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arcticdementor · 3 years

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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felassan · 4 years

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how do you see andrastianism being portrayed in northern thedas, especially in tevinter with its entirely separate chantry? is it going to be noticeably different than in past games do you think? looking back, the southern chantry and its templars, specifically, have played an Enormous role in the plots of the past DA games. it’s going to be interesting having a game without them, in a way...

Hello! Great question. This became long so it’s under a cut.

Hopefully true to the established lore and different in the ways and where it’s meant to be.

I think the most considerable or notable differences will be less in Andrastianism - as in, individual peoples’ personal faiths, their interactions with and conceptions of it, and how they relate to it and it to the world around them - and more in the institutional, organizational differences in the structures of the Imperial Chantry, and how that subsequently shapes Tevinter society and culture.

The former naturally varies between individuals already, as with southern Andrastians and many religions in our world. Our most visible examples of Tevinter Andrastians so far are Fenris (see his banters with Sebastian) and Dorian (see early conversation at Haven). From the little insight we get into their feelings on their faith and their opinions on it, we can see a bit of that variance, and it’s naturally colored by their respective life experiences in Tevinter. Fenris’ faith was never strong; he says it’s difficult for a slave to have faith in someone who abandoned them. Danarius, like a lot of Magisters who own slaves I assume, didn’t allow his slaves religious teaching or access to formal aspects of the faith, in order to deny them a sense of self-worth. Early on, Fenris feels that the Maker didn’t help him and doesn’t care for him or indeed anyone, and struggles somewhat to reconcile that and to square away the Maker’s existence with the ills of the world. Eventually, by Act 3, Sebastian comments that he noticed Fenris in the Chantry one day, praying.

Dorian identifies as Andrastian, but doesn’t “believe in the Chantry”. He thinks both the Imperial Chantry and the southern Chantry are outdated relics desperately clinging to relevance. He acknowledges that this opinion doesn’t make him popular - from that we can infer how his Tevinter peers from his social strata tend to feel about the Chantry, at least publicly. He doesn’t like the... not sure how to phrase it or what this is called, but like the piety-type religious practise aspects? It makes sense, given his personality and story arc in DAI, that he’s someone who would chafe under being told what to do and how to live his life. You can also see where such sentiments would in part originate considering his background (having once essentially been shipped off by his father to an expensive school in Minrathous known for its adherence to strict Andrastian discipline). At the same time he knows that he doesn’t know everything, has feelings of being small in the grand scheme of things (this stuff is an interesting layer to his character, as he usually presents as quite self-assured, sometimes larger than life, and is inclined to refer to his skill and intellectual prowess), and believes in something bigger than him existing, because the idea of there being nothing scares him.

The latter most obviously shows up in how Tevinter societal structure is flipped, with the elite mages at the top running things. It’s evident in things like how men and mages are allowed to be part of the priesthood as well as in Tevinter social mores - more tolerant views of magic, magical ability as a valued trait, blood magic’s pretty okay, magic widely-practised in society, etc. The Imperial Chantry holds some different beliefs, such as that blood magic was learned by humanity from ancient elves from Elvhenan, as opposed to from the Old Gods, and that the lies of the Old Gods are what was ultimately responsible for the actions of the ancient Magisters that led to the Blights, as opposed to mortal pride. They believe that Andraste was only a mortal prophet, albeit a mage, and even forbid worship of her. And they fundamentally reeeally diametrically disagree with the southern Chantry on the meaning of “magic exists to serve man, and never to rule over him”. Instead of ‘mages should be controlled, they’re nefarious’ it’s ‘magic’s great, it should be used for the good of mankind and we’ll do that by having mages rule’. Some of this stuff diverges quite a lot from the southern Chantry, but Dorian does comment that most of the Imperial Chantry’s teachings are the same as in the south “...despite some finicky bits about magic”.

I’m looking forwards to Tevinter as a setting, in part because of these kinds of differences that it has (speaking here of these aspects of its society, not others). It’s different. It’s fresh. I’m kinda weary of the south, and definitely of the southern Chantry. I’m interested to see these things that are established and referred to ‘in person’, as it were. As you say, the southern Chantry and things associated with it have been at the forefront so far due to its prevalence in the south - it’s time for something new! Beats like “mages vs templars” are well-trodden by now. The interplay between mages and templars in Tevinter isn’t comparable. The role of magic and the lot of many mages in Tevinter is totally different to what we’ve been dealing with so far. I guess my main point in answer to the question of Andrastianism’s portrayal in the north is a bit broad; like, I’m heeere for the new stuff, that interesting setting, and I hope they do the noted differences justice.

Even more minor stuff like: How Dorian had never heard of the Seekers of Truth as they don’t exist in Tevinter (he questioned Cassandra about what they are and wondered if they were some kind of “super Templar”, lol). How there are a lot of Tranquil in Tevinter, but there it’s a sentence handed down by the Magisterium for “abuse of magic” which conveniently has “many interpretations” (the inference being it’s a handy way among the scheming elite to get rid of political rivals). That the Magisters still make sacrificial offerings in rituals, ostensibly nowadays pretending that such things are for Andraste and the Maker rather than the Old Gods. The harsher and more direct political workings of the Imperial Chantry compared to the southern one - like, it sounds like it’s totally normal for the Black Divine to openly slaughter all his enemies after he ascends. Do the templars in Tevinter get chips on their shoulder because they’re basically cityguard Magister-goons and have no real power? Imagine Magisters being confronted by a southern templar NPC’s powers. Imagine the arcane knowledge and mysteries in the libraries of the Tevinter Circles, or going to an Imperial Chantry service and seeing the magic that’s performed at those. What an intense backdrop and sandbox to be exploring. I wanna meet the Black Divine.

There isn’t much currently known about Andrastianism/the Chantry as it is in Antiva that’s specific to there or that ‘jumps’ out, so it would be nice to learn a bit more on that front. Rivain of course is mostly not Andrastian. I don’t know if we’ll visit there in this game (locales like Tevinter, Nevarra and so on feel more likely) but would certainly reeeally love to do so and explore their pantheism and belief in the Natural Order. There’s a lot of really interesting stuff there like their seers, the long-established local traditions, even the Qun. The Anders are super pious - I’m sure if we visit Weisshaupt for example we’ll encounter Andrastians who are more devoted and more dour even than their southern counterparts. Nevarra is where again it gets quite different, and in a ‘potentially quite pertinent since it feels like we’ll go there’-kinda way. Their mages have almost as much power as Magisters do in the Imperium, and the populace has those hyper-specific and fascinating beliefs on death. The political intrigue there, their niche unparalleled knowledge of the dead, their influence on King Markus... more awesome, interesting new shit for a setting.

Not sure if this really answers your question. 😅 Basically I’m really excited to go north because some aspects of it are so different, even in fixtures of the setting like the Chantry and in Andrastian belief. I’d like to see some of the differences ‘northern Andrastianism’ has in action outside of Codexes and “back in my homeland” dialogue, especially in external stuff like societal structure and culture. I’m ready for mage-rule opposite-land for a change (not because it’s good or bad but because it’s different), and for new dynamics and different spins on old worn plotbeats. I can see the Imperial Chantry being prominent in the story and I welcome the fact that the domineering rhetoric around us will be somewhat changed up after three games in the south. Obviously the Magisters dominate the Imperium and they derive that right to rule from the Imperial Chantry’s beliefs/teachings. I’d guess we will be mostly leaving southern Chantry stuff mostly behind, as that allows the writers to keep the diverging ‘the new Divine’s way of doing things’ stuff off-screen. Time for different groups to play big roles, like the Magisters, the Qunari, the Crows. And some revelation about the faith of some description, like that Andraste was secretly a ghast in disguise, wouldn’t go amiss either.

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alexmitas · 3 years

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Abandon Ideology

In Jordan Peterson’s second foray into self-help, he writes his VI’th rule for life: ‘Abandon Ideology.’ As an ardent follower of Jordan’s, on first reading of this, I took this rules’s implications at face value; that is, the implication that an ideology is something that is held by a group of people, but that the individual, striving for what is true and pure, should rid themselves of all ideology, in the interest of progressing new and helpful ideas to the culture at large. Recently, particularly after having watched this YouTube video by Philosophy Tube, a question which I wrestled with subtly after reading Jordan’s recent work has made its way to the forefront of my mind: Are we so sure that it is even possible to abandon ideology? and I don’t mean once you already ‘have one’, so to speak (though this is a valid question also, albeit requiring a few more prior assumptions), but rather, is it even possible for an individual to not have an ideology? (Paraphrased,) Philosophy Tube makes this point explicitly, comparing ideology to a**holes: everyone has them, they use them everyday, but nobody tends to take a good look at their own unless something has gone wrong. So who is right?

Interestingly, both philosophers consider ideology to be something that actually exists - which, to me, is by no means a foregone conclusion. Jordan assumes that it is a sort of group-think parasite that infests the mind, while Philosophy Tube believes that ideology is an inevitable function within the individual. Anecdotally, I’ve noticed that the latter tends to be a more common belief among those with left political leaning, while Jordan’s point tends to be expressed by individuals who are more popular with those with right political leaning*. As we know that political leaning seems to be a result of a temperamental difference between individuals, it could be that this is just another form of what one could theorize as the fundamental question between the extremes of such differentiations, which is the question of whether the individual is fundamentally formed through nature or nurture. I have personally arrived at the conclusion, as have others, that the answer to this question is clearly both; however, the question of whether or not ideology is fundamentally group-oriented or individual-orientated doesn’t quite fit neatly into the dimensions of this theory. This is because, in no small part, that the roles of thought in regards to ideology in this case are antithetical to the typical hypothesis presented by the theory: in this case, the left leaning individuals are the one’s more likely to believe that ideology is an innate characteristic (nature), where as the right leaning individuals are more likely to believe that ideology is a product of culture (nurture). While it may not be a perfect comparison, this is the reverse of what an individual who agrees with this line of logic would likely guess. Is there a reason for this?

Perhaps it is the more fundamental tenant of conservatism, which tends to prize its own culture’s tradition, that demands from its right-wing thinker a bias in believing that their own way of interpreting the world is the ‘correct’ way to do so, based on the interpretation of the facts of ‘objective reality,’ which is free of ideology, because that is the way it is has always been; or perhaps it is liberalism’s inclination towards progression - its greatest strength and weakness simultaneously - that forces it to be open to all possibilities, and therefore implying that there is no single way of being, there is no objective reality, because reality could be anything based on the individual’s own subjective experience, based on their own ideology, which must therefore be present in all of us; or, perhaps, (and this is in no way to imply a comprehensively exclusive list) there is the consideration which I mentioned above, which questions the existence of ideology as an objective truth altogether.

[Aside: for sh*ts and giggles, let’s explore this last idea. So ‘ideology’, stems from the french word idéologie, where idéo- or ideo- is “idea”, and -logie or -logy is “the (scientific) study of the subject field represented by the stem.” (From Merriam-Webster.com). Also from Merriam-Webster: “Though ideology originated as a serious philosophical term, within a few decades it took on connotations of impracticality thanks to Napoleon, who used it in a derisive manner. Today, the word most often refers to ‘a systematic body of concepts,’especially those of a particular group or political party.” So according to this definition, ideology is more of a strictly philosophical or scientific term referring to the study of ideas. Well, everyone has ideas. But somehow this definition doesn’t quite seem to fit the bill. It seems as though both sides of the political spectrum seem to regard ideology as something deeper than the this definition gives it credit. It seems as though according to the political (to use a loose term to define the parameters of this debate) debate, believes that ideology is either a type of group-oriented idea that can inhabit a large swath of people, or it is the fundamental subjective framework that the individual uses to interpret the world. Of course, I doubt many serious thinkers on the right would deny that everyone needs a framework for which to use to interpret the world (Jordan Peterson certainly doesn’t). Instead, they would argue that framework is not the same as ideology, but simply a tenant of being human, as a combination of both an individual’s objective and subjective experience (and of course one could argue about whether objective experience actually exists also, but that’ll have to be another topic for another day; today we will assume that both objective and subjective experiences are real). But this also begs the question, why is it that some people can have an ideology while others can be free from it? This brings the argument illustrated nicely by Gad Saad into play; namely, that ideology is the equivalent of an idea pathogen, echoed by the complimentary position presented by Jordan’s work which contends with the idea that although not everyone need be infected by an idea parasite, everyone must have a narrative framework to operate in the world. This in and of itself, of course, asks us to contend with the question of whether or not there is even a difference between this “narrative framework” and ideology, to which we may get different answers based on the political leaning of the person whom we ask. As my inherent bias seems to lean to the right in most cases, my intuition tells me that there is a difference, that narrative framework is superordinate to ideology, but again, its difficult to assess whether or not that is my tendency towards conservatism and its respect of (let’s say the west’s) cultural background getting in the way of objectivity, sustaining that objectivity is real in the first place. But to play devil’s advocate to the side opposite to my intuition in a different way, I would say that it’s possible that the real problem is that we do not have our definitions straight: what is ideology to one may be narrative framework to another; and in this sense, I might also add that it is entirely possible that ideology itself does not exist past what may also be considered a narrative framework, since what one would call an ideology another may say they are only acting in according to their own narrative framework (or, “yes, I do have an ideology, but - of course - so do you). The obvious argument to refute this would likely refer to the nature in which an individual with an accused ideology would hold beliefs which mirror that of another individual with the same ideology, therefore rendering the ideas non-unique. And this is indeed a powerful argument. It’s also an argument which, hitherto, I never second guessed. But thinking now, of course it isn’t the case that two individuals narrative frameworks cannot be influenced by similar subjective experiences. This gets more complicated when you compound uncountable numbers of people who have “the same ideology,” and therefore expressing similar subjective experiences that derived their narrative frameworks; after all, could that many people really have had such identical experiences that they are brought to such similar beliefs independent from and “idea parasite” or ideology? Maybe not, but also, maybe the subjective experiences and narrative framework (or ideology), of the accuser has led them to a sort of confirmation bias, where one signal of similarity leads them to the expectation of uniformity; where the sight of a leaf of a certain type or color leads to certainty that that leaf must belong to a specific breed of tree, rather than perhaps a tree of only similar lineage. In this regard, with special consideration given to the possibility of miscommunication of words and their definitions, it is possible that the deeper form of “ideology” within the context of our current culture, does not even exist. It’s certainly a possibility which I will be keeping my eyes and ears on, anyways. End Aside.]

