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smash-chu · 3 years

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As i've stated before i've wanted to make a Viva Piñata iceberg, and while i've enjoyed putting stuff on it and writing down some info on each point i need some help with putting more stuff on here! I'm sure some of you have some neat things, theories or rumors that would go on here, do send those my way (preferably with a explanation, too)

Explanation on each point can be found below

The TV show - Some people’s first exposure to the franchise was the TV show, made to go alongside the games as a sort of advertisement. It was made by 4Kids and had a total of 2 seasons, starring the 4 main characters: Hudson Horstachio, Franklin Fizzlybear, Paulie Pretztail and Fergy Fudgehog.

Rare games easter eggs - There are plenty of easter eggs to other Rare games throughout Viva Piñata, the easiest ones to note are the broken arcade cabinets found in the first game as well as the various nods to Banjo Kazooie - such as the Bird and Bear statue, Mumbo statue, Breegull backpack and Bottle’s Glasses. Stardos is Dastardos - The game never tells you this directly, but it’s an easy and obvious conclusion to make.

Twingersnaps and Fourheads - Without using a guide or looking it up you may actually be baffled on how to acquire these piñatas in game. There is no obvious hint in game to tell you to hit the Syrupent egg before it hatches on the third bounce, which means you either have to figure it out through experimentation or by looking it up.

Leafos False Rumors - Leafos is meant to give you good advice to help you out while you play the game if you talk to her, however not all information she gives is true. Some rumors include putting a Badgesicle in water will turn it into a Sweetooth, feeding a Doenut to a Pretztail turns it into a Mallowolf and so on. None of these actually work.

Piñatas aren’t permanently broken - When a piñata is broken it is magically repaired, at least when on Piñata island, reforming at the edge of a garden when broken at one. It is stated that piñatas are repaired after having been sent to parties, which would potentially mean that piñatas only magically repair themselves when on the island.

The PC Port - Not very well advertised, there was a PC port released for the first Viva Piñata game. There are a couple of differences between the port and the original Xbox 360 release, which are touched upon later.

Piñatas are genderless - Technically no piñata is given a gender in game, all piñatas function the same. While in the show gendered piñatas are present it could potentially be that piñatas are naturally genderless and then if they are sapient can choose genders which fit their identity.

Burger king toys - A bundle of burger king exclusive plastic toys of piñatas were made and sold alongside the children's meals, some of the piñatas were Elephanilla, Sparrowmint, Goobaa and so forth. These toys are nowadays rare and sought after by people who collect the very small amount of official Viva Piñata merch that exists.

Wildcards - Wildcard piñatas are unique piñatas that have a feature which makes it stand out next to others of its species. There are a total of 3 variants of wildcards per piñata, some being exclusively gained through trading piñatas online. In the original game wildcards were extremely rare and there was only one variant, while they were made easier to acquire in TiP.

Both the games and show are canon - Just what it says, according to the creators both the games and show are canon to Viva Piñata lore. This makes for some strange implications, but that is for later.

TiP Fence Glitch / Exploit - A sort of well known glitch often used while playing Viva Piñata Trouble in Paradise. Fences normally do not stop Ruffians and Professor Pester from entering your garden, as they simply destroy them when they’re in the way. However, if arranged in a specific pattern in the area next to the volcano they enter from, the fence will make them permanently stuck. They will be stopped at the very edge of the garden at the fence, unable to properly enter or do anything. This can occur unintentionally as well in both the original game and TiP, as sometimes Ruffians and Professor Pester get stuck on seemingly random things and become unable to do anything.

Domesticated piñatas becoming un-domesticated - A strange difference between the original game and TiP is the fact that you can no longer buy domesticated piñatas from the Paper Pet’s store. Instead of being purchased they simply appear in the wild like any other wild piñata, whether this implies that these piñatas are no longer considered domesticated or is just a game design choice is unclear.

Piñata cards - In Viva Piñata Trouble in Paradise there is a function which is called Piñata Vision, which utilizes the Xbox Live Vision camera. By scanning the card you can get the piñata or item displayed on the card, some of these cards feature the developers in the form of a piñata and characters from other games.

Language Dubs - The PC port of the original game has a lot of language dubs, translated into languages such as Dutch, Swedish, Spanish, Chinese and more. Some of these do not extend to the UI oddly enough, while for the majority of translations all of the game’s features are translated accordingly, with the exception of piñata names. The language chosen is determined by the language set for the computer, so if you want the game in a specific language you’d need to change the language of the computer before installing it.

PC port graphical downgrades - Oddly enough the PC port has some graphical differences compared to the original Xbox 360 release. Mostly the graphics being downgraded, even on the highest settings, such as the lighting and texture resolution on objects and the environment.

Some piñatas are sapient, others not - Because of the fact that both the show and games are canon makes some things kind of weird. Though even if the show wasn’t canon this would still be a thing - as thanks to the existence of Langston and some of the show characters appearing in the DS game. Most piñatas in the games act like animals and cannot speak, however in the show and with Langston they are very much as sapient as a human. What causes a piñata of the same species to be sapient or not? Why does no character in the game acknowledge this strange difference? We don’t know.

Magic is real - In the Viva Piñata universe, at least on Piñata Island, magic exists. Seen in the form of Leafos and Jardinero summoning items, Jack transforming items into other things, Seedos and other characters teleporting and both Dastardos and Storkos being able to fly. There are other examples of magic, nobody really explains why magic exists or to what extent it is used or capable of being, but simply something that is commonplace on Piñata Island. If magic exists in other places is unknown.

The DS game - Known as Viva Piñata Pocket Paradise, the DS game came out after both the original game and TiP. It features a mix of piñatas from both the other games, however not all of them, because of the limitations of being on the DS. It is pretty much just another Viva Piñata game where you tend to a garden, now using the touchscreen to use your tools and so on.

How the fuck does the family not recognize Dastardos as Stardos - A strange phenomenon considering at least Jardinero considers Dastardos familiar, but apparently none of the other family members have been able to figure out that Dastardos is in fact Stardos. Whether this is them just being very oblivious or not it’s still sad that they can’t even recognize their own family member after being corrupted. This is also even more strange considering Dastardos lives literally across the garden from his family, how have they not been able to tell by now?

Langston taking over the position of authority in piñata central from Jeffe - Apparently Jeffe used to be in charge of the piñata central and was later kicked off his position and replaced by Langston, this is to reflect how Jeffe was originally planned as the head of the piñata central before being replaced by Langston as influenced by the show. Why he was kicked off his position is uncertain, but theorized to be because of the fact that he turned into a piñata or half piñata from ingesting too much candy - though why this would influence him being kicked off i’m not sure. Maybe he abused the central for his own gain?

“They all wear masks, some are just more elaborate than others” - A statement from a developer when asked about the masks worn by the humanoid characters in the games, whether they’re their actual heads or some kinda mask. This was meant to clarify that all the human characters are fully human, however it still leaves some things unanswered - such as if they are masks then why can we not see Fannie Franker’s face inside the mailbox on her head? Or what does that entail for the Ruffians whose bodies are pretty much completely covered in their masks.

Squazzil name debate - A reference to how in game Leafos mentions that the name for the Squazzil was debated before you, the player, arrived at the island. Being apparently called Nonsquirrel as they were trying to figure out a name for the species. Whether this is true or not is uncertain, as Leafos does state untrue rumors sometimes.

The side characters in P-Factor - P-Factor is a minigame in TiP that is you showing off your piñata in a contest against other players or npcs. This minigame features both already existing npcs, such Leafos for example, as well as some made exclusively for the minigames. Some of these npcs include Maxime, Babochka, Nana Urf and more. They also make an appearance in the Great Piñata Paperchase minigame, however they are much more prominently presented in the P-Factor minigame.

Unknown blue flower - There is a blue flower which appears outside of the garden space as a decoration in the original game. This blue flower is not a flower which appears anywhere else, and cannot be planted in the garden either. Most of the flowers and trees found outside the garden space are plants that are available for the player, but this one flower is unique in that it isn’t part of those plants.

Leafos might be a lesbian - As it is very much implied that Leafos is the one who writes the entries for the items, objects, characters and piñatas in the journal one can glean interesting information and thoughts about Leafos. In the entry for the Pink Flutterscotch there is the sentence “A girl (that I may or may not have liked) once told me that the Pink Flutterscotch reminded her of a kiss.” Some people take this as an implication that Leafos may be a lesbian and or bi, which i personally think would be neat.

Unused piñata concepts - There are plenty of piñatas that never made it into any of the games, as one would expect. Examples of piñatas that never appear in the game but had concepts made for them are a Giraffe, a Platypus that would’ve been acquired by breeding a Quackberry and Sweetooth together, a Hammerhead shark with a sour form and a Kangaroo. A goldfish piñata was also part of concepts, however this piñata does appear in the game - as the fish in the bowl on Miss Petulas head.

Banjo Kazooie Mountains - One of the rarer (hah) easter eggs to spot in the original game, in the distance across the swamp where Seedos lives one can see a mountain which has Banjo and Kazooie carved into the mountain. This is much easier to see in the Xbox 360 version compared to the PC port, because of the higher resolution textures.

Silent piñatas - Every piñata is voice acted, or are they? One might notice that there are two, well technically eleven, piñatas that are completely silent. The Flutterscotches and Motdrops are fully silent, not making any noise. Why this is is uncertain, as other bug piñatas do have noises, such as the Taffly and Sweetle. It may be because normally no noise is associated with butterflies or moths in real life, or it may be because these piñatas are meant to be more akin to decorational than a “proper” piñata.

Dragonache flying away glitch - A glitch which is easily done in game, by making the dragonache engage in a fight with another piñata and using the menu to send it off from the garden. By opening the fighting view, which can be accessed to monitor the fight separate from the normal camera view, it will focus in on the two piñatas. The camera will become strange as the Dragonache flies away from the garden, letting you see out of bounds and see details otherwise obscured by things in the background around the garden. I recommend doing this after having done at least one mandatory fight beforehand, as you are forced to watch the first fight that occurs and will unable to do anything till it is finished. Thus if you do this glitch while forced to watch it you will be unable to access the rest of your garden for quite some time.

Giant Zumbug glitch - Not certain if a glitch or hack, there have been reports of a giant Zumbug in TiP which is acquired through unknown means. This giant Zumbug can be sent through the Xbox Live service, but more than that is not known.

Professor Pester is legit evil and fucked up - Even though he’s presented in the show as a bumbling idiot of a villain, he has done a lot of fucked up shit. Not only does he employ Ruffians to mess up other people’s gardens, including Jardinero’s garden, he is also the reason why sour piñatas exist. Making a sour goop which is used for creating sour candy, it is a candy which makes anyone who eats it sick and possibly corrupts them - this is evident in how he corrupted Stardos by giving him sour candy. He may have rather bland goals as a villain, simply wanting complete control of the piñata island and its piñatas, but he’s done some pretty messed up stuff to try and accomplish this goal.

Extra color variants - All piñatas, except for the Flutterscotches, have three color variants that can be acquired by feeding the piñata specific things. However, there are piñatas that have more variants than others, through being caught in the Pinartic or Dessert Desert, and then feeding those the same things. This will cause them to gain a different tint of color compared to their normal counterparts, as thanks to having a different default color because of being from a different region.

Giant and tiny seeds - You can gain a plethora of things from the mine, which includes seeds. Sometimes when the mine uncovers seeds there is a chance for the seed to either be bigger or smaller than normal, these seeds work exactly like their normal sized versions, but sell for different prices. The size difference can vary wildly, with really big seeds and incredibly tiny seeds that are hard to see.

Ivor has two mouths - Something that may be easily missed, but Ivor Bargain does as a matter of fact have two mouths. One for each “face” he has, for when he’s a beggar and a merchant, he can flip between the two by spinning his head, flipping his head up or down. This is a little freaky, and completely glanced over in game, left unexplained why he has two mouths or can flip his head upside down with no consequences.

Leafos is vegan - A very recent thing which has been observed through the rare cookbook that has been released, which features an array of rare game inspired recipes. Recipes which are vegan or vegan friendly are marked with “Leafos vegan approved”, which implies that Leafos is vegan.

Humans can become piñatas rumor - In game this is presented in TiP with Jeffe, which is a human piñata or a half human half piñata, he states “If you eat enough candy and pull a face in the wind you'll become a piñata, I never want to see another piece of candy let alone a piñata full of it.” as part of dialogue during P-Factor. We cannot confirm whether this is actually true or not, but if Jeffe’s statement is true then it would imply that humans can turn into piñatas. This in turn creates a lot of questions, such as why does this happen? Has this happened to people outside of Piñata Island? Is this something exclusive to just the island or candy from the living piñatas? Can this happen with animals as well?

Tamed sour piñatas reverting via mail - A gameplay mechanic which is not commonly seen is the fact that tamed sour piñatas can revert back to a sour state. This occurs when you send a tamed sour piñata to a player which hasn’t unlocked the tamed version of that piñata, when the piñata is taken out of its mailed box it will be the sour version. This happens in all the main games, including Pocket Paradise as well.

Dastardos and Seedos special interaction - I have not personally seen this interaction but many have reported Dastardos and Seedos having an interaction with each other in game. If people want to elaborate on this or have footage of it that’d be great.

Viva Piñata Candy Stash - There are a few piñata games which aren’t widely known, for example this Adobe Flash tower defense game developed and published by 4Kids TV, known as Viva Piñata Candy Stash. This game features Professor Pester trying to steal the player’s candy using Ruffian robots, and to stop him the player builds towers invented by piñata characters from the tv show.

Piñata mascot suits - As part of promotions and promotion material there exists mascot suits of some piñatas, such as the Horstachio, Pretztail and Fudgehog. Whether these suits are kept in storage somewhere or have been thrown away we do not know.

#viva pinata #viva piñata #vp #iceberg #iceberg meme #yes i actually sat down n tried to make this #i feel like one can add more stuff but also i dunno what exactly #so do give suggestions if you have em #and if i should remove a point or replace it

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hard-reset-with-a-hammer · 3 years

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The world certainly loves to get my attention in interesting ways. More often than not, the methods used to do so are only a means to an end in order to piss me off, but this time I'm genuinely amused.

The most recent happening that has garnered my attention is the big stink going on with Hedge Fund concerning $GME and a handful of Redditors who bought the hell out of GameStop shares. A lot of people don't understand what this means or why so many of the wealthy and empowered are making a big deal out of it, but your ever helpful Uncle Fuck Off is here to educate you on things.

So let's start at the beginning. What is Hedge Fund? A Hedge Fund is an alternative investment that is designed to protect investment portfolios from market and certainty, while generating positive returns in both up and down markets. Hedge funds are financial partnerships that use pooled funds and employ different strategies to earn active returns for their investors. These funds may be managed aggressively or make use of derivatives and leverage to generate higher returns. Basically, it's a way for a select, limited number of very wealthy people to get even wealthier by buying stocks and trades at a low price, then waiting for the demand of these stocks and trades to go up in order to sell them at a higher price. Here's an example; Imagine a loaf of bread at any select store cost $2.00, and the supply is limited. Now imagine buying all that bread at $2.00 a loaf, completely emptying the county supply of bread. Then, directly afterwards, you turn around and start selling that bread at $3.50 a loaf, garnering a $1.50 profit.

It's kinda like that, but on a much, much larger scale, often resulting in the spending of millions/billions, and making a profit of half that after accounting for purchase.

So now that we've explained that, let's move on to the next chapter.

So what's going on with GameStop stock? Well so far, over the last 6 months, GameStop stock price has seen an 8000% increase, which is insane by any standards. The more complex answer is that it's stock has become a central gamepiece in a financial power struggle between a major hedge fund, Melvin Capital, and a group of amateur stock traders who yell on the internet.

So how is GameStop tied up in all of this? Well, Like many companies that are in rough shape, GameStop was the subject of what's called short selling, in which professional investors borrow shares of stocks to sell and then buy back later so they can return them, which lets them pocket the profit if the stock price goes down. They're basically bets that the company will fail. GameStop was one of the most shorted of all publicly traded companies. Other companies on the list include AMC Theaters, Bed Bath & Beyond and even the most defunct Blockbuster. And then GameStop became the source of a "Short Squeeze". I won't even get into explaining what a Short Squeeze is, it's a long and complicated subject. I'll just leave it at; A Short Squeeze means investors bought at a high price and bet the price would continue to fall, and when it didn't, they were left with millions in stocks that they had to sell at a much higher price.

Moving on, a handful of ametuer investors on the Reddit page r/wallstreetbets decided to throw 100% of their portfolios into $GME once they saw the shares rising, causing those who run WSB (r/wallstreetbets) to temporarily switch the community to private with the excuse that they were "Experiencing technical difficulties based on unprecedented scale as a result of the newfound interest in WSB.", which I think means the bean counters tried to intervene with us normal people making more money than we're supposed to.

This is where things get a little complicated and a bit more unclear. Shares in GameStop ticked up on January 11th after it named three people to its board of directors as part of a deal with shareholders who had been agitating for change. That caused some short sellers to abandon their positions, helping to drive the stock up more in the following days. The stock traded for about even for a few days, but things really began to change on the following Friday.

