#and to those of you compiling screenshots where they stand next to each other
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The alluring charm of Henry Cavill - Chapter 10
Summary: After the livestream, Henry is trying to move on from this. However, that is harder than it seems.
Henry Cavill x Adelaide Park (ofc)
Wordcount: 4.4k
Warnings: None
A/N: The formatting of this chapter is a bit different than usual, but I felt this would be the best way to describe Henry’s feelings.
Masterlist // Previous chapter // Next chapter
1 hour after the livestream
Henry fucked up. Henry truly fucked up. After he watched Adelaide step into that cab, the tears so evident in her eyes, he pushed all the cameramen out of his sight and didn’t want the other contestants to ask him any questions about this.
And because Henry obviously has a mature and adult way of dealing with his emotions, he locks himself up in the bedroom. The same bedroom where he made all those memories with Adelaide. He remembers her sleeping as soon as she would hit the mattress. Her fingers grazing over his arm. Her sleeping body securely in his arms, her head on his chest and the soft good morning kisses when they slept in the tent during their last challenge.
He takes ahold of the pillow Adelaide slept on and as he sits on the bed, he brings it to his face. He pushes his nose into the fabric, as he can still smell the hints of her perfume, her skincare products and her shampoo.
Tears of frustration burn in his eyes, as he continues to remember the hurt in Adelaide’s eyes just now. All because of him.
He fucking hates himself.
Yes, he cannot and will not deny the fact he did talk poorly about her, however he regrets every syllable of it. He knows better now, so much better. Adelaide Park is amazing and has so much to offer. They were planing on getting to know each other even better after this stupid program had ended.
But that is all over now and it’s all is fault.
He hates this show, every single producer and editor who works here and his agency. Especially his agency. He wants to sue every single one of them who were involved in making that heinous compilation, the one blew everything out of proportion, but he needs to think this over, before he makes any rash decisions. Decisions that might only do more damage than any good.
Henry stands up from the bed, to grab his suitcase and starts packing. He needs to leave this place, go back to England, to his own place and think about this.
Adelaide specifically asked not to mention her or talk to her and he should honor her wishes. That is the least he can do after everything that happened.
However, he should release a statement of his own. He should leave his agency. He should reach out to her in another way than directly contacting her. He needs to know whether or not she is okay.
Well, she might not be okay, but he needs to know how she feels. That she knows he is sorry, because he is sorry.
Very sorry.
Fuck, he is such a loser for letting her go like this. Adelaide was totally right. He should’ve been honest with her. Told her about his earlier thoughts regarding her and why he participated in the first place, but also specifically tell her how he changed his mind.
About her, about them, about him playing James Bond.
Henry grabs his phone, so he can check when the first flight back to England is, but he stops mid unlocking his phone and stares at his background. A few days ago, he changed his wallpaper in a picture of the both of them, sitting on the couch. Adelaide’s arms wrapped around his neck, her cheek pressed against his and her eyes shine with happiness.
Henry growls out of frustration. ‘Fuck,’ he hisses between clenched jaws. He already misses her, only sixty minutes after the live stream. He needs to think about this, because he will do anything to clear her reputation, to make it up to her.
Simply because he cares about her and only her.
His Adelaide Park.
◎ ◎ ◎
1 day after the livestream
‘Pick up, pick up, pick up,’ Henry mutters impatiently when he has his phone pressed against his ear. He is back home, as he wanders through his house. He really needs her to pick up. He needs to talk to her.
‘Henry,’ he hears Angela say in a flat tone when she finally picks up. Okay, she is mad and rightly so. ‘How are you?’
‘Not good,’ he answers in all honesty, because lying to Angela Bassett is only asking for trouble really. ‘Please, don’t spare me. I know you saw the livestream, I know you think I fucked up.’
She scoffs. ‘Well, in that case: you truly messed this up. I can’t believe you did this, Henry. Adelaide Park has been nothing but an angel to you and I honestly thought you liked her.’
‘I do like her,’ he says in a defensive and louder tone.
She is not impressed with his tone. ‘And yet you still broke her heart. What a way to show her you care.’
He doesn’t need to get defensive. This is all his own fault and he deserves this. ‘I know. I’m a fucking idiot.’
‘That’s an understatement,’ she mumbles. ‘Tell me, what do you want from me?’
Henry lets out a deep sigh. ‘I don’t want to call her, because she told me not to talk to her. I want to respect that and I need to respect that, but I have to let her know at least one more time how sorry I am. I regret the words, I regret not being honest to her. I’ll accept whatever answer I get, but I need her to know how sorry I am.’
Angela doesn’t say anything and Henry fears he overstepped. Overstepped a lot.
‘Okay,’ she says, ‘I’ can do that. However, after this, you really need to reflect on this situation. You have broken her heart and ruined it for yourself. Get away from that abysmal agency you’re under contract with and share a statement on every social media platform you have.’
‘I’m already drafting something and I really want to leave that agency, I can tell you that.’
‘Good, because you need to clear your name. I don’t know if that is going to work, but you need to at least try.’
‘I know. Thanks Angela. I owe you.’
‘You sure do,’ she says and hangs up shortly afterwards.
Henry takes a seat on the stool at the bar and looks at the piece of paper on the counter, filled with scribbles and notes. He should make a neutral statement, where his sorry and remorse clearly comes through. He has seen the reactions on her pictures. Fans constantly tag him underneath her pictures and her underneath his and he sincerely hopes they stop doing that.
She doesn’t deserve this at all. She doesn’t need to be reminded of his actions on every social media platform she’s on.
He continues to scribble down words and eventual sentences he can use in his statement. Angela is right: he should do this.
He doesn’t know how long he is bend over the notebook, as he continues to write down a statement that actually satisfies him, but he gets pulled out of his thoughts when he sees the screenshot Angela has send to him.
And it’s what he expected. Adelaide doesn’t accept his apology (which he understands) and she tells Angela she doesn’t want to talk to him ever again, let alone see him. He opens up her Instagram, stares at her beautiful face. He misses her, but this is all his fault.
And Henry should live with that.
◎ ◎ ◎
2 weeks after the livestream
Henry stares at the screen on his laptop, as he checks out the announcement for the newest movie starring Adelaide and David Castañeda. He keeps wondering what would’ve happened if he actually had auditioned for it.
Wondering is all he does nowadays. Wondering how his life would look like now if he has just been honest with Adelaide. Wondering about them together, if the livestream went well, instead of exploded in the way it did.
He “broke up” with his agency and is currently looking at others, hoping to find himself a new and suitable one. One that wouldn’t do something like this. He always had a little bit of issues with the previous agency, but they offered him pretty decent jobs and he figured that was the most important thing. He never realized how much they interfered in his own personal life.
Henry closes his laptop. He barely left the house after he got back from Italy, except to do some groceries, so he wouldn’t starve to death. He is barely on his phone, just to let Angela, his family and friends know he is sort of doing okay. However he does turn down every invitation to hang out, simply because he can’t face anyone right now. He can barely face himself.
While he continues to attend his own pity party, he has checked what Adelaide has been doing and from the looks of it, she is doing great. She is absolutely glowing and obviously dealing much better with this than he is. She has been putting on a brave face for years now, so dealing with this seems like a piece of cake to her.
At least, that’s what it looks like to the public. During Tommy Hilfiger collaboration, she had this calm glow over her and the reactions underneath the pictures told her so as well.
Later the newest movie announcement with her, David, Reese Witherspoon and Paul Rudd was made. After that announcement, she has been pretty active on Instagram again and he has seen the pictures pop up at his explore page. He resists the urge to check her stories, but decides it would be for the best he doesn’t do that, simply because he feels like he shouldn’t intrude like that.
Fuck, he wishes he would feel better, but he doesn’t. Deep down he feels like he should forgive himself and at least try and move on, but he can’t seem to find the strength to forgive himself for his actions.
His fans reacted well to his statement and lots of people said reality tv can make everything look worse than it actually is. While it was definitely made worse than it actually was, he still feels bad and realizes he shouldn’t be as easily forgiven as he is now.
Henry is still thinking about suing the program, but he decided to just drop it. He doesn’t even have the energy to think about a lawsuit, let alone actually do it.
There is one thing to be happy and grateful about: Adelaide seems to do okay and for now, that is all that actually matters to him.
◎ ◎ ◎
1 month after the livestream
The 8seconds event Adelaide attended for her collaboration with them, might’ve been the worst things that happened to either of them since the livestream. Henry did look up the event, because he just wants to continue to see how she is doing. He saw the moment the journalists could ask questions and especially the second one journalist asked if Adelaide had spoken to Henry after the statement and what she thought of it. Her face never showed any emotions and she simply thanked everyone for their time and walked off.
Almost as if it was a diversion planned beforehand, David Castañeda posted a picture on his Instagram of her and the attention was immediately shifted away of the awkward matter. People are now speculating whether or not the two of them are dating and while Henry thinks that is not the case, you simply never know. The public at least is already shipping them and Henry would lie if he didn’t think the two of them would be a great match.
Henry finally managed to drag himself out of his own house and he is now at his parents. He did ask them if they couldn’t ask about Adelaide, since he would like to forget about the situation and so far, they thankfully honored his wishes.
She continues to feed him with extra little cupcakes and cookies and normally he would politely decline, but now he eats like he hasn’t eaten for days. He goes to the gym a whole lot nowadays, to get his mind of the whole Adelaide situation, so he doesn’t really care.
‘Okay, dear, I know you are still sad, but it has been four weeks,’ his mom says, as she places her hand on his shoulder, giving him a reassuring squeeze. So much for not mentioning Adelaide. ‘You released the statement, you let go of your old management and you are keeping your side of the bargain. You are not texting her, you are not mentioning her. Yes, you hurt her, but you have learned from this.’
‘I know, I know.’ He rubs his face and looks up at his mom. ‘I just can’t believe I did this.’
‘Me neither,’ his dad mumbles. ‘I thought we taught you better than that.’
This hurts, but Henry deserves this. ‘You did.’
His dad sits up straight on the couch and stares at him, without even saying anything to him. No matter how old Henry is, that still makes him nervous. ‘You better have learned from this, Henry, because I’m rather disappointed in you.’
◎ ◎ ◎
2 months after the livestream
◎ ◎ ◎
5 months after the livestream
Henry managed to get his life kinda back to how it was pre-Adelaide. He has found himself a new agency and a wonderful agent, Julia, who managed to get him a great new role in a sci-fi movie. The filming process went great and he loved to be on set again.
Right now he is on his first press tour for the movie he did before the Celebrity Project ‘The Royal Heist’ with Anne Hathaway as his co-star.
Of course he still thinks about Adelaide, he thinks about her quite often as a matter of fact. He watches her interviews, he sometimes sees a picture of her on his Instagram explore page. Sometimes it’s a picture she posted herself, sometimes it’s a picture posted by David or someone else from the crew or a fan account.
It’s hard sometimes, not to think about her. Occasionally he wakes up un the middle of the night, thinking about her and seeing her laugh flash in front of his eyes. He realizes that of course he misses her, but it’s for the best they both move on without one another. From the looks of it, she is absolutely glowing and for that he is forever grateful. He feared she would blame herself, maybe completely hide herself, but she doesn’t. She has flourished and is not afraid to show it to the entire world. During her interviews she seems relaxed and makes a joke every now and then.
Henry sits next to Anne, as they are about to answer some questions about the new movie. The two of them joke around a bit, as Anne just recently discovered the wonders of Snapchat filters. It’s nice to have fun and not feel guilty as he did before. When he witnessed Adelaide having fun and being happy again, he felt it was okay for him to do so as well.
The questions about the movie are pretty basic, but after a while the interviewer seems less nervous than when he started. However, him feeling more confident, might have given him the impression he can actually ask questions he really shouldn’t be asking.
‘After the Celebrity Project, have you and Adelaide Park cleared the air with one another?’
Henry clenches his jaw. He wants to say a lot to this man. How he should mind his own fucking business, how Henry is going to rearrange his face for asking such thing, but then he remembers what Adelaide wanted from him.
He managed to do so for five months and he will not quit. Not now. ‘I thought my agent told you before hand I will not answer any Celebrity Project related questions.’
The interviewer doesn’t seem to care and continues to ask questions about how Adelaide was in real life, what they did when the camera’s were off and what he would do to make it up to the actress.
While he is nearly exploding with rage and anger, Anne manages to divert the conversation and when the end is near, Henry doesn’t thank the interviewer. He simply gets up to go outside for a fresh breath of air. The second he is outside, he takes a deep breath. Turned out he maybe wasn’t over Adelaide as much as he thought he was.
Henry grabs his phone and does something he hasn’t done for a while now. He goes to her account and checks the pictures. He sees the amount of David Castañeda related posts, so he goes to the actor’s page, where he sees excess of Adelaide pictures. She looks radiant and beautiful.
‘You okay?’ Anne asks, as she walks out of the building to stand next to him.
‘Yeah, I’m okay,’ he says, closing off Instagram and pushing his phone back into his pocket. ‘I made a promise and I wanted to keep that one.’
‘You did,’ she says with a smile. ‘Really, don’t let that idiot get to you. Weirdly enough, this is his job and you did well. As a thank you for diffusing the situation, you can buy me a coffee later today. Now, let’s go back inside. I’m wearing a flimsy bra and I don’t want the entire world to know I’m freezing.’
◎ ◎ ◎
8 months after the livestream
It has been eight whole months after the livestream and Henry finally thinks he is actually over the entire situation. The Royal Heist is nominated for an award, just like he was for his role in the movie. The rude interviewer three months ago was the last one to bring up Adelaide and thankfully he was, because Henry might’ve thrown some punches if someone asked about it.
He runs his hand over his black velvet jacket, before Anne stands next to him and says: ‘Maybe you should frown a little less.’
‘I’m not frowning,’ he says with a smile. ‘Just concentrated.’
‘Thus frowning.’
The two of them are guided by some very nervous assistants, who are managing the photo opts. And while he is slightly distracted by Anne and her embarrassing stories about other red carpets events, the commands of the paparazzi are becoming louder and louder and it gains his attention.
‘Adelaide, look over here! You look beautiful!’ Henry stretches out his neck and sees Adelaide Park, looking beautiful as ever.
The white dress she wears hugs her figure nicely and the matching heels create the illusion her legs are endless. Her long blonde hair, probably lengthened by extensions, is pulled together in a fancy ponytail.
Henry thought he was doing pretty well over the past months, thinking he was over her, but seeing her in real life… It makes him realize him being over her was all pretend. He can’t forget her.
Adelaide Park is the love of his life.
Fuck, what a moment to come to that realization.
He watches closely as David Castañeda stands next to her as he joins her. He plays her love interest in the movie, the man that has been all over her Instagram and the same man who she has done multiple interviews with. David looks like a nice guy, who seems a great friend to Adelaide.
David places his hand on her waist and together they pose for the camera. It’s weird seeing her like this. This at ease with someone else. When Henry met her, she was tense with stress, but that all disappeared. Of course he kept track of her, mostly to see how she was doing.
And she was blossoming and still is.
Henry watched their new movie, ‘Warm Up Period’ and it was an amazing romantic comedy, one of the best he has ever seen. Adelaide sure has a way of acting in these types of movies. It was all part of the job of course, he knows that, but he couldn’t push away those jealous thoughts he experienced when he watched their more intimate scenes. It’s all pretend—he knows that—but he could feel their connection through the screen. The way David touched her bare back, how the camera zoomed in on the goosebumps on her skin, the kisses they shared.
It was enough to make him green with jealousy.
‘You haven’t heard one single bit of what I was telling,’ Anne Hathaway concludes and he quickly looks at her. ‘You’re still not over her, aren’t you?’
He doesn’t know what to say. ‘I’m just happy to see she’s doing good,’ he eventually says, while still looking at her. Maybe she senses that someone is gawking at her, because she looks to the side, but he quickly looks away.
That’s what she wanted from him. If he saw her before she saw him, he should walk away.
◎ ◎ ◎
Afterparties aren’t really Henry’s thing, but he feels obligated to stay, especially after he won ‘Best Actor’. Other actors congratulate him as he makes his way through the hall and he puts on a brave face, but in all honesty: he is feeling miserable.
From a distance, he sees Adelaide standing all by herself. He could simply do it, he thinks to himself. He could walk up to her and talk to her. If she doesn’t want him there, he’ll understand and walk away.
Reluctantly, he walks up to her and when he is close enough for her to hear him, he takes a deep breath. He really is going to do this… ‘Hi Adelaide,’ he gently says to her.
She looks up, her eyes enlarging when she realizes it’s him. From up close she is even more beautiful. She looks breathtakingly gorgeous with blonde hair, but he misses the way her light brown hair made her look. It reminds him of a time where things were simpler and better.
Adelaide blinks a few times and says: ‘Hi,’ in a soft tone.
He missed hearing her voice. ‘If you don’t want to talk to me, just say so. I was just wondering how you’ve been.’
She clears her throat, as she studies his face. ‘I’m good,’ she answers and he lets out a sigh of relief. ‘How are you?’
‘I’m okay,’ he says, but his voice is telling otherwise. He is not okay, he is an utter mess. He just became a bit better at hiding it over the past couple of month.
She must sense that too, because she frowns for a split second. ‘Congratulations,’ she tells him and it sounds sincere. Of course it sounds sincere, the words come from Adelaide herself, the embodiment of sincerity. ‘The movie was really good and you deserved to win best actor. You were great.’
‘Thank you,’ he says. Henry can’t believe he used to be so comfortable around her and now he’s getting heart palpitations simply by looking at her. ‘You look amazing, Adelaide.’
She nods. ‘Thank you.’ She takes a sip of her champagne and purses her lips for a brief moment, probably thinking about what she can say. ‘I heard you turned down James Bond.’
Henry nods. ‘Yes, I did. I didn’t want to be part of that franchise.’
‘Was it because of me?’ she asks.
He sighs. ‘Well, I think you were part of my decision. I think I should thank you.’
Adelaide simply nods. ‘Right.’
Henry knows he shouldn’t do it, but he can’t stop himself. ‘Adelaide, I’m so terribly sorry for everything I did. I know I hurt you and it pains me every single day to know I betrayed your trust. Trust I didn’t even deserve in the first place.’
She simply shakes her head. ‘Please don’t do this, Henry. It’s all okay.’
‘No, it’s not okay,’ he tells her, taking a step closer to her, while still maintaining an appropriate distance from her. She doesn’t step back and from the looks of it, she actually is open to what he has to say to her, so he better make it worth while. ‘You had every right to be as mad as you were and I totally understand. I was just hoping that maybe we can talk about it, clear the air, so we can be in the same room together.’
Adelaide blinks her eyes a few times. ‘Really?’
‘Really,’ he confirms. ‘And if you don’t want to, I respect that. Just wanted to at least have suggested the idea to you.’
She nods. ‘Okay, just not here.’
‘Of course not,’ he quickly says. ‘How about we do coffee tomorrow? I know a nice place around here. They have nice cappuccino’s. If you want to of course. Maybe you want to meet up somewhere else, that’s fine with me.’
She shakes her head. ‘Coffee tomorrow is good,’ she says. Her eyes are brighter than the first few moments he started to talk to her. That’s a good sign, right?
Henry nods, as he counts his blessings, thankful that she actually agrees to this idea. ‘Good, good.’
Her co-star David walks over to the two of them and stands next to Adelaide. ‘Hi,’ he says when his eyes fall on Henry, holding out his hand. ‘Congratulations, man. I loved the movie and you were great. Very well deserved.’
‘Oh, thank you,’ he says with a smile, because David’s friendliness is contagious.
David places his hand on Adelaide waist. ‘Ready to go? Our limo is ready.’
Adelaide tears her gaze away from Henry and meets David’s eyes. She smiles at her co-star, in a way only she can do. This shouldn’t make him jealous, not after all these months they spend apart.
But seeing her this close to someone other than him, confirms what he thought earlier that night.
He missed her more than he originally figured.
‘I am,’ she tells David. ‘Henry, I’ll see you tomorrow then. You still have my number?’
As if he would erase her number. Ever. ‘I do.’
‘Text me a time and address and I’ll be there.’ She sends him a soft smile, before turning around. She walks off to the exit with David, his hand still in the dip her waist.
Henry stares after the pair, as his blood boils with rage and jealousy.
But he shouldn’t be. He can’t be.
Besides, the most important thing is: he is going to talk with Adelaide Park, face to face. He quickly looks over the crowd, to see if he can find Anne, so he can say his goodbye and go to his hotelroom to prepare, because this might be his only chance to make things right between him and Adelaide.
#henry cavill#henry cavill x ofc#henry cavill x oc#henry cavill x asian ofc#henry cavill x adelaide park#adelaide park#asian ofc#the alluring charm of henry cavill#henry cavill fandom#Henry cavill fanfic
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The Misconceptions of FF7: A Cloud, Aerith & Tifa Analysis Part 2/5
Link to all parts:
https://outbythehighwind.tumblr.com/post/640347336477966336/the-misconceptions-of-ff7-a-cloud-aerith-tifa
Last post, I examined the misconceptions around Cloud’s character with a brief psychological analysis on how the selves that are “Ex-SOLDIER” Cloud and ‘real’ Cloud pertain to ‘Cloud’ the being. This was to evidence that Cloud’s feelings (as both “Ex-SOLDIER” and his true self) are ‘Cloud’s’, and to refute the nonsensical notions that: the player until the Lifestream sequence is not really playing as Cloud; Cloud’s feelings toward Aerith are Zack’s; and only the ‘real’ Cloud’s feelings for Tifa are valid (because “Ex-SOLDIER” Cloud has feelings for Aerith).
I had referred to ‘feelings’ in the general sense. These next two posts will examine them in the specific spheres of friendship and romance.
Nowhere in the game or FF7 compilation does it explicitly state that Cloud romantically “loves” or “is in love with” Aerith or Tifa. FF7 handles its themes in a manner that is incredibly human and complex. So, before attempting an objective analysis of his ‘feelings’ beyond the general sense – ie. what kind of love he has for each woman – I want to draw attention to the role of the player.
The developers want the player to form their own attachments, have the agency to play to them out, and have their own emotions evoked throughout their experience of the game. This is why the love triangle exists within the narrative – narrative being that tool by design (how the story is told; the lens by which the player experiences the game, and the tool by which the writers play with the player’s emotions). The player can, to a degree, make choices that alter story events within the narrative. They can manipulate the affection points to take Aerith or Tifa (or even Yuffie) on the Gold Saucer date. They can keep the relationship with both women platonic and have a bro’s night out with Barret. A player who is torn between the girls can therefore experience ‘more’ of the love triangle than a player who takes the latter route of bonding with Barret.
Which brings me to another nonsensical argument: that because the date mechanics ‘favor’ Aerith (who begins with a 20 affection point advantage over Tifa), the game wants Cloud to date Aerith, and therefore Cloud’s true love is Aerith. Again, nonsense. For this argument to stand, it must first adhere to the fact that the love triangle exists outside of the date mechanics: if the game wants Cloud to date Aerith, it must want Cloud to date Aerith in its plot (the always true relationship between story events that does not alter on player decision). This particular date is only an available option within the narrative. That is not to say it is not canonical – quite the contrary. Of course Aerith’s date is canonical. So is Tifa’s, or Yuffie’s, or Barret’s – if the player so chooses. It is not a plot matter, but an experience for the player.
But let us assume, for a moment, that it were a plot matter. Let us assume Cloud’s ‘romantic love’ is the person he spends the night out with at Gold Saucer. Aside from the obvious Barret and Yuffie alternatives, here is the problem: who comes for a night out is not determined by Cloud’s affection toward them, but their approachability in their affections toward Cloud. It is Aerith or Tifa (or Barret or Yuffie) who takes Cloud out. Naturally Aerith would begin with points higher than Tifa because there is no barrier of a dark & secret past between them, and Tifa has lower self-confidence, tending to lock her feelings away.
So the player has agency over the Gold Saucer experience. This does not alter the plot. Aerith will die; and Cloud’s “sealed up secret wish” involving Tifa will be brought to light in the Lifestream.
Cloud’s feelings in the plot sense – ie. as they truly are (not to the player’s subjection, but objectively Cloud’s) – are complex. Before giving my two cents worth on two beautifully deep relationships, to all who say that ‘because Cloud romantically loves one girl he doesn’t care about the other,’ I propose the following statement:
“Those who cannot conceive Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend.” – C.S. Lewis
I lament with Mr. Lewis at the degradation of friendship's meaning in the world today. So when I speak of friendship, I wish to stress its meaning: that it is one of the highest forms of love.
Cloud’s feelings toward Aerith, I believe, can be interpreted as either of the two loves – friendship or Eros (romantic love) – or both. Even within the experience of Gold Saucer, I personally have not any solid evidence that Cloud’s feelings for Aerith are Eros, and whether they are or not has no influence on the plot. Cloud and Aerith will become (very) close; Aerith will die; Cloud will be distraught; and Cloud will continue the fight they started together – Eros or no Eros. That being said, I can see how conclusions of Eros are a possibility. Cloud’s investment in Aerith’s journey and well-being is very personal. His care toward her runs so deep, in fact, that his “Ex-SOLDIER” persona is often cracked.
Aerith is the first and only character to humor this self that Cloud is so desperate to project to the world. She takes the mickey by giving him the title なんでも屋さん (“Nandemoyasan”) – “Mr. Jack of all trades”. Yet she allows him to ‘play SOLDIER’ in making him her bodyguard and supportively holding him to that role.
Cloud is encouraged and feels strong when he is with Aerith. She raises his self-confidence and trust in his own strength in a uniquely distinct way that no other character does – not even Tifa. Though he is encouraged by Tifa to “be strong” also – in a uniquely distinct way pertaining to his accepting of self (which is, ultimately, what saves him) – Cloud feels weak around Tifa, due to his constant failure to live up to being her hero as he perceives it. With Aerith, we have the opposite effect.
Aerith simultaneously encourages the “Ex-SOLDIER” façade and breaks through it. They share laughter and tease one another on the rooftops. Cloud reveals his soft side when urging her to open up to him.
Aerith realizes that she does not know the ‘real’ Cloud, and tries very hard to find him, to bring him out. However, she does not. Not even within the Lifestream where he ends up twice in a broken state and she has maintained her complete physical consciousness. This is a role that only Tifa can fulfil.
Likewise, Cloud realizes Aerith is facing her own inner struggle – of what it means to be a Cetra – and he time and again goes out of his way to try help her, from risking his life to rescue her from Shinra to pushing to talk to her even when she wants to be left alone (note how Aerith turns her face away in the screenshots below). The writing stresses that this is by Cloud’s own investment, not simply that of the party’s as its leader. “But I’m… we’re here for you, right?”
Paralleling Aerith’s inability to reach Cloud’s true self, Cloud is unable to help her in discovering and fulfilling her task as the last Cetra, and Aerith finds herself more and more “alone” in pertinence to her inner conflict.
Her nandemoyasan, her dear friend, fails her, and that haunts Cloud after her death as he grapples with his own role in saving the Planet – a hope that is lost without Aerith.
Which now brings us to her death.
Aerith dies at the point where Cloud’s inner conflict against Sephiroth first peaks for the worst. Just having become aware that Sephiroth can override his very conscious (being forced to hand over the Black Materia in the Temple of the Ancients), Cloud has begun to doubt himself and is immensely afraid of who he is. Immediately following is his failure to save Aerith.
Cloud, whose entire life struggle and “Ex-SOLDIER” persona were built upon his self-loathing due to feelings of failure, weakness and inadequacy, has just failed to save this woman so precious to him. We see the haunting and guilt it holds over him in Advent Children, where he despairs and distances himself from his family for fear of failing them too.
Cloud does everything in his power to ensure Aerith’s mission is complete, not just for sake of the Planet, but for Aerith. The fight for the Planet is the party’s fight – the “we” fight, together as a whole. But it is more for Cloud, so much more.
“I’ll do the rest.”
Cloud’s external fight for the Planet and his personal feud with Sephiroth is in much part out of his deep love for Aerith.
This love is, no doubt, an incredibly powerful mutual friendship. It is clear that, in addition to this friendship, Aerith has romantic feelings for Cloud (which I will evidence in part 4), but what of Cloud for Aerith? Could he have feelings for her that are Eros too? Absolutely. I have found no evidence implicitly for it, nor implicitly against it, and that to me is a beauty of player experience in the narrative. (I also believe this is what Nomura meant when he expressed his desire to leave interpretation to the player.)
However, in the sense of plot and Cloud’s feelings that are not up for the player’s interpretation, I hold to my understanding that Cloud – even if having romantic feelings toward Aerith – is romantically in love with Tifa, and that that Eros is core to his very being.
I will not say “there’s nothing more” between Aerith and Cloud even in my interpretation of them as friends. For that implies friendship is a lesser love than Eros, which I do not believe is true. C.S. Lewis said that (no pun intended) “To the Ancients, Friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves,” “the crown of life and the school of virtue”, and I agree with his saying that “few value it because few experience it.”
My hope is simply this: that people would lose this notion of ‘competition’ – that one girl must win ‘all’ of Cloud’s affections, and that at the expense of one ‘winning’, his relationship with the other is belittled.
Link to all parts:
https://outbythehighwind.tumblr.com/post/640347336477966336/the-misconceptions-of-ff7-a-cloud-aerith-tifa
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Tinhat Theories
Pet Names/Honorifics/Endearments Theories
Age hierarchy in Korea (using honorifics to address people who are older than you), is a big deal. It is considered rude to not address those older than you respectfully. The casual way Jungkook calls to Jimin, (dropping “hyung”, calling him “Jimin-ah” or “Jiminie”, and even his exaggerated use of the overly formal “Jimin-ssi” which he does in a very flirty/teasing way), brings attention to the way their relationship is different from the other members. As the youngest, Jungkook should speak to his members respectfully and use honorifics. He almost always uses honorifics on his other hyungs, but somehow, Jimin is different.
Here he is in Bon Voyage 2 (filmed in April 2017) calling Jimin “baby” as an example.
Compilation of Jungkook Calling Jimin “Jimin-ssi”
Video explaining the significance of Dangshin and Jungkook’s use of it. He’s used it two or three times that we’ve seen on film. This video also shows why Jikookers believe Dangshin is being used in a way that means “dear/darling”, usually reserved for one’s spouse by highlighting how Jimin seems to be the only member that is consistently with Jungkook when he’s hurt/injured. More of those boyfriend privileges!
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The time at MMAs 2018 when K-Army thinks Jungkook called himself Jimin’s husband and Jimin’s boyfriend. The guy’s expression sitting behind Jungkook 😂😂
Jimin also gets his shots in with the cutsie names. Here, I think the members were asked to choose their favorite pet. Jimin said he would choose Jungkook because he was strong and could protect Jimin and then said he was his “reliable banryeo”. A cute play on words because it can mean pet, but it can also mean partner/life companion in the sense of a significant other.
We decided to place these instances of dropping honorifics and using cute names with one another in the tinhat section because, while no one can deny that they’ve said these things to each other, the meaning behind the words can be interpreted differently. Maybe Jungkook didn’t mean “Baby” like that. Maybe he was just being overly formal with Dangshin because they are broadcasting to a general audience. Maybe Jimin really did mean Jungkook is his favorite pet. Who knows! But the multiple instances sure do make for an interesting pattern.