A conclusion about who is right certainly won’t be reached in a blog post by me today. What I can conclude from this thought experiment, however, is yet another example of why your intuition - based from your temperament and experience - can lead you astray when considering complex questions. Or even seemingly non-complex issues, for that matter. The perspective that Jordan Peterson provides may very well be the correct one. But the perspective that Philosophy Tube highlights as well feels as though it could be superior. Then there is the possibility that they are both wrong - or both right (it is such a strange world we live in, after all, where paradoxes are known to exist). One thing is for certain: both of these people are much smarter than I, so, as per usual, there is much left to consider and ponder. And to gather erratically.

One day I will start to write blog posts that focus more on my reader than my inner ramblings. But for now, I still need to sort myself out, and I hear writing can be incredibly useful for that. This is ErraticWoolGathering, after all.

Best,

- Alex

*An example of this that I can bring to mind is exemplified by Gad Saad, author of The Parasitic Mind, who similarly claims - as I understand it - that ideology is a matter of group-think, or in his words, that an ideology is no different than a type of “idea pathogen.” Now, whether Gad claims to be of right political leaning or not (as far as I know, he does not), his book and his ideas clearly seem to be more popular with the the right-wing of our culture than they are with our left-wing.

#philosophy #JordanPeterson #Philosophy Tube #writing #ErraticWoolGathering

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geopolicraticus · 4 years

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Bird Brains: Better than We Thought

Alternative Neural Architectures for Consciousness

The issue of Science for 25 September 2020 features a crow on its cover with the headline “Avian Awareness: Carrion crows display sensory consciousness.” There are three articles in the journal on this theme, “A neural correlate of sensory consciousness in a corvid bird” by Andreas Nieder, Lysann Wagener, and Paul Rinnert, “A cortex-like canonical circuit in the avian forebrain” by Martin Stacho, Christina Herold, Noemi Rook, Hermann Wagner, Markus Axer, Katrin Amunts, and Onur Güntürkün, and “Birds do have a brain cortex—and think” by Suzana Herculano-Houzel.

Everyone who has watched crows carefully knows that they are intelligent birds. A friend once told me that if he went outside and pretended to target crows with a broom handle as though it were a gun, the birds would not move, but if he went outside with an actual gun, the birds would scatter. There is a video of a crow repeatedly sliding down a snowy roof, as well as another video of two crows sliding and rolling on a snow-covered car, which looks like the kind of intentional play behavior we associate with mammals (there are many similar videos of crows playing). I’m sure everyone has their own anecdotal account of avian intelligence.

Now we have something more than anecdotal evidence for corvid intelligence. The articles in Science report, respectively, an experiment that implies sensory consciousness and anatomical features of the corvid brain that are analogous, but not identical, to the mammalian brain. Herculano-Houzel notes that it has long been said that birds have no cerebral cortex, but she goes on to explain that the avian pallium derives from the same embryonic developmental structures from which the mammalian cerebral cortex derives. (She cites “A developmental ontology for the mammalian brain based on the prosomeric model” by Luis Puelles, Megan Harrison, George Paxinos, and Charles Watson, in which the authors argue, “Because genomic control of neural morphogenesis is remarkably conservative, this ontology should prove essentially valid for all vertebrates…” which would include both birds and mammals.)

Similarly, the conventional view has been that the limbic system is unique to mammals, but there may be structures in the avian brain that are homologous to the limbic system. A re-assessment of the avian brain is evident from papers such as Avian brains and a new understanding of vertebrate brain evolution by The Avian Brain Nomenclature Consortium, and Cell-type homologies and the origins of the neocortex by Jennifer Dugas-Ford, Joanna J. Rowell, and Clifton W. Ragsdale, and this re-assessment has been carried back to common ancestors of mammals and birds, as we find in the paper The Limbic System of Tetrapods: A Comparative Analysis of Cortical and Amygdalar Populations by Laura L. Bruce and Timothy J. Neary. All of this points to the increasing complexity and detailed articulation of evo-devo conceptions and the idea of deep homology, such that highly conserved genes produce similar structures—eyes, brains, and perhaps consciousness too—across many different species, even when there isn’t a direct line of descent; we should take this as a memo to similarly examine behavioral evolution from an evo-devo standpoint, but leave that aside for now.

Given the earlier research in the papers cited above, we would not be surprised to learn of further homologies being recognized to hold between avian and mammalian brains, but while there may be unrecognized neural homologies between birds and mammals, the bird brain is quite different from a mammalian brain. The Stacho, et al., paper addresses these different neuronal structures, but they conclude, “Our study reveals a hitherto unknown neuroarchitecture of the avian sensory forebrain that is composed of iteratively organized canonical circuits within tangentially organized lamina-like and orthogonally positioned column-like entities.” In other words, the avian pallium exhibits an architecture of layered neurons, and columns connecting the layers, which is a structure than has long been understood to characterize the mammalian cerebral cortex. The two structures are distinct in detail, but display overall similarities in the way in which iterated and interconnected neural circuits are arranged.

The Nieder, et al., paper approaches avian intelligence through behavioral research rather than through anatomy, although the stimulus response experiments are traced to a single neuron, so that there is an anatomical component to this research as well. The authors write:

“We trained two carrion crows (Corvus corone) to report the presence or absence of visual stimuli around perceptual threshold in a rule-based delayed detection task. At perceptual threshold, the internal state of the crows determined whether stimuli of identical intensity would be seen or not perceived. After a delay, a rule cue informed the crow about which motor action was required to report its percept. Thus, the crows could not prepare motor responses prior to the rule cues, which enabled the investigation of neuronal activity related to subjective sensory experience and its lasting accessibility.”

Nieder, et al., recognize the philosophical problems involved here by citing the famous paper by Thomas Nagel, “What is it like to be a bat?” They add, “…whether pure subjective experience itself (“phenomenal consciousness”) can and should be dissociated from its report (“access consciousness”) remains intensely debated.” And so it is.

The Nieder, et al., paper, though it appears in the same issue of Science as the Stacho, et al., paper, is entirely independent of the Stacho, et al., paper, and the former repeats many of the traditional assumptions about the absence of a cerebral cortext in the avian brain. However, knowing what is now shown in the Stacho, et al., paper, and its earlier anticipations, we should not be at all surprised to find both empirical evidence of consciousness and mechanisms of sensory consciousness in birds that are apparently parallel to those of mammals. Our common terrestrial ancestry, and the DNA all life in the terrestrial biosphere shares, seems to count quite significantly toward cognitive similarity, and points to the possibility of an evo-devo cognitive science.

Both Nieder, et al, and Herculano-Houzel discuss the phylogenesis of consciousness: since mammals and birds have a common ancestor about 320 million years ago, this raises the question of whether the common ancestor to both birds and mammals had some rudimentary form of consciousness, or whether consciousness appeared later, independently emerging in both birds and mammals. (I just discussed what I call the phylogenesis of mind in my newsletter 101.)

On the one hand, accounting for consciousness by the deep homology of highly conserved genes closely ties consciousness to the terrestrial biosphere and its contingent processes; on the other hand, multiple distinct biological mechanisms that realize consciousness suggest that consciousness as an emergent complexity is not exclusively reliant upon the specific biological mechanisms and neuronal architecture of highly developed mammal brains, which is the way in which we ourselves are familiar with consciousness. This in turn suggests that other intelligence in the universe could also be conscious intelligence something like we know from our own experience, and a mind constrained by the reality of consciousness as we know it would be at least partially understandable by us—and we would be at least partially understandable by an alien conscious intelligence—in virtue of shared consciousness, even if the biological underpinnings of consciousness were distinct in each case.

We cannot communicate via (grammatically structured) language with other forms of life on Earth, but we can and do communicate with them in terms of conscious interaction with other conscious beings. Even a biological relationship as adversarial as predation, for example, is mediated by consciousness—both beings seeking to survive, while one listens and watches in order to detect a threat, while the other waits and watches for a moment to pounce. (I earlier made a similar point in A Sentience-Rich Biosphere.) This ecological relationship is mediated by a conscious relationship between predator and prey, i.e., the shared consciousness of both predator and prey. Similarly, communicative relationships between ourselves and other beings that evolved in other biospheres, such as is posulated as the basis of SETI, could have a similar communicative structure based in shared consciousness that mediates an ecological relationship (with “ecological” here understood in a cosmological sense), even if it should turn out to be the case that human and alien minds are incommensurable and communication in the sense of shared information content is not possible (i.e., if what Freeman Dyson criticized as the “philosophical discourse dogma” is, in fact, an unsupported dogma).

These findings regarding avian consciousness should also be of great interest to artificial intelligence researchers, in so far as artificial intelligence can be conceived (even if it is not always conceived) as machine consciousness. Machine intelligence that is not conscious would be alien from human intelligence in a fundamental way (in the same way that an extraterrestrial intelligence what was not conscious would be more alien to us than a conscious mind). Artificial intelligence that was the result of machine consciousness, like an alien consciousness, would have at least something in common with us, increasing the possibility of our having aligned interests (i.e., the constructed AI more likely to be friendly AI).

Knowing that consciousness in both avian and mammalian brains may be associated with layered neural structures, engineers of computer hardware involved in artificial intelligence might consider constructing an iterated architecture of layered neural pathways—that is to say, layered neural networks—connected every so often by columns, and so producing a different kind of hardware more specifically suited to the emergence of consciousness.

The economic motive for artificial intelligence research is simply to extend automation beyond what automation has accomplished to date, and this is certainly where the most significant economic gains are likely to be found; this research will pay for itself. But the epochal breakthrough in computer science will not appear from the incremental improvement of increasingly “intelligent” expert systems, but from the appearance of machine consciousness, which is something entirely different from what is today understood by “artificial intelligence.” Since artificial intelligence researchers seem to be mostly content writing and re-writing software that runs on more or less the same hardware, artificial consciousness is not likely to emerge from these efforts; machine consciousness will probably require distinctive hardware that imitates the neuronal architecture of biological brains from which consciousness is an emergent.

But suppose that we can isolate the neuronal circuits of consciousness, and reproduce them in hardware form: once we can do this, we can do this at a larger and at a more complex scale than exists in any biological brain. If consciousness is an emergent from iterated layers and columns of neurons, hardware mimicking layers and columns of neurons could be constructed that also serves as an emergent basis for consciousness, and a consciousness that could be far more sophisticated than any biological consciousness, insofar as the technological basis of consciousness could be rapidly streamlined and miniaturized. From such a research program an optimized consciousness could emerge. And not only optimized consciousness, but it might also be possible to engineer qualitatively distinct forms of consciousness that are variously optimized for specific tasks.

Schematic drawings of a rat brain (left) and a pigeon brain (right) depict their overall pallial organization. The mammalian dorsal pallium harbors the six-layered neocortex with a granular input layer IV (purple) and supra- and infragranular layers II/III and V/VI, respectively (blue). The avian pallium comprises the Wulst and the DVR, which both, at first glance, display a nuclear organization. Their primary sensory input zones are shown in purple, comparable to layer IV. According to this study, both mammals and birds show an orthogonal fiber architecture constituted by radially (dark blue) and tangentially (white) oriented fibers. Tangential fibers associate distant pallial territories. Whereas this pattern dominates the whole mammalian neocortex, in birds, only the sensory DVR and the Wulst (light green) display such an architecture, and the associative and motor areas (dark green), as in the caudal DVR, are devoid of this cortex-like fiber architecture. NC, caudal nidopallium.

#birds #mammals #intelligence #SETI #evo-devo #neuroscience #consciousness #philosophy of mind #artificial intelligence #machine consciousness

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johnfmyles · 4 years

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Piketty’s Capital and Ideology

This book is a political-economic analysis of several, quite sweepingly broad (from the middle ages up to the present period of hyper-capitalism) historical regimes of inequality, mainly in the West although there are interesting comparative forays to India and Brazil. Piketty uses a very broad brush to depict a tripartite schema of inequality regimes ranging from medieval estates to the ownership/propertarian (aristocratic to haut-bourgeois) regime of the 18-19th centuries, then he goes on to the era of hypercapitalsim (with a significant interregnum of state redistribution- welfarism in the middle of the 20th century.) I said the sweep is broad, but it is also bold, not just in historical terms but also in its highly convincing use of data sets from key states, principally European and the United States, but also significant data from India and Brazil. The study thus gives a convincing statistical analysis of the economic bases of the inequality regimes and relates the regimes to their contemporary state ideologies, tax, revenue and welfare policies.

The point of the book is to relate, therefore, capital (although Piketty does use the term hyper- capitalism, the focus is, as the title states, on capital rather than capitalism in its more Marxist sense – I think on the whole Piketty’s position is Weberian) and the ideologies (as insidious belief systems that have a type of defining power on the dominant forms of policy thinking) coincident with the main inequality regimes. To my mind this book is somewhat theoretically weak in the area of its second key word – ideology. In many respects the book’s highly economistic analysis would surely have had the better title ‘Capital and fiscal inequality regimes’. Ideology, if it is to be of use theoretically, cannot just be tagged on to economic analysis in the manner of pointing to the historical coincidence of legitimatory ideas – although this is important. But any ideological analysis worthy of the name requires a much more cultural form of approach – ideology has to be seen as a force in its own right with its own forms of ‘data’, concepts, ideas, images, just as economic analysis requires clusters of concepts of finance, fiscal policy etc. Too often in this book ideology is seen as simply a legitimatory and reactive political phenomenon riding the back of economic inequality, in this sense it sometimes has a hint of crude 30’s Marxist understandings of ideology.

