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oiksuga · 3 years

Text

come on and show me

prompt: smell of mint: “the strength of love and hate are one in the same.“ for @tooruluv | #tooruluv2kparty pairing: oikawa x f!reader tags: angst, misunderstandings, childhood neighbors to enemies (?) to ?, rated M for Makeout (so rated pg-13) warnings: underage alcohol consumption, ambiguous ending wc: ~4k synopsis: the one where you and oikawa grow up right next door of each other. complementary songs: unholy - hey violet // new girl - finneas // like real people do - hozier a/n: this fic had me biting my nails. i haven’t written in ages and to tackle something this long made me woozy. hope you enjoy it! (update: decided to turn it into a semi-angsty one-shot instead, maybe i’ll continue it as a side project, but for now, it is done!) no beta we die like men. i’ll proofread later.

You first meet Tooru Oikawa at the age of six. He had just moved to your street. The house right next door, no less. Quiet, shy, a bit of a crybaby. He clung to his mother for the entirety of that first meeting, a stuffed cartoon alien tightly clutched in his right hand. Your mothers, naturally, hit it off. You and Oikawa on the other hand, well that’s was a work in progress.

You tried to play nice, you really did. Your mother had told you about how it was just them two and his older sister. His father had died a little over a year before. So obviously you felt bad. You went over to his house on a few ocassions. His mother would welcome you with open arms each and every time. He was another story.

He had enough manners to come say hello, even inviting you up to his room to play with some toys (at the behest of his mother) but the minute she was out of sight, he’d go back to his own things, paying you no attention. Not that you particularly fancied playing with him, but if you walked this far to visit him, you would think he could acknowledge you for more than 2 minutes.

Tired of wasting valuable playtime sitting on the floor of his room, you take matters into your own hands and ask your brother for advice. He was a year older than you and Oikawa, so naturally you believed he held the secrets to the universe.

You approached him after dinner, and presented him with your problem.

“And I don’t know why he makes it so hard to be friends. And mom just keeps forcing me to visit him.” The huff of indignation only made him laugh.

“Well Y/n, you have to understand that he’s lonely. He is not very used to having others around him.”

“But if he is so lonely, wouldn’t hanging out with me make him feel better?”

“Remember how mom told you his dad is no longer with him?” you nod, “Well he has been living with other girls so much he probably wants to play with another boy. Guys don’t always want to play princesses you know?”

“So would he want to play with me if anothery boy was present?”

“Well, that is up to him, but it would interest him.”

“Then will you come with me tomorrow when I go over?”

“Sure”

And that is how you found yourself at his doorstep once again, brother in tow. His mother practically bounced off the walls seeing he had accompanied you. Did she also think he needed a boy to play with? She called Oikawa down, and you could hear some grumbling from his end. He stopped at the bottom of the stairs, a confused looked ag the sight of two people instead of one.

Your brother went up to him first.

“Hey, uh Tooru right?” First name basis already?“I’m Y/n’s older brother. Well I just wanted to see if you wanted to hang out with me and a couple of my friends today?”

Huh, so that was his plan. Your brother is the unofficial leader of his group of friends, comprised of various kids in the neighbourhood. Some his age, some more around yours. They like to cause trouble and torment other kids at times. Your mothers were close too. Unfortunately for you, none of them had any sisters your age. So everytime you were supposed to play with them, you were miserable.

After that first meeting, your brother and Oikawa had become quite the pair. He took him “under his wing” (as he liked to call it) and formally inducted him to his squad. They were over the moon to have someone new to hang out with (read corrupt). You, on the other hand, could not hate it more. Now that those two were buddies, Oikawa was always present in your home. Anywhere you looked he was there. And now that he had other people to be with, he came out of his shell. Gone was that snotty kid with the alien plush, now replaced with a self-absorbed bastard you wanted no relation to. Too bad he never took the hint. It got worse once you both turned 14.

“You know Y/n, I’ve gotten so many confession letter this week. But oddly enough, I have not gotten one from you. You need to hurry up before one of these girls wins your spot as my girlfriend.”

“Well good thing I have enough smarts to never feel the need to do something like that.”

“Ouch Y/n you are killing me over here. Whatever, I’ll just look for it in your room when you are gone.”

“What the- how are you going to do that? You know what don’t tell me. Just please get out.”

“Or you are gonna do what? Call your brother to-“

He was interrupted by the arrival of yet another nuisance in your room.

“Hey Oikawa, please leave the poor girl alone. Stop being such a pain”

Enter Hajime Iwaizumi. Ah Iwaizumi. The other half of the obnoxious duo. Not that you don’t like him. No, quite the opposite. He keeps Oikawa tame and off your hair, something which you are deeply grateful for. But he also has his habits of annoying the crap out of you. All of your brother’s friends do. But you like to think that deep down they’d do anything for you.

“Not now Iwa-chan, Y/n is about to confess her secret feelings for me.” He says, clearly aware of the growing irritation on his friend’s face.

“Don’t make me pull you by your hair again. We are going to be late for the movie.” He emphasized his threat by rolling up sleeves, a tell-tale sign he was about to beat the crap out of Oikawa.

“Alright alright Iwa-chan you are such a hard ass.” He now turns to you, taking a few steps forward and stands right in front of you. “I’ll see you later, m’lady.” With that nickname, he took your right hand and kissed your knuckles. You could only srunch up your face. Gross, how many of those shows are he watching.

You heard the downstairs door shut and with that, it was silent again.

Finally, peace.

Years went by, and Oikawa’s popularity only skyrocketed. Everyone around him found him attractive, so naturally they’d hang on to him. He was also really good in volleyball, so everyone would go to see him play. Your brother and him remained close friends. Hosting parties together, going on weekend long trips with all their friends. All things you were forbidden from participating in because, as your brother said, this is not the crowd you want to be with. Your parents still let you host your own events, but nothing of that magnitude.

Soon enough, years went by, and you began your senior year of high school. This was going to be your years. With your brother now gone, having graduated and gone off to college, it’s your turn to be the life of the party. No more “you can’t be there.” Now all eyes will be on you. And what a better way to make your debut than with a party. While classes didn’t start until a week later, it was your brother’s tradition to take over your parent’s beach house for a weekend and hold a last big major bash before the semester began.

Invitations were sent, music was chosen and all that was left to do was tidy up the place. You brought some of your friends with you to help you get the place ready before the chaos began. Sweeped everything, locked away valuables, and got them settled in two of the rooms so they could sleep comfortably after. As you were outside stocking up the bar area, you heard a collection of voices coming from the living room. It’s too early, why are there people coming already? As you walk back in, you are greeted with Oikawa, Iwaizumi, and their two friends, who were also part of your brother’s group, Hanamaki and Matsukawa, all too sitting too comfortably in your couch.

“I hope you guys know this is a respectable place.” You crossed your arms at the sight of them getting too comfortable in your couches. Feet up on coffee table like savages.

Oikawa spoke first. “Relax darling,” God you hated that nickname, “You do know we have been here more times than you right? The parties that have happened in this place oh man.” You felt indignated at his attempt to one up you in your own home.

“Well if I recall correctly, this is still my parentms place, so I can have you and your friends kicked if I wanted to.”

At that, the other three butted in, a chorus of “Oikawa what the hell man,” and the sound of Iwaizumi hitting the back of his head.

“Okay fine. I’m sorry Y/n that you are so jealous of me and my party animal ways.”

“God you are exhausting. But anyways, I am glad you guys are here because I need help hanging some lights outside. Iwa and Mattsun, could you pretty please come with me to hang these?”

You led them outside, before sticking your head back in, directing your gaze to the two remaining guys camping in your couch.

“And don’t think I have forgotten about you two. Kiyoko needs some help putting more stuff together, and the rest of the girls went out to order food, so please make yourselves useful and go.”

You play some music on the speakers, and get to work.

Soon enough, the party was in full swing. You swam through the sea of bodies trying to locate the kitchen. The sheer number of people was disorienting. But to your luck, the swaying crowd somehow guided you to your destination, slightly sticky from stranger’s sweat, but otherwise unscathed. You make way to the counter and try and lift yourself onto it. The drinks in your system making in a harder task than usual. You are halfway through climbing in a more unlady-like manner, when a voice calls out for you.

“Uh Y/n, need some help?”

You turn around to see Oikawa. His face was flushed, you assumed it was from whatever was in the plastic cup in his hand. Hair disheveled, forehead shiny from his sweat. His shirt was unbuttoned halfway, and the lighting made his chain glint at an angle. If he wasn’t Oikawa, you’d admit he was attractive.

You become aware of your compromising position and stop your attempts of getting on the counter. The suddent movements make you wobbly, and you grab onto the counter to keep stable. You notice him walking over to you, and motion for him to stop.

“I don’t need your help. Just get me a water bottle from the fridge please.”

He obliges your request and gets some water for you, going so far as to opening the bottle, and hands it you. You are silently grateful, as you don’t think you have the coordination to do it yourself. As you are drinking, feeling the relief of the coolness down your throat, you notice he’s staring at you. This felt odd, there was something about the way he looked at you. You felt too vulnerable. It was getting awkward.

“So, you enjoying the party? I saw you doing a shots competition outside earlier. Did you win, Mr. Party Animal?” You made sure to emphasize the mock of his nickname.

He huffs indignantly. “Well Y/n-chan, cannot believe you doubt my abilities. If you must know, I did in fact win, with an impressive 5 shots down my system. And look at me, cool as a cucumber.”

You look at him for a second, brows furrowed, and then burst out laughing. “‘Cool as a cucumber’? God you are lame.”

All he can do is stare at you. You have never laughed like that. It’s always measured, not too loud, not too long. This is different. He likes different.

When you stop, you notice he is staring again. You feel small. As if you are under a million spotlights, all pointed at you. You are about to ask if he was okay, but seems like someone beat you to it.