Vlive Theories
Taehyung’s Vlive 07.12.2016
The Jikook theories start at 6:15. Tae goes to Jungkook’s room. Jungkook makes him wait outside, claiming he’s not dressed. He finally lets Tae in after 45 seconds. He’s in a robe that he hasn’t even tied yet. Body Electric by Lana Del Rey is streaming in the room.
Tae says he’s there to show ARMY him and Jungkook on Vlive. They mess around for a good bit of time, talking and singing. At about the 8:30 mark, Jungkook gets up with the camera facing toward the bathroom/exit. He glances back that way a couple of times and then turns so the camera is facing away from that area.
Throughout he and Tae singing together, Jungkook keeps glancing toward the hallway/bathroom. Tae brings up Dear No One by Tori Kelly, a song Jimin said represents him in June 2015 and that Jungkook said he loved in July 2015. Tae plays the song and Jungkook sings it while glancing repeatedly at something off camera. Then suddenly Tae brings up Jimin out of nowhere, says he texted him and is going to Jimin’s room if he responds, and immediately leaves the room.
Here is a good breakdown of the whole Vlive with screencaps if you’re interested.
The theory is that Jimin is actually the one who texted Tae and told him to GTFO the room. Once he leaves and goes back toward his own room, you can hear Jungkook’s door opening and closing and someone who sounds suspiciously like Jimin talking loudly in the background. Tae looks a bit weird/guilty, says he forgot the key to his room and must sign off Vlive so he can go get another key.
The next day, Jimin does a Vlive of his own where he’s petty about Tae possibly joining his Vlive. The theory is he’s still mad about Tae crashing Jungkook’s room the night before.
Hoseok Visiting Jimin’s room Vlive Tokyo 08.13.2016
Hoseok starts a Vlive. He eventually goes to Jimin’s room. When he’s let in, there is a very awkward moment where Hoseok won’t show the room and pulls Jimin into the frame, while the camera faces the door away from the room. Both of their eyes keep flicking to something off camera and the whole vibe is weird/guilty.
Lovely room Jimin has as you show us the door and the wall, Hoseok!
Once they get into the room, Jimin seems distracted, looking around, taking stock of the state of the room. There is food and Hoseok asks if he was about to eat. It’s A LOT of food. Like maybe too much for one person. Then suddenly there is noise in the area of the door and Taehyung appears, but how did he get in if Jimin and Hoseok are the only people in the room? Or maybe it was Tae who was in the room to begin with? But then this happens.
Notice in the far right corner is the door to the bathroom (the dark opening) at the bottom of the door you’ll notice something moving. Some people say it’s a hand. Some people say it’s a foot. I don’t know what it is, but it’s definitely movement in a bathroom that shouldn’t have anyone in it.
Eventually Tae leaves. Then there’s a weird moment when Hobi does this??? In the video this part starts at 13:43 ish and Hoseok proceeds to tackle/tease Jimin on the bed while saying “Oh Jimin! Oh Jimin!” It’s very “big brother teases little brother about being caught with a significant other” vibes.
So Hoseok leaves, but he leaves the camera with Jimin to continue the live without him. Jimin chats with ARMY while preparing to eat. It’s very clear at this point that someone is still in the room with Jimin. He keeps glancing off camera. At one point you can see a shadow cross the television screen behind Jimin. He keeps looking over to where the beds are and smiling/laughing. He makes some pretty sexual innuendo w/ a sausage that I don’t think is for ARMY’s benefit. In the end, I can’t say for sure it’s Jungkook in the room with him, but someone is definitely there.
Eat Jin Vlive 12.15.2016
In this live, Jin and Jimin are doing an Eat Jin Vlive. This is basically a common Vlive Jin does where he... you guessed it! He eats. He sometimes has other members join him and Jimin is a frequent guest.
Jungkook knocks on the hotel room door to join the live and Jin and Jimin give him a hard time about entering the room. Finally Jungkook threatens that he’s going to post something to Twitter off his phone if they don’t let him in. Jimin calls his bluff and tells him fine, post whatever. Jin tells him not to be so hasty and they finally let him in.
The whole vibe of the Vlive is weird. Jungkook is in a mood. Jimin is in a mood. At the end Jimin tries to flee the room and Jungkook grabs him and says, “Where are you running off to?” Jimin says he was going to the bathroom. Then Jungkook says, “I took a good selfie,” and attempts to show his phone to Jimin who immediately says, “I won’t go then.”
Here’s a screenshot of the selfie in question.
Then later that same day Jungkook posts this to Twitter. It’s the mysterious selfie he was trying to show Jimin in the Vlive. Some people think the mark on his neck above the collar of his coat is a hickey and that’s why threatening to post it kept Jimin from leaving the room.
Hoseok Birthday Vlive 02.17.2019
Hoseok starts a Vlive for his birthday. Eventually BTS (minus Yoongi who fell asleep) crashes his hotel room at midnight with a cake to wish him a happy birthday. Jimin shows up with wet hair wearing Jungkook’s shirt and mentions how he told Jungkook he wasn’t sure he could wake up for midnight and needed to set an alarm for 11:46 pm.
Later, Jimin leaves, then comes back into Hoseok’s hotel room to yell at Jungkook to leave, grabs Jungkook’s arm, and they exit the room together.
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The theory is that Jimin needed Jungkook to get back into their hotel room because he didn’t have a key.
Jungkook Vlive 05.18.2019
The theory here is that Jimin and Jungkook are sharing this hotel room and the clothes Tae comments on at 6:56 in the video are actually Jimin’s clothes, not Jungkook’s. As mentioned in an earlier section, this Vlive came directly after a Vlive featuring Jin and Jimin. In the Jin/Jimin Vlive, Jimin mentions the shirt he’s wearing isn’t his shirt. Jin asks him whose shirt it is, they stare at each other for a moment, and Jin says, “Never mind.”
Jimin is also only in a t-shirt in Jin’s Vlive. He leaves Jin’s room to chase after Jungkook, where he shows up a few minutes later on Jungkook’s Vlive, yet when he goes to leave Jungkook’s room, he goes over to the chair to grab a hoodie that he says is his. So, he was either hanging out in Jungkook’s room sometime prior to Jin’s Vlive, or the clothes were there because he is also staying in that room.
When Tae mentions Jungkook’s underwear being in the chair in front of everyone, Jimin immediately goes over to insert himself into that conversation. Several times after Jin and Tae show up to the room Jimin announces that he’s leaving. Several. Times. And seems to get more and more annoyed when the others don’t want to leave too.
A couple of things to note. There are two suitcases. One is messy. One is incredibly neat. Jungkook is a neatnik. You’ll notice that when Tae and Jin start going through the clothing in the neat suitcase Jungkook immediately refolds everything to make it nice again but leaves the messy suitcase alone.
Finally Jimin does leave. Jin leaves too. Then suddenly the doorbell rings and Jungkook goes to investigate. Comes back and tells Tae no one was at the door. Then he tells Tae he’s going to wash up and go to bed. Tae seems uninterested in leaving the room. He’s spending time with ARMY. Jungkook stands behind him and says, “You’re really not leaving?” and they stare at each other through the camera on the Vlive for an uncomfortable and embarrassing amount of time.
Jungkook goes to the bathroom and you can hear him talking in there, but he doesn’t appear to be talking to Tae. So, the theory here is that when the doorbell rang earlier, it was Jimin and he’s reentered the room and is chilling in the bathroom until the camera goes off.
The whole video (linked above) is a little over 13 minutes, amusing on its own, and worth watching if you want to 👁️👄👁️ over some suspect Jikook activities.
The next day Jungkook posts his meal to Twitter. Please note the viewable suitcase.
Jungkook’s Twitter post 05.19.2019
Now, all aboard the tinhat train. Later that day we got this photograph of the boys.
And Jimin’s outfit looks suspiciously like things in the visible suitcase.
Living Together Theory
For a long time, BTS lived in various dorms together. But in 2018/2019, several of them bought apartments in different parts of Seoul. Both Jungkook and Jimin bought property. Jimin bought what seems to be a very run down apartment or possibly the entire complex of apartment units. (Reports are sketchy and not very detailed), but given the state of the apartment/s, most people think he bought it as an investment or possible remodeling project and he doesn’t actually live there.
Meanwhile Jungkook bought an apartment in Seoul Forest Trimmage in late 2018. Hoseok also has an apartment there.
Spotted out together near The Trimmage in 2019, where Jungkook has/had an apartment.
The car sharing situation to and from airports and events seems to fit with where the boys bought their apartments, grouping them by the areas where they purchased their apartments, so it’s likely none of them live full time in the dorm anymore.
What is interesting is that Jimin often travels in the same car with Jungkook and Hoseok in 2019 even though, by all accounts, the property he bought isn’t near The Trimmage, nor is the dorm, if that’s where Jimin is still living. By 2020, Jimin and Jungkook seemed to be traveling to and from events almost exclusively together, and there have been recent rumors that Jungkook has bought another apartment and no longer lives at The Trimmage, explaining the absence of Hoseok traveling with them.
The car sharing is just one part of the belief among Jikookers that Jimin and Jungkook are cohabitating. There are also a bunch of small moments that add up to a bigger picture.
Jimin talking about how Jungkook is always late because he takes 50 minute showers.
Jungkook saying he included Jimin brushing his teeth in the morning in the Life Goes On MV because he wanted it to be realistic and Jimin has morning breath.
Jimin talking about how he rides in the same car with Jungkook every morning.
When asked what he enjoys lately, Jimin thought, why not say waking up and seeing Jungkook.
Jimin and Jungkook being together at 4 am when they got the #1 on Billboard Hot 100 news.
Jimin talking about how Jungkook’s snoring has gotten worse lately. Remember, Jungkook does not live at the dorm anymore.
This Youtube stream about the new album where the band talks about texting Jimin their ideas and Jungkook says, “I’ll just tell them to you,” indicating they would be together and there is no need for a texting. For some reason BH didn’t translate that part. It’s at 24:38 when Jungkook touches Jimin’s leg.
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More Room Sharing
Now, as if it weren’t enough to be around each other all the time for work and potentially living together back in Seoul, there’s also been a few other times where it seems like Jimin and Jungkook are sleeping in the same room.
For instance, consider when they first arrive in Saipan for Summer Package 2018. There are cameras already set up in the entryways for all the members’ rooms, which obviously Jikook didn’t know because they go to Jungkook’s room together and freeze immediately when they see the camera. Kind of like they got caught doing something.
Jimin wanders around and plays it off like he just wanted to check it out and see how Jungkook’s big room was different before going to his own. Because that’s natural, right?
Whether Jimin ended up coming back and staying with Jungkook after they turned the cameras off is debatable, but there’s reason enough to suspect that was the original plan, at least.
Bon Voyage 3, filmed later that summer in 2018, gives us a little more to work with in thinking they managed to pull it off this time, at least for a couple nights. In the second episode, Jungkook wins the room-picking game and gets a room all to himself with a private bathroom. Taehyung joins the others later in this season and winds up picking Jungkook’s room to stay in for the rest of the trip. Namjoon and Hoseok share the room next door and use the bathroom in the living room, while Jin, Yoongi, and Jimin share the big room upstairs with its own bathroom.
And at least according to how the series is edited, this is how you’d think the sleeping arrangements were kept. However, there’s a few moments that feel a little off and could be interpreted as evidence that Jimin did not stay in the big room with Jin and Yoongi, but instead moved to Jungkook’s room after the cameras turn off at night.
The behind cam for episode 2 features Hoseok giving us a tour of the house showing where the members are staying (starts around 3:17). He mentions that some of them are in the shower. Now, he, Namjoon, and Yoongi are on-camera in the upstairs bedroom, so it’s not them. The door to the upstairs bathroom is closed, so someone (Jin or Jimin) is likely showering in there. The shared bathroom downstairs is shown to be empty when Hoseok walks by. No one is in Hoseok and Namjoon’s shared bedroom. Even though one bathroom is empty, there are still three members unaccounted for: Jin, Jungkook, and Jimin.
Hoseok says he thinks Jungkook must be showering so he won’t go in his room. The video then cuts to Hoseok in his own room with Namjoon. Jimin appears soon after with wet hair, so he was definitely in one of the showers recently. Jin shows up, too, also with wet hair. So they’ve both showered, only one of them could’ve been in the one upstairs, and the shared bathroom in the living room was empty. That means someone had to be in Jungkook’s shower.
After the next cut, Hoseok starts to go into Jungkook’s room but stops in the doorway to tease him about how “amazing” his body is. You can hear Jimin say “you shouldn’t see this,” from inside the room. We can pretty safely assume Jungkook is at least a little naked here and fresh out of the shower. And remember, we just saw Jimin in the other bedroom, but now suddenly he’s in Jungkook’s room, where Jungkook is naked, before Hoseok got there?
We can also see there are two sets of towels on the bed. Jungkook pulls one from the nearer stack to dry off his hair, and Jimin walks around to the far side of the bed where the second stack is.
So not only did Jimin likely use Jungkook’s shower before we saw him in Hoseok’s room earlier, but he also felt comfortable enough to come back to Jungkook’s room while he was showering.
From another clip in the same behind cam, we get a pretty clear look at how Jungkook has settled in his room when he’s alone.
His suitcase is lying open and in front of the door, his electronics are all charging (also in front of the door), and his things are only on the nightstand closest to the door. It’d be pretty hard to get in that room without knocking into something and disturbing that setup, right?
The next morning, we see Jimin in Jungkook’s room, already dressed and ready for their date friendship trip, trying to wake Jungkook. (Episode 3 behind cam, starting around 4:50. It’s all very soft but there is also butt slapping, because of course.)
What’s interesting, though, is that all of Jungkook’s things are still in front of the door. So either Jimin got in the door without moving any of the things that someone would reasonably knock into early in the morning when they came downstairs for a shower, or he was already in the room from sleeping there overnight.
Also, that other nightstand is no longer empty. There’s now a glass of water sitting there, even though Jungkook seemed to only be using the other nightstand last night. And this is also the side of the bed where the other set of towels were, the side of the bed where Jimin sat down like he was comfortable doing that in someone else’s room.
More confirmation that Jimin is using the shower in this room: he tells Jungkook that they’re out of shampoo in that bathroom.
Now, this all comes to an end once Taehyung arrives and it’s pretty clear he is sleeping in Jungkook’s room and Jimin is back up in the upstairs room with Jin (Yoongi left when Taehyung joined them). But we get one last moment where Jimin’s habits of feeling free to come and go in this room as he pleased reveal themselves (Episode 4 around 50:47). Everyone starts to get ready to make dinner but Jimin walks into the room to do something:
Then immediately walks back out.
Kind of like he forgot for a second that’s not his room anymore. Or at least that’s the theory.
GCF Saipan
Beautiful job by JJK again
Please listen to the lyrics whenever Jimin pops up on screen because Jungkook is very deliberate and heavy handed with when and which parts of the song he’s chosen to slot the clips of Jimin in.
Solo clips of Jimin being silly being interspersed with clips of the other bangtan boys also has us feeling A Way.
Lyrics of the song
Namjoon’s tweet that shows them filming the funny clips by themselves
Thank you for joining us on this adventure! I hope you enjoyed the Jikook. We compiled as many of our favorite moments as we could and we know we still missed A TON, so we may be updating this from time to time as Jikook continue to Jikook, and we continue to remember things we forgot!
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got good taste in you (Phandom fic fest VDay)
Rating: T
Summary: a story about Phil cooking and contemplating past Valentine’s Days, Dan being soft in a liveshow, and slowly inching out of the closet
Words: 3k
beta: @queerofcups (thank you <3)
[AO3]
Phil’s standing in the kitchen and cutting red pepper into little pieces. The air around him smells like love – or, at least, it supposedly does. That’s what the label on the candle says, anyway, that’s been burning for a while now on their table in the dining area. Phil told Dan earlier today that it smells a bit more like bubblegum, tiny little bunny babies, and cherry. Dan had smacked him on the ass for that.
“Cherry, huh,” he’d said, and Phil had smirked and leaned in for a quick kiss. “Isn’t that the definition of love?”
“You’re the definition of love,” Phil had retorted, in a your mum is a door kind of voice, but he guesses it didn’t quite have the offending effect he’d been going for.
He smiles as he thinks back on that, and gets a bowl out of the cupboard that he scoops his pepper pieces into. The cupboard door stays open, but he doesn’t notice. Instead he picks up a zucchini and starts cutting it too. He’s got a Spotify playlist going on his phone, and hums along to the opening chords of something slow and sad and French that he’s forgotten the name of.
Today had been one of their better Valentine’s Days, Phil thinks. Valentine’s… it’d been kind of weird between them for a while. Not the first ones, no, not them. He still remembers the thrill of 2010, of having someone to call his – although, thinking back on it, there’d been a lot of anxiety, too. He’d been terrified a bit by all the implications of it. Dan had hinted to him weeks before about sweet things he’d planned, and Phil had felt inadequate in comparison. Unlike Dan, he’d really had no experience in being seriously romantic with other people.
It’d been good though; wonderful, really. Dan had made Phil a document in which he’d compiled all his favorite moments between the two of them – dailybooth screenshots, the first time Phil had tweeted him, their first twitter DMs. Important conversations saved in their skype history, shaping their relationship forever.
And Phil, Phil had made him a video. The video, he guesses. He’d spent hours working on it and it had been weird for a moment, talking to a camera so privately, but he’d just imagined it was a webcam he was talking to. And Dan’s reaction had everything made worth it.
The zucchini is all cut up now, and Phil adds it to the pepper. A little piece sticks to the cutting board and he thinks about how Dan would probably take it and put it in his mouth all raw if he were here. Phil would gag exaggeratedly, and Dan would laugh at him.
He’s got an onion out now, and carefully slices it in half before peeling off the dry layers. He kind of likes cutting onions. He also likes how Dan can’t handle it at all and always ends up crying. Dan laughs at him for his overly strong reaction to raw zucchini, and he laughs at Dan for crying over onions. It’s a good system.
In 2011, when Dan had lived in the dorms, they had gone out.
Like a real proper Valentine’s date. One of those that 24-year old Phil had never had before. They had dressed up and gone for dinner and sat on a table surrounded by many other couples doing the same thing. There had been drinks and nice food and it had felt awesome.
It had been different from 2012. That year had been more quiet, more personal. It could have been because they were less new to each other, but the decision to stay home that day had not really been because of that.
“Don’t want to get people speculating,” Dan had said, and Phil had nodded, a little sadly. They’d done that a lot, after last year’s Valentine’s surprise had suddenly been leaked, and Phil’s most private thoughts had been shared with a few people too many. And as much as it had been a mutual decision to reign in their affections publicly, as much as Phil had needed it to protect himself– it really sucked, how their audience had suddenly become this big factor in decisions that should be just about the two of them.
And then, there’d been the second leak, and 2013 had been a bit awful. Phil wishes he didn’t remember as much of that year’s Valentine’s as he does, because it hurts, frankly. It hurts how they’d accused each other, hurt each other, all under the pressure of the connotations Valentine’s Day now held for them.
They’d cried too much that day. And they hadn’t even cried together, but each of them on their own. It really hadn’t been a good period of time. That February 14 th – it had been too much pressure, maybe, too many emotions bottled up and arguments avoided, and it had exploded when Dan had screamed at Phil for making the video and Phil had brought up all the things Dan said publicly that hurt him and it had felt like- like breaking up, possibly, for a moment.
Suddenly the rice is boiling over, and Phil jerks around to take the lid off the pot. In his frenzy he moves the pot too fast and some of the hot water spills over his wrist. He yelps in pain. Dammit, he always gets distracted cooking. The rice water burns to the stove and it stinks in the kitchen now, not the sweet sweet scent of love like the candle had promised. Phil’s wrist is red and hot and throbs. He sighs and dives his head under the still open cupboard door as he shuffles over to the tap, where he lets cold water run over his skin. He feels all sad and tense and… wrong, now. His phone is playing something obnoxiously upbeat and with a frown on his face he fishes for it with his left hand to turn the music off.
It’s quiet now, aside from the slight bubbling of the rice and the cold water still running over his wrist. It’s quiet enough that he can hear Dan, just up the stairs. He’s doing his liveshow right now while Phil cooks dinner for them. He’s nice like that, sometimes.
Dan laughs loudly and then seems to launch into a rant about something Phil can’t distinguish right now.
It loosens something inside his chest. He sees- no, feelsmore, a picture of Dan, leaned back in his chair, swirling around a little. Dan in this fluffy black jumper he’s wearing today. The way he closes his eyes and throws his head through the air when he’s really obnoxiously passionate about something. His dimples- just– his dimples.
Dan is a calming thought. He’s been a calming thought for years.
Phil’s wrist is getting cold and he turns the water off to inspect it closely. It doesn’t seem to be burned badly.
It’s even quieter in the kitchen now, quiet enough that Phil can make out what Dan’s saying.
“’… did you like Hamilton’- Micheal, YES, of course. It was fantastic. I haven’t stopped listening to the soundtrack, Lin really is a genius. ‘shut up rat you already talked about it’ excuse me? Who was that? Wait let me- that’s- Leah. Listen, Leah. Listen.”
Phil giggles to himself. Oh, Dan.
He gets back to cooking and keeps the music off this time, just listens to Dan in the background. He finishes the onion and opens a can of sweet corn, and another one of chickpeas, and dumps all of that with the rest of the veggies in a pan where it starts sizzling quietly.
Slowly his mind wanders back to his Valentine’s contemplation.
Yes, 2013 had been the worst. But it’s gotten better over the next years. A sudden a conversation comes back to him, it must have been the year right after that big fight.
Remember last year, Dan had said.
I’d rather not, he’d replied, and it is a careful feeling he remembers now, how they’d just been quietly building something new. A calm day, a common day, nothing special.
He remembers that, yeah. How hard they had tried to free themselves of the horrible memories they associated with Valentine’s now.
All of their Valentine’s Days after their first three had been kind of ordinary days. Sometimes with sweet gestures for themselves in their own home, but never- never anything really special anymore. It had felt like too fragile of a holiday somehow, too fragile for them to brave something different.
Phil drains the rice – carefully avoiding the water this time – and dumps it in the pan with the sizzling vegetables. He turns around and opens another cupboard door where he fishes around for seasoning- curry for sure, a bit of soy sauce maybe. Salt, pepper- garlic?
“Phil and I-” there’s a slight pause, “went outside today. Yes, I know, I know. Aliens stole Dan and Phil, I don’t know who we are either. ‘what were you doing’ phantastic asked, doesn’t matter really, went outside, did stuff, but when we came back we suddenly realized that we had forgotten our keys. Yes. Dan and Phil FORGOT THEIR KEYS. I thought about making this into another reasons why Dan’s a fail, but it’s kinda too embarrassing. ‘omg what did you do’ well, yeah, let me get to that. So we stood there, not being able to get inside. Didn’t want to call a locksmith yet because that’s awkward as fuck.”
Awkward, and also really expensive. But of course Dan would leave that part out again, just like he never mentions exactly how expensive his newest jumper really was. Thank god he has Phil to make sure they will both have a decent pension.
“… and we didn’t want to ring our neighbour’s bells either because they are still mad at Phil with his pigeon kink.”
Pigeon kink. Phil snorts.
“So we called our friends who have a key to our flat and just waited there. And then it literally started raining! We really need to get new friends, because they took ages and we were completely soaked by the time they arrived. ‘why didn’t you wait in the hallway’ well Lee, because we would have had to make social interaction with our neighbours to let us in, see. So anyway. We are huge fails.”
They had indeed been soaking wet when they finally got inside. Bryony had laughed loudly at them and said no to the cup of tea they offered her, just said they should get in the shower as quickly as possible.
Which, they did. Both at the same time because no one wanted to wait, which had – not so strangely – transformed into shower sex that helped the warming up process considerably.
Phil smiles into the pan with his rice veggie mix as he stirs it once more before he turns the heat down. He looks at the clock then. Dinner’s finished, but Dan isn’t, and he lets his gaze travel through the kitchen as he thinks of something else to do. Halloumi, maybe? They still have halloumi in the fridge, if he remembers correctly. He could fry some of that, and after those eight minutes or so, Dan would be done too.
It kind of had been a perfect Valentine’s Day this year. They had gone out for lunch. Lunch, because there would not be such a mass of people out already, they’d reasoned. And maybe it had also felt like lunch was one step before dinner, like lunch was what they could take on right now. Because… things had been changing with their audience and within themselves. They had slowly inched towards more relaxation in many ways, and when Dan had asked Phil to go out for a Valentine’s lunch with him with a soft smile, Phil’s heart had jumped a little in his chest and he’d grinned back immediately.
It felt good to be able to do these things now. Exhilarating and scary each time, yes, but also very freeing.
They’d gone for that Thai restaurant they loved, just the two of them together. The waiter had asked if they wanted to see the Valentine’s menu and they had said yes. Phil had been a bit on edge the entire time, halfway prepared for a seemingly very casual reaction if a fan might approach them or even confront them, but no one had seemed to recognize them, and anyway- it’d have been fine. That’s something they’d told each other a lot over the past couple of months with each small step they took out of the closet. If someone were to see this, it’d be fine.
Beneath the table, Dan had caught one of Phil’s feet between his ankles, and Phil had wondered at how he could still feel butterflies, after this many years.
Dan is talking about some music stuff right now that Phil’s a bit relieved not to be the core audience for, for once. It’s still a nice background noise as he carefully lays the halloumi stripes he cut up in the frying pan.
The kitchen is a mess, honestly. Should he clean it…? Maybe, just check twitter for a moment first.
He’s busy scrolling through his timeline and occasionally shaking the pan a little bit, when he suddenly hears from upstairs:
“Yes, I did have a nice Valentine’s Day, thanks for asking! Who was that, I lost your name, Mauree …? Yes, it- it was a really nice day.”
Dan’s voice sounds soft and smiley, and like he almost wants to say more, and Phil stands frozen listening to him. His skin thrums with something like possibility and pride.
To others it would seem small, to strangers who don’t know them at all, but for Phil it feels so big, to acknowledge their romantic lives in any way at all.
He wants to show people, suddenly, desperately, in a strange surge of possessiveness- wants them to see who it is that Dan talks so fondly about. Who it is that he spent his day with, even if they all know, technically.
His gaze snaps to the halloumi, it’s cooked now. Dinner’s ready.
He takes that love that fills him up on the inside, turns the heat down, and walks over to the stairs.
Dan reads off the top fans when he comes into Phil’s view, and he looks over at him stealthily, eyes lighting up and his smile only slightly confused.
Phil smiles back at him, waits for him to finish.
“… thanks for hanging out with me. I, um…”, Dan’s gaze snaps from the webcam back to Phil, inquiringly and laughing, “I’ve got a visitor I think…?”
Phil feels brave.
“Maybe I missed you?”
“You did?” Dan places his hand over his heart in mock affection.
“No, I didn’t, I lied. I just wanted to tell you that dinner is ready.”
Dan looks at him, grinning widely and disbelieving, before a laugh shakes his frame. He pokes his tongue through his teeth slightly and Phil knows he’s just mirroring what he sees on his own face.
“You wanna come say hi…?”
Phil shakes his head.
“No, I just want you to hurry up or I am eating all your halloumi by myself and there won’t be any left for you.”
“Rude!” Dan turns back to his laptop. “Well you heard him guys. Phil doesn’t want me talking to you, it’s not my fault, but I’ve gotta leave.”
Phil turns and walks back down the stairs. “I’ve almost finished eating it all up! It’s so delicious!”
“Shut up rat!” he hears, and giggles slightly to himself. He feels a bit jittery with excitement. It feels so, so good to let themselves just be… themselves, more and more.
He’s just putting the plate down at his seat when Dan joins him in the dining area.
“You were quick.”
“After you threatened to eat all my dinner…! Mmh, that looks good.”
Dan gets glasses for them and then sits down in his seat, feet propped up on the chair beside him, like he always does. Phil tickles a bit at them, like he not always does, but often enough for Dan to anticipate it and kick at him already in advance.
“Ow!”
Dan ignores him. “What was that just now?”
“I tickled you?”
“You know what I mean.”
He does. He takes a bite to stall, and then smiles at Dan as he chews. Dan is sat back in his chair, arms crossed over his chest, prompting Phil silently.
Phil makes a gesture to his mouth to indicate he can’t talk right now, and Dan rolls his eyes and takes the cutlery in hand.
“They went all berserk in the chat, about how domestic that just was and shit.”
Phil laughs. “Did they really?”
“Yeah. Isn’t something we usually do, is it?”
Phil knows it isn’t. Maybe he had done it because of what he’d been thinking about, all of their past Valentine’s Days. Maybe it had been because of how sad it makes him sometimes, how they hid so much of themselves. It could have just been their nice day though, and how he’d been really… happy.
He takes another bite and remembers that feeling that had bloomed inside his chest, warm and full, as he’d stood there, hearing Dan talk upstairs.
“I just… felt like it. Especially after what you had said after it having been a nice day and stuff.”
Dan is already looking at him when Phil meets his gaze. He looks surprised.
“You heard that?”
“Mmh. Listened to you for a bit while I was cooking.”
Dan blushes just the slightest bit and tucks his chin, nudging his knee against Phil’s side under the table. “Well. It was a nice day.”
“It was. It feels really good, to be… to do something like that for us.”
They look at each other for a moment, smiling. Phil leans forward then and presses a kiss onto Dan’s mouth, lingering slightly and relishing in the comfort of it.
“Love you,” Dan says as they pull apart.
Phil feels warm all over and smells the candle again, suddenly. Sweet and fruity is what love’s supposed to smell like, but they got it all wrong, because right now it strangely smells of curry rice with veggies and fried halloumi.
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Baldur's Gate Download Mac
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Baldur's Gate
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Siana
A dark, slender figure enters. Shafts of daylight flow into the room until the door closes once more with a loud bang. The room is so crowded that making one's way is a delicate task. Commoners run about to and fro, maidens carry large trays with slopping liquid and the noise is almost unbearable. The floors creak, glasses clink together in toasts and patrons scream for ale. The stranger emerges from the crush by a table and sitting herself down glances at the door. The air about her seems to crackle with a form of electricity, she seems almost ethereal, although human.
Moments later, more adventurers arrive. The locals become nervous as the tension in the room rises. A half-crazed warrior speaks, with his sword swung over his back, to a small, furry creature (is it a hamster?) and makes his way to the strangers table. As they begin to converse in low tones, another woman makes her way across the room from the bar. Standing nearby, in a booming voice she speaks to the stranger, 'Siana, isn't it? There is no doubt, you fit the description,' and promptly draws her sword.
