust quants either and sabotaged the process. (this is also where winston first appears! hi winston!)

3x04: taylor expects a space mission led by weird off brand elon musk to fail and invests accordingly. they’re rooting for him anyway and are horrified when he dies in an explosion after launch. they also deal with attempts to get them to invest in a charitable organization brought to axe’s attention by oscar langstraat, a venture philanthropist, and wind up with significant distaste for oscar.

3x05: taylor encounters oscar again in silicon valley where they’re hearing pitches, and though they’re hostile to him at first, a conversation about star wars makes taylor regret that they made other plans for dinner, and playing an obscure board game is enough for them to sleep with him. (like i said: enemies to lovers speedrun!)

3x06: taylor is “rattled” (their word) by something related to axe’s legal troubles in this episode. oscar flies in from silicon valley unannounced to keep taylor company while they’re working on their quant project because he’s That invested. no clips of any of this online though

3x07: axe and wendy are planning to convince mafee to take the blame for some shady investing they did at the end of last season, and taylor inadvertently enables them to do it by giving them information about how mafee thinks and what he believes in.

3x08: axe returns to axe cap free to trade again, and immediately undoes all of taylor’s work (including the quant project), though he also invites them to join the team that will raise money for axe cap. taylor wants a fund of their own to manage (still affiliated with axe cap but separate), but axe won’t give them as much money for it as he’s promising.

3x09: axe needs money and tries to take some from grigor andolov, a russian oil oligarch, which taylor thinks is a terrible idea. they also restart the quant project again, in secret, which means winston’s back! winston & taylor’s meeting in a room with a chalkboard and taylor’s introduction of the quants to the quant headquarters are both from this episode.

3x10: taylor and oscar are celebrating a deal that oscar’s about to make, but when taylor mentions it to axe in asking for his help with getting a dinner reservation, axe, who’s searching for more sources of money, makes the deal before oscar can, which crushes taylor and ends their relationship. 

3x11: taylor discovers that winston has driven off the other quants, but asks him to work on The Algorithm instead of firing him. it’s also comp time - axe won’t give taylor as much of a bonus as they want and also removes them from the capital raise team; this decision is later reversed when taylor talks to wendy and wendy talks to axe. winston completes The Algorithm, and taylor emerges from the quant basement into the offices of taylor mason capital to talk to grigor.

3x12: taylor meets with grigor and convinces him to invest in tmc, arrives (late) to the capital raise event and impresses the investors there, swipes a good portion of that capital for tmc, and leaves axe cap for good, having successfully convinced mafee (and failing to convince ben kim) to join them. axe and taylor argue about taylor’s betrayal and what comes next. taylor also tries and fails to bring wendy to tmc.

season 4: taylor strives to keep tmc successful while fending off axe’s repeated attacks and dealing with their own interpersonal relationships interfering with business. how will it end? we don’t yet know [UPDATE: it ends with taylor making deals with both axe and chuck, but truly being on no one’s side except their own.]

4x01: taylor, mafee, and sara (taylor’s COO) struggle to hire employees due to axe paying off tmc’s headhunter (though they don’t initially know that’s the case). taylor disguises themself as a cis woman to get money from a sovereign wealth fund that axe cap is also seeking money from. (the full episode is available on youtube.)

4x02: taylor can’t get funding because axe has persuaded all the banks to cut them off. grigor brings in a pair of shady brothers to invest in tmc; taylor would really rather not depend on the brothers’ money, so they trick the banker the brothers are using into cutting off their credit lines and ask grigor to use his influence to get independent funding for tmc.

4x03: axe cap has managed to get a hold of tmc’s trading patterns, and they start front running tmc (making trades based on what they expect tmc to do) to throw taylor off. (this is where winston comes in again! and declares himself cassandra!) taylor’s dad, douglas, shows up and spends nearly all of his screentime either persistently misgendering taylor or helping them create a mathematical equation, which includes a mistake added by taylor as a message to axe (who of course is watching) for a meeting. when they meet, taylor asks axe for a truce, and he declines.

4x04: grigor brings down axe cap’s whole computer system, allowing tmc to profit off a natural gas crisis that axe cap was hoping to benefit from. taylor also agrees to support douglas’s aerospace project, a “lattice grid fin,” now that he’s actually respecting them as a person. but the climax of this episode is chuck talking about his and wendy’s sex life in front of the press, and taylor calls wendy afterward to offer sympathy. (and chuck, who subsequently wins his election, gets grigor deported and his money frozen.)

4x05: taylor is #Stressed about the loss of grigor’s money, which endangers tmc overall and douglas’s project especially. sara brings in lauren, an investor relations expert, to help out; lauren gets taylor a meeting with the new york firefighters’ fund, who used to invest only with axe but are looking elsewhere, and taylor gains their support.

4x06: taylor is working with douglas and a couple other companies on getting his lattice fin project off the ground, while trying to avoid axe cap’s spying (not that successfully), and douglas is mad that he isn’t being treated like the smartest person in the room. taylor and wendy also meet up repeatedly, in a seemingly friendly way, but wendy mines their conversations and her patient files on taylor to figure out how to force taylor to destroy douglas’s project. 

4x07: rebecca, axe’s girlfriend (though tmc doesn’t know that) and a business mogul herself, offers to buy douglas’s project (as a way for axe to access and destroy it), which taylor turns down. taylor has also enlisted wendy’s help to furnish a new apartment for their parents. then taylor gets the news that douglas’s project has been found to be a threat to national security (thanks to axe) - and though they initially choose to hold onto his project despite the ensuing loss of funds, wendy comes over to commiserate and inadvertently gives away that she’s been playing taylor this whole time. taylor sells the project to the government to save tmc, at the cost of their relationship with douglas.

4x08: taylor wants financial revenge for being manipulated, and first taunts, then argues with axe on live television. at mafee and dollar bill’s charity boxing match, taylor first is confronted by wendy about reporting her for malpractice (which sara did without taylor’s knowledge), then reveals that they tricked axe into getting fracking legalized so they could profit from buying water rights where fracking happens.

4x09: taylor is going to great lengths to destroy rebecca’s new position as ceo of a department store (saler’s), including buying out three of the largest shareholders and planning to meet up with a fourth who already hates axe. the plan doesn’t work in the end, but taylor finds out that axe will make huge sacrifices for rebecca - and starts a relationship with lauren, who helped them get a meeting with the fourth shareholder’s son.

4x10: taylor is preparing for wendy’s malpractice hearing, buying an appliance manufacturer closely tied to saler’s in order to have power over rebecca, and doing a terrible job of hiding their relationship with lauren. wendy comes to see them at tmc, and taylor claims they won’t go to the hearing, for wendy’s benefit.

4x11: taylor indeed doesn’t go to the hearing, and wendy fesses up to her wrongdoing. it’s comp time at tmc (winston’s most recent appearance! we’ve only just recently stopped shouting about it!), and everyone defers their bonus except lauren, who says she’d be too heartbroken to stick around if she and taylor broke up. rebecca, who’s tired of taylor making her life difficult, offers taylor a business deal related to saler’s, and taylor, who’s tired of being at war, accepts.

4x12: here is imdb’s summary of this episode: “Axe makes a big decision. Connerty gets closer to the truth. Tensions rise, and dynamics shift.” real specific. [UPDATE: taylor apologizes to their employees and promises to focus on running tmc The Right Way. and then axe sinks tmc by effectively killing saler’s, and sends a former axe cap employee who tried to get a job at tmc to try and bait taylor into engaging in insider trading; he hopes that chuck will then arrest them and blackmail them to work for axe again. taylor doesn’t take the bait, but chuck arrests them anyway, and makes a deal with them to work together to take axe down. secretly taylor plans to set up chuck and axe to destroy each other, and then get out of the way. the episode ends with taylor and their tmc team walking into axe cap and being “welcomed home.”]

#inbox #cockbiteproductions #billions #taylor mason #winston billions #if you have more questions feel free to ask! i unexpectedly love talking about this lmao

[bbclesmis]

Just Like Jean Valjean, Dominic West Is Done Being A Bad Guy

After a career of playing notable villains,  actor Dominic West says he’s ready to turn a new leaf. So his role as the tortured thief, Jean Valjean, in the new MASTERPIECE production of Victor Hugo’s classic novel, Les Misérables, is a helpful bridge to be a better man on screen. In an interview, he talks about what it means to play Valjean, how his character seeks personal redemption and what the rest of the series has in store for the repentant former prisoner 24601.

Transcript:

Jace Lacob: I’m Jace Lacob, and you’re listening to MASTERPIECE Studio.

The story is well known — an impoverished man steals a loaf of bread to feed his family, and spends 19 years in prison. Upon his release, the convict nearly falls prey to old habits… but instead spends the rest of his life struggling to prove he has truly reformed.

CLIP

Old Woman: What are you doing there, my friend?

Jean Valjean: Trying to sleep, what does it look like?

Old Woman: Why don’t you go to an inn?

Jean Valjean: I did. They wouldn’t take me. No would take me.

Jace: In Andrew Davies’ sweeping new adaptation of Victor Hugo’s legendary epic, Les Misérables, the bleak stakes of the story take on dazzling new heights.

CLIP

Bishop: Consider this: even if the world has done you a great injustice, does it really serve you to have a heart full of bitterness and hatred?

Jean Valjean: How could I not have a heart full of bitterness and hatred? I’d like to see you after 19 years in the hulks! So don’t preach to me about God and love.

Jace: Best known for his turns in The Wire and The Affair, actor Dominic West has made a name for himself playing villainous rogues on American and British television, and his role as Jean Valjean includes its fair share of monstrous rage and sly trickery. Despite all this, he also found room for moral clarity.

Dominic West: This man’s a brute…who for whom compassion and humanity has been withheld for 20 years, and it takes a bit more to for him to be able to control that bestial side.

Jace: West joins us to explore Valjean’s story still to come in Les Miserables, why he might be done with playing scoundrels, and how he and his wife have become their own real-life Monarchs of the Glen in their castle-hotel in Scotland.

And we are joined this week by Les Misérables star and executive producer, Dominic West. Welcome.

Dominic: Thank you very much. Hi.

Jace: Jean Valjean has preternatural strength and a secret identity. Is he the first superhero in literature?

Dominic: He’s not the first because I suppose you’ve got the Greeks, but he’s the best. And he climbs buildings like Spiderman and he beats people up like Iron Man and he rescues children like Superman. But none of those superheroes did 19 years hard labor in a 19th century French jail, so he’s the toughest of the lot. I think.

Jace: We all know Jean Valjean’s prisoner number by heart and his story of redemption. What was the initial appeal of playing Valjean?

Dominic: The initial reservation was that the been played so many times before and that the film of the musical had just come out, and therefore what the hell have we got to add to it and certainly what have I got to add to the part? But the appeal came once I started reading the book and I realized it’s the best book I’ve ever read, and probably ever written. And that he’s I think the greatest hero in literature. And I quickly fell in love with him and  suppose what was most appealing about him, apart from his strength and ability to save children’s lives, etcetera, was his inner heroism, his heroics of battling your own demons and trying to do what’s right rather than what you impulsively and emotionally feel like doing.

Jace: We see Valjean not when he’s released from prison, but at the thick of it at the quarry. He strikes a massive boulder and it plummets down onto a guard, the same man who hit him earlier when he’s led through Toulon in chains. Is this an accident, or an intentional act on his part?

Dominic: Is very much intentional. He’s been brutalized for 19 years and he’s quite happy to want to kill anybody and certainly kill his tormentors. What becomes an accident is that he then rescues the guy that he’s just dropped the rock on and that of course is usually significant later on in Javert’s recognition of Valjean later. So no, he’s a brutalized brute who wants to harm people, wants to get revenge.

Jace: Even in these early scenes there’s an almost magnetic pull between Valjean and Javert that feels almost psychosexual, in a way.

CLIP

Javert: Well now, 24601. What was all that about today? You saving that guard’s life, why? If you  were trying to get yourself an early release, you tried in vain. There’s no hope of that, no hope at all.

Jace: And why is Javert so obsessed with this particular prisoner?

Dominic: Well it’s the big question it was the first question I asked in rehearsal, it’s the obvious question — What the hell is wrong with this guy? You know? What’s his beef? Why is he…? Because it’s not very apparent in the book at all. And I think we discuss this a lot and my preference is always to go for the big motivators which are love and sex. I think that’s what motivate most of us the most. And so I think there’s a huge magnetic attraction that Javert has for Valjean, and David hints that in the scene where I’m stripping off and he has a look, and it’s just one look, and it’s sort of…it just lets it hang there. David didn’t want it to overplay that bit because I think he thought what was more important was the attraction that a very small bitter mind has for the big mind, that a mean person has for a generous person, that the devil has for a saint. You know, I think that that’s probably more interesting.

Jace: These two men come to represent two very different sides in a philosophical debate about good and evil. Why is Valjean’s ultimate optimism, the notion that change and forgiveness are possible, so refreshing particularly right now?

Dominic: Well I suppose it’s fairly standard thinking now, that we’re not born bad, that we are the products of our environment and of of how people treat us. But when this book was written this was very much a philosophical debate that people believed, you know, people like Javert, that people are born bad and there’s nothing you can do about it. I think after, you know, a century of psychology and modern psychology and we realize that that’s not necessarily the case, but it’s worth being reminded of these things because I suppose you know, in modern political life in the UK and the US there’s a lot of currency in vilifying people for what they are, rather than who they are.

Jace: I mean even recently in France protesters called Emmanuel Macron president of the rich. I mean Les Misérables feels incredibly relevant and timely given the class struggles and sort of wealth inequality of today. Does that notion sort of stick with you, having played this part?

Dominic: Yeah I mean the French revolution happened because the gap between rich and poor never been wider. And I think it’s a lot wider now. And I think one thing that Victor Hugo understood was that once that chasm between rich and poor widens enough, there’s going to be trouble. And that it’s unsustainable. And I think I remember making this realizing that, you know, this what we have now, which is an enormous gulf between rich and poor in the world and in America, it’s pretty dangerous territory. And revolution tends to follow that of territory.

Jace: One year later Valjean is released from prison and giving one hundred nine francs after various deductions. But more importantly he gave his name back and becomes more than just a number.