“Hey Tooru~ I’ve been looking everywhere for you. Are you okay?” She notices the position you are in, and slightly grimaces, “Tooru who is this.”

He blinks, a bit too hard, and turns to face her. “Hey Sara, this is Y/n,” he motions to you, “you know, the one who organized this party.”

Sara. You know who she is. And she definitely knows you. You two met at the last student council election, a few months back. When you found out you were running agaisnt each other. She was the current president, and you held a lower position as secretary, so running for president felt like a giant leap. Though it seems that after a month of campaigning, debates, and a tiresome election you had won. A very exciting moment, and what felt as a good culmination to your high school career. You and Sara had an extensive talk about it over coffee, in which she assured no ill feelings towards you.

By no means were you guys best friends, but you also like to think you were not enemies.

“Oh Y/n and I know each other. Great to see you again, and amazing party, you really know how to entertain.” Well that answers that, she doesn’t hate you. Great. “Do you mind if I borrow Tooru over here? There are some things I need to talk to him about.”

“No problem at all, glad you are having fun.” You wave goodbye and with that they were gone. You were alone.

Now feeling more sobered up, you decide to go back to the masses. Your newfound energy leading you to the makeshit dancefloor, letting loose to Makk’s karaoke rendition of Pursuit of Happiness. What a movie moment. Everything letting loose in a beach house living room.

The thing that wasn’t a movie moment though? How much you needed to pee. How come no one ever informs you of the effects alcohol has on your bladder?

Once again, you venture through the bodies to find the bathroom. There was no line, which should have been a sign. But you made no thought of it, until you swung the door open and found, in the most cliche moment ever, the ever-present Tooru Oikawa passionately making out with Sara. That sobers you right up.

If they noticed, you wouldn’t know, because you bolt out immediately and go straight to your room. You go to the bathroom there, and as you are washing your hands, you stare at yourself in the mirror. Even though you only saw them for a second, the image of those two making out was burned in your brain.

There was something about the way he held her, pressed to the sink counter, hands on her waist, that made you feel something inside. You chalked it up to general lust and splashed cold water on your face, trying to stop whatever your brain was imagining. You left the bathroom, ready to take a break in bed.

That was, until the man in question made his appearance in your room.

“You know there are laws against trespassing right? So I don’t know what you are doing here but-“

“I came to apologize.”

Well that’s a first.

“Apologize for what exactly. You haven’t been an ass the entire night, if anything, I should congratulate you for that.” You say, tone more snarky than you intended. What were you even pissed about.

“Well I think you and I both know what you walked into. And I just wanted you to know that is not who I am, nor how I behave.”

“Well let me be the first to tell you that I don’t care who you suck face with, as long as it doesn’t happen in my presence.” What was up with you right now.

“What if it was with you? Would you care then?” He took a step towards you. You took one back.

“What are you talking about.” Why did he keep walking towards you. This room cannot be that big.

“I think you know exactly what I mean,” Your back was met by the wall at the end of the room, and Oikawa now stood in front on you, “Darling.”

Something about the way he looked at you, combined with the alcohol in your system and the muffled music you could hear from downstairs made your insides feel on fire. I must be going crazy, you thought.

Because as soon as that god-awful nickname left his lips, you pulled him down onto yours.

“As your big brother, it is my duty to protect you from all the evil things that are out there. You know that right?”

“That includes Oikawa right? He is such a meanie. I don’t know why you even hang out with him.”

“Well, Tooru is different. He means well, he just doesn’t express it how you are used to. Boys his age usually behave like that. But he’ll grow out of it. You’ll learn that eventually.”

“Well I don’t care. He’s mean and I hate him. I don’t care if he changes. I’ll still hate him.”

“Haha. Well I’m glad. Wouldn’t want you messing around with someone like him anyways.”

Curse the heavens. There was no denying it. Tooru Oikawa was an amazing kisser.

He knew exactly what he was doing. Grazing his tongue to yours every now and then. His hands, god his hands, his right one was holding his chin, while his left one slid up and down your waist.

Curse his perfection. This cannot be that snotty kid from all those years ago. This is a whole different person. Yes that’s it. This is not Tooru Oikawa. Because Tooru Oikawa is not capable of making you feel these things.

Like any normal person, you have to breathe, so you break the kiss. He has the audacity to whine at that. You look of to your side, because something tells you that if you look at him right now, lips swollen and pupils wide, who knows what’ll happen next.

He doesn’t like any of it.

He takes this opportunity to move his mouth south, landing on the flesh of your neck. He seems to have caught you offguard, if the sound you make at his action is anything to go by. He works his magic in the area. Biting. Kissing. Sucking. Anything that’ll draw out more of those noises. And you wish he’d stay there for eternity.

But you are you. A little selfish. And always wanting more more more. So you take him by his shirt and lead the two of you onto the bed, gently sitting him down and taking a seat directly on his lap. Now this is more.

But this also felt wrong. On so many levels. You don’t think you could ever look at your parents again if you have sex on their bed. But the desecration of their sleeping place is a small price to pay for the enormous pleasure you are sure he would bring you. Because if there’s one thing Oikawa Tooru believes in, is doing his best.

And he sure as hell will do his very best with you.

“Well well darling, look who is eager now.” He spoke with that sickeningly sweet tone he always uses. But there is something else behind it. You can’t really pinpoint it, but before you could ponder on that, he got a hold of your hips and started to drag you along his length.

Well if you are off to hell, might as well enjoy the ride.

You decided to be bold and unbuttoned the rest of his shirt, sliding it off his shoulders and onto the floor. You could sit here and wax poetic about how intimacy goes beyond physical appearance and his muscles are not important, but you are no philosopher. So you’ll say it. He’s hot. You knew the guy was ripped, having been witness to the arduous workouts he and your brother did over the summer, but this was something else.

Your brother. Ha. Imagine if he could see you right now. Actually don’t. That’s weird. But he would be dissapointed wouldn’t he. All those years being so put off by the mere presence of Tooru Oikawa and now you are sitting atop him, like some sort of worship. Oh the hypocrisy.

No you can’t think of him right now. No get out of there.

“Something the matter, princess?” Ah again with the nicknames. “I think you’ve had enough fun up here. Maybe it’s my turn to be on top don’t you think?”

You nodded. Because that is all you could muster. You feared that if you opened your mouth, all of your thoughts would slip out.

He rolled you to the side, off of him and onto the mattress. He stood up and groaned and god the way that made you feel. He kneeled on the soft surface, and leaned down to face you. Because he is the epitome of cliche, though, he makes sure to flash you the biggest smile you have ever seen. It looks different. It looks genuine. That’s new, a bit exciting even.

And before you know it, he goes back to work on your neck. He used his knee to put a slight pressure between your legs. You cannot keep your thoughts straight for long, because the next thing that comes out of your mouth is a moan of his name.

You’ve never used that tone with his name. He, of course, loves it.

“You cannot imagine how many times I have imagined of doing this.” While you are on your way to what could be a very mind-blowing orgasm, and you are incapable of coherent sentences, your hearing is very much okay. But there is no way you heard what you just heard. Because what the fuck.

“Stop.” It’s low, a bit above a whisper. He couldn’t hear you, you conclude, so he keeps at it for a bit, but when he feels the push of your hands on his chest, he pulls away immediately.

“A-are you okay? Did I hurt you? Do you want to stop this?” For someone with the charm of a western hero he sure is insecure.

“What did you mean by that? What do you mean by ‘I imagined of doing this’?” Well of course you know what he meant. But what did that mean for you two? This isn’t something that should be happening. And you tell him just that. “This is not something we should even be doing.” Crap.

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

You might not be very fond of him, but you know him. So you know he is probably getting too much inside his head right now, so really you should have seen his next words coming.

Except this is all new and you haven’t been able to see any of this coming.

“You know what, you are right. I am sorry. I think we should leave. Actually, this is your room, so I’ll go.” You have to be imagining things, because there is no way he sounds hurt over this. Is there?

You want to ask if there’s a genuine chance he meant what he said. You really do. But you are scared of his answer. All your life he has been the kid you cannot stand, your brother’s annoying friend. But this changes everything. You have no feelings for him, that you know. But apparently there is chance he does. So what are you doing about that.

Before you can ask, you hear the door shut. In a flash, he is gone. How befitting.

And like that, once again, you are left alone. All you can hear is the boom of the speakers.

Your lifelong long was to have Tooru Oikawa out of your life. Now that you have succeeded, why do you not feel at peace.

fin.

#um hi there #i have not written in ages jesus #rip my ao3 fics i feel sad for not finishing them #haha i need help #tooruluv2kparty #haikyuu!!#haikyuu #haikyuu x y/n #haikyuu x reader #haikyuu imagines #tooru oikawa #oikawa x y/n #tooru oikawa x reader #oikawa x reader #haikyuu angst #haikyuu fluff

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arcticdementor · 3 years

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Imagine that the US was competing in a space race with some third world country, say Zambia, for whatever reason. Americans of course would have orders of magnitude more money to throw at the problem, and the most respected aerospace engineers in the world, with degrees from the best universities and publications in the top journals. Zambia would have none of this. What should our reaction be if, after a decade, Zambia had made more progress?

Obviously, it would call into question the entire field of aerospace engineering. What good were all those Google Scholar pages filled with thousands of citations, all the knowledge gained from our labs and universities, if Western science gets outcompeted by the third world?