This is not, of course, to say that this book is not a great, important, crucially timely work that is a resource for all who need substantive factual backing for their arguments against contemporary trends in states in thraldom to populism, identitiarian (nationalism), tax and ‘fiscal dumping’ policies, what Piketty summarizes as the ‘drive to the bottom’ logics of global capitalism. Some of the strongest sections of the book are in fact on the propetarian regimes of the 19th to early 20th century in which Piketty shows how sacrosanct ideologies of ownership had the effect of stifling more progressive state and social policies. He gives as an example the UK in the 19th century where a propertarian ideology blinkered state policy to the extent that the principals of debts arising from the Napoleonic wars were repaid right through until the first world war to the detriment of national economic development. Piketty contrasts this to the accelerated German and French debt reductions after the second world war when ‘Debts of 200-2000% of national income in 1945-50 were reduced to almost nothing’ (444-5)

Piketty often uses what at first appear quite hackneyed historical examples, the Democratic Party’s support for slavery, the social-welfarist state in Sweden, the rise of Russian Oligarchs, all quite time-worn now. But he develops these by revealing the facts of their economic underpinnings. And the book is also studded with less well-known examples, such as the extradition of Mexican immigrants from Roosevelt’s United States in the 1930s (228). But nearly always for Piketty the key actor and focus is less social classes than states and it is no coincidence that he gives a primary role for state and federal agencies in his hopes in the final pages of the book for revolutionary reform of the social, welfare and taxation systems of contemporary societies. Piketty, in this vein, often has a nostalgic view of the post- war social democratic reformist states of the UK and European states, particularly France, Germany and Sweden (not, also, forgetting the highly progressive tax policies of the USA in the 1960s): The significant reduction in inequality that took place in the mid-twentieth-century was made possible by the construction of a social state based on relative educational equality and a number of radical innovations, such as co-management in the /Germanic and Nordic countries and progressive taxation in the United States and United Kingdom. The conservative revolution of the 1980s and the fall of communism interrupted this movement; the world entered a new era of self-regulated markets and quasi-sacrilization of property. (1036-7) However, he grafts much that is new onto this generally acknowledged view, such as ideas of temporary property ownership, the need to foster progressive taxation at the federal level, the need for deliberative democratic principles as the basis for developing dynamic fiscal rules, particularly required at the regional and global levels of governance (such as the EU) in order to counter hypercapitaist accumulation and competitive ‘drives to the bottom’. But there are also subtle and confusing lapses or contradictions in Piketty’s analysis. There are minor ones, deriving I think from the unacknowledged but nevertheless clearly Weberian-pluralist political bases of his argument. For example his notes the ‘conflictual socio-political trajectories in which different social groups and people of different sensibilities within each society attempt to develop coherent ideas of social justice’ (454). But then he has, sometimes conscious, but certainly underlying, a Durkheimian ideal of the possibility of an organic social order at the basis of his ideas for reform. This latter ideal might be the basis for new forms of social solidarity to counter old identitarian ideas again on the rise (racism and anti-immigration). But I cannot see how this contradiction between the motive forces of capital and society, of human nature and ideals, can be easily resolved. I am not certain it is something that will easily yield to the deliberative model of governance-technocratic management Piketty essentially adopts.

Other minor flaws in the argument come from the book’s unreflectively liberal view of what he deems ‘secondary’ market transactions. In this Piketty contrasts primary goods and services, such as education, which should not be marketized, and secondary sectors by which he means areas like clothing where: there is a legitimate diversity of individual aspirations and preferences – for instance, in the supply of clothing or food – then decentralization, competition, and regulated ownership of the means of production are justified. (595)

But the major problem with this book is its lack of a more complex understanding of the concept of ideology. At the start, Piketty signals that he was going to use cultural examples, such as extracts from novels, in order to illustrate the defusing of the ideas underlying inequality regimes into everyday life. But these examples, mainly from novels (an essentially 18th century cultural form) are brief, limited, often footnoted, rather than being intrinsic to the analysis. Piketty needed to have some understanding of the role of the media and state intellectuals (i.e. from cultural Marxists like Gramsci), if the reader was to make the link between capital and ideology. What is needed is a more informed understanding of ideology, ideology as a force in its own right. Too often Piketty sees ideology as arising in a type of ‘logic’ riding on the back of the inequality regimes they coincide with: We learned that most premodern societies, in Europe as well as in Asia, in Africa as well as in America, were organized around a trifunctional logic. Power at the local level was structured around, on the one hand, clerical and religious elites charged with the spiritual leadership of society and, on the other hand, warriors and military elites responsible for maintaining order in various evolving political-ideological configurations. Between 1500 and 1900, the formation of the centralized state went hand-in-hand with a radical transformation of the political-ideological devices that served to justify and structure social inequalities. (410) At other times, particularly in the analysis of the cultural influence of the Brahamic domination of ancient India, seen by Piketty in the Manusmriti texts which: ...the authors plainly believed that the time had come to promote their preferred model of society...(313)

Similarly, in criticising the ‘philanthropic illusion’ arising around contemporary billionaires like Bill Gates he fails to relate how elite figures must be seen in terms of the broader ideological currents of the time – in this case, for example, Band Aid.

Nevertheless, Piketty’s book is massively generous in its scope and the depth of its economic analysis of the variations in polices that accompany the historical inequality regimes. His calls for policy reforms in areas such as progressive taxation, basic income, the socialization of ideas of property and inheritance, participatory democracy in the economy, redistributive financing of educational opportunity which are presented on the firm back of substantive economic analysis. It is this, the capital-side of the analysis, in which the reader experiences the book’s most powerful rhetoric – hidden behind Piketty’s restrained, almost prosaic text - the statistical tables and graphs that relentless flow facts after facts recording our historical and contemporary shame.

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scots-dragon · 5 years

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The Big Fucking D&D 4E Rant

Or, ‘That Time Wizards of the Coast Fucked Up D&D’s Lore’

At the risk of raising the spectre of edition war again, I feel like it’s worth going back and exploring that time that Wizards of the Coast fucked over basically all of their lore to chase a trend that wasn’t there. Admittedly this comes with the (begrudged) acknowledgement that quite a bit of of this is likely to be out of date now that fifth edition has been out for a good several years now, but that edition has its own problems and while I’m not really going to touch upon it now, my problems with it are many and numerous.

It should be noted from the outset that this is going to talk about fourth edition in a negative and critical context, but I’m not going to be talking about the rules of the actual game as a game. This is entirely centred on story, worldbuilding and lore, and how those were handled in fourth edition as compared to what came before. That being said, if you like fourth edition, and especially if you like its lore, I would not suggest reading further.

I’m going to go far beyond being critical in this; I’m going to get outright mean.

A shout out must go to Susanna McKenzie (@cydonian-mystery) for input and feedback on this.

I suppose the most important place to start is, in many ways, the beginning, by which I mean my own introduction to Dungeons & Dragons. Mostly because it’s directly linked to the main reasons why I consider the lore to have been ruined, but before I even start off with that, I’m going to have to tell you where the lore was before I can really adequately explain its downfall.

In Realms Forgotten...

Like many people of my generation, I got into Dungeons & Dragons first through the computer based role-playing games. Specifically I started off with various titles by Black Isle and BioWare in the late-90s and early-00s, with stand-outs including Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale, Neverwinter Nights, and their sequels. What all of these had in common beyond being Dungeons & Dragons adaptations is the fact that they took place in the Forgotten Realms, one of the more famous settings thereof, and the lore of that world intrigued me far more than the rules alone.

This might not sound like much, of course, to a newer fan for whom the Forgotten Realms, and its central setting of Faerûn, likely feels just like that generic world that D&D just happens to take place in nowadays. But back in the day, it was far more than that.

At the time I was getting into it, local libraries and bookstores carried bestselling novels set in the worlds in question, so I could pick up a novel based around various characters who appeared in the games, like the drow ranger Drizzt Do’Urden or the powerful wizard Elminster. There was also this huge encyclopedic book of geography and deities and the history of the world, with a big fold-out map which is still stuck up on my bedroom wall even after moving house three times. It was perfect fodder for my young nerdy fangirl self to develop full-on special interests in this stuff.

And the level of detail and lore and nuance in the world and its peoples was immense, with even the tiny and obscure bits of the setting earning massive amounts of unique lore. The result was a world that felt like it was alive, vibrant, and lived-in. Like real people could live there, with colourful heroes and villains to encounter.

This, I think, was the unwitting downfall of the Forgotten Realms, but I’m getting ahead of myself because this is really only step one, and Realms are really only one part of it. There are in total three of them, and I’ll be going through the baselines of each of them before we move on.

Out to Planescape

If you’ve read through the core books for fifth edition, there’s a chance you already have some degree of knowledge of Planescape and what it is. Or more precisely you know about the core structure of the Dungeons & Dragons multiverse; the Great Wheel. A series of elemental inner planes and transitive planes, with a ring of sixteen aligned outer planes representing various combinations derived from the axes of law versus chaos, and good versus evil, centred around a neutrally-aligned central plane.

At the centre of this central plane is an infinitely tall spire, atop which lies the famous torus-shaped city of Sigil, the city at the centre of the multiverse. There are a few more bits to it than that, and there are actually differences between how it once was and how it now is. For instance back in the day, there was no such thing as the Feywild or Shadowfell, and neither one was present in the original structure as laid out in 1987’s Manual of the Planes for AD&D.

Once again, to say that this is barely scratching the surface of the planar cosmology and its general meaning to Dungeons & Dragons lore would be a gross understatement. It wasn’t long after the publication of the above book that there was a new campaign setting created called Planescape, which would centre entirely upon this cosmology and build it into the lore. This is where the city of Sigil was introduced, a place of weird concordance where demons, angels, and creatures far, far stranger than either rubbed shoulders in the street, and only the watchful eye of the mysterious and powerful Lady of Pain kept things from erupting into all-out war.

It was a world of disputes, where a myriad of factions representing various philosophical concepts went toe-to-toe with one another. All wrapped up in a tone not unlike a strange mix of China Miéville and Charles Dickens, with the local dialect and thieves cant giving a unique flavour that no major campaign world outside of Planescape can really manage.

Perhaps the most famous and lasting contribution that this setting has was the tieflings, aasimar, and genasi, referred to collectively as the planetouched. These were born from a mix of planar interaction with human bloodlines, in particular through the very old fashioned way that any hybrid is created, which is perhaps why tieflings were the more common. They carried the blood of fiends, and most commonly demons by way of ancestors who reproduced with succubi and incubi, though no two tieflings looked especially alike, with variable and strange features.

I’ll be getting back to these later, but suffice it to say that Planescape was an interesting outlier setting, far stranger and more creative than almost anything else in anyone’s catalogue. And it forms the second part of our list of ruined lore.

And back down to Greyhawk

There’s a very good chance that your knowledge of Greyhawk is pretty limited, because while one could make good arguments for the above only just being ruined when fourth edition came around, there’s a lot to be said about how Greyhawk’s been the forgotten cousin for a while now, though to the credit of the current staff at Wizards of the Coast, they did just release a full-on Greyhawk adventure with Ghosts of Saltmarsh.

Introduced in the late seventies and early eighties, the World of Greyhawk, taking place on the fictional planet of Oerth and in particular on the subcontinent of the Flanaess, was the personally created campaign setting of Gary Gygax himself. While not as detailed as the Forgotten Realms, nor as interestingly out-there as Planescape, it is nonetheless a pretty cool world overall with a fun pulpy atmosphere that gives it its own sense of weight and nuance.

However, after Gary Gygax left TSR back in the 1980s, some later creators took it upon themselves to more or less mock his legacy overall. Nonetheless it remains a popular location for fans and creators, and towards the late third edition there was a lot of good work done in reviving it, such as with a series of adventure paths published in Dungeon Magazine in the form of Shackled City, Age of Worms, and Savage Tide, and following that a big adventure module in the form of Expedition to the Ruins of Greyhawk.

Since it’s the most basic element, let’s start with how they treated Greyhawk...

Strip-Mining the Free City

To say that Wizards of the Coast ruined Greyhawk would actually be inaccurate because, to a degree, they didn’t actually use Greyhawk. At least, not fully.

What they did instead was create a ‘new’ campaign setting, sometimes called the Nentir Vale, that used a few scavenged and cherry-picked Greyhawk deities and also a whole selection of adventures and locations previously specific to Greyhawk. Notable examples of such on the larger worldmap seen in the boardgame Conquest of Nerath included the Tomb of Horrors, the Vault of the Drow, and the Temple of Elemental Evil.

The resulting setting wasn’t Greyhawk, but had enough pieces that it felt like an insult to it. Often having those elements be modified in such a way that they felt like mockeries rather than the original concepts. A big part of why that felt like mockery is of course that Nentir Vale, or the Points of Light setting as it was sometimes referred to as, didn’t really exist as its own fully-fledged world. There wasn’t really a campaign setting book, or much detail on anything outside of a few small locations.

This is a relatively small part of what Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition did wrong, but it’s a small taste of what’s to come. However as seen with the Greyhawk conversion guidelines for many adventures, and even the release of the recent Ghosts of Saltmarsh, Greyhawk itself seems to have survived while the Nentir Vale remains almost entirely forgotten except for mentions of the Dawn War pantheon on one page of the Dungeon Master’s Guide.

It seems like Wizards of the Coast realised it was a bad idea.

‘The Great Wheel is Dead!’

As we go back out to Planescape, we notice that — much like Greyhawk — it also isn’t there, as the entire cosmology and its thematic importance has been replaced with something so radically different that it’s practically a complete replacement. Just about the only part of Planescape that was kept was Sigil itself, but as shown repeatedly in the fourth edition version of Manual of the Planes, they obviously didn’t understand either Sigil or the Great Wheel in any real way.

I’m not going to talk about the World Axis much in direct terms, but instead more the mindset that was taken with regards to Planescape’s Great Wheel. Now this requires something of a diversion into an old pre-fourth edition preview document, and how it handled the Great Wheel and old materials.

The Great Wheel is dead.

One of my mantras throughout the design of 4th Edition has been, “Down with needless symmetry!” The cosmology that has defined the planes of the D&D multiverse for thirty years is a good example of symmetry that ultimately creates more problems than it solves. Not only is there a plane for every alignment, there’s a plane between each alignment — seventeen Outer Planes that are supposed to reflect the characteristics of fine shades of alignment. There’s not only a plane for each of the four classic elements, there’s a Positive Energy Plane, a Negative Energy Plane, and a plane where each other plane meets — an unfortunate circumstance that has resulted in creatures such as ooze mephits.

The planes were there, so we had to invent creatures to fill them. Worse than the needless symmetry of it all, though, is the fact that many of those planes are virtually impossible to adventure in. Traversing a plane that’s supposed to be an infinite three-dimensional space completely filled with elemental fire takes a lot of magical protection and fundamentally just doesn’t sound fun. How do you reconcile that with the idea of the City of Brass, legendary home of the efreet? Why is there air in that city?