CLIP

Javert: Here is your passport. You are required to show it to the authorities in every town and village you pass through. You have your name again, Monsieur 24601. I wonder if you can remember what it is.

Valjean: Jean Valjean.

Javert: You sure about that?

Valjean: JEAN VALJEAN!

Jace: Why is this such a powerful and profound moment of self identity for the prisoner?

Dominic: Well I suppose from what you says, he you, know he becomes a human being again, rather than a statistic or a number or a commodity. And hence his shouting to the echoing forests and wide open valley that he’s now free to roam. He shouts his name. And it’s very interesting with Valjean, his journey goes from being a number, to being Valjean, to being Monsieur Madeleine, when he’s the mayor, to being one in denial of Jean Valjean and of that being a personality that he is ashamed of, until his final embrace of that. And so it’s it’s very crucial to his arc and his development and his evolution that his names plot very clearly, what he’s called is very, very relevant to his state of mind.

Jace: I love the scenes between you and Sir Derek Jacobins Bishop of Dean.

CLIP

Valjean: You give me a bed here, right next to yours? Are you crazy? How do you know I’m not a murderer?

Bishop: That’s the Good Lord’s business, not mine. Or to put it another way, I’ll take my chance with you, my friend. Good night now, and sleep well.

Jace: What was it like filming these scenes with Derek Jacobi?

Dominic: Well it was bliss. It was. I mean I’ve admired him for years, and it is a tricky one when you got to cast the sort of most virtuous, nicest best man who’s ever lived, which is how he reads in the book. It’s so hard to write about virtue, it’s so hard to make virtue interesting. It’s easy to make the devil funny and interesting but it’s hard to make a saint interesting. And that’s what Victor Hugo does and that’s what Derek Jacobi does. And there’s very few actors who can do that, can make virtue interesting. But acting with him, who is a real hero of mine was in one sense, it’s dead easy because he does it all for a year and he’s so sympathetic and another it’s very salutary, it’s very…he was extraordinarily, he was very detached, you didn’t get involved talking much, you sat very quietly at the side of the set until he’s called. He’s very contained as an actor. And very generous, but it was great watching a master at work.

Jace: There’s a beautiful moment right before the Petit Gervais incident when Valjean collapses under the tree. We hear the church bells ringing out. We see the sunlight streaming through the leaves of the tree. It’s a really beautiful moment and then there’s temptation in this sort of Garden of Eden. The singing boy with his coin. What makes Valjean fall once more?

Dominic: Well it’s interesting, but in the book and I think in the script, too, but we didn’t end up filming it, is when he’s under the tree, after having encountered love and kindness for the first time in 19 years from the Bishop, he remembers his mother and he remembers the last time he felt loved, which was from his mother. And so that was what was going on at that moment of where the transformation is starting to happen. It’s been put in place by the Bishop, he remembers his mother and in the book that sort of precipitates his anguish, when his best side comes out, what makes him fall, what makes the scorpion sting? You know, he’s a scorpion and this man’s a brutalized man who for whom compassion and humanity has been withheld for 20 years and it takes a bit more for him to be able to control that bestial side.

Jace:You’re a dirty thief,’ Petit Gervais screams at him. How much will these words haunt him in these episodes to come?

Dominic: Well totally, and I think what’s interesting, what’s so beautiful about how Victor Hugo makes the agent of Valjean’s change being a little child, a defenseless child who is essentially, Valjean sees him, the bestial Valjean sees him as someone weak and therefore to be exploited. And what he learns is that the weak are what give us humanity and one’s attitude and one’s treatment of the weak is crucial to our humanity.

Jace: You mentioned a damascene conversion. After stealing Petit Gervais’s 40 sous, he changes his mind. He calls out to him. There’s a look of profound agony on your face as he searches his soul. Is this the moment where he where he does decide to be good?

Dominic: Yeah I think it is. I think the whole tragedy of his life and of his brutality comes crashing in on him he realizes that the deep, deep, deep sorrow of what’s happened to him in the last 20 years. And I think as soon as he’s allowed to pity himself in a way is is when he starts to love himself again.

Jace: Valjean collapses on the road curling up into a fetal ball in the dirt. Should we read the scene as a spiritual or moral or rebirth?

Dominic: Yes, very much so. Yeah, and I think that that element of the remembering the mother, which was we didn’t show explicitly, that is very much what Victor Hugo was writing I think that this is, he is reborn back into humanity.

Jace: What was it like filming this particular sequence?

Dominic: It was bloody hard. And really hot. It was really hot and it was the end of a long day that finally I had had to collapse. And I did seem to spend a lot of the shoot in tears. But for some reason at this point I couldn’t, the tears didn’t come. Which is fine, because they have to, but I was very conscious that this was probably the most important single moment of the whole story. And that can be very daunting to try and act. So I found it hard, and I’m still not entirely happy with it.

Jace: This first episode centers on both Valjean and Fantine. There are circumstances in this first episode are very different but they’re forced to make a choice by the end of the installment. Are they mirrors for each other in a way?

Dominic: Yeah, I suppose as she descends, he ascends. I suppose her attitude to Valjean the prisoner would probably be similar to what her daughter’s is later on, of revulsion and horror and what happens of course when they meet is that he becomes her protector.

Jace: Before this next question, a quick word from our sponsors…

Jace: You’ve played a lot of philanderers in your career, whether that’s McNulty or Noah on The Affair. Hector Madden in The Hour. Willie in Collette. Many, many philanderers. Why is that, do you think?

Dominic: I don’t know. I mean I’ve played a lot of villains and this was one of the, I suppose that was the initial attraction of Valjean was not playing a villain, playing the hero and the good guy, but as to why it’s philandering I don’t know. I’m not, I don’t know, I’ve no idea why people think I suited for philanderers. But they think I seem a villain. So hopefully after this I’ll be just plain, monogamous heroes.

Jace: Your big break came with David Simon’s seminal HBO series The Wire, my favorite all time series where you played Jimmy McNulty. Was there a sense at the time that this was a groundbreaking piece of television?

Dominic: I don’t think so. I think I’m sure we were all aware that with The Sopranos and that this was the dawn perhaps of a new golden era. But it’s very hard I find to take an objective view on things, I mean, and I’m only just starting to get an objective view on Les Misérables, in fact. And certainly while we were shooting no one, no one was watching it, really. I mean, a few law enforcement people and lawyers and a few gangsters but no one really was watching and certainly no one from the UK, and so I didn’t really, I wasn’t really aware of how how important it was and how what a groundbreaking series it was until much later, I think. You’re just too close to see these things.

Jace: True or false you joined: in Argentina you joined an Argentinian circus for a spell.

Dominic: I did, De La Guarda. Yeah it was, it was only in New York for a while and I did it in London for five months. Best job I ever had.

Jace: Sarah Treme, who created The Affair said of you quote, ‘He’s not afraid to let a character be complicated. There’s a flawed humanity that he seems to understand inherently.’ How do you react to that?

Dominic: What a lovely thing for Sarah to say. Yeah, I do get a lot of philanderers and a lot of villains but usually they have another side to them, and I think it’s essential no one is purely evil or purely good. Most of us are conflicted. So it’s important to be an actor who can portray that.

Jace: Given how well you nail the accent in The Wire and The Affair, are fans ever surprised to realize you’re not American in real life?

Dominic: They Oh I’m great I’m glad Yeah they still are. People still come up and I’m amazed. But I remember when I did it when The Wire had just come out in the UK and was getting quite a big following and there was a charity night and I was asked to go along. And it was a quiz night, that was as a charity night that was a quiz night, and the way the quiz was entirely about The Wire. And so it was full of Wire nuts, you know, people who really knew the show. And I remember going in and I had to ask the final question or something like that and I started speaking and I just remember sensing the whole room deflate with disappointment that hearing my accent when they realized I was a Brit. And so I you know usually in America people are pleasantly surprised, in the UK, people are unpleasantly surprised that I’m just a Brit.

Jace: Off screen you’re living your own version of Monarch Of The Glen. You recently rescued your wife Catherine’s family seat Glin Castle in County Limerick and converted it into a family run hotel. How is that project going?

Dominic: Well it’s great fun. It’s not true to say we rescued it, it was run as a hotel by her parents and then her father unfortunately died. So it was put on the market. But yeah, we decided to keep it going and to try and make it a going concern. It has been in my wife’s family for 700 years, really not much choice, but it’s going OK, actually. It’s going remarkably well, I think. You know, Ireland is sort of booming at the moment and I think once nobody from Europe is allowed to go to Britain anymore, then they’ll all flock to to Ireland.

Jace: Who is funnier —Dominic West or Olivia Colman?

Dominic: Olivia Colman is spectacularly funny and able to laugh and joke right up until they say action, when she is then able to go into a serious moment, as you can, which is not something Dominic West can do quite as well. And I felt as I found to my cost on the set of Les Mis, it was maybe that scene where we had the big fight at the Thenadier’s, and we were all crying with laughter at what Olivia was saying and then I realized of course that I had to do some proper acting. So I then tried to avoid her after that.

Jace: You directed an episode of The Wire and an episode of Jimmy McGovern’s Moving On. Is directing something you’d like to do more of in the future.

Dominic: Yeah I after doing that I thought that’s what I wanted to do forever and then I realized actually, well two things happened — when I started getting very good acting parts, I didn’t really have time for the writing, and the other one was I realized that a director is first in and last out, whereas an actor is last in and first out.

Jace: You left Guild Hall in 1995 one of your first onscreen roles that year was the Earl of Richmond in Richard III opposite Sir Ian McKellen. Was it a formative professional experience.

Dominic: Oh very much so. Robert Downey, Jr. was in it, Annette Bening was in it, Maggie Smith was in it. It was an amazing cast that I was just out of drama school and was able to sort of go around watching them all at work. And it was headed by Ian McKellen who’s a really great leading man in terms of his compassion and his ability to lead a cast and keep everybody happy. It was yeah, it was a wonderful job and an amazing job to have at an early stage in your career, because it was with a lot of people who were very generous with their knowledge.

Jace: You once reached out to wine critic Robert Parker to try and interview him. What ended up happening?

Dominic: He lives in Baltimore, so I was in Baltimore and I said, ‘Look can I come and interview you?’ and he said, ‘No you can’t but I’ll tell you what, you bring some of The Wire cast, I’ll bring the wine.’ And so we went out for dinner and there were four or five of us from The Wire. Andre, who played Bubbles, was with us and insisted on drinking Jack and Coke the whole time. I was telling him, ‘This is the best wine you’ll ever have in your life, and you insist on Jack and Coke?’ So we drank a lot of extremely great wine and I can’t remember much about it other than Robert Parker very generously gave us an hundred year old bottle of cognac and he said ‘I want you to open that when you finish the last frame of The Wire,’ and we did, which happened to be at six o’clock one morning in Baltimore. And we nailed the whole bottle.

Jace: That’s amazing. Dominic West, thank you so very much.

Dominic: Thank you very much.

Jace: Jean Valjean is the narrative core of Les Misérables. But his lifelong nemesis, the relentless Inspector Javert, keeps things moving in his pursuit of personal justice.

David Oyelowo: He has no problem in in saying that person is a criminal. And so therefore they deserve this punishment.

Jace: Actor David Oyelowo joins us next week on the podcast with a close look at how Javert’s need for truth and justice propels Victor Hugo’s epic forward.

MASTERPIECE Studio is hosted by me, Jace Lacob and produced by Nick Andersen. Elisheba Ittoop is our editor. Susanne Simpson is our executive producer. The executive producer of MASTERPIECE is Rebecca Eaton.

#les mis bbc #bbc les mis #dominic west #Jean Valjean #podcast #Interviews #pbs

[aceyasu]

Ciel’s Umineko Merch Highlights: Case File 01 & 02

As you probably know by my blog, I love merch, and I have a lot of it. My special interest is very hungry for plastic and paper. Sometimes, I come across merch that I find really fun, interesting, or otherwise notable. Here’s some: the Case File books!

Looking good!

These books were included as supplements inside the premium edition of the anime (as licensed and published by NIS America) and were not for sale separately. The Case Files are a fun combination of artbook and supplementary material: featuring both a rather thorough overview of each mystery and a plethora of production sketches from Studio DEEN, as well as stills from the anime and full-page promotional illustrations. Both books are printed in full color on glossy paper and are in English.

Together, the books cover the entire anime (Case File 01 covers episodes 1-18; 02 takes the rest) and pull forward all the mysteries for the reader’s consideration. Something I really like about the Case Files is their presentation; styled as newspaper clippings, which is an aesthetic I just can NOT resist.

Each character also has their model sheet sketches and a brief profile (as well as this very difficult relationships chart). Peppered in between are production sketches of important locations and props.

--(it was very difficult to choose what images to include in this post; if you want to see more pages from the book, just let me know and I’ll post some more high-resolution pics...so you can actually see what’s going on. lol)

Case File 01 also features a rarely-seen interpretation of the epitaph—its wording is quite different than the Witch-Hunt variant we’re all used to. It’s less literal to the original text--but in sacrificing a literal translation to favor style, the word choice and atmosphere is probably closer to what Kinzo intended (lol). It’s very grandiose-sounding!

(transcript here)

I actually really like this epitaph. It’s got some pizazz. A certain je ne sais quoi. It’s very flowery and dramatic hahahah--you can tell it tries to stay true to the hints too (as much as it can, being a translation, anyway)!

All in all, these are fun books with a fun aesthetic—but since they’re all anime-based, probably won’t knock your socks off in the theorycrafting department if you’re a veteran of the series. Despite that, though, there’s something fun about being able to flip through all the EP1-4 mysteries in rapid succession… The amount of sketches is a huge bonus for these books too, I think!

It feels like the project of a team that really did like Umineko, and wanted to put it out--and thus put a lot of effort into making a cool release! With the books and the card game and just the overall design, their dedication made the premium release really worthwhile, I think.

This has been the merch highlight! I’m Ciel, and—...who am I..?

(Ask me anything about Umineko!)