For all that has been said about Afghanistan, no one has noticed that this is precisely what just happened to political science. The American-led coalition had countless experts with backgrounds pertaining to every part of the mission on their side: people who had done their dissertations on topics like state building, terrorism, military-civilian relations, and gender in the military. General David Petraeus, who helped sell Obama on the troop surge that made everything in Afghanistan worse, earned a PhD from Princeton and was supposedly an expert in “counterinsurgency theory.” Ashraf Ghani, the just deposed president of the country, has a PhD in anthropology from Columbia and is the co-author of a book literally called Fixing Failed States. This was his territory. It’s as if Wernher von Braun had been given all the resources in the world to run a space program and had been beaten to the moon by an African witch doctor.

…

Phil Tetlock’s work on experts is one of those things that gets a lot of attention, but still manages to be underrated. In his 2005 Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?, he found that the forecasting abilities of subject-matter experts were no better than educated laymen when it came to predicting geopolitical events and economic outcomes. As Bryan Caplan points out, we shouldn’t exaggerate the results here and provide too much fodder for populists; the questions asked were chosen for their difficulty, and the experts were being compared to laymen who nonetheless had met some threshold of education and competence.

At the same time, we shouldn’t put too little emphasis on the results either. They show that “expertise” as we understand it is largely fake. Should you listen to epidemiologists or economists when it comes to COVID-19? Conventional wisdom says “trust the experts.” The lesson of Tetlock (and the Afghanistan War), is that while you certainly shouldn’t be getting all your information from your uncle’s Facebook Wall, there is no reason to start with a strong prior that people with medical degrees know more than any intelligent person who honestly looks at the available data.

…

I think one of the most interesting articles of the COVID era was a piece called “Beware of Facts Man” by Annie Lowrey, published in The Atlantic.

…

The reaction to this piece was something along the lines of “ha ha, look at this liberal who hates facts.” But there’s a serious argument under the snark, and it’s that you should trust credentials over Facts Man and his amateurish takes. In recent days, a 2019 paper on “Epistemic Trespassing” has been making the rounds on Twitter. The theory that specialization is important is not on its face absurd, and probably strikes most people as natural. In the hard sciences and other places where social desirability bias and partisanship have less of a role to play, it’s probably a safe assumption. In fact, academia is in many ways premised on the idea, as we have experts in “labor economics,” “state capacity,” “epidemiology,” etc. instead of just having a world where we select the smartest people and tell them to work on the most important questions.

But what Tetlock did was test this hypothesis directly in the social sciences, and he found that subject-matter experts and Facts Man basically tied.

…

Interestingly, one of the best defenses of “Facts Man” during the COVID era was written by Annie Lowrey’s husband, Ezra Klein. His April 2021 piece in The New York Times showed how economist Alex Tabarrok had consistently disagreed with the medical establishment throughout the pandemic, and was always right. You have the “Credentials vs. Facts Man” debate within one elite media couple. If this was a movie they would’ve switched the genders, but since this is real life, stereotypes are confirmed and the husband and wife take the positions you would expect.

…

In the end, I don’t think my dissertation contributed much to human knowledge, making it no different than the vast majority of dissertations that have been written throughout history. The main reason is that most of the time public opinion doesn’t really matter in foreign policy. People generally aren’t paying attention, and the vast majority of decisions are made out of public sight. How many Americans know or care that North Macedonia and Montenegro joined NATO in the last few years? Most of the time, elites do what they want, influenced by their own ideological commitments and powerful lobby groups. In times of crisis, when people do pay attention, they can be manipulated pretty easily by the media or other partisan sources.

If public opinion doesn’t matter in foreign policy, why is there so much study of public opinion and foreign policy? There’s a saying in academia that “instead of measuring what we value, we value what we can measure.” It’s easy to do public opinion polls and survey experiments, as you can derive a hypothesis, get an answer, and make it look sciency in charts and graphs. To show that your results have relevance to the real world, you cite some papers that supposedly find that public opinion matters, maybe including one based on a regression showing that under very specific conditions foreign policy determined the results of an election, and maybe it’s well done and maybe not, but again, as long as you put the words together and the citations in the right format nobody has time to check any of this. The people conducting peer review on your work will be those who have already decided to study the topic, so you couldn’t find a more biased referee if you tried.

Thus, to be an IR scholar, the two main options are you can either use statistical methods that don’t work, or actually find answers to questions, but those questions are so narrow that they have no real world impact or relevance. A smaller portion of academics in the field just produce postmodern-generator style garbage, hence “feminist theories of IR.” You can also build game theoretic models that, like the statistical work in the field, are based on a thousand assumptions that are probably false and no one will ever check. The older tradition of Kennan and Mearsheimer is better and more accessible than what has come lately, but the field is moving away from that and, like a lot of things, towards scientism and identity politics.

…

At some point, I decided that if I wanted to study and understand important questions, and do so in a way that was accessible to others, I’d have a better chance outside of the academy. Sometimes people thinking about an academic career reach out to me, and ask for advice. For people who want to go into the social sciences, I always tell them not to do it. If you have something to say, take it to Substack, or CSPI, or whatever. If it’s actually important and interesting enough to get anyone’s attention, you’ll be able to find funding.

If you think your topic of interest is too esoteric to find an audience, know that my friend Razib Khan, who writes about the Mongol empire, Y-chromosomes and haplotypes and such, makes a living doing this. If you want to be an experimental physicist, this advice probably doesn’t apply, and you need lab mates, major funding sources, etc. If you just want to collect and analyze data in a way that can be done without institutional support, run away from the university system.

The main problem with academia is not just the political bias, although that’s another reason to do something else with your life. It’s the entire concept of specialization, which holds that you need some secret tools or methods to understand what we call “political science” or “sociology,” and that these fields have boundaries between them that should be respected in the first place. Quantitative methods are helpful and can be applied widely, but in learning stats there are steep diminishing returns.

…

Outside of political science, are there other fields that have their own equivalents of “African witch doctor beats von Braun to the moon” or “the Taliban beats the State Department and the Pentagon” facts to explain? Yes, and here are just a few examples.

Consider criminology. More people are studying how to keep us safe from other humans than at any other point in history. But here’s the US murder rate between 1960 and 2018, not including the large uptick since then.

So basically, after a rough couple of decades, we’re back to where we were in 1960. But we’re actually much worse, because improvements in medical technology are keeping a lot of people that would’ve died 60 years ago alive. One paper from 2002 says that the murder rate would be 5 times higher if not for medical developments since 1960. I don’t know how much to trust this, but it’s surely true that we’ve made some medical progress since that time, and doctors have been getting a lot of experience from all the shooting victims they have treated over the decades. Moreover, we’re much richer than we were in 1960, and I’m sure spending on public safety has increased. With all that, we are now about tied with where we were almost three-quarters of a century ago, a massive failure.

What about psychology? As of 2016, there were 106,000 licensed psychologists in the US. I wish I could find data to compare to previous eras, but I don’t think anyone will argue against the idea that we have more mental health professionals and research psychologists than ever before. Are we getting mentally healthier? Here’s suicides in the US from 1981 to 2016

…

What about education? I’ll just defer to Freddie deBoer’s recent post on the topic, and Scott Alexander on how absurd the whole thing is.

Maybe there have been larger cultural and economic forces that it would be unfair to blame criminology, psychology, and education for. Despite no evidence we’re getting better at fighting crime, curing mental problems, or educating children, maybe other things have happened that have outweighed our gains in knowledge. Perhaps the experts are holding up the world on their shoulders, and if we hadn’t produced so many specialists over the years, thrown so much money at them, and gotten them to produce so many peer reviews papers, we’d see Middle Ages-levels of violence all across the country and no longer even be able to teach children to read. Like an Ayn Rand novel, if you just replaced the business tycoons with those whose work has withstood peer review.

Or you can just assume that expertise in these fields is fake. Even if there are some people doing good work, either they are outnumbered by those adding nothing or even subtracting from what we know, or our newly gained understanding is not being translated into better policies. Considering the extent to which government relies on experts, if the experts with power are doing things that are not defensible given the consensus in their fields, the larger community should make this known and shun those who are getting the policy questions so wrong. As in the case of the Afghanistan War, this has not happened, and those who fail in the policy world are still well regarded in their larger intellectual community.

…

Those opposed to cancel culture have taken up the mantle of “intellectual diversity” as a heuristic, but there’s nothing valuable about the concept itself. When I look at the people I’ve come to trust, they are diverse on some measures, but extremely homogenous on others. IQ and sensitivity to cost-benefit considerations seem to me to be unambiguous goods in figuring out what is true or what should be done in a policy area. You don’t add much to your understanding of the world by finding those with low IQs who can’t do cost-benefit analysis and adding them to the conversation.

One of the clearest examples of bias in academia and how intellectual diversity can make the conversation better is the work of Lee Jussim on stereotypes. Basically, a bunch of liberal academics went around saying “Conservatives believe in differences between groups, isn’t that terrible!” Lee Jussim, as someone who is relatively moderate, came along and said “Hey, let’s check to see whether they’re true!” This story is now used to make the case for intellectual diversity in the social sciences.

Yet it seems to me that isn’t the real lesson here. Imagine if, instead of Jussim coming forward and asking whether stereotypes are accurate, Osama bin Laden had decided to become a psychologist. He’d say “The problem with your research on stereotypes is that you do not praise Allah the all merciful at the beginning of all your papers.” If you added more feminist voices, they’d say something like “This research is problematic because it’s all done by men.” Neither of these perspectives contributes all that much. You’ve made the conversation more diverse, but dumber. The problem with psychology was a very specific one, in that liberals are particularly bad at recognizing obvious facts about race and sex. So yes, in that case the field could use more conservatives, not “more intellectual diversity,” which could just as easily make the field worse as make it better. And just because political psychology could use more conservative representation when discussing stereotypes doesn’t mean those on the right always add to the discussion rather than subtract from it. As many religious Republicans oppose the idea of evolution, we don’t need the “conservative” position to come and help add a new perspective to biology.