The Sword Coast
Welcome to the most addictive realm in the universe: The Sword Coast of Forgotten Realms. How many thousands of people out there have wasted many an hour with paper and pen, or in titles like Pools of Radience, Eye of the Beholder , or any number of campaigns or computer games involving The Forgotten Realms? O.K. don't scream yes all at once! :-). How long have we waited for something new? Something to come along and fill that craving ache that the Dungeon Master can no longer fill because they burned out 10 years ago after running games for 10 more? How long, I say, how LONG? Yes! I hear you, you are shouting across the globe, TOO LONG! How did we all hear that? Easily, by the number of copies grabbed up and off the shelves of the one game to promise it to you once again. Really the first game to sell like seriously tasty hot-cakes. Interplay couldn't burn them fast enough and those who had them were the envy of every group of gaming friends across the world. I still to this day play on a mud located in Finland, there was NOTHING but ' BG ' chat on the wizard channel. What day are you on? Where is that blasted magic ring? I just found Volo, damn that Captain. I just got to Cloakwood!!! Talk about community addiction, no one could stop playing. Even here at GDR almost every editor is playing Baldur's Gate and cannot stop. Is it worthy? Hell yes, how can the whole world be wrong!? But really, let's have a look.
Single Player Mode
My kingdom for Multiplayer! Single player mode in Baldur's Gate is fun, and tough. But it's not as good as multiplayer and there are a few reasons for this, which I will explain presently. Single-player mode allows you to play through the story with one character which you create at the beginning. Your character may then form a party by including NPCs found in the game or just go it alone. Yes, the game is even solvable with a single character, but so far (or as far as I know) only by one particular class. In general, players will instead group with mages, thieves, clerics or whoever else turns their fancy. Each NPC has their own personality, while one may be sniveling and insecure, the other might be half-crazed. A spectrum from good to evil in all the neutral, lawful and chaotic combinations ensures the traditional AD&D; variety.
Single-player mode does have its charms. Creating your character in the traditional way by choosing race, class (dual and multi-classes available), gender, abilities, alignment, proficiencies and spells to start with. You must also select your name and portrait, and your icon appearance and roll for your stats. If you've played any of the old Forgotten Realms CRPGs you will feel right at home with this. Most of the AD&D; 2nd Edition rules are adhered to, with slight changes documented to make the transition to computer game. Bioware have done an excellent job of this, and it may come as a shock to those less familiar with the rules, since progression is slower and more subtle than in other computer games which are loosely related, such as Daggerfall where progression was quite easy.
Once character generation is complete, you begin your story in the town of Candlekeep. 'This citadel of learning stands on a volcanic crag, overlooking the sea.' From the opening animation of a Vader like character beating and torturing a poor knight, you do know that something evil has begun a campaign of some sort along the Sword Coast. In Candlekeep, you learn that you are the ward of Gorion, that you know nothing about your past, and that your peaceful life in Candlekeep, where books are a ticket into the gates, is threatened by some mysterious danger. It is this danger which drives you and Gorion from Candlekeep and onto a journey which will take you across the wilderness and through the towns between Baldur's Gate in the north and Arm in the south.
Go for the eyes Boo!
The story then in Baldur's Gate takes precedent. That is, you eventually progress toward solving the mysteries behind the danger threatening you. There are however, numerous side quests to follow, items to search for and monsters to destroy. Each area is a large 2D map which you can either spend time clearing or move directly through to get to your next destination. A large overview map is used to select the area you want to go to, and time is added (such as 4 days) to the overall game when you move from one city to the next. Sometimes you may be waylaid by monsters or bandits, and this might occur at a map which you normally cannot select.
Communication with characters is the main source of information and story progression. You often can choose a way to role-play through talking to NPCs and it may even affect your reputation. Reputation is related to alignment (if you are evil and doing nice deeds and improve your reputation you may loose your evil party members who think that's a toss). When playing single-player mode, it can be difficult in beginning to sort out a party. You are presented with NPCs of various alignments and skills and must compile a group that will live (literally. Ed) with each other. Since there are not so many in the beginning it can be tough going, especially if you are a mage (generally weak and cannot wear armor) and really need those extra members to survive. If the NPCs do not get along, eventually they will leave or attack you. Even still, I managed to keep good, neutral and evil aligned characters together by playing a lawful evil character and travelling both by day some of the time and by night the rest. They bitched and moaned and were nasty to each other, but with a medium reputation (of 10) it seemed to work.
This is one of the drawbacks of single-player mode however, you really are stuck with whoever you find, rather than creating your own party. In some sense though, this was humorous because they behaved in ways which were totally unexpected and added to the sense of being on a journey. At the same time, it meant that they were not my ideal type of group.
Although it wasn't my group, the role-playing aspect in single-player mode was much more rich. For one game (I have two running), I have the Ranger Chaotic Good leader grouped with Imoen, Neutral Good Thief NPC (childhood friend to my character). They were joined in the woods by a Chaotic Evil Necro and a Neutral Evil Thief. They stayed grouped from the woods to The Friendly Arm. Then, after grouping with the two friends of Gorion in the Arm, we went upstairs and I let the evil thief try to steal first from a chest, he was unsuccessful with lock picking, then attempt a pick-pocket from a noble. Well, the noble caught him and a fight ensued...the characters started shooting arrows at all the nobles. After firing arrows and killing the nobles the characters all started talking. The good chars said, 'I dont think I like how this group is being run!' The evil necro said,' Oh, for the first time this group is becoming palatable!' :-). Anyway, more than half were pissed off and wanted to break group. Worse yet, since Rangers are meant to be doers of good deeds, immediately the reputation changed and my character lost her Ranger status. So, role-playing with NPCs really works.
Bring me some ale!
As you travel, you enter taverns, private houses, farms, woods and meadows. These rooms and outdoor areas are beautifully rendered and are the most unusual to date, absolutely fascinating. Looking sketched or painted, these maps have shadows which change over time, and eventually become dark as day turns to night. Rain or light snow falls and crystal clear rivers are filled with small stones and approachable islands. Your characters move with distinct behaviours and certain terrains, such as mountains and cliffs, are impassable. Actually this provided some problems with path-finding, which has recently been addressed in a beta patch. Both interior and outdoor scenes are augmented by excellent sounds of people moving, shouting, doors opening and closing or birds and animals moving about. The wind rustles, a monster cries, it's all in a days work on the road.
101 Kobolds
Combat in Baldur's Gate is different from its predecessors, as it is in real-time. The combat method is based on AD&D; rules adjusted to real-time, so instead of a 60 second initiative period, each character is given 6 seconds. The speed with which a character attacks is a number between 1/10 and 10/10ths time per round and the initiative is decided by a combination of rolled factors: ability, situation, and chance. Whether a character has a successful attack still depends on their THAC0 (To Hit Armour Class 0) and their attack roll. Critical hits and misses are decided by the attack roll, 20 or 1, respectively. Strength, dexterity, modifiers and weapons all affect attacks. Casting is treated in a similar way, although spells must be previously memorized (rather than being based on the mana of the caster) and can be disrupted in combat if the caster is hit.
This real-time aspect to AD&D; combat takes some getting used to, actually most everyone I know uses either the selection of different types of auto-pause (such as pause after every round for each character) or the space-bar to pause combat. I initially started out with autopause and then switched to space-bar. The reason is that combat is too difficult to control real-time. Firstly, although you control each of the NPCs as well as your character, to play without pause requires using the A.I. scripts provided or making your own. A.I. has 3 different settings for each class, for instance you can play your mage defensive or aggressive. The problem I had with scripts was that they did not control the characters well enough. I often found my mad necromancer in the middle of combat, after he had fired off all of his spells using his piercing weapon. Meanwhile, the warriors ran off, chasing their fleeing opponents, only to run into a nest of new monsters. This led to the group breaking up, and often added too many enemies to the battle at once.
Therefore in single-player mode, I resorted to pause and handled all of the combat on my own. Grouping archers and mages to the back, warriors and thieves at the front. Handling each fired spell, and every attack. Archery was a wonderful tool, and one of my main combat methods. But another problem I had was that archers, when in heavy combat against a large number of monsters, would use up the 3x20 arrows in quivers and then require changes. In single-player going to the inventory window of the interface immediately causes the real-time combat to begin again (a choice Bioware made in order to simulate a change of weapon in combat) and thus things were running in the background behind the inventory screen (which I could not see) while I clumsily made the change to add arrows. Some of the reason for this is that monsters will 're-pop' in an area (pop up again) after you have killed the first batch. This means that you can continue fighting all day, not that realistic and one of the niggles.
On the other hand, Bioware have provided some excellent options settings to ease the difficulty of real-time combat. Almost every spell and action can be mapped to keys using a convenient set of configuration windows so customizing your combat is not uncomfortable.
Finally, this group is becoming palatable
Despite the niggles mentioned above, single-player mode is a more challenging way to play Baldur's Gate. By sticking it out through the first stages, I learned the interface and created my own ways to deal with situations and my NPCs. As the story progressed, and the more involved I became, then the more trouble I had giving up characters that I had gotten used to for new members that came along. It's actually better to make some tough choices early since the characters which join your party gain experience, and therefore levels, along with your main character, building up their powers over time to help with the more troublesome events that come much later in the game.
Aleya
Journal Entry: Day 77, Hour 12 (17 Flamerule, 1368)
It was about noon when my companions and I set up camp in the Cloakwood Forest, giving me my first opportunity to update my journal since leaving Beregost. Strange monsters and human bandits beset the road to this beautiful place and my companions and I are weary from the seemingly endless battles. It is a rare pleasure to be able to stop and enjoy the beauty of nature.
I have to admit that I would have never dreamed myself living this type of life. How could I have predicted it when I was growing up amongst the serenity of the books at Candlekeep? Now my old friends and I are being hunted for reasons I'm not sure of, my foster father slain by a mysterious armored figure. Gorion believed too fervently in the need for the powers of good to prevail, but he was a caring and generous man. Why he or I would have enemies this powerful is a mystery to me. Well, at least I have the comfort of my friends who I have grown up with and trust completely. It would have been much harder had I needed to rely on the strangers I have met in my journeys.
Something out there is tipping the balance of power to the side of evil. I understand the need for evil in this world, but this lack of balance is forcing me to have to tip the scales back through good deeds and heroic actions. To be honest, though, I would much rather stay here with my fellow druids in Cloakwood. It would be wonderful to disappear into these woods and not return to the mess that is human civilization, but I feel something stronger calling me. These strange dreams I have been having would indicate that there is something lurking just over the horizon that I haven't grasped yet. Perhaps I will learn more when I find that mine and talk to whoever is in charge there. Perhaps.
Multiplayer
This game was so big it took two of us to review it - Karen focused on playing the game through in single player mode, and I played the multiplayer mode with my husband over my home LAN. Interestingly enough, Karen and I had two different experiences playing the game although we both shared the same addiction to it. Let's face it, this game is nothing short of incredible. I generally don't play games like these through again, but as I write this, I'm on my fourth full game of Baldur's Gate and still enjoying it as much as I did the first time through.
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While some of the issues Karen had with the single player mode were resolved by multiplayer gameplay, I didn't see some of the interesting NPC features she would have been able to see. Creating six custom characters definitely has its merits, such as being able to create the exact type of characters you want rather than hoping the game will supply them for you. However, doing so prevents the player from seeing the interactions that take place between the NPCs in your party and other characters in the game world. Each NPC has his/her own unique personality and history that affects the way some quests are solved and can even influence the flow of the storyline.
Custom characters do not have much of a personality, nor do they have any sort of history aside from 'you were a friend of the main character at Candlekeep'. These custom created characters are not as likely to break and attack the party for acting outside of their alignment as NPCs are. My husband controlled both a neutral evil Thief and a lawful good Paladin; he enjoyed sneaking away from the rest of the party to take his characters on house raids in the major towns while I wasn't paying attention. Granted, he left the Paladin in the living room while the Thief roamed the house and stole things - but I still would think that a character with a lawful good alignment would have a problem breaking into houses. Nor would a Paladin really be able to tolerate being grouped with an evil character in the first place. These differences aside, the story line and subquest structure of both single player and multiplayer is exactly the same.
Multiplayer mode allows far greater control over the characters, which is why many players chose to play the game in this mode instead of single player. Each player in the game session controls a certain number of characters, and to make up for the fact that there can be up to six people playing the game at once, the game does allow you to enter the Inventory screen while paused. This complete control over the characters meant that I never had to worry about auto-pausing the game in battles as Karen did to ensure my characters were doing the right things. I never ran out of arrows, potions, or anything else. However, I did notice that the character scripts still had an effect if you chose to set them; when I set my fighter to aggressive I had a much harder time controlling him, as he tended to run and attack anything the instant it turned into an enemy. Unfortunately, this meant that if I accidentally made townspeople angry he would generally kill them before I had even realized what happened - but this was easily fixed by turning off the scripts.
Lots of Options
Baldur's Gate offers an amazing amount of control over how the game is played in a game session. It is very easy to set up a multiplayer game, and just as easy to join one in progress over the Internet or LAN. Each game can be protected using a password to keep unwanted players from joining. The player on the server machine (or the 'leader') has the power to decide - on a per player basis at any point during the game - whether or not the other players have the ability to modify characters, spend gold, initiate dialog, view other character records, leave an area, pause the game, or modify permissions.
The leader has the power to kick other players from the multiplayer session instantly or decide, using the Character Arbitration screen, which player controls which character(s). Because of the fluidity of multiplayer game play, characters can be added, deleted, or reassigned during game play on the fly. At any point during the game, the leader can completely change the dynamics of the party, deleting all the old characters and creating completely new ones if he so desires - although any party manipulations mid-game like this drop the party reputation back to 10 or 11. The leader also dictates how player import works. One can choose to import a character into a game with all experience and items, with experience only, or at with no items or experience.
The fact that characters can be imported and exported with full items at any point in the game helps protect players against player killing - the leader can either revert back to a saved game or you can just import your character back in. An added bonus to this import/export option is that it also allows for some interesting cloning experiments in terms of both player characters and items. Just as a test of the import process (it isn't considered 'cheating' when done as an experiment, right?) I managed to clone in five copies of my fighter for an extremely tough battle. I dismissed the other five people from the party temporarily, then had them rejoin after I sent the five 'clones' into battle to be killed. By cloning the fighter, I not only duplicated him but also any items the he was holding when I exported him. I could pick these items up from the bodies of the dead 'clones' and redistribute them within my party, allowing my characters to be equipped with multiple copies of very rare magical items.
The game is designed to run in asynchronous mode, which means that not all computers will show the exact same events on the screen. While this is good in terms of latency issues, it is a little disconcerting during the gameplay. It seemed that whatever appeared on my machine (the server) was 'reality' and whatever appeared on my husband's computer was not. There were many times either my characters or his got killed because of this; to him it looked like the monsters were across the screen, or not there at all, when in reality they were right in the middle of the party. We even had a couple instances where his characters appeared in impossible places, such as trapped behind walls, when the computers would readjust what was on both our screens.
What's that Icon Mean?
The interface is one that takes a lot of time to get used to and has a high initial learning curve. There are several icons surrounding the main game screen, and as is sometimes the problem with icons, they aren't always intuitive. For instance, a mask appears for the thief's 'unlock/disarm trap/pickpocket' button, which doesn't make me think of any of those. Because of these icons, I had to keep the manual handy to keep track of all the different icons and options throughout the game.
In general, the icons along the side are the game management icons, allowing the player access to the character screens, inventories, map, journal, and game options. The character portraits are along the opposite side. These can be moved around at will, including putting new characters into the 'main character' slot. Players can chat amongst themselves using the dialog box, which can be expanded to be bigger or smaller, depending on the amount of conversation occurring. Game text, battle statistics, and conversation with NPCs also appears in this box.
The icons at the bottom for quick items, weapons, and abilities can be confusing at first, as the icons that appear differ depending on the character type. For instance, the screenshot above is taken with my druid character highlighted, so her bar contains spells, items, and two weapons. The thief's bar would contain different icons to represent his ability to hide in shadows, find traps, and disarm/unlock. The fighter's icons are different, as are the mage's, and so on.
For the most part, the game does an excellent job of providing alternate ways to know icons aside from digging out the manual or quick reference guide. Either a mouse click or leaving the mouse over an icon brings up descriptive text about the icon, spell, ability, or item. One other thing Baldur's Gate does very well is map areas and document major and minor quest information in the journal. I did not have to keep manual notes at all, which is a first.
The Game Bible ... er, Manual
A game this large and with so much to learn in order to play it needs a manual that is equally as large, and the one that ships with the game is the size of a short novel - 159 pages of very important information. I must have read through it about three times! I have some experience with playing AD&D; games, so I had a basic knowledge of the character classes, alignments, and spells. This manual, however, greatly enhanced my knowledge of how things worked in the AD&D; world, and contained any piece of relevant information that might be needed to play the game. I always had it on hand when I played the game, and I found myself referring to it quite often. However, I wish it had contained more in-depth information about the pros and cons of the different races and classes. I found myself having to ask friends who used to Dungeon Master in the AD&D; pen and paper days for clarification instead.
However, with as much helpful information this manual contained, I don't think it was laid out in such a manner as to be helpful to new players. The information about character races, alignments, and classes was contained in the middle of the manual under a section about AD&D; Rules. Normally character creation information is at the front. The description about how the statistics for each attribute (such as intelligence, etc) actually affect the character is at the very back of the manual under a totally different section. The manual does have both an index at the back and a table of contents, but these still did not seem to cut down on the amount of time I, and others I know, had to search through the manual for information. I still managed to go almost 75% of the way through the game without knowing how to disarm traps or that I could set spells up in the quick use slots because I somehow overlooked that information in the manual.
Also, not many people even like to have to read a manual, not to mention one this long. Anyone who does not read the manual is at a disadvantage unless they know something about AD&D; rules. The quick reference guide is wonderful for mapping icons to meanings, but does not get into character limitations or detailed spell information. Even if one knows the rules and just uses the quick reference guide, there is a good chance that you will miss a key game option or feature.
The Battle Ends - For Now
Journal Entry: Day 130, Hour 10 (9 Eleint, 1368)
My quest has ended, although I am too weary from battle to recount all the details. Suffice to say my quest was difficult and lengthy, but one the gods surely enjoyed. The ending of my saga seemed somehow anticlimactic given all that I had been through, but I can definitely live with that! I have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed my adventures, and for some reason, I feel as if this journey was only the beginning of more to come. I will welcome the challenge, and am looking forward to where the fates may take me.
Review By GamesDomain
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Jayzer2020-04-290 point
Game has been re-abandoned on GOG in favor of the Enhanced Edition by BeamDog.
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Baldur's Gate was also released on the following systems:
Mac
Year:2000
Publisher:Graphsim Entertainment Inc.
Developer:BioWare Corporation
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Baldur's Gate
4.5 / 5 - 8 votes
Download extras files
Manual, map and refcard available
Baldur's Gate Download Mac Iso
Description of Baldur's Gate Windows
Read Full Review
Siana
A dark, slender figure enters. Shafts of daylight flow into the room until the door closes once more with a loud bang. The room is so crowded that making one's way is a delicate task. Commoners run about to and fro, maidens carry large trays with slopping liquid and the noise is almost unbearable. The floors creak, glasses clink together in toasts and patrons scream for ale. The stranger emerges from the crush by a table and sitting herself down glances at the door. The air about her seems to crackle with a form of electricity, she seems almost ethereal, although human.
Moments later, more adventurers arrive. The locals become nervous as the tension in the room rises. A half-crazed warrior speaks, with his sword swung over his back, to a small, furry creature (is it a hamster?) and makes his way to the strangers table. As they begin to converse in low tones, another woman makes her way across the room from the bar. Standing nearby, in a booming voice she speaks to the stranger, 'Siana, isn't it? There is no doubt, you fit the description,' and promptly draws her sword.
The Sword Coast
Welcome to the most addictive realm in the universe: The Sword Coast of Forgotten Realms. How many thousands of people out there have wasted many an hour with paper and pen, or in titles like Pools of Radience, Eye of the Beholder , or any number of campaigns or computer games involving The Forgotten Realms? O.K. don't scream yes all at once! :-). How long have we waited for something new? Something to come along and fill that craving ache that the Dungeon Master can no longer fill because they burned out 10 years ago after running games for 10 more? How long, I say, how LONG? Yes! I hear you, you are shouting across the globe, TOO LONG! How did we all hear that? Easily, by the number of copies grabbed up and off the shelves of the one game to promise it to you once again. Really the first game to sell like seriously tasty hot-cakes. Interplay couldn't burn them fast enough and those who had them were the envy of every group of gaming friends across the world. I still to this day play on a mud located in Finland, there was NOTHING but ' BG ' chat on the wizard channel. What day are you on? Where is that blasted magic ring? I just found Volo, damn that Captain. I just got to Cloakwood!!! Talk about community addiction, no one could stop playing. Even here at GDR almost every editor is playing Baldur's Gate and cannot stop. Is it worthy? Hell yes, how can the whole world be wrong!? But really, let's have a look.
Single Player Mode
My kingdom for Multiplayer! Single player mode in Baldur's Gate is fun, and tough. But it's not as good as multiplayer and there are a few reasons for this, which I will explain presently. Single-player mode allows you to play through the story with one character which you create at the beginning. Your character may then form a party by including NPCs found in the game or just go it alone. Yes, the game is even solvable with a single character, but so far (or as far as I know) only by one particular class. In general, players will instead group with mages, thieves, clerics or whoever else turns their fancy. Each NPC has their own personality, while one may be sniveling and insecure, the other might be half-crazed. A spectrum from good to evil in all the neutral, lawful and chaotic combinations ensures the traditional AD&D; variety.
Single-player mode does have its charms. Creating your character in the traditional way by choosing race, class (dual and multi-classes available), gender, abilities, alignment, proficiencies and spells to start with. You must also select your name and portrait, and your icon appearance and roll for your stats. If you've played any of the old Forgotten Realms CRPGs you will feel right at home with this. Most of the AD&D; 2nd Edition rules are adhered to, with slight changes documented to make the transition to computer game. Bioware have done an excellent job of this, and it may come as a shock to those less familiar with the rules, since progression is slower and more subtle than in other computer games which are loosely related, such as Daggerfall where progression was quite easy.
Once character generation is complete, you begin your story in the town of Candlekeep. 'This citadel of learning stands on a volcanic crag, overlooking the sea.' From the opening animation of a Vader like character beating and torturing a poor knight, you do know that something evil has begun a campaign of some sort along the Sword Coast. In Candlekeep, you learn that you are the ward of Gorion, that you know nothing about your past, and that your peaceful life in Candlekeep, where books are a ticket into the gates, is threatened by some mysterious danger. It is this danger which drives you and Gorion from Candlekeep and onto a journey which will take you across the wilderness and through the towns between Baldur's Gate in the north and Arm in the south.
Go for the eyes Boo!
The story then in Baldur's Gate takes precedent. That is, you eventually progress toward solving the mysteries behind the danger threatening you. There are however, numerous side quests to follow, items to search for and monsters to destroy. Each area is a large 2D map which you can either spend time clearing or move directly through to get to your next destination. A large overview map is used to select the area you want to go to, and time is added (such as 4 days) to the overall game when you move from one city to the next. Sometimes you may be waylaid by monsters or bandits, and this might occur at a map which you normally cannot select.
Communication with characters is the main source of information and story progression. You often can choose a way to role-play through talking to NPCs and it may even affect your reputation. Reputation is related to alignment (if you are evil and doing nice deeds and improve your reputation you may loose your evil party members who think that's a toss). When playing single-player mode, it can be difficult in beginning to sort out a party. You are presented with NPCs of various alignments and skills and must compile a group that will live (literally. Ed) with each other. Since there are not so many in the beginning it can be tough going, especially if you are a mage (generally weak and cannot wear armor) and really need those extra members to survive. If the NPCs do not get along, eventually they will leave or attack you. Even still, I managed to keep good, neutral and evil aligned characters together by playing a lawful evil character and travelling both by day some of the time and by night the rest. They bitched and moaned and were nasty to each other, but with a medium reputation (of 10) it seemed to work.
This is one of the drawbacks of single-player mode however, you really are stuck with whoever you find, rather than creating your own party. In some sense though, this was humorous because they behaved in ways which were totally unexpected and added to the sense of being on a journey. At the same time, it meant that they were not my ideal type of group.
Although it wasn't my group, the role-playing aspect in single-player mode was much more rich. For one game (I have two running), I have the Ranger Chaotic Good leader grouped with Imoen, Neutral Good Thief NPC (childhood friend to my character). They were joined in the woods by a Chaotic Evil Necro and a Neutral Evil Thief. They stayed grouped from the woods to The Friendly Arm. Then, after grouping with the two friends of Gorion in the Arm, we went upstairs and I let the evil thief try to steal first from a chest, he was unsuccessful with lock picking, then attempt a pick-pocket from a noble. Well, the noble caught him and a fight ensued...the characters started shooting arrows at all the nobles. After firing arrows and killing the nobles the characters all started talking. The good chars said, 'I dont think I like how this group is being run!' The evil necro said,' Oh, for the first time this group is becoming palatable!' :-). Anyway, more than half were pissed off and wanted to break group. Worse yet, since Rangers are meant to be doers of good deeds, immediately the reputation changed and my character lost her Ranger status. So, role-playing with NPCs really works.
Bring me some ale!
As you travel, you enter taverns, private houses, farms, woods and meadows. These rooms and outdoor areas are beautifully rendered and are the most unusual to date, absolutely fascinating. Looking sketched or painted, these maps have shadows which change over time, and eventually become dark as day turns to night. Rain or light snow falls and crystal clear rivers are filled with small stones and approachable islands. Your characters move with distinct behaviours and certain terrains, such as mountains and cliffs, are impassable. Actually this provided some problems with path-finding, which has recently been addressed in a beta patch. Both interior and outdoor scenes are augmented by excellent sounds of people moving, shouting, doors opening and closing or birds and animals moving about. The wind rustles, a monster cries, it's all in a days work on the road.
101 Kobolds
Combat in Baldur's Gate is different from its predecessors, as it is in real-time. The combat method is based on AD&D; rules adjusted to real-time, so instead of a 60 second initiative period, each character is given 6 seconds. The speed with which a character attacks is a number between 1/10 and 10/10ths time per round and the initiative is decided by a combination of rolled factors: ability, situation, and chance. Whether a character has a successful attack still depends on their THAC0 (To Hit Armour Class 0) and their attack roll. Critical hits and misses are decided by the attack roll, 20 or 1, respectively. Strength, dexterity, modifiers and weapons all affect attacks. Casting is treated in a similar way, although spells must be previously memorized (rather than being based on the mana of the caster) and can be disrupted in combat if the caster is hit.
This real-time aspect to AD&D; combat takes some getting used to, actually most everyone I know uses either the selection of different types of auto-pause (such as pause after every round for each character) or the space-bar to pause combat. I initially started out with autopause and then switched to space-bar. The reason is that combat is too difficult to control real-time. Firstly, although you control each of the NPCs as well as your character, to play without pause requires using the A.I. scripts provided or making your own. A.I. has 3 different settings for each class, for instance you can play your mage defensive or aggressive. The problem I had with scripts was that they did not control the characters well enough. I often found my mad necromancer in the middle of combat, after he had fired off all of his spells using his piercing weapon. Meanwhile, the warriors ran off, chasing their fleeing opponents, only to run into a nest of new monsters. This led to the group breaking up, and often added too many enemies to the battle at once.
Therefore in single-player mode, I resorted to pause and handled all of the combat on my own. Grouping archers and mages to the back, warriors and thieves at the front. Handling each fired spell, and every attack. Archery was a wonderful tool, and one of my main combat methods. But another problem I had was that archers, when in heavy combat against a large number of monsters, would use up the 3x20 arrows in quivers and then require changes. In single-player going to the inventory window of the interface immediately causes the real-time combat to begin again (a choice Bioware made in order to simulate a change of weapon in combat) and thus things were running in the background behind the inventory screen (which I could not see) while I clumsily made the change to add arrows. Some of the reason for this is that monsters will 're-pop' in an area (pop up again) after you have killed the first batch. This means that you can continue fighting all day, not that realistic and one of the niggles.
On the other hand, Bioware have provided some excellent options settings to ease the difficulty of real-time combat. Almost every spell and action can be mapped to keys using a convenient set of configuration windows so customizing your combat is not uncomfortable.
Finally, this group is becoming palatable
Despite the niggles mentioned above, single-player mode is a more challenging way to play Baldur's Gate. By sticking it out through the first stages, I learned the interface and created my own ways to deal with situations and my NPCs. As the story progressed, and the more involved I became, then the more trouble I had giving up characters that I had gotten used to for new members that came along. It's actually better to make some tough choices early since the characters which join your party gain experience, and therefore levels, along with your main character, building up their powers over time to help with the more troublesome events that come much later in the game.
Aleya
Journal Entry: Day 77, Hour 12 (17 Flamerule, 1368)
It was about noon when my companions and I set up camp in the Cloakwood Forest, giving me my first opportunity to update my journal since leaving Beregost. Strange monsters and human bandits beset the road to this beautiful place and my companions and I are weary from the seemingly endless battles. It is a rare pleasure to be able to stop and enjoy the beauty of nature.
I have to admit that I would have never dreamed myself living this type of life. How could I have predicted it when I was growing up amongst the serenity of the books at Candlekeep? Now my old friends and I are being hunted for reasons I'm not sure of, my foster father slain by a mysterious armored figure. Gorion believed too fervently in the need for the powers of good to prevail, but he was a caring and generous man. Why he or I would have enemies this powerful is a mystery to me. Well, at least I have the comfort of my friends who I have grown up with and trust completely. It would have been much harder had I needed to rely on the strangers I have met in my journeys.
Something out there is tipping the balance of power to the side of evil. I understand the need for evil in this world, but this lack of balance is forcing me to have to tip the scales back through good deeds and heroic actions. To be honest, though, I would much rather stay here with my fellow druids in Cloakwood. It would be wonderful to disappear into these woods and not return to the mess that is human civilization, but I feel something stronger calling me. These strange dreams I have been having would indicate that there is something lurking just over the horizon that I haven't grasped yet. Perhaps I will learn more when I find that mine and talk to whoever is in charge there. Perhaps.
Multiplayer
This game was so big it took two of us to review it - Karen focused on playing the game through in single player mode, and I played the multiplayer mode with my husband over my home LAN. Interestingly enough, Karen and I had two different experiences playing the game although we both shared the same addiction to it. Let's face it, this game is nothing short of incredible. I generally don't play games like these through again, but as I write this, I'm on my fourth full game of Baldur's Gate and still enjoying it as much as I did the first time through.
While some of the issues Karen had with the single player mode were resolved by multiplayer gameplay, I didn't see some of the interesting NPC features she would have been able to see. Creating six custom characters definitely has its merits, such as being able to create the exact type of characters you want rather than hoping the game will supply them for you. However, doing so prevents the player from seeing the interactions that take place between the NPCs in your party and other characters in the game world. Each NPC has his/her own unique personality and history that affects the way some quests are solved and can even influence the flow of the storyline.
Custom characters do not have much of a personality, nor do they have any sort of history aside from 'you were a friend of the main character at Candlekeep'. These custom created characters are not as likely to break and attack the party for acting outside of their alignment as NPCs are. My husband controlled both a neutral evil Thief and a lawful good Paladin; he enjoyed sneaking away from the rest of the party to take his characters on house raids in the major towns while I wasn't paying attention. Granted, he left the Paladin in the living room while the Thief roamed the house and stole things - but I still would think that a character with a lawful good alignment would have a problem breaking into houses. Nor would a Paladin really be able to tolerate being grouped with an evil character in the first place. These differences aside, the story line and subquest structure of both single player and multiplayer is exactly the same.