#ciel's merch highlights #case files #umineko #umineko no naku koro ni #long post

[sophie-zadeh]

Gable Tostee, Warriena Wright and the Missing Phone

I had a request to revisit part of the 60 Minutes Australia interview with Gable Tostee, to analyse Tostee’s behaviour surrounding Warriena Wright’s missing phone. This is a few minutes of the interview which I skipped over in my original article Gable Tostee Reveals his Guilt in Warriena Wright’s Death.

If you’re not familiar with the case, in 2016 Gable Tostee was found not guilty of the murder and manslaughter of Warriena Wright, who plunged 14 storeys from Tostee’s Gold Coast apartment just hours after they met. This is a case that people are passionate about, with many believing justice has not been served.

I should warn you, the 60 Minutes Australia video of the interview with Tostee includes audio snippets of a recording that Tostee made that fateful night. The recording in parts is horrific to listen to, as Wright screams in anguish, pleading to be allowed to go home shortly before plunging to her death.

Let’s take a look at Tostee’s behaviour surrounding the missing phone. I’m filling in the missing parts from the 60 Minutes Australia video editing with the transcript from the audio recording. If you want to listen to the full uncut audio recording, you can do so here.

Gable Tostee Recording Transcript combined with 60 Minutes Australia Interview

Music stops (38:49 audio recording)

Wright

Where’s my sister’s phone?

Tostee

What you after?

Wright

Where’s my sister’s sh*t?

Tostee

That’s your bag there isn’t it?

Wright

Yeah but where is all her sh*t? Where’s my f**king shit?

Tostee

Like what?

Wright

All my f**king data. Where is all my f**king data?

Tostee

What does it look like? Is it in there or?

Wright

It looks like a f**king iPhone. Sh*t.

Tostee

Do you want me to ring it?

Wright

Yeah, I’d love you to f**king ring it.

Tostee

What’s the number, I’ll find it?

Wright

Yeah, well f**king (inaudible/Tostee coughs)

Tostee

There’s some of your stuff right here.

Wright

(Inaudible/muffled) This is f**king serious

Tostee

Hey, look, I didn’t say you had to leave, I just said stop beating me up.

Wright

(Inaudible)

Tostee

No, it’s in there next to the bed.

Wright

Where, where?

Tostee

There. 

Wright

Where? Are you going to f**king untie me?

Tostee

Right there, look. Look.

Wright

Because I will f**king, I will f**king destroy your jaw. It’s not f**king funny.

8:25 (60 Minutes Australia video clip)

After playing a snippet from the audio recording from the night, interviewer, Liam Bartlett, questions Tostee. We hear the latter part of Wright’s statement from the above transcript.

Wright

… f**king, I will f**king destroy your jaw. It’s not f**king funny.

Gable Tostee Body Language Analysis

The Facial Expression of Anger

In response to what he is hearing or the context of the situation (emotions and expressions occur in real-time), starting from an almost neutral facial expression, Tostee gulps, blinks then leans back. Leaning back, a distancing behaviour, indicates dislike or discomfort—a physical distancing reflecting psychological distancing.

As Tostee leans back, a facial movement called Brow Lowerer (Action Unit 4/AU 4) occurs when the eyebrows are pulled together in a downward motion. This is commonly described as a frown. We see this movement take place, but it’s also evident in the still screenshot, with the bulge that appears at the inner corners of his eyebrows.

In addition to Brow Lowerer, we see another facial movement, the Lid Tightener, scientifically called Action Unit 7 (AU 7). In the screenshot, this is evident in the narrowing of the eye, the tension and slight bulge just below the lower eyelid. This is caused by the contraction of the inner part of a muscle that runs around the eye, pulling the upper and lower lid inwards, towards the eye.

These facial movements can be combined with others in the eye/eyebrow area in a few emotional expressions. However, as we see them here, they are either part of the emotional expression of anger or are a focusing mechanism. Well, they are a focusing mechanism, whether independently or during the expression of anger.

Facial expressions serve several purposes, one of which is that they have physiological benefits. We need to focus during the emotion of anger, mentally and visually and these facial movements aid focus. AU 7 seems to be most responsible for focus but AU 4 seems also to play a part. You’ve probably observed people doing this movement/s as they try to focus on something visually. I do it a lot when I’m not wearing my glasses.

Eye Blocking Behaviour

As Tostee leans back, we see an eye blocking behaviour, twice—a momentary eye closure that lasts longer than a blink. Typically, eye blocks last slightly longer than what is observed here, however, since they appear longer than a blink, they are most probably being suppressed by Tostee. We display blocking behaviours when we feel dislike or discomfort. Closing (or covering) our eyes reflect a desire to remove the stimulus.

The Facial Expression of Contempt

We also see a facial movement in the mouth that is possibly an expression of contempt, an asymmetrical expression. I’d have to see this occur from the front to confirm it as contempt/asymmetrical.

Bartlett

She’s pretty angry there.

And so is Tostee!

Tostee

Yeah

As Tostee says, “Yeah”. We can be certain that the emotion he is experiencing is anger—unless he’s faking it, which wouldn’t be in his best interest. What we don’t know is why he is experiencing anger. We can only speculate.

Tostee's anger could have been evoked from the memory of his experience with Wright on listening to the audio clip or triggered when he hears her threat of breaking his jaw. Alternatively, it might be because he is on 60 Minutes being challenged about what had happened.

Bartlett

Why is she so angry she can’t find her phone?

Tostee

Erm, I’m not sure why she got so angry like that, but we were looking for her phone apparently and she couldn’t find it and she seemed to be blaming me for that and I was offering to, you know, call her phone to help her find it. Cough. And erm.

It doesn’t take a statement analyst to realise that “we were looking for her phone apparently” is a red flag. I’d love to hear statement analyst Colin Ector explain what’s happening here with the use of the word ‘apparently’.

Listening to the audio recording of the fateful night, not just this part but the whole thing, there are times where I feel Tostee is aware of what he is saying, as though he’s playing to it. A deliberate concealment of reality, so that what is recorded could serve a future purpose. If this is the case, the use of the word, ‘apparently’, makes sense.

Is Tostee using the recording as a tool to stretch the truth? Is his slip of words a reflection that he thinks his responses to Wright in the recording, might make it apparent that we were looking for her phone?

At the same time, there is a slight twitchy movement in Tostee’s otherwise still body language. It’s hard to see what’s happening with the darkness of the video and most of his body not being in view. This movement could reflect feelings of awkwardness at this point. The twitching also forms a behavioural cluster with the use of the word apparently and his cough as he ends the statement. A cluster of behaviours at a certain point can raise a red flag in terms of deception detection.

Potential Microexpression of Disgust

As Tostee says, “she seemed to be blaming me for that”, there is a slight twitch at the sides of his nose. This could be a microexpression of disgust. Is Tostee disgusted by Wright or disgusted that because of her he is now in this situation? Or something else?

A microexpression is an emotion expressed in half a second or less. Tostee’s potential microexpression of disgust occurs quicker than half a second. Microexpressions are either suppressed or concealed emotions/expressions, or stem from the subconscious before the conscious has caught up with the emotional state.

Bartlett

Did you know where it was?

Tostee

No I didn’t know where it was.

Bartlett

Okay, but at the time, you know, as we just heard, she says, “do you want me to destroy your jaw?”

Tostee

Yeah

Bartlett

So, had she already hit you?

Tostee

Erm at that stage it was kind of, what I, what I understood to be play fighting. But as you’ll see throughout the night it got worse and worse. 

Facial Expression of Contempt

As Tostee says, “at that stage it was kind of”, we observe an expression of contempt, with the lip stretched to one side to the extreme. Even though the other side of his face isn’t visible, we can observe even the middle portion of his lips move slightly to his left, as the lip stretches from the outer corner.

That’s all I have for you for this analysis. As you can see in just seconds in time a lot of nonverbal behaviours occur. Seconds and minutes of footage can lead to hours of analysis and compiling an article or report (if it’s a private case). I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this article and more importantly, that you’ve learned something more about behaviour and communication. I’m leaving you with the transcript of Tostee’s recording of the night, surrounding the missing phone.

Gable Tostee Recording Transcript

Wright

Where? Are you going to f**king untie me?

Tostee

Look there, look. Look.

Wright

Because I will f**king, I will f**king destroy your jaw. It’s not f**king funny.

Tostee

Look there. Look, look, look.

Wright

You may have f**king, (inaudible)

Tostee

That, that’s your stuff right there. You gonna…

Wright

Get it for me. Get it. Get it for me.

Tostee

I don’t know what to look at. That’s your stuff. 

Wright

Get it for me.

Tostee

You get it. It’s right there.

Wright

Will you f**king get it?

Tostee

Right there. Here.

Wright

Give me.

Tostee

I should never have…inaudible

Wright

I’m calling the police.

Tostee

Okay do it.

Wright

I’m f**king calling the police. Give me.

Tostee

It’s right there.

Wright

No, I’m going to call the police. Give it to me.

Tostee

You do that.

Wright

Give it to me. 

Tostee

It’s right there.

Wright

Nah. Get it for me. I’ll call the police.

Tostee

You’re leaving.

Wright

Good.

Wright

(Inaudible muffled), f**king asleep. Get it for me now.

Tostee

Come on Cletus.

Wright

(Inaduible) get it for me. 

Tostee

It’s right there.

Wright

…f**king made me (inaudible). Get it, get it. (Inaudible)

Tostee

Right there. Trust me.

(Inaudible)

Wright

Okay, I’m going to call the police and they’re going to come here, yeah, are you going to be alright with the police coming here?

Tostee

Yeah, because, because um. 

Wright

Good. I’m going to call the police.

Tostee

What are you looking for?

Wright

I’m going to call the police! Good.

Wright

Like, where’s my f**king money? (Inaudible) sh*t. (Gasp)

Tostee

Call them with what? I thought you lost your phone.

Wright

Exactly.

Tostee

So how are you going to call anyone without your phone?

Wright

You stole my f**king phone.

Tostee

I didn’t touch your god damn phone.

Wright

You guys f**king stole my sh*t.

Tostee

Sh*t, I should never have…

Wright

f**king call me?

Tostee

should never have given you so much to drink. I thought we were going to have fun.

Wright

Where’s my sh*t!

Tostee

Where’s your phone.

Wright

Where is my sh*t?

Tostee

What’s your phone number, I’ll, I’ll have it.

Wright

Going hundred f**king psycho bitch. F**king...

Tostee

I don’t deserve this shit alright? I’m a nice f**king guy.

Wright

Ahhh, yeah. No (inaudible). Oh… where f**king so not f**king (inaudible).

Tostee

Your phone must be out of battery. What’s this? Oh that’s mine.

Wright

No, no no no no.

Tostee

It must be on the balcony.

Wright

Oh, I have sh*t loads of money in my…my f**king money.

Tostee

Stop. Just calm down please.

Wright

I’m not calming down because…

Tostee

You’ve had too much to drink, alright.

Wright

I’m not calming down because I’ve had so much to drink and I have sh*t loads of money in New Zealand, it’s not funny. Because I’m a f**king rich in New Zealand and it’s not f**king funny. And it’s sh*tty because I f**king rule in New Zealand and it f**king sucks because people f**king take advantage of me in New Zealand and it’s sh*t because I have f**king money. It’s not f**king funny. Sh*t. You know.

Tostee

Calm down please.

Wright

Do you know? How (inaudible) because no one else has money.

Tostee

Do you even remember what you were doing to me like half an hour ago? It was freaking me out, you were beating me up for no reason.

Wright

Yeah. Exactly.

Tostee

Why?

Wright

Because you said (inaudible) you’re a freak.

Tostee

You thought it was funny or something. It’s not.

Wright

No, I told you

Tostee

Like, you’re kind of strong, for your size.

Wright

I’m pretty strong, that’s what I said

Tostee

So why were you beating me up?

Wright

I’ll be gone. I’ll be going (inaudible). Okay goodbye.

Tostee

Here’s your phone.

Wright

See you later.

Tostee

Such a drama queen.

Wright

No sh*t (inaudible).

Tostee

That’s your phone.

Wright

Oh is it?

Tostee

It is, yeah.

If you enjoyed reading this article, you might also like:

Gable Tostee Reveals his Guilt in Warriena Wright's Death

Gable Tostee Reveals what he was carrying after Warriena Wright fell fourteen storeys to her death

#Gable Tostee #Deception #Crime

[leaveharmony]

In 2014, NJPW released a few short documentaries on World, before Wrestle Kingdom 9.  They were all released in versions with and without english subtitles; this is my transcription of the english subtitles on part one of Hiroshi Tanahashi’s.  I’ve done this before with plain screencaps interspersed but I wanted to redo it with .gifs, ‘cos I really love these little videos, and ‘cos I can now, and also, just ‘cos.  :)

This is from Part 1.  Part 2 is here!

Teaser:

(the opening shot is Tana standing in an  elevator)

Hiroshi Tanahashi (referred to from this point on as HT): “I’m not tired.  I never  get tired.”

(he pretends to fall asleep on his feet, with  his head resting against the wall) image

(there’s a little introductory sequence,  subtitled with the idea behind the  documentary - a look at Tana’s then-15-years  in wrestling, his love of it, and his love of  the fans.  My favourite clip is when a little girl he’s holding for a photo kisses his cheek and he throws his head back like “Oh!  You got me!”)

(a close-up, Tana is standing in the sun,  talking)

HT:  “Well, it’s been…15 years since I began  my career and I’m happy that I’ve never grown to hate pro wrestling.”

(the theme of the documentary is “Why I love pro wrestling” because if anybody deserves a  title worthy of a painfully earnest  gradeschool paper, it’s Tana)

(Tana is walking in the rain at night.  His gait is strange, swaying, like he’s always going downhill or is afraid his shoes will fall off...it strikes me as strange every time I see it.  Always assume it’s because his knees are so fucked.  His footsteps are really loud, and seem to drag a little bit, like the soles are scuffing against the ground)

Caption: New Japan Pro Wrestling holds over  130 events a year.  He posts about NJPW  whenever he gets a spare moment.  