CNBC data showed that the volume of shares traded - a closely watched indicator of activity around the stock - spiked on Friday. Increased volume can indicate a short squeeze, meaning people who had bet against the stock either chose or were forced to give up and take losses. and while WSB had gotten some media attention in recent days for its GameStop boosterism, a boom in coverage of GameStop and WSB helped bring the story out of the financial world and more into the mainstream. GameStop shares would go from trading at around $43, already significantly more than it traded at the beginning of the year, to as much as $380, becoming one of the most traded stocks on the market along the way. This alone has Wallstreet shitting themselves, as it could potentially cost them tens of billions of dollars.

So how will the market be different if this continues? There is some belief that WSB signals the arrival of a powerful new force as large numbers of retail investors find influence by acting in concert or following one another into a big trade. That may serve as a check or balance on other large forces, such as hedge funds, which are used to throwing their weight around without ordinary investors affecting a price. As for how it couldn't affect us normal people, right now, the speculation activity is only around a few companies, which isn't that uncommon. But the broader concern comes when what are known as retail investors - amateurs buying stocks for their own personal gain - become overly exuberant and inflate stock prices, sometimes by taking out loans to buy shares. and some skeptics point to the situation around GameStop and other companies as evidence that the stock market has reached a dangerous level of enthusiasm and speculation.

Now, very often a short squeeze ends in a price falling back to where it was before the drama started. In 2008, when Volkswagen was in the middle of a trader tug of war, it briefly became the stock market's most valued company, but it's price settled down eventually. History suggests that no stock can go up forever, and over time, stock prices generally reflect the expected future earnings of corporations. But long shots can go on for extended periods if the players have enough resources to risk. Tesla, for example, would need 1,600 years of profits to justify its current price to earnings ratio, according to a calculation this last year.

So far, there's no evidence that any of this is illegal, although NASDAQ CEO Adena Friedman has said stock exchanges and regulators need to pay attention to the potential for schemes fueled by social media. While Reddit didn't answer questions this past Wednesday about whether it's in touch with regulators, it said it prohibits posting illegal content or facilitating illegal transactions. In a short statement, a Reddit official stated "We will review and cooperate with valid law enforcement investigations or actions as needed".

Of course I personally find this all to be bullshit. In my personal viewpoints, this is just another way for the very rich and wealthy to strongarm us normal people into being complacent, as they cannot make money off of us if we continue to make more and more money. Many investors and Wall Street members have stated that this could very well impact the fragile Trickle-down Economy, however, this again is absolute bullshit. Let me explain why.

Trickle down economy works exactly how it sounds, except it doesn't work at all. The long and short of it is investors and very wealthy people make a lot of money and they believe that eventually that money will make its way down to us normal and poorer people, however it never really does as most of the time, and in very, very many cases, these investors and wealthy people will more often than not square it away in a bank account or throw it back into stocks where they can make more money to put in their bank accounts. Trickle-down Economics only works the other way around, where us normal, poor people make money and buy stuff to put that money back into the economy where it will eventually make its way back to the wealthy making them far wealthier. Now I will agree that not all of that money goes back to the rich, but a good portion of it does. Most of the time that money will go back to paying employees, paying for equipment, and paying for materials used, but whatever else is left will go back to the rich. So you can see why this GameStop shit has Wall Street's panties in a twist.

Now, keep in mind that even if these amateur investors do win in this stock trade and cost Wall Street billions in US dollars, it is very unlikely that we of the current generation will see any of that money come back to us. The reality of the situation is that it would take years if not several decades for the money that Wall Street "loses" to circulate back to the normal person.

And that's what going on in this fucked up problem child of a country. Anyway, hopefully some of you actually paid attention to all of that, because I'm sick of explaining that the only side I'm on is my side. If you've got legitimate points that you'd like to make, I'd gladly listen to them and debate them, and I'll even concede defeat if I am wrong, but stop blowing up my inbox with half baked arguments because I have no patience to argue with someone who has little more intelligence than a water flea.

#gme #gamestop #stock market #wall street #reddit #news #perpetually pissed off

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moonlightmanifestation · 3 years

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Quick Summary:

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This program is different than all other manifestation programs you’ve tried before because it utilizes the ‘2 am manifestation window‘ when your Thalamus is on prime and chemical access into the mind that quiets all the negative sounds.

According to the Moonlight Manifestation official website, all our dreams can be converted into reality with vibrational tracks available in this program. You have to listen to these soundtracks before sleeping to transform your dreams into ultimate reality.

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How Does Moonlight Manifestation Work?

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The Soul’s Purpose Akashic Journey: With the help of this audio track, you will discover the soul purpose assigned to you when you were born. It will help you to realign your body with your soul to live a happy and fulfilling life.

Past Life Karma Clearing: This track will remove generational blocks to help you manifest money and wealth in your life. We grow up with many negative beliefs which stop us from reaching our highest potential. This track will remove them.

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Builds On A Solid Foundation:The main reason why Moonlight Manifestation works and gets many positive reviews from users is that it builds on dream yogic principles and the old concepts used by Himalayan Yogis. In addition, it is the only manifestation program that utilizes the ‘2 am manifestation window’ – the best time for changing the thinking patterns in the subconscious mind.

Not Only About Wealth:The Sound Journey’s track fixes the fundamental issue in your thinking patterns that negatively affect all aspects of your life. The frequency of these audio tracks will get deeper into the mind and remove doubts and beliefs that sabotage our efforts.

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This program will significantly help people who are tired of social media toxicity and want to get out of it. This program helps them to refocus their energy and send it towards positive things. However, this doesn’t mean you have to turn blind-eye to all wrongdoings in the world. Instead, it creates the right mindset for the right things.

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Who should not use it?

Moonlight Manifestation is not for those who see the world as paradise, and they don’t need anything from their lives.

Additionally, Moonlight Manifestation is not for narcissistic people who think only about themselves because the concept of this program is to spread positivity that narcissistic people can’t do.

Also, people who think only listening to these audio tracks will manifest their dreams and are not ready to put their efforts into avoiding this program. Moonlight Manifestation can clear the mind from negative thoughts and create positive thinking patterns, but people must put their efforts to grab ideas their minds send to them.

Moonlight Manifestation Bonuses:

You will get three bonuses:

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You will get the “Dream Yoga” sound journey track and “Dream Yoga Made Easy” guidebook to help you explore mullion dollar opportunities around you.

This bonus system is not only limited to money, but you can also use this soundtrack to meet new people, and you can find your “soul partner” with this bonus as well.

2. Overnight Hypnotic Healer Series:

This is the six-sound journey track series containing proven hypnotic language, words, phrases, and terms that will directly talk with the subconscious mind.

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These audio tracks will remove all work stress, and you will awake fresh and full of energy.

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What Is The Cost Of Moonlight Manifestation And Where You Can Buy It?

You can access the Moonlight Manifestation program from its official website only. Alexander Wilson has not authorized any other website or online store to sell this program. He has done this to help people avoid the pricing scam and make sure users get the original product.

You can purchase this program in a one-time payment of $55.50. At this price, you will get access to the Abundance Rising, Divine Block Dissolver, Income Manifestation Series, The Unstoppable Motivation Series, Unlock The Quantum Magic Series, and three other bonuses.

Note: This program is a digital program that gives you immediate access, and no product will come to your home address. You can purchase and access this program immediately, even at 2 am.

Moreover, Moonlight Manifestation contains a 60-day money-back guarantee. If you are not satisfied with the program, then you can send a refund request. If you don’t get an answer from the author, you can contact the ClickBank support team to get your money back.

Final Thoughts:

At the start of this review, I was wondering if Moonlight Manifestation is a fat hoax. However, after going through the content, listening to the audio tracks, and reading customers’ reviews, I don’t think why it should be.

I believe this program has everything that can change your life if you allow it to. As long as you keep using these audio tracks and stay committed to them, I don’t see why you can’t have results with them.

After including Sound Journey tracks, there will be a huge impact on your life.

New opportunities will come in front of you. You will be able to apply for your dream job, you will be able to start a new business, and you will meet your life partner.

If you are currently struggling in your life, I request you to give it a try. The price is very reasonable for the content you are getting in it. Plus, if you don’t like it, you can have your money back.

I am sharing a link with you below for the lowest price that I found online. I can’t wait to hear your success story. Let me know how Moonlight Manifestation works for you, and don’t forget to ask me anything about this program. I’ll be happy to help you!

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pnwriter · 3 years

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Endemic Pandemic

Part 1: Seattle as the Epicenter

How did it all start? First, it was STEP A, everyone from China, talking about it and one student bemoaning the fact that some people in Wuhan, China will eat anything. It seems eating a diseased bat started it, as contact with a monkey started AIDS. That group made it back and we had a fun time. The next two-week class was canceled because travel from China had been suspended. I skipped the next group to go to Mexico with Rene and Anne, and started the fourth group with a reduced group. After only one week, the UW decided to cancel in-person classes and that program ended. Now, there is the worry that I may not even have enough work to retire as I had planned. I started job hunting as soon as we heard the program will probably close the end of summer. Now, it's the start of spring quarter, and we only have 20 new students (as opposed to a healthy 80). Moreover, these classes may have to be on-line, so I'll have to learn a program called Zoom. All the signs are pointing to me getting out of this career and Rene is talking about getting out of the country. China and Iran took the biggest initial hits, then Italy closed down. Just today, 3/11/2020, Dumptr canceled all flights to and from Europe, except for England, who Brexited earlier this year. Also, today, the public schools followed the university's precedent, and closed down, as did the Burke Museum. The governor has banned any meetings over 250 people. Any meetings over 13 are discouraged and on my way back from the gym, which is still open, the train was mostly empty, with the buses being just a little fuller. You see people in masks, bus drivers, students until the classes were cancelled, doctors and nurses, shoppers, passers by. It's all disconcerting. People are over reacting, in my opinion...the North Dakotan whose bus driver always made it through when all the others cancelled.

Facebook and Instagram are double edged swords. First, it is and always has been a community of contact at a time when face to face contact has decreased steadily over the years. (Ironically, it's been decreasing directly because of the technology that gave us Facebook in the first place!) I send a photo of a candle burning for all our brothers and sisters across the world to my Greek pagan witch friend Vas. I am at home after going to our favorite neighborhood coffee shop this morning with the dog (hoping to see its friend Pinky there), only to find out that they are closing, due to the uncertainty. There are those who say that what is happening now in Italy will happen here, too. It's only a matter of time.

Speaking of FB, I'm chatting on line now with Alban, my brother-from-another-life teacher friend in France, where everything is still normal. We talked about how people are getting into being the characters in an epidemic horror film and acting accordingly. We both acknowledge the advantages of learning in the flesh, but also know people are lazy and always take the easy way out. Even as we communicated, President Macron issued the edict to close all schools and universities starting Monday. I look outside to the sunny March day and think similar days greeted the Spanish Flu and the Black Death. At least this one is not smelly.

Here's the resume I have sent:

CAREER SUMMARY

My international experience began after undergraduate school with the Peace Corps in Morocco. My strengths of responsibility, patience and adaptability gained from being raised on a farm contributed to a successful and rewarding overseas experience. The professional aspect of my international experience began with teaching and studying in the Teaching English as a Second Language Program at CSU. As the Graduate Student Representative, in addition to teaching, being the liaison between the faculty and the students honed my leadership, organizational and diplomatic skills. From my first teaching job at Saint Martin’s College to my extensive career at the University of Washington, these skills developed greatly over the years.

Writing and editing, International relations, counseling, public relations, intercultural communication,

EMPLOYMENT

English Language Instructor, UW Campus and downtown ELP, material development, listening and speaking and grammar specialties 3/16/2005 to present

Compliance Specialist, (change to Professional Staff status from Extension Lecturer) effective March 2004

Admissions and Immigration Director, University of Washington International Outreach Programs, Seattle WA. Admissions and Immigration for all UW Educational Outreach International Programs. Primary Designated Student Official in the Immigration and Customs Enforcement SEVIS program. 1/2004 to present.

Director of Student Services, University of Washington Educational Outreach, Seattle, WA. Directing all international student services in the English Language program including acceptance, immigration advising, orientation (initial and on-going), information dissemination (weekly newsletter), sponsors, housing, language exchange and extracurricular activities. Teaching an English Language class is part of the administration positions. 9/2000 to 1/2004.

Acting Director, Downtown ESL Program, Directing ESL program with 80 students and nine faculty and staff. Payroll and expenditure authorization, supervising office staff and providing support for teachers and students. June 12-August 18, 2000.

International Student Advisor, ESL Programs, University of Washington Educational Outreach (UWEO), Seattle, WA. Immigration, academic and personal advising. Activities supervisor, conversation exchange program coordinator, extended orientation class development and instruction, weekly newsletter publisher. Taught extended orientation class in ESL Program, speaking and listening focus. Liaison with UWEO Business Office, sponsoring agencies and embassies, UW housing office, and home stay agencies. 3/87 to 9/2000.

PROFESSIONAL ORGANIZATIONS AND SERVICES

Peace Corps Volunteer, Taza, Morocco. High school instructor of English at Lycee Sidi Azzouz in Taza. Outreach to disabled children in a special summer project at a special school in Martil, Morocco. From 6/78-6/80.

Member NAFSA: Association of International Educators and the Association of Washington International Student Affairs (AWISA). Received Outstanding Service Award. Reached out especially to the LGBT international community by producing a video and presenting workshops and sessions yearly at national and regional TESOL and NAFSA conferences.

EDUCATION AND PROFESSIONAL TRAINING

Cetlalic Language Program, Cuernavaca, Mexico, Intensive Spanish study January 3-16, 2004.

International House, Madrid, Spain, Intensive Spanish Study and Study Abroad experience 99-00

NAFSA Professional Development Training May 1998

M.A. TESL/Linguistics, Colorado State University 1982

B.S. Psychology, Minor in French, University of North Dakota, 1977

a week, we had done some bonding and I was remembering the difference between the two girls with similar, to me, names.

Like the 1918 Spanish Flu, which took my grandmother Voeller and Catherine Thomas' husband, starting the huge Voeller clan, the last dying before this next-100-year epidemic took hold. It centered in a nursing home in Kirkland, and has taken mostly the elderly. Some say it is cleaning out the dark, negative energy.

Part 2: Two Months in

It's now been over two months since people were sent to their rooms to thinking long and hard about what they have done...to the

Mother, to Gaia. Yesterday was Mother's Day and I posted photos both of my mother and Gaia in celebration of the day. I have picked up a variety pack of online friends...Roial Co (Philippine Reiki Master (I attuned him from 2 to 3 over the phone in an hour-long ceremony last weekend. He could be part of the soul family...other members being Kim, Aric, Bob, Bachir, Robert, Vivian, Paki, Roy, Cynthia, Alban for sure), Mahamed, Eryk (also for sure), Samuel and the latest...Randy. There could be up to 90 scattered across the planet at this time...like shatters of glass (Roi). I'm almost to the point where I can start writing in my books again.

The state was supposed to go into what is called "Stage 2" on June 1, five days from now, but people are still dying (up to 100,000 in the states, 300,000 worldwide) so now it's mid-month. More monetary help is on the way. The veil is thinning. Strange events are starting to become common. I am meeting good people around the world on social media. We send money to Samuel after vetting him, but Kelvin Moore turns out to be a Yemeni hack. Oh well. My gardens, on the other hand, are glorious and giving me much pleasure. I have fresh flowers here at my little at home desk and downstairs on the kitchen counter. The ones at my office desk are from the top deck and the ones on the counter are from the east English garden. I am trying to attract elves and fairies to both gardens and have started playing my harp out there, with melodies that come to me from the plants' exhalations. I installed a lady bug house at the base of the climbing vines and will sit out there when the weather gets better and it's supposed to reach record heat this summer. Yikes. Along with world pandemic, murder hornets, ravaging storms and the 17 year cadydid cycle falling on 2020, a record heat wave and resulting fires are just par for the course.

Going out in public these days, at least here in the city, you would see that nearly everyone has a mask on. It's a bit disconcerting looking at eyes above various colors of masks, the new item of outer wear. The cute barista wore a black one, the owner a bandanna, his wife, the chef, a more medical-looking surgical mask, the lady in front of me, a homemade jobby. Out in the boonies, there is a culture war between those who believe we need to wear masks to protect both ourselves and others and those who believe that it's all a hoax and it's a way for the government to muzzle us, limit our freedom. Both sides see the other as sheeple.

Part 3: Month 6

It's now 70 days until November 3 and as Antonio from Spain said, "At the end of the day, it's up to a few Floridians, a bunch of Ohioans and a handful of Michiganians to decide the future of mankind..." The DNC went better than anyone had expected, with great speeches from both Michelle and Barack Obama, the AOC, Kamala Harris and culminating with one by Biden, himself. This week, the shit show in a burning dumpster called teh RNC has started with hysterical screaming and drug-induced ramblings laying all blame the the Dems and predicting a daily reality of lawlessness, rioting and burning cities if Biden gets elected. Only 70 days until we decide whether to stay in this country, or like our ancestors, try our luck in a new one: Mexico, Spain or Portugal are the top runners right now. We plan to go south to check out Flagstaff and Sedona, Arizona this Christmas. Last Christmas, it was El Paso, Alpine and Marfa, Texas and Los Crucas, New Mexico.