Multiplayer mode allows far greater control over the characters, which is why many players chose to play the game in this mode instead of single player. Each player in the game session controls a certain number of characters, and to make up for the fact that there can be up to six people playing the game at once, the game does allow you to enter the Inventory screen while paused. This complete control over the characters meant that I never had to worry about auto-pausing the game in battles as Karen did to ensure my characters were doing the right things. I never ran out of arrows, potions, or anything else. However, I did notice that the character scripts still had an effect if you chose to set them; when I set my fighter to aggressive I had a much harder time controlling him, as he tended to run and attack anything the instant it turned into an enemy. Unfortunately, this meant that if I accidentally made townspeople angry he would generally kill them before I had even realized what happened - but this was easily fixed by turning off the scripts.
Lots of Options
Baldur's Gate offers an amazing amount of control over how the game is played in a game session. It is very easy to set up a multiplayer game, and just as easy to join one in progress over the Internet or LAN. Each game can be protected using a password to keep unwanted players from joining. The player on the server machine (or the 'leader') has the power to decide - on a per player basis at any point during the game - whether or not the other players have the ability to modify characters, spend gold, initiate dialog, view other character records, leave an area, pause the game, or modify permissions.
The leader has the power to kick other players from the multiplayer session instantly or decide, using the Character Arbitration screen, which player controls which character(s). Because of the fluidity of multiplayer game play, characters can be added, deleted, or reassigned during game play on the fly. At any point during the game, the leader can completely change the dynamics of the party, deleting all the old characters and creating completely new ones if he so desires - although any party manipulations mid-game like this drop the party reputation back to 10 or 11. The leader also dictates how player import works. One can choose to import a character into a game with all experience and items, with experience only, or at with no items or experience.
The fact that characters can be imported and exported with full items at any point in the game helps protect players against player killing - the leader can either revert back to a saved game or you can just import your character back in. An added bonus to this import/export option is that it also allows for some interesting cloning experiments in terms of both player characters and items. Just as a test of the import process (it isn't considered 'cheating' when done as an experiment, right?) I managed to clone in five copies of my fighter for an extremely tough battle. I dismissed the other five people from the party temporarily, then had them rejoin after I sent the five 'clones' into battle to be killed. By cloning the fighter, I not only duplicated him but also any items the he was holding when I exported him. I could pick these items up from the bodies of the dead 'clones' and redistribute them within my party, allowing my characters to be equipped with multiple copies of very rare magical items.
The game is designed to run in asynchronous mode, which means that not all computers will show the exact same events on the screen. While this is good in terms of latency issues, it is a little disconcerting during the gameplay. It seemed that whatever appeared on my machine (the server) was 'reality' and whatever appeared on my husband's computer was not. There were many times either my characters or his got killed because of this; to him it looked like the monsters were across the screen, or not there at all, when in reality they were right in the middle of the party. We even had a couple instances where his characters appeared in impossible places, such as trapped behind walls, when the computers would readjust what was on both our screens.
What's that Icon Mean?
The interface is one that takes a lot of time to get used to and has a high initial learning curve. There are several icons surrounding the main game screen, and as is sometimes the problem with icons, they aren't always intuitive. For instance, a mask appears for the thief's 'unlock/disarm trap/pickpocket' button, which doesn't make me think of any of those. Because of these icons, I had to keep the manual handy to keep track of all the different icons and options throughout the game.
In general, the icons along the side are the game management icons, allowing the player access to the character screens, inventories, map, journal, and game options. The character portraits are along the opposite side. These can be moved around at will, including putting new characters into the 'main character' slot. Players can chat amongst themselves using the dialog box, which can be expanded to be bigger or smaller, depending on the amount of conversation occurring. Game text, battle statistics, and conversation with NPCs also appears in this box.
The icons at the bottom for quick items, weapons, and abilities can be confusing at first, as the icons that appear differ depending on the character type. For instance, the screenshot above is taken with my druid character highlighted, so her bar contains spells, items, and two weapons. The thief's bar would contain different icons to represent his ability to hide in shadows, find traps, and disarm/unlock. The fighter's icons are different, as are the mage's, and so on.
For the most part, the game does an excellent job of providing alternate ways to know icons aside from digging out the manual or quick reference guide. Either a mouse click or leaving the mouse over an icon brings up descriptive text about the icon, spell, ability, or item. One other thing Baldur's Gate does very well is map areas and document major and minor quest information in the journal. I did not have to keep manual notes at all, which is a first.
The Game Bible ... er, Manual
A game this large and with so much to learn in order to play it needs a manual that is equally as large, and the one that ships with the game is the size of a short novel - 159 pages of very important information. I must have read through it about three times! I have some experience with playing AD&D; games, so I had a basic knowledge of the character classes, alignments, and spells. This manual, however, greatly enhanced my knowledge of how things worked in the AD&D; world, and contained any piece of relevant information that might be needed to play the game. I always had it on hand when I played the game, and I found myself referring to it quite often. However, I wish it had contained more in-depth information about the pros and cons of the different races and classes. I found myself having to ask friends who used to Dungeon Master in the AD&D; pen and paper days for clarification instead.
However, with as much helpful information this manual contained, I don't think it was laid out in such a manner as to be helpful to new players. The information about character races, alignments, and classes was contained in the middle of the manual under a section about AD&D; Rules. Normally character creation information is at the front. The description about how the statistics for each attribute (such as intelligence, etc) actually affect the character is at the very back of the manual under a totally different section. The manual does have both an index at the back and a table of contents, but these still did not seem to cut down on the amount of time I, and others I know, had to search through the manual for information. I still managed to go almost 75% of the way through the game without knowing how to disarm traps or that I could set spells up in the quick use slots because I somehow overlooked that information in the manual.
Also, not many people even like to have to read a manual, not to mention one this long. Anyone who does not read the manual is at a disadvantage unless they know something about AD&D; rules. The quick reference guide is wonderful for mapping icons to meanings, but does not get into character limitations or detailed spell information. Even if one knows the rules and just uses the quick reference guide, there is a good chance that you will miss a key game option or feature.
The Battle Ends - For Now
Journal Entry: Day 130, Hour 10 (9 Eleint, 1368)
My quest has ended, although I am too weary from battle to recount all the details. Suffice to say my quest was difficult and lengthy, but one the gods surely enjoyed. The ending of my saga seemed somehow anticlimactic given all that I had been through, but I can definitely live with that! I have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed my adventures, and for some reason, I feel as if this journey was only the beginning of more to come. I will welcome the challenge, and am looking forward to where the fates may take me.
Review By GamesDomain
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Jayzer2020-04-290 point
Game has been re-abandoned on GOG in favor of the Enhanced Edition by BeamDog.
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Year:2000
Publisher:Graphsim Entertainment Inc.
Developer:BioWare Corporation
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Dios Meme-o! (Rafael Barba Mini-Series, Pt. 6)
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 7
Part 8
Frankly, it had to have been when Lucia got involved that Rafael knew things were going too far. Even Carmen of all people was beginning to join in on the fun! (While Rafael really did appreciate the cup of coffee waiting for him when he came into work that morning, but did she really have to include the receipt bearing the name “Abo-guapo”?) And all at once, it appeared that the dam keeping his cohorts in SVU at bay had buckled under pressure – and the typhoon of fresh, new memes.
The initial, unspoken agreement had been to not bring up memes around Rafael or to laugh about them in his presence. But it didn’t take long for Sonny to throw caution straight into the garbage and use the technical loophole of sending him his latest finds (though, always making sure to precede them with at least one contribution to the case). It didn’t take long for the likes of Fin, Rollins, and even Liv every once in a while, to follow suit in some way shape or form.
By the end of the third week of this madness, Rafael swore he’d seen it all: Gifs of him from the press conference, pastel edits (causing him to wonder what the significance of flower crowns even was), more crude comments about his hand veins and midsection pudge, photo compilations of himself in his attire from previous acclaimed cases. Every once in a while, he’d even receive a screenshot wherein somebody had clearly photoshopped themselves into a picture with him. These were interestingly enough some of the images that caused Rafael the most concern, seeing as they weren’t even using decent photos for their apparent intentions: Were they really supposed to look like a power couple, with him so clearly focused on the press and not by their clumsily Photoshopped-in figure standing behind him? They looked more like prosecutor and client than anything.
What, more gifs of him before the press? Wait, these ones had captions edited into them. Oh, hell, what do they say?
Rafael Barba: I am here to address the rumors that have been circling about. I’ll be upfront: Yes, (Y/N) and I have been seeing each other. No, we are not dating – we’ve recently become engaged. I’ve loved her for many years in secrecy, and it shouldn’t be a crime to want something beautiful in this harsh life –
“Ugh.” Rafael all but retched as he x-ed out of the newest link from Rollins. He glared once more at the message she’d written in the email:
When were you gonna tell us that you were betrothed, Barba? I’m sure we would’ve understood the harshness of your life ;).
The lawyer sighed heavily through his nose as he pressed against his forehead. Rollins had given him some crucial information yesterday, so he couldn’t completely hound on her for slacking off. Yet. But god, was his already thin patience eroding at a rapid rate.
By noon, just as he’d calmed down from the eerie feeling of being shipped with other real-life people, another message came through. This time, to his surprise, from Liv.
He rose a brow. No words; just a link. This could’ve gone one of two ways: Bad, or very bad. He knew better than to do anything about the message, and honestly should have just deleted it on site. But alas, curiosity was such a destructive trait of man, enough so as to overwhelm his sense of self-preservation out of grotesque intrigue. With the click of his laptop mouse, Rafael at least had an answer as to which direction this would go down in: It was a Buzzfeed article, so that meant very bad.
“ ‘Check Out the Attorney Everyone Wants to Call’ ” it read. Before he could stop his eyes from searching the page for more info, he found himself reading the embarrassing excuse for an article:
The NYPD’s specialized squad, the Special Victims Unit, has had more than its fair share of rough roads. But luckily, they have a secret weapon:
Below lay a gif of Rafael stepping up to the podium on that fateful day where his looks would break the Internet. Inside of his own mind, Rafael screamed for gif-Rafael to retreat and run away before it was too late. Obviously, gif-Rafael persisted, over and over in an endless loop that would reset itself the moment he settled himself at the pedestal.
Meet ADA Rafael Barba. He’s been with the 16th precinct for four years, and he’s managed to make quite a splash for all of them. But let’s be real, it’s not just his smarts and courtroom prowess that the Internet has been talking about these last couple of days . . .
The next image was a photograph of Rafael mid-speech and even he had to admit: The angling was just right. The lighting and shadows worked together to properly define his profile in such an appealing way. It was a photo capable of damning a man.
It turns out that ADA Barba is actually one Harvard-educated hottie!
The accompanying picture came from one of Rafael’s previous cases. One wherein his stance atop the courthouse steps looked artistically posed. With one foot still planted on a step higher than the other, briefcase clutched in one hand, suit tailored to fit, eyes looking elsewhere. Amateur modeling photographers would’ve been proud. To anyone else, he would have looked like those grand oil paintings depicting a conquering hero, the gleaming sunlight only serving to further this victorious suggestion. Even the tweet that the image came attached with went as far as to say, “LOOK AT THIS MAJESTIC MF.”
While visually this might have been the case (especially assuming he’d just exited the courthouse after a victorious trial), the reality was more likely that he had been contemplating getting pho for dinner and was trying to remember the name of that one noodle house a couple of blocks away. The article went on:
No, seriously, if sexiness was a crime, this man would be guilty as charged!
Rafael couldn’t help but lift a brow at this. A law pun? Really? Hadn’t there been enough of those? He scrolled down further, his eyes first catching the image of him being surrounded by the press.
Because of the nature of his job (and hopefully single personal life), there aren’t too many photos of him for us to draw on. But don’t worry: The press has given the Internet just enough fodder to work with.
The image of him at arraignment court prior to the prolific AJ Martin case was posted, courtesy of the blue hellhole that was Tumblr. It was taken predominately from behind, given the position of the press at the time but from the way his head was turned, Rafael’s profile was made just noticeable enough for the original poster to freak out: “He could peck my eye out with that nose and I would thank him for it so long as he left me the other eye to still see him with.” The hashtags visible, aside from his name and title, included #dat profile doe, #LAWD, #such a noble nose, and #seriously tho that profile is perf i need to use it as reference for my art project.
Rafael could feel his teeth digging into his lips as they tucked themselves into his mouth. For a split second, he wondered if he was subconsciously trying to swallow himself.
Some people are drawn to him for his eyes, the article read, offering an example in an enhanced photo of Rafael that managed to capture his eyes just enough to show that they weren’t an expected brown, but an enchanting green. Having been a tweet, the post’s source expressed that Rafael’s eyes “made them weak.”
Some just can’t get over this guy’s designer duds, it went on. Beneath the text was a small photoset of four pictures: Each one of Rafael, of course, but each one also had him sporting vastly different color themes. In this one, springtime pink accessories stuck out against the darkness of his pinstriped suit. In that one, yet another dark suit . . . But orange was, in the grand scheme, quite the unusual color to be seen on most lawyers. Even in tie form. The third photo had been taken as he was leaving the courthouse, the billowing wind allowing for the yellow streak of his tie to flutter about, as well as to showcase that even his suspenders were brightly colored. And in the fourth one, purple. Everywhere. Maybe not in the charcoal grey of his suit jacket, but definitely in the primary color of his polka dotted tie, the lines running up and down his dress shirt, and the lightly-checkered pattern of his pocket square.
To say that these were mighty unusual colors to be found in the courtroom (and on an attorney for such horrific situations, no less) would be an understatement.
And others? They’re finding completely different assets to be won over by! (All perfectly wonderful in their own right, of course.)
These “assets”, apparently, were his stomach and hands (surprise, surprise). Or, perhaps more specifically, the pudginess of his stomach and the veins that lined his hands, as suggested not only by Rafael’s own experience, but by the corresponding images for that particular line: Some of the very same posts he’d seen at the very beginning. The post about wanting to slurp up his hand veins, enthusiasm over his tummy-embellishing suspenders . . . It all came rushing back to Rafael with an internal shudder.
But apparently, not all of the images were of him: The next textual segment (But whichever physical attribute people have found themselves drawn to, one thing is for certain: They help make one clean-cut counselor) was followed by the image of a tan, cartoon fist popping out of a yellow sweater sleeve. The tweet it had come from included the words, “When you catch feelings for the perfect man but he’s a goddamn lawyer.” Rafael almost wanted to feel upset by the comment, but there was just too much about it to figure out what all to be peeved with.
Many are willing to risk it all for this Manhattan heartbreaker, the article proclaimed, their evidence coming in the form of a Twitter post stating exactly that. It was a photograph taken at a gala (God, it had to have been long ago, then), and Rafael just happened to be in just enough of the photo for the dapperness of his appearance to pop. In the background, however, was a man (whom Rafael recognized as a judge) with an expression that could easily be mistaken for subtle lusting. Of course, Judge Khachaturian was actually probably looking in Rafael’s general direction and likely at a woman off camera. But the Internet didn’t know that. Or rather, the Internet didn’t care to consider that.
The caption lining the top of the picture stated that “old man finna risk it all for Barba 😂😂😂.” This, of all things, caused Rafael’s mouth to hang open with shock. The idea of his superior (and much older superior at that) lusting after him left a bad taste in his mouth. But with one last line to go . . .
But don’t worry: We’re sure he can use his smarts to get you out of it.
Simple, yes, but considering all that Rafael had to go through just to get to it, the cocktail of feelings within him was still quite present.
“Oh . . .” Rafael whispered shakily as he watched the gif version of himself raise a hand and retreat from the podium at the press conference. Despite the ridiculousness of the suggestion, his mind screamed at the gif, Now you leave!? His ever hungry but scowling eyes couldn’t help themselves from scanning the comments section below. Lot of Spanish terms being thrown around there by people who probably only knew them from the Latin Lover craze from the early 2000s. Like June Madoff’s comment on how he was such a “precinct papi”, or Barbra Cassahan, with her suburban mom-ness, having the creepy, middle-aged audacity to call him a “papi choulo.” (Which, Rafael thought in his tempered bitterness and attention to the misspell, was probably the most out of her comfort zone she was willing to travel.)
There was also Celia Esposito calling him “Barbaro Barba”, but he really wasn’t sure how comfortable he was being called a badass under such circumstances by a high schooler, creativity behind the nickname be damned.
But then . . . there was Julia “JuJuBean” Parson: “My friend’s sister sat in the gallery during the Jocelyn Paley case where ADA Barba was defending Jocelyn against Adam Cain. Y’all, she said Barba won the case by letting Cain choke him with his motherfucking *belt*!”
And, for the first time since this entire escapade began, Rafael couldn’t help but feel true a hint of pride. After all, it was by letting Cain choke him at all that he was able to convince the jury to plead guilty and send that bastard to jail where he belonged. He was honestly quite pleased with that little daring stunt, considering how worth it it was to experience such a dangerous discomfort. But even more so, he was just glad that someone had looked past the more superficial traits that everyone else was adoring in order to focus on something more important: His job and the crazy things he did to perform it.
. . . But then he read the replies to it: “OMFG” and “choke me, daddy 😩😩😩!” And those were just the ones he could see without clicking “see more replies.”
At that, Rafael’s eyelids practically retreated back into his skull as his eyes popped more than he even knew themselves capable of doing. The loud clap of his laptop being shut closed resonated within the office, followed by huffy breaths of embarrassment. He could feel his face burning. Of all the implied fetishes and kinks he’d seen centering about him, the use of the belt to choke him was an entirely new one, and one that he could very easily proclaim he had no desire to try again.
ENOUGH!!!
A ragged sigh was released into the air as Rafael pinched the bridge of his nose. Probably harder than he even needed to, anyway. He regarded the time ticking by in the corner of his laptop screen. It was still too early to start sipping bourbon like tomorrow was a dream, but not too early to grab a bite and pop a tablet or two of ibuprofen. Not necessarily what he was in the mood for, but it was a start. Anything to get away from his laptop, which he now deep down felt had been completely sullied by now from all the meme trash he had to view upon it.
Grabbing his phone and wallet, he exited his office and made Carmen aware that he was going on his lunch break. As he headed for the elevator, he could’ve sworn that he’d caught a glimpse of the Buzzfeed article on her computer. He fought against the urge to shake his head in somberness: He’d officially lost her; she was too far gone into the rabbit hole to pull her out of it. Exiting the Hogan Place, Rafael felt alone amongst the crowded streets of Manhattan.
#that bastard meme fic#regrettablewritings#rafael barba imagine#rafael barba imagines#barba imagine#barba imagines#svu imagine#svu imagines#law and order svu imagines#law and order svu imagine#law & order svu imagines
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Wild Theory
Today is Undertale's second anniversary. I love Undertale so much that it has been my hyperfixation ever since I played it at the beginning of 2016. I joined tumblr in May of 2016 because I saw that a lot of people were talking about Undertale on here. This is the origin of this particular blog. And now, I have planned a Special Post(TM) for this occasion.
(Warning: this post is extraordinarily long - as in, over five thousand words long - and contains many spoilers for the game. I have hidden it under a "Read More" so that it doesn't clog up people's dashboards.)
I. Preface and Special Thanks
First, though, I must tell you a story. It all started when I made my husband play Undertale, because it was so great when I played it, and I wanted to see how he would play the game. Which route would he take? (He ended up doing True Pacifist after killing the first Froggit and feeling so guilty about it that he reset). Once he finished, I asked him who his favorite character was.
His answer? Papyrus.
"Papyrus?" I thought. "But why?" I felt like he was probably the most forgettable character in the entire game, perhaps apart from Sans (note: I have never done a Bad Time route). What was it about this goofy skeleton that made my husband like him so much? Was it his malapropisms? Was it the fact that he can somehow shout in whispers? Was it his Ghost costume... er, "battle body?"
So, I decided to do some research. I started searching "Papyrus from Undertale" on Google, and most of the results I found came from the wonderful, well-functioning website which we all know and love as tumblr. He was buzzing, and it seemed a lot of people felt about Papyrus the same way my husband did.
I made an account, and the first thing I posted was a Very Profound Theory(TM) which was met with some disagreement. That "theory" is that Papyrus is Sans' older brother, and not the other way around. (Keep in mind that, at this point, I had not seen Toby Fox's tweet about Papyrus calling Sans the common word for "older brother" in Japanese, which was actually an allusion to the fact that he was translating Undertale into Japanese, but I digress.)
The reasons I posted were simple enough, and if you really want to, you can even go back and read it for yourself. I'll link to it here for you also:
https://eroshiyda.tumblr.com/post/144298607667/papyrus-is-the-older-brother [link to my first tumblr post, "Papyrus is the older brother."]
This just came from my personal experience as an older sibling, and a closer analysis of Papyrus' character during my second True Pacifist playthrough.
Through this "theory" post (and I really am hesitant to call it a "theory" now, because it's so mundane), I met a lot of friends who were also theorizing about Papyrus. However, this is not the theory that I wanted to talk about.
As I gained more and more tumblr friends who were also very interested in Undertale (mostly Papyrus in particular), I started seeing more posts about all of the weird things he does and says. Not "weird" in a derogatory way, I just mean weird as in "odd," "unusual," "eccentric," and sometimes "nonsensical" or "unpredictable."
@undertale-encyclopedia did a really good job of compiling each of the canon strings of text, so I will mainly be using that blog as a resource for my canon information (since I never played anything but True Pacifist, and therefore do not have my own screenshots of certain bits of dialogue from other routes).
https://undertale-encyclopedia.tumblr.com/ [link to undertale-encyclopedia's tumblr blog]
@jewels336 (now deactivated) also provided a masterpost for which I am eternally grateful, as even though I had seen all of the posts (and even participated in a lot of them) compiled within that master list, they were now in a very neat and accessible place. I will be referencing those posts as well, as they were a springboard for many parts of this theory, and utilize canon information. Here it is:
https://eroshiyda.tumblr.com/post/151713943787/compilation-of-mysterious-papyrus-things [link to jewels336's tumblr post, "Papyrus Masterpost!"]
@uselessundertalefacts (formerly @uselessshoelacefacts), @lefthanded-sans, and @papyrus-knows also indulged a lot of questions I originally had about Papyrus. They all made some really good analysis posts about the skelebros in general as well, so you should definitely go and check out their blogs, too.
I would also like to thank each and every one of my followers/mutuals/friends, who let me talk about Papyrus with them at some point or another. I am very much aware of how wild my theories are, so thank you for putting up with me.
Right. *deep breath* Now onto the theory.
II. Introduction
If you have not yet read @napstamuse's "Goner Theory Part III: Skeletons in the Closet," I very strongly urge you to do so right now. Here it is, for your convenience:
http://napstamuse.tumblr.com/post/139568679252/goner-theory-part-3-skeletons-in-the-closet [link to napstamuse's tumblr post, "Goner Theory Part III"]
This is the actual post which made me join tumblr, and ultimately it led me to make up this theory. In summary, it points out how little we know about Papyrus, despite his talking incessantly. In fact, it even mentions at the very end that there's only one other character in Undertale of whom we know about as little: Mystery Man.
[picture of Mystery Man sprite]
With a name like "Mystery Man," one would expect at least some intrigue surrounding such a character. We know what Mystery Man looks like:
[picture of Mystery Man, surprised]
We know what font he speaks in:
[picture of Entry 17 in capitalized Wing Dings font with no asterisks]
And are therefore able to conclude that he was a Royal Scientist, as the only other person to write "entries" is Doctor Alphys, the current Royal Scientist of the Underground:
[picture of Doctor Alphys' entries in normal font, with standard asterisks at the beginning]
and that his name was probably Wing Dings, or W. D. for short:
[picture of one of Gaster’s followers referring to him as “Doctor W. D. Gaster”]
But what does this have to do with Papyrus? Well, let's start with what we know about Papyrus.
We know that he looks like this:
[picture of Papyrus wearing a cape, battle body, and hotpants]
sometimes this:
[picture of Date Papyrus with MTT-brand Basketball Shoulder Pads, a shirt which says "Cool Dude" in all caps, shorts, and sneakers]
or even this:
[picture of Papyrus wearing a sweatband over his head and a shirt which says, "Jog Boy" on it]
We know that he likes puzzles:
[picture of Papyrus standing next to and talking about one of his puzzles]
We know that he's a good artist:
[picture of Papyrus talking about how he painted the Snowdin bridge over a rock formation]
We know that his name is Papyrus (obviously) because he is referred to as such, and talks in this font:
[picture of Papyrus saying "Nyeh heh heh!" in capitalized Papyrus font, also without the standard asterisks]
And... that's it.
The rest of this theory involves putting these clues together. Ready?
III. Appearance
Let's start with Papyrus' appearance. He's pretty tall, compared to his brother Sans. According to this chart by @kitty4915, he's approximately 6 feet and 8 inches tall:
https://kitty4915.tumblr.com/post/138141358237/yo-undertale-heights-go [link to kitty4915's tumblr post, "YO UNDERTALE HEIGHTS GO!!"]
[picture of Papyrus next to a door]
A bit strange for brothers, don't you think? One of them definitely got the short end of the stick. *badum-tss*
[picture of Sans Height Chart, 4'8"]
Anyway, I've seen it speculated that Papyrus and Sans are not "brothers" in a literal sense, but they are very close friends who sometimes call each other "brother." However, I do not think this is quite the case.
Sometimes I forget that half-siblings are a thing that exist. Half-siblings are siblings who share only one parent. How is this relevant to the skelebros? Well, @zarla-s has come up with an AU called Handplates which has one possible explanation for this: the skelebros technically share one parent, because they are both cloned from the same person. That person is, you guessed it: Royal Scientist Wing Dings Gaster.
http://zarla-s.tumblr.com/post/139516306171/okay-i-get-a-lot-of-questions-about-what-order-the [link to @zarla-s' "Handplates" AU Index post on tumblr]
Speaking of Mystery Man, we haven't analyzed his appearance next to Papyrus':
[pictures of Mystery Man sprite and Papyrus sprite next to each other]
It is said that the eyes are windows into the soul. Something people notice right away about Gaster's eyes are that they are extremely asymmetrical. His left eye is much bigger than his right.
Papyrus, on the other hand... well, both of his eyes are small, but if you look closely, you'll see that his left eye is smaller than his right, even when it is facing slightly away from view, like in his battle and date sprites. And it's more noticeable from the front, like in his overworld sprite, pictured above.
Ok, so they're kinda-sorta mirror images of each other, nothing too special. Could be a coincidence. Right? Well, sure, if this was the only thing they had in common, it could definitely be a coincidence. Never mind the fact that Papyrus seems to be raising his right eyebrow and squinting his left eye, almost as if he's compensating for them naturally being the other way around...
But why stop there? The other thing to note is that both of these skeletons are tall. Very, very tall. We already know how tall Papyrus is, but how big is Mystery Man?
[picture of Gaster Height Chart]
Wow, 7 feet and 6 inches! That is really tall. Even taller than Papyrus (by ten inches). Cool. So, if Papyrus somehow came from Gaster, then Papyrus' extreme height would make a little more sense. But again, where does that leave Sans?
[picture of Sans shrugging]
One could argue that Sans has inherited Gaster's, shall we say, roundness. That makes a little less sense, as we are not even sure exactly how "round" Gaster even is. His black "cloak" (not even sure if it's really a cloak canonically) does not necessarily represent Gaster's bodily shape - as it could be flowy, melted, or otherwise augmented by some magical law of physics. And besides, this theory doesn't really have anything to do with Sans.
IV. But Something's Missing...
However, even I must admit that something isn't quite right about the height discrepancy between Gaster and Papyrus, either. With Gaster being nearly a whole foot taller, it seems as though there's something... missing.
And, even if you take away that extra ten inches from Gaster's height, there's something else which Gaster has which Papyrus, at first glance, seems to not have.
Refer back to the pictures of Gaster and Papyrus next to each other. See the holes in Gaster's hands? And Papyrus'... well, they're covered in gloves, so I guess we'll never know. Darn.
[pictures of Papyrus saying “I know it like the back of my hand… which, since I’m always wearing gloves… I don’t know anything about!!”]
Thanks, Papyrus.
But, there is still something else missing, and this thing has nothing to do with appearances. Of course, I am referring to Wing Dings' experience as the Royal Scientist of the Underground.
Gaster even has "followers" who consider him to be important in the Underground's history long after he is gone. You can find them with certain Fun values:
[pictures of Gaster's three followers]
In contrast, Papyrus holds no important status in the Underground (unless all of the other boss monsters are killed, leaving Papyrus to take King Asgore's place in the end). But he *does* want to join the Royal Guard.
[pictures of Papyrus saying that his “lifelong dream” is joining the Royal Guard]
Why? Well, for starters, he is friends with the Royal Guard Dogs in Snowdin (which is his place of residence), as well as the Captain of the Royal Guard herself, Undyne.
[picture of Undyne]
Undyne got her job because she asked King Asgore "Fluffybuns" Dreemurr to train her in combat. They subsequently became close, and she was so well-trained that she was basically a shoo-in. (This is all canon information which you can obtain by going on the "friendship date" with Undyne in True Pacifist.) But this theory isn't about her, either.
So again, what is Papyrus' motivation for wanting to join the Royal Guard? He's not close with the King. In fact, Papyrus is never mentioned by anyone other than Flowey (who knows everything, but we'll get to that later), Undyne (arguably his only friend), and Sans (his own brother); and, at the very end of True Pacifist route, by both Toriel (who had only heard his name because of Sans) and Monster Kid. No one really knows who he is, so the reason for his wanting to join couldn't possibly be his connections.
Could it be that he wants to FIGHT? Considering that he can't even bring himself to hit Frisk in any run (regardless of how many monsters they have killed in the Underground upon meeting Papyrus), I would say that this is also rather unlikely.
Luckily for us, Papyrus hints at what it is he is really after:
[picture of Papyrus saying "Powerful, Popular, Prestigious!"]
He wants to be powerful, popular, and prestigious. Sounds fair enough, right?
Not so fast. Who in the Royal Guard is powerful, popular, and prestigious? Certainly the Royal Guard Dogs are not. And, while Undyne is undoubtedly powerful, I wouldn't really call her "popular," except with Monster Kid (and Doctor Alphys, but that is a whole other story). But Monster Kid is exactly that: a kid. A child.
[picture of Monster Kid]
Papyrus wants a child to look up to him. Part of the reason he dresses up and acts like a super hero is to appeal to children and give them a role model to emulate. This is also evident in the way he treats Frisk, who is also a child: with open, accepting arms, ready to embrace them and be their friend.
[picture of Papyrus saying "I, Papyrus, welcome you with open arms!"]
But let's tie this back into Mystery Man, shall we? The previous Royal Scientist definitely had a connection with the monarchy as well (which, as we've already established, Papyrus did not have). How else would he have gotten such an esteemed position? He may have also been extraordinarily intelligent, much like the current Royal Scientist, Doctor Alphys:
[picture of Papyrus explaining to Frisk that Doctor Alphys made an advanced puzzle]
[picture of Bratty & Catty telling Frisk that Doctor Alphys made Mettaton's robot body]
but, ultimately, W. D. Gaster met with an untimely death after having an accident of sorts:
[picture of one of Gaster's followers saying that "he fell into his creation"]
which implies that he was a savant, or someone who could be considered "book smart," but also absent-minded and accident prone. That sort of reminds me of someone else...