(somewhere overlooking a road, Tana is  standing outside.  It’s still raining.   During Tana’s monologue, footage of him  attending various promotional events plays;  Tana on camera, Tana doing a promo video with Yoshitatsu)

Caption: His hectic schedule

HT: “I asked for this situation.  Nobody asked  me.  I just wanted to liven pro wrestling up.   You may think it’s livened up now, but I  still don’t see the top of the mountain.   Even if it’s going well right now, I won’t  cease my efforts.  I must keep going.  As I  continue promoting, I’ve been blessed with  various offers.  I just feel grateful and  happy seeing people exited about and craving  pro wrestling.  Nothing makes me happier.”

(the footage switches to a DVD release event  at Tower Records; Tana makes his way through the crowd to a small stage and immediately poses for pictures, which makes me laugh every time, then joins Hiroyoshi Tenzan, Togi Makabe, and two gentlemen I don’t  recognize for the event talk.  The Blonde One is chatting with  Tana, I’m gonna represent his dialogue with  “TBO” until I know otherwise.  I think here that they’re talking about a recent event in which Tana himself was supposed to perform but decided against it and so Tana’s remarks are self-deprecating, the whole context is a little unclear but that’s my best guess, because he looks a bit sheepish lol)

Caption: Part three of “Gekijo Pro-Wrestling”  DVD release party at Tower Records

TBO: “How was part Three?”

HT: “The venue was Namba Grand Kagetsu, a holy  place for comedians in Osaka.  In addition to  young comedians, many big-name comedians  appear there.”

TBO: “That’s right.”

HT: “I was overwhelmed.”  

TBO: “Though the young comedians performed  freely…a legendary comedian was unable to  perform.

HT: “So the roles were reversed.”

TBO: “He was too nervous.”

(we switch back to outside, where Tana is  fiddling with his phone)

Caption: Tanahashi keeps the world posted.   Even while filming, he writes on his blog as always.

HT: “I’m posting on my blog.  I like writing.”  

Staff/Interviewer:  “Have you gotten used to your  smartphone?”

HT:  “Not yet.”

Staff/Interviewer: “How long have you been using it?”

HT: “About a week.”

Staff/Interviewer: “How do you like it?”

HT:  “It’s super handy.”

Caption: He used to stick to a flip phone

HT: “The other day, I went to the office and  boasted ‘I can type so fast.’  And an  assistant said, ‘You’re three years behind.’  (laughs)”

Staff/Interviewer:  “What made you finally get one?”

HT:  “One reason was that my old flip phone was  worn out.  Also, my jobs were hindered  because I couldn’t open attachments.”

Staff/Interviewer: “Your jobs as a writer?”

HT:  “Yeah, but this is really fast.”

Caption: In 2014, his words were published in  book form.  

(interior shot, Tana walking in a cluttered  white room carrying his book.  He grins at  the camera and points to it)

Caption: November 18th, the NJPW offices

(Tana sits down with Koji Uno, an editor with  R25 magazine.  They greet and introduce one  another, then sit down.  

HT:  “This is our second time, right?”

KU:  “Yes.”

(Closeup on Tana’s book, the caption reads  "How Hiroshi Tanahashi Suceeded in  Reconstructing New Japan Pro Wrestling")

KU: “I wanted to feature you in our magazine  after I read your book.  I felt the title was  like a business book, and it was actually  very interesting.”

HT:  “Thank you.”

HT (in voiceover, again from outside):  “It’s a  great non-fiction book.  A positive side- effect of the book is that it reached a new  audience for pro wrestling.  Also thanks to  the book, major mass media outlets,  newspapers, and business websites began to  interview me.  So I’m glad it got published.”

(back inside, where Uno is taking notes as  Tana speaks)

HT:  “Well, I like novels.  When I was in high  school, I was into Yasuo Uchida’s Mitsuhiko Asami series.  Asami pilots the Soarer.  He  isn’t married and he’s laid-back…”

(outside in the rain again)

Caption:  Tanahashi is delighted to have a  hectic work schedule.  Is it because he  endured the hard period dubbed the ‘Dark  days’?

HT: “Looking back, it wasn’t tough at all  because everything was rewarding.  I promoted  pro wrestling and more people came to enjoy  it.  I really love it when they say, ‘It was fun!’  People tend to compare the dark days  with the current situation, but my activities  never changed and will never change.”

(an exterior shot of a glass skyscraper)

Caption: November 15th, Shosen Book Tower  Akihabara.  His 15th anniversary DVD release  party will be held on this day.  30 minutes  before the event, what is drawing his focus?

(A close-up of Tana’s face; he looks urgently focused on something.  His face keeps contorting; whatever it is, it’s Serious Business.  The shot pans back…Tana is  playing on his DS lol)

Staff/Interviewer: “Is that for relaxation during  long tours?”

HT: “I enjoy this during tours.  Since I don’t  have time to go out, I automatically save  money.  (he looks a bit sheepish)  Sometimes  I play too much, and it affects my health. (laughs)”

Caption: 10 minutes before the event, the  meeting finally begins.

(Another white room, with three people  inside.  One has a lanyard on, one is at a  table with a pen, and Tana is seated before a  mirror with a flatiron, fiddling with his  bangs.  They’re going over itinerary for the  event)

Staff: “Then the selected match…”

Caption: The DVD includes Famous Tanahashi  Quotes.

Staff: “’Tanahashi that doesn’t fly is just a  good-looking guy.’”

(Tana starts laughing)

HT:  “Is that on there?”

Staff:  “Yes.”

HT: “When did I say that? (still laughing)”

Staff: “Before your match with Kojima-san”

HT (recalling):  “Right, I couldn’t do my High Fly because of my knee injury.”

Staff: “You were wearing the black shorts.”  

HT (repeating it to himself): “’A Tanahashi  that doesn’t fly is just a good-looking guy.’   I’m still good-looking.  (laughs)”

Staff:  “And still boasting.”

(A quick-cut.  Tana is still backstage, every  time we make a cut he’s got less buttons done up on his shirt.  His whole undershirt has vanished.  He’s taking a huge bite out  of some kind of pastry; it has a fish design  on the top)

HT (noticing the camera): “Ah!”

Caption: A rare sight of Tanahashi enjoying a  treat during his busy day

HT:  “Yum.  I was trying to sneak this, but you  caught me.  (laughs)”

Staff:  “You shouldn’t eat that.  Maybe just a bite.”

HT (laughing a little, to someone else in the room rather than responding to her):  “The event starts in two minutes.”

(Tana laughs and takes another huge bite.   With his mouth full, he says “Yummy!”  Staff  are scurrying around)

Staff: “Did you eat lunch?”

HT:  “Yes I did.  A fan gave me these when I came in. (he indicates a white box with two  other …fish pastry things..inside)  So good!”

Staff:  “Are you ready?”

HT (dramatically): “It’s time.”

Staff: “This way.”

HT: “Okay.”

Caption: To the venue where his fans await

(Tana walks through dimly-lit hallways, there  are boxes piled up everywhere.  We see the  emcee of the event welcoming fans.  There are  over a hundred in attendance.  As we cut back  to the other room, Tana’s music starts  playing out in the venue.  Tana’s buttons are now entirely undone.)

Caption: Backstage, for some reason he bares  his chest.

(Tana is laughing at his own ridiculousness)

Caption: Then, something unexpected happens…

HT:  “Hey!  For real??”

(the fans have started singing “Happy  Birthday”; Tana’s birthday was two days after  this was filmed.  Tana looks like a kid at christmas, and claps along with the song a little bit.  Everyone yells happy birthday.   There’s an explosion of giggles as soon as everyone can see him with his inexplicably undone buttons.  The emcee, Haruo Murata,  greets Tana)

HM: “As you can see, we started with a  birthday surprise.”

HT (grinning but also blushing like an anime  character):  “Look at me.  How embarrassing…I  was supposed to make you laugh!  Thank you.”

HM:  “And here’s a cake for you.”

(The little vanilla-frosting cake has 1/100  on top)

HT:  “Ah, my nickname.”

(another explosion of giggles.  Tana picks  the cake up and holds it for a second.  “One  blow” he pledges, and blows his candles out.   Everybody yells happy birthday again, and  Tana thanks them.)

HM:  “This is a great photo opportunity.”

HT (sheepishly):  “Let me do up my buttons.”

(the event begins in earnest; Tana turns up  the charm and starts chatting with Murata,  and telling stories)

HT:  “It’s been 43 years since NJPW was  founded…and 60 years since pro wrestling  began, which means a better wrestler than me  won’t appear for another 40 years.”

HT:  “I think it was 2007 when I became the G1  winner, and I was wearing black shorts…a  reporter from TV Asahi asked me why I was  wearing them, I answered, ‘Because it’s sexy.   Shorts are sexier.’  (to the audience) But  that’s not what fans want, right?”

HM:  “How did the reporter react?”

HT (laughing):  “I don’t remember.  Maybe like  ‘Ok..?’  I used to bother them a lot.”

(quick cut to the photo op portion of the  event.  People keep bringing him birthday  presents, and giggling.  He chats a little with everybody and takes pictures with them.   A little tiny girl gives him a present and  declares “He’s a prince!” before he picks her  up for a photo; her mother carefully places  electric pink birthday sunglasses on Tana’s  head for the picture)

Caption: He keeps a hectic pace to please his  fans.  He says he owes all that to his  family’s support.

(we’re outside again, with Tana in the rain)

Caption: Gratitude to his family

HT:  “I’m always out for training, promotion,  and matches.  The only thing I can do is try  to make the most of the time when I can be  with my family.  I feel bad for making my  wife and kids miss me.  My wife always  prepares me well-balanced meals…and my kids  always give me a big welcome yelling ‘Dad!’  when I return from tours.  I’m so lucky to  have them.”

(nightfall, after the event.  Tana exits a  back gate but as soon as he’s visible,  there’s shrieking from the street.  Tana says  “Whoa.”)

Caption: Tanahashi willingly grants fans requests right until he leaves.

(there’s a little crowd of mostly-girls  looking for autographs.  One of them yells  “Take me home with you!”  “Takeout?” Tana  jokes in response.  He chats with everybody even as he’s actually in the back of his taxi)

Caption: Because NJPW is currently riding a  wave of prosperity

(Tana stands against a wall mural, with the  heavyweight title over his shoulder.  He’s  pontificating a little bit but also grinning because he knows it, and it’s practically self-parody at this point)

HT: “I think some wrestlers get carried away  with that.  But not me.  Still, someone needs  to watch our step…and keep an eye out for  the fans’ needs.  I have to anticipate their  slight emotional changes and cater the  performances to what they want.  Once it  becomes too routine, it won’t excite them.   The best part of pro wrestling is always  changing performances.  But don’t worry,  leave it to Tanahashi.”

Caption: Dreams

(as he’s talking, footage is playing featuring him with two of the kids who were at the event that day; probably siblings.  He picks them up, one in each arm, to pose for the picture)

HT:  “For the future of pro wrestling, I want  more kids to aspire to be pro wrestlers.  We  don’t have farm teams like baseball and  soccer do.  And baseball has the Major League  while soccer has role models like Honda and  Kagawa.  Kids can aspire and work towards  being like them.  I want to show kids that  being a pro wrestler is something they can  also aspire to be.  To make that happen, I  must rise up and show them what it can be  like and hopefully more kids will dream of  becoming pro wrestlers.  Perhaps, they’ll  play pro wrestling at schools.  I vaguely  imagine such a vision of the future. image”

Caption: What is pro wrestling to you?

(The sun has come out.  Tana is in full Inspiration Mode, talking right to the camera.  I’m not gonna lie to you, Tana in Inspiration Mode is powerful stuff, and if he told me to go fight a bear in that confident you-got-this voice, I’d believe him)

HT:  “Pro wrestling is my way of life.  I don’t  feel right saying ‘It is my life’ as my life  will go on even after quitting pro wrestling.   In pro wrestling there are good times and  bad times.  If I endure hardships, then  golden opportunities come.  Then I  counterattack and seize them.  So what I do  in pro wrestling and in my life are closely  linked.  It has taught me so many valuable  lessons.  When people ask me this question, I  always answer, ‘It’s my way of life.’”

----------

@peachy-tana

#Hiroshi Tanahashi #Rasslin' #Tanariffic #Movin' pixels #Actual shining god of love & beauty #sayin' that I do these for my own reference and enjoyment doesn't mean I don't appreciate a few reblogs lol #The Emergency Button

[recentanimenews]

Anime in America Podcast: Full Episode 6 Transcript

  We may not be able to go to the movies right now, but at least we can live vicariously through anime history in the latest episode of Crunchyroll's Anime in America podcast. Read on for the full episode 6 transcript! 

  The Anime in America series is available on crunchyroll.com, animeinamerica.com, and wherever you listen to podcasts. 

  EPISODE 6: AT THE MOVIES: EVENTUALLY

Guest: Jerry Beck

  Disclaimer: The following program contains language not suitable for all ages. Discretion advised.

  [Lofi music]

  There is one name you HAVE to talk about when it comes to anime. A foundational influence on the entire medium and an enervating force in the animation market. A man without whom we may not even have the anime we know and love today.

  It’s not Tezuka, but good guess.

  When it comes to the world of animation, and honestly most media, all roads lead back to Walt Disney. The man who all the animators in Japan’s growing post-war industry were trying to emulate. Most prominent among them, the legendary manga author and Japanese national treasure Osamu Tezuka who truly lived up to Walt’s legacy both by popularizing the medium of animation and establishing many regrettable business practices still felt in the modern industry. 

  Disney’s beloved animated features were the envy of every studio on both sides of the Pacific and the pursuit of that special magic Walt brought to the silver screen was what kicked off the race to bring Japanese animation to America. So, I guess…we can start there.

  [Lofi music]

  In the ‘50s Toei Animation was basically the only major animation studio in Japan and had the stated intent of becoming “The Disney of the East.” Toei’s first 3 films, Hakujaden, Shonen Sautobi Sasuke, and Saiyuki were all released near the end of that decade and all stuck very closely to the Disney formula, retelling traditional folktales with colorful animation, plenty of cute animals, and, in the case of Saiyuki, musical interludes.

  Back home in the U.S., Disney was deep in a run of blockbuster releases with titles like Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, and, umm [cough] Song of the South. Just about every major studio was trying to figure out how to steal some of that thunder. Metro-Goldwyn Mayer was one such studio who considered Disney their rivals at the box office. If you wanna know how that turned out for MGM, uh, Disney acquired their parent company Fox in March 2019.