So our goals in defining a new cosmology were pretty straightforward.

• Don’t bow to needless symmetry!

• Make the planes fun for adventure!

The ‘impossible to adventure in’ mindset towards the Great Wheel is entirely bullshit, which I think is best highlighted in the passage on the City of Brass. How can a plane of pure unchanging fire without variation also have a city-state? Maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t without variation and they’re making shit up to justify their own nonsense.

The arrogance here is nothing short of infuriating. It typifies everything about the approach that Wizards of the Coast was taking towards Dungeons & Dragons at the time, and can only really be described as destructive.

There was nothing but an arrogance and often gleeful disdain for previous editions. Along with declarations of how it was so much better now, with the old version being bad for some reason despite that version having generated a huge fanbase, and a critically beloved computer role-playing game in the form of Planescape: Torment. And as with Greyhawk, they’ve done what they can to reverse that. The only elements of the new cosmology that remain are the Elemental Chaos as an in-between for the Elemental Planes, the Feywild, and the Shadowfell.

Wizards of the Coast once again seemed to realise where they were going wrong, and this is basically a recurring element of fifth edition.

Unfortunately, the World Axis and Nentir Vale aren’t really where the majority of my frustrations lie.

The Shattered Realms

To summarise the degree to which they basically destroyed the Forgotten Realms is going to take a while, simply because they were thorough. And it’s this that ultimately puts me into a position where I’m always going to be negatively predisposed towards Wizards of the Coast and their handling of Dungeons & Dragons.

As a bitof a preamble, fourth edition brought with it several substantial changes to the way a lot of the ruleset worked. And not just on a mechanical level, but on a lore level as it related to certain in-universe elements.. Basic concepts about magic and how it worked were altered at the baseline level, and in order to explain these differences it was decided by the higher-ups at Wizards of the Coast to implement a big huge event to explain the edition differences. This was something they called the Spellplague.

This is not the first time they’ve done that; they previously had the Time of Troubles, which worked to explain the relatively minor differences in magic between the first and second edition versions of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, killed off or replaced a few gods, and ultimately shook things up a little bit. This was not really met with widespread acclaim at the time, and many complained about it but ultimately it’s a series of events which were later picked up by BioWare for Baldur’s Gate so it’s hard to really complain too harshly.

And indeed, they did it again with the change-over from fourth edition to fifth edition, with the Second Sundering bringing radical changes that all coincidentally left things looking like the pre-fourth edition version of the Forgotten Realms. Like with Planescape and Greyhawk, Wizards of the Coast knew they’d fucked up. But unlike with those, there were more than a few scars that haven’t really been all that fixable.

And to show you what I mean, I suppose we can start with the map, as that’s one of the clearest indications, when put in comparison, as to just how much was changed.

If you scroll back up and compare with the original map, you can kind of see just how much they absolutely fucked the Forgotten Realms.

The basic idea behind the Spellplague was that the goddess Mystra was murdered, and in her death throes the entirety of magic went haywire. Blue fire erupted across the world, and left entire nations and segments of the landscape scarred and destroyed. Often, conveniently, hitting worst those places that would traditionally, in-setting, be inhabited for the most part by various peoples of colour. Going into exhaustive detail would be extremely difficult, but keep in mind that the most heavily-devastated looking locations tend to be those that are inhabited by non-white people.

At least one of the nations destroyed, Halruaa, was actually the homeland of a long-running half-elf wizard character of mine at the time.

Most major magic-user characters suffered extreme maladies to their spellcasting, either killing them off or rendering them powerless.

In a series of unrelated but contemporary events, the entire elven and dwarven pantheons were radically altered. Most elven deities who weren’t Corellon Larethian were revealed to be aspects of non-elven deities, and around half of the elves themselves wound up being renamed to ‘eladrin’ to match the bullshit new elf subrace from the fourth edition books.

The drow pantheon was similarly culled until only Lolth remained, and as part of that they slew the goddess of good drow, Eilistraee. What happened to her followers is probably a good example of how there was a good deal of racism involved. Basically, the drow who followed her were ‘cleansed of the taint’ that had turned them into drow to begin with.

Including lightening their skin.

This is an event that Wizards of the Coast hasn’t really broadcast much after their reintroduction of Eilistraee, and it’s really not hard to see why they’ve minimised it.

The human gods didn’t fare much better. The entire Mulhorandi Pantheon was removed, because apparently having real-world Egyptian mythological gods around was a little too much for them. They also did the same with Tyr, who was originally from Norse mythology, though left Silvanus, Oghma, and Mielikki. Possibly because barely anyone pays attention to Celtic pantheon deities, and the latter Finnish deity was the patron goddess of a specifically popular character from the novels.

And between destroying half of the map, eliminating half of the pantheon full of various fan favourite gods, and killing off a lot of major magic-user characters, you’d think that would be considered a bad enough result.

But then there’s the timeskip.

Wizards of the Coast advanced the timeline by approximately one hundred and five years, therefore killing off literally every major human character who didn’t have some kind of magical way of extending their lifespan. And in addition to the effects of the Spellplague, brought in a variety of huge geopolitical changes that replaced major governments and kingdoms with new and nearly-unrecognisable versions that might have shared a name.

I’m not going to go into much more detail on various other changes, but keep in mind that this is only barely scratching the surface. There wasn’t a single region of the Forgotten Realms left unaltered or unmarred by this event, and it ultimately can’t be seen as anything other than an act of vandalism. It’s not even getting into the fact that, for instance, entire sections of the landscape of Toril were replaced by segments of another world entirely so they could justify the introduction of dragonborn as a core race.

Which is incidentally why I dislike the dragonborn.

The events of the fifth edition changeover worked to mitigate a lot of this, but the sheer extent of damage done is so much that the modern Forgotten Realms is still only a pale echo of its former self. All because they wanted to chase the audience of fucking World of Warcraft of all things.

Seriously, fuck Wizards of the Coast.

#4e negative #D&D 4e #the spellplague #we all get drafted into the edition war #wizards of the coast critical #wotc critical #forgotten realms #an old rant that's been a long time in the making

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pretty-bun · 5 years

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Which Clover Is Best? - An Analysis By Me

First and foremost, you must all know by now how much I love Clover. I mention her way too much on this blog, and here is my magnum opus – a comprehensive guide on Clover’s character in each version of the story, and my ranking of which Clover is best. Is this excessive? Of course, but I have no other way to use my Tuesday night. Do I have any idea how to analyse characters? Hell no, I’m using Wikihow to help me. Am I going to use my knowledge on Feminist literary theory? Fuck yeah I am.

But here we go. Here is my over analysis of Clover. Heart emoji, rabbit emoji, clover emoji.

_____

The Novel

“Four rabbits were crowded against the wire, pressing their noses through the mesh. Two – Laurel and Clover – were short-haired black Angoras. […] Clover, the Angora doe – a strong, active rabbit – was clearly excited by Hazel’s description and asked several questions about the warren and the downs.”

Clover in the context of the novel has no real role – she has been given no time for characterisation, as the only doe with any kind of real role is Hyzenthlay. However, Clover plays an importance part of the warren dynamics; she is the first rabbit to bear a litter in Watership Down.

This is a monumental moment for the warren, instantly assuring the rabbits that the warren will continue, if just for a little while, after they pass.

Using the concept of stock characters in fiction, you can attribute the character of “farmer’s daughter” to Clover. These stock characters are portrayed as desirable and naïve, and these characteristics can be seen in the above quote, and often the farmer’s daughter character will be community minded, a concept that is visible in that she is to breed and dig runs for the rest of the warren. But to limit her to such a simple standard can lead to detrimental readings of the story.

The language of the Watership Down novel is highly phallocentric, a term used by the post-structuralist theorist Jacques Derrida, and the phallocentric nature of the novel determines that the meaning is derived from masculine agenda, and the importance of it means that feminine jouissance – a feminine language derived from the French word for the female orgasm – is a deconstruction of the phallic language, threatening to shake the stability of it. The phallocentric culture is derived from binary opposites, such as male/female, language/silence, presence/absence etc., with the first word having meaning over the other. Feminist readings of the novel will note this, and this leads back to Clover in that she is the binary opposite from the masculine characters in the novel – where they have language and presence, she instead has silence and absence; she is only in the novel for a moment to birth the first litter of the down, and then she becomes a static character.

But the novel iteration of Clover is a realistic portrayal of rabbits in nature, so maybe its unimportant to focus on the feminist aspect of the novel, and in nature it is the does role to breed and dig.

However, in the context of each version of the story – novel, film, series and miniseries – Clover’s role is important, and that importance is told to the audience.

The Film

In the film, Clover has an extremely brief role in the film, and so there is not much to be said about her. The film counterpart of Clover is only added to further the plot of Hazel, rather than to further the plot of the film.

Her scenes could easily be taken from the film with little consequence, the only part which is needed is the part in which Hazel gets shot. In this version, Clover does not escape her hutch, and once freed from it, is immediately caught.

But her design is much cuter, in my opinion. Her white fur and sweet voice is once again indicative of her naïve curiosity to the outside world, with white often being used to describe characters of innocence and purity, but in some instances can be used to represent faith. As she is the reason why Hazel gets shot in the first place, the faith aspect could possibly be representative of death, especially considering how religious the Lapine world is.

The Television Series

Clover in the children’s series gets more characterisation than the version that exists in both the novel and film, although her characterisation is still limited.

Clover seems to be rather motherly, as she is seen comforting both Pipkin and Blackberry on differing occasions. But her main role is, once again, to be a love interest. This is a reoccurring concept with her character, however in this version, her love interest is Hawkbit, and this is only touched upon in the last season.

She is much more feminine in this version, mostly by virtue of the story revolving more around human characteristics of the characters, and her outward physic is much more sexualised than the other iterations of her design, but this is not necessarily bad, and is more an artistic choice to take. Once again, this is because she is a stylised character in this version compared to the realistic version seen in the novel and film.

Clover has a girl next door kind of quality to her, with a sense of basic wholesomeness as her main focal point; she isn’t a bad character, however is not a good character either. This was likely not intended, and probably the result of no characterisation set for her.

Clover is not the focal point of any larger plot, and mostly sticks to expanding on her friendship with Blackberry and her romantic intentions for Hawkbit. She is just above the film in terms of actual character, however on my own personal opinion, I find her to be the second best designed Clover out of the four, with the films version the best. I think her design is reflective of her character; she is bigger and softer looking than the other rabbits, which leads back into her originally being a hutch rabbit, and her proportions are much more pleasant than some characters (coughcoughprimrosecoughcough), although she does fall victim to the season 3 design change.

Her original colour is a soft peachy pink, which doesn’t feel at all like it clashes with the rest of the colour palette (not in the way I feel Pipkin did), but her season 3 design is a much harsher yellow. It was not at all a good change, and felt totally out of place. Season 3 also took out many of her softer features, such as her slightly rounder physic, and the tufts of fur which gave her a fluffier look.

Season three introduced a much better pacing to the overall show, but failed in the design aspect miserably, and it’s a shame that Clover fell victim to it.

The Miniseries

Clover in the miniseries is both better and worse than all the other versions, but the things the miniseries did better will come before the things they did worse.

Clover received a lot of characterisation, which finally placed importance on her once again. Although she is not stated to be the mother of the warrens first litter, her importance comes from a different and more empowering source – she helps plan the escape form Efrafa. In a story filled with minimal roles for females to play, changing the narrative to incorporate strong female leads who act independently is fundamental. Alongside this, it also adds something that has never been in the other adaptations. By doing this, the miniseries becomes its own work and not just a CGI version of the film.

Her design is also interesting and different; the muddy browns of her coat give her a much more realistic feel, while still making her separate from the other designs of her. Her coat patterns are beautiful as well and give the audience a tell that she is not a wild rabbit in the same way the plump look of the television series Clover tells the audience she is from a hutch.

That is where the praises stop.

While she received much more characterisation in the miniseries than any other version, her characterisation is almost for the worst. Almost. She and Hazel fall into the trap of archetypal Lovers – this aspect of both of their characters could have been a good dynamic if the writers hadn’t taken them a step too far. The importance scene in all the other adaptations where Fiver finds Hazel after he is shot, a scene to highlight their deep relationship as brothers, is replaced with Clover finding Hazel in the drain. They barely had any interaction up to this point, so Hazel playing damsel in distress to his girlfriend comes off as incredibly cheap as it completely disregards the bond of Hazel and Fiver. Hazel’s motive to take does from Efrafa becomes less about liberation and more about saving his girlfriend, which completely undermines Hazel’s original character. This goes for Hyzenthlay, too; by having Clover take her place in most of the scenes in Efrafa, it makes Hyzenthlay a static character who doesn’t help free the rabbits in an act of mercy.

The writers could have had their lifted characterisation of Clover and kept Hyzenthlay as she is supposed to be if they had just held back from taking Clover too far.

So which Clover is best?

Based on my own personal opinion, I believe that the television series Clover is best – her design is cute for most of the shows life, and she gets a level of character while still letting the lead characters lead. In basis of character and impact on the story, the film’s Clover comes in last (although if this was based on aesthetics, she’d be first). The difference between the novel and miniseries isn’t much; they’re almost on par with each other, but it bugs me that Clover’s miniseries version takes so much away from the original characters so she comes in third.

With that, here’s the final ranking:

1. TV Series

2. Novel

3. Miniseries

4. Film

#watership down #this was almost 2000 words yall #not a waste of time tho #tbh I have no idea if my ramblings on the feminist literary theory make sense #yeah I still have a lot of feelings about the miniseries

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douchebagbrainwaves · 4 years

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YOU GUYS I JUST THOUGHT OF THIS

I guarantee you'll be surprised by the consequences of the licensing deal for DOS, just as it's easier to get people to remember just one quote about programming, it would be more interested in an essay about why something isn't the problem, even though you know that free with just two exclamation points has a probability of. Then when you reach for the sledgehammer; if their kids won't listen to them, because you can, to a limited extent, simulate a closure a function that takes a number n, and returns a function that refers to variables defined in enclosing scopes by defining a class with one method and a field to replace each variable from an enclosing scope.1 The US Is Not Yet a Police State. Better Judgement Needed If the number of users and the problem is usually artificial and predetermined. There are two main kinds of error that get in the way you'd expect any subculture to be, in certain specific moments like your family, this month a fixed amount you need to simplify and clarify, and the threat to potential investors and they hope this will make it big is not simply to give them at least 20 years, and then at each point the way such a project would play out? You could do it than literally making a mark on the world.2 I'll come running.3 They make such great CEOs. First of all, for the most part they punt. For all its power, Silicon Valley is that you get discouraged when no one else at the time.