[pictures of Papyrus explaining Alphys' puzzle]
[picture of Papyrus getting shocked]
Anyway, there appears to be something *else* missing, on top of everything we've just covered.
V. Memories
Papyrus seems to have a... sketchy memory, to say the very least. At first glance, he appears to retain nothing:
[picture of Papyrus saying "Really though!!! That human!!! Do I know that person?” Hint: the answer is "yes."]
but, upon closer inspection, we learn that he retains quite a lot (as evidenced by his telling Frisk seemingly random trivia about nearly each and every room in the Underground over the phone):
[picture of Papyrus saying, "I have a photographic memory for phone calls!"]
and, upon even closer inspection, we see that he actually can't even remember commonly-used idioms:
[picture of Papyrus using the malapropism "smells like the moon" instead of "odor the moon," which comes from the idiom "over the moon," as pointed out by @eheufeles]
then, upon microscopic inspection, we see that there's something definitely off with Papyrus' memory. He literally remembers and even references things which do not exist (or have yet to happen) in current timelines:
[pictures of Papyrus alluding to Mettaton's EX forme – specifically, his “bishonen eyes” – while Mettaton is still in Box forme, and Undyne inadvertently confirming that his EX forme has not yet been revealed, by replying “He doesn’t even HAVE eyes!!!”]
[picture of Papyrus talking about a "Laborador... y?" which is a reference to both Endogeny and the True Lab, yet to be discovered]
[pictures of Papyrus telling Frisk that he will talk to them again, even though this has not yet been confirmed at this point in the True Pacifist route]
[picture of Papyrus telling Frisk that they "can do a little better!" even after killing every monster they have encountered up until this point]
So... what gives? How can he remember things that have not yet happened, unless he is, say, perhaps, a time traveler?
VI. Time-Space Shenanigans
Now, I know what you're thinking: "But, eroshiyda, Sans already told us that Flowey gives Papyrus predictions, so this discussion is all meaningless!"
Ok, but we also know that Sans has the ability to travel across time-space in strange ways; namely, he teleports. It's not exactly an easter egg or anything, as it's too extraordinary a phenomenon to ignore.
[pictures of Sans appearing in two places in the same room at the same time]
[picture of Papyrus asking Sans if he is, in fact, in two places at once; walking into the next room will prove that this conjecture is correct]
But the implication is that Papyrus has the same ability (because they are brothers), or at least a very similar one, as Sans' ability comes as no surprise to Papyrus.
[pictures of Papyrus asking Frisk, "Is Sans pranking you across time and space? I hate it when he does that!"]
And, in fact, there is alternate evidence of their similar abilities:
[picture of Papyrus battle in Pacifist or Neutral routes, showing blue-colored, bone-shaped magic]
[picture of Sans battle, exclusive to Bad Time route, also showing blue-colored, bone-shaped magic]
[picture of the narrator saying, “Papyrus prepares a non-bone attack, then spending a minute fixing his mistake"]
[picture of Papyrus telling Frisk "Had I only used my Special Attack, you surely would have been blasted to..." with a forlorn look on his face. This only happens when you abandon a Bad Time route by sparing Papyrus.]
[picture of Sans using Gaster Blasters during his battle with Frisk. This is only available during a Bad Time route, killing everyone else – Papyrus included.]
Of course, you cannot possibly see them both in action during the same route (Toby Fox, you clever dog), so it is difficult to compare the two without going back to play Undertale in an entirely different way than before. So, this may count as an easter egg.
What is, perhaps, a bit more of an easter egg (at least, according to my Papyrus-fixated tumblr friends), is the fact that Papyrus can - and does - manipulate time-space in his own ways:
[gif of Papyrus literally walking on air over Frisk]
[gif of Papyrus quickly transposing off of the screen without moving his body otherwise]
So, who's to say that he doesn't travel across time as well?
[picture of Gaster's first follower saying that "he shattered across time and space"]
VII. Memories, Revisited
Remember that "memory" thing I pointed out? Well, I'd like to come back to that for a bit.
There are two things which I have noticed, and I get why they've been met with resistance in the past when I brought them up. But, keep in mind all of the evidence listed above and the things we've talked about thus far. As I said, I know that these are wild theories, but please bear with me for just a little bit longer.
Ok, here's the first thing I've noticed:
[picture of Papyrus leaving Frisk with 1 HP so that he can capture them after battle; this happens no matter what, if you lose to him]
[pictures of Papyrus referring to the battle as “a terrible memory" over the phone]
[pictures describing the Bad Memory item, found in the True Lab; it depletes exactly 1 HP when consumed by Frisk]
And the second thing is this:
[pictures of Papyrus immediately recognizing Frisk as a human during a Bad Time route]
[picture of Papyrus not immediately recognizing Frisk as a human during a Pacifist route; he asks Sans if Frisk is human]
Something about HP, bad memories, and a human... Now, how could this possibly be connected?
Well, I'm afraid that I have no more canon evidence to support my theory, so now we are plunging deep into headcanon territory from here on out. If this upsets you, please just stop reading now. I'd rather you form your own headcanon, given the canon evidence so far. Perhaps yours will be more satisfying than mine is, because it's about to get kind of dark. In fact, I would hide it under another "Read More" if I could. But I can't, so I'll give you a break.
Last chance to turn back now.
By continuing to read this, you are submitting yourself to probably the most wild and ridiculous theory that has ever been made in the Undertale fandom.
VIII. Conclusion
If you're still reading this, I must confess that I do have one, tiny piece of canon information to support this theory, which has seemingly nothing to do with anything I just talked about. Here it is:
[picture of a silhouette of Toriel standing next to a human in the introduction to Undertale, with the caption "Long ago, humans and monsters lived in peace."]
[picture of a silhouette of Asgore fighting with a human in the introduction to Undertale, with the caption "They were at war."]
The king and queen were on the surface during the Monster and Human War. This implies that they knew humans at some point before they were sealed away Underground when the humans won.
So... what if Gaster, their Royal Scientist before Doctor Alphys, was a human?
A stretch, I know. But here is another tiny piece of evidence to consider:
[picture of Gaster's second follower saying, "I'm holding a piece of him right here." In their hand is what looks like a human face]
Our Mystery Man once had a face which looks strikingly human. Of course, by the time we see him, he looks more like a skeleton with two large fractures on either side of his skull. So, it makes sense that his face went missing.
Which reminds me of this:
[picture of Papyrus realizing that he doesn't have ears]
[pictures of Papyrus referencing his “hair” and “skin,” neither of which he has, since he is a skeleton]
The only reason that Papyrus could possibly "realize" that he has neither ears nor hair is if he had had them before, and only now realizes that they are gone. Remember: Papyrus has a sketchy memory. Something definitely messed with it at somewhere along the way. But what?
Well, remember the aforementioned "accident" which Royal Scientist W. D. Gaster had? I would think that being spread across time-space would be... disorienting, if you will. Parts could go missing. Pieces. Memories, physicalities, any of it.
"Wait," I hear you thinking. "Surely you're not trying to suggest that Papyrus is Gaster! That would be ludicrous!"
Wouldn't it?
"They have such different personalities!"
Don't they?
"Papyrus could never be the Royal Scientist!"
Are you sure about that?
Let me explain to you how I think it happened.
(This is the dark part. I decided not to dive right into it because I wanted to give you time to adjust to my wild theory. Once you are comfortable with the headcanon of Papyrus being Gaster, please proceed. If this is against your sensibilities, I won't hold it against you at all. You are free to stop reading this post at any time.)
Gaster was a human who lived on the surface like everyone else. He was a friend to monsters before the war. He even knew Asgore and Toriel, although Toriel took to him a bit better. Once the war broke out, everyone had to choose a side. The line was drawn between monsters and humans. Only W. D. Gaster decided to cross that line.
When the monsters were sealed Underground by a magical barrier after the humans won the war, Gaster ended up being sealed with them. Asgore and Toriel were elected the King and Queen of the Underground, and they elected Gaster to be Royal Scientist.
The magical barrier transformed Gaster as time passed. He became immortal, like a monster. He started to adopt their mannerisms, and even started to look like a monster. As his body aged, soon all that was left of him was his skeleton. Without vocal cords, he could only speak in a strange font: Wing Dings. This earned him his nickname.
Then, "The Accident" happened. I don't know exactly how, or when, but we all know that it happened. Gaster "fell into his creation," and "was shattered across time and space," according to his followers. A new Royal Scientist was needed.
In the meantime, two skeleton brothers randomly showed up in Snowdin. We get this information from an NPC in Snowdin:
[pictures of the Snowdin Shopkeeper telling Frisk that Sans and Papyrus "just showed up one day"]
Interesting.
IX. Supporting Evidence/More Headcanons
But how did the Royal Scientist Wing Dings Gaster become the Papyrus we all know and love?
(trigger warnings: mentions of violence and child death)
Let's go back to canon evidence, shall we? We are far enough into the headcanon realm that I do think it's time for some canon reminders:
[Papyrus, looking slightly worried as he says "LOVE." in all capital letters, which holds a very different meaning than lowercase "love" in the game of Undertale]
I know that Papyrus speaks in all caps all of the time, but notice how the word is separated from the rest of the sentence (even though there was definitely room to fit it in with the rest), as if to draw your attention to the word. Also, look at the expression on his face. Doesn't that look like someone who knows what LOVE stands for "Level Of ViolencE," as Sans points out to us in Judgment Hall? Because it sure does to me. Also, remember how Papyrus definitely knows that Frisk is a human during the Bad Time route, but not during a Pacifist route? Why would Papyrus make the connection between humans and violence?
There are two explanations for this.
The first is that a few sub-conscious memories of his time as Gaster were somehow retained; that is, he remembers the war between humans and monsters, much like how he remembers having hair and ears. So that is one possible explanation.
The second is perhaps the wildest headcanon you will ever hear about Papyrus.
Ready?
Ok.
*sighs*
Papyrus... has killed before.
"WHO? WHAT? WHERE? WHEN? WHY? HOW?" you ask. Well, here's my theory.
Papyrus, being newly incarnated from Gaster (alongside his brother, Sans), doesn't really know much about the world around him. He has memories missing. Which ones, we're not sure of, but he's definitely... not all there, if you get me.
Now is a good time for to mention Papyrus' stats versus Sans' before I continue with this story. Have you ever noticed how Papyrus is up to twenty times stronger than Sans?
[picture of Papyrus' Pacifist stats: 20 Attack, 20 Defense]
[picture of Sans' stats: 1 Attack, 1 Defense, with the caption "*The easiest enemy."]
But Papyrus and Sans are brothers, so we would expect that they would have the same stats, which clearly isn't so.
Tying this back into what we know about LOVE, we know that with every increase of LOVE, one receives an increase in stats as well:
[pictures showing LV 1 stats, and then saying, "Your LOVE increased!” to LV 2, and the HP stat going up.]
So, the only logical explanation is that Papyrus received an increase in stats because he received an increase in LOVE. And how did this happen?
Think about the Items which Frisk finds in Snowdin: the Tough Glove and the Manly Bandanna.
[pictures of Frisk acquiring Tough Glove and Manly Bandanna in Snowdin]
To which child did they belong? The Orange SOUL.
[picture of the Photoshop Flowey battle, depicting the Orange SOUL in the box and the Tough Glove being used as a weapon against Frisk]
Which trait is attributed with Orange? Bravery.
[picture of the Ball Game in Snowdin showing the word "bravery" in orange]
What happens when an attack is Orange? You have to keep moving.
[picture of Doctor Alphys explaining how orange lasers work in Hotland]
From this canon evidence, what can we infer the Orange SOUL kid's gimmick was, if they were "brave?"
I'll tell you: they kept moving forward, no matter what.
Now, what color magic does Papyrus have?
[picture of Papyrus using blue-colored bones in battle]
What does Blue magic do? It requires you to *stand still,* or else you will get hurt.
[picture of Doggo using blue magic on Frisk's motionless, red SOUL and doing no damage]
Tell me, how is a kid who is incapable of standing still going to survive Blue magic? Simple: they won't.
I even wrote a short ficlet about it here:
https://eroshiyda.tumblr.com/post/152526581522/orange-soul-headcanon [link to my tumblr post, "Orange SOUL headcanon"]
Of course, I'd like to think that it was just an accident. But, accident or not, Papyrus killed a human child, which was enough to raise his stats to twenty times higher than what they were originally. (Remember that humans are far more powerful than monsters, so they would be worth a lot of EXecution Points.)
This is why Papyrus knows exactly how much to lower his stats during the Bad Time route. He's not trying to kill Frisk, and he knows how much force is needed for that.
[picture of Papyrus lowering his stats to 5 ATK, 5 DEF in a Bad Time route]
That's also how he knows that Frisk is going down the "wrong path" by moving closer to Papyrus in a threatening way.
[pictures of Papyrus lecturing Frisk to stop moving before battling them during a Bad Time route]
Papyrus has experience battling at least one human child. And Papyrus didn't lose, either; otherwise, he wouldn't be around anymore by the time Frisk arrives, right?
But this is why his character development is so important to the story of Undertale. This is why he's (arguably) Flowey's favorite monster in the whole Underground, long after Flowey grew tired of torturing everyone else:
[picture of Flowey at the end of a Neutral route saying, "Took me a long time to get bored of that one." Yes, he is referring to Papyrus.]
Because even after Papyrus committed the most heinous atrocity any monster could ever think of, he changed. He resolved to never FIGHT again. He solemnly swore to only use MERCY, no matter how dire the circumstances got. Even after all he had been through, he proved that people can change their ways.
[picture of Papyrus saying, "Everyone can be a great person if they try!"]
It's all about the choices you make. Because accidents happen, everyone makes mistakes, but ultimately you have a choice; do you keep going down the path of least resistance, or do you learn and grow from it enough to do the right thing, no matter how hard it gets?
X. Afterword
Thanks for reading this theory all the way through! You're a real trooper!
I know that this is a topic that doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things, and I probably left out a lot of discrepancies, but I really did have fun working on this for the past year and a half. I hope you had fun reading it, too.
As I was finishing up this project, the Japanese version of Undertale came out. Some of the information gathered from gleaning nuances in the Japanese text conflicts with this theory, while some supports it; but I just didn’t get a chance to include any of it, to my dismay.
By the time you see this post, I most likely will have left tumblr. So, I cannot accept any of your thoughts about it, unfortunately.
However, if you would like to do even further research of your own, I have left behind this blog as an archive, along with another, super-secret blog I used to reblog my sources. The url is @papyrus-is-gaster. Here’s the link to it:
https://papyrus-is-gaster.tumblr.com/ [link to one of my sideblogs, called papyrus-is-gaster]
I'd like to think of this as my sort of "tumblr dissertation," and I've officially graduated and am ready to move on to other things. Undertale was a fun phase in my life, but all phases come to an end.
And, with that, this post has also (finally) come to an end as well.
Just remember,
[picture of Papyrus saying "Still! I believe in you!"]
The Great Papyrus believes in you, and so do I.
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wild theory
(Note: this version is cross-posted from my main blog, @eroshiyda [link: https://eroshiyda.tumblr.com], so please reblog it from there, if you can.]
Today is Undertale's second anniversary. I love Undertale so much that it has been my hyperfixation ever since I played it at the beginning of 2016. I joined tumblr in May of 2016 because I saw that a lot of people were talking about Undertale on here. This is the origin of this particular blog. And now, I have planned a Special Post(TM) for this occasion.
(Warning: this post is extraordinarily long - as in, over five thousand words long - and contains many spoilers for the game. I have hidden it under a "Read More" so that it doesn't clog up people's dashboards.)
I. Preface and Special Thanks
First, though, I must tell you a story. It all started when I made my husband play Undertale, because it was so great when I played it, and I wanted to see how he would play the game. Which route would he take? (He ended up doing True Pacifist after killing the first Froggit and feeling so guilty about it that he reset). Once he finished, I asked him who his favorite character was.
His answer? Papyrus.
"Papyrus?" I thought. "But why?" I felt like he was probably the most forgettable character in the entire game, perhaps apart from Sans (note: I have never done a Bad Time route). What was it about this goofy skeleton that made my husband like him so much? Was it his malapropisms? Was it the fact that he can somehow shout in whispers? Was it his Ghost costume... er, "battle body?"
So, I decided to do some research. I started searching "Papyrus from Undertale" on Google, and most of the results I found came from the wonderful, well-functioning website which we all know and love as tumblr. He was buzzing, and it seemed a lot of people felt about Papyrus the same way my husband did.
I made an account, and the first thing I posted was a Very Profound Theory(TM) which was met with some disagreement. That "theory" is that Papyrus is Sans' older brother, and not the other way around. (Keep in mind that, at this point, I had not seen Toby Fox's tweet about Papyrus calling Sans the common word for "older brother" in Japanese, which was actually an allusion to the fact that he was translating Undertale into Japanese, but I digress.)
The reasons I posted were simple enough, and if you really want to, you can even go back and read it for yourself. I'll link to it here for you also:
https://eroshiyda.tumblr.com/post/144298607667/papyrus-is-the-older-brother [link to my first tumblr post, "Papyrus is the older brother."]
This just came from my personal experience as an older sibling, and a closer analysis of Papyrus' character during my second True Pacifist playthrough.
Through this "theory" post (and I really am hesitant to call it a "theory" now, because it's so mundane), I met a lot of friends who were also theorizing about Papyrus. However, this is not the theory that I wanted to talk about.
As I gained more and more tumblr friends who were also very interested in Undertale (mostly Papyrus in particular), I started seeing more posts about all of the weird things he does and says. Not "weird" in a derogatory way, I just mean weird as in "odd," "unusual," "eccentric," and sometimes "nonsensical" or "unpredictable."
@undertale-encyclopedia did a really good job of compiling each of the canon strings of text, so I will mainly be using that blog as a resource for my canon information (since I never played anything but True Pacifist, and therefore do not have my own screenshots of certain bits of dialogue from other routes).
https://undertale-encyclopedia.tumblr.com/ [link to undertale-encyclopedia's tumblr blog]
@jewels336 (now deactivated) also provided a masterpost for which I am eternally grateful, as even though I had seen all of the posts (and even participated in a lot of them) compiled within that master list, they were now in a very neat and accessible place. I will be referencing those posts as well, as they were a springboard for many parts of this theory, and utilize canon information. Here it is:
https://eroshiyda.tumblr.com/post/151713943787/compilation-of-mysterious-papyrus-things [link to @jewels336's tumblr post, "Papyrus Masterpost!"]
@uselessundertalefacts (formerly @uselessshoelacefacts), @lefthanded-sans, and @papyrus-knows also indulged a lot of questions I originally had about Papyrus. They all made some really good analysis posts about the skelebros in general as well, so you should definitely go and check out their blogs, too.
I would also like to thank each and every one of my followers/mutuals/friends, who let me talk about Papyrus with them at some point or another. I am very much aware of how wild my theories are, so thank you for putting up with me.
Right. *deep breath* Now onto the theory.
II. Introduction
If you have not yet read @napstamuse's "Goner Theory Part III: Skeletons in the Closet," I very strongly urge you to do so right now. Here it is, for your convenience:
http://napstamuse.tumblr.com/post/139568679252/goner-theory-part-3-skeletons-in-the-closet [link to @napstamuse's tumblr post, "Goner Theory Part III"]
This is the actual post which made me join tumblr, and ultimately it led me to make up this theory. In summary, it points out how little we know about Papyrus, despite his talking incessantly. In fact, it even mentions at the very end that there's only one other character in Undertale of whom we know about as little: Mystery Man.
With a name like "Mystery Man," one would expect at least some intrigue surrounding such a character. We know what Mystery Man looks like:
[picture of Mystery Man, surprised]
We know what font he speaks in:
[picture of Entry 17 in capitalized Wing Dings font with no asterisks]
And are therefore able to conclude that he was a Royal Scientist, as the only other person to write "entries" is Doctor Alphys, the current Royal Scientist of the Underground:
[picture of one of Doctor Alphys' entries in normal font, with standard asterisk at the beginning]
and that his name was probably Wing Dings, or W. D. for short:
[picture of one of Gaster’s followers referring to him as “Doctor W. D. Gaster”]
But what does this have to do with Papyrus? Well, let's start with what we know about Papyrus.
We know that he looks like this:
[picture of Papyrus wearing a cape, battle body, and hotpants]
sometimes this:
[picture of Date Papyrus with MTT-brand Basketball Shoulder Pads, a shirt which says "Cool Dude" in all caps, shorts, and sneakers]
or even this:
[picture of Papyrus wearing a sweatband over his head and a shirt which says, "Jog Boy" on it]
We know that he likes puzzles:
[picture of Papyrus standing next to and talking about one of his puzzles]
We know that he's a good artist:
[picture of Papyrus talking about how he painted Snowdin’s bridge over a rock formation]
We know that his name is Papyrus (obviously) because he is referred to as such, and talks in this font:
[picture of Papyrus saying "Nyeh heh heh!" in capitalized Papyrus font, also without the standard asterisks]
And... that's it.
The rest of this theory involves putting these clues together. Ready?
III. Appearance
Let's start with Papyrus' appearance. He's pretty tall, compared to his brother Sans. According to this chart by @kitty4915, he's approximately 6 feet and 8 inches tall:
https://kitty4915.tumblr.com/post/138141358237/yo-undertale-heights-go [link to @kitty4915's tumblr post, "YO UNDERTALE HEIGHTS GO!!"]
[picture of Papyrus next to a door]
A bit strange for brothers, don't you think? One of them definitely got the short end of the stick. *badum-tss*
[picture of Sans Height Chart, 4'8"]
Anyway, I've seen it speculated that Papyrus and Sans are not "brothers" in a literal sense, but they are very close friends who sometimes call each other "brother." However, I do not think this is quite the case.
Sometimes I forget that half-siblings are a thing that exist. Half-siblings are siblings who share only one parent. How is this relevant to the skelebros? Well, @zarla-s has come up with an AU called Handplates which has one possible explanation for this: the skelebros technically share one parent, because they are both cloned from the same person. That person is, you guessed it: Royal Scientist Wing Dings Gaster.
http://zarla-s.tumblr.com/post/139516306171/okay-i-get-a-lot-of-questions-about-what-order-the [link to @zarla-s' "Handplates" AU Index post on tumblr]
Speaking of Mystery Man, we haven't analyzed his appearance next to Papyrus':
[pictures of Mystery Man sprite and Papyrus sprite next to each other]
It is said that the eyes are windows into the soul. Something people notice right away about Gaster's eyes are that they are extremely asymmetrical. His left eye is much bigger than his right.
Papyrus, on the other hand... well, both of his eyes are small, but if you look closely, you'll see that his left eye is smaller than his right, even when it is facing slightly away from view, like in his battle and date sprites. And it's more noticeable from the front, like in his overworld sprite, pictured above.
Ok, so they're kinda-sorta mirror images of each other, nothing too special. Could be a coincidence. Right? Well, sure, if this was the only thing they had in common, it could definitely be a coincidence. Never mind the fact that Papyrus seems to be raising his right eyebrow and squinting his left eye, almost as if he's compensating for them naturally being the other way around...
But why stop there? The other thing to note is that both of these skeletons are tall. Very, very tall. We already know how tall Papyrus is, but how big is Mystery Man?
[picture of Gaster Height Chart]
Wow, 7 feet and 6 inches! That is really tall. Even taller than Papyrus (by ten inches). Cool. So, if Papyrus somehow came from Gaster, then Papyrus' extreme height would make a little more sense. But again, where does that leave Sans?
[picture of Sans shrugging]
One could argue that Sans has inherited Gaster's, shall we say, roundness. That makes a little less sense, as we are not even sure exactly how "round" Gaster even is. His black "cloak" (not even sure if it's really a cloak canonically) does not necessarily represent Gaster's bodily shape - as it could be flowy, melted, or otherwise augmented by some magical law of physics. And besides, this theory doesn't really have anything to do with Sans.
IV. But Something's Missing...
However, even I must admit that something isn't quite right about the height discrepancy between Gaster and Papyrus, either. With Gaster being nearly a whole foot taller, it seems as though there's something... missing.
And, even if you take away that extra ten inches from Gaster's height, there's something else which Gaster has which Papyrus, at first glance, seems to not have.
Refer back to the pictures of Gaster and Papyrus next to each other. See the holes in Gaster's hands? And Papyrus'... well, they're covered in gloves, so I guess we'll never know. Darn.
[pictures of Papyrus saying “I know it like the back of my hand… which, since I’m always wearing gloves… I don’t know anything about!!”]
Thanks, Papyrus.
But, there is still something else missing, and this thing has nothing to do with appearances. Of course, I am referring to Wing Dings' experience as the Royal Scientist of the Underground.
Gaster even has "followers" who consider him to be important in the Underground's history long after he is gone. You can find them with certain Fun values:
[pictures of Gaster's three followers]
In contrast, Papyrus holds no important status in the Underground (unless all of the other boss monsters are killed, leaving Papyrus to take King Asgore's place in the end). But he *does* want to join the Royal Guard.
[pictures of Papyrus saying that his “lifelong dream” is joining the Royal Guard]
Why? Well, for starters, he is friends with the Royal Guard Dogs in Snowdin (which is his place of residence), as well as the Captain of the Royal Guard herself, Undyne.
[picture of Undyne]
Undyne got her job because she asked King Asgore "Fluffybuns" Dreemurr to train her in combat. They subsequently became close, and she was so well-trained that she was basically a shoo-in. (This is all canon information which you can obtain by going on the "friendship date" with Undyne in True Pacifist.) But this theory isn't about her, either.
So again, what is Papyrus' motivation for wanting to join the Royal Guard? He's not close with the King. In fact, Papyrus is never mentioned by anyone other than Flowey (who knows everything, but we'll get to that later), Undyne (arguably his only friend), and Sans (his own brother); and, at the very end of True Pacifist route, by both Toriel (who had only heard his name because of Sans) and Monster Kid. No one really knows who he is, so the reason for his wanting to join couldn't possibly be his connections.
Could it be that he wants to FIGHT? Considering that he can't even bring himself to hit Frisk in any run (regardless of how many monsters they have killed in the Underground upon meeting Papyrus), I would say that this is also rather unlikely.
Luckily for us, Papyrus hints at what it is he is really after:
[picture of Papyrus saying "Powerful, Popular, Prestigious!"]
He wants to be powerful, popular, and prestigious. Sounds fair enough, right?
Not so fast. Who in the Royal Guard is powerful, popular, and prestigious? Certainly the Royal Guard Dogs are not. And, while Undyne is undoubtedly powerful, I wouldn't really call her "popular," except with Monster Kid (and Doctor Alphys, but that is a whole other story). But Monster Kid is exactly that: a kid. A child.
[picture of Monster Kid]
Papyrus wants a child to look up to him. Part of the reason he dresses up and acts like a super hero is to appeal to children and give them a role model to emulate. This is also evident in the way he treats Frisk, who is also a child: with open, accepting arms, ready to embrace them and be their friend.
[picture of Papyrus saying "I, Papyrus, welcome you with open arms!"]
But let's tie this back into Mystery Man, shall we? The previous Royal Scientist definitely had a connection with the monarchy as well (which, as we've already established, Papyrus did not have). How else would he have gotten such an esteemed position? He may have also been extraordinarily intelligent, much like the current Royal Scientist, Doctor Alphys:
[picture of Papyrus explaining to Frisk that Doctor Alphys made an advanced puzzle]
[picture of Bratty & Catty telling Frisk that Doctor Alphys made Mettaton's robot body]
but, ultimately, W. D. Gaster met with an untimely death after having an accident of sorts:
[picture of one of Gaster's followers saying that "he fell into his creation"]
which implies that he was a savant, or someone who could be considered "book smart," but also absent-minded and accident prone. That sort of reminds me of someone else...
[pictures of Papyrus explaining Alphys' puzzle]
[picture of Papyrus getting shocked]
Anyway, there appears to be something *else* missing, on top of everything we've just covered.
V. Memories
Papyrus seems to have a... sketchy memory, to say the very least. At first glance, he appears to retain nothing:
[picture of Papyrus saying "Really though!!! That human!!! Do I know that person?” Hint: the answer is "yes."]
but, upon closer inspection, we learn that he retains quite a lot (as evidenced by his telling Frisk seemingly random trivia about nearly each and every room in the Underground over the phone):
[picture of Papyrus saying, "I have a photographic memory for phone calls!"]
and, upon even closer inspection, we see that he actually can't even remember commonly-used idioms:
[picture of Papyrus using the malapropism "smells like the moon" instead of "odor the moon," which comes from the idiom "over the moon"]
then, upon microscopic inspection, we see that there's something definitely off with Papyrus' memory. He literally remembers and even references things which do not exist (or have yet to happen) in current timelines:
[pictures of Papyrus alluding to Mettaton's EX forme – specifically, his “bishonen eyes” – while Mettaton is still in Box forme, and Undyne inadvertently confirming that his EX forme has not yet been revealed, by replying “He doesn’t even HAVE eyes!!!”]
[picture of Papyrus talking about a "Laborador... y?" which is a reference to both Endogeny and the True Lab, yet to be discovered]
[picture of Papyrus telling Frisk that he will talk to them again, even though this has not yet been confirmed at this point in the True Pacifist route]
[picture of Papyrus telling Frisk that they "can do a little better!" even after killing every monster they have encountered up until this point]
So... what gives? How can he remember things that have not yet happened, unless he is, say, perhaps, a time traveler?
VI. Time-Space Shenanigans
Now, I know what you're thinking: "But, eroshiyda, Sans already told us that Flowey gives Papyrus predictions, so this discussion is all meaningless!"
Ok, but we also know that Sans has the ability to travel across time-space in strange ways; namely, he teleports. It's not exactly an easter egg or anything, as it's too extraordinary a phenomenon to ignore.
[pictures of Sans appearing in two places in the same room at the same time]
[picture of Papyrus asking Sans if he is, in fact, in two places at once; walking into the next room will prove that this conjecture is correct]
But the implication is that Papyrus has the same ability (because they are brothers), or at least a very similar one, as Sans' ability comes as no surprise to Papyrus.
[pictures of Papyrus asking Frisk, "Is Sans pranking you across time and space? I hate it when he does that!"]
And, in fact, there is alternate evidence of their similar abilities:
[picture of Papyrus battle in Pacifist or Neutral routes, showing blue-colored, bone-shaped magic]
[picture of Sans battle, exclusive to Bad Time route, also showing blue-colored, bone-shaped magic]
[picture of Papyrus "preparing a non-bone attack, then spending a minute fixing his mistake"]
[picture of Papyrus telling Frisk "Had I only used my Special Attack, you surely would have been blasted to..." with a forlorn look on his face. This only happens when you abandon a Bad Time route by sparing Papyrus.]
[picture of Sans using Gaster Blasters during his battle with Frisk. This is only available during a Bad Time route, killing everyone else – Papyrus included.]