I am on the break between summer and fall...noteably the longest one of the year, often five weeks. I usually go back to North Dakota during this time, but that's not happening this year, probably never again. The last time I was there, I was suffering from depression and I had a feeling I would not be seeing it again. Best to leave it to my memories of happier days there when the people I grew up with were still alive.

This divide in the country, instigated by Russian bots and carried out by Puppet Dumpster, has been the last straw, the one to have broken the camel's back that was my family connection. Foreseen by my late sister Lori, when she said (in response to whether it was now my job to keep the family together), "We are all adults now. If anyone decides to never see the others again, then that's up to them, not you." First, it was LaVonne who stopped texting or answering my texts. Then, Dennis stopped answering my phone calls and stopped calling as well. Rosie and Jamie are still cyber-stalking me on Facebook and Instagram (Rosie made an Instagram account as soon as I said I was leaving FB in disgust. She has never posted anything and has no photos in her folder...she just checks to see what I'm up to.) I stopped posting political craziness last week as it was becoming too much work to research what was fear-inducing truth and what was fear-inducing fiction. The tainted GOP is all about striking fear into the hearts of anyone who will listen to their rabid rantings.

Another week, another innocent black man shot by racist white police. Then, to add insult to injury, a trumped up 17 year old from Illinois goes across the border to shoot two protesters, walking by police to go home and then turn himself in the next day. (It comes out later that he shot the first victim in the back, and that his mom drove him to the protest, as if it were a soccer practice!) I had to break my political silence on FB, which I have just decided I will have to leave. I don't know if I can deal with Liker, the current alternative, either. It's the brainchild of some guy who saw where FB was going in 2012 and decided people needed an option. They need an option, all right. The option to opt out of social media, the new Dolls of the 2010s and now 20s.

I wake up early on 8/27/2020 and disable my Facebook account. I can't quite go cold turkey and get rid of Messenger along with it, because there are some people on there I still want to support. This is the second time I have tried to do this. After 13 years (is that all? It seems half my life!), it's a main social outlet that I am moving away from. Especially now, in the time of pandemics, it will be more isolating, but the vitriol and Hate being spewed forth is out of balance with what's really out there...I hope. There were those who had to spew the venom that the skateboarder that was killed, a gentle, long-haired hippy soul, deserved to die. I can not relate nor be exposed to such unadulterated hate. Their minds have been poisoned by no other than the POTUS, (and the institutionalized racism/hate behind him) as well as hate speech on line. My family has succumbed to the Fear of the Other as well. So be it. It may mean leaving the country if this upcoming election is stolen like the last one was. I refuse to believe that a majority of people in this country have drunk the Kool-aid.

Reading "The Witches are Coming" by Lindy West is giving me more insight, a chance to laugh and even some hope.

"Our propensity for always, always, always choosing what is comfortable over what is right helped pave the road to this low and surreal moment in US history."

Part 4: Month 7

From September 8 to 18, Seattle was socked in under a cloud of ash from the fires down south. I could feel the ashes of the bodies the those who died, as well as the chemicals of the burnt human structures. Breitenbush Hot Springs lay in ashes with only the main buildings saved. I could feel the heaviness in my lungs. Mishka could sense it and acted out by peeing outside the box. On the 14th, it finally rained some and we still have more days to endure. I got up from epic dreams of lost family (my mom, That Bitch Denis, DJ, my nieces who my mom prepared us for so they could come in and check us out sleeping) and went out into the acid rain to witness it. The craziness coming from the POTUS and media intensifies as it's now 50 days till the election.

Then, when it seems to be darkest before the dawn, the triple threat of the GOPruients, COVID-19 and the death-ash from the west coast fires, we find on the evening of 9/18/20 that the Notorious RBG, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, justice of the SCOTUS, died at 87, after having fought numerous ailments, including cancer. That bitch, Moscow Mitch immediately states the Senate will vote on a replacement even before the body is cold, even though in 2016 he said that the people of the US should have a say in the next SCOTUS, therefore, the appointment should wait until the election of the new president...blocking Obama in this last year, from appointing one. This will enable the Dumpster in his last weeks to appoint another conservative, anti-abortionist.

It becomes harder to grasp what is actually going on..these times are so unprecedented in our life times, though to those of us for whom AIDS was an epidemic, this is our second time around fearing for our lives. We know it's a long haul with many casualties before we come out on the other side, but whatever was normal no longer will be.

We go out for healthy burgers at Little Big Burger, where you can get a lettuce wrap in the place of a bun. We are both on edge and irritable and go to our separate corners after we eat in silence to grieve in our own way. Me typing here with all my altar lights on and a candle burning by the RBG candle, as the first fall rains sound outside, clearing the air for the first time in 10 days. The temptation to sell the house and leave the country is strong. The need to stay and fight on will probably prevail, but may not take the re-election of the anti-Christ, the embodiment of the Seven Deadly sins: pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth,

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summerseeder27 · 3 years

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Award Winning Workplace Mediation Services

Content

Mediation Professionals.

Resolving Neighbour Disagreements

The moderator educated the celebrations that they had little paperwork for, or recollection of, the mediation as well as advised the celebrations of the mediation agreement in which they had actually agreed not to call them as a witness. The mediation procedure achieves these end results in different ways, however probably most notably it boosts interaction and also addresses unreasonable insurance claims and expectations. People have a tendency to take up rigid placements and avoid interacting with the party with whom they are in problem or will certainly interact with them via an intermediary. The in person conference that happens in a joint session enables interaction directly in between the celebrations. It supplies a risk-free environment in which celebrations can move gradually towards rebuilding their connection.

What documents do you need for mediation?

Checklist: Things to take with you to mediationTake documents like court documents, statements, photographs, invoices and payment records. Put all your documents and information in order. If you want the other parties to look at any documents, you may want to make copies to give to them.

While ACAS has actually seen some boost in its workload as a result, this has actually not yet been really felt on an extensive level by other mediation service providers. Mediation in the workplace is still the exception as opposed to the standard. There appears to be a genuine resistance to workplace mediation; although Human Resources professionals express support for the procedure, relatively couple of employers have used the mediation procedure.

Mediation Professionals.

Extremely qualified, experienced moderators can bring favorable resolution to staff member problems and also conflicts. This workplace mediation solution gives a quick, fair, neutral as well as casual option to typical counselling as well as grievance procedures. Staff members know that they will certainly be deciding, are anticipated to try to recognize the various other event's problems and also to take a look at choices for dealing with those issues.

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That's a significant time commitment and also doesn't take into account that many such concerns were not fixed and also led to employment tribunal cases, adding more significant time as well as price effects. But when conflicts involve supervisors themselves, or in some way the events are unhappy with supervisors obtaining involved, this becomes difficult. Mediation is a casual disagreement resolution process that operates in 80% of disagreements.

Dealing With Neighbor Conflicts

To get the very best results, conciliators need to be educated and also maintain to date with expert developments.There are lots of organisations that will offer this training yet, ideally, courses need to be recognized by the Civil Mediation Council. As discussed above, Acas has a training system, which causes a Certificate in Interior Workplace Mediation. Acas limits student numbers to 12 on each courseto permit optimum specific interest. Lots of companies have separate training courses for various locations of mediation job, such as civil as well as industrial cases, workplace mediation and also household arbitrations. A lot more individuals are advising employers to adopt workplace mediation as a standard operating procedure to fix conflicts. This article explores some of the concerns that occur when considering this choice.

This means that if you choose you intend to go to Tribunal, you have thirty day to make your appeal.

mediation services plymouth to make additional arrangement about settlement and mediation services and the application of equality regulations to such solutions; and also for linked purposes.

Our Resolution-trained mediators are all experienced family members legal representatives with professional understanding of the Family Court's assumptions.

Typically, sessions last in between one and 2 hours and also the number called for will depend on how promptly arrangement can be gotten to.

Mediation functions to repair the relationship for the celebrations included and to restore a much healthier environment for all those affected by the situation. Mediation is launched mainly by Human Resources experts or senior supervisors instead of the parties themselves. People should always be given the possibility to resolve their difference for themselves. However, if they can not solve it and the circumstance is obtaining out-of-hand by then early treatment is recommended in contrast to watching workplace mediation as a last resource. Get in workplacemediations.co.uk to access a completely educated workplace mediator to assist you solve workplace disputes, conserving time, money and stress.

Can I Obtain Legal Guidance On Whether The Recommended Arrangement Is Fair For Me?

As an example, character clashes are frequently hard to figure out making use of grievance processes. Recognising problem and taking very early action like mediation to solve it can save time, money and also anxiety, and also stay clear of potentially costly disagreements establishing. These refined changes in way of thinking can be tough to achieve but have a tendency to be powerful. Effectively workplace mediation reduces the damages, associated expenses and the threats of possible acceleration.

Mediation can be utilized when a problem is in its infancy as well as no protests have been made, or any time approximately and also after a formal Work Tribunal end result. Where no protest has been lodged, mediation can help those entailed to resolve their distinctions without the anxiety as well as time of an official treatment. Where an official treatment has started, mediation can work within official timescales and also in numerous circumstances will certainly help to produce a resolution that brings the official procedure to a very early close.

Results consist of negotiation, withdrawal of the issue, or where no agreement is reached, hardly ever, extension to formal procedures. It's difficult for a HR Director, any Elderly Supervisor or without a doubt business proprietor to be viewed as neutral in a mediation.

Milwaukee housing advocates prepare for end of federal eviction moratorium - Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service

Milwaukee housing advocates prepare for end of federal eviction moratorium.

Posted: Thu, 17 Dec 2020 08:00:00 GMT [source]

Our conciliators can aid to solve conflicts in between people straight administration partnership, between other associates, or in between groups. All our specialist mediators are long serving, occupation arbitrators who have actually been experts in workplace mediation.

This is in spite of a success rate for mediation of 70% to 80% of disputes mediated. Our mediators are friendly, so if you have any type of questions concerning the procedure of our workplace mediation service, don't wait to set up a totally free assessment. Our workplace moderators are below to help with any kind of employment and also workplace disagreements between a private and supervisor, disputes in a group or between an individual as well as Human Resources department. When a mediator is designated, they are generally supplied with a review of the problems associated with the workplace conflict as well as any kind of pertinent papers that either celebration wants to trust or discuss during the mediation procedure. This assists the arbitrator to comprehend the background to the case and also helps make sure that discussions will be effective as feasible on the day of mediation. While services often have formal policies and procedures in position to handle workplace conflicts, some scenarios may be much better matched to a much less formal strategy to settling matters.

Do both parties pay for mediation?

One or both participants pay for the mediation as the payments come due. They are then reimbursed out of the assets at the end of the mediation process when they have reached a settlement.

He or she will certainly recognize the characters included as well as will not be viewed as neutral. An external mediator will assist show that Human Resources is looking to resolve this conflict without taking sides. The HR Director or Manager additionally might be entailed later in a grievance or disciplinary dispute. Workplace Mediation has long been gathering momentum, becoming increasingly prominent amongst UK firms who currently utilize it as an efficient method to fix disputes at the workplace. Along with case specific mediation working as a consultant, we are also able to use in-house mediation understanding training. Dealing with you and your assigned employees, we can provide assistance to build a society of 'avoidance' as opposed to 'remedy'. Your service will then keep control and have the abilities in-house to reduce potential conflicts.

A straightforward conversation in a private setup, very carefully managed by the mediator, can flush out problems and bring about basically transformed behaviour. This, in turn, can bring about more enhanced team loyalty as well as improved efficiency than any kind of number of Human Resources procedures can have achieved. Professionals anticipated the floodgates to open up to workplace mediation adhering to the introduction of the ACAS code as well as assistance.

Months after 'historic' police reforms, few want job of police arbitrator - KSTP

Months after 'historic' police reforms, few want job of police arbitrator.

Posted: Wed, 06 Jan 2021 04:01:39 GMT [source]

Each of our workplace moderators has a considerable medical history with wide experience across a variety of company markets and also whatsoever levels in organisations. There is likewise definitely hesitation by some legal agents. There is a role for lawyers suggesting employees encountering a grievance to motivate mediation. Nevertheless, some attorneys may favour rights-based outcomes to informal processes intended to recover partnerships.

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scgdoeswhat · 5 years

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Unpacking The Elementalists Finale

I’d like to dedicate this to my dear Kane anon (and other TE anons) who have been hitting my ask box up for the last several months. I’m sorry this took forever to get out and I know it doesn’t ease the fact that they ixnayed Kane, but hopefully this makes a little more sense of TE’s abrupt ending.

Without further ado...

I’ve been wanting to make this post since Book 2 Chapter 10, but life has been hectic. TE’s finale finally forced my hand and so here I am, with a bunch of theories, points, and thoughts I've had noted since the book came back from its hiatus. First off, now that TE is officially over (😭) we now know that the hiatus was primarily used to tie up all the loose story lines and to give us a tidy ending. The writing in the second half of the book was more solid, concise, and had a clear cut vision of what the writers wanted and where the plot was headed. As much as I hate to say it, the first half of the book may have been overly ambitious. They introduced the Moral Compass, potentially two villains in Kane and Alma, and a plethora of different storylines. I had a number of people tell me through the first five/six chapters of Book 2 that they were confused with the plot because it became too convoluted and hard to follow along. I think they introduced too many elements into the story, which dragged down the arc. Let’s break down some of these individually: The Moral Compass was something we were all excited to see implemented, because it gave us the potential to be an evil MC. In the end, we know it didn’t make much of a difference, save for dialogue and/or violent options. I think this was originally something intended to be greater than what it amounted to, and part of it is the limitations of the medium that the app is and simply, resources. This also ties into…. The plot involving Kane and Alma. I don’t believe having Kane as the Big Bad was supposed to be as defined as it ended up being. The two Sources were written far more ambiguous in the beginning, with the chance that depending on your choices, you could side with either one by the end of the book and/or series. The hiatus streamlined the plot, discarding elements that were difficult to pull off, including multiple MC point of views that may have held the possibility of being evil or choosing Kane, therefore placing Alma as the antagonist. In a narrative story app such as Choices (as opposed to Lovestruck, where the routes have the same players but different stories altogether), I just don’t think this advanced storytelling would have been doable. These plots are primarily linear, and MC being evil/with Kane/etc, it would present a different set of problems, including the fact that this becomes an entirely different story while there is supposed to be one solid ending. (For what it's worth, I enjoy the MC customizability of Choices more.) Looking at the group of friends, obviously Beckett was incredibly fleshed out while the others were not as much. I wanted to delve further into our friends’ backgrounds a bit more, and I think at the beginning of the book, we were on that path. Aster and her wood nymph family was a perfect example of table setting. We had two or three scenes before the hiatus to go to the forest, and I thought the Wand Wars and their involvement against Kane was slated to be more prominent. I think the writers had something bigger planned, but how would it all tie in if players started choosing the evil choices? Again, having too many choices causes a domino effect that makes it nearly impossible to navigate when the story is supposed to end with a particular goal in mind. The chapter where we can receive the wand was a symptom of ending the book early and I think the execution of the actual Wand Wars scene was lacking the emotional punch the initial introduction of it warranted. This is unfortunate because the setup they had in Book 1 made it seem much more violent, disastrous, and full of hate compared to what was shown (i.e. Attuned just being greedy bastards). We were introduced to Shreya's Serene & Sublime business and the potential of family disapproval and lack of support in the beginning, but everything was tied up with the gala chapter. Looking back, I was curious why it was so easy to get so many financial backers this early into the series, but knowing that TE only went for two books makes much more sense why we knew whether S&S succeeded or failed. (Tangent - for anyone who didn't secure backing, is S&S successful at the end of the book?) I think Griffin, his scholarship, and his decision between Natural Sciences and Thief was also slated to be a bigger subplot. We never met his parents, despite them being brought up very early in Book 1. If TE had gone the originally planned three or four books, I have no doubt his family would've been introduced and MC would have needed to help sway his parents (and the committee for the scholarship) whether Griffin continued on the NS or professional Thief path. Doing the Griffin scenes (even as platonic friends) influenced his standing for the scholarship and not doing them made him lose out to Amy, if I'm not mistaken. Question for everyone regarding Zeph and the Thief captaincy: Does he get it in everyone's playthrough? I wonder if the writers always planned for Zeph to get the captaincy or if Griff would have kept it depending on your playthrough if they had all four books to use. Another big plot point that resolved itself out of nowhere was Atlas and MC butting heads over their Sun Source mother. I was not a fan of this storyline at all. I felt like the disagreements between the siblings was unnecessary drama that came off as forced. They tried to explain Atlas' position, and I understood where they were coming from, but Atlas was very unreasonable with their constant “who cares about mom” shtick.

I think this was something that could have been more impactful if there weren't so many plotlines happening and more focus could have been given to it instead of a few screens of Atlas saying they were pissed off before storming away from MC. This was also a plotline that was directly influenced by the Kane/Alma decisions. If MC sides with Kane, it makes much more sense for MC and Atlas to be against each other as opposed to MC being good/siding with Alma.