But there is also huge source of implicit tags that they ignore: the text within web links.4 It was more prestigious to be one of those things until you strike something. Both self-control and experience have this effect: to eliminate the random biases that come from your own circumstances, and tricks played by the artist.5 It's very common for startups to exist.6 But even in the mating dance, patents are part of the mob, stand as far away from it myself; I see it there on the page and quickly move on to the next step, whatever that is. Meanwhile the iPhone is selling better than ever. 4 million is starting to appear in the mainstream media came from. People's best friends are likely to be careful here to distinguish between them. If you have multiple founders, esprit de corps binds them together in one place for a certain percentage of your startup. There is more to be actively curious. Most CEOs delegate taste to a subordinate.7 The closest thing seemed to be synonymous with quiet, so I won't repeat it all here.

The nature of the application domain.8 Mean People Fail November 2014 It struck me recently how few of the startups we fund. Angels don't like publicity.9 That can be useful when it's a crappy version one made by a company called Y Combinator that said Y Combinator does seed funding for startups is way less than the measurement error. But there is no argument about that—at least in computational bottlenecks. And in the film industry, though producers may second-guess directors, the director controls most of what is now called VoIP, and it will take off. Instead of bubbling up from the bottom, by overpaying unions, the traditional news media, and the techniques I used may be applicable to ideas in general.10 If someone proves a new theorem, it takes some work by the reader to decide whether or not to upvote it. But because patent trolls don't make anything physical.11

They work well enough in everyday life.12 This site isn't lame. It's all evasion.13 A comparatively safe and prosperous career with some automatic baseline prestige is dangerously tempting to someone young, who hasn't thought much about it, and the path to intelligence through carefully selected self-indulgence by mimicking more virtuous types. Spend little. Someone like Bill Gates? In the last 20 years, grown into a monstrosity. I'm not writing here about Java which I have never seen any of ITA's code, but according to one of the causes of the increase in disagreement, there's a good chance the person at the next table could help you at all. Also, startups are an all-star team. I can solve that problem by stopping entirely. Wouldn't it start to seem lame?

It would be a good idea.14 I read most things I write out loud at least once a week, cooked for the first couple generations.15 I'm not saying it's correct, incidentally, but it happens surprisingly rarely. I've learned about VC while working on it for a couple years for another company for two years. The word boss is derived from a talk at Oscon 2004.16 I assumed I'd learn what in college.17 But also it will tell you to spend too much. The problem is not the one that is. Inexperienced angels often get cold feet.18

Even more important than others? File://localhost/home/patrick/Documents/programming/python projects/UlyssesRedux/corpora/unsorted/schlep. But after a while I learned the trick of speaking fast.19 Why wouldn't young professionals make lots of new things I want to reach users, you need colleagues to brainstorm with, to talk you out of stupid decisions, and to analyze based on what a few people think in our insular little Web 2.20 Fortunately if this does happen it will take a big bite out of your round. What difference did it make if other manufacturers could offer DOS too? One of the things I had to condense the power of compound growth. Then they're mystified to find that there are degrees of coolness. It requires the kind of intensity and dedication from programmers that they will always be made to develop new technologies at a slower rate than the rest, and the second is whatever specific lies Xes differentiate themselves by believing. This bites you twice: they get less done, but they need more help because life is so precarious for them. Unless they've tried not taking board seats and found their returns are lower, they're not drifting.

Programmers don't use launch-fast-and-so is an animal.21 But it is very hard for someone who publishes online.22 Not because starting one's own company seemed too ambitious, but because it didn't look like a car spinning its wheels. It's hard for them to change. Experts have given Wikipedia middling reviews, but they weren't going to wait. Wufoo seem to have any teeth, and the useful half is the payload. This is arguably a permissible tactic.

Most books on startups also seem to be joined together, but really the thesis is an optimistic one—that everyone should go and start a startup during college, but it was simpler than they thought. I do in proper essays. Because they personally liked it. Game We saw this happen so often that we made up a name for what I learned from this experiment is that if VCs are only doing it in the plainest words and you'll be free again.23 That's the worst thing about our software. Now the results seem inspired by the Scientologist principle that what's true is what's true for you. Also, the money might come in several tranches, the later ones subject to various conditions—though this is apparently more common in deals with lower-tier investors sometimes give offers with very short fuses, because they get their ideas? If you do that you raise too many expectations. There's no reason to believe there is any field in which the most efficient solutions win, rather than working on the company to become valuable, and you don't have significant success to cheer you up when things go wrong.24

Notes

That's a good nerd, just that if the statistics they use; if anything they could to help you even be tempted to do is adjust the weights till the 1920s to financing growth with the other hand, launching something small and traditional proprietors on the admissions committee knows the professors who wrote the recommendations. If you're doing. There were a property of the world will sooner or later.

And yet I think it's publication that makes curators and dealers use neutral-sounding language. Google and Facebook are driven by money, then you're being gratuitously troublesome. We walked with him for the next round.

People were more dependent on banks for capital for expansion.

That's not a remark about the idea upon have different time quanta. Since the remaining power of Democractic party machines, but since it was 10. The chief lit a cigarette.

Without the prospect of publication, the average Edwardian might well guess wrong.

In fact, for example I've deliberately avoided saying whether the 25 people have responded to this talk, so that you can't help associating it with the founders' salaries to the prevalence of systems of seniority. Moving large amounts of new stock. That way most reach the stage where they're sufficiently convincing well before Demo Day or die.

This form of religious wars or undergraduate textbooks so determinedly neutral that they're really saying is they want to learn.

This is an interesting sort of dress rehearsal for the first 40 employees, with the issues they have that glazed over look.

According to Sports Illustrated, the first duty of the anti-dilution protections.

Currently we do at least seem to understand technology because they could not process it.

Doing a rolling close usually prevents this. The liking you have to replace you. Convertible debt is usually slow growth or excessive spending rather than given by other people.

Investors are fine with funding nerds. Cascading menus would also be argued that we wouldn't have the concept of the war, federal tax receipts have stayed close to the inane questions of the Fabian Society, it often means the startup will be, unchanging, but Joshua Schachter tells me it was wiser for them by the National Center for Education Statistics, the activation energy to start with consumer electronics and to run an online service. Seeming like they worked together mostly at night.

Instead of making n constant, it is. I started using it out of their due diligence tends to happen fast, like good scientists, motivated less by financial rewards than by you based on respect for their judgement. If you're sufficiently good bet, why not turn your company into one? Which explains the astonished stories one always hears about VC while working on such an interview.

Com/spam. So if you're a YC startup you can do it to colleagues. Doh.

That's the difference between good and bad measurers. I get the money, then their incentives aren't aligned with some question-begging answer like it's inappropriate, while she likes getting attention in the nature of server-based applications, and how unbelievably annoying it is. That's probably too much to hope for, but they can't teach students how to deal with the other direction Y Combinator.

The downside is that there's more of the expert they send to look you over.

If he's bad at it he'll work very hard to pick a date, because the median case.

They're motivated by examples of how hard they work. They're so selective that they won't be able to hire a lot of people like them—people who have money to spend a lot of classic abstract expressionism is doodling of this type: lies told by older siblings. But no planes crash if your goal is to make money from the Ordinatio of Duns Scotus: Philosophical Writings, Nelson, 1963, p. Structurally the idea that they probably wouldn't be irrational.

They thought most programming would be to say for sure whether, e. Travel has the same investor to do it to them, but investors can get done before that. To get all that matters, just as he or she would be on demand, because universities are where a lot of startups will generally raise large amounts of our own, like a wave. So as a naturalist.

It's interesting to consider behaving the opposite. Which in turn forces Digg to respond with extreme countermeasures.

Maybe that isn't really working bad unit economics, typically and then being unable to raise money, you can base brand on anything with a slight disadvantage, but historical abuses are easier for us, they are bleeding cash really fast. Though in fact it may be underestimating VCs. 25. And I've never heard of many startups from Philadelphia.

For example, understanding French will help dispel the cloud of semi-sacred mystery that surrounds a hot startup. Those investors probably thought they'd been pretty clever by getting such a dangerous mistake to believe that successful founders still get rich will use this technique, you'll be well on your product, just harder.

Common Lisp for, but those are probably not do this right you'd have reached after lots of back and forth. This is isomorphic to the company's PR people worked hard to get a real partner. In fact since 2 1.

I'm not saying that's all prep schools is to give them sufficient activation energy for enterprise software.

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thelightningawardsofficial · 5 years

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Review | K A T H A R O S

Judged by Shawn (Snowwhitewolf09)

Category: I'm Not A Mary Sue

[ Author: ArimaMary ]

>Title (5/5): I'm a sucker for Greek and Latin words, and Katharos is a word I find to be on the beautiful side of the Greek language. The title itself gives much of the work immediately, the chosen word obviously being a reference to Kiyoshi's emphasis on purity. Ergo, readers know what to expect the story to revolve around. However, I like the charm that it has to it, a lingering sense of mystique that persists.

>Summary (7/10): It's short and sweet, and manages to summarise what Katharos is. I am just docking a few points because I feel that you could have added a bit more to give a better picture of the story and hook readers. I also wouldn't really call Kiyoshi an 'average student' of Teikoku, since he seems to be more of an outcast if he gets flack for being a "foreigner".

>Plot (22/25) -> [17.6/20]: The overall plot is straightforward, and there aren't any twists and turns that make it complex. It might not be an intriguing stand-alone story, but since the book is a spin-off that is supposed to highlight the character and philosophy of Kiyoshi, I'm lenient regarding that matter.

I like how each chapter shows an important part of Kiyoshi's personality. They are well-picked, highlighting different facets each time, and adding a little bit more background on why Kiyoshi thinks like this or acts like that. I didn't feel a 'filler chapter' and that gives you quite a boon. The pacing was also adjusted enough to show the perspectives, though perhaps it leans a bit to the slower side.

The way I see it, though it is in third person, the narrator is attuned with Kiyoshi, appropriately moving slowly where Kiyoshi would be slow himself, like the almost-drooling-over-Kidou scene. Sometimes, it would feel a bit dragging, but that doesn't affect it too much, since it is covered with splendid character portrayal.

I didn't give you full points because the plot didn't make me crave to know what would come next (Partially because of the speed, and partially because there wasn't really much action to be looking out for), and it feels a tad lacking in events due to brevity and (I assume) the focus.

Regardless, the plot itself managed to bring out Kiyoshi's character with events, dialogue, and the pacing, so kudos to you.

>Characterization (18/20) -> [13.5/15]: I've little to say other than you've done great with Kiyoshi. After going through some of the chapters, his actions seemed to become easy to understand, since his character had been shown well. I enjoyed seeing his convictions and his vulnerabilities, as well as his view on 'purity'.

If purity is staying true to oneself, I find Kiyoshi to be creating many exceptions: he is merely staying true to what he feels at the moment, believing that it is his true self. He says rather early that he needs nobody else, reinforcing what he felt at the time. Later on, he shows that he actually is rather lonely, and convinces himself to mend his relationship with Keima. It's an interesting, yet utterly desperate (fitting of his character), way to view purity.

I do have a problem with how he saw Teikoku as his Paradise, as the earlier outburst gave me the vibes that he was not exactly fine with his place in school. Considering his vulnerable side that is shown later on, such irritability rubs me off as the result of having a negative view of the people in his school. Perhaps he frequently convinces himself that Teikoku is Paradise (which is why he also had his view of Teikoku changed into some sort of place of dark deals). Maybe it just strikes me as odd.

Keima is also well-done, but I honestly feel like he just seems a bit lacklustre before he talks with Kiyoshi about mending their relationship. That said, I look forward to seeing a bit more of him.

Grammar and Writing Style (13/15): While I did spot a few sentences that were oddly constructed (either run-ons or have pronouns that seemed to be ambiguous) and 'Hachidan' alternated with 'Hachi-dan', that is not what I want to mainly discuss.

The way you unfurled Kiyoshi's character was made effective by the well-written descriptions and the use of figurative language/symbolism. Of course, the most prominent would be the mention of the Garden of Eden, as it was what summed up Kiyoshi's motivations.

I also appreciated the use of 'Kin' as a human face for weakness and past mistakes, as though I am not sure who this Kin is, Kin has come to personify concepts that Keima and Kiyoshi find negative. I also particularly liked how his box of dreams was a literal cardboard box that had his hopes and dreams contained within—now that he was dead-set on following them again, they did not need to be boxed up and kept to the side anymore, but brandished. The hissatsu of Keima comes to me as a sort of representation of his reformation—Cortana was the blade that had its tip cut off, similar to how the once forceful Keima was trying to cut off his 'edge'—and makes me think of how much he contrasts with Sir Tristan of the Round Table (Tristan being the sorrowful Knight). He also had the Tristian-Igraine relationship with Kiyoshi back then, as Tristian married another person named Igraine, but always compared her to his first love.

It was a little hard to catch, but I saw a subtle "light at the end of the tunnel" derivation which made me read again just to make sure. As Kiyoshi was doubting whether or not he would actually be able to reach his dream through these dirty methods, walking through uncertainty, he drew nearer to the end. That was where he would face his dream. The scene was a transition from doubt to hope.

There's also this little bit that gives me a better view of Kiyoshi and Keima's relationship. I didn't get it at first, but I then realised it after studying up the names. Kiyoshi was the dragon to Keima's knight back then, reflected in their names Ryuugamine and Keima. Kiyoshi was the one who challenged Keima's moral code.

The mention of a red oni brought into my mind the 'red oni, blue oni' trope. The red oni is a symbol of passion and desire, or simply emotions. The red oni within Kiyoshi was being quenched, the void of loneliness being filled with the forgotten feeling of having someone to complete you.

I had to dock points for the little mistakes and some portions with descriptions that seemed to be a tad long, but those are just minor problems.