Of course, you cannot possibly see them both in action during the same route (Toby Fox, you clever dog), so it is difficult to compare the two without going back to play Undertale in an entirely different way than before. So, this may count as an easter egg.
What is, perhaps, a bit more of an easter egg (at least, according to my Papyrus-fixated tumblr friends), is the fact that Papyrus can - and does - manipulate time-space in his own ways:
[gif of Papyrus literally walking on air over Frisk]
[gif of Papyrus quickly transposing across the screen without moving his body otherwise]
So, who's to say that he doesn't travel across time as well?
[picture of Gaster's first follower saying that "he was shattered across time and space"]
VII. Memories, Revisited
Remember that "memory" thing I pointed out? Well, I'd like to come back to that for a bit.
There are two things which I have noticed, and I get why they've been met with resistance in the past when I brought them up. But, keep in mind all of the evidence listed above and the things we've talked about thus far. As I said, I know that these are wild theories, but please bear with me for just a little bit longer.
Ok, here's the first thing I've noticed:
[picture of Papyrus leaving Frisk with 1 HP so that he can capture them after battle; this happens no matter what, if you lose to him]
[pictures of Papyrus referring to the battle as “a terrible memory" over the phone]
[pictures describing the Bad Memory item, found in the True Lab; it depletes exactly 1 HP when consumed by Frisk]
And the second thing is this:
[pictures of Papyrus immediately recognizing Frisk as a human during a Bad Time route]
[pictures of Papyrus not recognizing Frisk as a human during a Pacifist route]
Something about HP, bad memories, and a human... Now, how could this possibly be connected?
Well, I'm afraid that I have no more canon evidence to support my theory, so now we are plunging deep into headcanon territory from here on out. If this upsets you, please just stop reading now. I'd rather you form your own headcanon, given the canon evidence so far. Perhaps yours will be more satisfying than mine is, because it's about to get kind of dark. In fact, I would hide it under another "Read More" if I could. But I can't, so I'll give you a break.
Last chance to turn back now.
By continuing to read this, you are submitting yourself to probably the most wild and ridiculous theory that has ever been made in the Undertale fandom.
VIII. Conclusion
If you're still reading this, I must confess that I do have one, tiny piece of canon information to support this theory, which has seemingly nothing to do with anything I just talked about. Here it is:
[picture of a sillhouette of Toriel standing next to a human in the introduction to Undertale, with the caption "Long ago, humans and monsters lived in peace."]
[picture of a sillhouette of Asgore fighting with a human in the introduction to Undertale, with the caption "They were at war."]
The king and queen were on the surface during the Monster and Human War. This implies that they knew humans at some point before they were sealed away Underground when the humans won.
So... what if Gaster, their Royal Scientist before Doctor Alphys, was a human?
A stretch, I know. But here is another tiny piece of evidence to consider:
[picture of Gaster's second follower saying, "I'm holding a piece of him right here." In their hand is what looks like a human face]
Our Mystery Man once had a face which looks strikingly human. Of course, by the time we see him, he looks more like a skeleton with two large fractures on either side of his skull. So, it makes sense that his face went missing.
Which reminds me of this:
[picture of Papyrus realizing that he doesn't have ears]
[pictures of Papyrus referencing his “hair” and “skin,” neither of which he has, since he is a skeleton]
The only reason that Papyrus could possibly "realize" that he has neither ears nor hair is if he had had them before, and only now realizes that they are gone. Remember: Papyrus has a sketchy memory. Something definitely messed with it at somewhere along the way. But what?
Well, remember the aforementioned "accident" which Royal Scientist W. D. Gaster had? I would think that being spread across time-space would be... disorienting, if you will. Parts could go missing. Pieces. Memories, physicalities, any of it.
"Wait," I hear you thinking. "Surely you're not trying to suggest that Papyrus is Gaster! That would be ludicrous!"
Wouldn't it?
"They have such different personalities!"
Don't they?
"Papyrus could never be the Royal Scientist!"
Are you sure about that?
Let me explain to you how I think it happened.
(This is the dark part. I decided not to dive right into it because I wanted to give you time to adjust to my wild theory. Once you are comfortable with the headcanon of Papyrus being Gaster, please proceed. If this is against your sensibilities, I won't hold it against you at all. You are free to stop reading this post at any time.)
Gaster was a human who lived on the surface like everyone else. He was a friend to monsters before the war. He even knew Asgore and Toriel, although Toriel took to him a bit better. Once the war broke out, everyone had to choose a side. The line was drawn between monsters and humans. Only W. D. Gaster decided to cross that line.
When the monsters were sealed Underground by a magical barrier after the humans won the war, Gaster ended up being sealed with them. Asgore and Toriel were elected the King and Queen of the Underground, and they elected Gaster to be Royal Scientist.
The magical barrier transformed Gaster as time passed. He became immortal, like a monster. He started to adopt their mannerisms, and even started to look like a monster. As his body aged, soon all that was left of him was his skeleton. Without vocal cords, he could only speak in a strange font: Wing Dings. This earned him his nickname.
Then, "The Accident" happened. I don't know exactly how, or when, but we all know that it happened. Gaster "fell into his creation," and "was shattered across time and space," according to his followers. A new Royal Scientist was needed.
In the meantime, two skeleton brothers randomly showed up in Snowdin. We get this information from an NPC in Snowdin:
[pictures of the Snowdin Shopkeeper telling Frisk that Sans and Papyrus "just showed up one day"]
Interesting.
IX. Supporting Evidence/More Headcanons
But how did the Royal Scientist Wing Dings Gaster become the Papyrus we all know and love?
(trigger warnings: mentions of violence and child death)
Let's go back to canon evidence, shall we? We are far enough into the headcanon realm that I do think it's time for some canon reminders:
[Papyrus, looking slightly worried as he says "LOVE." in all capital letters, which holds a very different meaning than lowercase "love" in the game of Undertale]
I know that Papyrus speaks in all caps all of the time, but look at the expression on his face. Doesn't that look like someone who knows what LOVE stands for "Level Of ViolencE," as Sans points out to us in Judgment Hall? Because it sure does to me. Also, remember how Papyrus definitely knows that Frisk is a human during the Bad Time route, but not during a Pacifist route? Why would Papyrus make the connection between humans and violence?
There are two explanations for this.
The first is that a few sub-conscious memories of his time as Gaster were somehow retained; that is, he remembers the war between humans and monsters, much like how he remembers having hair and ears. So that is one possible explanation.
The second is perhaps the wildest headcanon you will ever hear about Papyrus.
Ready?
Ok.
*sighs*
Papyrus... has killed before.
"WHO? WHAT? WHERE? WHEN? WHY? HOW?" you ask. Well, here's my theory.
Papyrus, being newly incarnated from Gaster (alongside his brother, Sans), doesn't really know much about the world around him. He has memories missing. Which ones, we're not sure of, but he's definitely... not all there, if you get me.
Now is a good time for to mention Papyrus' stats versus Sans' before I continue with this story. Have you ever noticed how Papyrus is up to twenty times stronger than Sans?
[picture of Papyrus' Pacifist stats: 20 Attack, 20 Defense]
[picture of Sans' stats: 1 Attack, 1 Defense, with the caption "*The easiest enemy."]
But Papyrus and Sans are brothers, so we would expect that they would have the same stats, which clearly isn't so.
Tying this back into what we know about LOVE, we know that with every increase of LOVE, one receives an increase in stats as well:
[pictures showing LV 1 stats, and then saying, "Your LOVE increased!” and the HP stat going up.]
So, the only logical explanation is that Papyrus received an increase in stats because he received an increase in LOVE. And how did this happen?
Think about the Items which Frisk finds in Snowdin: the Tough Glove and the Manly Bandanna.
[pictures of Frisk acquiring Tough Glove and Manly Bandanna in Snowdin]
To which child did they belong? The Orange SOUL.
[picture of the Photoshop Flowey battle, depicting the Orange SOUL in the box and the Tough Glove being used as a weapon against Frisk]
Which trait is attributed with Orange? Bravery.
[picture of the Ball Game in Snowdin showing the word "bravery" in orange]
What happens when an attack is Orange? You have to keep moving.
[pictures of Doctor Alphys explaining how orange lasers work in Hotland]
From this canon evidence, what can we infer the Orange SOUL kid's gimmick was, if they were "brave?"
I'll tell you: they kept moving forward, no matter what.
Now, what color magic does Papyrus have?
[picture of Papyrus using blue-colored bones in battle]
What does Blue magic do? It requires you to *stand still,* or else you will get hurt.
[picture of Doggo using blue magic on Frisk's motionless, red SOUL and doing no damage]
Tell me, how is a kid who is incapable of standing still going to survive Blue magic? Simple: they won't.
I even wrote a short ficlet about it here:
https://eroshiyda.tumblr.com/post/152526581522/orange-soul-headcanon [link to my tumblr post, "Orange SOUL headcanon"]
Of course, I'd like to think that it was just an accident. But, accident or not, Papyrus killed a human child, which was enough to raise his stats to twenty times higher than what they were originally. (Remember that humans are far more powerful than monsters, so they would be worth a lot of EXecution Points.)
This is why Papyrus knows exactly how much to lower his stats during the Bad Time route. He's not trying to kill Frisk, and he knows how much force is needed for that.
[picture of Papyrus lowering his stats to 5 ATK, 5 DEF in a Bad Time route]
That's also how he knows that Frisk is going down the "wrong path" by moving closer to Papyrus in a threatening way.
[pictures of Papyrus lecturing Frisk to stop moving before battling them during a Bad Time route]
Papyrus has experience battling at least one human child. And Papyrus didn't lose, either; otherwise, he wouldn't be around anymore by the time Frisk arrives, right?
But this is why his character development is so important to the story of Undertale. This is why he's (arguably) Flowey's favorite monster in the whole Underground, long after Flowey grew tired of torturing everyone else:
[picture of Flowey at the end of a Neutral route saying, "Took me a long time to get bored of that one."]
Because even after Papyrus committed the most heinous atrocity any monster could ever think of, he changed. He resolved to never FIGHT again. He solemnly swore to only use MERCY, no matter how dire the circumstances got. Even after all he had been through, he proved that people can change their ways.
[picture of Papyrus saying, "Everyone can be a great person if they try!"]
It's all about the choices you make. Because accidents happen, everyone makes mistakes, but ultimately you have a choice; do you keep going down the path of least resistance, or do you learn and grow from it enough to do the right thing, no matter how hard it gets?
X. Afterword
Thanks for reading this theory all the way through! You're a real trooper!
I know that this is a topic that doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things, and I probably left out a lot of discrepancies, but I really did have fun working on this for the past year and a half. I hope you had fun reading it, too.
As I was finishing up this project, the Japanese version of Undertale came out. Some of the information gathered from gleaning nuances in the Japanese text conflicts with this theory, while some supports it; but I just didn’t get a chance to include any of it, to my dismay.
By the time you see this post, I most likely will have left tumblr. So, I cannot accept any of your thoughts about it, unfortunately.
However, if you would like to do even further research of your own, I have left behind this blog as an archive, along with another, super-secret blog I used to reblog my sources. The url is @papyrus-is-gaster. Here’s the link to it: https://papyrus-is-gaster.tumblr.com/ [link to one of my sideblogs, called papyrus-is-gaster]
I'd like to think of this as my sort of "tumblr dissertation," and I've officially graduated and am ready to move on to other things. Undertale was a fun phase in my life, but all phases come to an end.
And, with that, this post has also (finally) come to an end as well.
Just remember,
[picture of Papyrus saying "Still! I believe in you!"]
The Great Papyrus believes in you, and so do I.
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From 4.3GHz All-Core Overclocking to SMT Scaling: A Comprehensive Review of the AMD Threadripper 3990X
AMD has spent the last three years rewriting the rules of desktop performance. On Friday, the microprocessor manufacturer launched its AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X, the world’s first single-socket 64-core CPU. I’ve already written a teaser for this article and gone over some of my early thoughts on the CPU, but here’s where we dig into the data on the chip and see what the reports can tell us.
Under the right circumstances, the Ryzen Threadripper 3990X offers incredible performance. In unoptimized workloads, it’s flat or even declines against the Ryzen Threadripper 3970X. I’ve spent a great deal of time putting the CPU through its paces, looking for scenarios where it succeeds and analyzing where it falls flat. I also threw it outside in 12-degree Fahrenheit (-11C) air and overclocked it using the Asus Zenith II Extreme, just for fun. We’ll talk about that, too. I may have missed the world record to an enterprising individual with liquid nitrogen, but the CB20 score I hit would still qualify this system for second-place according to HWBot.
I’m going to assume you’re aware of the Threadripper 3990X and have read our 3970X review, plus the 3990X launch discussion from last week.
The Windows Thread Scheduler
One issue affecting our Windows 10 results is the fact that the OS doesn’t scale above 64 threads very effectively. The OS splits CPU workloads into processor groups, with up to 64 threads assigned to each group. Some applications provide their own thread schedulers, but applications that don’t are often capped at ~50 percent CPU usage on the 3990X. Linux scaling is generally better; Rob Williams at Techgage has more data on this. 3D rendering applications are easily the strongest use-category for the 3990X, which puts up its strongest scaling figures in these applications. There have been reports that Windows 10 Enterprise may offer better scaling, but our contacts at AMD indicated there’s no reason for a user to run Windows 10 Enterprise when buying a 3990X. The official guidance from AMD is that Windows 10 Pro is enough.
The (Lack of) Intel Competition
We reached out to Intel to inquire if the company would provide Xeon server CPUs to benchmark against the 3990X, but the company has opted not to sample against the AMD CPU. While these comparisons wouldn’t align on price, they would have allowed us to compare top-end solutions from both companies. Without the option to draw on Xeon, our comparison vehicle was limited to the Core i9-10980XE.
At ~$1000, the 10980XE cannot be considered fair competition for the $4000 3990X, but it’s the closest Intel CPU we have, and I wanted to give some indication of how it stacked up. Because different applications have such different responses to high core count CPUs, there are cases where the 10980XE matches or outperforms the 3990X. More cores are not always better, even today.
Results Formatting, Test Setup
This review has a larger footprint than my typical coverage, and I’ve subdivided the results into several different categories. Our standard suite of tests compares the top Threadripper and Core i9-10980XE (along with the Ryzen 9 3950X where possible) in a wide range of applications. The next section discusses SMT scaling on the 3990X specifically, with some specific evaluations in applications like DaVinci Resolve using the Puget Systems Extended Benchmarks for that application. Finally, the overclocking section discusses our OC results, with a little help from Mother Nature.
All testbeds were equipped with 64GB of DDR4-3600 in four sticks of RAM. XMP was enabled on both the AMD and Intel systems, but the Intel Cascade Lake required a DDR4-3200 RAM clock, not DDR4-3600. Both Intel and AMD systems were benchmarked with a Corsair MP600 SSD, though the AMD system used the drive in PCIe 4.0 mode, while the Intel rig was limited to PCIe 3.0.
An RTX 2080 was used to provide GPU testing in all cases, with Nvidia GeForce Game Ready Driver 442.19. The latest UEFI images were loaded on all motherboards.
A few application-specific notes before we get started: I’ve included MATLAB results here. MATLAB favors Intel by default for reasons we discuss in far more detail in this article. I’ve benchmarked AMD’s with the “Cripple AMD” instructions both enabled (default) and disabled.
We’ve also added a significant prosumer / workstation workload. Puget Systems distributes their own extended benchmark suite for various applications, including DaVinci Resolve. These tests don’t kid around — the 8K DaVinci Resolve suite requires a GPU with up to 20GB of VRAM, which precluded us from testing it. AThe free trial of DaVinci Studio was used, which does impact the performance of one H.264 benchmark according to Puget, but the test results we present are accurate relative to that version of the application and the same workload ran in software on all of the CPUs we tested. I have data from Agisoft Metashape as well, but I realized late on Sunday that I need to re-check those results.
Arnold Render CPU Benchmark – Antonio Bosi
Special thanks to Antonio Bosi, who designed our Maya 2020 Arnold Render CPU benchmark by modifying a scene from his existing test suite. Antonio maintains his site with a number of Arnold Render tutorials, personal art, and 3D models for download. The tweaked version of the standard Fast benchmark scaled about four percent better than the default flavor, and, at 1.4x scaling over the 3970X, delivered our strongest render uplift between the two CPUs.
05_030_A
We also downloaded a number of Blender scenes for test rendering, all of which were used in the Blender open movie “Spring.” Two screenshots of representative animation frames are shown above and below:
03_005_A
Test Results
Tests included: 7zip, Blender (stand-alone benchmark and full application), Cinebench R15 and R20, Handbrake 1.31, Indigo Bench, Maya 2020, Neat Bench, POV-RAY 3.7, and a Qt compile benchmark using MSVC 2019.
We see two different performance profiles in these results. In some applications — generally rendering applications — the 3990X is 1.3x – 1.4x faster than the 3970X. Some tests, like V-Ray, predict even stronger scaling. We’ve benchmarked a range of rendering applications to demonstrate that in many cases, existing software does take advantage of these capabilities. In some cases, like Arnold Render, the 3990X even comes close to proving cost-effective against the 10980XE, which takes 3.63x longer to render our test scene and costs 25 percent as much. We’ll also examine a renderer that doesn’t scale in our SMT section.
Outside of rendering applications, the 3970X is generally a better choice, especially given that it’s more cooperative with the regular version of Windows 10. Inside rendering applications, particularly at the professional level, the improved performance might be worth it to creatives with cash to burn.
I’ve fallen back to using slideshows for this article because of the amount of data, but a few of our results don’t fit well in that format for various reasons. Our MATLAB benchmark was provided by Intel for testing the Core i9-10980XE’s performance. The table below summarizes MATLAB performance on AMD hardware versus Intel.
MATLAB is an application that doesn’t scale past 64 threads on Windows 10 Pro. As a result, the 3990X is slower than the 3970X with SMT enabled because its baseline clocks are lower, even in 32-core mode. We’ve seen several examples of this.
The Blender 1.0Beta2 benchmark is based on an older version of Blender (2.79) and runs more slowly than the current flavor (2.81). It also crashes on the 10980XE for unknown reasons (the 10980XE doesn’t have this problem in the actual application). Blender is a solid win for the 3990X, and while we don’t see our best scaling in this renderer, the 3990X renders between 25 – 35 percent faster than the 3970X in these scenes.
SMT Scaling
Our standard test suite explored performance scaling between the 3970X and 3990X, generally finding that the 3970X is the stronger option for the typical user, but with specific improvements in certain workloads for the 3990X. Now we’re going to take a look at the SMT scaling question under Windows 10.
Tests included: Blender, DaVinci Resolve (Puget Systems), Keyshot 9, Maya 2020, Maxwell Render 4.2.
There are only a handful of applications that show performance declines when SMT is enabled, but Maxwell Render 4.2 definitely does. Unfortunately, the “Benchwell” scene included in Maxwell Render 4 will no longer load in Maxwell Render 5, so I was unable to test if the same problem occurs in the newest version of the test. Turning SMT off gives the 3990X a win over the 3970X, but not enough to justify the cost of the CPU.
Other tests, however, showed consistent scaling from enabling SMT, and benefited from its use. We rendered an extensive series of Blender scenes (Junk Shop, Spring, Agent 327, and Mr. Elephant), all of which show varying responses to SMT use. I ran a number of additional test renders that don’t appear here, just to keep the data set manageable, and the general performance improvement in Blender in the professional-level renders available via Blender Cloud is a very consistent 1.3 – 1.4x. Keyshot scales a bit less, at roughly 1.2x-1.25x.
In DaVinci Resolve 16, Intel doesn’t win, but it does win the price/performance category. The 3990X scales a bit off the 3970X, but I don’t know that many people would pay 4x more for a 1.16x performance gain. It might very well come down to which specific codec and media settings you were editing, since the 3990X does show larger gains over the 10980XE in a few specific tests.
Intel, therefore, definitely still makes a case for its own utility and relevance in these workloads. The 3970X and 3990X have carved out real territory for themselves, but they aren’t a slam dunk in every situation.
Overclocking Performance
17 years ago, literally to the day, on February 10 2003, AMD launched the Athlon XP 2500+, 2800+, and 3000+. To overclock the 3000+ — and because we all knew at the time that it couldn’t match the Pentium 4 at default clock — I stuck it outside to OC it, and pushed the CPU up to 2.6GHz, 1.2x over stock. I never did it again until this past weekend. This article was originally supposed to run on Friday, but I’m tickled that it’s actually running today, because having the dates align this perfectly is fun. The 3990X is a rather good overclocking CPU, if my single sample is anything to go by, and the fact that this article is running on the same day is just icing on the cake.
How’d I do it? Simple. I stuck the entire system outside in 12F / -11C air. I actually experimented with testing the system inside, by putting the CPU radiator + fan assembly up against a window screen, so the cooler could draw directly from the outside air. This worked to a point, but it didn’t provide the cooling I wanted. Solution: Outdoor overclocking.
Besides, that sounds better than “Bathroom overclocking.”
Who has had two thumbs and is unhappy this idea didn’t work? Me, that’s who.
I started my testing at an all-core 3.7GHz and 1.4v, but this was too much voltage for the Asus Zenith II Extreme. The OCP protection on the motherboard would kick off halfway through stress tests. Lowering the voltage to 1.35v produced better results. I ran the complete Blender Benchmark 1.0Beta 2 suite at 3.6, 3.7, 3.8, and 3.9GHz all-core, lowering the voltage at each step.
At 3.9GHz and 1.33v, I decided to leap. I knew that an all-core 4GHz wouldn’t break the 32K mark, which is where I needed to be to beat the (now second-highest) score. I dialed in 4.1GHz and she POSTed… but my score was still too low. Since I wrote my article on Friday, the world record has been claimed by someone with a 5.3GHz overclock, and I knew I wasn’t going to hit that, but I thought I just might manage to take second place.
At this point, it’s about 1:30 AM on Sunday morning. Anyone driving past would have observed a remarkable sight — a brilliant (because of course both the motherboard and RAM are LED-equipped) star shining in my front yard. Had they come closer, they would have marveled at the sturdy, unassuming, and unexpectedly extremely valuable nightstand stoutly holding about $6000 in computer equipment out of everything computer equipment is never supposed to touch.
I considered this. I contemplated the wisdom of testing extremely expensive hardware at night, in the open air. I thought about snow and wind, and contemplated the fact that I was running markedly less voltage than I had used to maintain a stable 3.7GHz OC.
If you want to be good at overclocking, you have to understand it as an art. Systems don’t just become randomly unstable. There’s an order and a hierarchy. Systems need to POST, boot, and then run benchmarks. The longer and more rigorous the test you can run, the greater the chance the overclock is stable. I knew the 3.7GHz all-core was stable enough to run through a fair number of tests, and that 3.9GHz had been stable through Blender. I knew I couldn’t be too far off hitting the motherboard’s overcurrent protection, however. The CPU idled at 6C in the frozen wasteland of my… front yard, but under load, she was already hitting 67C. Overclocked CPUs are often far more thermally sensitive than their stock-clocked counterparts, and 67C was more than I was comfortable with already.
Any time you push a CPU to the outer edge of the envelope (and here, that could mean anything from a stock cooler to LN2), you’re dancing on the head of a pin. It’s a gamble that you can tune the CPU just enough to eke out a test result without impacting performance in a way that kills the net effect of your improvement.
CPU power dissipation increases with TDP, but it increases much more strongly as a result of voltage. I gambled that I’d reduced the VRM load enough that she could handle a 4.3GHz all-core at 1.3275v, even though I’d seen the machine hard-off at 4GHz and 1.4v.
Keep in mind, we’re talking about a CPU clock that’s about 1.26x higher than where I’d estimate the 3990X’s clock sits on a regular basis, and we’re talking about doing it on 64 CPU cores at once. All-core 4.3GHz = 275.2GHz. 0.275THz. Yeah, it starts with a decimal. Don’t care.
I felt like Han Solo reaching for the hyperspace levers on the Millennium Falcon, if Han had been the biggest damn nerd on Earth. My hands were freezing, my ears were numb, my front yard sounded like a hair dryer, and the rig had already spooked a dog walking by. It was time to see what she had. I typed “43,” hit “Save and Exit,” and crossed my fingers. She POSTed. Booted.
Took a second-place world record in Cinebench R20 and in Cinebench R15, though I’m still working on the submission process to HWBot.
I’ve been a reviewer for 18.5 years. I’ve tested systems valued at over $10,000. I’ve never tested a CPU that could be called the second-fastest at anything on the planet. Even knowing that my own record will soon be broken by 3990X owners with LN2 and exotic cooling setups that don’t rely on the weather, even knowing that the result was simply in a benchmark, there’s something undeniably cool about that.
I don’t think people are going to get 4.3GHz overclocks out of the 3990X on a regular basis, but lower clocks seem eminently possible. The results above show that they can provide a sustained benefit and the voltage required to maintain an AC 3.7GHz is clearly well below 1.3275v, given that I used that same voltage to hit 4.3GHz. I’ll leave it to manufacturers like Boxx to figure out what the possibilities are, but these test results imply they might be good.
In the right workloads, for the right buyer, overclocking the 3990X could make good sense. My performance improved by 10 – 17 percent moving from stock to 3.7 AC.
Conclusion
The 3990X is not the CPU for everyone. It doesn’t scale well enough to objectively justify its price, unless you shop in markets where price is no object. Even assuming better scaling from Linux or Enterprise Windows, it’s unlikely that enough applications would benefit to make the chip an objective improvement for many buyers.
All of this is completely normal for products at the top of a product stack. The Intel Xeon W-3265 is a 24-core chip at 2.7GHz base / 4.4GHz boost. The Xeon W-3275 is a 28-core CPU at 2.5GHz base / 4.4GHz boost. The W-3265 costs $3349. The W-3275 is $4449. That’s a 1.32x price increase for a 1.17x increase in core count. The Xeon Platinum 8280 is a $10,009 CPU with 28 cores, the Xeon Platinum 8270 is a $7405 CPU with 26 cores. Nobody blinks when Intel prices parts this way, even though there’s no workload on Earth where an 8280 is going to deliver a reasonable uplift over the 8270 with just two extra cores.
But the 3990X isn’t trying to be all things to all people. It’s the laurel wreath. It’s a victory lap. The 3970X is the CPU that’s actually intended to go toe-to-toe with what Intel has to offer; it’s the 3990X that clinches the deal, for the AMD customer for whom money is no object.
As for the significance of that? This is the first time in 15 years that AMD has had a product that competed for the “money is no object” segment in the first place. You have to go back to the days of dual-core Opteron and Athlon 64 FX, when AMD was facing off against Prescott and Smithfield, to find a time when AMD was so confident of its endgame to launch a part in this kind of position. Other reviewers, with access to more expensive Xeons than I have, have confirmed that AMD wins benchmarks against $20K worth of Xeon CPUs in multiple areas. That’s the kind of performance disparity that can make even the “Money is no object” crowd sit up and take notice.
Well played.
Now Read:
The AMD 3990X Pre-Review and Overclocking World Record Attempt
Intel, AMD Both Claim Wins Based on New Market Share Data
AMD Crushes on Earnings on Strength of 7nm
from ExtremeTechExtremeTech https://www.extremetech.com/computing/305965-from-4-3ghz-all-core-overclocking-to-smt-scaling-a-comprehensive-review-of-the-amd-threadripper-3990x
from Blogger http://componentplanet.blogspot.com/2020/02/from-43ghz-all-core-overclocking-to-smt.html
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The Mass Effect trilogy remaster everyone wants is already here
“Stand by for clearance Normandy,” bellows Captain David Anderson as the iconic ship approaches Citadel Dock 422. Shortly thereafter the wonder of the galaxy’s epicentre hits you like a sledgehammer, its empyrean skyline a majestic marvel among the cosmos. However, there exists a monumental issue that has plagued this cutscene for over a decade: it has aged like a fine wine, if only said wine had its cork removed long before it was shelved.
Fortunately, there is a fix. After the divisive denouement of Mass Effect 3 ripped a fissure in the community, a group of fans banded together to rewrite the series’ disgruntling culmination. Thus the Mass Effect modding community was born, brewed from a chaotically potent cocktail of discontent and desire for more. “We only have Mass Effect 3 mods because of the terrible endings,” Spectre Expansion Mod author Tydeous tells me in a recent interview. “People hated them with such passion that it spawned an entire community that wanted to fix them.”
Although the ensuing ending mods were relatively renowned within Mass Effect circles, the movement didn’t stop there: accepting the unlikeliness of an official remaster, these dedicated tinkerers decided to work on a complete 4K overhaul of the entire trilogy, as well as orchestrating their own original mods to boot. The aim of this enterprise is to complete Mass Effect Modding Workshop creator Ryan “Audemus” Ainsworth’s own labour of love, ALOV (A Lot Of Videos), which is the result of a community-wide effort to remaster Mass Effect’s inaugural iteration.
Citadel arrival in Mass Effect 1 using the A Lot of Videos mod.
“We have 2TB of dedicated Nextcloud storage on a Gigabit connection thanks to our team member bosp,” Ainsworth says. “Another team member designed a script that can automatically check through hundreds of videos in the mod for errors such as missing frames or an incorrect framerate.” Meanwhile, a dozen team members volunteered to upscale frames to 4K using Gigapixel in an ambitious attempt to meet the mod’s scheduled release date last year.
However, modding Mass Effect is no easy endeavour, nor is it a phenomenon BioWare encouraged or even facilitated. “I can’t overstate how difficult it is to mod a PC game that was designed primarily for consoles on an engine that offers no mod support whatsoever,” Ainsworth explains. “Because of this, there are only a handful of people in the community that can use the toolset to its fullest capability.”
A prime example exists in the low-res story sequences in the original Mass Effect. “The pre-rendered cutscenes in Mass Effect are 720p videos that were heavily compressed to allow the game to fit on the disc,” Ainsworth tells me. “When playing the game at 1080p to 4K with texture mods, those cutscenes were the biggest thing holding it back from looking like a true remaster.”
There are other hardships, too. Modding Mass Effect is nothing like creating expansions for games like Skyrim or Fallout, Ainsworth adds. “Their Creation Kit was created and supported by Bethesda, while ME3Explorer had to be created from scratch by talented and dedicated fans.”
Screenshot of Mass Effect 3 using the A Lot Of Textures mod.
Perhaps paradoxically, difficulty is part of what inspires Mass Effect modders to persevere against the odds while maintaining the harmony inherent to Ainsworth’s community. “The [Mass Effect] modding scene is small, but tight-knit,” ALOT (A Lot Of Textures) author CreeperLava tells me. “Any modder who lingers there ends up getting to know every other modder.”
“Perhaps because it is so small, or because the games are so difficult to mod, only die-hard fans end up dedicating time to learning how to mod them,” CreeperLava adds. Regular contributors also ensure each subsequent mod released via Nexus is cross-compatible with every other project in the community’s existing oeuvre. “This is impossible in larger mod bases like Skyrim, where the amount of work involved would be insane.”
CreeperLava also asserts this is likely the reason the Mass Effect modding process is so collaborative within the community. “They seek to make sure their mods work together from the get-go,” they explain. “It’s kind of like having a team with many heads, all trying to get the best out of the games they love.”