Five major subplots were opened, but how do you seamlessly weave these elements into a 17-19 chapter book? In my opinion, you can't. Each time something new was introduced, I felt things were glossed over, despite big chunks of chapters being focused on whichever subplot the chapter was about. Throw in the romance and I think it is nearly impossible to resolve each aspect in a complete manner.

What also hurt was the pacing of the series. This was also seen in Book 1, where sometimes a chapter would span one or two days, only for a huge time jump to occur in the next chapter.

So many ideas could have been explored through the course of four books (which is what I believe they had planned), but all the different elements should have been introduced at different times. Instead, Book 2 was an amalgamation of so many ideas but not enough time, space, or resources to thoroughly hash out and have a satisfactory resolution. For what it’s worth, I don’t think it was having too much Beckett that hurt the series. He obviously kept the series afloat and was one of PB's biggest moneymakers in recent history. Despite the constant complaints on tumblr, people fail to realize that the ENTIRE online fandom (FB, IG, Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit, Wiki) comprises maybe 0.5% - 2% of the ENTIRE player fan base. It only made sense that PB capitalized on him because their numbers dictated that the resources should be spent in that manner. The fallout from this was that Beckett was the only one who had his storyline relatively complete, and that was due to the spending power of everyone who romanced him. I think what hurt them the most was the multiple storylines and the indecision of which direction they wanted to go. They had a grand idea of the direction through Book 2 (and Book 3, let’s not lie here) but in-game mechanics and the type of game Choices is made it difficult to pull off. The app wasn’t the correct medium for what they envisioned. In my opinion, the overall story arc had the potential to be brilliant, but again, the app wasn't designed for the type of story the writers wanted to tell.

I also think the timing and having a very short turnaround hurt, as well. Players had high expectations and when you factor in the hype around the other books that were also released on Fridays, TE lost some of its sparkle. Most players didn’t get a chance to miss it for the regular 2-3 months we’ve been trained to wait for sequels. (I recognize that I’m an anomaly and the previous three sentences do not apply to me at all.)

Even with all this, I applaud the writing team for wanting to deliver a story that was worthy of a magical world. I love all the Pend Pals (‘Motley Crue’ for me), the familiars, the side characters, loved to hate the villains, and from someone who is not into Harry Potter lore at all, I was absolutely sucked into the magick universe that the writers built. (Metal Att for life ⚙!)

If TE does return in the future (and I REALLY hope it does), I think it will be even stronger than the first two books because the world building is complete. We know almost everything we need to know now. Instead of using a Book 3 to search for Sun Mama, the family is complete, MC and Atlas are attuned to all the elements, and there are so many open-ended questions that Book 2 left us.

If they implement a time jump where MC and the Pend Pals are all post grad/mid 20s, it also gives the writers a chance to move the story from the Young Adult genre to a more mature setting. We saw this in the later diamond scenes, where the writing appeared similar in their vividness (and coding in the final scene - THANK YOU, glorious writing team) to Open Heart, Bloodbound, and A Courtesan of Rome. This removes the restrictions placed on the group of being college kids, and therefore are almost fully developed with their magick, giving the possibility of moving the story out of a university setting.

If you've made it all the way here to the bottom, thank you for sticking with me and apologies for spelling/grammar since this has all been on my phone 😂 I think this comprises almost all my notes I've been keeping for the last 2 months. Feel free to agree or disagree; I just wanted to post my thoughts on this book and series that I love so much.

Now, I'm going to go back to my holiday (don't worry, I didn't write all of this while on vacay lol) and I'll try to answer asks when I have downtime.

#the elementalists #beckett harrington #shreya mistry #griffin langley #aster d'yew #playchoices #choices #beckett x mc #griffin x mc #shreya x mc #aster x mc #zeph hernandez #atlas ernhardt #te

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phroyd · 4 years

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Sending the U.S. military to use force is among the most consequential decisions presidents can make. Matters may get out of control even with the most careful and deliberate planning. Skipping such steps shows callous disregard for American lives and interests. And there is overwhelming evidence in the past week that President Trump instigated an escalation cycle with an American enemy without such consideration. According to multiple news reports, policymakers gave Trump the option of killing Qasem Soleimani as one of several choices, perhaps hoping that including such a dramatic measure would push him toward a middle course; instead, he went for it, reportedly with little forethought or preparation. Our national security system is not meant to function that way.

Instead of holding a tightly managed, inclusive debate in the Situation Room, Trump made one of the most dangerous choices of his presidency among a tiny group at Mar-a-Lago. Such decisive moments are usually preceded by hundreds of people spending countless hours in dingy government offices and conference rooms, building PowerPoint slides and questioning lawyers. These individuals create the parameters and permutations of what the decision-makers consider. They identify the possible options, vetting their likely operational, diplomatic, economic and other effects. That work enables the commander in chief to make wrenching decisions about his military options wisely.

At least, that is how decisions are supposed to be made, and how we helped leaders make them when we worked in government. Bad options, considered with little serious deliberation on an unnecessarily rapid timeline, should never get to the president in the first place.

Like the broader system of government, which is designed around cumbersome checks and balances to prevent impulsive action, the traditional decision-making process for employing military force is ponderous. These steps frustrate some who view military advice as best when it’s direct and unadulterated, but they are supposed to ensure that the president chooses only from options that have been examined thoughtfully by experts in a variety of relevant areas. And the process is meant to consider all possible reactions with due preparation. To do otherwise may come at a toll of blood and treasure, credibility and certainty.

Since Soleimani’s death, many foreseeable consequences have unfolded. Iran threatened retaliation and took at least two such actions, first announcing the death of the 2015 nuclear agreement, then launching a ballistic missile attack on Iraqi bases where U.S. forces are deployed. The Iranian public — probably under some pressure — rallied around its government, expressing anger in massive street demonstrations. Elements of the Iraqi government also signaled that the U.S. strike has imperiled that bilateral relationship, with the parliament voting to expel American forces from the country. In his first public address on the crisis Wednesday, Trump suggested that he will pause further military action, but the American position in the Middle East is almost certainly worse now, with little benefit to show for the strike.

We have no idea what we’re doing in Iraq. We didn’t before we killed Soleimani.

Soleimani and his campaign of violence were provocative and merited an American response. But killing him, and doing it in Iraq, needlessly escalated the situation. Any standard Defense Department and interagency process of vetting options would have seen the threats, counterthreats and missile launches coming and recommended against it — which we know because two very different administrations rejected targeting the general. But many press accounts say no such process was followed under Trump.

In our combined 25-plus years in the Pentagon and the White House, use-of-force and even show-of-force decisions created some of the tensest moments between civilian and military leaders, revealing differences in approaches and assumptions. We saw controversies over the U.S. naval presence in the South China Sea, counterterrorist strikes in areas outside active hostilities across the Middle East and Africa, and troop deployments in Afghanistan. Interactions can be so fraught, and secrecy so important, it was often tempting for both sides to limit the number of people involved or go directly to those with decision-making authority. With Soleimani’s death, we don’t know whether civilians cut out military planners or if military officials took shortcuts in the process. Regardless, whatever truncated steps led to the choice to kill him had alarming results.

In our experience, any serious process to consider military force should include six key criteria.

First, the use of force must be consistent with international and domestic law. Deliberately targeting civilians or cultural sites, for example, should be off the table — and the Pentagon ruled those options out after Trump suggested them this past week.

Possible courses of action should be aligned to the broadest strategic objectives. The Soleimani strike was a tactical success, but it damaged the goals of countering the Islamic State, stabilizing Iraq and getting Iran to the negotiating table; it also put U.S. personnel across the region at risk. Before the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011, planners considered many parallel matters: the risk to U.S. service members; the possibility of civilian casualties; the likely diplomatic fallout with Pakistan and what that might mean for the war in Afghanistan; the legal authorities and implications; the domestic political cost if the raid resulted in American casualties, failed or both; and how Congress would react to all of those considerations.

Operations must be proportional to the security context. Killing one of the most senior Iranian military leaders, even with his lengthy list of despicable crimes and ostensible involvement in imminent threats, was an extreme response to the staged protests against the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and the rocket attack on an Iraqi base that killed one American. Killing Soleimani in response to these acts — particularly without providing any public evidence of an impending attack against Americans (though the administration has repeatedly insisted that this is what it was trying to prevent) — skipped tens of rungs on the escalation ladder.

Military actions must also be operationally feasible. Political leaders may ask for proposals that belie the laws of space and time because of a well-intentioned but fundamental misunderstanding of military capability. The U.S. military cannot simply find and kill a target anywhere in the world at any time using drones, a demand sometimes made by policymakers. Research by one of us found that many senior officials involved in drone policy underestimate the cost and logistics and overestimate drones’ availability, capabilities and range.

Options for strikes should be real options. Reportedly, whoever drafted the president’s briefing slides used the Goldilocks paradigm — presenting options that were too mild, too extreme and one that was just right. In such frameworks, most of the options are meant to be throwaways; these typically receive much less attention and planning than the preferred option does. Such frameworks are deceptive and dangerous: The Soleimani strike was never meant to seem best.

President Barack Obama faced this paradigm during the Afghanistan strategic review in 2010, when the military leadership offered widely varying recommendations for troop levels. During the George W. Bush administration, former senior Pentagon official Peter Rodman lamented how difficult it was to get the military to tee up meaningful and discrete options besides “do nothing and thermonuclear war.” This kind of advice presumes that the decision-makers are in on the gag; they aren’t always.

Finally, options must be politically informed. Obama’s unwillingness to intervene in Syria, for example, was rooted in his belief that the public wouldn’t support it. When Congress signaled its resistance as well, his view was solidified.

Inside the Pentagon, by statute, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is responsible for the development of military analysis, options and plans to share with the defense secretary and the president as he sees fit. In reality, military advice is not just one individual’s best ideas but a massive and complex process that engages hundreds of military and civilian experts. Those people generate and vet the options and flag political considerations, calculating how to best mitigate risk and coordinate with allies.

Yet it appears that the tight circle at Mar-a-Lago involved in making the decision to kill Soleimani — mainly the secretaries of defense and state — neglected many of these key elements, as the convoluted messaging, lack of preemptive mitigating actions and failure to inform close U.S. allies, let alone members of Congress, demonstrate.

It seems that the national security apparatus skipped crucial steps while deferring to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s advocacy. For example, consulting the Commerce Department might have flagged potential oil market impacts; Treasury could have noted the likely market fluctuations; the intelligence community could have offered real-time analysis on threats to U.S. personnel before and after the strike; and the State Department may have requested noncombatant evacuations of Americans from various Middle Eastern hotspots, highlighted the diplomatic fracas with European allies and underscored the need for deft diplomacy to repair the inevitable U.S.-Iraqi government crisis so that killing Soleimani did not cause a rupture.

Instead, Trump reportedly relied on a few advisers for what may be the most consequential foreign policy decision of his presidency. Small-group decision-making limits the imagination and thwarts checks and balances — and it can be dominated by impassioned advocates. The resulting decisions tend to be more about the president’s preferences than about national security interests. Now Trump needs to hear from a broad range of advisers about what might come next.

Of course, with this chaotic administration, lecturing on procedural deliberation from the outside may seem like wishcasting, at best. What, then, can responsible defense and military officials do when the president demands risky options, when the secretary of state inserts himself in the chain of command or the commander in chief publicly threatens war crimes? The answer is not to make post-hoc justifications or to pray that our system survives. The muscles of deliberation have to be exercised. Engaging Congress, which established the authorities that create good military options; reiterating to the troops and the world that the U.S. military follows the rule of law; telling senior commanders that they should not be tempted by those seeking private advice; promoting the secretary of defense as the face of the defense apparatus — these are all useful near-term steps.

No matter the president, bad military options should not land on his desk. We may have been lucky to ratchet down tensions with Iran. We shouldn’t have to rely on luck next time.

Phroyd

#trump #iran #assassination

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recreationalwizard · 4 years

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Social Hacking Techniques

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Carrying out a social hacking attack involves looking for weaknesses in user behaviour that can be exploited through seemingly legitimate means.[3] Three popular methods of attack include dumpster diving, role playing, and spear-phishing.

Dumpster Diving Sifting through garbage is a popular tactic for social hackers to recover information about the habits, activities, and interactions of organizations and individuals. Information retrieved from discarded property allows social hackers to create effective profiles of their targets. Personal contact information such as employee titles and phone numbers can be appropriated from discarded phone books or directories and used to gain further technical information such as login data and security passwords. Another advantageous find for social hackers is discarded hardware, especially hard drives that have not properly been scrubbed clean and still contain private and accurate information about corporations or individuals.[1] Since surfing through people's curbside garbage is not a criminal offence and does not require a warrant, it is a rich resource for social hackers, as well as a legally accessible one. Dumpster diving can yield fruitful, albeit smelly results for information seekers such as private investigators, stalkers, nosy neighbours, and the police.

Roleplaying Establishing trust by fooling people into believing in the legitimacy of a false character is one of the main tenets of social hacking. Adopting a false personality or impersonating a known figure to trick victims into sharing personal details can be done in person or via phone conversation.

In person By posing as third party maintenance workers in an office building, medical practitioners in a hospital, or one of many other forms, social hackers can get past security personnel and other employees undetected. In both examples, uniform apparel is associated with specific job functions, giving people reason to trust impersonators. A more complicated manoeuver would involve a longer planning cycle, such as taking up employment inside an organization that is being targeted for an attack. read this article recreationalwizard.com

In the movie Ocean's Eleven, a sophisticated crew of con artists plot an elaborate heist to rob three popular Las Vegas casinos by assimilating themselves in the everyday activities of the casinos' operations. Although the heist is executed in less than a day, the planning cycle is long and notably fastidious. An imperative function of the attack is to present credibility in the roles being impersonated, to which attention to detail is inevitably required.

Tailgating Tailgating is the act of following someone into a restricted space, such as an office building or an academic institution. Third party maintenance workers, or medical personnel, as mentioned above, often have limited cause to justify their credibility because of their appearances. Similar to role playing, tailgating functions around the assumption of familiarity and trust.[4] People are less likely to react suspiciously to anyone who appears to fit into the surrounding environment, and will be even less liable to question individuals who don't call attention to themselves. Following behind someone in an unassuming fashion may even eliminate the need to establish a rapport with authorized personnel.

Spear Phishing Online social hacks include “spear phishing” in which hackers scam their victims into releasing sensitive information about themselves or their organization. Hackers will target individuals within specific organizations by sending emails that appear to come from trusted sources including senior officials within the organization who hold positions of authority. To appear convincing, a social hacker's email message has to establish a tone of familiarity that belies any suspicion from its recipient. The email is designed to put forth a request for information that ties logically to the person sending it.[5] Often, company employees will fall prey to these emails and share personal information such as phone numbers or passwords, thinking that the information transfer is taking place in a secure environment. In more sinister scenarios, the emails from hackers may be embedded with malware that infects victims’ computers without their knowledge and secretly transfers private data directly to hackers.[6] From October 2013 to December 2016, the FBI investigated just over 22,000 of these incidents involving American businesses. In total, they saw losses approaching $1.6 billion.[7]

A successful example of spear phishing was highly publicized in the news media in January 2014, when Target, a U.S.-based retailer, experienced a security breach that allowed hackers to steal customers’ credit card and personal data information.[8] Later, it was revealed that the cyber criminals were able to access Target's financial and personal data files by targeting a third party mechanical company that had access to Target's network credentials. The social implications of such a high-profile social hack affect Target's popularity as a retailer, but also consumers’ trust and loyalty towards the brand.

Another example of Spear Phishing happened in June 2015 to Ubiquiti Networks Inc, a network technology company based in the United States. During this act of Spear Phishing Ubiquiti Networks reportedly lost over 46.7 million dollars. The hacking group sent Spear Phishing emails to employees in the finance department. These hackers sent spear phishing emails directly to the finance department's employees posing as company executives. The hackers managed to trick the employees into transferring funds to third party groups over seas.[9] Fortunately for Ubiquiti Networks, 8.1 million dollars were recovered from the hackers.[10]

Security Although Target may not have been slacking in its security, the hackers were able to infiltrate Target's network indirectly, by identifying a third party company with by access to Target's credentials. The social hack was in defrauding employees of the third party to divulge sensitive information, while the cybercrime was conducted by means of a malware infected email phishing attack.[11] The need for vigilant online security is highlighted by cyber-attacks against corporations like Target as well as other global businesses and high-traffic websites. Even small websites are vulnerable to attacks, specifically because their security protection is presumed to be low.[12] In Target's case, the third party mechanical company had inadequate security software which left them open to a malware attack.[11]

In a similar incident, Yahoo Mail also announced in January 2014 that their system had been hacked and a number of user email accounts had been accessed.[13] While the origin of the cause was unclear, poor security was again at the centre of the trouble. In both cases, large corporations with assumed understanding of security policies were compromised. Also in both cases, consumer data was stolen.[14]

In a study by Orgill et al., an observation is made that “it is important that each person responsible for computer security ask if their system is vulnerable to attacks by social engineers, and if so, how can the effect of a social engineering attack be mitigated.” [15] Using strong passwords[16] is one simple and easy method that assists in such mitigation, as is using reliable and effective anti-virus software. Other preventative measures include using different logins for services used, frequently monitoring accounts and personal data, as well as being alert to the difference between a request for help and a phishing attempt from strangers.[17]

Ethical Hacking To counter security breaches at the hands of social hackers as well as technical hackers, companies employ security professionals, known as ethical hackers, or more popularly, white hat hackers, to attempt to break into their systems in the same manner that social hackers would employ. Ethical hackers will leverage the same tools methods as hackers with criminal intent but with legitimate objectives. Ethical hackers evaluate security strengths and weaknesses and provide corrective options. Ethical hacking is also known as penetration testing, intrusion testing and red teaming.