>Originality (9/10) -> [4.5/5]: Okay, I docked a point for the Teikoku Spy trope, and the lack of much things that are 'shockingly original'.

However, I will say that Kiyoshi himself is someone I find to be original in some ways amongst IE fanfiction characters. His desperate view of purity is something I haven't really encountered, and I find his foreign blood to be uncommon (Though Suabara also has foreign blood). I also liked how Kiyoshi was learning Killer Slide, a hissatsu that doesn't get much love, as it usually is seen as a show of brutality.

Also... Kiyoshi's later motivation for being a spy is refreshing to see. It was first much like desperation, but later on hope and optimism. Guess Keima did rub off on him.

>Feels Factor (14/15): I have to say, you made me feel much for Kiyoshi. He reminds me much of a friend of mine, and I sometimes I would be whelmed by Kiyoshi's shows of his desperation to cling to purity and what little bit of his dreams he has left. His mother was portrayed well enough for me to almost want to slap her across the face, while the contrasts made between Kiyoshi and Keima's backgrounds made it much more difficult to not feel anything for the blond.

I felt less for Keima, though it was to be a given since he was not the focus. Nonetheless, your words managed to make me connect with his doubts about how he treats others, though I feel like there could have been a bit more to him.

Seeing Kiyoshi come to terms with his dream and his interactions with Keima was a blessing. You averted one of the things that I find too often—a spy doing it because of some threat. You gave Kiyoshi a positive reason to become a spy, which is not to prevent damage to himself, but to finally reach his dreams that had been suppressed.

I had to dock a point because of Keima and how I wasn't particularly craving to know what would happen next, but that's minor.

🅞🅒 🅡🅔🅥🅘🅔🅦 -> [➊➍.➊/➊➎]

>Name(5/5): Ryuugamine means "dragon's peak", and is not too odd of a surname. The contrast with Keima's name gives it a little bit more substance, though the name itself isn't telling of too much. Additionally, I thought of the Seiryū, and how its connection to Wood fitted soundly with the elemental affinity of Killer Slide.

Kiyoshi's name reflects who he is, as well as the ideal that he strives to achieve. Ultimate purity, stainless, at all costs. Kiyoshi's name means "pure," and is fitting.

>Appearance (6/8): I get enough description from Kiyoshi to have a general idea of what he would look like in a crowd, but details of his physical appearance aren't as focused on as Kidou Yuuto's.

I like the little detail that he likely has some pimples on his face, as it makes him look more human in a world where practically every character looks like their face never needed cream nor shaving their entire life.

I had to dock points for the scarcity of description. Aside from the colour of his hair, the presence of red-rimmed glasses, and his pimples, there is little else. His physique nor skin colour isn't touched upon, even his eye colour isn't something I've found.

Furthermore, I cannot seem to get around him being called foreign-looking because of his blond hair, considering the fact that there are many who also have blond hair, and that green hair isn't anything odd.

>Personality(10/10): Kiyoshi's personality is definitely well-developed and well-shown. I've already touched most of this in the Characterisation, so it'll be redundant here. You've done a good job of showing how strongly he clings to his idea of purity. Especially that fixation on Kidou, that is almost unsettlingly detailed.

The development of Kiyoshi's character with Keima as the trigger was pleasing. Early on, he was against having friends, and came off as an individual who was fiercely independent. Just as he was back then, according to his talks with Keima. But talking with Keima showed that Kiyoshi still had the capacity to truly connect; it had only been boxed up and put to the side like his dreams.

>Strengths and Weaknesses(11/12): His vulnerabilities are well-exploited. His desperation made him lean to Kageyama, and his hesitation to act upon his passion was made apparent many times. You managed to show Kiyoshi's weaknesses and bloodily ripped them out for people to see.

His strengths don't really shine all that much, though they do show themselves. The most prominent is his dedication, especially to his own idea of purity and his dream. Kiyoshi's skills were mentioned or shown, though not particularly highlighted—he has great body coordination, notable skills with technology, and a commendable cooking ability. It's a bit hard to see, but Kiyoshi also has a sort of childish charm at times that slips through the cracks.

>Interaction With Canon (10/10): It doesn't wreck or affect canon all that much, and happens at a time when Teikoku likely would have sent spies to Kidokawa, so no problem here.

>Relationships With Canon Characters (5/5): It's mostly Kidou, and they share a relationship I see as something that wouldn't be off. Kidou maintains an attitude towards him that is like most Teikoku subordinates, while the crush that Kiyoshi has doesn't seem to far of a stretch considering his status and charm.

Kiyoshi's relationship with Kageyama isn't expanded much, but it can be seen that he has a pretty... typical relationship with the man. It is not odd, rather it is something that is reasonable given Kageyama's notorious reputation. Kiyoshi seems to see him as the blood-stained path that would lead him to his dream, the evil benefactor that offers him his deepest desire. He sees that Kageyama is shady, and Kiyoshi seems like he does not want to concern himself with the Coach anymore than he has to, but he is willing to put those aside for football.

[Raw] 74.6/100 + 47/50 [Scaled] 88.7/100 [Final] 88.7%

Banner by -artxyuki

#review #fifth critique #katharos #inazuma eleven #original characters #pre-canon #prequel #slice of life #introspection #friendship #ryuugamine kiyoshi #kirishima keima #short story #I'm not a mary sue

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zdbztumble · 5 years

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Botching Backwards and Forwards, Or: Today’s KH Ramble, Part I

As I play through KH III, I’ve also been catching up with the series by watching the Let’s Plays of the other games done by Team Four Star. Because they didn’t play through Coded and only watched the cutscenes from 358/2 Days, that means that there’s only one game on their playlist that I haven’t played myself, that game being Dream Drop Distance. From what I can tell, its gameplay operates on a similar mechanic to Birth by Sleep, which I enjoyed quite a bit. I frankly prefer the Command Decks to what we have in the console games. DDD making levels out of some left-field choices in Disney worlds was a pleasant surprise too. For the Fantasia world alone, I’ll have to consider picking DDD up when I’m not facing a month of utter financial ruin.

And yet, between the two of them, BbS and DDD are responsible for nearly everything wrong with the story of Kingdom Hearts up to this point IMO. Coded got the ball rolling by opening back up a story that had already been satisfyingly ended in KH II, but these two titles do the bulk of the damage to a series that, up to that point, had handled its story pretty well.

Starting with BbS, I freely admit that some of my issues with it boil down to a matter of preference. Turning the Keyblade into a (once) fairly common weapon with many wielders, with a history detailing a great Keyblade War and a test for a Mark of Mastery...all of that wasn’t to my taste, but I can’t say that there’s anything in principle wrong with it. It isn’t necessarily out of place for this series, and the one major wrinkle in continuity it causes (Keyblades choosing wielders) could be squared fairly easily. A prequel focusing on hitherto unmentioned characters rather than the series protagonists isn’t an inherently wrong choice either, though I’ll have more to say about that in Part II of this rant. That I don’t find Terra, Ven, or Aqua terribly interesting as characters is mostly a matter of preference as well, though I do think Terra’s descent into the darkness relies too much on sheer idiocy, and I will admit that Aqua is possibly the most fun player character in this series with her plethora of magic spells. But where I more seriously fault BbS (and Coded, for opening this door) is in its changes to Xehanort’s plots and backstory, and in undermining one of the best thematic ideas from the original Kingdom Hearts game.

"Ansem” turning out to be the true villain of KH I after two-thirds of the gameplay pass under the assumption that it’s the confederation of Disney villains was an effective twist that let an original character, more comfortably of the Square Enix half of the crossover, shine. “Ansem” turning out to be Xehanort the renegade apprentice, with his Nobody Xemnas the leader of Organization XIII, was hardly the most organic twist in the world; I don’t think anyone would go back to KH I and say “oh, it was so obvious, how did I not see it before?” But it made for another genuinely surprising twist in KH II. A villain can only have so many twists and secret plans, however, before effective surprises become cheap gimmicks, and any ability to take their current scheme seriously evaporates.

The revelation that Xehanort is in fact a transparently evil old man who, years before any of the events that led to KH I, plotted to synthesize a X-Blade and bring about a second Keyblade War (with less than ten combatants, so it’d be more of a Keyblade Skirmish) in what basically amounts to a mad scientist’s scheme in fantasy genre clothing, was the breaking point for me. This is a common trap of both prequels and conventional sequels; trying to tie too many things into a small group of characters, or in this case, a single character. Making Xehanort into a villain that spans multiple generations, the man who set into motion everything that preceded KH I and is indirectly responsible for Sora, Kairi, and Riku becoming Keyblade Wielders, can seem like an expansion of the universe on paper, but in execution, it’s a contraction. It reduces too many events down to factors in a single character’s actions. The fact that his scheme is no more coherent than those from KH I and II doesn’t help, nor does the fact that the storyline that most directly leads into Xehanort’s role in those games - Terra’s - is so transparently ripped from Revenge of the Sith.

But Xehanort’s abrupt reentry into the story isn’t truly maddening - not in BbS, at least. For me, the worst part of the BbS story is how it retroactively changes Sora’s. I’d go so far as to say that BbS is to Sora what Dragon Ball: Minus is to Bardock and Goku.

Don’t misunderstand me on that point: BbS is nowhere near as bad a game as Dragon Ball: Minus is a comic. What I mean by that is: prior to Dragon Ball: Minus, most people took Bardock: the Father of Goku to be canon. And, in that TV special, the history given to Goku, derived from what was said in the manga at the time, was that he was of no account by the standards of Saiyan society. He was a no-account spawn of a low-class warrior, sent off to a far-flung planet to clear out its worthless inhabitants. That low-class warrior who fathered him was as ruthless and mercenary as any typical Saiyan, and while he was stronger than the average low-class fighter and was given psychic insight into the fate of his people, Bardock was ultimately just another Saiyan doomed to die and be forgotten by time. Nothing in Goku’s origins is special or fated, which makes his accidental amnesia and eventual surpassing of Vegeta, the supposed Saiyan ideal, more remarkable. By transforming Bardock into a more tamed Saiyan with a close familial bond to his mate, who sends his son to Earth for safety in a blatant rip-off of Superman’s origins, Goku and Bardock both become too special, Goku’s turning into a kind-hearted child becomes too telegraphed, and their stories become too beholden to “chosen one” cliches.

And that is what BbS does to Sora, Riku, and to a lesser extent Kairi. That all three of them just happen, in their childhoods, to have had contact with Keyblade Wielders who left a personal mark upon them - and, in Sora’s case, literally took up residence inside him - is just too pat. It makes the three of them ending up with Keyblades too easy, too predestined. This hurts all three of them, but Sora most of all. Ven looking like Roxas and Vanitas looking like Sora, is a massive headache (and yes, I’m aware that there is at least some explanation of that), but the big loss is in the thematic content of the story, and there is where the comparisons to Dragon Ball: Minus really come into play.

Like a pre-Minus Goku, pre-BbS Sora is not special, in any way, at the start of KH I. He’s an ordinary young teen, plucky and affable and just a bit lazy, with a burgeoning quasi-romantic interest in his friend Kairi and an in-all-things rivalry with his best friend Riku. Compared to Riku, Sora comes up short in pretty much every area. Riku, at first glance, is faster, stronger, smarter, more dedicated, more fearless, and more capable. If you were going to choose one of those two to be the fated hero wielding a magic blade to save the worlds from darkness, Riku’s the better candidate by every metric, on paper. And, in fact, the Keyblade does choose Riku. The whole “chosen one” cliche is subverted in KH I in a brilliant way by essentially having destiny make the wrong choice. That Sora only gets the Keyblade by accident, loses it to its intended master, but quickly reclaims it on the strength of his accomplishments and his purity - that he earns it - is one of my favorite things in this entire series, and is a wonderful thematic idea and moral. Giving Sora and Riku both a fated “touched by a master” backstory kills so much of that idea, and it’s enough to make me wish that there was no BbS, as fun as the gameplay can be.

Ironically, DDD tries to have its cake and eat it too by playing up the fact that Sora wasn’t chosen by the Keyblade, but the damage was done by that point. And DDD further undermines that initial concept in the way it writes Sora, and his relationship with Riku. For one thing, Sora in DDD seems so much dumber than he was in previous games. Up to that point, he’d been written as an upbeat young teen, possessed of a certain level of immaturity and naivete, but always determined to help save the day, and more than capable of getting serious when needed. DDD abruptly starts to portray him as more of a doofy shonen hero, without any clear motivation and to no real purpose. It also introduces the idea that the central dynamic in Sora and Riku’s friendship is that Sora lifts Riku’s spirits while Riku takes up the slack from Sora’s sloppiness and carelessness. I have a real problem with that presentation, because it just isn’t true.

If you go back and look at KH I, those early Destiny Islands scenes set Sora up as the underdog to Riku’s Big Man on Campus. Riku jokes that he’s the only one working on the raft, and Kairi remarks that “he’s changed,” but he doesn’t come off as someone needing to perk up. And with one of the first challenges of the game being Sora gathering raft supplies, it doesn’t seem that Riku needs to take up that much slack either. In any event, over the course of KH I, Riku’s the one who drops the slack and falls into darkness, with Sora literally having to stop him from doing horrible things. And it’s Sora who continues on through CoM and KH II, saving the worlds. While Riku does appear here and there to aid Sora, his aid doesn’t come in the form of “taking up slack” or cleaning up after messes Sora leaves; Sora, Donald, and Goofy are still able to save the day by their own skill in each world. This whole notion, and Sora’s more dim-witted persona, seem invented, if not from whole cloth, then from very little that was previously established.

And again, there doesn’t seem to be a clear motive, unless it’s to highlight the differences between Sora and Riku and give more justification to Riku getting the Mark of Mastery when Sora wasn’t. But the writing doesn’t give a coherent through-line to that idea, nor does it sufficiently justify Sora not becoming a Master. Had the game actively told a story of turning the tables, and made a point to stress the idea that Riku’s fully reformed and that Sora was slipping up, then I’d be more forgiving (even if I still wouldn’t like the idea), but the work just isn’t there.