Ainsworth says roughly 30 people were involved with the Project Earth Overhaul Mod specifically, marking it as the biggest Mass Effect modding endeavour of all time. To this day, however, the team continues to rework the games they love. “We have over a dozen active modding projects going on, and everyone is encouraged to collaborate,” Ainsworth adds. “I would liken the modding community today to a loose development team, made up of programmers, writers, artists, voice actors and more. I’m extremely proud of what we’ve built together.”
“It’s not even about the game anymore,” CreeperLava adds, ushering the sentiment in a new direction. “The modding I did started as a personal quest for a more beautiful game, but ended up as a coming of age experience for me. Its development mirrors my own – ALOT matured and became much more than just a compilation of textures.”
CreeperLava goes on to explain they were joined by developers who conceived an installer for the mod while they learned how to implement their own textures. “I saw articles being published about my work,” they continue. “What amazes me the most to this day is that beyond just saying thanks, some people stepped forward and offered their help, knowledge, and time to improve the mod.”
CreeperLava also fondly recalls working at a LAN party on one occasion, where a random person came over and asked, “are you that CreeperLava? From Mass Effect?” As it turned out, this was a fan who had played through Mass Effect with ALOT installed. “Really took me by surprise,” CreeperLava adds. “I felt really good for the rest of that day.”
Screenshot of Mass Effect 3 using the A Lot Of Textures mod.
Ainsworth echoes this passion, and proceeds to proclaim Mass Effect as an entity that has had a profound influence on him. “I don’t think many people can say they’ve been a Mass Effect fan for most of their life,” he explains. “But for me, Mass Effect formed the backbone of my love of sci-fi storytelling in the way Star Wars or Star Trek did for older fans.”
Tydeous shares this emotional connection. “I grew up watching shows like Stargate SG-1 and Star Trek: Next Generation, where teams of people work together to explore the galaxy, discovering new worlds, facing dire threats, and meeting alien cultures,” they say. “For me, Mass Effect gives me that chance to explore the unknown in a way I’ll never get in the real world.”
Tydeous explains that although the community almost fizzled out, it has bounced back stronger than ever, and many fans of the mod have voiced their gratitude. “The best compliment I’ve had is when one user said the new emails [added as part of the mod] and my ‘Ghost of Antilin’ storyline were BioWare quality,” they add. “They hadn’t realised those texts were fan-written.”
Alongside the praise, working on something of this caliber comes with a variety of unseen, humorous mishaps. Although Tydeous maintains most of their modding experience has involved bashing their head against the desk in a futile attempt to understand why something isn’t working, one such mistake resulted in a barrel of laughs for them. “During some experimental combat modding, I accidentally changed the number of Banshee spawns from one to eight, as I thought I was changing the amount of Husks that spawn,” Tydeous remembers. Despite their best efforts, they never managed to defeat them.
Meanwhile, a modder who goes by the handle “Mgamerz,” who is also part of the Mass Effect Modding Workshop community and is the founder of ME3Tweaks, managed to unravel an exceptionally well-hidden secret when tinkering with some scenes featuring The Illusive Man. “In my cutscene randomiser, I expanded it to support more branching characters, such as your squadmates,” Mgamerz explains. “I did not realise that in many cutscenes there are extra versions of pawns that are used for different angles, so we have The Illusive Woman.”
The same randomiser yielded other comedy nuggets. “I was trying to randomise cutscenes and the animations a bit – it’s meant to be something you’d play if you were somewhat tipsy,” Mgamerz continues. “I did not realise the data format for these animations was different from other animations and Miranda gained a lot of flexibility.”
Evidently, the Mass Effect modding community has achieved an astronomical amount since the polarising polemic that emerged in the wake of Mass Effect 3, especially considering the obstacles blocking their path. From a full-fledged PC remaster to some original voice acting sent to Eurogamer, this is the work of a group of people who have persevered without ever having access to modding toolsets or developer-established communities. Heartwarmingly, newcomers are welcomed with open arms to this day: “Seeing the 2019 N7 Day Modding trailer we put out last year, that was especially cool,” Tydeous explains. “Seeing the live stream comments about each mod was great – especially for newer modders showing off their work for the first time.”
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However, despite the community’s investment in the original trilogy, modding Andromeda, BioWare’s ill-fated 2017 Mass Effect game, remains a complex affair. Because it runs on the Frostbite engine, none of the modding tools the community have used for the first three games are compatible with Andromeda. “As of now, it’s not possible to import new content into the game,” Ainsworth explains. “That means no new items, quests, weapons, [or] abilities. Because of this, there’s never been a community that’s formed around modding Andromeda like it did for the trilogy.”
Ainsworth adds there are people in his community who are already interested in modding Andromeda, but after enduring three long years without updates to compatibility, and after the departure of a key Frostbite modder named GalaxyMan – who, Ainsworth explains, works with EA/DICE on Frostbite proper now – “it’s looking more likely those features might never happen”.
It’s not all bad though. Recently, and for years past to boot, rumours have circulated about whether or not an official remaster for the Mass Effect trilogy will ever be released. However, according to Ainsworth, “the remaster everyone has been clamouring for is effectively already here.” Give a community this dedicated long enough and they’ll do it themselves.
“Had to be me,” I imagine the Mass Effect modding community saying. “Someone else might have gotten it wrong.”
from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2020/01/the-mass-effect-trilogy-remaster-everyone-wants-is-already-here/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-mass-effect-trilogy-remaster-everyone-wants-is-already-here
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#KeralaFloods: How Social Media Changed the Face of Disaster Management
December of 2004 witnessed the third-largest earthquake that literally shook the whole world and the resulting tsunamis caused unprecedented loss of human lives. Back then, the world broke all boundaries and came together to lend a helping hand to those affected. People from around the globe sent donations in form of clothing, food, and money in hopes of lessening the anguish of the survivors.
July 2018 saw a similar scenario with the devastating Kerala Floods. The only difference here is that people are now armed with their social media accounts. For a long time, in fact ever since it came into existence, Social Media has been mocked to be the reason people don’t communicate to each other anymore and its users are called shallow and narcissistic. But what these critics don’t see is the how social media boosts everything humanity stands for.
This part of social media was dramatically highlighted when Kerala faced the devastating, disastrous floods.
Jumping Into Action
The #KeralaFloods hashtag soared earlier this week as people started tweeting for relief and help.
When the rest of the country heard what happened in Kerala, #KeralaFloods quickly started trending across all major social media platforms. Now, critics might argue that people should go and offer help in person instead of tweeting about, and yes, that is the ideal situation, but the reality isn’t ideal and the reality is that not everyone can afford to make the trip.
So such people chose to do the next best thing; donate essentials and money virtually. They put off posting selfies and foodstagrams and celebrity gossip and instead used their accounts to inform people about the crisis or to urge them to donate. Even the ones who couldn’t send direct help took to social media to raise awareness about it, And believe it or not, simply sending forwards and posting about ways to donate on social media can garner a lot of help.
A group of freelancers on Twitter even went as far as developing a platform on Google Maps that compiles and provides relief information across Kerala; this information includes, but is not limited to, shelter, medicine, helpline, volunteers, transportation, relief collection, food and water resources.
Celebrities weren’t far behind, using their wide social media reach to urge people to donate and raise awareness by actively posting in the #KeralaFloods hashtag; everyone from actors to cricketers and other influencers came together to help the survivors in Kerala. In fact, some of the celebrities located in Kerala chose to go out and help the people themselves. The Indian Cricket Team also dedicated their win to Kerala and donated all of their match fees to the relief efforts.
The Indian Cricket Team also dedicated their win to Kerala and donated all of their match fees to the relief efforts.
Again, some people might argue that celebrities’ posting about donations on social media is just a way for them to “feed their egos” but you need to understand that these people have a huge following and their fans look up to them as role models. In a crisis like the Kerala Floods, they don’t post about their donations and other kind acts in hopes of garnering likes and shares; it is done in hopes of inspiring their fans to do the same.
Not just celebrities, even politicians chose to keep their differences aside to raise awareness about the crisis and keep the public updated about the rescues. The Kerala State Disaster Management Authority sent out numbers stranded survivors could use to contact them or send their location on Whatsapp. The state Government sought to Google Maps where they created an option that allowed people to upload their location. They also created a website specifically for seeking or offering help (https://keralarescue.in/).
Speaking of rescues, The Indian Army and various NGOs also used their presence on social media to find stranded survivors and update everyone else about the ones rescued. Outside of that, they are also keeping an eye out for hoaxes and cons regarding the floods. Recently, the Indian Army debunked a fake video [going around on Whatsapp about the #KeralaFloods.
Such unselfish acts weren’t confined to India; other countries, most prominently UAE also joined in and sent help in the form of financial aid, food, water, and even rescue teams to a point where the hashtag #ThankyouUAE started trending on Twitter.
Big companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Flipkart, BigBasket, Airtel Payments Bank, Paytm and Tez have provided an option that allows you to send donations towards relief on their platforms.
However, it wasn’t only the people outside who were using social media as an emergency management tool, even the ones affected sought to various platforms in the situation. They posted about their location, informed people when they were safe, and even praised the ones who helped them.
Social Media Tips! @ https://bit.ly/2nB54x9
Social Media For Emergency Management
In emergency situations, especially in recent times, social media has proven itself to be a great asset to the public as well as the authorities. In a study by American Red Cross in 2010, 18% of the participants said that they would turn to social media if calls to 911 were unsuccessful.
To start off, the social media platforms themselves have disaster management tools to help you out in emergency situations. For example, Facebook has a Disaster relief feature called “Safety Check” where people in disaster-struck regions can mark themselves safe. The platform will then send everyone in the person’s friend list a notification informing them the same. Another example can be Google Maps that allows you to upload your location so that rescuers can easily find you.
Social media is also an important means of communication in such situations where you may or may not have access to a television or radio. You can easily go on any social media site and find the official accounts of relevant authorities to stay updated on the latest news about the crisis. You can also use it to contact your loved ones in case you can’t reach them through conventional means like a phone call or message.
People love to poke fun at social media for turning people into “shallow narcissists”. There is a popular meme about the Titanic that has been around for a while. In this meme, you can see people in the water recording the sinking of the RMS Titanic was sinking with the title “If Titanic Happened in 2017/2018”. But based on all the ways social media has helped in disasters like Kerala Floods, Hurricane Sandy, etc. I do believe that social media would have definitely helped in that situation. The Google Maps would have helped rescuers save so many more people, Facebook’s Safety Check would have helped relatives of the survivors find them easily, and, if nothing, the victims could have at least been able to say their last goodbyes to the ones they were leaving behind.
P.S. if you want to lend a helping hand to those affected in the Kerala floods, you can visit https://keralarescue.in/ or browse through #KeralaFloods on Twitter or Facebook where people are constantly updating you with ways to donate or send help in other forms. If you can’t donate, use the hashtags to post about the floods with relevant, verified information about the floods and what people can do to help. Also, keep an eye out for messages on Whatsapp regarding the floods and forward the same to as many people as you can.
Another important thing you should be doing is looking out for fake news. If you see any suspicious or unverified information on any social media platform, especially Whatsapp, immediately inform the concerned authorities about it (it would be helpful if you attached a screenshot or direct link to the news along with it).
Watch Motivational video @ https://bit.ly/2Pff2kn
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Stop looking like an amateur and start winning more work
We all want to win more writing work, yeah? Looking like a professional and responding fast can be the difference between being booked to capacity and having an empty pipeline.
But first, we need to make sure we have all the standard documents, tools and resources that will help us look professional while responding fast to prospective clients or customers.
Even if you’re disorganised or a total rookie, you can help yourself win more work by at least looking like a pro. Fake it ’til you make it, right?
Here are 10 tips to help you maintain the appearance of someone who looks like they know what they’re doing and win more writing work.
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Get your standard procedures in order
I had a brilliant apprenticeship with the first digital media company I worked for back in the 1990s.
It was a small company and I was schooled in every aspect of the business, from pitching to clients to managing project budgets to designing websites and shopping for staff morning teas. I was given a lot of responsibility for someone so green, but the company could do that because they had invested in the resources and support I needed to get the job done on my own with limited supervision. They had standard procedures and processes and documents that radically cut task time. We were a slick, well-oiled corporate machine.
Documenting procedures and processes, and creating a library of reusable assets meant that I didn’t have to think up something from scratch every time a task landed on my desk. We had templates for everything. A potential client wants to see examples of our past work? No problem. Here are seven relevant pre-created project descriptions ready to go with a cover and an ‘about us’ page. A client wants a benchmarking report? We’ve got a template for one of those. Need to create a functional spec? Here’s the template for that document. Want a workshop on online accessibility? Here’s one we prepared earlier.
Document your own procedures
Do you have processes and procedures in place or are you creating everything on the fly?
Imagine if you were sick or extremely busy and needed to hand work to a subcontractor. Could you do it easily?
Take a moment to think about what you could document or template that would help you save time.
Being able to respond quickly with a quality response makes you look professional. It can also make you stand out against your competitors who are still madly scrambling to write up those seven examples of relevant, recent work.
The smart way to work is to document your processes and procedures.
If you create your own library of reusable assets, you will save you time and the need to think things up every time you need to do a repetitive task.
I need to put into practice here what I am preaching. I have a bunch of stuff documented – the big stuff – but it’s the smaller more frequent tasks that need my attention.
Prepare standard documents and correspondence
Think about all the documents and correspondence you regularly send clients (or potential clients). These could be:
proposals
proposal follow-up emails
project briefs
copydecks
first draft emails
second draft emails
final draft emails
invoice reminder emails
examples of recent work
your rate card
sub-contractor agreements
confidentiality agreements
evidence of insurances
blog post outlines
content audits
‘about us’ interview questions
social media content calendars.
And this list is just a super-quick brain dump. I’m sure we could all add dozens more to this list with little effort.
Having good processes, templates and quality documents can set you apart from other copywriters.
When I started looking for copywriting work beyond agency land a few years ago, I bought a bunch of templates in a bundle from The Clever Copywriting School. I knew it would take me days of tedious work to prepare them all for myself, but here they were, all the documents I needed in the immediate future to get started. I customised them to suit my brand and my way of doing things, but the bulk of work was done and I didn’t have to think this stuff up for myself. It was a smart SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY investment. If you want to look professional but your current documents aren’t cutting it, do yourself a favour and buy a bundle.
Otherwise, during a lull in client work, spend some time creating templates from your existing documents. Get rid of non-standard text and leave only the generic text. Add instructions to remind yourself or tell subcontractors what to do.
If I were a bit smarter, I would start to create more emails templates instead of writing the bulk of my emails from scratch.
Document standard instructions
I do a lot of web work and I find clients need the same instructions for things like setting up Google Search Console or Google Analytics or how to change a setting in WordPress.
By documenting these ‘how to’ processes once (but with redacted images to preserve privacy – or use your own accounts) you’ll have a reusable asset ready for the next time someone needs the same information. I have a mix of videos and Word documents with screen grabs to document the how-tos.
I love SnagIt for capturing screenshots and Camtasia for recording my screen. If you don’t have the budget for Camtasia, you can use the free tool VEED to capture your screen recording. If you don’t have budget for screenshot software, using the ‘Print Screen’ and your current graphics package and cropping the image will be enough.
Create a beautiful proposal
Putting proposals together was something I did from my first day on my first digital job. The company had developed their own ‘Proposal assembler’ in MS Word using Visual Basic to code it. It was clunky and riddled with problems, but we made it work. As long we kept it up-to-date with project descriptions each time we finished a project, we could create a half decent proposal in a matter of minutes.
I made an embarrassing rookie error one day. When compiling and binding a printed proposal in a rush, I grabbed some sensitive legal documents off the printer at the same time and bound them into the proposal. A few days later the potential client wanted to know what the relevance of the legal documents was. We didn’t win that job. While I don’t think it was because of the legal documents sneaking their way into the proposal, but from then on, I never let a client document leave the building under my watch without first checking every page to make sure it should be there. There are some lessons you only need to learn once.
Until recently, I was using Word to create proposals. How 2000s of me.
These days, I use Nusii to create beautiful online and PDF proposals. It’s a bit like our old proposal assembler. You can create reusable assets, ‘components’ for your proposals that you can use over and over again. You can create your own templates.
You can email a link to an online version or attach a PDF to an email. You can see how many times and when a client has opened your online proposal. It’s pretty awesome. And the proposals look great. I have customised it with my branding colours and logo.
An example of an online proposal created in Nusii I created for an outdoor company.
The more proposals I create, the more reusable assets I’ll have which will make me compile proposals even faster in the future.
Answer the bloody phone
A lot of writers are introverts who hate talking on the phone more than staring at a blank page. The question, ‘What is the meaning of life’ has more chance of being successfully answered than a call from an unknown number to an introverted writer.
By answering your phone, you’ll have a jump on your competitors who are anxiously ignoring their phones.
I live in Korea, but I have an Australian number people can call me on. It’s a Skype phone number that looks like a regular Melbourne number. People can call me on this number and reach me where I am in the world when I’m connected to the internet. It’s perfect for making your business portable and look professional.
And because you’ve got your standard documents in place and processes documented you’ll be able to whip out the information you need to wow your potential new client.
Call your potential client
All those copywriters who let their phones ring out also hate making calls. They prefer to communicate by email alone. But not all clients love email. Some want to have a chat.
So, by the simple act of calling a prospective client (e.g. someone who contacts me first or a lead that gets passed to me) I know I am already ahead of other copywriters.
Having the chance to chat give me much more opportunity to build a connection with that potential client and convince them I’m the right person for the job.
Use booking software to manage your calendar
I use Calendly so clients can book a meeting time with me at a mutually convenient time. You can even receive payments for certain types of meetings, like coaching calls. It syncs to Google calendar (and a bunch of others). If I don’t want to take meetings on a particular day, I block out time in my Google calendar. Sending people a link to Calendly is so much smarter than going back and forth over email with each other’s availability. And it’s so much cheaper than hiring a PA to do it for you.
Make it easy for people to get in touch with you.
I’ve embedded the Calendly booking form into my consulting website on my writing coaching page.
Using tools like Calendly will give people a sense that you’re organised and that you know what you’re doing, even if you don’t.
Be ready with the right response to a client’s objections
One of the biggest objections I have to counter is my location.
I do a lot of work for federal and state governments. People in government don’t want to be accused of offshoring work. As soon as I tell people I’m living in Korea, I tell them that my business is based in Australia. I reassure them that even though I am overseas, I’m still an Australian tax paying resident. I have an ABN and am registered for GST.
What are some of the standard objections potential clients have about working with you?
Their objections could be anything from price to the delivery timeframe to relevant experience or even a perceived conflict of interest.
Knowing how to respond to these objections will ensure you’re not caught off-guard when chatting to them on the phone (because you WILL be chatting with them on the phone, right?)
Be responsive
That person who contacted you through your website might be shopping around for a copywriter, but if you respond promptly (and you can because you’ve got your standard documents in order, right?) it might be the only edge you need.
Also, there’s a good chance that the other copywriters contacted won’t respond at all. I’ve heard copywriters say this so often – they got the job because no one else bothered to respond.
Guess who’s going to be getting the signature on the dotted line, eh?
Follow up
Don’t be a fatalist. Don’t be all ‘oh they never got back to me’ and file the proposal in the lost jobs folder.
The smarter writer takes action. And just because you’re booked solid this month doesn’t mean you should ignore your project pipeline.
You don’t know what’s happening in your client’s world. Life gets in the way and suddenly that previously urgent copywriting job got bumped for some higher priority task. Maybe their kid is sick or their supplier went bankrupt and they’re dealing with a bigger crisis.
There’s a very good chance your copywriting competition won’t bother to follow up on the proposal, either (if they even bothered to submit one).
A simple email could be all it takes to get them to sign your project proposal. I might send something like this (from a template email, when I get around to creating the pesky things!)
Hi Potential Client,
I hope you’re well.
I’m following up on the proposal I sent X days (or weeks) ago. Do you have any questions about the proposal? I have the capacity to take this project on in X and I would love to talk further about how we could work together.
Best wishes,
Sandra
Use testimonials to sell yourself
The smart way to tell someone how good you are is to get someone else to say it for you.
Us Aussies loathe talking about how good we are. The tall poppy syndrome is ingrained in us. We don’t want to be perceived as being a bragger.
But what if your happy clients say all the good stuff for you? That fits much better into my comfort zone. How about you?
Getting testimonials from your past clients should be a standard part of your end-of-project process. Send them a brief email to thank them for being such a great or easy-to-work-with and interesting client (whatever adjective best fits) and tell them how important testimonials are for your business. Give them a testimonial script to follow. Turning this into an email template and send it to every client at the end of every project.
What are you doing to make sure you look like a pro? Let me know in the comments below.
Stop looking like an amateur and start winning more work was originally published on The Smarter Writer
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Steve Martin taught me to be funny. Didya hear the one about whale sounds and sex?
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Steve Martin taught me to be funny. Didya hear the one about whale sounds and sex?
“Are you sure you’re that funny?”
That’s what I get when I tell people I’m focusing on becoming a professional comedian and comedy writer. It’s a valid question. Even if I’m funny enough to captivate a room of drunk friends, can I make a living at it? And by a living, I mean more than just making enough to live in squalor and eat decent pizza.
Steve Martin teaches a class on how to be funny. Yes, staplers can be funny.
Video screenshot by Bonnie Burton/CNET
As a kid, I reenacted Monty Python scenes so well my classmates thought I might be secretly British. Friends loved it when I did impressions, down to the angry twitch that took over our fourth grade teacher’s eye when the class refused to quiet down.
These days, I always manage to get a chuckle from a stoic exec at a company meeting by sneaking sight gags into PowerPoint presentations. When I worked at Lucasfilm, I once snuck a horrible oil painting of a dog playing the ukulele into George Lucas’ priceless art collection that hangs on the walls. I didn’t get fired, so I figured he got the joke.
But there’s a big difference between making friends, classmates and co-workers laugh, and being funny on stage in front of strangers. So I decided to up my game by taking a MasterClass about comedy taught by comedian Steve Martin. The $90 online course (that’s about £65 or AU$119) includes 25 video lessons that add up to over five hours dissecting every aspect of comedy — from finding your comedic voice to dealing with hecklers.
I’ve taken MasterClasses before — one taught by filmmaker Werner Herzog left me feeling eager to direct a documentary and another led by astronaut Chris Hadfield convinced me visiting Mars didn’t seem so alien. So why not learn the ins and outs of comedy from a man whose humor has earned him an honorary Academy Award and several Grammys?
“I never actually thought I was funny,” Martin confesses in his MasterClass video trailer. “You may think you don’t have any talent. I guarantee you I had no talent. None. I couldn’t sing, dance or act. I couldn’t tell jokes. But I just started doing it, because I liked it.”
Martin stresses throughout his class that ‘doing comedy alone on stage is the ego’s last stand.’
That might sound like the worst pitch ever from a teacher, but it’s comforting to know one of the most prolific names in comedy started at the bottom before going on to appear on Saturday Night Live, play sold-out stadiums and appear in more than 45 films. And he’s still going. He and Martin Short have a May 25 Netflix original comedy special called Steve Martin and Martin Short: An Evening You Will Forget For The Rest Of Your Life.
In one week, I binged all of Martin’s videos while lounging on my couch in my PJs. Some videos are one-on-one lessons and pep talks. In the rest, he interacts with lucky hand-picked would-be comedians and comedy writers about their work. Watching the videos, I laughed out loud and nodded my head as though I was right in the room with Martin. The lessons range from around 11 to 20 minutes.
Here’s Steve Martin giving advice to some very lucky students in his online class.
Video screenshot by Bonnie Burton/CNET
The class includes videos and a downloadable workbook with reviews of the lessons, challenges and assignments, which might include watching one of Martin’s film or TV performances. The thing about taking an online course like this is there’s no one around to nag you about completing your lessons. It’s up to you, and I took it seriously. I finished every written assignment — downloadable PDFs you complete after each video lesson.
One lesson suggested eavesdropping on arguments and mining them for material, so I did that when writing in cafes or standing in line at the post office. Sure enough, I heard a woman talking on the phone say, “I don’t care that you think whale sounds are soothing to listen to. It creeps me out that you put them on when we have sex.”
How could I NOT use that in a future act? I incorporated it into a piece about the worst things to play to get in the mood for romance — whale sounds, bird calls, car crash sound effects and Enya.
Overcoming a lack of talent makes you unique.
Steve Martin
I also spent time reading my classmates’ comments in an online class forum where you can share your works in progress and ask peers for help if you’ve hit a roadblock. One student suggested trying new material in places other than comedy clubs and bars to take some of the pressure off — spots like laundromats, office break rooms and family gatherings. I also learned it’s best to not try out jokes on people like hairdressers, manicurists and waiters because they might laugh at anything just to get a better tip.
In addition to the students’ advice, Martin’s class was worth it just for his insight on the basic do’s and don’ts that a lot of comics aren’t privy to in the beginning of their careers. Here are some highlights:
Do’s and don’ts of comedy
Do go where the action is. If you want to be a comedian or a comedy writer in the entertainment industry, you have to move to a place where the comedy is, like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles or Toronto. There’s a big appetite for new talent in the industry, so why not increase the chances you’ll be the one who ends up at the right place at the right time? You could be at a party or a club that becomes an opportunity to show what you can do.
Do talk comedy with friends and others with similar goals. This doesn’t mean just having a quick chat about comedy. The kind of discussions you need to have will last for days. Pitch ideas, talk about topics not covered by comedians yet, hone your ideas. Something will come out of these conversations.
Do think about comedy all the time. Always think of the joke. Everything you see, hear, smell and feel is usable. Eavesdrop on conversations, pay attention to the oddball things that happen in your daily life. Take notes. Critique TV sitcoms and standup comedians. This all adds up to perfecting your comedy skills in both performing and writing.
Do educate yourself. Learn something new. Read more. Every time you understand a new topic, you get more subject matter for your routine. You never know what will inspire you. I learned Morse code just so I could say an entire punchline in a series of beeps.
Don’t be intimidated by starting with nothing. Sometimes not having performance skills already perfected means you can be creative. If you can’t dance or sing, that’s OK. You can fake dancing and singing, and make that funny. I once did a standup routine wearing tap shoes just to imply I might try to dance, but never did. It got a great laugh.
Don’t worry about being an introvert. Most comedians are introverts in real life, but the minute they hit the stage they have a place to shine. The stage is where you can let loose and be heard.
Don’t fret about getting head shots and an agent. Before you worry about the marketing end of being a comedian, concentrate on being a good comedian. Spend more time honing your craft than trying to become famous.
There’s room for you
Comedy pointers aside, Martin’s heartfelt pep talks made me think this dream of becoming a standup comedian and comedy writer isn’t so far-fetched.
“Whatever makes you unique as a performer, do it,” Martin says in Lesson 24. “Overcoming a lack of talent makes you unique. If you prepare yourself, you can be in the right place at the right time. It can be done. There’s room for you.”
That’s especially good to know when you’re a comic like me who bombs a lot. Sometimes my routines get great laughs, but the same routine the next night could fail to get even the kind of courtesy applause reserved for audiences that have to clap when less-than-talented kids take the stage at school performances. But knowing there’s room even for the triangle-players of comedy like me makes me try even harder to get the laugh.
It’s showtime!
I was finally ready to put Martin’s advice into action with my first standup performance since taking the class. My friend and comedian Joseph Scrimshaw invited me to perform in his new Los Angeles show for geeks called Game Night: A Variety Show. Musicians, comedians and actors share the stage for music, standup and a bit of improv to entertain a small audience (under 100 people) for an hour or two.
Here I am looking (kind of) like a professional comedian in my first standup show after taking Steve Martin’s online class.
Bonnie Burton
It seemed like the perfect place to try Martin’s techniques.
My comedy is less about telling jokes, and more about telling funny stories about my life as an awkward farm kid and a Goth teenager. I mix in a few tales about working for disorganized tech startups and an iconic movie company. Think Sixteen Candles meets Silicon Valley meets 30 Rock.
I recounted childhood stories about tricking friends into eating grasshoppers by making them think they tasted like mint chocolate and being bullied as a teen after getting my braces caught in shag carpeting while laughing too hard at a popular girl’s slumber party. That earned me an off-color nickname for years.
I got more confident when I allowed time for the audience to laugh without talking over them. Instead of letting my mind race to the next thought, I enjoyed the moment.
The only mistake I made during my set was focusing on a few audience members who looked bored. Really bored. Like the kind of bored where you can tell they’re mentally compiling a grocery list.
It threw me for a loop when I should have focused on my next bit. Granted, those audience members could have zoned out way before I took the stage — especially the teenager who looked like he was about to slip into a stoner coma at any second.
Martin did mention in his class that he always looks at the top of people’s heads, not directly in their eyes, when he’s on stage, just in case he gets a bad reaction to a joke. Luckily, I zapped back into focus by looking at people in the crowd who were laughing at my stories and managed to stay on track.
Here’s a nervous selfie of me backstage before my first standup gig since taking the class.
Bonnie Burton
Using Martin’s techniques I got a lot more laughs than when l played at San Francisco Sketchfest and variety shows and in a comedy webseries. The applause at the end of my set fed my ego enough to give me a boost of energy to participate in the show’s group improv skit at the end. We acted out what it would be like if cats could become more powerful than human superheroes. The audience loved it. I counted this as a win.
A few weeks later, I performed an impromptu comedy skit behind the podium at an academic conference at my alma mater, the University of Colorado at Boulder. The head of the conference had heard I was a comedy writer and asked if I could entertain everyone at a welcome dinner after the university president and other important alumni said a few words.
I had nothing prepared, but with Martin in my head, I was able to wing it and earn some laughs joking about politics, science and the conference itself. (As waiters cleared the tables, I joked about security at the event being so tight, the staff was collecting DNA from our wine glasses.)
Bonnie Burton (middle) stands on stage with other comedians for the final improv act during Game Night: A Variety Show at Geeky Teas in Los Angeles.
Joseph Scrimshaw
I know I’m not Tina Fey or Amy Schumer, though I dream of rising to that level of comedic genius. Martin’s class helped motivate me to not just talk about wanting to be funnier in my standup routines, but to try hard whenever I get the opportunity — whether on stage, in a friend’s variety show or at an academic conference.