  It was never much of a rivalry to begin with. MGM put out a behind the scenes docu series called The MGM Parade aping Disney’s “The Magical World of Disney” series in 1955 and decided to close their animation department in 1957, the heads of which, a Mr. William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, would depart along with most of the staff to form the very successful Hanna-Barbera Productions. 

  So, what do you do when you want to compete with a company like Disney in animated features but don’t want to go to the trouble of producing any animated features? MGM became the first company to license and release a Japanese anime in the United States, premiering Toei’s Shonen Sarutobi Sasuke, retitled Magic Boy, in theaters in July 8th, 1961, winning a close race against Global Pictures and American International by only two months ahead their releases of Toei’s two other films, Hakujaden, retitled Panda and the Magic Serpent, and Saiyuki, retitled Alakhazam the Great.

  They didn’t do too great, which probably explains why between those three movies released in 1961 and Hayao Miyazaki’s debut in American cinemas in 1986, only 3 other anime made it to theaters in the U.S. 

  Not even Tezuka’s magic could break open the box office for anime in the ‘70s. His production company, Mushi Production, had two films, A Thousand and One Nights and Cleopatra: Queen of Sex that were both released early in the decade and flopped. In the case of the latter, Xanadu Productions’s attempt to sell the erotic historical drama as a porno probably didn’t help.

  The rest of the following two decades saw plenty of anime films being released in the West but only for direct to video releases with major Japanese studios leaning hard into this new market. Many U.S. distributors were now exploiting Japanese studios to animate their own cartoons, so many of the same era took on a sort of Western bend. Toei Animation in particular released a number of films during that period that seem pretty focused on replicating that Disney formula even more closely, using Western history and folktales as source material. Some of my favorite examples are The World of Hans Christian Andersen (originally Anderson Monogatari), Les Miserables (originally Jean Valjean Monogatari), 30,000 Miles Under the Sea (yes, miles), Animal Treasure Island, and even Puss n’ Boots (who became Toei’s logo) during the ‘70s.

  [Music from “Toei Logo History” plays]

  In 1986, Hayao Miyazaki finally appeared in the American scene. If you haven’t heard of him… how the fuck not? How is that possible? I don’t, I don’t understand. Often referred to as the Walt Disney of Japan, Miyazaki is the primary creative force of what would become the internationally renowned Studio Ghibli which we’ll get into a bit later. Their first film Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind was created before the studio even had a name, wowing American audiences with its beautiful art and epic story involving environmentalist themes... kind of. Well not really, actually. Manson International and Showmen Inc. got their hands on the movie and cut it up so bad you couldn’t really call it a Miyazaki work anymore. I mean, they didn’t, they changed everything. They changed the title to Warriors of the Wind, [Clip from 1985 commercial for Warriors of the Wind] renaming Nausicaa to “Princess Zandra” and doing their best to make it an action movie while cutting out any of the environmental themes at the core of the narrative by cutting out a whole 22 minutes of the film. Then they drew up a He-Man ass poster with a whole squad of dudes and a pegasus that were not even in the movie.

  [Lofi music]

  Enter Streamline Pictures.

  Co-founded by Jerry Beck and Carl Macek. Each already working to spread the good word of anime, the two were disappointed in early dubs and brought a new philosophy to the localization game with Streamline. 

  Do. Not. Mess. With. It. Don’t do that. For your own good. 

  Beck: We were quite proud of them, because we had a theory on how to do this, which was to use the original music and effects tracks, not cut anything, uh and to do the dubs as accurately and as correctly as we possibly could, with the best actors we could get. Our model was the Warriors of the Wind, meaning we were going to be everything that movie wasn’t. We were going to be the opposite of Warriors of the Wind. 

  That was the man, Jerry Beck himself. The formula was simple, arguably a lot less work than completely changing a movie to shoe-horn it into some western film archetype, the two-man company began visiting Japanese studios… or rather their Los Angeles offices since every major Japanese studio had one of those in the 1980’s, and asking for dubbing and distribution rights.

  Both passionate anime fans, the two had a ton of knowledge of emerging anime titles and an interest in bringing many of them over which larger studios would have passed up for dumb reasons like “profitability.”

  Beck: We literally made a checklist that we got all the films. We wanted Fist of the Northstar, we wanted Wicked City, we wanted Vampire Hunter D, we wanted Castle of Cagliostro, we wanted- you know, we wanted Lensmen, but I’m not sure why, I actually know why at the time, but that’s such an odd film. So, but we ended up getting them all.

  After handling the theatrical screenings of the Mangum Dub of Castle in the Sky, Macek secured a deal with Japanese publisher Tokuma Shoten to dub future titles, including My Neighbor Totoro and Kiki’s Delivery Service. After that they went on a tear, where they were basically the only company in the game theatrically releasing anime from 1985 to 1995, averaging almost 2 movies a year in a period where non-Streamline anime films could be counted on one hand with room to spare. 

  I cannot emphasize enough how much Streamline did for anime in America. They even helped the medium properly break into American television in the early ‘90s alongside Central Park Media by contributing to Syfy’s anime block which aired Dominion Tank Police, Robot Carnival, Project A-Ko, Vampire Hunter D, and another film brought to the U.S. by Streamline which could be considered their greatest achievement.

  Akira. Or AH-ki-ra [first syllable stress], if you’re a purist.

  Beck: Marvel Comics was printing an adaptation of Akira and we knew about the film [Requiem from Akira plays]. And at that point, that was like, of course like ‘88 or so, you know there were already bootleg VHS copies for sale at comic book conventions and stuff. But we looked at it and went “oh my God, this is like state of the art, you know? This is really a big deal for film.” And I don’t even think we had seen it on the big screen or anything, we just knew we wanted it, if it was gettable. And the good news was that the Akira Committee was kinda desperately wanted it to be shown in America, and they had gone to Paramount, Universal, Fox, everywhere, trying to get somebody to pick up Akira, and nobody would because it was too violent. The idea of that kind of thing being shown in America was, you know, unthinkable. So we were like “we’ll do it!” 

  Akira was a cultural and technological achievement in animation. It set a new record number of colors used in an animated feature at 327, 50 of which were unique colors created specifically for the movie. You could fill a mega size box of Crayons with colors that only exist thanks to Akira, which is insane. The film consisted of 160,000 frames, clocking in at almost 3 times the average for an animated feature of that same length. It was also the most expensive anime film ever produced at the time with a budget of 1.1 billion Japanese Yen. As Jerry said, it was also intensely violent, considered graphic in Japan and especially in America which still considered animation almost wholly a realm of children’s entertainment. The Akira Committee was desperate to get it in American theaters. And obviously, there were difficulties. 

  After being collectively shot down by Hollywood, the Akira Committee was approached by the small and unproven Streamline with a unique offer: if the Akira Committee could put up the cost to dub and distribute, Streamline would give them 100% of the profits up to a cap before beginning to collect their own percentage.

  And it was not easy. Jerry had to negotiate for months with an agent from the committee who basically watched their operation at work to make sure they knew what they were doing. Then Streamline was given an opportunity to prove themselves by hosting a screening of the film in the Spreckles theater at ComicCon. Only once they pulled that off did the committee ink the deal, but with one demand. They were adamant about getting a quality dub and wanted someone who had, at the very least, been nominated for an Academy Award to manage it. At the very least. Carl Macek had one of his associates search around and eventually they landed on Sheldon Renan, who had previously received recognition from the Motion Pictures Association of America for a documentary short just to fit the bill. 

  [Akira versus Kaneda, english dub clip]

  And it was a hit. Screenings pulled in profits on par with or even exceeding critically acclaimed live action foreign films. Streamline established their reputation in the industry on the success of Akira, and the next step was home video, which turned into another battle for Streamline as one of the principles of the committee, Kodansha, was intent on selling out the rights to a large distributor based on Akira’s success in theaters. Still they were turned down and once again, despite not even being a home video distributor, Streamline made an offer.

  Beck: We said to them, you know, we’re gonna get you the reviews, you’re going to get reviews in every town. We got Siskel and Ebert, they reviewed it; we got it on Entertainment Tonight, we got it everywhere. And so we were doing all this stuff, the idea though, the goal, was to get all this coverage and then they would go, they would instead of going to movie studios they would go to the home video people and try to convince them to put it out on home video. No home video distributor wanted it. Nobody. Because there was nowhere, we found out later, there was no place in a video store, then, for them to put it. They couldn’t put it in the kids’ cartoon section, the idea of putting it in science fiction, I don’t know why that didn’t work, that should’ve worked, but they probably had Heavy Metal there, but they for some reason that was not a thing that- they didn’t, there was nowhere to put what we call “anime” in a video store at that time. They did say to us “you gotta have a bunch of them. Five, six, seven, and we’ll create a shelf, we’ll put a shelf in our stores.” This is what Blockbuster said, this is what Suncoast said. So we ended up, we ended up, what we did was we got the vid- they couldn’t sell the video rights, so WE got the video rights, even though we weren’t a video company! And so we ended up putting out Akira on VHS. We couldn’t sell it in video stores. So we ended up- and there was no Ebay or Amazon, that didn’t exist, so we actually went to comic book stores and obviously it was the perfect thing to do, because Akira was a comic book, it was manga, and Marvel was printing it. And we ended up selling them to comic book stores and we- it worked. It was exclusive to comic book stores, it was the only place you could get it. Oh my God, we sold… thousands. 

  Streamline hung up its hat with the release of Space Adventure Cobra in 1995 but many of their partners who handled the theatrical distribution like Tara Releasing and Fathom Events continued without them. Just as TV anime was headed toward its own watershed moment, the field for anime movies broadened in the second half of the ‘90s. Manga Entertainment brought over Ghost in the Shell with Palm Pictures in 1996. VIZ Media broke into films by capitalizing on Ranma ½’s growing popularity with the release of Ranma ½ the Movie: Big Trouble in Nekonron China alongside CBS theatrical in 1998. 

  And then the big one came. 4Kids partnered with Kids WB and dropped Pokemon: The First Movie in 1999. And to call it a smash hit for anime movies would be an understatement. [Pokemon: The First Movie, trailer 1 plays] I saw it. Because my dad bought the VHS from one of those dudes that sold bootlegs in the Kroger parking lot. The one he hand recorded himself. You remember those? We had ‘em. 

  The movie hit $10.1 million in the box office on its opening day, which was a Wednesday, by the way. Over its opening weekend it would climb to $31 million and eventually cap out at $85 million at the box office which has remained the record anime movie in the United States for 20 years. For a moment in time it even claimed the best opening weekend for an animated feature full stop until Toy Story 2 dropped two weeks later. [Pokemon Bumper - 2000] Plastic-faced newscasters began referring to its opening weekend as “Pokeflu,” since so many kids mysteriously called in sick from school the same day.

  “Pokemania Comes to America - 1999, ABC News”: Pokemon is now in full mania! And others may follow suit, when a new Pokemon movie hit theaters this fall, spurring even more… Pokemania.

  "’Pokémania’: 1999 MSNBC Pokémon News Report”: School officials are finding that Pokemon cards are responsible for fist fights and the constant trading is not only distracting kids from classwork, but turning the playground into a black market. 

  And ya know what? Given recent events, Pokeflu sounds very racist. But that’s what they called it. 

  Anime was still a few years off from its Oscar grab and even today hasn’t fully reached acceptance as a respected form of media, but the Pokemon movie proved there was lots and lots of money to be made from anime if you played your cards right. Although it’s difficult to tell if that's what 4Kids and Warner Bros did. Each subsequent Pokemon movie pulled in roughly half what the previous managed. Pokemon: The Movie 2000 scored a total box office of $43 million and Pokemon 3: The Movie grabbed $17 million before the whole thing fell off a cliff. Pokemon 4Ever pulled in only $1.7 million and Pokemon Heroes didn’t even crack $1 million. Mind you, this still gives Pokemon the 1st, 2nd, 6th, and 19th highest box offices of anime films in the U.S., so, you know, what do I know?

  Pokemon’s explosive success at the box office inspired other attempts to grab some of that Disney demographic. Fox was the first to jump after the 1999 success of the first Pokemon movie with Digimon: The Movie which I’m definitely gonna talk about in a little bit. 4Kids itself also tried to recapture that Pokemon magic as the franchise was showing diminishing returns with Yu-Gi-Oh! The Movie: Pyramid of Light.

  Unfortunately the Pokemon movies were also a return to form for crazed American producers with scissors. 4Kids onigiri erasure in Pokemon TV series is notorious on its own, but its former president Norman Grossfeld also feared the Pokemon: The Movie movie would do poorly as written. Casting Mewtwo as a sympathetic antagonist confused and angered the profit-minded execs who produced content for children despite probably never having children of their own. They cut out the prologue describing Mewtwo’s past as the victim of genetic experiments and made edits to portray him as a generic villain and Mew as… like some kinda savior, messiah-type thing?

  [Lofi music]

  Fox, in its desperation to compete with the success of Warner Brothers’s Pokemon looked to Digimon, spawning the creation of the cinematic chimera Digimon: The Movie. You see, there wasn’t actually a movie called Digimon: The Movie in Japan, but several short Digimon films titled Digimon Adventure, Digimon Adventure:... um… Children’s War Game?, and Digimon Adventure 02: Digimon Hurricane Landing!!.

  The first two had been directed by the acclaimed Mamoru Hosoda and the last by Shigeyasu Yamauchi. I really want to emphasize these were three different movies utilizing different art styles and creative processes with the last one even focusing on an almost entirely different cast of characters. So, like Harmony Gold before them, they took a knife to all three features, leaving more than 40 minutes on the cutting room floor to create a bizarrely paced, three-arc, Digimon feature before slapping on a mostly ska soundtrack and Angela Anaconda short in the beginning [Angela Anaconda part of the Digimon Movie]. The movie premiered in 2000 and was panned by critics but walked away with a $9.6 million box office, making it the 9th most successful anime film in the States, so I’m sure the producers cried all the way to the bank while the rest uh… learned that evil pays.