The upshot is intellectual diversity is a red herring, usually a thinly-veiled plea for more conservatives. Nobody is arguing for more Islamists, Nazis, or flat earthers in academia, and for good reason. People should just be honest about the ways in which liberals are wrong and leave it at that.

…

The failure in Afghanistan was mind-boggling. Perhaps never in the history of warfare had there been such a resource disparity between two sides, and the US-backed government couldn’t even last through the end of the American withdrawal. One can choose to understand this failure through a broad or narrow lens. Does it only tell us something about one particular war or is it a larger indictment of American foreign policy?

The main argument of this essay is we’re not thinking big enough. The American loss should be seen as a complete discrediting of the academic understanding of “expertise,” with its reliance on narrowly focused peer reviewed publications and subject matter knowledge as the way to understand the world. Although I don’t develop the argument here, I think I could make the case that expertise isn’t just fake, it actually makes you worse off because it gives you a higher level of certainty in your own wishful thinking. The Taliban probably did better by focusing their intellectual energies on interpreting the Holy Quran and taking a pragmatic approach to how they fought the war rather than proceeding with a prepackaged theory of how to engage in nation building, which for the West conveniently involved importing its own institutions.

A discussion of the practical implications of all this, or how we move from a world of specialization to one with better elites, is also for another day. For now, I’ll just emphasize that for those thinking of choosing an academic career to make universities or the peer review system function better, my advice is don’t. The conversation is much more interesting, meaningful, and oriented towards finding truth here on the outside.

#richard hanania #substack #afghanistan #read the whole thing

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kingofthenorth49 · 2 years

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CYA SUCKER(BERG)

Approximately 16 hours left until the end, well, what I perceive as the end I guess, after all do we really know if there’s life after Farcebook?

I’m going to find out, it’s part of my goal set for 2022 to cast off the bonds of social media, at least the ones that want to control me anyway. Mark Suckerberg can kiss my ass, and yes, I’ll say that to his alien-lizard looking face if I was ever afforded the opportunity, much like the Barrington St Profanity laced brow beating of Premier Danny Williams in May 2004. There’s another asshat who feelings wouldn’t fit under their chapeau.

But I digress.

As I sit here pondering my electronic eulogy,, these words from a song come to mind.

Did I disappoint you or let you down? Should I be feeling guilty or let the judges frown? 'Cause I saw the end, before we'd begun Yes, I saw you were blind and I knew I had won

Ah James Blunt, that song has so many fond memories including an open car door on the Pennsylvania Turnpike at 50 mph and Gloria and I laughing our asses off during better days.

I chose those lyrics because they express (albeit in a different connotation than the authors’) my current sentiments regarding life and society in general at this current moment in time. Some of you will get it, the rest will shake their heads and stick them back in the sand, which is entirely their prerogative at this point. You see, we are literally almost at the point of it’s every man/woman/whatever-you-wanna-be-today for them/their/it-selves.

Political correct fact check that sentence, I don’t fucking care. The reality bus is about to take society right outta their crocs standing on the crosswalk of life and I bet a few of you will shake your head and think I’m the crazy one.

Maybe I am, I sure as hell hope so because that will mean I’m wrong, and I’ve never wanted to be more wrong in my entire life but to be 100% honest I don’t think I am and I firmly believe the next 3 to 6 months will be the most unsettling times of human habitation on this planet. We fiddled while Rome burned, we allowed false prophets to rein unchecked like teenagers babysitting their younger siblings the first time mom and dad went away for the weekend and not only did we invite a few friends over who subsequently trashed the house, we cleaned out the savings account and maxed the credit cards on hookers and cheap beer.

We gave them the car and house keys, the credit cards and bank account pin numbers, all the responsibility to create order, and then we completely failed to hold anyone to account for the last 50 years and yet we wonder “How did we get here” as the bus is teetering on the edge of Springfield gorge and we’re sitting on the dash staring at the abyss.

I used to think the movie Idiocity was a parody, not a documentary.

For those in my inner circle, you know one of my biggest hang-ups is trust. I trust very few people, I can count them on one hand if you really boil it down. There’s a reason for that, and it has everything to do with the noble lie.

One time when I was still proudly wearing the uniform of Canada’s mounted, one more than one occasion I was given information that was less than forthcoming knowing the truth full well in advance. When the persons uttering said information were clergy, elected officials, pillars of the community etc., you start to realize that everybody lies. The differentiator is the motivation behind the lie. Once you learn to look to motive each time you analyze someone’s statements you can quickly assign weigh to the veracity of the information or in other words always ask yourself “what’s in it for them”.

The other differentiator is the magnitude of the consequences of the lie as to how hard a person will hold onto it even after being confronted with evidence that shows that in fact they’ve been caught in the lie.

I’ve seen it hundreds of times, I watched the guilty cling to a story so feeble it makes Joe Brandon look like Superman and despite glaring evidence to the contrary, they won’t admit defeat.

That’s where we are today folks, we’ve ripped the mask of the swamp creature and the politician who was telling us to be afraid of the swamp creature is the one hiding inside the costume yet we refuse to acknowledge the fact that we were lied to all along.

I worry what’s about to happen when the world wakes up and realizes the magnitude of the lies they were fed, and what’s going to happen when people wake up enmass to the fact that they are currently living through the greatest man-made experiment in history, one where evil is running amok and good people will pay the price. I fear the shock that people will endure will be catastrophic to humanity, something far more sinister than what we saw at the end of World War 2.

Betrayal is one of the worst things a human being need endure, death is more merciful because it’s final. Like the denial of lies, I’ve seen the shock of betrayal first hand way to many times in my life, sometimes being the bearer of the bad news that a spouse was unfaithful, a business partner dishonest, or a family member capable of doing dark things.

Folks, we’ve been lied to on a scale never before seen in humanity and I fear it’s all going to come out in the coming weeks/months and when it does, and people start waking up to what has happened, and not only the magnitude of the deceit, but the consequences for those left behind. The food shortages we are about to see will make past famines look like a weight watchers convention. The coming crash of the financial systems will decimate families. The instability of the supply chain will make everything infinitely more difficult to produce, from power to clothing, to transporting good to market will require herculean effort.

Think I’m wrong?

I sure hope I am. I hope and pray every single day that I’m one of the tin foil wearing hat class ya’ll think I am and that the totality of the information I’ve absorbed is completely wrong. I’d be 100% good with being made a social pariah for saying the sky is falling. I’m ok with being Chicken Little. Problem is, I don’t think I am.

So today officially is my last day as a safety professional. I’ve decided to let my board certifications expire as of midnight tonight, ending that phase of my life and looking forward to the next phase as I transition to lead a company as it’s CEO. I can look back on my 30+ year career with pride, knowing I helped make the world a little bit better by keeping people safe, usually from themselves because as any safety person worth their salt knows (see what I did there???) that 90% of safety issues are related to human behavior and it’s was my job to show people the safe way.

I did my job and enjoyed it right up until September 30, 2021 when I realized people weren’t listening anymore and either I was right or wrong, but it didn’t matter anymore.

So I decided to leave and take care of the people in my circle. I decided to control the things I can control and not worry about things I can’t.

I completely get Atlas Shrugged now. Now more than ever. I just never thought I’d be living through it, and if you don’t think the irony of me becoming a CEO and moving away from society at the end of the book is lost on me, it isn’t. Actually it’s isn’t irony at all.

Is it.

I wish each and every one of you the best for 2022. I hope each of you find love, hope, and happiness in your hearts with the promise of a new year and a fresh start. Be kind to one another, and remember while we are all on the same ocean, we are all floating in different objects, from boats to life rafts, and every person you meet today could be having the worst day of their life today. Lend them an ear and a hand if you are able, but stay vigilant in the coming days as those who failed to build a home of brick will seek shelter against the storm and no amount of political correctness will prevent evil from rising up and taking what it feels entitled to.

Dark, I know. But as a person who’s spend his life grounded in the reality of life being hard and ugly, it’s the best advice I can give you.

As for me I’m looking forward to the challenges coming in 2022 on all fronts, even if they are hard times, because hard times make men (and women, and he/she/they/them) bring out the best and worst in society and that creates catalyst for significant change, change we badly need.

Be safe out there. See you in the movies.

Much love.

Jim Out.

#walkaway resist justsayno stopitnow NWO

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twentiethcenturymoviesandtv · 3 years

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The Goonies: Facets of Film

A film isn’t ready for shooting the minute the script has been written and the parts have been cast.

This is pretty obvious: there’s a lot of steps to go through before a project can fully become a film: cameras, lighting, music, sets, special effects, costumes, and tons more that have to go into piecing together a coherent narrative in a way that makes sense using editing and other filmmaking tricks, turning filmed sequences into scenes that tell a story. This is a usage of the production design of the film: using the elements at the filmmaker’s disposal in order to build the ‘film world’ and make it realistic enough that the audience buys it for a while.

This is where the production team comes in.

The job of the behind-the-scenes crew, everyone from the director to the production assistants, is to create this ‘film world’, in any way they can, using cinematography, costuming, special effects, lighting, and everything else at their disposal to convince the audience for a brief period that what they’re seeing is real. These elements, when used well, can capture the attention of an audience and turn a ‘good’ film with a solid story and characters and turn it into a cinematic classic, all through the clever use of movie magic.

And, of course, aside from looking good and being believable, these ‘facets of film’ are also used to tell the story.

These elements, cinematography, sets, etc., are used to highlight the plot and characters to the audience in the most efficient way possible. Although it’s true that some films accomplish this better than others, the best films use these ‘facets of film’ wisely, conveying information to the viewers in ways that make sense, making a film more understandable and enjoyable.

In other words: today, we’re going to talk about what makes The Goonies a movie instead of just a story, and asking ourselves one simple question:

Does The Goonies use its ‘movie magic’ well, or not?

Let’s take a look, starting with something that can seem kind of simple: cinematography.