I’ll admit that there’s a certain amount of bias in my assessment; I’ve never liked Riku as a character. As a teen playing KH I for the first time, I found it easy to project my dislike of certain people IRL onto him, and in the years since, I’ve continued to find that the manner of his turn to darkness in KH I makes it very hard to accept him back into the fold with Sora and the others. He’s also a lousy player character in Reverse/Rebirth and in KH III IMO. But I accept that he’s the deuteragonist, and that his story since KH I has been one of redemption. In principle, a game that builds him up as a character and lets him save the day is fine. But the manner in which it was done in DDD was all wrong. And to an extent, the changes made to his and Sora’s friendship, and to Sora’s personality, have all carried over into KH III, which is even more frustrating.

And, speaking of things carried over...DDD is where Xehanort gets completely ridiculous IMO. Having pulled a third twist that he was actually an ancient Keyblade Master seeking to provoke a war, now there’s a fourth twist where his younger self has been traveling through time (by ridiculous means) to ensure that the fifth twist - that all that business about Nobodies having no hearts was a lie, and that the real Organization XIII exists to create thirteen Horcruxes vessels for Xehanort’s heart, so that there can be thirteen darknesses to face the seven lights in the Keyblade War (which still seems short of the numbers you’d need for an actual war, but whatever). The whole business about “recompletion” allowing an original person to revive if their Heartless and Nobody are destroyed is already enough of a contrivance to bring the original Xehanort back, but time travel and heart-splitting is even more absurd. And I still haven’t been able to figure out how “Ansem” and Xemnas can be back in action, even with the time travel aspect.

Recompletion also means that DDD brings back the rest of Organization XIII. I consider nearly all of them to be glorified henchmen, possessed of a gimmick for combat and a single personality trait at best, so their revival - and their cameos in BbS - do nothing for me. A big exception to that is Axel, but if I don’t care much for Riku, I can’t stand Axel. He comes off as what an “edgy” teenage writer would come up with for a “cool” character in a bad first stab at fiction. From his character design to his abused catchphrase, everything about him pisses me off. His one saving grace in KH II was that he sacrifices himself, and nothing undermines a sacrifice like a contrived way around death. That he’s become a Keyblade Wielder, and one of the Seven Guardians of Light, is ridiculous to me, and I’m not sure if I can think of a more blatant example of a writer’s pet character being so inorganically shoved to the forefront of a story that supposedly isn’t about them.

DDD also started to open the door to the possibility of Roxas and Namine being restored. That idea is less annoying to me than any of these others, but it’s still a mistake IMO. That Roxas and Namine both ultimately elect to give up their lives as individuals to return Sora and Kairi to their full selves, accepting their fate so that others can live more fully, is a bittersweet and touching concept, and one that lets “death” have some real consequences and the happy ending of KH II come with a price. I hate seeing that undermined, and I’m frankly frustrated by how much of KH III’s front half involved chatter about Roxas.

And speaking of KH III...that’s where Part II comes in.

ADDENDUM: Another thing about DDD that I feel undermines Sora is that, while writing him dumber, the game also hypes him up more than he ever was in the past. It’s the same problem as Harry Potter; for all that series’ virtues, constantly pointing out how special Harry is can end up taking away from his character by making his unique traits too ubiquitous. Other characters constantly pointing out how kind and loving and easy to bond with Sora is undermines that trait by over-playing it and turning it into an exercise in “tell, don’t show.”

#critique #commentary #kingdom hearts #birth by sleep #dream drop distance #disney #z's crits

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inkblotstuff-blog · 5 years

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Black and Beyond

“In order for light to shine, darkness must be present”- Anonymous

Close your eyes: you see a space. It’s empty, it’s dark. While your eyes are closed, think of the words that come to your mind when I say the word “Black”. The most common answers I’ve heard are – Dark, Fear, Nothingness, Empty, Death, Evil, to name but a few. When I asked a bunch of writers in a group discussion, their responses amounted to and rested on the fact that most observations and insights fell under the category of negative connotations.

Why is it that this colour which is a contradiction in itself, attracts much more negativity than it deserves? I decided to dive in and look at various areas where black goes against these misconceptions. I think the best way to begin is to know that Black is literally the absence of colour. This contradicts the phrase “colour black”.

If we look at the colour pigments like RGB or CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Krypton(black) Red Green and Blue mixed together give us black, and the colour scheme CMYK consists of the colour black. In the world of Physics, fast rotation of the colour wheel gives us white, whereas, if all the colours in the colour wheel were mixed together in pigment form, the colour obtained at the very end is a dark hue (black). This in a way twists the theory that black is colourless. In fact, it houses all the colours.

Emo and Goth cultures are two of the most common cultures that incorporate black in their attire. While Emo cultures derived their style out of the music they listened to (mainly Punk), Goth culture emerged from an offshoot of the post Punk period. The Goth culture dates back to the Gothic and Victorian era attires and styling. Emo culture focuses more on styling that incorporates black and music band t-shirts. The similarity is that both these groups associate with the colour black, because it binds them as a community.

A misconception exists with the term Emo. A lot of people who are “Emo” are categorised as depressed, sad, suicidal and the colour black seems to enhance those assumptions even more. Such people are said to have pasts of hurting themselves, and always being extremely quiet. People have branded them as “Emotional”. Speaking to a fellow student of mine who identified themselves as Emo, said “Emo doesn’t mean Emotional. Rather, it means Emotive”. Emo people are more in touch with their feelings. They are sensitive and express their feelings and so does their music”.

Comparison is one of the most visible ways of knowing the differences between objects, materials, colours and ideas. When you hear someone talk about purity or cleanliness or angel like, the word your mind associates it with is the colour white. At the same time white is the purest because it is compared to the colour black, which our mind is conditioned to perceive as something impure, dull and devilish. White without its counter part black would not mean the same thing as is does today.

In the concept of positive and negative space, positive space is white and negative space is black. What’s interesting is that even though black is negative space, it is the background that gives definition and context to the object, without which it would be unrecognisable.

Why is it that black is always associated with death and endings?

Every movie ending, where some character of importance dies, their transition into the heavens above is always shown as a beam white light. This light is shining and “pure”. It marks the end of the journey of that person in the physical sense. But have you ever noticed how movies depict the moment a new born child opens their eyes to stare into the unknown world: to meet the eyes of their parents and see what is in store for them? It begins with black. It seems that the end is not actually black. In fact, it is the beginning. Before the eye allows light to penetrate and illuminate a new-born’s mind, life has already been gifted. The eye makes its way through black: the very beginning and then emerges, into its physical sense.

It is said that a certain amount of darkness is required to see the stars. Those stars, float around in space that is has no colour, and bring life and beauty to the residents that inhabit this limitless lake. Space: black and infinite, stretches from unknown points, and its end, might just be something else’s beginning. This space has infinite possibilities, it stores the unknown and it captures and emits curiosity.

The black hole: what is it? It’s a section of space that has a huge magnetic force. It sucks in everything close to it, even light. This entity of measureless black now also houses a black hole. It is an abyss within a larger endless rift. The power, possibilities and the sense of infinite can only be experienced within this colourless colour black.

In physics, we learn that certain colours are more absorbing and some are less absorbing. It is said that white is a colour that keeps the heat and light away, while black, absorbs all the energy. It is a colour that absorbs everything, embraces everything and receives everything. So, black is not a colour that always depicts claustrophobic spaces and caged surroundings

Is white really pure? Or is black the purest of them all? If a tiny speck of dirt falls on a white surface, this blemish is noticeable to the naked eye. If dirt falls on black, it goes unnoticed, absorbed and masked by black. The colour people associate with being dirty is in fact the purest colour.

Polluted, soot, unclean this is what coal is. This material, that gets every person’s hands dirty, blackened and filthy, is also the very same material that enables ever woman to live the fairy tale dream. On their wedding days, sitting on the bride’s finger is a diamond ring. This diamond is called beautiful, sparkling and polished. It is a gem that is obtained from coal. It’s refined and elegant body is the result of this black and filthy coal, shedding its layers to bring alive this beauty.

Our bodies, this sacred house, is coloured in different shades. The result of these shades is due to a pigment called melanin. Throughout the course of history, many instances of white people, degrading, insulting and looking down upon people with darker skin has existed. This supremist mentality arose due to the people with lighter skin, feeling that lighter tones of skin are superior. What’s ironic is that cause of white or pale skin is actually due to them lacking in melanin. It’s interesting how people with lighter skin feel proud, while in reality they lack the pigment in their body, that would have otherwise let them enjoy the beautiful sunny days without having to stay way from the brightest light.

We perceive the world in a variety of ways. This article may to some of you, be the most relatable and engaging one, because your favourite colour is black. While there will be a few of you who think that there can be two sides to this. This is what the conscious mind thinks. The mind that is aware and present. But what about the unconscious mind. The mind that we are not aware of, the mind that holds mysteries and secrets. This space of unconscious, is best describes in terms of being black, vast, unknown and mysterious. Similar to space its possibilities and potentials are limitless and infinite, but like space if we delve deep into this realm of the unknown a lot can be found out about ourselves, and our ways of thinking and perceiving. Sigmund Freud depicted and explained the conscious mind is like the tip of the ice berg, only a portion of it is visible and that is what we comprehend. And the unconscious mind that is the other portion of the ice berg is entirely submerged in the vast ocean. No one knows hoe big and the ice berg is and how deep it goes into the ocean, into that vast black space both holding atmospheres of unknown.

Our mind is like the yin and yang: a Chinese symbol that portrays the perfect harmony required to maintain balance. If there was only white then the balance dips to one side, and if there is only black, it dips more to the opposite side. Combining both, allows for structure, free flow and stability. Same goes for the balance between the conscious and unconscious mind. A person requires both the conscious mind: that’s aware and continuously getting illuminated by the world, as well as the unconscious mind: that’s unknown, unexplored, limitless and secretive, to complete a person and bring balance into their life.

This entity that houses all yet none of the colours. It has properties of being undefinable. And it turns these features to its advantage. This undefinable property makes space for multiple possibilities to exist together. Such properties allow room for change to take place, making sure uniqueness can be found in its monochromatic plane. While black embraces change it doesn’t forget to pay equal attention to its property of mutability.

Black has another feature, duality. Colours like green, yellow and red, just to name a few are extremely noticeable whereas black as compared to the brighter colours goes more unnoticed. But this is the power of black, it can choose when to get noticed and when not to. This ability of duality allows black to complement everything.

Black is all around us, silently assisting other colour to shine and be notices while it stays as a background unnoticed. We unknowingly used black as a metaphor to express our deepest desires and secrets. It’s limitless and abyss like nature allow for it to absorb and give out multiple meanings that otherwise no other colour is capable of doing. It’s been used in a various area as symbols for harmony and balance, and it contrasting nature makes it a colour that’s compatibility is 100%. In conclusion I would like to say that while visible to the naked eye, black is dull, dingy, awful, and obscure it also houses meaning of infinity, power, strength, possibilities, balance and possibilities. All of which are what makes this colour inclusive, unique and a body that can house millions.

#black #colors #cosmic #colorwheel #misconceptions #color

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schtroumpf-a-lunettes · 6 years

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under cut because long!!! this is roughly a discussion of like, children’s media (or something propped up as children’s media/parodying a kid’s show) being depicted with grimdark and/or mature content or w/e. I both agree that these ideas are often completely unoriginal and boring and stuff and bad. but also it can be done right and have plenty of merits. and in saying that, that’s not what my fic is trying to do as well though

I think I’m edging (relatively) closer to looking like a little bit of a hypocrite if I agree with the notion that portraying characters from children’s media in dark situations tends to be boring/unoriginal/edgy and I don’t know how to, fully express how much that I... well for one thing that’s not.. what I ever really want to go for. many of those kinds of portrayals are generally irreverent, wildly OOC, edgy for the sake of being edgy, purely for shock value. Sometimes the person doing it doesn’t rly know anything about the source material beyond the most basic surface level, and it furthermore can be boring if it doesn’t offer any meaningful commentary. ofc those things don’t usually intend to offer meaningful commentary, they just want the shock value of something like “haha the SMURFS but VIOLENCE/ADULT CONTENT, wild right???”, and they achieve that very basic goal, and it can be boring. it doesn’t tell us anything, it’s just, shock value and that’s it.

Ok I mean... it DEPENDS, sometimes (plenty of times) I actually find the Subverted Kids Show trope incredibly enjoyable, but like, hm. some ways of going about it are more tasteful than others. I guess part of that is personal preference though I do think there is a small amount of objective guidelines involved too

and you can still make insightful commentary on a text aimed at children through a Subverted Kids Show Format while having the characters be ooc! Robot Chicken smurfs (which I will discuss more in other posts) for me oscillates between making a surprisingly good commentary sometimes and mindless (but fun(ny)) scenes to, very tasteless/bad scenes that don’t do much imo. well its goal is to be funny and that’s it I guess, and it hits that goal some of the time

I guess the exact opposite of the surface-level shock value joke can also be super boring though. a text/theory that takes itself super seriously and tries to explain to you how Actually This Kid’s Show Dark! can possibly be even worse. e.g. “characters in kids show are just trapped in purgatory/it’s all a coma fantasy!!” or whatever. But I think, part of what would make a thing like that Bad is a fundamental misunderstanding of core parts of the canon and/or a... lack of regard for canon in the sense that you’re really willing to sit here and write of everything that the characters have ever been through as being Meaningless because it was all just one character’s dying memories? that completely robs the text of its power. Like saying Homer’s been in a coma since like season 5 of the simpsons. As a certain podcaster that won’t be named said because I have, a lot of bones to pick with them lol - there’s something so redundant and pointless about saying “everything that’s happening in this fictional show isn’t real”. what does it realistically.. add, kinda thing.

But I don’t think there’s cause to be automatically dismissive of anything that tries to.. approach children’s media from an angle where you can construct it as being just a little bit more sombre than it looks like on the surface or something? idk. because there can be worthwhile things to explore that make interesting commentary on the text, where you NEED to introduce less-than-happy concepts to derive them. (Sometimes the kind of commentary that deconstructions try to make is, not so good and misses the mark, although it’s not always the case.) there’s one argument against this which is like, Why can’t you just let kids have things? It’s not that deep. You’re trying to put a sinister spin on something when... it’s just not necessary. Why add to the darkness of the world. let people, especially kids, just have this bright and pure thing.