More advice from the pros
While Martin didn’t comment for my article, a few of my favorite comedy writers and comedians did give me their advice on how to be funnier. Here’s what they had to say:
“Tweet your jokes, make shorts and videos, put up shows on stages. The only way to get good at comedy is to do it A LOT. Every ‘overnight comedy success’ has a good decade of working their butt off that you didn’t see happen.” — Ashley Nicole Black, comedy writer on Full Frontal with Samantha Bee
“Know you and be you. Trust your thoughts and make sure you have fun first. Enjoy yourself. If you don’t think you’re funny, no one one else will either.” — George Wallace, standup comedian and actor
“Have a good sense of irony and observe the world around you from that perspective.” — Laraine Newman, comedian and original cast member of Saturday Night Live
“Get up in front of audiences, hone your material and delivery, get comfortable with performing. If you’re a writer, study scene structure and joke structure and understand the mechanics of jokes while writing every day to hone your voice. Basically, it’s a lot of honing.” — Hal Lublin, improv performer and voiceover actor
“Build it and they will come. I wasn’t given opportunities until I made my own. I wrote and starred in my own series and films because nobody was doing that for me.” — Melinda Hill, comedian and actor
“Find an open mic if you want to do standup. Find a publication that takes open submissions if you want to be a comedy writer. You’ll get rejected again and again, but that’s what literally everyone goes through. Even the best, smoothest people had some missteps. Don’t be afraid of failure.” — Mike Drucker, comedian and writer on Full Frontal with Samantha Bee
“I’ve done sketch, standup, improv, theater, children’s theater, audience interactive theater, storytelling, historical costumed character walking tours, and I had a job shrink-wrapping knives where everyone laughed at you if you cut yourself. Getting to know the mood, the perspective, the rhythm of different audiences helps expand your view of what comedy can be.” — Joseph Scrimshaw, comedian and writer
Martin stresses throughout his class that “doing comedy alone on stage is the ego’s last stand,” and while I was initially scared of failing in front of an audience, his words reminded me that performing comedy isn’t about boosting my self-esteem. It’s about putting myself out there to try to make people laugh. I don’t want courtesy clapping or a forced laugh, but the kind that makes drinks squirt out their noses. Snot cocktail fountains for everyone!
Tech Culture: From film and television to social media and games, here’s your place for the lighter side of tech.
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Picture The Future.
What Do You See?
Is It A Sci-Fi Wonderland Filled With Incredibly Clever Robots? These Sleepless Mechanical Beings Are Set To Take Over The World, But Let’s Not Get Ahead Of Ourselves Yet.
Though It Might Sound Scary And Far-Fetched, There Is The Very Real Possibility That Robots Will Become A Stalwart Part Of Our Future Because, As Humans, There’s A Limit To How Much Data We Can Process Is Any One Go.
Source
Unfortunately, We Don’t Have The Capacity To Hone Down Large Amounts Of Information And Process It At The Drop Of A Hat, Which Is Why Artificial Intelligence (AI) Has Risen Its Head To Pick Up The Slack.
But We’re Not Talking About AI Today, Or The Future. We’re Talking About Content In The Now.
Source
Every Minute, 1.3 Million Pieces Of Content Are Shared On Facebook And 300 Hours Of Video Content Is Uploaded Onto Youtube. Add To That The 500 Million Tweets That Are Sent Each Day And The 85 Million Pieces Of Content That Is Instagrammed, And You Have A Mind-Boggling Amount Of Content Swirling Around The Internet.
Trawling This Content, Monitoring It, And Analyzing It Is A Mammoth Task That Even The Most Accomplished Human Would Severely Struggle With.
Which Is Where Content Intelligence (CI) Comes In.
Source
2018 Is Set To Be The Year Of AI – Actual Intelligence Rather Than Artificial Intelligence. In A Survey Run By Salesforce, Marketers Using Artificial Intelligence Will Increase By 50% In The Next Two Years But, While Automation And Advanced Technology Seems To Be The Next Logical Step, Artificial Intelligence Isn’t Making A Material Impact On Marketing Outcomes – Yet.
Instead, This Idea Of “Actual Intelligence” Goes Hand-In-Hand With CI, Which Is Run By Analytics And Automation.
Basically, It’s Allowing Marketers To Leave Out The Guesswork. With The Ever-Increasing Technological Advancements, Marketers Are Now Able To Analyze Large Quantities Of Data And Produce Automated Outcomes Based On The Results To Stand Out In Their Industries.
But What Exactly Does This Mean For Content In Particular?
WHAT IS CONTENT INTELLIGENCE?
Ryan Skinner, A Forrester Analyst, Defines The Term Content Intelligence As “Technology That Helps Content Understand Itself – What It’s About, How It Speaks, How Effective It Is At Accomplishing Certain Goals, What Emotions It Calls To Mind, Etc.”
For Such A Technology-Fuelled Phrase, Content Intelligence Is A Pretty Simple Concept. It Essentially Refers To The Systems And Software That Turns Data Into Actionable Insights For Marketers.
But It’s Not All About “Big Data”.
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It’s Also About Having The Full Context Of A Single Piece Of Content – Almost Like Looking At It From Every Perspective, Including Those We Might Not Even Be Aware Of (After All, The Robots Of The Future Are Supposed To Be One Step Ahead Of Us Mere Mortals).
Having Access To This Information Means Marketers Can Make Better Decisions About The Content They’re Creating.
But, Like Anything In The Tech-Sphere, Content Intelligence Is Constantly Evolving. Today, The Term Is Increasingly Being Used To Refer To The Tools That Give Marketers Access To New Marketing Insights.
WHAT EXACTLY IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CONTENT INTELLIGENCE AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE?
AI Is The Slightly More Advanced, Robotic Version Of CI.
Those Robots You Imagined In The Sci-Fi Wonderland Of The Future? Those Are The Products Of AI In The Future. The Term Refers To The Development Of Computer Systems That Can Perform Tasks That Humans Normally Perform – Think Speech Recognition, Decision-Making, And Translation.
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CI, On The Other Hand, Is Simply A Set Of Tools That Can Mine Big Data And Offer Insights Based On Analysis For Marketers. CI Can’t Do Human Thinking, But It Can Provide A Quick And Easy Process To Something That Would Take Mortals A Much Longer Time.
HOW CONTENT INTELLIGENCE CAN BE APPLIED TO MARKETING
Vanity Metrics Are A Thing Of The Past.
Instead, Marketers Are Moving Beyond Arbitrary Numbers And Connecting Up The Dots To Produce Bigger, Bolder Insights.
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CI Pulls In Huge Amounts Of Data That A Human Couldn’t Compile Themselves, Let Alone Even Begin To Compute. By Using Automated Tools And CI Software, Marketers Are Now Able To Bring Together Data From Dispersed Sources And Apply The Information To Content To Get A Broader Understanding Of What They’re Dealing With.
INFORMED DECISIONS FOR SUCCESSFUL ACTION
With The Reports Generated From CI, Marketers Can Make Intelligent And Informed Decisions About What To Do With Their Content. Things Like:
What Content To Create: At The Moment, Machines Can Only Produce Data-Driven Content; They Can’t Think Creatively. However, This Hasn’t Stopped CI From Informing Brands About New Content They Could Create. Coca Cola, For Example, Has Implemented CI To Generate TV Adverts, In Which The Software Chose The Music And Created The Scenes.
Which Content To Update: CI Helps Marketers Determine What Content Needs Refreshing. For Example, A Prompt Can Be Sent If A Particular Blog Post Is Performing Well And Hasn’t Been Refreshed In A While.
What Content To Share: CI Can Provide Data-Driven Suggestions For What Content Performs Best At Every Stage Of The Sales Funnel, Helping Sales And Marketing Departments Save Time While Boosting Conversions.
AUTOMATION FOR TARGETED CONTENT
CI Doesn’t Just Harness Tons Of Data At Once, It Also Improves The Automation Process. This Saves Marketers Time And Means They Can Laser-Focus Their Targeting To Increase Conversions And Make More Sales.
EXAMPLES OF CONTENT INTELLIGENCE BEING USED IN CONTENT MARKETING
Now We’ve Covered What CI Actually Is And Why It’s Hugely Beneficial To Marketers, Let’s Take A Look At Some Brands That Have Successfully Implemented This Futuristic Feature.
UNDER ARMOUR OFFERS PERSONALIZED TRAINING
Under Armour, A Sports Apparel Company, Worked With IBM To Deliver Personalized Content To Its Customers. By Bringing Together User Dating From Its Record App And Third-Party Data Gathered On Topics Like Fitness And Nutrition, It Was Able To Offer Relevant Training And Advice To Its User.
For Example, A “32-Year-Old Woman Who Is Training For A 5km Race Could Use The App The Create A Personalized Training And Meal Plan, And Could Offer Suggestions On How To Improve Her Diet To Improve Performance.”
SCREENSHOP CREATES STORES FROM SCREENSHOTS
Social Media Platforms Like Instagram Are Full Of Pretty Pictures, And Sometimes (Well, A Lot Of The Time), Users Want To Buy What’s On Offer In The Shot – Especially When It Comes To Clothing. New App ScreenShop Lets People Do Exactly That.
It Works By Converting Any Mobile Screenshot Into A Shoppable Store. Basically, Users Screenshot An Instagram Photo They Want To Buy An Item From And Upload It Into The App Which Then Generates Shopping Results For Similar Items Of Clothing.
HUE SHARES THE MOST COMPELLING POSTS
One Of The Biggest Struggles Marketers Face Is Finding Engaging Content And Sharing It With Their Audience. It’s Difficult And Time-Consuming, But TINT’s Feature HUE Makes That Process A Whole Lot Easier.
The Tool Analyzes Your Aggregated Customer Content And Determines What’s Popular And Compelling To Your Audience. From There, It Makes Recommendations So You Never Leave Great Content Gathering Cobwebs. Using A Deep Learning Algorithm To Unlock Audience Insights, HUE Builds A Library Of Engaging Content That’s Just Waiting To Be Published.
CHATBOTS SERVE CUSTOMER-FOCUSED CONTENT
You’ve Probably Landed On A Website And A Box Has Popped Up In The Corner Asking You If There’s Anything You Need Help With. Nine Times Out Of Ten, These “Chats” Are Run By Chatbots, Which Have Been Set Up To Provide A Stellar Customer Experience.
These Bots Have Access To Huge Amounts Of Data Related To Customers, And They Are Tuned To Detect Patterns. But They Aren’t Always Used For Customer Service Errands.
Take Sephora’s Kik Bot, For Example, Which Serves Users With A Mini-Quiz About Their Makeup Preferences Which Then Leads To The Bots Providing Personalized Content Marketing Suggestions Based On The User’s Responses.
BIG-NAME BRANDS HAVE PERSONALIZATION COVERED
Perhaps The Most Common Form Of CI Is Played Out In Big-Name Brands Like Netflix And Amazon. These Companies Gather Insightful Data From Their Users In Order To Serve Up Relevant TV Shows, Films, And Products.
Each User’s Homepage Provides A Personal Experience Based On The Content They’ve Viewed Or Purchased Before.
In An Age Where Consumers Are Seeking An Authentic Experience With Brands And Where 74% Of Online Consumers Get Frustrated With Websites That Don’t Show Them Relevant Content, Personalization Is A Huge Benefit Of CI.
This Method Of Personalization Isn’t Just Limited To Big-Name Brands. It Can Also Be Applied To Blog Content And Personalizing Site Messaging, Too, Making It Ideal For Subscription-Based Businesses Where The Algorithm Can Learn More About The User Over Time.
SOCIAL MEDIA LETS USERS CURATE THEIR OWN FEEDS
1.37 Billion People Log Into Facebook Every Day, But Here’s The Kicker: No Two People See The Same Thing.
Facebook Uses CI Algorithms To Curate Feeds Based On What Users Like, Dislike, And Share The Most. Users Have A Say, Too, Thanks To The Option To “Hide” Posts If They’re Not Relevant.
Facebook Isn’t The Only Social Platform To Serve Up Personalized Feeds.
In Fact, Most Larger Social Media Sites Are Using Data And Insights To Curate Their User’s Feeds Into Personal Streams Of Fun. This Has Had An Impact On The Paid Ad Industry, Too, As It Means Ad-Buying Brands Don’t Have To Waste Money On Serving Ads To Users That Have Already “Hidden” Them.
BOXEVER DELIVERS MICRO-MOMENTS
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Travel Industry Hotshot Boxever Uses CI To Improve The Customer Experience. As The Customer Is Working Their Way Through The Travel Booking Process, Boxever Files Away At Their Preferences And Behavior To Provide “Micro-Moments”.
By Doing This, Boxever Helps Its Customers Find New Ways To Engage Their Clients In Their Travel Journeys.
Not Only Is The Software Picking Up On What The Customer Wants, They’re Using That Information To Serve Up Further Content And Material To Encourage More Sales While Providing A Personalized Experience That Consumers Today Are Craving.
CONTENT INTELLIGENCE AND CREATIVITY
Consumers Are Increasingly Looking For A More Authentic Experience With Brands, And Content Is The Perfect Way For Businesses To Engage With Their Audience. With CI, These Brands Can Find Out What Their Audience Want And Serve That Up By The Bucketload, Leading To A More Engaged Group Of Followers And More Loyal Fans.
It Automates Systems, Digs Deep Into Big Data, And Provides Insights That Can Be Turned Into Compelling Content, Saving Marketers Time And Money.
As CI Continues To Evolve, We’re Likely To See More Personalization And A Bigger Focus On External Data Sources That Can Be Combined With Internal Sources To Create Even More Detailed Insights.
But Content Marketing Still Remains And Inherently Creative Process, And Still Requires The Thoughts And Ideas Of Mere Human Beings. We Can Still Expect Big Ideas And Innovative Campaigns To Be Led By The Human Mind, But Unskilled Parts Of The Process, Like Data-Mining And Automation Will Continue To Feed Into The Ever-Evolving World Of CI.
Are You Ready To Implement CI In Your Content Marketing Strategy?
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Ways To Come Up With New Game Ideas
I knew I wanted to create an app game, but I also knew that I wouldn’t be able to complete a fully functioning game in the time we were given. However, Ricardo did mention that we must provide screenshots of the app (home page and game play) to present in the Open Studio; through the form of a poster or a GIF (if including sound)
So, I did some research on how to come up with new game ideas because my mind was going blank for a while and no matter how hard I was thinking nothing was coming to me. Being creative and coming up new game ideas is a skill that I must learn, not a naturally born talent. I read that “anyone can become a master at generating awesome game ideas if they apply and practice the right methods.” This website compiled a list designed specifically with game developers in mind. Each of these 9 methods will help me get those creative juices flowing again and make it easy for me to come up with an awesome app game idea. all while keeping in mind the - the integration of one or more of the studio projects we’ve done; play, sound, speculative design.
Here are the steps that I took to come up with my game idea:
· Play a lot of games
“Games can transport us into a different world, entertain, and challenge us in new exciting ways.”
Playing games is the best way to get your ideas flowing and to find inspiration for your upcoming game. I found that it was very important to go on the app store, download, and play as many games as possible - trying out the different styles, not just the ones I favoured. I started off with the classics; Candy Crush, Angry Birds, Fruit Ninja, and then I moved towards the top current games in different categories (action, arcade, board, family, sports, trivia, etc.)
The website told me to take notes of any features, themes, colour schemes, characters, effects or game play mechanics that stand out to me and pay attention to all the little details that make the game fun and unique.
Note: Game mechanics are constructs of rules or methods designed for interaction with the game state, thus providing game-play. All games use mechanics; however, theories and styles differ as to their ultimate importance to the game.
· Be observant of the world
As Steve Jobs once said, “Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.” Notes to self:
- Be observant to of your surroundings and pay attention to all the little details (your environment, people and the things that we often overlook) -----> Use this as inspiration.
- You never know what might spark an idea for a new theme, background or interesting game-play concept.
- Come up with ways to apply them into your game.
- Ask yourself, “Could this be used in a game?” If so, ‘How?’ Write it all down.
· Seek input
As the wise saying goes, ‘When in doubt, ask.’
It’s always a good to get feedback from others on your game ideas.
So, I went around my home and asked my family what they thought of my possible game concepts that I’ve been bouncing around in my head. The main one being a game that raises awareness of the effects of water pollution on marine life. This is the idea that went off into my head after going to see the art gallery, that takes into consideration all the projects we’ve done this semester.
They were wondering why I chose to do this out of all things, this is what I had to say:
1) Uses PLAY - My card game was based off a fishing game so I wanted to stick to the same theme; marine life/fish - because it’s just easier to develop a concept that you’ve already touched down on (well that’s what I personally think).
2) Uses SOUND - I’ll be creating the background music and the sound effects for the app game using Audacity (the program we used for the second studio assignment). I know that all app games need sound so I thought this would be the most straight-forward way to combine play and sound in one project.
3) Worldwide environmental issue: For our third project, we researched everything we could on e-waste to create a speculative design for 2050 through the form of short film. Instead, I am choosing to research Water Pollution – to raise awareness on the effects it has on marine life.
I wanted to find out what type of games people like to play and how I could convey this: The effects of water pollution on marine life, through an app game. My family gave me ideas on how to “play” this idea and then they asked me these questions:
- Why should we care about this issue?
- Who are you trying to raise awareness to?
- Who is your target audience?
- What do you want the audience to experience and take away from this game?
To be totally honest, I hadn’t thought of this but I know with further research I’ll be able to get the answers.
How to play ideas:
- Make it an arcade game; where you must keep trying to beat your high score.
- You play a sea creature; turtle, fish, whale, jellyfish, etc.
- The longer you swim (stay alive) the more points you get.
- Tap screen game or swipe left and right game
-Dodge the pollution that comes your way.
- If you hit into it, you lose and you must start again.
These game mechanic ideas were very helpful because it allowed me to build an image of the result or prototype in my head. Kind of excited to see this come to life. I know that I want to focus on this game idea out of all the ideas I came up with.
· Use an Idea Log
Everything begins with an idea. So, it was important for me to keep track of them. I used the notepad app on my phone to record any ideas that popped into your head. I found that using a game idea log made it easier for me to come up with new ideas. And before I knew it, l had an entire list of app games. (sound ideas below) By the end of this, I could make up my mind on what I wanted to work on.
· Mind map it
Mind mapping a potential game idea: Effects of water pollution on Marine Life Game (still need to come up with an actual name). This method was very useful and it allowed to get as many concepts of the game on paper.
· Research
I want to come up with a new game idea, but first I need to know what’s already working. Therefore, research is a requirement. Researching things like precedents on your ideas, which games are topping the charts, in which categories, and why, so that I don’t end up wasting my time on a concept that no one is ever going to play. Researching your genre and the theme you’re going to explore is very important. In this case, I need to research as much as possible on water pollution, endangered marine life, the effects of water pollution on marine life, arcade app games, what makes a good app game.
· Focus on a genre
At first I was having a hard time coming up with game ideas, but then I decided to focus on a specific game category and genre; arcade. I found that focusing on a specific thing, made it easier for me to generate ideas. I personally enjoy the arcade genre of games where you must beat your high score, because it gets me hooked. When I was brainstorming game ideas of this genre, I looked at other comparable games in that category - For example: Astro. The game-play is like the ideas that was given to be my family. The astronaut flies in upward direction through a tapping motion on the screen. Your score increases with each tap and you die if you hit into the asteroids.
· Pick a theme to explore
“Sometimes you need to go even further and when you’re thinking up game ideas and pick a specific theme to explore as well. Selecting a specific genre and theme will help you better pinpoint the type of game you want to create. A few minor details can make a huge difference in the overall shape of your game. For example, a simple shooter style game with a space theme is now much more interesting. Adding that one extra touch can ignite your imagination. As you think more about the concept, you’ll be able to come up with more elements to add and soon you’ll have a great game idea in the works.”
· Start off with a character
“Starting off with a character in mind is another method that’s worth trying if you’re stuck in the middle of a creativity block. When you select the main character first, it can make the process of coming up with a game idea much easier.”
Coming up with a main character for this app game was easy and straight-forward; sea creature(s) But which one? I know that once I have a set character (e.g. sea turtle) I need to think up different possible scenarios that could work all while considering how my character would interact and respond.
What’s Next?
By following these simple methods, I am now able to discuss my final idea and write up a brief in my upcoming blog.
Resources
https://www.buildbox.com/19-ways-to-come-up-with-game-ideas/
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Steve Martin taught me to be funny. Didya hear the one about whale sounds and sex?
New Post has been published on http://funnythingshere.xyz/steve-martin-taught-me-to-be-funny-didya-hear-the-one-about-whale-sounds-and-sex/
Steve Martin taught me to be funny. Didya hear the one about whale sounds and sex?
“Are you sure you’re that funny?”
That’s what I get when I tell people I’m focusing on becoming a professional comedian and comedy writer. It’s a valid question. Even if I’m funny enough to captivate a room of drunk friends, can I make a living at it? And by a living, I mean more than just making enough to live in squalor and eat decent pizza.
Steve Martin teaches a class on how to be funny. Yes, staplers can be funny.
Video screenshot by Bonnie Burton/CNET
As a kid, I reenacted Monty Python scenes so well my classmates thought I might be secretly British. Friends loved it when I did impressions, down to the angry twitch that took over our fourth grade teacher’s eye when the class refused to quiet down.
These days, I always manage to get a chuckle from a stoic exec at a company meeting by sneaking sight gags into PowerPoint presentations. When I worked at Lucasfilm, I once snuck a horrible oil painting of a dog playing the ukulele into George Lucas’ priceless art collection that hangs on the walls. I didn’t get fired, so I figured he got the joke.
But there’s a big difference between making friends, classmates and co-workers laugh, and being funny on stage in front of strangers. So I decided to up my game by taking a MasterClass about comedy taught by comedian Steve Martin. The $90 online course (that’s about £65 or AU$119) includes 25 video lessons that add up to over five hours dissecting every aspect of comedy — from finding your comedic voice to dealing with hecklers.
I’ve taken MasterClasses before — one taught by filmmaker Werner Herzog left me feeling eager to direct a documentary and another led by astronaut Chris Hadfield convinced me visiting Mars didn’t seem so alien. So why not learn the ins and outs of comedy from a man whose humor has earned him an honorary Academy Award and several Grammys?
“I never actually thought I was funny,” Martin confesses in his MasterClass video trailer. “You may think you don’t have any talent. I guarantee you I had no talent. None. I couldn’t sing, dance or act. I couldn’t tell jokes. But I just started doing it, because I liked it.”
Martin stresses throughout his class that ‘doing comedy alone on stage is the ego’s last stand.’
That might sound like the worst pitch ever from a teacher, but it’s comforting to know one of the most prolific names in comedy started at the bottom before going on to appear on Saturday Night Live, play sold-out stadiums and appear in more than 45 films. And he’s still going. He and Martin Short have a May 25 Netflix original comedy special called Steve Martin and Martin Short: An Evening You Will Forget For The Rest Of Your Life.
In one week, I binged all of Martin’s videos while lounging on my couch in my PJs. Some videos are one-on-one lessons and pep talks. In the rest, he interacts with lucky hand-picked would-be comedians and comedy writers about their work. Watching the videos, I laughed out loud and nodded my head as though I was right in the room with Martin. The lessons range from around 11 to 20 minutes.
Here’s Steve Martin giving advice to some very lucky students in his online class.
Video screenshot by Bonnie Burton/CNET
The class includes videos and a downloadable workbook with reviews of the lessons, challenges and assignments, which might include watching one of Martin’s film or TV performances. The thing about taking an online course like this is there’s no one around to nag you about completing your lessons. It’s up to you, and I took it seriously. I finished every written assignment — downloadable PDFs you complete after each video lesson.
One lesson suggested eavesdropping on arguments and mining them for material, so I did that when writing in cafes or standing in line at the post office. Sure enough, I heard a woman talking on the phone say, “I don’t care that you think whale sounds are soothing to listen to. It creeps me out that you put them on when we have sex.”
How could I NOT use that in a future act? I incorporated it into a piece about the worst things to play to get in the mood for romance — whale sounds, bird calls, car crash sound effects and Enya.
Overcoming a lack of talent makes you unique.
Steve Martin
I also spent time reading my classmates’ comments in an online class forum where you can share your works in progress and ask peers for help if you’ve hit a roadblock. One student suggested trying new material in places other than comedy clubs and bars to take some of the pressure off — spots like laundromats, office break rooms and family gatherings. I also learned it’s best to not try out jokes on people like hairdressers, manicurists and waiters because they might laugh at anything just to get a better tip.
In addition to the students’ advice, Martin’s class was worth it just for his insight on the basic do’s and don’ts that a lot of comics aren’t privy to in the beginning of their careers. Here are some highlights:
Do’s and don’ts of comedy
Do go where the action is. If you want to be a comedian or a comedy writer, you have to move to a place where the comedy is, like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles or Toronto. There’s a big appetite for new talent in the entertainment industry, so why not increase the chances you’ll be the one who ends up at the right place at the right time? You could be at a party or a club that becomes an opportunity to show what you can do.
Do talk comedy with friends and others with similar goals. This doesn’t mean just having a quick chat about comedy. The kind of discussions you need to have will last for days. Pitch ideas, talk about topics not covered by comedians yet, hone your ideas. Something will come out of these conversations.
Do think about comedy all the time. Always think of the joke. Everything you see, hear, smell and feel is usable. Eavesdrop on conversations, pay attention to the oddball things that happen in your daily life. Take notes. Critique TV sitcoms and standup comedians. This all adds up to perfecting your comedy skills in both performing and writing.
Do educate yourself. Learn something new. Read more. Every time you understand a new topic, you get more subject matter for your routine. You never know what will inspire you. I learned Morse code just so I could say an entire punchline in a series of beeps.
Don’t be intimidated by starting with nothing. Sometimes not having performance skills already perfected means you can be creative. If you can’t dance or sing, that’s OK. You can fake dancing and singing, and make that funny. I once did a standup routine wearing tap shoes just to imply I might try to dance, but never did. It got a great laugh.
Don’t worry about being an introvert. Most comedians are introverts in real life, but the minute they hit the stage they have a place to shine. The stage is where you can let loose and be heard.
Don’t fret about getting head shots and an agent. Before you worry about the marketing end of being a comedian, concentrate on being a good comedian. Spend more time honing your craft than trying to become famous.
There’s room for you
Comedy pointers aside, Martin’s heartfelt pep talks made me think this dream of becoming a standup comedian and comedy writer isn’t so far-fetched.
“Whatever makes you unique as a performer, do it,” Martin says in Lesson 24. “Overcoming a lack of talent makes you unique. If you prepare yourself, you can be in the right place at the right time. It can be done. There’s room for you.”
That’s especially good to know when you’re a comic like me who bombs a lot. Sometimes my routines get great laughs, but the same routine the next night could fail to get even the kind of courtesy applause reserved for audiences that have to clap when less-than-talented kids take the stage at school performances. But knowing there’s room even for the triangle-players of comedy like me makes me try even harder to get the laugh.
It’s showtime!
I was finally ready to put Martin’s advice into action with my first standup performance since taking the class. My friend and comedian Joseph Scrimshaw invited me to perform in his new Los Angeles show for geeks called Game Night: A Variety Show. Musicians, comedians and actors share the stage for music, standup and a bit of improv to entertain a small audience (under 100 people) for an hour or two.
Here I am looking (kind of) like a professional comedian in my first standup show after taking Steve Martin’s online class.
Bonnie Burton
It seemed like the perfect place to try Martin’s techniques.
My comedy is less about telling jokes, and more about telling funny stories about my life as an awkward farm kid and a Goth teenager. I mix in a few tales about working for disorganized tech startups and an iconic movie company. Think Sixteen Candles meets Silicon Valley meets 30 Rock.
I recounted childhood stories about tricking friends into eating grasshoppers by making them think they tasted like mint chocolate and being bullied as a teen after getting my braces caught in shag carpeting while laughing too hard at a popular girl’s slumber party. That earned me an off-color nickname for years.
I got more confident when I allowed time for the audience to laugh without talking over them. Instead of letting my mind race to the next thought, I enjoyed the moment.
The only mistake I made during my set was focusing on a few audience members who looked bored. Really bored. Like the kind of bored where you can tell they’re mentally compiling a grocery list.
It threw me for a loop when I should have focused on my next bit. Granted, those audience members could have zoned out way before I took the stage — especially the teenager who looked like he was about to slip into a stoner coma at any second.
Martin did mention in his class that he always looks at the top of people’s heads, not directly in their eyes, when he’s on stage, just in case he gets a bad reaction to a joke. Luckily, I zapped back into focus by looking at people in the crowd who were laughing at my stories and managed to stay on track.
Here’s a nervous selfie of me backstage before my first standup gig since taking the class.
Bonnie Burton
Using Martin’s techniques I got a lot more laughs than when l played at San Francisco Sketchfest and variety shows and in a comedy webseries. The applause at the end of my set fed my ego enough to give me a boost of energy to participate in the show’s group improv skit at the end. We acted out what it would be like if cats could become more powerful than human superheroes. The audience loved it. I counted this as a win.
A few weeks later, I performed an impromptu comedy skit behind the podium at an academic conference at my alma mater, the University of Colorado at Boulder. The head of the conference had heard I was a comedy writer and asked if I could entertain everyone at a welcome dinner after the university president and other important alumni said a few words.
I had nothing prepared, but with Martin in my head, I was able to wing it and earn some laughs joking about politics, science and the conference itself. (As waiters cleared the tables, I joked about security at the event being so tight, the staff was collecting DNA from our wine glasses.)
Bonnie Burton (middle) stands on stage with other comedians for the final improv act during Game Night: A Variety Show at Geeky Teas in Los Angeles.
Joseph Scrimshaw
I know I’m not Tina Fey or Amy Schumer, though I dream of rising to that level of comedic genius. Martin’s class helped motivate me to not just talk about wanting to be funnier in my standup routines, but to try hard whenever I get the opportunity — whether on stage, in a friend’s variety show or at an academic conference.
More advice from the pros
While Martin didn’t comment for my article, a few of my favorite comedy writers and comedians did give me their advice on how to be funnier. Here’s what they had to say:
“Tweet your jokes, make shorts and videos, put up shows on stages. The only way to get good at comedy is to do it A LOT. Every ‘overnight comedy success’ has a good decade of working their butt off that you didn’t see happen.” — Ashley Nicole Black, comedy writer on Full Frontal with Samantha Bee
“Know you and be you. Trust your thoughts and make sure you have fun first. Enjoy yourself. If you don’t think you’re funny, no one one else will either.” — George Wallace, standup comedian and actor
“Have a good sense of irony and observe the world around you from that perspective.” — Laraine Newman, comedian and original cast member of Saturday Night Live
“Get up in front of audiences, hone your material and delivery, get comfortable with performing. If you’re a writer, study scene structure and joke structure and understand the mechanics of jokes while writing every day to hone your voice. Basically, it’s a lot of honing.” — Hal Lublin, improv performer and voiceover actor
“Build it and they will come. I wasn’t given opportunities until I made my own. I wrote and starred in my own series and films because nobody was doing that for me.” — Melinda Hill, comedian and actor
“Find an open mic if you want to do standup. Find a publication that takes open submissions if you want to be a comedy writer. You’ll get rejected again and again, but that’s what literally everyone goes through. Even the best, smoothest people had some missteps. Don’t be afraid of failure.” — Mike Drucker, comedian and writer on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon
“I’ve done sketch, standup, improv, theater, children’s theater, audience interactive theater, storytelling, historical costumed character walking tours, and I had a job shrink-wrapping knives where everyone laughed at you if you cut yourself. Getting to know the mood, the perspective, the rhythm of different audiences helps expand your view of what comedy can be.” — Joseph Scrimshaw, comedian and writer
Martin stresses throughout his class that “doing comedy alone on stage is the ego’s last stand,” and while I was initially scared of failing in front of an audience, his words reminded me that performing comedy isn’t about boosting my self-esteem. It’s about putting myself out there to try to make people laugh. I don’t want courtesy clapping or a forced laugh, but the kind that makes drinks squirt out their noses. Snot cocktail fountains for everyone!
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