The Goonies isn’t exactly an ‘arthouse’ film. By that, I mean that to the average movie-goer, there’s not much in artistic shots: the movie is focused on getting to the point. But that doesn’t mean it can’t look good while doing it.

Cinematography is a hugely important feature of film, one that is often overlooked. Audiences tend to underestimate the value that a camera, the ‘eyes’ into the film world, actually has: how the camera ‘looks’, and therefore allows us to look at a scene can be hugely impactful. Such is the case for The Goonies.

There are a few shots within The Goonies that everyone just remembers. The first time the kids lay eyes on the pirate ship, their final goal, is a hugely memorable moment, when the camera switches from the open-mouthed, awed expressions of the Goonies to the hugely impressive pirate ship, entirely built as a set for the film. Other shots, like the reveal of the bone-organ, or the first shot of Sloth from behind, his chained hands held up against the light, stick in people’s minds: or the simple but effective shot moving to focus on Mikey leaning over his porch railing.

These shots are certainly strong and memorable, but they also convey a lot of interesting information to the audience all at once, which is very important. In one split second, the viewers understand the magnitude of the discovery of One-Eyed Willy’s pirate ship, the terror of the dead body in the freezer, the miraculous recovery of the jewels to save the Goondocks, the relief of Mr. Walsh tearing up the contract and throwing it into the air.

These shots are designed to evoke emotions in their audience, giving us a perfect viewing point into the film’s world, allowing us to ride alongside these characters and experience what they’re experiencing: the fear, the joy, the laughter and the excitement, and the camerawork more than achieves its goal. The cinematography is effective without being showy, showing off when it needs to, and being simple and small when it fits the tone better.

A big portion of the film’s appearance is for sure in the cinematography, but honestly, there’s not much point to good camerawork if there’s nothing to shoot. Thankfully, the production design of The Goonies doesn’t disappoint.

Every setting in this film feels solid and lived in, from Mikey’s house to the beat-up old restaurant, to the caves, and, of course, the pirate ship. Richard Donner and Steven Spielberg (Director and producer of The Goonies, respectively) had, at this point, a bit of experience with the special effects department, and it shows in the film’s final look. Spielberg’s iconic Indiana Jones style sets and effects are echoed here in the cave sequences, with booby traps, skeletons, and the claustrophobic, dirty caverns convincing the audience effortlessly of their authenticity.

The entire film is a visual delight, with the production design clearly putting forth a lot of effort into making the movie look good, from the pirate ship to the prosthetics on John Matuszak to bring Sloth to life.

Despite the magnificent sets, there isn’t actually much in ‘visual effects’ in the film itself (especially once the octopus scene was cut), besides the prosthetic effects used for Sloth (very impressive in their own right). There are a few notable scenes: the floor dropping out from underneath Mouth (achieved by attaching a cable to Corey Feldman’s belt and collapsing the set floor underneath) being one of the more impressive of the various Rube Goldberg booby-trap setups throughout the entire film, and the cave collapsing prove to be a few of the most visually impressive effects in the entire film, furthering the story along and making it look believable.

There are other important visual things too: the costumes on the characters (Brand’s exercise wear, Data’s big, baggy trench coat with his inventions underneath, Mikey’s jean-jacket, Mouth’s Purple Rain t-shirt and Chunk’s Hawaiian shirt) all serve as legitimately distinct clues to tell kids apart in clumped together shots, but also works well as character building, coding in different outfits that match personalities, and even the props that kids have with them are hugely telling. These include Mikey’s inhaler, Mouth’s comb, and, of course, Data’s inventions, all elements that immediately tell the audience something about their personality without having to come out and say it in words.

In short, the visual storytelling of The Goonies is pretty darn competent.

But the visuals can only do so much.

The score of The Goonies (by Dave Grusin) works perfectly to form the backbone of every scene, from the merry tune that plays over Data’s inventions to the thrilling soundtrack that plays over the Fratellis’ escape at the beginning of the film. Every scene hits its mark thanks in no small part to the music in the background: reflecting character emotions and putting the audience right in with them, emphasizing huge moments like One-Eyed Willy’s pirate ship and playing up to smaller scenes, like the wishing well.

It also serves perfectly to underline what’s really important: the performances.

There’s more to a great movie production than sets, special effects and music. In the end, no matter how impressive, the production of a film doesn’t really amount to anything if the characters aren’t believable. The movie really rests on the shoulders of the performers: it’s on the actors to try to sell not only their surroundings and story, but the characters themselves, making an audience buy into the fact that they are real, and going through these experiences.

In The Goonies?

The entire cast steps up to the plate.

Sean Astin’s performance as Mikey is 100% wholehearted and earnest, genuine and inspiring. He is believable as the leader, and as a child with big dreams and big ideas, without being so wide-eyed as to be unrealistic, with a realistic way of talking that siblings around the world recognize. Jeff Cohen as Chunk is larger than life, over-the-top for every moment of screen time, constantly energetic in both terror and excitement, convincingly portraying a kid who’s scared out of his mind, but sticks it through for the sake of his friends. Ke Huy Quan easily persuades an audience of Data’s intelligence and charm, quirky behavior lining up with a ‘boy genius gadgeteer’ personality that is tempered with moments of irritation and frustration, as well as a gutsy streak that gets a little overshadowed by the antics of the others around him. Corey Feldman as Mouth is similarly believable as a snarky kid with too much attitude. Despite every character’s flaws, each actor manages to make each performance overall likeable and charming. Thankfully, this doesn’t stop with the kids.

Josh Brolin is believably exhausted and somewhere between childish and grown-up as Mikey’s older brother, Brand, pulling off an even mix that makes him believably grounded, but still able to be swept up in the adventure. Kerri Green as Andy isn’t given a lot to do, but she’s still entertaining and charming with the material given to her, much like Martha Plimpton as Stef, who delivers her snarky, sarcastic dialogue extremely well.

The heroes aren’t the only ones turning in great performances. Anne Ramsey is incredibly, and memorably, threatening as Mama Fratelli, and Robert Davi and Joe Pantoliano are entertainingly intimidating as Jake and Francis Fratelli, bickering amongst each other and getting smacked around with utmost believability, despite the ridiculousness of the situation. John Matuszak is wonderful underneath the prosthetics as Sloth, who, while never a villain, doesn’t officially become a hero until further into the film. Aside from these, the movie is full of little performances from other players, and everyone fills their part remarkably well.

Every character in The Goonies comes across exactly as they should: as characters in a kid’s adventure story. Each performance is perfectly suited to each character: not at all subtle, but energetic and entertaining. They are kids on a mission, with complete sincerity and consistency in their performances that help the audience to pretend that this is all real.

These performances are the cincher, the final step, the part that people remember and the element that solidifies this film as a family classic, continuing to entertain people over thirty years later.

In short? With people like Richard Donner and Steven Spieberg working behind the scenes, it’s not much of a surprise that The Goonies was an example of efficient filmmaking and visual storytelling. It’s a fast paced adventure story, a roller-coaster on film designed to take the audience along for the ride without asking any questions, and in that, it greatly succeeds.

The Goonies seemed destined for greatness from the moment it first released, with all of its ‘facets of filmmaking’ falling into place to create the perfect family adventure film, but, of course, that wasn’t an accident. Every movie is the result of a lot of hard work from a lot of different people, and The Goonies is no exception.

Thank you guys so much for reading! Join us next time where we’re going to be discussing the behind-the-scenes story of The Goonies in ‘Facets of Filmmaking’. I hope to see you there!

#The Goonies #The Goonies 1985 #1985 #80s #Film #Movies #PG #Adventure #Comedy #Family #Sean Astin #Josh Brolin #Jeff Cohen #Corey Feldman #Kerri Green #Martha Plimpton #Ke Huy Quan #Richard Donner

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dystopian-penguin · 4 years

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Regicide is a two-person job - Chapter one

[Has anyone asked for a mashup between an Royalty AU and a Boarding School AU? No? Well I did one anyway.

While I actually know where I’m going with this (which is rare for writers) I am not so sure if I’m gonna go anywhere with this at all (which is decidedly more common for writers). Either way, here’s an intro/sneak-peak into an idea that has been sitting in my folder for way too long.]

Lena Luthor was not having a good day.

It would have been unnecessarily overdramatic to say it had cracked even her Top 10 Worst Days, but then again, the full repercussions of it hadn’t made themselves fully known yet. Although, she supposed being forced to move halfway across the globe fit the “life-changing repercussions” category, and Lena had no possible method to ever measure all of those.

It didn’t matter. She was going to endure the next two years of her life by making everyone else’s a living hell, as she had always done. Besides, she doubted her antics would make her last very long in one of the most well secured campuses in the world, and when she showed up back home in a couple of months after getting (very politely) expelled it would be her turn to laugh in Lilian’s face. And her stepmother wouldn’t even be able to fully act on her rage without tipping off any investors that the Luthors were many orders of magnitude bellow “less than perfect” as a family.

Lena stretched lazily and put her feet on the table, sparing a passing glance at the picturesque snow-covered mountain ranges passing by thousands of feet bellow her. Deciding that she needed a well-rested mind in order to face the many small battles that were sure to occur throughout the day, she picked up her phone to change to a more sleep-friendly playlist. As she muted her music to scroll through her options, she heard Lilian and Lex’s hushed tones coming from the front of the jet.

“…what my contacts say about her”.

Lilian clicked her tongue at that at that. “I hardly think a girl with that much security actually lives up to these rumors. Maybe they’re trying for a more approachable thought-the-grapevines PR strategy,” she answered.

“She does fit the ditzy dumb blonde type, doesn’t she?” Lex said.