  Yu-Gi-Oh! The Movie: Pyramid of Light came later in 2004 and might be an even more bizarre feature than Digimon, since 4Kids produced the movie rather than just chopping it up after the fact. In fact, it might be the first anime film to be screened in the United States before Japan, releasing in August while Japan didn’t get the theatrical release until November. Somehow the Japanese version was still a full 14 minutes longer than the U.S. release. It’s not really clear whether Studio Gallop made the film whole cloth and 4Kids cut it down, as was their usual practice, or if they added some extra content after the fact that 4Kids didn’t want for the American audience. I guess we’ll never know.

  Since it was produced for the U.S., we did get the bonus of having all the cards appear like the actual game complete with english text, even if it sometimes appeared upside-down. Pyramid of Light also had ska music unfortunately. Umm… the 2000s was a, it was a big time for ska. Once again the movie was panned, finding a place in Rotten Tomatoes’s 100 worst reviewed films of the 2000s, but became the 4th most successful anime film in the U.S. ever, with a $19.8 million box office.

  But that is enough about box office for now. Now we can talk about home video releases.

  [Lofi music]

  If you’ve ever tried to catch an anime film in theaters, you’ve probably noticed that even today they usually have extremely limited showings. At Streamline’s peak, they weren’t the only company localizing anime films, they were just the only ones making a push to put them in theaters. Other publishers were going for the straight to video route, but there was one serious hang-up. Blockbuster just didn’t give a shit. 

  Streamline’s own Akira release had limited theatrical showings, meaning they were leaning heavily into home video and the movie really beat the odds, finding success in the two markets mom and pop video stores and comic shops. Bootleg fansubs of Akira had been in circulation for months before the film’s official release, so Streamline sweetened the deal by including actual original animation cels with the VHS which seems less an intelligent marketing gimmick and more of a giveaway of cultural artifacts in retrospect. Those people are probably very wealthy, now. It was probably also unnecessary. Akira’s home video success was a moment in anime history in many ways, but it was also an exception. 

  The direct to video market would never find the same success in comic shops that Akira had. You could find anime in privately owned video stories but even then they were being crowded out by mainstream outlets like Blockbuster who were much less interested in putting anime on their shelves, especially of the famously violent variety like Akira. For anime to get its foot in the door, it would need a new face that was not only child friendly but also insanely popular. I know I just talked about Pokemon’s breakout success, but its home video wouldn’t hit the shelves until 2000. Instead, the man who would help open Blockbusters’s blue and gold doors for other anime in the late ‘90s was one of its creators who most famously hates home video. Hayao Miyazaki.

  Miyazaki was already making the rounds in the U.S. via World Pictures and Streamline dubs of a few of his films which was probably fine by him, as he seems to resent the idea of people  watching his movies in any setting other than a theater, but Ghibli producer Toshio Suzuki had his sights set on dominating the animation industry and Disney just happened to be in the market for international films. Former Head of Disney Home Video International Division and current CEO of Herbalife Nutrition Michael O Johnson inked a deal with Ghibli in 1996 granting global distribution rights to their entire library of films. 

  This was thanks in large part to the effort of Disney’s Steve Alpert who went so far as to film a mini-documentary in Disney studios to basically show Eisner and his fellow suits that every single person they employed to draw moving pictures was already a diehard fan of Miyazaki’s work. Alpert himself would jump ship to Ghibli to work alongside Suzuki battling his former employer at every turn to make sure they kept their promise about not cutting Ghibli films.

  Probably expecting Ghibli’s next film to be another Totoro or Kiki, Disney was shocked to see limbs flying off people's bodies in Princess Mononoke and pushed the distribution under their Miramax label to distance themselves from its morally objectionable content, which I can only assume came from a place of deep ignorance of both their own company’s history and the work of their HR department. Also the notion that um… just producing the same thing under a different wing of your company makes you any less morally objectionable… is also morally objectionable. 

  Unfortunately the Harvey Weinstein-lead Miramax was dead set on changing everything about Mononoke that it possibly could. And with Ghibli holding onto an iron-clad contract giving them final say, this transformed into all-out warfare with Miramax trying to weasel in every change they could and Alpert flying over the Pacific to nip that shit in the bud, only ending after Weinstein himself was twice humiliated in public. And to that I say: Good. First in a now iconic story wherein Suzuki presents him with a unsharpened prop sword at a meeting full of Disney and Miramax suits while shouting “Mononoke-hime NO CUT,” and then when Miyazaki and crew left in the middle of their own post-premiere party to carefully consider the suggestion Weinstein had been shouting at Alpert to chop 40 minutes off the movies runtime or they’d “never work in this town again.” And then several years later, the entire entertainment industry said “no, YOU’LL never work in this town again!” 

  Although Streamline had been following our modern era’s best practice of not messing with the source material for about a decade, Ghibli’s “no cuts” policy was one of the first pushes in that direction to come from Japan and doubtless helped to normalize the practice… eventually. As I said before, 4Kids and Fox raked in millions spinning out heavily edited films but Buena Vista bending the knee to Ghibli’s demands, the lasting cultural impact of Ghibli movies, and an increasingly saturated market of TV anime untouched by an editor’s razor eventually pushed the industry in the right direction. After all, no edited anime movies ever have been nominated for Oscars, but more on that later.

  Despite being a global hit, Princess Mononoke didn’t really take off in the way Disney had hoped, only pulling in $2.3 million in its first eight weeks. But it recovered in… that’s right, home video releases! Boom. Got ‘em. They also started churning out actual VHS releases for other Ghibli titles like Kiki’s Delivery Service and My Neighbor Totoro and then, when Streamline’s rights expired, Disney produced their own lavish dubs for DVD re-releases featuring a star-studded cast with voices like Dakota Fanning, Kirsten Dunst, Patrick Stewart, and uh, Shia LeBeouf. What?! Blockbuster was finally persuaded to start moving in anime content when Disney’s Buena Vista came knocking and the doors were officially open for more anime content.

  Ghibli was way ahead of its time in many ways and rights management was no exception. Or at least Miyazaki’s insistence on the purity of a theater-only movie-viewing experience had some unintended benefits. A mere two years before 4Kids would pull off the heist of the century screwing Shogakukan and Nintendo out of millions in profits in their deal of the explosively popular Pokemon franchise, Ghibli would deny Disney digital rights to their works in their contract. Disney was fine with that, the prevailing belief among executives being that those rights were basically useless. Ha-ha! Imagine that.

  Disney wasn’t interested in digital and if Disney, the most powerful media rights holder in the world, wasn’t going to push into that new sphere of distribution, then it was doomed to failure. Which, looking at the titanic size of Netflix who recently acquired streaming rights to the Ghibli Films worldwide minus Japan and the U.S. and is now staring down the barrel of Disney’s own competing streaming service Disney+ and Warner’s HBO Max, is kinda funny in retrospect.

  [Lofi music]

  Buena Vista might’ve helped Ghibli in another way though. Let's talk about when anime won an Oscar. No one’s quite sure how it happened, really. Not that Spirited Away didn’t deserve it. It definitely did. It’s a good movie. It’s just, uh, this was the first and only of Miyazaki’s works to have even been nominated. Ever. In fact, no anime films before Spirited Away in 2003 received a nomination for best animated film in the Academy Awards, and only The Tale of Princess Kaguya has been nominated since. Maybe the stars aligned, maybe it’s because Spirited Away’s stiffest competition in the 75th Academy Awards was Lilo & Stitch and Ice Age [Spirited Away Wins Animated Feature: 2003 Oscars], maybe it's because Spirited Away carried extra credibility by being released in the U.S. under the auspices of Disney. Whatever the cause, anime, via Ghibli, had grabbed a piece of critical acclaim in the American entertainment industry that seemed otherwise determined to ignore it.

  Not that Hollywood hadn’t noticed anime long ago. Two of America’s most celebrated directors, Christopher Nolan and Darren Aronofsky, have both committed what can charitably be described as borrowing from a certain Japanese director by the name of Satoshi Kon to build their respective, uh repertoires. Aranofsky heavily borrowed story, themes, and imagery from Kon’s Perfect Blue in his film Black Swan and even recreated the bath scene from Perfect Blue in his Requiem for a Dream. Guess which two of those three movies were nominated for Oscars? Nolan’s Inception collected four Oscars in 2010 which contained several scenes that anime fans got a sneak preview of 3 years before in the limited screening of Kon’s 2007 Paprika. And also in that one uh, Donald Duck comic strip. 

  Uh, look, I’m not trying to roast anybody or anything like that. Maybe Aronofsky. But you just can’t talk about Spirited Away grabbing an Oscar without giving mention to not just anime films, but foreign films in general which Hollywood seems to find value in but only when filtered through one of its own creators. So what does this get us? It gets us Scarlett Johansenn playing a woman named Motoko Kusanagi and an Oldboy remake that completely misses the point. 

  Trust me when I say the only good adaptations by Hollywood are Doug Liman’s Edge of Tomorrow and the Wachowski sisters’s Speed Racer. You heard it here. If you want a new Ghost in the Shell movie just open your wallet, call Mamoru Oshii, and ask him to make another one. Stop with this weird shit. 

  Although many films were in uncertain licensing situations until GKIDs started recollecting them, the works of visionary directors like Mamoru Hosoda, Satoshi Kon, and Isao Takahata have managed to find their way to American theaters over the years without edits and a minimal delay that recently has been reduced down to less than a year. Not quite simulcasting, but given none of them have had a real breakout hit, it’s long strides to think that fans have had consistent opportunities to watch their movies in theaters over the years and purchase them in home video.

  [Lofi music.]

  Since Miyazaki’s most recent retirement, Ghibli underwent a sort of identity crisis on what to make of their studio or even if they would continue making films at all. During this period many of their creators left to join other studios, some of them even forming their own Studio Ponoc itself dedicated to continuing Ghibli’s traditions of movie making. Ghibli itself was just kinda there until very recently, when the aforementioned GKIDs secured the rights to Ghibli within the U.S. and entered into a deal to stream the entire Ghibli library on HBO Max. Ghibli also recently announced that it's nearing the release of TWO new films, Miyazaki’s own How Do You Live? and the studio’s first entirely CG feature film Earwig and the Witch, by Miyazaki’s son, Goro. 

  And I know what you’re thinking. I thought the same thing until I saw the images and I will just say I’m definitely gonna go see it.

  And y’know what? That’s great for Disney, but Ghibli’s downtime created an existential dread within the anime industry and fandom, because there wasn’t any other big name director to replace Miyazaki in the collective consciousness of America as “THE anime director,” or as Mother’s Basement on YouTube would say “the new Miyazaki,” until only recently...

  Makoto Shinkai has been directing anime movies, arguably the SAME anime movie, since 1998 and has been a well known quantity in the fandom since his 2002 film Voices of a Distant Star. But something changed in 2016. His movies are almost always about young people in love separated by time, space, circumstance, or supernatural circumstance, but each iteration has refined his technique until one finally reached critical mass. Your Name became the most successful Japanese film of any kind in multiple countries, including China, and Japan’s second most successful anime film domestically behind Spirited Away. Didn’t even crack the top 10 in the U.S., though.

  And no Oscar.

  That said, Your Name was a resounding success in the United States, now surpassed by Shinkai’s newest film Weathering with You last year. Each pulling in $5 million in the box office is no small feat for anime films. Appearing more frequently in mainstream outlets may be slowly growing Shinkai into a household name which, matched with his own formula for successful films, could be the beginning of another single director legacy that will pull the industry up with it.

  Now although we’ve seen less explosive releases since the children-focused anime movies around the turn of the millenia, it’s hard to describe our past decade of the 2010s as anything but a stateside renaissance for anime film. While the collective box office brought in by anime in the U.S. during the 2000s completely dwarfs that of the ‘90s, there weren’t all that many more films making it over. The real difference in the marketing and theater availability after Pokemon provided a proof of concept. Although there’s been roughly 50% more anime films coming out per year in Japan in the 2010s than the 2000s, the yearly average with theatrical releases in the states more than doubled between the decades.

  And while TV anime are slowly being consolidated into a few select streaming services, more distribution companies have entered the industry to put anime films in theaters. Nowadays GKIDs, Fathom Events, and Eleven Arts have an almost monthly churn of screenings that actually top the daily box offices… on their Wednesday showings. Wednesday. Still, given the movies are airing in limited theaters and showings, the numbers are very good. Just last year Dragon Ball Super: Broly had the 3rd most successful box office for an anime film in the U.S. at $30 million.

  Sounds like we’re in a pretty good place. Well, it’s all- I mean, it’s all relative. We have doubled the number of movies we license every year since last decade, but American theater-goers still only get the opportunity to watch maybe half of the anime films that come out every year in Japan. Meanwhile, there are an average of over 200 TV anime produced every year and, with rare exceptions, every single one is licensed and distributed in the United States across a number of streaming services. Next up, we’re going to talk about anime on TV and how it's grown into one of the largest, fastest, and most sophisticated localization industries in the world.

  Bye!

  [Lofi music]

  Thank you for listening to Anime in America, presented by Crunchyroll. If you enjoyed this, please go to Crunchyroll.com/animeinamerica to start your 14-day free trial or just log on for some free, ad-supported anime. 

  Special thanks to Jerry Beck. You can find more of Jerry’s work over on cartoonresearch.com along with the history of Streamline Pictures written by Fred Patten, one of the co-founders. 

  This episode is hosted by me, Yedoye Travis, and you can find me on Instagram at ProfessorDoye or Twitter @YedoyeOT. This episode is researched and written by Peter Fobian, edited by Chris Lightbody, and produced by me, Braith Miller, Peter Fobian and Jesse Gouldsbury. 

By: [email protected]

#Anime #News #Latest in Anime News by Crunchyroll!