Impacting Social Media The internet affords social hackers the ability to populate content spaces without detection of suspicious behaviour. Social hacking can also occur in environments where user-generated content is prevalent. This includes the opportunity to influence opinion polls and even to skew data beyond a point of validity. Social hacking can also be used to provide favourable reviews e.g. on product websites. It can also be used to counter negative feedback with an influx of positive responses ("like button") e.g. on blog or news article comment sections. Social hacking can cause damage to the online profile of a person or a brand by the simple act of accessing information that is openly available through social media channels.

Technology Appropriation Technology appropriation can be perceived as a type of social hacking in that it involves social manipulation of a technology. It describes the effort of users to make sense of a technology within their own contexts beyond adopting its intended use. When this happens, the use of the technology can change. Adaptation of a technology can incorporate reinterpretation of its function and meaning, to the effect that the technology itself can take on a new role. Appropriation accentuates that the user adjusts the technology for his own best practice, while adaptation advises that the use sometimes changes in general. For example, advances in today's technology make it easier than ever to portray another person. This method is known as creating a "deepfake". A deep fake is where someone can recreate somebody else's face and voice with a computer program. It is used to fake people saying and doing things they have never done or said before. "Public figures may be more “fakeable” through this method than private ones. Visually routine situations, like a press conference, are more likely to be faked than entirely novel ones." Deepfakes can be very dangerous in the sense that they can be used to fake what people with high authority have said such as, the president and politicians. There have been many articles and discussions over the new discovery of deepfakes such as Youtuber Shane Dawson's video, "Conspiracy Theories with Shane Dawson" where he talks about the conspiracy of deepfakes and what they could mean for the world today.

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thekeyissue · 5 years

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Reflections from a NYCC Panel: Chronic Illness, Disability, and the Comics Industry

During “The Creative Community, Disability, and Chronic Illness” panel at New York Comic Con this year, two overhead lights flickered nonstop, directly over the seated panelists. For most this was an annoyance – but for the presenter living with epilepsy, it made for a dangerous and unsafe environment. He had to wear sunglasses to avoid a potential seizure and participate in the panel meant to address this exact kind of issue.

It was embarrassing for everyone, and a perfect encapsulation of the state of support that the comics industry provides professionals who live with chronic illness and/or are differently abled. Giving conversations like this space and time at large events like NYCC is absolutely to be applauded, but clearly we are far from properly hearing, implementing feedback, and accommodating this community.

* * *

The panel itself took place in the early afternoon on Friday of NYCC weekend in one of the smaller designated panel/screening spaces. Six panelists and a moderator, all of whom live with conditions that complicate their work, spoke to each other and a room that was about a third full (I’d guess around 50/60 people watching – not a bad turn out).

I slipped into the back of the audience right before the panel kicked off, deciding to attend somewhat at the last minute. I have a family member who lives with a chronic illness (but does not work in comics) - it can be burdensome for her (or any differently-abled or chronically ill person) to explain her day-to-day challenges on top of facing them – so I took this as an opportunity to gain a fuller understanding of what her life and coping may be like, while also learning about comic-specific issues. I mention the context of my attendance only because I believe the majority of the audience at the panel also had a direct or adjacent relationship with disability or chronic illness as well (this assumption comes from audience reactions I observed – nodding at points being made, voiced agreement, questions asked). To some degree that’s a shame – like many things, increasing awareness can be a huge catalyst for change, especially when many of the accommodations that would help this community stem directly from individuals’ awareness.

From the panel’s first minute a steady stream of personal blind spots were revealed to me – a both satisfying (learning more is so helpful) and disheartening (feeling inconsiderate/like a failure at having missed them) process that continued throughout the session. Helpfully, the panelists were all amazing speakers, projecting positivity and a clear desire to educate and spread awareness, even while recounting emotionally-charged, disrespectful, and challenging situations they’d experienced.

The hour-long conversation they held was serious, funny, charming, poignant, sad, hopeful, informative, and too short – but more than anything, it illustrated each panelist’s tenacity and bravery. Recounting difficult personal anecdotes and sharing emotional vulnerability in front of one person can be challenging – this group did it in front of an audience in the service of their community, a demonstration of toughness and grit that should be celebrated. I was surprised to learn that participating in the panel brought with it a potential risk and necessary braveness in and of itself. Many creators who fit the criteria for the panel turned it down to avoid publically revealing their condition, fearing companies and editors might subsequently not “risk” working with them. While examples of those who had treated the panelists with understanding and accommodation were given, the prevalent fear of losing work & money due to their conditions clearly suggests that decent companies/editors are more exception than rule. The world is already ill-suited to fit the needs of those who are differently abled or living with a chronic illness simply because they are not the majority – it’s a sad reality that this disadvantage is topped off with an increased risk of losing or not being able to find employment. It’s easy to see why this community is so tough and brave – they have no other choice.

The challenge of the comic convention setting was another major topic of conversation during the panel. Attending conventions is necessary to make (or try to make) a living wage in this industry, but most comic cons do a poor job of accommodating the differently-abled and chronically ill. Surprisingly, even those that do offer a range of accommodations typically fail to adequately communicate the resources they’re providing. More than once a panelist would mention an accommodation NYCC provided that other members of the panel were not aware of. What’s the point of these accommodations if the people who need them the most are not actively told they exist? And failing that, shouldn’t this information be easily found? As time quickly ran out, it felt like the entire room was disappointed – we had only scratched the surface of the topic (not a huge surprise given the complexity of the subject matter) and there was an incredible amount that still hadn’t been addressed – but I left with a bunch of simple, actionable, convention-specific advice that I’d like to summarize below in the spirit of others joining in to support this community:

- Dedicated, easily accessible entrances, bathrooms, and elevators should be provided at conventions for the differently-abled to reduce the body stress this setting creates. - Designated quiet spaces should be accessible and large enough to accommodate anyone who needs them. - Often accommodations are limited. Do your best to not unnecessarily take up an accommodation that someone might truly need to get through their day (if you do not need it in such a way). - Be wary of your surroundings and those behind you when walking. It’s difficult and painful for someone in a chair/with a walker/etc. to have to move to avoid you, and they may not be able to. Don’t stop suddenly in front of someone, be understanding of their level to the ground, and prioritize their difficulty moving through crowds if it eclipses your own. - Remember that a creator might find crowds and constant (or any) social interaction challenging. Some may need breaks/alone/quiet time to not be overwhelmed with anxiety. Some may literally not be able to recognize or remember faces/pair them with names. Some may lack the ability to pick up on social cues that seem obvious to you. - Accommodations should be clearly communicated to anyone who might need them. The information should be actively given and easily/clearly accessible. - No one owes you a disclosure of their condition – be patient, understanding, and assume everyone’s best intentions – and don’t ask for or demand explanations.

* * *

I’d like to wish a huge, gracious and appreciative thank you to the participants from this year’s panel for all they so bravely shared and taught. I have not included their names (which can be easily found) because – and I am honestly not sure whether or not this is the right inclination – I’d hope their work is appreciated before the challenges they live with. It would distress me if sharing this experience and advice resulted in the panelists becoming more known for the condition they live with than their work – all of which is interesting and fantastic, and inherently deserves attention without further context. On the off chance one of the panelists reads this and would like to be identified, I’d happily edit their name(s) in.

Also - I’ve done my best to understand and properly use language around being differently-abled and living with chronic illness, but if I’ve messed up please let me know so I can correct and apologize.

* * *

Thanks for taking the time to read. Below please find the NYCC “The Creative Community, Disability, and Chronic Illness” panel’s official description:

Disabilities, both visible and invisible, can make working in the deadline-intensive, yet creatively rewarding fields of comics/gaming/geek culture especially challenging. Managing energy, coping with pain, depression or other mental health issues, and the added cost of being self employed (no employer benefits) are all candidly discussed in this panel which features professional creators who all have disabilities or chronic health concerns. They will not only share their challenges, but their strategies for success, while being open and honest about their work and their lives, and the way they are perceived by clients. Brandon Kazen-Maddox will provide ASL translation services.

#comics #comic books #disability #chronic illness

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mostlysignssomeportents · 5 years

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Interoperability and Privacy: Squaring the Circle

Last summer, we published a comprehensive look at the ways that Facebook could and should open up its data so that users could control their experience on the service, and to make it easier for competing services to thrive.

In the time since, Facebook has continued to be rocked by scandals: privacy breaches, livestreamed terrorist attacks, harassment, and more. At the same time, competition regulators, scholars and technologists have stepped up calls for Facebook to create and/or adopt interoperability standards to open up its messenger products (and others) to competitors.

To make matters more complex, there is an increasing appetite in both the USA and Europe, to hold Facebook and other online services directly accountable for the actions of its users: both in terms of what those users make available (copyright infringement, political extremism, incitements to violence, etc) and in how they treat each other (harassment, stalking, etc).

Fool me twice...

Facebook execs have complained that these goals are in conflict: they say that for the company to detect and block undesirable user behaviors as well as interdicting future Cambridge Analytica-style data-hijacking, they need to be able to observe and analyze everything every user does, both to train automated filters and to allow them to block abusers. But by allowing third parties to both inject data into their network and pull data out of it--that is, allowing interoperability--the company's ability to monitor and control its users' bad behavior will be weakened.

There is a good deal of truth to this, but buried in that truth is a critical (and highly debatable) assumption: "If you believe that Facebook has the will and ability to stop 2.3 billion people from abusing its systems and each other, then weakening Facebook's control over these 2.3 billion people might limit the company's ability to make that happen."

But if there's one thing we've learned from more than a decade of Facebook scandals, it's that there's little reason to believe that Facebook possesses the requisite will and capabilities. Indeed, it may be that there is no automated system or system of human judgments that could serve as a moderator and arbiter of the daily lives of billions of people. Given Facebook's ambition to put more and more of our daily lives behind its walled garden, it's hard to see why we would ever trust Facebook to be the one to fix all that's wrong with Facebook.

After all, Facebook's moderation efforts to date have been a mess of backfiring, overblocking, and self-censorship, a "solution" that no one is happy with.

Which is why interoperability is an important piece of the puzzle when it comes to addressing the very real harms of market concentration in the tech sector, including Facebook's dominance over social media. Facebook users are eager for alternatives to the service, but are held back by the fact that the people they want to talk with are all locked within the company's walled garden. Interoperability presents a means for people to remain partially on Facebook, but while using third-party tools that are designed to respond to their idiosyncratic needs. While it seems likely that no one is able to build a single system that protects 2.3 billion users, it's certainly possible to build a service whose social norms and technological rules are suited to smaller groups. Facebook can't figure out how to serve every individual and community's needs--but those individuals and communities might be able to do so for themselves, especially if they get to choose which toolsmith's tools they use to mediate their Facebook experience.

Standards-washing: the lesson of Bush v Gore

But not all interoperability is created equal. Companies have historically shown themselves to be more than capable of subverting mandates to adhere to standards and allow for interconnection.

A good historic example of this is the drive to standardize voting machines in the wake of the Supreme Court's decision in Bush v Gore. Ambiguous results from voting machines resulted in an election whose outcome had to be determined by the Supreme Court, which led to Congress passing the Help America Vote Act, which mandated standards for voting machines.

The process did include a top-tier standards development organization to oversee its work: the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), which set about creating a standard for their products. But rather than creating a "performance standard" describing how a voting machine should process ballots, the industry sneakily tried to get the IEEE to create a "design standard" that largely described the machines they'd already sold to local election officials: in other words, rather than using standards to describe how a good voting machine should work, the industry pushed a standard that described how their existing, flawed machines did work with some small changes in configurations. Had they succeeded, the could have simply slapped a "complies with IEEE standard" label on everything they were already selling and declared themselves to have fixed the problem...without doing the serious changes needed to fix their systems, including requiring a voter-verified paper ballot.

Big Tech is even more concentrated than the voting machine industry is, and it's far more concentrated than the voting machine industry was in 2003 (most industries are more concentrated today than they were in 2003). Legislatures, courts or regulators that seek to define "interoperability" should be aware of the real risk of the definition being hijacked by the dominant players (who are already very skilled at subverting standardization processes). Any interoperability standard developed without recognizing Facebook's current power and interest is at risk of standardizing the parts of Facebook's business that it does not view as competitive risks, while leaving the company's core business (and its bad business practices) untouched.

Even if we do manage to impose interoperability on Facebook in ways that allow for meaningful competition, in the absence of robust anti-monopoly rules, the ecosystem that grows up around that new standard is likely to view everything that's not a standard interoperable component as a competitive advantage, something that no competitor should be allowed to make incursions upon, on pain of a lawsuit for violating terms of service or infringing a patent or reverse-engineering a copyright lock or even more nebulous claims like "tortious interference with contract."

Everything not forbidden is mandatory

In other words, the risk of trusting competition to an interoperability mandate is that it will create a new ecosystem where everything that's not forbidden is mandatory, freezing in place the current situation, in which Facebook and the other giants dominate and new entrants are faced with onerous compliance burdens that make it more difficult to start a new service, and limit those new services to interoperating in ways that are carefully designed to prevent any kind of competitive challenge.

Standards should be the floor on interoperability, but adversarial interoperability should be the ceiling. Adversarial interoperability takes place when a new company designs a product or service that works with another company's existing products or services, without seeking permission to do so.

Facebook is a notorious opponent of adversarial interoperability. In 2008, Facebook successfully wielded a radical legal theory that allowed it to shut down Power Ventures, a competitor that allowed Facebook’s users who opted in, to use multiple social networks from a single interface. Facebook argued that by allowing users to log in and display Facebook with a different interface, even after receipt of a cease and desist letter telling Power Ventures to stop, the company had broken a Reagan-era anti-hacking law called the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). In other words, upsetting Facebook was at the center of their illegal conduct.

Adversarial interoperability flips the script

Clearing this legal thicket would go a long way toward allowing online communities to self-govern by federating their discussions with Facebook without relying on Facebook's privacy tools and practices. Software vendors could create tools that allowed community members to communicate in private, using encrypted messages that are unintelligible to Facebook's data-mining tools, but whose potential members could still discover and join the group using Facebook.

This could allow new entrants to flip the script on Facebook's "network effects" advantage: today, Facebook is viewed as holding all the cards because it has corralled everyone who might join a new service within its walled garden. But legal reforms to safeguard the right to adversarial interoperability would turn this on its head: Facebook would be the place that had conveniently organized all the people whom you might tempt to leave Facebook, and even supply you with the tools you need to target those people.

Revenge of Carterfone

There is good historic precedent for using a mix of interoperability mandates and a legal right to interoperate beyond those mandates to reduce monopoly power. The FCC has imposed a series of interoperability obligations on incumbent phone companies: for example, the rules that allow phone subscribers to choose their own long-distance carriers.

At the same time, federal agencies and courts have also stripped away many of the legal tools that phone companies once used to punish third parties who plugged gear into their networks. The incumbent telecom companies historically argued that they couldn't maintain a reliable phone network if they didn't get to specify which devices were connected to it, a position that also allowed the companies to extract rental payments for home phones for decades, selling you the same phone dozens or even hundreds of times over.

When agencies and courts cleared the legal thicket around adversarial interoperability in the phone network, it did not mean that the phone companies had to help new entrants connect stuff to their wires: manufacturers of modems, answering machines, and switchboards sometimes had to contend with technical changes in the Bell system that broke their products. Sometimes, this was an accident of some unrelated technical administration of the system; sometimes it seemed like a deliberate bid to harm a competitor. Often, it was ambiguous.

Monopolists don't have a monopoly on talent

But it turns out that you don't need the phone company's cooperation to design a device that works with its system. Careful reverse-engineering and diligent product updates meant that even devices that the phone companies hated--devices that eroded their most profitable markets--had long and profitable runs in the market, with devoted customers.

Those customers are key to the success of adversarial interoperators. Remember that the audience for a legitimate adversarial interoperability product are the customers of the existing service that it connects to. Anything that the Bell system did to block third-party phone devices ultimately punished the customers who bought those devices, creating ill will.

And when a critical mass of an incumbent giant's customer base depends on--and enjoys--a competitor's product, even the most jealous and uncooperative giants are often convinced to change tactics and support the businesses they've been trying to destroy. In a competitive market (which adversarial interoperability can help to bring into existence), even very large companies can't afford to enrage their customers.

Is Facebook better than everyone else?

Facebook is one of the largest companies in world. Many of the world's most talented engineers and security experts already work there, and many others aspire to do so. Given that, is it realistic to think that a would-be adversarial interoperator could design a service that plugs into Facebook without Facebook's permission?