And I completely agree with that sentiment, honestly. The smurfs are good, happy, innocent, that’s the way they are and should be, don’t try to take that away from kids or people. Like 80%-90% of my enjoyment of the smurfs is all about that, I’m in full agreement, I just want happy little innocent elf society adventures and I’ll be happy. Although. It’s not like smurfs was always happy. there are plenty of tearjerker moments in the show, plenty of disasters and bad things happen to them (that they readily overcome by the end of the episode). and here I guess you also have to avoid patronising kids in thinking that only happy and nice stuff can be for them. as in, the smurfs does have really sad and upsetting moments but that Obviously doesn’t make it Not For Kids.

I think that in addition to that, slightly darker themes can be explored and exposed under certain extreme circumstances if smurf society was subject to it. And I think this in no way invalidates their tranquil, happy status quo and good nature as a society as we know it. Also it just so happens that my inspiration for fic happened to revolve around negative ideas instead of positive despite me, in fandom, just enjoying the positive/light-hearted usually (I think?). whoops. but these kinds of outside-of-canon things don’t do anything to the canon, canon stands as it is. I try my best to stick as close to canon as possible kind of, as a kind of canon purist, haha, in terms of characters and realistic reactions.

another thing is, for a positive kid show like smurfs, to have something really bad happen might seem off, but, one of the things I want(ed) to explore is “if x thing happened, how would the characters deal with it?” (I think this point will be, more pertinent to the next smurfs fic I have lined up once I finish the current one I’m working on. heh, heh, heh.)

I mean really bad stuff happened in the cartoon but it was never too extreme and it was resolved by the end of the episode normally. so for something long-term... yeah.

I also think occasionally I’ve done like. stupid smurf stuff that is kinda ooc over the years. and part of why is I think something happened where I was so anti-doing that that it kind of looped back around to the point where I Did it because, of course, I acknowledge how far-removed from canon it is that it therefore doesn’t mean anything, or something like that. and It Amused Me. and sometimes shock value smurfs at least done Somewhat tastefully is amusing to me too for that same reason because (if) it’s harmless fun or something

now this whole thing I’ve written up is mostly general thoughts and not actually much related to my fic. just, writing the fic has got me thinking about this kind of stuff so some of it is vaguely related. But fundamentally I don’t want my fic to be super dark. in fact, there are many very dark storyline paths that I could have taken which I actively chose not to, because those paths were not what I wanted this story to do. I just want it to be a fic where the smurfs experience a lot of hardship that they struggle to overcome, and I want to keep it very closely aligned to canon where I can, while other stuff changes, with.. time. Like yea there are definitely some dark elements though haha. But I’ve read some dark smurfs fic and haha.. don’t think mine really shapes up.

Like this whole post might sound like me being defensive or something, but it’s not because the premise of my fic isn’t “Edgy Grimdark Smurfs” or anything like that, and therefore that’s not a concept that I need to defend for my fic. and I don’t need to be on any kind of defense because nothing anyone else has said has prompted this post, haha. I didn’t set out to write Dark smurfs fic, I set out with an idea of some challenges the village could face and followed through with how I thought the village and its inhabitants would/could react to them, or some of the possible ways the village could react to them. And IF the results turn less-than-smurfy, I still follow up on them if I think it is realistic to the canon for it to happen and an interesting path to explore. Like I’m not really taking the world and adding/forcing dark elements in, I’m bringing out underlying currents that I already saw present when observing the society in the cartoon. Maybe I added some stuff to flesh things out, but the core ideas I bring out have basis in the cartoon imo. Anyway yeah like 70% of this post isn’t related to my fic, just kinda general thoughts type thing as I said lol.

Oh yeah also it’s like - I want my fic to still remain mostly in-tune with the show, I want to do my best with that. I don’t want darkness-induced apathy or for it to feel like it’s too far out of line from what is plausible. in-tune with the universe and the characters, but exploring stuff you wouldn’t necessarily pitch to young children at the same time type thing. And I’m not going out of my way to do that, moreso I’m not imposing that restriction on myself in terms of what I write. I’m tryin’ my best, haha. like, setting out to write grimdark fic is fine, but it possibly requires a different audience and authorial approach compared to what I feel is the approach I want to encourage for my fic. both approaches and writing styles are valid, just different type thing. I’d hate to turn people away if they’re not into grimdark stuff when it’s not what I was going for or w/e

#I don't want the fandom to judge me because like #I'm one of you!! I agree!!!! hahaha #take this I'm adding it to the queue and it's rly late lol so sorry if it's not so gr8 lol #just sum thoughts

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suudonym · 6 years

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the other day I was reading a fantasy manga and one character said that another was suitable to be a magician because they had a lot of mana, and for some reason in that moment I became acutely aware of just how proliferated the concept of mana is in fantasy settings. it’s so common now that pretty much any story can say “this works because of mana” and we’ll all just nod our heads with perfect understanding

well it was like midnight so naturally I had to pursue this line of thought and find out exactly why mana is so commonplace in fantasy, and the answer turned out to be like super interesting so I’m gonna spend roughly 3 hours writing about that history to share it

for the record, all my information is coming from this thoroughly cited article written by an assistant anthropology professor so I feel fairly confident in its accuracy. the article itself is an interesting read if you have the time but it’s also really long so I’m gonna summarize the main parts. (that’s not to say this post won’t also be long, because it will be, but it at least won’t be as long as the article by a long shot)

first of all, what is mana? you may be inclined to think it derives from the biblical manna, but it’s actually a polynesian spiritual concept that... honestly makes a whole lot of sense for its pop culture usage. see, the polynesian mana is the idea that all things - people, groups, governments, inanimate objects, nature, everything - have influence, an ability to make things happen. honestly I don’t feel like I understand it well enough to give any examples without making assumptions but you can give the wikipedia article a look if you want to know more about it

so how did a polynesian spiritual belief originating from austronesian taiwan some 5000+ years ago become a universally-accepted feature of the modern fantasy genre? well it starts in the 19th century with an english missionary whose take on spreading christianity started with understanding the local culture. he lived and participated in a melanesian community for 20 years before returning to England where he published his learnings as a massive anthropological study - the first of its kind about the area he visited. through his writings, victorian scholars started toying with the thinking that mana, with its similarities to the spiritual beliefs of other ““primitive”” cultures, was evidence that all humans had an awareness of the same cosmic force that was at the root of christianity

that (super insensitive) way of thinking’s been debunked by now, but at the time it was an exciting thought that popularized the melanesian study, and some 50-ish years later a romanian scholar, whose research took him all over the world and eventually landed him in the US as a professor, took up studying and comparing spirituality between cultures and published the missionary’s work in an academic anthology - and this guy published TONS of books for college use so they got to be pretty widespread

this is the late 1950s by the way so we’re rocketing headlong into the hippie era, so people, especially youth, are looking to discover the world that exists outside of the neat little boxes they were raised in. thanks to our romanian scholar thinking the missionary’s writings on the pacific islands were super cool, mana got pulled into the storm of psychedelia and foreign spirituality

fast forward a bit to the 1970s when dungeons and dragons made its meteoric debut and kickstarted a boom of fantasy games. many of these games based their magic use on a points system: you had however many spell points and could cast spells until you used them up. the problem was that it didn’t have any lore to it - it didn’t sound terribly fantastical to say in-universe that a wizard’s power came from their spell points. so now we rewind a little to 1969 to the short story “not long before the end,” set in the distant past when the world had a massive supply of mana that was used by wizards to cast spells but they used it all up and so now our world is without magic. the story was extremely well-received, was published repeatedly in various anthologies, was extended into a novella called “the magic goes away,” and also spawned some spin-offs. this became influential to computer games because the same nerds who did programming were also likely to read works like this

so, fast forward even more to the 1980s when computer games got sophisticated enough to start integrating reasonably complex systems of magic. ultima III in 1983 used magic points and abbreviated them as MP, and in 1987 final fantasy also used MP. and then, also in 1987, came dungeon master, which went out on a limb and said the M in MP stood for mana

a little while later, in 1993, magic the gathering made its debut, which was SUPER inspired by “the magic goes away” (so much that it even had a card that was the author’s name backwards) and featured mana as a major aspect of the game - specifically, mana cards with different elemental attributes were required to activate other cards. it gained astounding popularity, and again, the nerds who made computer games also played mtg. in 1994 warcraft came out, but while it had a magic system in place, it didn’t really have any worldbuilding or lore. this changed a year later with warcraft 2, which specified mana as the unit of measuring magic, and then another year later diablo adopted mana too

in 2004, warcraft expanded into world of warcraft, and the already highly popularized concept of mana became more or less ubiquitous, a mainstay of almost all popular fantasy going forward

so that’s the history of mana in fantasy fiction, and while I found it super interesting to learn that mana wasn’t just some made-up mechanic that became universal through the influence of successful video games - and even more interesting to find out that the mana in games and stories is actually really close conceptually to the real-life polynesian mana, I kind of have really mixed feelings. like, I’d never even heard of mana outside of games before, and now I come to learn that it’s actually a big part of pacific islander culture and heritage. another article I read said that at it’s height, world of warcraft had 3-4 million more players than there were pacific islanders alive. it feels maybe kind of scummy that everybody understands mana as this imaginary magic power from fantasy worlds without even knowing that it’s also a very real spiritual belief that, to my understanding, is still relevant today. maybe it’s about time we stop leaning on mana as an easy explanation for magic use in our fantasy worlds?

#saydonym #long post #by publishing this I am accepting the risk that maybe I'm actually one of very few people who didn't know that mana is a real thing #please spare my pride and don't bring it to my attention if that's the case

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mousekatsu · 6 years

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Review: 日本語総まとめ N4 文法・読解・聴解 (Sou Matome N4 Grammar / Reading / Listening)

I got my hands on a copy of one of the new Sou Matome books for N4 「日本語総まとめ N4 文法・読解・聴解」and since I couldn't find a review anywhere online for them when I was looking to buy, I thought I'd do my own.

Early last year, not long after I started Japanese, I found a copy of the Sou Matome N3 Grammar second hand in a bookstore but in pristine condition, so even though it was too advanced for me then, I picked it up because it was cheap. Along with the Kanzen Master books, Sou Matome, in many reviews, seems to be one of the go-to study books for the JLPT. So when I learned that there were new editions for the lower levels I felt compelled to get my hands on a copy.

Anyone familiar with the older Sou Matome books for N3~N1 won't be too surprised with the exterior of the books. But where N3~N1 have an individual book for each skill, at the lower levels these are combined into one or two books. At N4, grammar, reading and listening form one book and vocabulary and kanji form another. At N5 all five skills are found in the same book. On a purely aesthetic note, the shaded covers (which seems to be something ASK are doing for their editions with Vietnamese translations) seem to lose some of the freshness of the dazzling white + colour of the older kind.

The premise of Sou Matome is simple: do two pages per day for six weeks and you will finish the book in six weeks. For each week, there are six "lessons" or two-page spreads to review, followed by realistic JLPT-style questions on the seventh day. In this book for N4, four weeks are devoted to grammar and a week each to reading and listening.

At the start of each "lesson" in the N3 and N2 books, a cute line drawing with a short text at the appropriate level featuring the grammar or vocabulary for that day. Here is an example from my N3 book ("I think about you every day but I’m too shy to tell you"):

Notice, also, that each of the example sentences is translated and the grammar explanation, although short, provides enough information to derive the grammatical forms, explains usage and even provides some examples.

Opening the N4 book at its first lesson, the format doesn't seem too different. Four grammatical topics are covered and there are some practice questions included.

But when you look closer, you notice where the style of the book differs from the higher levels. The example sentences aren't translated (only the sentence in the grey banner) and there are no, or very limited grammatical explanations. For me, too, there's something really annoying about the bears, too. Every day of the week, except the seventh, the bears ask a question, which is a good idea compared to just a sentence or two of text in N3 and N2, but for me I didn't like it aesthetically. If ASK didn't want the line drawings I appreciated in the higher levels, then they should have used the cats like in N1, which follows this format more closely than N3~N2.

Notice that the example sentences don't feature translations and the grammatical explanations are very limited (presumably to save space). This, to me, seems counter to the nature of the book and its intended level: beginning learners need this help the most. In my opinion, it would have made more sense to spread the grammar over six weeks (like at N3~N1) but still to combine listening and reading in a single volume... but what do I know?

Where the strength of this book lies though, is the fresh way of presenting information in a condensed way, like in the following examples:

One of the main criticisms I have experienced (i.e. read in reviews and on online fora) of the Sou Matome series as a whole is that nuances and differences between grammatically similar concepts are not really teased out. The N4 book goes some way to resolving this by treating these similar concepts together, for example all of the grammatical concepts involving 「よう」are treated together, or the conditionals, as shown in the following:

In the book, only one week (six lessons and a review) are devoted to reading comprehension, but the third page of every seventh day also features an extended reading passage:

The six reading "lessons" feature as interesting a variety of topics to read about as can be achieved in six days.

And, yaaaas, the simple line-drawings I like make an appearance again at the end in the listening exercises!

The book comes with a CD bearing the audio files required for the listening exercises. I haven't had chance to listen to the listening exercises since I don't have anything that plays CDs at home or at work, but the book comes with a flyer saying that they can be downloaded online (I found them here).

The book features a summary of base grammatical forms at the start, and a set of conjugation tables and a list of transitive and intransitive verb pairs at the end.

Pros: ● Presents all of the required N4 grammar in a very concise way. ● Keeps (mostly) to the engaging, tried-and-tested Sou Matome-format which is used worldwide by people studying for the JLPT. ● Some concepts are treated in a very fresh and helpful way (see above).

Cons: ● Some concepts are treated way too briefly and some are combined under a single banner on a day's lesson. It would have perhaps been better to spend a full six weeks on grammar and then treat reading and listening together in one week. ● Listening and reading receive only one week of treatment each. ● The example sentences don't feature translations (presumably to save space).

tl:dr ● The book doesn't fully correspond to the format of the older Sou Matome books for N3~N1 but comes close enough. The information is very dense, and some detail is lost for the sake of combining these three skills into one book, but the overall product is still no doubt invaluable for those studying for the JLPT N4.

I’m going to give this book a 4/5, recommend it to anyone studying for N4 (who can deal with sparse grammatical descriptions, and seriously think about buying the kanji/vocabulary volume for myself).

#jlpt #jlpt n4 #learning japanese #japanese study #japanese langblr #japanese language proficiency test #日本語能力試験 #review #oc #日本語

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