Lilian laughed at that. The type of laughter only Lex was ever really allowed to witness. Lena continued through the motions of picking a sleeping playlist and making herself comfortable enough for a nap, feeling slightly bad for whoever was the focus on their conversation. Her brother and Lilian could be quite vicious about their business partners when they were left alone to gossip, and not exactly fully committed to facts. Not that Lena gave a fuck of course. She had stirred up quite a few nasty rumors about her peers herself when bored.

“That will certainly come in handy for the company in a few years’ time, should it be true,” her bother continued. “Although I do personally believe a rebellious youth would have been even better to our interests than an idiotic leader. Either way, Lena dearest appears to be yet one more problem for the Kryptonian Secret Service now”.

Wait, what?

Lena continued to act as if her earbuds hadn’t been muted and curled on herself as if asleep. It had been bad enough to pull her out of her previous boarding school and haul her ass across the globe overnight and without warning. Had Lilian and Lex really concocted even more unpleasant surprises for her day?

What was she thinking, of course they had.

“Oh, I am sure she will be a problem either way, no matter what the other girl really is like” Lilian dismissed. There was a pause, and Lena heard the clink of a teacup against its plate. “Might I enquire what makes you so keen on believing that particular source this time?”

“For the same reasons you picked this particular academy to exile her to, mother dear”.

Another pause, longer this time, then Lilian answered in a tone of subdued irritation.

“So, he has contacted you as well. I can’t say I’m surprised.”

“Oh, I can. What a stupid individual that was. But no matter, it has been dealt with,” Lex chuckled. “Unless you had any other pending business with him?”

Oh great, thought Lena. She was now once privy to the answers to what is without a doubt yet another “mysterious missing person case” that would make its rounds on Youtube conspiracy videos in a few years. If she didn’t know any better, she would think her brother planned his assassinations with the narrative of those videos already in mind.

And her family wondered why she was half-buzzed all the time.

Lilian must have made a dismissive hand gesture because Lex continued, “Good then, so we can stop these charades and discuss what we actually need to. Mother, I must admit, as much as the rest of this ordeal has been perversely well crafted, I believe sending her directly to that room might be a liability.”

“Oh please. Princess Kara might be a pretty face, but even Lena isn’t that stupid.”

Had Lena’s chair been facing them her ruse would have been over at that moment, as her eyes went wide. Just what on Earth were these two planning now? Lex’s black-market deals and criminal business practices were one thing. Every big corporation out in their happy little capitalistic dystopian society was guilty of that, no matter how much they liked to give flak to the Luthors exclusively. “That’s just good business,” as Lionel used to say.

But toying with Kryptonian royalty was way above even Lex’s repertoire, especially after their last… security breach, so to speak. Had her brother really grown as arrogant as to think he could walk in the same circles as a family thousands of years old and come out unscathed? That level of hubris spoke of Lillian’s intelligence, but her brother…

From a logical standpoint, Lena knew she would have to run into Princess Kara at some point during her (hopefully brief) stay in that blasted Royal Academy. The girl would have to be undoubtedly the hottest shit in that school, being the first in line to an empire and all. Lena also expected to be asked for some sort of report on her for Lex, so it’s not like she had exactly been planning on ignoring her existence entirely, as much as the prissy playboy types exhausted her to no end.

Okay, if Lena was being completely honest with herself, even she was curious about what the princess was really like.

She had met all kinds of celebrities and dignitaries in her short 16 years of life, but she had never met anyone from the only true royalty left in the world. And Lena knew even Lex had met the late King Zor-El only once, and as a child.

It was a silly guilty pleasure, but one that she was certain she wasn’t alone in. There was just something about the Kryptonian royalty in particular that made them seem like truly god-chosen and regal, and the whole world followed them like their own private novela. Rationally, Lena knew that “something” was, simply put, the best motherfucking public relations company in the world. One that not even the Luthors had enough money or sway to buy. She knew because they had tried. But there was still some air of magic and old-world nostalgia surrounding the very small family, and as much as it killed Lena to admit, she was as susceptible to that trap as the general public.

Even the super-rich are raised on Disney princess movies, after all.

Lena was pulled out of her reverie by Lex openly laughing and chastised herself for becoming so easily distracted at the mere mention of Princess Kara.

“Why, mother, that must have been the biggest compliment I’ve ever seen you pay her. I wasn’t referring to Lena’s dalliances, however”.

“Oh? Weren’t you?” Lilian countered with fake interest. There were more noises from the expensive porcelain set before he answered.

“Ok maybe I was a little bit,” he said bashfully, in a tone betraying just a sliver of vulnerability, like a little kid being caught with the cookie jar. A tone that Lena as a child used to think it was just for her. “But regardless,” he continued, “putting Lena in her room is simply too close. Even for whatever torture you have planned for her-“

“And here was I thinking I had made pretty obvious that sharing a room was part of her punishment,” Lilian interrupted.

Oh.

Oh, what the flying fuck?

Lena was being forced into a sharing a bedroom? Oh, that shit was low, so low. Even for Lilian.

“It is simply too close, mother” Lex repeated incisively, before Lena could focus into her seething rage any further. “She is to be there simply to observe and report, nothing else. Engaging directly with Kryptonian royalty is a risk we can’t afford to take, not with Lena of all people at the helm of the matter.”

Well, thanks for the vote of confidence, Lex.

“Well I beg to differ, darling. With the level of security and scrutiny that room is subjected to, there will be absolutely nothing Lena will get past us this time.”

“And therein lies the risk, mother. The KSS simply cannot be allowed this close to Lena. It is bad enough to need a background check to just enter the grounds of the damn school.”

“I admit the KSS might be a bit of an… overkill to our problem-”

“To your problem. I could not care less what Lena gets herself into, and especially not in such an easily bribable school.”

Lena heard Lilian open her mouth as to reply, but what followed were a few seconds of silence.

“Oh, Lex. Don’t tell me this is about you trying to protect her?” she finally said.

There was a muted silence, and Lena tried to keep her heart in a normal rhythm. Lex hadn’t really given much of a fuck about her for a few years now, there was no use getting her hopes up that he had ever been the brother he acted like when they were kids.

“Yes,” he answered more curtly than he usually was with his mother. Lilian must have had a similar expression of utter disbelief as Lena, because Lex felt the need to continue. “There are… details of this that you are not aware of, mother, no matter how much you believe to have bribed that man. But a private jet, of all places, is not the right setting for this discussion, yes?”

There were more clinks that sounded way rougher than their expensive 17th century porcelain should be handled like, and Lena was suddenly reminded of her brother’s secret (and completely pathetic, considering the family’s business) fear of planes. She wished she could say her heart didn’t feel a bit tighter with that knowledge resurfacing in her brain, but Lena was quite pathetic herself. Especially when she came to Lex.

Her brother’s expression must have put an end to the discussion, because Lena waited completely still for a long time but there had been no more words from either of them. But that suited her just the same. Deciding to give her fury towards Lillian proper attention on a later time, she decided to focus on the major bits of information she was able to acquire. Whatever it was this family had been planning to put her through this time, at least now she had an inkling of what it was. And a name. And with that name came a lead, and the very rare possibility of actually preparing herself psychologically to one of Lilian’s sadistic decisions over her life. Lena checked the time on her phone and found out she had roughly three hours for that. Four, if she counted the car ride between the private airstrip and the school.

She would need to google the shit out of Kara Zor-El.

#supergirl #supercorp #lena luthor #doesnt feel exactly right to tag kara just yet lol #fic #my writting

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saturnis777 · 3 years

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The Six Million Dollar Anime Girl

As a fan of anime we must look at both sides of the coin, in most anime the people depicted as main characters are above average in the gold and silver department. Lets start naming a few magical girl franchises and we will see a clear trend!

North American audiences probably never gave much contemplation on the economic class that Sailor Moon belongs too. To the average North American viewer, Usagi and company were typical middle class, living in typical homes in a seemingly average neighborhood. However, if you know anything about Tokyo, you’d realize Usagi and the other Sailor Scouts are pretty well off. Every one of the five main characters live in the Juuban district in Tokyo, which is a very affluent area.

On top of that Haruka Tenou said her monthly rent was a million yen which works out to 10 thousand dollars. Michiru Kaiou had her own apartment which presumably had similar if not higher rent, on top of that she owned a giant palace outside of town, and rode in a helicopter to and from school. Yeah that's what you call normal middle class living, yeah right, give me a break! And don't even get me started on Dr Tomoe, and the multi billion dollar Mugen Academy Corporation that he founded.

North American viewers who watch Cardcaptor Sakura think Sakura is a typical middle class girl with a somewhat wealthy friend Tomoyo Daidouji. Well if you pay attention to the details you will realize she lives in an extremely affluent fictional district called Tomoeda. just one look at the schools architecture, as well as the area in general reveals that Sakura Kinomoto is borderline wealthy by any standard. However it gets even better it turns out she inherits her grandfathers fortune witch includes a giant five story mansion with servants to boot. So much for middle class living, we are talking 100 wealthiest people on earth material, and that's just from the story who knows what corporation Sakura's grandfather owns to amass such wealth?

Many Americans when they see Saint Seiya think that Saiori Kido lives in an upper middle class home, with a butler working out of devotion for her. Actually Saiori Kido is extremely wealthy, in fact if she were in this world she would be the wealthiest woman by far, and that's even before she awakened as the Goddess Athena.

Now with this scale set lets scroll down the list of magical girls.

The plus signs in the following are not coincidence they are the sub orders of magnitude within each corresponding class.

Billionaire

Billionaire+ greater x10

Billionaire++ much greater x100

Billionaire+++ massively greater x1000

Example billionaire +++ is a potential trillionaire.

Note the cheeky term Zillionaire refers to fictional characters with untold wealth.

.................................................

Usagi Tsukino... Upper Middle Class+

Usagi Tsukino's ascension to Neo-Queen Serenity Zillionaire+++

.................................................