Ultimately, this is not a question with an empirical answer. It's true that few have tried to pull this off since Power Ventures was destroyed by Facebook litigation, but it's not clear whether the competitive vacuum is the result of potential competitors who are too timid to lock engineering horns with Facebook's brain-trust, or potential competitors and investors whose legal departments won't let them even try.

But it is instructive to look at the history of the Bell system after Carterfone and Hush-a-Phone: though the Bell system was the single biggest employer of telephone technicians in the world and represented the best, safest, highest-paid opportunities for would-be telecoms innovators, after Carterfone and Hush-a-Phone, Bell's rivals proceeded to make device after device after device that extended the capabilities of the phone network, without permission, overcoming the impediments that the network's operator put in their way.

Closer to home, remember that when Facebook wanted to get Power Ventures out of its network, its primary tool of choice wasn't technical measures--Facebook didn't (or couldn't) use API changes or firewall rules alone to keep Power Ventures off the service--it was mainly lawsuits. Perhaps that's because Facebook wanted to set an example for later challengers by winning a definitive legal battle, but it's very telling that the company that operated the network didn't (or couldn't!) just kick its rival out, and instead went through a lengthy, expensive and risky legal battle when simple IP blocking didn’t work.

Facebook has a lot of talented engineers, but it doesn't have all of them.

Being a defender is hard

Facebook's problem with would-be future challengers is a familiar one: in security, it is easier to attack than to defend. For Facebook to keep a potential competitor off its network, it has to make no mistakes. In order for a third party to bypass Facebook's defenses in order to interoperate with Facebook without permission, it has only to find and exploit a single mistake.

And Facebook labors under other constraints: like the Bell system fending off Hush-a-Phone, the things that Facebook does to make life hard for competitors who are helping its users get more out of its service are also making life harder for all its users. For example, any tripwire that blocks logins by suspected bots will also block users whose behaviors appear bot-like: the more strict the bot-detector is, the more actual humans it will catch.

Here again, Facebook's dizzying user-base works against it: with billions of users, a one-in-a-million event is going to happen thousands of times every day, so Facebook has to accommodate a wide variety of use-cases, and some of those behaviors will be sufficiently weird to allow a rival's bot to slip through.

Back to privacy

Facebook users (and even non-Facebook users) who want more privacy have a variety of options, none of them very good. Users can tweak Facebook's famously hard-to-understand privacy dashboard to lock down their accounts and bet that Facebook will honor their settings (this has not always been a good bet).

Everyone can use tracker-blockers, ad-blockers and script-blockers to prevent Facebook from tracking them when they're not on Facebook, by watching how they interact with pages that have Facebook "Like" buttons and other beacons that let Facebook monitor activity elsewhere on the Internet. We’re rightfully proud of our own tracker blocker, Privacy Badger, but it doesn't stop Facebook from tracking you if you have a Facebook account and you're using Facebook's service.

Facebook users can also watch what they say on Facebook, hoping that they won't slip up and put something compromising on the service that will come back to haunt them (though this isn't always easy to predict).

But even if people do all this, they're still exposing themselves to Facebook's scrutiny when they use Facebook, which monitors how they use the service, every click and mouse-movement. What's more, anyone using a Facebook mobile app might be exposing themselves to incredibly intrusive data-gathering, including some suprisingly creepy and underhanded tactics.

If users could use a third-party service to exchange private messages with friends, or to participate in a group they're a member of, they can avoid much (but not all) of this surveillance.

Such a tool would allow a someone to use Facebook while minimizing how they are used by Facebook. For people who want to leave Facebook but whose friends, colleagues or fellow travelers are not ready to join them, a service like this could let Facebook refuseniks get out of the Facebook pool while still leaving a toe in its waters. What's more, it lets their friends follow them, by creating alternatives to Facebook where the people they want to talk to are still reachable. One user at a time, Facebook's rivals could siphon off whole communities. As Facebook's market power dwindled, so would the pressure that Web publishers feel to embed Facebook trackers on their sites, so that non-Facebook users would not be as likely to be tracked as they use the Web..

Third-party tools could automate the process of encrypting conversations, allowing users to communicate in private without having to trust Facebook's promises about its security.

Finally, such a system would put real competitive pressure on Facebook. Today, Facebook's scandals do not trigger mass departures from the service, and when users do leave, they tend to end up on Instagram, which is also owned by Facebook.

But if there was a constellation of third-party services that were constantly carving escape hatches in Facebook's walled garden, Facebook would have to contend with the very real possibility that a scandal could result in the permanent departure of its users. Just the possibility would change the way that Facebook made decisions: product designers and other internal personnel who argued for treating users with respect on ethical grounds would be able to add an instrumental benefit to being "good guys": failing to do so could trigger yet another exodus from the platform.

Lower and upper bounds

It's clear that online services need rules about privacy and interoperability setting out how they should treat their users, including those users who want to use a competing service.

The danger is that these rules will become the ceiling on competition and privacy, rather than the floor. For users who have privacy needs--and other needs--beyond those the big platforms are willing to fulfill, it's important that we keep the door open to competitors (for-profit, nonprofit, hobbyist and individuals) who are willing to fill those needs.

None of this means that we should have an online free-for-all. A rival of Facebook that bypassed its safeguards to raid user data should still get in trouble (just as Facebook should get in trouble for privacy violations, inadequate security, or other bad activity). Shouldering your way into Facebook in order to break the law is, and should remain, illegal, and the power of the courts and even law enforcement should remain a check on those activities. But helping Facebook's own users, or the users of any big service, to configure their experience to make their lives better should be legal and encouraged even (and especially) if it provides a path for users to either diversify their social media experience or move away entirely from the big, concentrated services. Either way, we’d be on our way to a more pluralistic, decentralized, diverse Internet.

https://boingboing.net/2019/08/13/interoperability-and-privacy.html

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rabidsquabbiteldewrito · 5 years

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ElDewrito: The Future of the Mod, And our Involvement with 343 on MCC PC.

Note: It’s been 10 months since our last blog post. The purpose of this post is to clear some confusion, correct some incorrect information floating around regarding ElDewrito, and update everyone on what we’ve been doing since last April. It’s been a roller-coaster of events since then. There are some things I can not speak about, such as features or scope of MCC that have not already been publicly announced/discussed by 343, but I’ve been granted permission to speak about certain things, including any meetings that took place that were not under NDA. But first....

Some Thanks Are in Order

There are so many people who’ve helped the team along the way to make ElDewrito what it is today. As of the time of writing of this post, ElDewrito players have played over 1 million games since 0.6′s launch; 1,101,115 games to be exact. We have been humbled by the support of the players, the creativity of the forgers who have made amazing maps, and the hosters who have kept a steady supply of ElDewrito servers to play on.

Thanks to the previous ElDewrito devs who are no longer active. The groundwork you layed out gave us the means opportunity to deliver 0.6 successfully.

The server hosts who volunteer their own hardware to keep plenty of ED servers up. The ElDewrito team does not host a single server - All are ran by you, the community. An extra special thanks to those that are hosting the ranked and social servers.

Thanks to all of the 0.6 testers. Over 3000 full-lobby test games were played prior to the launch of 0.6, and without this extensive testing, 0.6 could have been 0.5 all over again.

The forge map makers who put in countless hours recreating maps as well as designing completely original maps. We’ve been extremely impressed with the creativity this community has.

Despite the posts saying goodbye to ElDewrito and the thanks we are giving out, do not be mistaken; the mod is not dead, nor is it inactive or going away. In fact, it’s the most popular it has been in many many months. Within the reddit post, I have made a comment regarding some statistics detailing the million+ games played.

Our Involvement with 343

On April 24, four days after we released 0.6, the few of the more active members of the ElDewrito team met with certain 343 employees and other members of the Halo Universe, including Frank O’ Conner, the Halo Franchise Development Director. Our initial meeting, which was not under NDA and therefor did not touch on the topic of MCC at all, was about ElDewrito and a simple request that we pause development. After the success of our 0.6 release, where we had 12,000 concurrent players, they were professional, impressed, congratulatory, and even sympathetic and apologetic about the unfortunate circumstances surrounding Microsoft issuing DMCA takedowns against Halo Online and Twitch Streamers. They publicly released this statement:

“One thing remains clear – the community really wants more Halo on PC. As we look ahead, we’re very excited about the prospects of an official classic Halo experience making its way to PC and we hope to be able to partner with the ElDewrito team and broader mod and content creation community to help inform the types of experiences and features our fans desire. While we have nothing to announce today, please know that the PC community is very important to us and top of mind as we work towards the future. “

They mentioned to us that our success with ElDewrito lit a spark and we were told it "gave us a kick in the pants”. MCC has obviously always been planned to eventually be on PC, but was never on the current roadmap. So while ElDewrito is not responsible for MCC coming to PC, it is responsible for it coming to PC right now. So for that, the ElDewrito team would like to thank you, the community, for spreading the word, playing ElDewrito with such positive reactions, and enjoying the game we poured our hearts and souls into; ElDewrito is what set MCC PC in motion.

After that initial meeting, our small group of 5 met on occasion with 343 to discuss their future plans, gather opinions, and discuss and how they would like us to be involved in MCC on PC’s development. We have been acting as an advisory board prior to the Halo Insider program to help them shape the MCC experience. While we were brought in by 343 for our particular set area of expertise, we unfortunately have not been actively doing any technical work with them for some time now due to our area of expertise (modding) not being needed at this time. However, as Ske7ch/343 bublically mentioned in the Reddit AMA, modding is on the roadmap for a future time, and they have been focusing on bringing Halo:Reach into MCC. Here are a couple of questions you may have, which have been answered by 343 directly already.

Will MCC have modding tools and/or Steam Workshop support? And splitscreen?

“We are working closely with the members of the modding community (including some friends on the ElDewrito team) to explore our options for "official" mod support, but we won't have this at launch. Our #1 priority for launch is ensuring we get each of these core games "right" for PC and security/anti-cheat is a big focus. As we've stated, this entire offering will grow and evolve over time.”

So to reiterate, MCC will not have any sort of modding capabilities on launch, but they have stated that they want to add support later down the road, and plan to work with our team to achieve this.

What about forge/theater?

The initial launch of MCC will not include any forge or theater functionality. Again, as they stated in AMA, it is planned for later. Below is a quote from the AMA:

“Forge and Theater are awesome features but as we learned with Halo 5: Forge, these features require a lot of extra work and diligence to bring to PC - particularly with the complexities of M/KB and remappable key-bindings. With this in mind, Forge and Theater for Reach won't be ready at the same time as the MP/Campaign/Firefight experiences on PC. From a development perspective, it makes more sense for the team to tackle Reach's Forge/Theater a little later in the roadmap at the same time as Halo 3 and Halo 4 work.”

While we are beyond excited that MCC is coming to PC and this is fantastic news for all Halo Fans, many of us are a little disappointed in what is being offered on launch. ElDewrito 0.6 didn’t just attempt to bring a Halo game to PC, it brought it with a very fresh experience while keeping the Original, classic “Yep This Is Halo” feeling. An insanely enhanced forge, and a plethora of gametype and player trait customization never before seen in a Halo game. While we feel that this is a crucial aspect that should be included on launch to keep players interested with the limited initial content, we are very glad that modding support and forge are on the roadmap for a future time, and look forward to helping 343 shape this aspect of MCC.

There are a couple of tings we particularly commend/respect 343 for, including the following:

Learning from some of the mistakes of the Xbox One MCC. 343 has made it clear that this will be released “when it’s ready”, which is the same approach we had with Eldewrito 0.6. There won’t be a broken release followed by two years of silence with MCC PC; it will be released when flighting has proved it is ready to be released.

Increased transparency/communication with the player-base. This has been very important for the ElDewrito team and we are glad that 343 has gone to great lengths to keep the community updated with accurate information.

We are not at liberty to reveal anything else regarding our involvement with 343.

What are we doing now?

What any group of Halo Modders and reverse engineers would do. Continue to mod and reverse engineer Halo. Regardless of the future of MCC on PC, the team isn’t going anywhere. We’ve never stopped reverse engineering the game, engine, and resources.

Since last April, we’ve learned so much, and have been able to do some incredible things, some of which were thought to be impossible, and you will be seeing some of this work in the near future in the form of an update.

Bottom Line: This is in not in any way a goodbye. The ElDewrito team is not going anywhere, and you’ll be seeing a hell of a lot more from us in the future, whether it be in the existing ElDewrito mod, or MCC PC itself. As always, we will keep the community informed of our activities. Feel free to ask questions on the reddit post where this was linked. We will answer what we are allowed to answer. The future is bright my friends, and it’s time to be patient now. As for the ED team, "I think we're just getting started.”

Til next time (Soon™),

RabidSquabbit

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myfriendpokey · 5 years

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subterranean modern

1. Modernism as a concern with being modern.

Which on the face of it is a weird and trivial thing to be concerned about. Who cares? Is the modern good, bad, does it have any specific qualities or objectives whatsoever? If it does, then why not address yourself to those goals directly, rather than having to fret about the merely temporal? The neoclassical and romantic don't strictly speaking have to worry about being modern, they could always be justified on the basis of the eternal human verities, like such-and-such, or the other thing. The postmodern doesn't need to worry about being modern as "modernity" is something which has already happened, and which is inescapable, which is why we can safely afford to engage in pastiche. So what was the moment in between - when art could neither justify itself as something safely outside of history nor as something already contained within one which had already occured? A period of art trying to deal directly with historicism itself?

To be anxious to be modern is to see your life, beliefs, status and role in the context of a history where any of these things could abruptly or violently be changed by forces out of your control - it involves a sharp awareness of how poorly "history" will treat or has always treated those deemed to have been left behind. And it's an anxiety with no necessarily fixed political expression, which helps to explain why modernism itself could be so various (and sometimes dubious) in this regard. The Martian attack in War Of The Worlds is famously an extrapolation of the West's own colonial history, turned back on itself: now we are the victims of genocidal, technologically accomplished marauders. But if this is a critique of the colonial mind it's also a kind of paranoid extension of it, imagining faceless alien hordes just waiting to swamp europe if we ever get lax or fall behind in the arms race: the common cold which eventually undermines and destroys the space invaders also mirrors western anxieties about foreign contamination (as syphilis had historically been viewed), or miscegenation. The awareness that a change in "history" could mean death or diaspora might just lead to trying to punch first and most brutally in the name of preserving some advantage, or trying to hold on to your spoils another few generations – but it could also mean trying to find another way of thinking, acting, writing which would break out of the cycle itself.

Literary modernism drew on and tried to position itself within a range of competing historicisms (Marx, Freud, Spengler, Carlyle, Darwin, etc) and in the process tried creating new ones. The results are in general not inspiring: Yeats’s gyres and cycles; Shaw’s mysterious “life force”; Joyce’s Vico-inspired circular history; Ezra Pound’s doggedly stupid efforts to construct a new theory of fascist political economy by crossing John Adams with dynastic China. But I think we also have to see these as scaffolding, to some extent, around a larger project: which is the idea of art as an intervention in history, an apparition of the future (or the uncanny past) which would burst in on the present with a set of new demands for everyday life. We currently live in an economic system in which the blood of the present is continuously drained to artificially prolong a possible, impossible future: one which attempts to pre-emptively shut any political act which would infringe on the right of rentiers to generate constantly increasing returns on their investments until the heat death of the universe. The avant-garde is the reverse – something which would take its energy from the future in order to extend the range of action in the present. When the neoclassical emphasis on the merely aesthetic (or the merely moral, the improving) palls into kitsch, when the postmodern emphasis on “challenging narratives” becomes a purely ritual form of defusing tensions so that business can go on as usual, the concept of the modern as an unsettled question still has capacity to startle.

2. Are videogames modern?

Emilie Reed has already explored this question from the perspective of visual modernism. But i think if we ask it using the definition that I started out with earlier in this post, the answer has to be: no, absolutely not. Videogames aren't anxious about modernity, not because they're so formally advanced (the whole videogame industry is largely an anachronism) but because they never had a sense of history to begin with. History in videogames is at most the history of the stylistic signifiers of videogames themselves - from 8bit to 16bit and so forth - but even then, there's no real sense of that transition being historical in nature, in being linked to some specific change in how people lived or worked or thought about their lives.

To some extent this is because videogames emerged and were propogated across a strangely uniform historical moment – the moment of neoliberalism, from the mid-70s to present, of a supposedly vindicated free market capitalism re-emerging throughout globalized economies worldwide. Videogames are up there with the IMF in terms of historical signs that you're living in this state of affairs: luxury commodities, consumer-grade electronic toys which take advantage of a busy tech sector, cheap manufacturing and shipping, and of course a progressive slackening of regulations around marketing to children. Videogames mean leisure as well as novelty - every videogame is an excess, a kind of portent of the easy abundance and constant progress that the market had to offer. They emerged without anybody much ever wanting them to, part and parcel of the range of spontaneously occuring new conveniences and devices that accompany consumer society.Twenty years too late, they nevertheless would have fit right into the famous “kitchen debates” of the 1950s, in which a model house filled with brand new appliances and recreational devices acted as showcase for a way of life that “anyone in America could afford” (start saving those pennies!!)