[tak4hir0]

User research can touch on a dozen different job functions in practice, and it seems like each one has at least 5 different SaaS tools vying for your attention. Design tools, research tools, prototyping tools, video conferencing tools—the list goes on. So what’s a researcher to do? Go with a one-size-fits-all platform that boasts tons of features, but maybe not the 1 feature you really need? Or piece together a custom stack of products that might not always play nice with each other? And how do you even find tools that cover your whole stack, work smoothly with what you already have, and fit your team’s workflow well enough to actually use? Enter our UX Research Tools Map, 2020 style. Taking inspiration from classic subway maps, each “lineâ€� represents a type of feature or functionality, and each “stopâ€� contains logos for tools that deliver those features. Connections between lines give a sense of where your tools overlap and serve multiple purposes. Pretty cool huh? Feel free to download and copy in any of the following formats: Give it a share by clicking one of the buttons below 👇 Last year, we made our debut version because we wanted to make it easier for UX pros to pick tools that worked for them. We grouped tools by functionality, and made it easy to see overlaps, so you can minimize the number of extra tools you’re using. The goal was to make something like the impressive (and somewhat overwhelming) “LUMAscapeâ€� of marketing tools, but for UX research. Our 2020 version includes 47 new tools, tighter categorization, and even a lightweight version you can use in presentations to help show stakeholders where you need support in your stack, since many of you wrote us to say that’s how you were using last year’s map (user research FTW). How to use the UX Research Tools MapPart of the point here is to demonstrate how the UX research landscape has grown in the past year. But once you get past the initial shock of “OMG so many logos,â€� this map can help you identify which tools cover which parts of the UX research process. The lines show which jobs each tool can help with, and the stops illustrate where tools can cover multiple jobs. The goal is to show you where tools in your stack overlap, and help you find new tools to cover functions that might be missing from your stack. Scroll through the map to get a closer look, or download the full image to share on social media or use in your presentations. What's new this yearWe wanted to share a little of our process for building the 2020 map, partly to help explain the logic behind our choices, but also because the Tools Map reflects how UXR as a field is growing. More tools with more features. We added 47 logos, raising the total to 137. In addition to a few brand-new companies, we heard from researchers about a number of tools that hadn't been on our radar before. We also filled out subcategories that researchers let us know were important, such as session recorders and eye-tracking tools. A number of tools either debuted or expanded into new feature sets this year. For example, copytesting.com launched this year, and Handrail upgraded their repository tool with a number of new features. Video and transcription. Technological advances in transcription and AI, combined with the Zoom-ification of everything post-COVID, mean video and transcription are more central this time around. Just a few examples of companies taking these ideas to heart: Dovetail added video transcription, clipping, and sharing to their research repository and note-taking suite.EnjoyHQ also upgraded their research repository with new transcription features, including for uploaded audio files.Lookback has continued to hone their “made for researchersâ€� video tool in some cool ways, especially on mobile.More tools = stricter categories. To keep the map readable, we decided to err on the side of caution when adding tools to lines. As we wrestled with definitions for each line, we made use of a technique that can be vital for working out information architecture for your own UX research: user stories. You can find a complete list of those user stories at the bottom of this post, but here are a few examples of how they played out in practice. Loop11 offers an open-ended usability testing system, allowing researchers to create their own tasks and questions and send users to more niche tools like card sort or diary-study apps. It’s solidly on the Usability Testing line. In addition to video interviews, Dscout offers a purpose-built Diary product for capturing feedback over time in a diary-study-like format—a Specialized Test.Userlytics offers both general-purpose usability tests and tools built specifically for creating card sorts, tree tests, and other specialized types of research.Here at User Interviews, we offer complex screener surveys as part of recruiting, but we didn’t qualify ourselves as a full-fledged Survey tool.What's on the horizonThe UX research landscape changes quickly: new tools crop up, existing tools add features, all while researchers' needs evolve. We'll work to keep this map up to date. Did we leave out an app you love? Let us know at [email protected]. Ready to recruit some participants, really fast? Get your first three recruits free (you pay incentives) by creating a free account here or use our Research Hub plan, free forever. Appendix: 2020 Tools Map “lineâ€� definitionsActive Research: I want to run a study to collect user feedback. Usability Testing I want participants to test out a product or prototype and share their feedback, either live or async.Surveys I want to send participants a survey to complete (more than a 1-question auto-survey or a pre-screener before the "real" research session).Specialized Tests I want participants to complete a task that’s more specific than a usability test (tree test, card sort, diary study, SMS interview...).Video Interviews I want to record 1:1 or group video calls with participants.Insight Management: I want to store and organize the data I collect. Transcription I want a text transcript of my video interviews.Note-Taking I want to take notes on any kind of research, save them, and organize them.Research Repository I want a single home base for all of the relevant feedback and insights I collect.Passive Insights: I want to “set and forgetâ€� a method to collect feedback as users interact with my product. Automated Feedback I want to trigger feedback requests at key points in the user experience (e.g., NPS surveys, in-app polls).A/B Testing I want to show different users different variants of a page or feature, to see which variant performs best.Heatmaps, Eye Tracking, Session Recording I want to track users’ mouse/finger/eye movements and interactions in real time to spot issues and opportunities in the user experience.Analytics I want quantitative data on how users interact with my product.Research Ops: I want to build and manage research participants and studies. Research CRM I want to build a panel of research participants (including metadata and research history) and reach out to them based on that information.Recruiting & Payment I want to recruit, screen, and incentivize participants. Participant panel for native tests: I can recruit participants for the study types available on this tool, and only those study types.Scheduling I want to find convenient times for solo, group, deadline-based, or other research sessions.Design: I want to create visuals that help me get feedback. Brainstorming I want to explore ideas with as little friction as possible.Wireframing I want to map out the connections between ideas, steps, or sketches of a user flow.Prototyping I want to create a simple mockup that approximates my real product.

#User Interviews | The User Research Recruiting Platform for Teams

[sugarwaterradio]

Professional Athlete: Hollywood Pedophiles Are Real, Drink Adrenochrome

Boxer David Rodriguez usually fights in the band. But lately, the martial artist came out to provide his 2 cents on Hollywood pedophilia rings. Assuming you are not aware, an increasing number of is coming out that reveals there’s a major issue in Hollywood, and anywhere else. The viral documentary, Out of Shadows sheds lighting on just how bad things are actually. by Marco De Francis, visitor writer Rodriguez states he’s connections in Hollywood and will verify that there’s an enormous kid abuse issue that’s been going on for many years. Heavyweight Boxer, David Rodriguez, Says Hollywood Pedos Actually are Real And’ actually Drink Adrenochrome’ Though the great news is actually there is a sting operation trying to have it all down. And any day today, news of most of this is going to hit the presses, based on Rodriguez. Within the video below, Rodriguez directs the world what he understands. He claims that there are actually pedophile rings currently being taken down. That there are actually kids sacrifices where folks in fact drink adrenochrome. Adrenochrome is a drug produced from tortured individuals, typically kids. In case you believe that is all ridiculous bull have you noticed that?

Adrenochrome How about this adrenochrome patent. Or perhaps the one. Rumor has it, best pedophile rings as well as human trafficking facilities, pick the drug from tortured kids. Rodriguez says he understands folks in Hollywood and states it’s genuine. Perhaps Barack Obama’s brother printer hl2270dw has published about this on twitter. Malik Obama? ObamaMalik On top of all the that…THIS!? 3,045 folks are actually speaking about this But before you decide to go grab the bottle of yours of Bourbon to drown at bay the tears of yours, which happens to be a very standard reaction, you need to recognize that people that are good are actually doing a thing about it. Rodriguez says I gotta inform you, a great deal of you do not love Trump though he is doing the best thing right now. Rodriguez is not the only one that believes that.

Have you ever read of QAnon? This’s the alleged optimistic military operation which is actually taking down the full state. And frankly, after dumping through a huge number of Q posts & proofs, I feel it actually is what it promises to be. Check out this Q evidence video clip, and in case you’ve proof that disproves it, make sure you write about it with me. Since I could not disprove any kind of of it. Should we trust Rodriguez? I do not understand. He is simply speaking into the fujifilm finepix a303 in an off-the-cuff approach. Though the testimony of his may result in an investigation. Or perhaps, at the very least it must, in case you ask me. I will not theorize way too significant about what he means with all he says. But in case you put the testimony of his to the dozens of specifics, including Allison Mack’s participation for NXIVM, Harvey Weinstein’s conviction, as well as Jeffrey Epstein’s murder ahem – excuse me – suicide, next it is beginning to are like there actually is a tremendous pedophile network about high profile individuals. And based on the documentary Rodriguez speaks regarding, Out of Shadows, other officials and the CIA are definitely covering up institutional kid abuse. https://youtu.be/MY8Nfzcn1qQ Here is the video clip of Rodriguez. Below the video, is actually the entire unedited transcript. https://youtu.be/C0Ef1hHpFlM START OF TRANSCRIPT As you all know I have been engaged in boxing and becoming a pro athlete for a quite a while. And um.. I have created several connections.. I have created several effective connections with mma fighters, UFC figures, expert fighters. I have been in this arena, where I rub shoulders with several big names. You know. I have existed Tony Robbins. I have been about, you know I have absent out there with like Opera. I have gone out with a great deal of people that are big. And had.. you understand been in a position to meet a great deal of people that are big as well as talk to them like I am speaking to you all. I just need to point out one thing. And I understand a great deal of you’re doubting that. But this’s the truth, male. There’s a huge sting performance going down. It is happening, and I am telling you male These pedophile rings are now being taken down. It is ahh Hollywood ain’t awesome any longer. Hollywood is actually going down. And I still speak to the sources of mine. I still speak to folks. Which are required and Pay attention. There’s a huge operation going down. And they are And they are getting taken out. And everyday is actually confirmation to me. It is an It is a secretive thing. Though I believe it is likely to come out. They are saying it is likely to turn out on the press um when it is all said as well as done. And I think what is going to happen is actually going to truly shock a great deal of you. I mean a great deal of you’re gonna kinda comb this off & be similar to, I always knew it was there. Though I do not believe you realize just how common this pedophile rings truly are in Hollywood. And also within um In the sports activities arenas.. And in Hollywood And for political arena I mean almost everywhere male. It is awful. And It is ahh It’s man trafficking. You discover And sex trafficking is actually probably the hottest thing, probably the biggest commodity right now. And I think um Once that all is released to the surface area a great deal of you’re likely to be disgusted & and feel extremely dirty for perhaps knowing the info. Um I gotta inform you, a great deal of you do not love Trump though he is doing the best thing right now. This guy is actually uh spearheading this entire thing it is an impressive thing to watch. They are moving following the cartels with man trafficking. They are going after the kid pedophilia rings All these highways lead to Clinton Foundation as well as Haiti. They lead to I am trying not to hand out a lot of info but um Jeffrey Epstein you understand, everyone knows he did not kill himself. Um Harvey Weinstein is actually dropping substantial quantities of info. Ah There is a lot going on right this moment. And it is gon na come to the surface area. And you all are planning to see that. And you all are actually going to experience something happen that is just absolutely amazing. We have to protect the children of ours, male. We are just You know Corey Haim is actually approaching available with documentaries. These individuals are wanting to leak info. Though it is all likely to come out at the proper time. And ah like I stated Hollywood is actually going down. It is fucking going down! It is sinking as the Titanic. And they are all attempting to bail themselves out there. And they are all attempting to jump ship. And several of probably the biggest celebrities that you understand were involved with this specific shit. And I am not going to disclose any names But um I’ve friends that are I am gonna just say it I am not bragging or maybe anything that way. Though I’ve friend are actually A list celebrities that are actually people that are good and they shed a number of names to me I was as whoa! I can’t think that. I mean I cannot You think You cannot realize that you will find kids sacrifices where folks in fact drink adrenochrome. Where they terrify the kid very much And this’s tough to swallow This’s difficult to even grasp though it is a real ancient ritual to terrify primarily kids, because they are a lot more clean, they are adrenal glands are more clean terrorize them to the stage where they are very afraid and they are pumping out very much adrenaline and they are and so terrified. And you eventually eliminate them and you consume the blood of theirs and it as the supreme aphrodisiac, it is as the water fountain of youth. It rebuilds collagen. And it And it ahh.. does many sorts of ahh enhancements because of the body. It is a sick. It is a sick, sick, sick, ill, ritual ceremonies. And today they bottle it up as well as promote it within the vials. And folks purchase that shit. It is a drug. And in case you see You know I have looked at before and subsequent to pics of several of these celebrities that were on adrenochrome, allegedly, and next off and it looks as they aged 20 to 30 years in a question of a month. This shits real. And I do not care whether ya’ll telephone call me looney, a conspiracy theorist. I am not. I understand others in that company that that ahh are actually verifying to me what I realize. And this’s an operation moving down. And I cannot wait to notice these dominos fall male these parts of shit get removed, trigger it is time. And I feel I actually do think, on a religious level, it is a question of a mass awakening taking place at this time. I think our earth is actually going through a worldwide shift of consciousness to the place we’re all waking up and discovering the simple fact of what what actually is this matrix what’s actually going on in this particular truth. And I believe that um that we are likely to haver to cope with a great deal of great and a great deal a large amount of ugly. And bring about you gotta have both. You gotta understand the dark side as well as the good side. And I think the deep side is actually likely to reveal itself. And you all are actually likely to be extremely very um bothered by that. And disgusted. I mean, in case are actually In case you’ve some sort of effective grain left in you or perhaps some great of a morality, you are gonna be disgusted with everything you see. Ahh You know I am sitting back patiently with this particular quarantine kinda knowing this info kinda like, impress this shit is actually going down. I everyone knows the economy isn’t going to actually be the exact same. I do not understand what is going to take place there. There’ s rumors serotonin to a gold backed dollar. And eliminating the Fed. I cannot I cannot validate any of this Though I can I feel comfortable enough I do understand the pedophile rings are actually going down. And we’ve ships in the Caribbean at this time intercepting medications. Trump has sent large battleships out they are fighting the cartels. I mean This’s going down. Now I believe that the virus was a worldwide episode by way of a it would have been a bioweapon. I do think that. I believe the virus does are available but never to the level they say it’s. I think Fucking everybody is actually dying of this coronavirus but wig ahh.. breaking down of various other ailments and then they are thinking it is the coronavirus. I do not realize I am skeptipal skeptical about everything that. Though I do know Hollywood is actually going down today. And I just needed to say the little piece of mine. There’s a silver lining within this within this particular quarantine and in this particular lockdown. And I feel all of us simply have to be patient to find out what surfaces. And it’s going to um There’s a documentary online which came out that a good friend sent me called From the Shadows It is possibly in the shadows of from shadows. But I’ve to check out. I believe it is out the shadows. And it is on YouTube I ahh.. I will check it out. Um it is actually good. Goes in level about this material. And um You are gonna to simply find out how disturbing and just how ill these fucking individuals are actually. Um Ahh You learn Sigh You understand, right now everybody just stay diligent. You know Keep your sessions simple. It is an exciting moment to be alive in the opinion of mine. I believe this’s an extremely exciting moment to be alive. Though I think a great deal of earth shattering breakthroughs are actually likely to be occurring. You know I believe the path where going is actually like for every action there is an opposite and equal reaction. And I believe we are going to begin coming into a great deal of ahh ahh preventive medication, remedies organic ahh You know treatments as well as um remedies for diseases. And I believe we are going to have a lot of breakthroughs today is such an exciting moment to be alive. So that is the positive note of mine on it. And I believe many of us have to um pay attention.. you understand I am learning how you can mediate now. I am praying each day. I am staring to you realize I never ever used to do that within boxing. I was constantly go go go go go locomotive locomotive train locomotive battle strong guy. And now Im beginning to sit just and back you know as enjoy the view as look at the perspective You know like That is all of Mexico above there. All of Mexico. All right there. I am simply enjoying going out edge. I am enjoying being with the family of mine. I am truly keeping it simple. And simply quite ahh down to earth male Though I am telling you what is happening today is a really very exciting time. So pay attention. Keep the ears of yours to the ground. And understand that things that are big are happening. And I am I am convinced on that. Um yeah what it is in no way going to be the exact same. I think the same as when the web came out it altered humanity. It altered consciousness for you understand humanity’s consciousness. It was a change the internet. There is pre internet and then there is each technology was moving somewhat.. it had been moving slower all through time, for a huge number of years. But as soon as the web struck boom, it was as an explosion of technological breakthroughs and information and ingenuity and inventiveness, directly after the web. I believe that was a change in the planet, right. I was a change a change in consciousness. I believe the exact same thing is taking place today with this worldwide shutdown um the economy actually being wrecked. I believe it is going to permanently shift the consciousness of ours. And we are moving into a more religious way of being in case you chose the route in case you chose the route. And I believe it is really important that um we concentrate on the great things. We we go inside. And um actually pay attention to ourselves as well as what we really want in daily life and be a lot more innovative. Anyway that is my 2 cents. Thank you just about all for tuning wearing. Um I just needed to provide my 2 cents, that is it. Thank you all. You’ve a great day. I am hoping you love the day. Go for a stroll. Go for an operate. Um Looking at all of the folks asking questions I cannot read lead to the sun’s in the face of mine a little bit. But yeah it is a paradigm change, Sonya. It is a paradigm shift. And so huge things happening. And I feel we simply gotta be patient.