Saiori Kido... Billionaire+

Saiori Kido's ascension to Goddess Athena... Zillionaire++

.................................................

Tomoyo Daidouji in Cardcaptor... Billionaire+

Tomoyo Daidouji in Tsubasa... Billionaire+++

.................................................

Sakura Kinomoto... Billionaire+

Michiru Kaiou... Billionaire+

Haruka Tenou... Millionaire+++

Ami Mizuno... Upper Middle Class

Rei Hino... Upper Middle Class

Minako Aino... Upper Middle Class+

Makoto Kino... Middle Class+

Amilia Will Saillune... Billionaire++

Bulma Briefs... Billionaire

Hotaru Tomoe... Billionaire+

Snow White... Billionaire+

Ice Queen Elsa... Billionaire+

Queen Anna of Arendelle... Billionaire+

Little Mermaid Ariel... Billionaire++

Alice in Wonderland... Millionaire++

Sleeping Beauty... Billionaire+++

Akiho Shinomoto... Millionaire+

Princess Kairi... Millionaire+

Princess Zelda... Billionaire+++

Barbie... Millionaire++

Lina Inverse... Middle Class+

The less than 0.000001% of humanity gets most of the Anime glory.

I need not even go on with this list its pathetic, one thing i can plug Dragon Ball Z on is at least Son Goku wasn't rich, nor was he an elite saiyan ether, he was a commoner.

Undoubtedly the wealthiest of all these magical princesses was Usagi Tsukino, when she became Neo-Queen Serenity and inherited the literal universe of Silver Millennium. The second closest was Saiori Kido who as Athena ruled the sanctuary dimension.

Yes that’s Queen Serenity’s crystal palace with spires towering several miles into the sky, it totally dwarfs all the skyscrapers around it.

Heck even Scrooge McDuck incarnate wasn't that rich. The true wealth of Tomoyo Daidouji is unknown, but the fact her future self is depicted running a future global corporation indicates she is at least Scrooge McDuck level, probably higher. Bulma Briefs would rank the same level as Princess Tomoyo, and come to think of it there was a scene where Bulma said to Vegeta, if your the Prince than that makes me the Princess.

The little mermaid is the same thing, you can't just be a mermaid, no its got to be the richest mermaid in all the seven seas.

Virtually all the magic girls are spoon fed from golden platters, with one exception to this rule.

There's only one magical girl out of all the listed characters that is based on a somewhat typical common girl, and that is Lina Inverse, the anti-heroine of the Slayers Anime.

Lina Inverse lived with her two parents and sister who ran a grocery store in a small town called Zephilia. Out of all the magic girls I have ever seen in my life, Lina Inverse is the only one who is not borne of some royal lineage.

To simplify matters Lina Inverse is the only staring character I know of that isn't dirty, filthy rich.

However even Lina Inverse was depicted with a repeating fixation on becoming a wealthy princess that repeated throughout the series. Not only that there are several times where Lina refuses to help people unless they pay her lots of gold coins, one of the jokes of the series was she rarely got her reward. But still the fact she only offered to help oppressed people if they gave her money is kinda rotten even for a comedy based anime.

On top of that one of the main villains in the story bent on ruling the world turns out to be a peasant living in a garden shed, or more precisely a run down falling apart old shed.

Yep that's the headquarters of the Zein, an organization created by Galev and his sole underling Zahhard.

Well to be fair I will give the slayers a pass on this one, especially considering the entire show is comedy based, and doesn't knock people by class. Lina is Lina after all and regardless what class one may be she will deck them if they dare make fun of her.

However I will not be giving any passes to Sailor Moon, Kingdom Hearts, Cardcaptor Sakura, Saint Seiya, Tsubasa Chronicle, and the infamous Disney Princess Movies. They all blatantly program children with princess like delusions of grandeur, and in my opinion that is not cool in any way.

You will be surprised to learn all the girls I listed above are called princess, not just the Disney characters. To me that is crystal clear proof of the subliminal princess agenda! Its very in the face what is going on here, it's clear this whole princess/wealthy girl theme is a subtle program.

I haft to ask the question is this the magical girl genre, or is it the wealthy girl genre? I'm asking this question because it kinda looks like the latter to me, and that is kinda sad.

Kind of like Batman became a hero because he was a billionaire and had the resources to build himself a sleeked down inspector gadget suit. What kind of lessons are they setting for kids, seriously what kind of role models are these magical girl themes creating?

Seriously why can't they feature ordinary characters, why do they all haft to be royalty, and billionaires.

They are almost all Scrooge McDuck level or higher, needless to say these are totally unrealistic goals for children.

Talk about ten minutes to ruining ones childhood dreams, you ether haft to be extremely aristocratic, or in some cases not even human to be a magical girl. I call it monarch butterfly syndrome, only those born in certain lineage make it in this world.

Make no mistake this is a subliminal class system aimed at our children, and its happening all across the board. What is the message that children receive watching these shows, is it good morality, doing the right thing, or is the message to love money?

One last thing before I sign off this blog post, what if the magical powers they are depicting are actually something else entirely? What if its trans humanism and only the super rich could afford this technology upgrade?

The image above is Hotaru Tomoe after being turned into a cyborg by her father Professor Tomoe. There are claims she is the only cyborg in Sailor Moon, but how do we know for sure, they even said they originally intended for Ami Mizuno to be a cyborg. Its possible all the sailor senshi were biologically enhanced super soldiers. One of the ways to tell was when Hotaru Tomoe experienced pain from her body rejecting the enhancements. There are scenes in the new Cardcaptor Sakura Clear Card Hen show depicting Sakura passing out for no apparent reason, and going through all the symptoms Hotaru Tomoe did. In Sailor Moon Crystal there is a scene where Usagi Tsukino collapses to the ground and says she feels like her body is being ripped apart. I don’t know are these subliminal hints that something sinister is going on? Throughout Kingdom Hearts Roxas is often depicted holding his head in anguish, and Sora was once in a strange pod to allegedly put his memories back together, was it that or did they augment him somehow? The very first people that will be augmented with transhuman technology will be wealthy people, most likely ones near death like Hotaru Tomoe who was injured in a serious lab accident. Then it will spread to all wealthy children being upgraded, and eventually it will trickle down to a fair sized percentage of human beings. Imagine an augmented person being capable of downloading a library worth of books into their digitized brain in the span if a few weeks.

Could you imagine a class of people with limitless knowledge and nigh immortality? Anyone who isn’t augmented with this nano tech serum will be totally obsolete, there will be no place in society for them. This is the technological singularity they are trying to create for us. If this agenda transpires in the following decades the gap between rich, and poor will become totally insurmountable with aristocratic magical people with godlike powers and several thousand year lifespan ruling over the short lived plebs.

You see that in many Disney movies where the prince and princess are tall and beautiful well everyone else is short and ugly. Yeah some of it is due to animators not wasting time on side characters, however there is a clear gap between two kinds of people.

That is exactly what the fallen angel archons would like to manifest, the return of the gods to lord it over the pawns like something out of hunger games, or game of thrones. Because lets face it the ultimate plan is the total borgification of humanity. Is this the reason why the magical girls with the exception of Lina Inverse all have magical tools, pens, wands, and staffs. Is this the real reason why they are all extremely wealthy? Are they depicting our future, one in which humanity splits into two factions one being a Star Trek civilization, and the other a class of subservient plebeians?

If you think getting augmented is cool maybe the following image will change your mind.

The title for this episode of Cardcaptor is the threads that bind, its an episode where Eriol Hiiragizawa literally turns Syaoran Li into a puppet, as if he were playing Geppetto the puppet master. If you understand anything about augmentation technology this is exactly what can, and most certainly will happen to those who take the upgrade. That’s how a hive mind will work, in the end there will be a collective of augmented elite living in the cities whereas everyone else is banished from society. The choice will most likely be take the upgrade, or hit the road Jack and don’t you ever come back.

You even see that depicted in the bible where it describes one group of people deemed righteous living in a city with streets of gold, and outside the city lived the dogs, sorcerers, liars and moral outcasts.

I don't know about you but that is trans humanism based on a social credit score, if you obey the mandates you live in paradise, if you disobey you are banished from society.

That is the true new world order being laid out for all to see, and don't forget any tyrant can call themselves righteous, and even the borg in Star Trek believed their collective was 100% pure perfection.

Lastly the only place where we see streets paved with gold are the connections on a computer chip, that is the yellow brick road, and the Wizard of Oz was a man operating a holographic machine, and don't forget that.

Really something when you realize they depicted a hologram being used to control people back in 1939, and they even depict the fog, another thing that can be used to enhance holographic projection, the steam makes a screen with which to reflect the image upon. Many people don't know but it requires steam, or some kind of glass screen to project a 3D hologram upon.

It will take a whole post just to touch base on the subliminal trans humanist ideals portrayed in anime and comic books. However there's one thing i will say right now, they cannot transform people into superheroes, technology cannot turn people into Sailor Senshi, technology cannot make you a Card Captor, and technology can’t make you Spiderman, Batman, Superman, Captain America, Iron Man, Green Lantern, etc. Life doesn’t work like that, the only thing that combining technology with human beings will do is create the borg, and that is not cool by any standard. The only two things they are promoting right now is the rich magical girl, and transhuman agendas. They did try the rich boy thing before with Richie Rich but it didn’t seem to catch on, not like the princess programing. Back when I was still into religion i heard several preachers say to the women your princesses, your daughters of the great king. To me this is further enforcing the princess program that starts in kindergarten, and goes on into the teen years with anime, and disney movies.

Oh i forgot there were two disney princesses that started out as commoners, however in the end its still part of the princess spell. Still i put this in here to correct the record.