[The history of Atari is an interesting time capsule of videogames as aimless luxury doohickey rather than anything as essentialist as a “medium”. Atari’s other products from this time included a sort of proto-winamp skin, a music visualizer that plugged into a tv to display a limited range of soothing animations. It cost $170, which i believe would be over $600 in 2019 dollars – shades of the Oculus Rift, but also an interesting indication of the kind of commodity Atari thought they were making in general]

Videogames are “futuristic” but it’s in a sort of vague, unwilled way – nobody asked for these things to be invented. People behind the scenes were certainly struggling to produce and advance on them but the public representation is, as the Housers say, that videogames are made by elves. The famous “end of history” was still a few years off, but the sort of passive, ambient futuricity of videogames were part of the pitch, part of the idea that if history hadn’t yet ENDED it could at least be something that happened far enough away that you never felt the tremors.

Why is videogame culture so hospitable to the far right?

Postmodernism is haunted by the notion of conspiracy, the idea that history lingers on in some subterranean way, continuing to exert a baleful influence upon the present; officially denied, but still working behind the scenes, a secret society of postal workers here, an albino papist assassin there... so perhaps it’s not surprising that something of the same paranoia would hang around videogames, or some of the specific targets it would end up revolving around. One weird thing is that the people paranoid about keeping politics out of the format never seem to be all that vocal when it’s, say, the US military working with these companies for explicit propaganda purposes, or weapon manufacturers looking for free advertising, or large companies involved with weird shady review practices, etc.... but it also makes sense when we consider that these things, the military, industry, big tech, are what have always supported the supposedly ahistorical bubble that videogames exist within. If the US army does it, it can’t be political – because that army is exactly why we’ve been able to keep a certain form of “politics” at arm’s length.

If fascists find a home within these circles it’s partly because fascism is itself anti-political, or at least anti- the discursive and constructed nature of the political, anti-having to be political. It addresses itself instead to the inchoate realm of pre-existing essences and “natural”, i.e. historically unexamined, identities, posited as seperate from and superior to the ebb and flow of any given discourse. Which in fact is not dissimilar to how videogames have also presented themselves, and the affluent 1970s american middle class leisure patterns that they continue to preserve in aspic through their design assumptions although they’ve dissolved nearly everywhere else. To talk about the specific political meanings implied by such-and-such mechanics is not wrong per se but i think it does miss a broader picture: these things were sold, not as an artform or a medium of communication to begin with, but as the simple birthright of those lucky enough to have been included in the winner’s circle of 20th century globalization. And insofar as the gruesome escalating culture war around these objects is not really about them but about that birthright, about the right to not have to think about these things or what they cost or how they’re made or what they even really do, they will retain some character of the horrible idiot Boy’s Adventure rhetoric of fascist thought – traitors within, invaders without, take back what’s ours etc.

It’s not like modernism proper was lacking in antisemites, misogynists, imperialists, fascists of every stripe. Although the real connection between the two has tended to be overemphasised: it doesn’t include, say, the painters exhibited as “degenerate art” under the nazis, or murdered jewish artists like Bruno Schulz, or the feminists, socialists, anarchists, homosexuals, etc etc (and even the most ignominous cases like that of the futurists don’t feel quite conclusive, unless you think Mussolini really was keen on abstract sound poems as the new and vigorous art of the future). But maybe the gruesomeness of that list is the point: everything bad about modernism is already here. We have the weird cultish adoration of a strictly pro forma version of “difficulty”, we have the idiot jingoism and “provocative” chauvinism, we have lots of dumb schlock about saving western civilisation and masculinity and etc. Like the scrapmetal cars in Mad Max all-new unified theories of history are or have already been constructed from the flotsam, junk science and vague prejudice of the previous century. At a point where gamer cults are watching youtube explainers of Carl Jung while drinking brain-enhancing nutrient paste i think we have officially lost the right to make fun of W.B. Yeats for hanging out with Rosicrucians and injecting ape glands into his scrotum to restore male vigour. It was good while it lasted.

But given that we’re here already, is there anything worth taking from modernism the first go round? I can think of a few different things. The internationalist qualities of the artist’s magazine and manifesto, both cheap and portable forms which could easily be adopted or changed, which served as hubs for local action and also as ways to exchange findings and ideas with other groups doing the same. Compare this to videogames where “local scenes” surely do exist but for the most part do so as ancillaries to a generic industry pipeline, making games for the same carefully featureless, anglocentric audience that this entails. Relatedly, how central translation was to modernism, not just as a way to introduce more works to the existing market but as a form of creative estrangement and of getting out of a limited market-based parochialism – a way to engage not just with singular decontextualised works but also with criticism, theory, arguments. Given how much more capitalised even alternative videogames still seem to be than alt comics, literature, etc, it’d be nice if we could achieve at least parity with those forms.

I could also point towards the modernist interest in material and the new working methods this opened up – the interest in what mass production could mean and what new relations to art it could entail – attempts to create new forms of audience, of public and public speech, and to imagine forms of popular art which didn’t necessarily abide by the gloopy poptimist ethos of the popular always equalling the profitable always equalling the ubiquitous (there were many false starts, but i believe poptimism finally died forever with the advent of the funko pop). And I could also point at the interest in combining the critical and the aesthetic – in the argument that style is itself a combination of the critical and the aesthetic, is also a way of thinking about history, rather than just being what gets swapped in over the programmer art when it’s time to show a build, or treated as the meaningless expression of some changeless pre-existing taste. Is taste changeless? Or to what extent? What does this mean for forms of public speech, like art, which themselves exist within the constraints of taste? Unfortunately, we will probably not be helped in our thinking on these questions if we only ever write about Red Dead Redemption 2.

***

Part of the reason videogames have tried pointing themselves away from the modern is to try to establish their own lasting importance; instead of a provisional tangle of different incongruous traditions and materials designed to fit a peculiar historical or economic context, these things are a medium, which is imagined as a sort of mysterious Stargate portal onto the realms of Systems or Empathy or Play or whatever other Panglossian catch-all helps get you some of that californian venture capital, or possibly a book deal. But part of the consequence has been a stunted dogshit format where art is downgraded for being anything other than an advertisement for itself and which acts as a haven for fascists looking to also naturalise their tiny bubble of seigneurial rights away from any consequence or critique. Videogames might not be modern but by now they’re part of our image of what modernity looks like, and as that modernity continues revealing itself to be frayed, collapsing, incoherent or wildly unsustainable these things will like it or not become another part of that stock heap of broken images pulled from at random to build the futures that you may or may not ever want to live in. We can start thinking about the past as a way to find alternatives within it; or we can outselves become that past, and have our bones incorporated into the deathmobiles of the new age. History is back baby! it’s still a sewer!! awooo!!! Get ready to die historicist, on the fury road!!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Leax63ullPE

[images: Modernism(1995), World History Quiz, My First Amazing History Explorer, Smart Mouse for Sega Megadrive]

#gamecrit #modernism #art

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originaljediinjeans · 5 years

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MCU Rewatch: The Avengers (2012)

I cut out a lot from the individual character metas but it’s still pretty long and IDK how to summarize, maybe just read the bolded text for some of the juicier points

LOKI: Unpopular opinion, I do not believe that Loki was directly mind-controlled by Thanos. I don’t care if it’s “canon.” However, there is no denying that Thanos hurt and tortured Loki. Whatever he went through, it was bad enough that Loki agreed to cooperate. But Loki thinks he 100% deserves a planet to rule of his own after being kicked out of Asgard when he was the “rightful ruler”. (Who thinks that when they’re being mind controlled, really?) He must have done some real persuasion to convince Thanos that he could bring him the Tesseract and that he would not fail. But even then the Other is really hard on him. Loki is doing someone else’s bidding and he knows it. And he tugs at the leash. But he’s “come too far”--been tortured too much--to fail.

Loki as the villain of this film is perfection. And the scene with Natasha blows me away every time. The montage during his speech just syncs with it perfectly. Poetic cinema, as they say, but in the most literal and professional sense of the phrase.

My headcanon ever since the first time I saw this movie is that Loki can read the minds of Midgardians. Even if Barton told him everything (which I might not sure is even possible), Loki being slightly psychic is still cooler. Loki in this movie is freaking SCARY. (but that’s why he’s great, give Tom Hiddleston an Oscar already, Hollywood what is wrong with you?)

Who is the Other? He kind of reminds me of the Mouth of Sauron in LOTR. Is he another sick, twisted sycophant who believes in Thanos’ cause? Of course. He is proud to represent Thanos, and what’s more, acting creepy and giving people poetic threats is his way of doing his job: intimidating people into cooperation. Well, not like it matters much. I laugh every time I watch GOTG and Ronan kills him.

Coulson’s murder made Loki a murderer

I love Loki but I still want to punch him for what he did to Barton and Selvig and not to mention Coulson and just doing lots of bad things for bad reasons and I hope when I do punch him that it hurts, I don’t care if he’s a fictional character I’m going to punch him

THOR: Asgard must have some kind of dope intelligence system. They knew about the Chitauri–they didn’t know where they were from or who they were working for, but they knew enough and Thor knew enough to figure that he’d better get Loki before it got out of control. Also, the rest of the universe knows that one paramilitary organization on a small planet was experimenting with an Infinity Stone a really powerful energy source to use as a weapon. So Thor going to Midgard isn’t just about getting Loki: it’s making sure that a world under Asgard’s “protection” isn’t overrun by an invading army. And don’t forget, Thor has officially designated himself the Earth’s protector–he’s willing to share that responsibility with the Avengers, after these events. Willing enough to go search the universe for answers about the Infinity Stones. Maybe after Infinity War he regrets that.

Thor admits to Coulson for being embarrassed for himself and his people because of all the destruction and chaos Loki has caused

The moment when they’re in New York and Thor and Steve are taking a break–that’s when they bond. Other people see Steve Rogers as a mere wooden soldier but Thor recognizes a kindred warrior spirit. Thor and Steve’s friendship is criminally underrated and has a heinous lack of screentime.

CAPTAIN AMERICA: I have to admit, on this viewing Steve’s characterization seemed a little wooden to me. But it makes sense if you keep in mind that Steve is under stress about being in a new place and time.

I’ve always liked Steve’s uniform in this one, even though it’s not very popular or not as “cool” or practical as some of the others. What I dislike, though, is the helmet. The more it’s off, the better.

Steve actually doesn’t deal with stress that gracefully

I hate to say this, but Steve walks away from this movie with a deep-seated mistrust of Tony Stark and it’s only going to get bigger and get worse

I can’t help thinking of this famous saying: “It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool, rather than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.”

All of the above considered, Steve Rogers went through a lot of crap during the War. And it wasn’t all just fighting Hydra. He must have led the Commandoes on other not closely related missions, too. But he’s been in a lot of different situations. He knows how much bad there is in the world. He knows what kind of people want to take over the world. That’s why he isn’t taking crap from anyone.

And even if Steve isn’t psychic he sees right through Loki. Steve and Loki don’t get much screen time together but Loki knows how Cap feels about him and it bugs him. And that’s why Steve is so pushy about wanting Tony and Bruce to stay on task because he knows Loki and Loki’s accomplices are up to no good and they need to stop it

Cap actually has been on some pretty bumpy plane rides.

I agree with the fandom that it is unfair that someone as young as Steve (only like 25 years not counting the ice) is pushed into a lot of leadership positions. But he gets called on to lead because he has that wartime experience. He knows how to lead a team, he knows how to fight battles of all sizes. And being a leader, Steve knows when and when not to trust the people in charge. I think Tony takes a cue from him when he deals with Loki.

IRON MAN: Between Iron Man 2 and when Avengers opens, Tony is actually Living his Best Life(TM) with Pepper and the fact that the events of this film ends it forever kills me.

When he sees the portal open and the Chitauri coming out, the response “Right–army” sounds cute but he’s genuinely terrified. He’s already bruised from his brief encounter with Loki when he literally flies into the Mark 7.The longer the battle goes, the worse it gets.

The Nuke: Tony made his fortune building/designing weapons and then he stopped when he saw that they were being used to kill innocent people. The government ordering a nuclear strike on Manhattan is horrifying to him. He figures out a good way to get rid of it and stop the Chitauri. He doesn’t let go until he’s absolutely sure that it’s over, regardless of the cost to himself.

Summary: Tony goes from being in a good place to a bad one. There are some things even shawarma cannot cure.

Tony already knows Bruce Banner’s history and has studied his scientific work. Tony already knows about all the crap that Banner has been through. Tony relates to what Bruce has been through. He validates both the Hulk and Banner. The science bros are actually a really big deal and they mean a lot to me.

I am so glad Pepper was in this movie and I am so glad that Pepperony exists so help me if the Russos kill off Tony in Endgame–

Steve and Tony really almost got into an actual fight in that lab scene. They really did.

I never got the line “We are not soldiers” until this time around. He’s referring to those airmen in Afghanistan who died in vain to protect him from the terrorists that kidnapped him. He doesn’t want to think that of himself, or anyone else of the Avengers, or even Coulson. I wonder if maybe to an extent he can’t deal with the guilt or the mentality of going to war. Golly, figuring that out is a gut punch.

THE HULK: I don’t really feel like there’s much to say about Bruce this time around. Except that I’m so proud of him for actually going to Calcutta and helping people who needed help. I’m glad that SHIELD wanted him for his expertise and not just the Hulk. He is happy to be used for his knowledge. And meeting Tony Stark was probably the best thing to ever happen to him.

Even the Hulk cares about Tony–the Hulk likes Tony Stark/Iron Man better than he likes Bruce Banner.

BLACK WIDOW: Natasha has a legitimate fear of the Hulk and it’s actually kind of incredible that she did get past that. If there was something in this film about Natasha’s fear versus the Hulk that was supposed to be continued in Age of Ultron, bad writing killed it. Either that or there wasn’t enough exposition.

There’s an implication, with how Natasha is the first of the big 6 shown, how she’s asked to go find Banner, that Fury and Coulson kind of looked to her as a leader or co-leader for the Avengers. Would her responsibilities include bringing and keeping them together? Yes.

Natasha still thinks about the big picture during the battle. She knows that her teammates have limits. She knows what they’re up against.

I think she does get kind of scared when she’s riding the Chitauri chariot thing and she’s trying to control it. It’s not an easy task and there’s also speed and the risk of falling.

Clint and Natasha’s relationship is amazing. It’s one of the best things about this movie and it’s a travesty we don’t really see this again in the MCU (holding out hope for Endgame). They talk and fight and work together like they’ve known each other for years. She looks up to him because he helped her change her life. And now he looks to her because she saved his.

HAWKEYE: I just…need more Clint Barton in my life. Seriously he is so cool. Like he really needed a stand-alone movie in Phase 2. He just deserved better period and by that I mean more screen time. Maybe it wouldn’t have worked for him to have been in Cap 2 but he needed something.

COULSON: Agent Phil Coulson is the heart and soul of this movie.

The Stark Tower visit: Pepper calls him “Phil,” she notices that he looks shaken (even though it’s hard for even me to tell). She asks Phil about the Cellist and Tony offers to even fly him out to Portland to see his SO–do you know how much plane tickets cost that is huge. It is more than safe to assume that Phil has kept in touch with Tony and Pepper and even come over to hang out. Like enough that Pepper can read his moods. Good grief Pepper must have been destroyed when she found out.

Despite the initial bureaucratic unfairness, what if Coulson has kept in touch with Jane and Darcy? Maybe been a liaison to SHIELD for them. Did he suggest to SHIELD that they recruit Selvig?

Coulson is naturally a friendly person, and Thor is comfortable enough with him to talk about his concerns about Loki. Like they are friends. Like THOR WATCHES HIS BROTHER STAB AND KILL THE SON OF COUL, CHAMPION OF MIDGARD, AND HE WILL LIVE WITH THAT FOR THE REST OF HIS LIFE.

If Steve Rogers thought he’d escaped the Captain America fans boy was he wrong

But more importantly, Captain America is Coulson’s hero and Steve knows it. When Coulson dies, Steve knows that it was because he was trying to stop Loki and that Coulson was a good man.

Do you see why I want to/am/should be writing fanfiction about Coulson?

Coulson also knows Nick Fury very well. I would go so far as to say that on a certain level they are like brothers, even. Gosh they better get quality screentime in Captain Marvel!

Of course Coulson has known Clint and Natasha for years, maybe even as long as they’ve been at SHIELD. You hear the concern in Coulson’s voice when he tells Nat that Barton’s been compromised. It’s redundant to say this but it’s audible. He knows what Clint means to Natasha. He’s probably one of the 5 people who know about Clint’s family, maybe Phil is friends with Laura. And it’s implied that he has a personal relationship with Clint.

TL;DR Phil Coulson genuinely cares about the Avengers individually and as a group. He probably knows about Steve, Tony, and Banner more than they know each other by the end of the film. He knows that they’re the only real line of defense. He knows that the guys and Nat are capable of doing great good. He believes in heroes .Nick Fury tells them as much in his pep talk and for dramatic effect he uses the cards. Subtext: Coulson cared about you guys. He believed in you. And he wanted you to go kick Loki’s butt. Phil Coulson just really cares about people no matter how well he knows them. And I love him for it.