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#DavidRodriguez #Gossip #HipHopNews #Infotainment #newsandgossip #todaysnews

[adambhalalough]

Battle for the Soul of Bitcoin: Stories from the Making of The New Radical 

Speech delivered at Indie Memphis, Nov 2, 2017

Full transcript below (video is only the intro, film clips not included)...

There is a war being waged for the soul of Bitcoin. On the one hand you have those who want to stay true to the roots of Bitcoin. The original programmers who were inspired by the Open Source movement and the Cypherpunk movement. They created Bitcoin with these tenants in mind: privacy, security, independence, self-reliance, and most importantly: freedom. The other side of the battle can be defined in one word: legitimacy. You have those looking to give Bitcoin institutional legitimacy. Their aim is to regulate it. Their motivations are very different, however. There are those who see Bitcoin and see dollar signs. Let’s call them the bankers. They want to dress it up in a suit and tie. But to have it appeal to the angel investors of the world it must be safe, clean, free from any association with drugs, guns and dark markets. And that leads us to our third group - let’s call them the Feds. These are the law enforcement and government regulators of the world who see Bitcoin as a threat. A way to launder money. A way to make purchases without any trace back to your name or identity. So in late 2013 when Bitcoin jumped to $1,000 per coin, from $13 a coin just the year before, battle lines became drawn. That’s where I entered the fray with my camera in tow. On October 19th of 2013 I flew to Austin, Texas to meet with Cody Wilson the inventor of the 3D printed gun The Liberator. I had no idea this meeting with the “21st Century Gun-Runner of the Internet” would lead me deep into the middle of a life or death conflict over the soul of Bitcoin and the group of young men on the front lines of that conflict. I first heard of Cody Wilson in June of 2013. I was driving through Beverly Hills on the way to another boring, dead-end Hollywood studio meeting when I heard a young man speaking on the radio. (play NPR clip, 1 minute 30 second). I was equally disturbed and intrigued by what Cody was saying. I am not a gun guy, I do not own a gun nor did I grow up in a house with guns. But a trait of my personality and a common theme between my films is my attraction to people on the extremes. People pushing against the system. Where others are repelled, I find these characters to be fascinating and my curiosity lead me to Cody Wilson’s front door step. When I arrived in Austin on a rainy October morning in 2013, we began shooting within an hour of dropping my luggage at the La Quinta Inn. Day 1 was chock full of great content - We went to a gun range, Red’s, where Cody was spotted by one of the employees who geeked out like a celebrity had walked in and just wanted to shake his hand and thank him for his service. We went to a local BBQ joint. Then that night we drove to the outskirts of town to visit the tiny closet where he created The Liberator, the world’s first workable 3D printed gun. (Play Cody intro clip, 2 minutes). It was all great stuff but all of it I had expected. Day 2 everything changed. The next morning Cody notified me he had a Skype call with some anarchist hackers living in a squat outside Barcelona. Together, he and these hackers were planning a new project. And they were about to launch this project on indieGoGo the same way he initially launched the Liberator before being kicked off the Crowdfunding platform for violating their legal policy by attempting to crowdfund the manufacture of a gun. On the Skype call were a few young hackers all with foreign accents from various nations. One, Vitalik Buterin, would go on years later to receive acclaim and huge amounts of money for launching a new cryptocurrency called Ethereum. But all these hackers were dry, emotionless and frankly boring, except for one. (Play Skype call, 1 minute 11 sec) Amir Taaki immediately jumped out at me. His childlike enthusiasm was contagious. He was full of life in a way very few people are. After the Skype call ended I immediately started to ask Cody questions about Amir. Cody gave me the lowdown while flipping through Google and showing me various articles and photos of Amir. Apparently Amir was famous in the Bitcoin scene already. He had been around since the very beginning of Bitcoin and there were even rumors he was the infamous Satoshi Nakamoto - the name used by the unknown person or persons who designed bitcoin and created its original reference implementation. (Play Amir TNR intro, 3 minute 15 second) Whether Amir was Satoshi or not, I still do not know but what I do know is Amir was integral to the creation of Bitcoin, a fascinating character living in a squat somewhere in Spain and I had to have him part of my film, so that is what I did. Through Cody’s trust and vouching for me I was able to create a strong filmmaker / subject relationship with Amir and start filming with him after a few months of courtship. So I had my two main characters now, an unlikely duo. Cody Wilson, a white, Texan law school drop-out and 2nd amendment freedom fighter and Amir Taaki, a British Iranian hacker and squatter. They made a strange pair together. You wouldn’t expect them to have anything in common. Yet what they did share in common was the desire to upend governmental and financial structures and bring power to the masses through the use of technology. The stage was set. There were Crypto Anarchists on one side. The Bankers and the Feds on the other. And at stake was the future of Bitcoin. The battle for the soul of Bitcoin can be traced back to the Crypto Anarchist Manifesto written by legendary Cypherpunk Timothy C. May in 1992 and posted to the Cypherpunk mailing list. This online list was a very active forum with technical discussion ranging over mathematics, cryptography, computer science, political and philosophical discussion, and personal arguments. An early member of this list was a 23 year old Australian hacker named Julian Assange. The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto was a call to arms that predicted the online drug marketplace Silk Road a full 21 years before Ross Ulbricht programmed it. To put it into perspective the year Tim May wrote this manifesto McDonald’s opened it first restaurant in China. Hurricane Andrew hit Florida. Bill Clinton became president and AT & T released its first video telephone for $1,499. I’d like to read you a portion of The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto because I believe its words will prove as uncannily prescient to you as they did to me. A specter is haunting the modern world, the specter of crypto anarchy. Computer technology is on the verge of providing the ability for individuals and groups to communicate and interact with each other in a totally anonymous manner. Two persons may exchange messages, conduct business, and negotiate electronic contracts without ever knowing the True Name, or legal identity, of the other. Interactions over networks will be untraceable… The State will of course try to slow or halt the spread of this technology, citing national security concerns, use of the technology by drug dealers and tax evaders, and fears of societal disintegration. Many of these concerns will be valid; crypto anarchy will allow national secrets to be traded freely and will allow illicit and stolen materials to be traded. An anonymous computerized market will even make possible abhorrent markets for assassinations and extortion. Various criminal and foreign elements will be active users of CryptoNet. But this will not halt the spread of crypto anarchy. Just as the technology of printing altered and reduced the power of medieval guilds and the social power structure, so too will cryptologic methods fundamentally alter the nature of corporations and of government interference in economic transactions... And just as a seemingly minor invention like barbed wire made possible the fencing-off of vast ranches and farms, thus altering forever the concepts of land and property rights in the frontier West, so too will the seemingly minor discovery out of an arcane branch of mathematics come to be the wire clippers which dismantle the barbed wire around intellectual property. Arise, you have nothing to lose but your barbed wire fences! Fast forward 25 years later. Cody and Amir along with a group of hackers known as UNSYSTEM put the finishing touches on the beta version of the Dark Wallet, an encrypted wallet that masks transactions making the buyer and seller anonymous. They release a YouTube video as part of a launch of their crowdfunder. The video instantly goes viral among the Bitcoin community. Suddenly the pendulum has swung from the Bankers and the Feds toward the Crypto Anarchists as they make a bold play to take back the soul of Bitcoin and bring it to its roots. (Play DW crowdfunder, 4 minutes 20 seconds) The Dark Wallet crowdfunding video and the $50,000 dollars the indiegogo page quickly raises garners the attention of the Feds. Specifically FinCen, - the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, one of the US Treasury Departments leading agencies in the fight against money laundering. As well the Dark Wallet falls under investigation by both the IRS and DOJ’s cybercrime divisions. I would journey to San Francisco where I would interview the IRS agent Tigran Gambarayan, a young Russian immigrant in charge of investigating Dark Wallet. He carried a gun on his hip and told me in detail about his recent investigation and arrest of a law enforcement agent on the Silk Road case who extorted millions of dollar worth of Bitcoin from Ross Ulbricht, the same guy he was supposed to be building a case against, and then tried to launder the money using his Secret Service badge to force a bitcoin exchange in Luxembourg to give him cash. It was the first major Bitcoin heist in history. Tigran also admitted on camera he was watching Amir Taaki. I drove across town to interview Katy Hahn, head of the cybercrime unit at the Department of Justice. She also admitted she was investigating Cody and Amir after hearing them brag on the radio about Dark Wallet being a money laundering tool. And she told me how ISIS had just put a memo out about the Dark Wallet and its usefulness as a tool to send Bitcoin to the mujahideen across the Middle East without being tracked by authorities. (Play DW pushback vid, 3 minutes 10 seconds) Then, that year the Bitcoin community witnessed its first major arrest Post-Silk Road when 23 year old entrepreneur and founder of BitInstant, Charlie Shrem was busted for money laundering. Shrem was a young, successful and idealistic Brooklyn based Bitcoin millionaire. In 2013 Cody Wilson and I visited him while he was on house arrest at his parent’s place. Cameras were rolling. (Play Shrem, 6 minutes 39 seconds). Shrem was the first of a number of Bitcoin entrepreneur’s to be arrested and convicted in the aftermath of the Silk Road. The Feds and the Bankers were sending a clear signal to the community - disobedience will not be tolerated. The irony that Shrem did 2 years for laundering the equivalent of $1 million of Bitcoin while only one banker was sent to prison in the wake of the 2008 Financial Crisis was not lost on the Crypto community. Many argue that the financial crisis was what lead to the creation of Bitcoin and the need create a safe and secure decentralized crypto currency not controlled by a central bank, or any one person or group for that matter. A few months after Shrem went to prison Amir Taaki disappeared. He stopped answering my phone calls, my emails and my text messages. Cody had no idea where he was either. I assumed he was on the lam running from a financial crime warrant. There were rumors Interpol was looking to bust him for the Dark Wallet specifically (even though the app wasn’t even officially launched). Weeks of silence turned into months, which turned into a year and finally about a year after my last communication with him I got a pgp encrypted email. It read, “Hi, I’m in Syria. The Dark Wallet is dead. What I am doing now is far more important.” It turns out Amir was fighting ISIS on the front lines in Rojava. He was embedded with the Kurds, with a Kalashnikov and a uniform, helping to liberate the Anarchist society that had formed there in Rojava out of the ashes of a once great nation destroyed by Western meddling and warmongering. Dark Wallet development had ceased. A true final version of the wallet was never finished. Today it does seem that the bankers have won the battle for Bitcoin’s soul. Bitcoin’s total market cap is nearing 100 Billion dollars, bigger than Goldman Sachs. As of today one Bitcoin is worth $6421. When I began shooting this film it was around 400. But there is hope for the Crypto Anarchists. Recently Amir left the Middle East for Barcelona where he is now active in the squats forming a a Hacklab - a live/work commune space where Crypto products can be made and developed safely. I texted him yesterday via the encrypted Signal app and asked him if there were any other notable developments in the hacker space. He pointed me to a group called Paralelni Polis and their Institute of Crypto-anarchy in Prague. The members of this group boast on their website of hacking into a live broadcast of Czech Television and a “virtual interaction with politician’s mobile phones.” The aim of the Institute of Cryptoanarchy is to encourage a parallel decentralized economy, crypto-currencies, and other conditions for the development of a free society in the 21st century. As their website statement page reads, “New technology brings the possibility of choice – we are in a time that is defined by The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto. With a fast internet connection, reliable anonymity and decentralized currency, you preserve freedom which we have been losing as a society.” Thank you. (C) Adam Bhala Lough 2017 All Rights Reserved

#bitcoin #crypto anarchy #cryptocurrency #amir taaki #cody wilson #julian assange