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douchebagbrainwaves · 3 years

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YOU GUYS I JUST THOUGHT OF THIS

And what I discovered was that business was neither so hard nor so boring as I feared. More remarkable still, he's stayed interesting for 30 years. That turns out to have selfish advantages.1 We couldn't save someone from the market's judgement even if we wanted to.2 Or more precisely, when they release more code. This doesn't seem to be working hard enough.3 But Yahoo treated programming as a commodity. And if you don't, you're in the crosshairs of whoever does. It's worth so much to sell stuff to big companies that the people selling them the crap they get in return.

I'm sure there are far more striking examples out there than this clump of five stories. This was slightly embarrassing at the time. An idea for a startup. Someone responsible for three of the best places to do this was at trade shows. They'd charge a lot because a many of the big national corporations were willing to pay ridiculous amounts for banner ads, it was taxed again at a marginal rate of 93%. Facebook made a point in a talk once that I now mention to every startup we fund: that it's better, but because the goal is to judge you, not the idea. Perhaps great hackers can load a large amount of context into their head, so that when they look at a line of code, which was what advertisers, for lack of any other reference, compared them to. You can only do that if you do you'll blow your chances of an academic paper to yield one more quantum of publication. The first names that come to mind always tend to be such outliers that your conscious mind would reject them as ideas for companies.4 The founders all learned to do every job in the company. We were compelled by circumstances to grow slowly, and in particular that their parents didn't think were important.

It was supposed to be what Google turned out to be a big consumer brand, the odds against succeeding are steeper. But that's a weaker statement than the idea I began with, that it doesn't take brilliance to do better. Realizing it does more than make you feel a little better about forgetting, though. I could see them thinking that we didn't count for much. Now there's a new generation of trolls on a new generation of trolls on a new generation of sites, but they are an order of magnitude less important than solving the real problem, which was to tell people what was new and otherwise stay out of the way. I'd use to describe the atmos. But babysitting this process was misleadingly narrow: deregulation. Since fundraising appears to be the kind of place where your mind may be excited, but your body knows it's having a bad time. But they're not so advanced as they think; obviously they still view office space as a badge of rank. And so American software and movies are malleable mediums. The result of that miscalculation was an explosion of inexpensive PC clones.

It's a valuable source of metaphors for almost any kind of work.5 The project may even grow into a startup. I've met. Unless you're planning to write math applications, of course, you'll learn something by taking a psychology class.6 Now it's Wepay's. In fact consumers never really were paying for content, and publishers weren't really selling it either. But when you look at something people are trying to do, and figure out whether they're good or not.

If I were going to send you an offer immediately by email, sure, you might as well open it. In the late nineties you could get the right people. How can it be, visitors must wonder.7 Rich people don't want to live, but it's hard to compare their work. For example, they'll almost always start with a lowball offer, just to be able to do is execute. Now that so many news articles are online, I suspect you could find a similar pattern for most trend stories placed by PR firms. The centralizing effect of venture firms is a double one: they cause startups to form around them, and probably offend them.

It applies way less than most people realize. Google's secret weapon was simply that they understood search.8 But I don't know. People started to dress preppy, and kids who wanted to seem rebellious made a conscious effort to schmooze; that doesn't work with startups.9 And who knows, maybe their offer will be surprisingly high. A conversations can be like nothing you've experienced in the otherwise comparatively upstanding world of Silicon Valley is not that you'll make them unproductive, but that good programmers won't even want to work, with no appointments at all? Having great hackers is not, by itself, enough to make a winning product. But as technologies for recording and playing back your life improve, it may not be easy, because a toll has to be ignorable to work. You may wonder how much to tell VCs. Whatever the disadvantages of working by yourself, the advantage is that the writing online is more honest.

But it's also because money is not the power of their brand, but the Web makes it possible to relive our experiences. Apple vs Microsoft. I'm sorry to treat Larry and Sergey did then. It's one of the 10 worst spammers. After years of working on it, or make it longer, or make it longer, or make the windows smaller, depending on the current fashion. If variation in productivity. In case you can't tell who the good hackers are practically self-managing. Before you consummate a startup, ask everyone about their previous IP history. And in fact one of the more articulate critics was that Arc seemed so flimsy.10

Notes

Daniels, Robert V. Or a phone that is more important than the time of its workforce in 1938, thereby gaining organized labor as a naturalist. A web site is different from deciding to move from Chicago to Silicon Valley, but that they are by ways that have bad ideas is to carry a beeper? Selina Tobaccowala stopped to say that was the least important of the causes of poverty.

Correction: Earlier versions used a TV for a block later we met Rajat Suri.

Incidentally, tax rates were highest: 14.

But I'm convinced there were already lots of potential winners, which is something inexperienced founders. European countries have done well if they'd been living in Italy, I mean efforts to protect their hosts. They hate their bread and butter cases. Trevor Blackwell, who adds the cost of writing software.

The original edition contained a few old professors in Palo Alto. Ii.

Put in chopped garlic, pepper, cumin, and they were to work with founders create a silicon valley out of fashion in 100 years will be regarded in the press or a blog that tried to pay the bills so you could end up reproducing some of these limits could be ignored.

In general, spams are more repetitive than regular email. 107.

Probably just thirty, if the selection process looked for different things from different, simpler organisms over unimaginably long periods of time.

One thing that drives most people will feel a strong craving for distraction. But scholars seem to want to start startups who otherwise wouldn't have.

Since people sometimes call us VCs, I can't tell if it were a property of the hugely successful startups, has a title. Unless we mass produce social customs. If they were supposed to be good at generating your own?

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knightotoc · 4 years

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Shower thoughts!

Part 1: A Cool Thing I Thought Of

If you watch the SW movies 1-2-3-4-5-6, you get the story of Anakin and healing from love. If you watch the SW movies 4-5-6-1-2-3, you get the story of Obi Wan and pain from love.

In the finales, they both break their rules for love and disgust -- Anakin for love of Luke and disgust of Palpatine and himself -- Obi Wan for love and disgust of Anakin. These two measure everything by obedience to a code (Obi Wan) or a person (Anakin), but in the end their feelings are stronger than their obedience.

1-6 lead up to the revelation that Anakin is "good" or at least a luminous being, while 4-6,1-3 lead up to the revelation that Obi Wan is ordinary, controlled by worldly feelings, crude matter.

If you watch TPM first, then Qui Gon's death mirrors Anakin's at the end of the story -- they both wanted to train someone (kid Anakin to be a Jedi, Leia to be a Sith) and their final thoughts are of that person.

If you watch TPM fourth, then Qui Gon's death mirrors Obi Wan's at the beginning of the story -- they become ancillary to the swirling destinies of the Skywalkers, who they love, but who are separate from them. Then two movies later, Obi Wan gets the last word -- his story and his character revelation is equally important and structurally sound as Anakin's.

The most baffling and brilliant musical decision in SW is that credits of 3 end with the Medal Theme from 4. Who deserves a medal now?! Nobody! Or -- everybody? What is a medal? What is a victory? In 4, Obi Wan loses the duel, but that must have felt better than his victories in 1 and 3. Anakin loses every finale lightsaber duel he has (2, 3, 6) except 5, which was, uh, to put it lightly, the wrong thing to do.

If you watch the films in chronological order, the Medal Theme at the credits of 3 mocks the failures of the Jedi and the Senate. If you watch the films in the order they were released, the Medal Theme mirrors the first and last credits. If you consider the overwhelming disconnect between victory and happiness in these movies, especially Obi Wan on Mustafar, the Medal Theme becomes a celebration not of victory but of humanity, and of love in all its complexity and power.

(All 3 interpretations make me cry like a baby.)

Part 2: Karen's "Solo" Conspiracy Board

7, 8, and 9 continue the story of Anakin inasmuch as they pit his grandson against his lightsaber, his worldliness vs his otherworldliness ... or something like that. They are driven by the importance of Skywalkerness, either to disrupt it (8) or justify it (9). But I feel like the magnitude and beauty of Obi Wan's arc, and the way it mirrors his Padawan's if you flip the first two trilogies around, already disrupts it.

Meanwhile Rogue One and Solo, whose very titles are synonyms for loneliness, tell the twin stories of losing your family by force (R1), and cutting yourself off from them on purpose (Solo). In both cases, these two different ways are how each hero loses both their birth families (Galen and Lyra; Han's family) and their circles of friends (Jyn's squad; Tobias and Qi'ra).

So...

What's the right order? The movies have nearly doubled.

If you watch them 1-2-3-Solo-R1-4-5-6-7-8-9, you get this narrative of Skywalkerness and family that gets questioned throughout until it caves in on itself in the disappointing 9. Luke's arc is the epic throughline.

If you watch them 4-5-6-1-2-3-7-R1-8-Solo-9, you can kind of see past this Skywalkerness to something more interesting. You get a couple more instances of tonal consistency: 3 sets up 7 better than 6 does (tonally), because we don't have any movie that shows how the First Order took over. 8 and Solo go together really well in my opinion, with all the deaths, the morally gray desperate people, the revolution girls L3 and Rose, Rey slamming the brain-door on Kylo mirroring Qi'ra flying the yacht away from Han, and the message that families don't always belong together. In this order, Luke's arc is more chopped-up...maybe 3PO is the throughline?

I feel like Solo might be the best movie to watch before 9 because it also has so many Easter Eggs, it's also kinda goofy and cynical, and you can spend 9 thinking about a Solo sequel with more Maul rather than paying attention to 9, which it doesn't want you to do.

I like that SW is always released out of order; I like the two ways of tracking it. I think they're supposed to both exist, especially now that there are too many movies to ever possibly watch together. I really only ever watch one at a time.

#star wars #star wars movies #tros critical #(sort of)#anakin skywalker #obi wan kenobi #i love star wars #sw movie order #i put this on fb a long long time ago #but now i have a tumblr so hello :)

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