NICK FURY: Knowing what we know now--because Coulson and Fury will be in Captain Marvel which takes place 15-ish years earlier--Coulson and Fury in this movie already know that there are bad ETs and they play rough. Even after the Chitauri are finished, Fury knows that this is just the beginning. He may have even suspected that Loki didn’t get that army on his own. That explains why Nick Fury asked the World Security Council to approve Insight. And the Dark Elves in Thor TDW may have made it more urgent.

You have to keep in mind, though, that Nick is under pressure from the Pinheads on the World Security Council and Hydra sleepers working under him

Nick is no stranger to pressure, however. He knows what he’s doing.

“I was playing something even riskier.” Riskier than weapons because people with superpowers can’t always be controlled or at least do what you want or even ask. Riskier because he suspects (rightly) that they won’t always get along. And that if they do disagree they may turn on each other. Riskier because people with superpowers cause destruction, sometimes more than they can fix. But always less than they prevent if they can do their job.

The events of Civil War may not have been that surprising to him as he watched from a distance wherever. He may have been quietly rooting for Cap. Or even worked with the Secret Avengers...where was I?

(Not that he doesn’t love Tony)

I actually appreciated Nick more on this viewing

Nick Fury is, in fact, the Main Character of The Avengers. We just didn’t realize it until now.

SHIELD AND MISCELLANY: I may need to watch this movie again soon because the peanut gallery that is My Family made it kind of hard to watch

But one of my brothers suggested why not have Cap hook up with Maria Hill? I admit it’s intriguing but they don’t actually have that much interaction in this film or in CATWS. Ships have sailed on more shallow waters but I don’t think this one floats for me.

The soundtrack is perfect, a great blend of dramatic epic themes with spy movie beats, with some chilling backdrop music to set a sinister tone for Loki. Alan Silvestri’s best work.

THE AVENGERS THEME MUSIC IS MAGNIFICENT, IT DESERVVES AS MUCH ATTENTION AS THE STAR WARS THEME

Infinity Stones do what they want.

Infinity Stones are also connected and that might be important in Endgame.

This is still one of the greatest superhero movies ever made. Still one of the best movies ever made period. Granted, you have to have seen the other movies for it to make any emotional sense but The Avengers is a masterpiece. Every character interaction has weight. Every detail is connected. The storytelling here is matchless. That’s my opinion and I’m sticking to it as fact.

Age of Ultron was just so “bad” that the rest of y’all forgot how good The Avengers is.

I would love to see this movie on a big screen again one day. Maybe a summer drive-through. It might be the only MCU movie besides GOTG that would be appropriate for that.

Jane Foster isn’t stupid y’all. She would have figured out something was up when SHIELD shipped her to consult at a remote observatory. The moment she saw Thor on the news her suspicions would be confirmed, when she heard about Coulson and Loki she would be even more hurt and confused about why Thor didn’t even at least look her up to say hello

The Original 6 Avengers are bonded in a way but they’re not really a family.

Actually they are but they aren’t at the same time, it’s hard to describe. Even when they spend more time later and build a working relationship they aren’t quite the family some of them think they are. Some of them are part of each other’s families but they’re not really a solid unit. Age of Ultron and Civil War split them along the subgroup lines that are already there.

Eric Selvig looks like a mess when he comes out from the mind spell. Is he ever okay again?

The guy who found Banner in the abandoned hangar may have seen aliens before.

While Thor opened up the MCU to “other worlds” it was really The Avengers that established that there was an entire UNIVERSE beyond where the Avengers were from--beyond even Asgard and its conquests--full of worlds that had lots of alien races--and plenty of them could pick a fight with a puny blue planet of people with relatively primitive technology if they wanted to. I think GOTG establishes that most don’t. But some still do.

I really don’t think there’s anything to compare with being on a movie set where Robert Downey Jr has been turned loose.

I still think Loki should have had that drink and I hope he did

Coulson might one day forgive Nick Fury for doing what he had to do--but those trading cards were in near-mint condition. Sheesh.

Well, that’s down to ten pages from around what could have been sixteen.

#SUPER LONG POST #meta #the avengers #aka the dysfunctionals that avenge stuff #avengers assemble #long post #mcu rewatch

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theliberaltony · 6 years

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Welcome to Secret Identity, our regular column on identity and its role in politics and policy.

Secret identity

The Trump administration’s policy of separating children from their parents as part of its border-enforcement strategy is generating widespread opposition, even from people who have traditionally been allies of the president. It has forced the administration to defend an approach that polls terribly1 and results in images of children in cages and accounts of breastfeeding kids being taken away from their mothers.

It seems like bad politics.

So why do it? The administration’s explanations aren’t much help here. President Trump said he hates the separations and falsely claimed that they’re the product of laws passed by Democrats. Other officials have denied that the policy exists at all. Attorney General Jeff Sessions invoked the Bible to defend the strategy, referring (unwittingly, I assume) to a passage from Romans that people used to defend slavery in the 19th century. And while the implementation and defense of this policy is perhaps the most jarring action the Trump administration has taken so far on immigration, other such policies, like ending the Deferred Action For Childhood Arrivals program, have also been unpopular and defended in misleading ways.2

But there is a potential driving force behind many of the administration’s immigration policies, one that it largely avoids discussing in public but that ties all these disparate actions together: reducing or at least stopping a pre-Trump spike in the number of immigrants in America.

I don’t think it’s a secret that immigration policy is an issue that hits on identity, or that Team Trump is not wild about immigrants. But understanding Trump’s immigration policies as a full-scale revolt against rising numbers of foreign-born Americans helps explain what is happening: Controversial immigration policies that would limit both legal and illegal immigration, often combined with rhetoric designed to cast immigrants, usually falsely, as a criminal or national security threat.

America is in the midst of an immigrant boom, by historical standards. The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that 14 percent of Americans, about 44 million people, are foreign-born. Those numbers are up from 2000, when about 11 percent of the population (31 million Americans) were foreign-born. The foreign-born population had hit almost 15 percent at its peak around 1890, but it dipped below 5 percent by the 1970s. So it is quite high now (compared to the past 50 years), and the Census Bureau estimates it will hit 15 percent again over the next decade.

If you think of stopping the growth in the foreign-born population as the unifying goal — rather than strengthening national security or promoting law enforcement — then Trump’s immigration agenda hangs together more clearly. The steps taken or proposed by the administration, such ending DACA and sharply curtailing refugee admissions, are likely to result in: some foreign-born people currently in the U.S. being forced to return to their home countries, including highly skilled tech workers; those who remain here having a harder time helping relatives come to the country; fewer refugees ever entering in the first place; and some immigrants who got citizenship having it revoked.

Reducing the nation’s foreign-born population is also an issue the president’s allies talked about before they entered the government.

“It’s important to understand that historically speaking, that immigration is supposed to be interrupted with periods of assimilation and integration,” senior Trump adviser Stephen Miller said in a radio interview in 2016, according to Vox.

“We should follow America’s history, and the history of America is that an immigration-on period is followed by an immigration-off period,” he added.

The Center for Immigration Studies — a D.C.-based think tank that describes itself as “low-immigration, pro-immigrant” and has close ties to the Trump administration — and Attorney General Jeff Sessions have also long lamented the growth in the immigrant population overall.

And most Republican voters want less immigration. According to Gallup, most Republicans want the number of immigrants to go down, while Democrats are both less concerned about immigration overall and increasingly opposed to reducing the number of immigrants. Almost 80 percent of Democrats think immigrants strengthen the country, according to a 2016 Pew Research Center poll, compared to about a third of Republicans.

So why doesn’t Team Trump just say that it wants to limit the foreign-born population? Well, some members do, particularly Miller. But I suspect that you don’t hear that sort of justification more often because focusing on the raw number of immigrants would be viewed as racist. And it might be racist. The majority of immigrants in the U.S. today are from Asia and Latin America.

I simply don’t know if Miller or Sessions would be as concerned about an immigration boom if the people entering the U.S. were British, French or German. Trump reportedly suggested he would like more immigrants from Norway, a heavily white nation. So that’s a clue. And a 2016 poll from the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution showed that a majority of Republicans thought immigration levels were too high for people from Central America and Mexico, the Middle East, and predominantly Muslim nations, but less than half of Republicans felt that way about Asia (despite high immigration levels from that region in recent years), Africa, Europe or mostly Christian areas.

In any case, not talking about the true roots of the administration’s immigration policy has costs. Some of those costs were clear when Sessions cited Romans to suggest that separating kids from their parents was supported by the Bible. Unable to say, “We want fewer foreign-born Americans, full stop,” the Trump administration is instead constantly making arguments that don’t withstand much scrutiny. White House chief of staff John Kelly suggested last month that recent immigrants are struggling to “assimilate” into U.S. society. A 2015 study, however, found that new immigrants are learning English and taking other steps to integrate into American culture just as quickly as past generations of immigrants did. But does Kelly really think new immigrants coming to the U.S. can’t assimilate, or does he oppose additional immigrants coming to the country and think that talking about assimilation is a more politically palatable way to defend this position?

The other problem with not having a debate about what really seems to be driving the administration’s immigration policies is that we don’t know whether Democrats (at least Democratic elites) are comfortable with growth in the foreign-born population and what, if any, new immigration limits they would back. Do they support the gradual increase in the number of immigrants that the Census Bureau projects we will see? Would they support a larger increase? Do they view the future U.S. as a more racially mixed place with no one group forming a majority — like California — or as a majority-white nation? How do they want immigration policy enforced, and should that change dramatically from now on, as some activists in the party call for the abolition of the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency?

I doubt this debate over the foreign-born population will emerge publicly and directly. It’s a bit challenging for both sides — particularly the Republicans. But it would be ideal if we had an argument over what we are actually arguing about, instead of having Trump make misleading claims about immigration, which fact-checkers then criticize, while the president avoids mentioning the values and goals that I think are actually undergirding the administration’s immigration policies.

What else you should read

I can’t think of anyone who follows the day-to-day details of Trump’s immigration policy better than Vox’s Dara Lind does. She is particularly good at explaining exactly how Trump’s policies differ from those of former President Barack Obama (whose administration deported more than 2 million people) and when they actually aren’t all that different. Follow her on Twitter ( @DLind). She is one of my must-reads.

One more person to follow. Trump’s policy on separating children from parents is generating strong opposition across the religious community (leaders of Catholic, evangelical Christian, Jewish and Muslim organizations are among the critics), and Religion News Service’s Jack Jenkins (@jackmjenkins) is covering that story closely. And he’s great overall on the intersection of religion and politics.

California Sunday interviewed a variety of people in (from high school teachers to leaders at venture capital firms) about the under-representation of people of color and women in the tech industry. This is a very familiar issue for the tech industry (and many others), but this range of perspectives was unique.

This new data about Harvard’s admissions policies and how they appear to negatively affect Asian-Americans was compelling and is likely to lead to sharp criticism of the university.

By the numbers

Up to 50,000 people each week attend services at Houston’s Lakewood Church, according to a Houston Chronicle article. And unlike many American Christian churches, which are typically still dominated by one racial group or another, Lakewood (which is non-denominational) has substantial blocs of Asian, black, Latino and white congregants. Lakewood’s services are also broadcast nationally, drawing an estimated 10 million viewers each week. That reach — in Houston and nationally — has made Lakewood’s lead pastor, Joel Osteen, an influential figure in American Christianity. But Osteen is also controversial — because of another figure mentioned in that Chronicle story: $12 million, the value of the home Osteen lives in, according to the article. His critics view Osteen as a symbol of a vein of American Christianity too focused on material wealth. It’s worth checking out the Chronicle’s recent three-part series on Osteen and Lakewood.

If you have ideas for this column, you can reach me via e-mail ([email protected]) or Twitter (@perrybaconjr).

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Perry Bacon Jr.

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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10 New Windows 11 Features You Need Right Now

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Microsoft’s official Windows 11 showcase wasn’t exactly the most exciting live stream event of the season, but at least it finally confirmed the core features we can look forward to in the upcoming (and for most users, free) Windows update.

While you can pretty much bet on early versions of a Windows update being at least a bit of a mess, most of them (except for you, Windows 8) typically offer enough new features to justify the growing pains. So far as that goes, you’re probably going to want to give Windows 11 a shot as soon as it’s formally released sometime during the 2021 holiday season.

In the meantime, let’s take a look at the 10 Windows 11 features you’d probably love to have right now. Why not 11? Because taking it to 11 is actually wildly impractical and would probably destroy your eardrums, thank you for asking.

Auto HDR for Xbox Series X Quality Visuals

This might not sound like the most exciting addition, but Windows 11’s Auto HDR support will likely be the first gaming-centric feature you’ll notice when you boot up the new OS.

Essentially the PC version of the same feature previously released for Xbox Series X/S, Auto HDR will recognize if you’re using an HDR-compatible monitor and update your image quality appropriately. If the Windows 11 version of Auto HDR works as well as the Xbox Series X/S version, gamers with compatible monitors will enjoy immediate lighting and fidelity improvements that don’t even require you to dive into the settings.

Direct Storage for Enhanced Game Performance (and Possibly Quick Resume)

Here’s another gaming friendly feature that Windows 11 intelligently borrows from the Xbox Series X/S.

Basically, Direct Storage will allow Windows 11 machines to load programs via the GPU and SSD while leaving the CPU out of the process pretty much altogether. In other words, Direct Storage is what drives the Xbox Series X/S game-changing (literally) Quick Resume features. We’ll just have to wait and see whether Windows 11will similar functionality and what kind of hardware you’ll need to properly power this feature.

Snap Layouts For Workplace Multitasking and Hopefully Something More Interesting

Windows 10 allowed you to view multiple desktop programs at once via a “snap” feature, but its limited functionality meant that you often had to manually resize each program window or rely on a much less useful two-program view.

Windows 11 should address that shortcoming by allowing you to use a series of pre-determined layouts that make snapping and managing more than two programs at once easier than ever. Microsoft says this feature should help you with workplace multitasking, but we’re holding out hope it will also be useful for things we actually want to do.

The New Start Button and Taskbar

Microsoft has tried to do a lot of different things with the Windows Start button over the years (including getting rid of it), and Windows 11 continues that tradition of messing with a pretty good thing by moving the Start button to the center of Windows 11’s new taskbar.

The idea is that this new layout will make Windows 11’s overall user interface a bit cleaner (and honestly much more “Apple-like”). While you can always move the Start button back to its bottom left position if you prefer, this new design does look like it will make managing multiple taskbar applications far easier and significantly less “clunky.”

Faster Windows Updates (Because Everyone Hates Windows Updates)

There are actually a few new Windows 11 features designed to make Windows faster than ever, but the one you really need to know about is Microsoft’s promise that Windows 11 will make Windows updates 40% faster than ever.

While “40% faster” is a bit of a vague metric, the very idea that we’ll all spend less of our lives waiting out Windows updates is more than enough to be happy about at the moment.

Surprising Support for Android Apps

Microsoft surprised quite a few people by revealing that Windows 11 will support all Android apps available via Amazon’s Appstore.

Not only does this mean that you no longer have to emulate certain Android apps to get them to run on Windows, but those apps will even properly support Windows 11’s new taskbar, snap features, and other UI improvements. Now we just need to see how smoothly the whole thing runs.

A Version of Teams You Might Want to Use

You’re forgiven if you see Microsoft Teams as the new Mixer (i.e. the alternative to a popular product that few people really asked for), but it’s pretty clear that Microsoft is committed to pushing the Teams communication platform harder than ever with the release of Windows 11.

It remains to be seen if their efforts will convince you to abandon your current communication platform of choice, but the fact that Teams will be integrated into the Windows 11 taskbar is still a pretty smart design decision. Ideally, the Windows 11 version of Teams will allow you to easily communicate with users of various other platforms at the touch of a button.

The New Microsoft Store Wants You to Forget You Don’t Like the Microsoft Store

The Microsoft Store has long been one of Microsoft’s toughest sells. It was bad enough that old versions of the Microsoft Store featured some truly outdated UI designs, but the way Microsoft would sometimes force you to use it made it that much easier to despise.

The Windows 11 version of the Microsoft Store certainly looks better than ever, but what’s really interesting is the freedom Microsoft is affording developers who choose to upload their apps to the marketplace. The new Microsoft Store will allow developers to update their apps outside of the Store as well as utilize third-party commerce platforms without having to pay Microsoft a royalty cut. That last point could prove to be a big one as it directly attacks one of Apple’s most controversial policies.

You’ve Got the Touch, You’ve Got The Taskbar Power

While Windows 10 made Windows much more accessible for touchscreen users, it’s always been clear that there is still a lot of work to be done in that department.

By updating the Windows touch keyboard and making it significantly easier to access complicated Windows features (like the “snap” system) without hitting the wrong zones, Windows 11 might just make the already appealing Microsoft Surface systems more functional than ever.

Improved Light and Dark Modes

This isn’t technically a new feature, but since Windows 10’s light and dark modes were kind of an afterthought, Windows 11’s version of those concepts certainly feels new.

Windows 11’s dark mode setting now makes sweeping changes to your UI (including reimagined versions of the default Windows wallpapers). With more and more users relying on dark mode, this could soon become the best way to use Windows 11.

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