#or site created specifically to make you feel bad about every aspect of yourself

[rahbekholden0]

Purchasing a vehicle can often think that a difficult job. Some individuals really feel afraid of how small information they may have, while some feel cheated since they are very well well-informed. Through the use of these guidelines, you'll be able to get a car you need at the excellent value whenever you go out to shop for an auto.

Search for your brand new auto on the web before you decide to possibly go to the dealership. Searching online permits you to examine stock from several dealerships, and yes it enables you to privy to information regarding on the web only prices. This is a great way to evaluation go shopping and really make sure you are getting the best offer. When looking for a fresh automobile, think about all your choices. There are lots of used autos that have very low kilometers and rock base rates. bmw m3 e46 to search for are the ones which have been leased and returned. These automobiles happen to be repaired at the car dealership in most cases have ample factory warrantee defense left. Tend not to hold back until you choose to go vehicle shopping to consider how you might financing your car or truck. You have to get through to the car dealership together with your car loan pre-certified in a respectable monthly interest. You happen to be typically heading so that you can have a greater package compared to dealer would look after you. Think in advance when you plan on creating a auto purchase. Usually do not make the blunder of buying a vehicle without having thinking of regardless of whether it might be useful for future use. Getting a sports car will not make significantly sensation if you are intending to possess a loved ones anytime in the near future. Even though some web sites proposed not examination driving a car an automobile due to emotional attachment that will take place, it is actually never smart to obtain some thing without the need of attempting it out. Take at the very least a fifteen second very long examination generate to completely have a sense of exactly how the auto manages and just how comfy the auto absolutely is. Only use critiques on the net being a common information. A number of people if they have difficulties with a car will post bad critiques on the web. So look at all the reviews for popular issues rather than a general position. If you have a problem with a serious component, then most likely get a distinct vehicle. One of the most essential aspects to consider prior to making an automobile obtain is which car or type you want. By determining this well before entering a car dealership, it is possible to avoid high-stress revenue. It may also help you to definitely combine your searching and incredibly tell your self about one particular specific brand name. Read all the paperwork that happen to be presented to you if you invest in a new automobile. They will will often have a sizable bunch that you can sign. Don't really feel pressured into signing anything at all that you just do not fully grasp. Unless you understand something, enquire about it before signing. Before you indication your company name to all the documentation, it is possible to move out of the car dealership and not need to pay any money. Get yourself a motor vehicle record statement for virtually any vehicle you might be very seriously contemplating. You only need the car id quantity (VIN). This record can advise you concerning the car's automobile accident and fix background, along with if the car has been around in a deluge or another tragedy. Some web sites let you pay for a one-calendar month subscription, that is helpful if you will end up taking reviews on several cars. Prior to starting exploring which kind of auto you should buy, you have to explore your existing condition. Don't make a decision your financial allowance in accordance with the car, but decide the automobile you will buy depending on a sensible budget for your household. Doing this can save you economic head aches. Don't expect to produce a obtain with your initial dealership. In fact, if you so, then maybe you are building a awful acquire. Shopping around is obviously essential, and this is also true in relation to generating a sensible obtain having a vehicle or van. Invest some time and search all around. Read every one of the documents which are made available to you once you get a new automobile. They will likely normally have a huge stack that you can indication. Don't truly feel pushed into putting your signature on nearly anything that you simply do not recognize. Should you not comprehend something, inquire about it before you sign. Until you indication your company name to all of the documents, it is possible to move out of your car dealership rather than need to pay any money. As you now find out more about vehicle purchasing, you are able to place the advice into exercise. Don't allow you to ultimately go shopping for a car with out initial with the guidance you study. That knows, you may just find the auto you possess generally wished for now. Just go and start off automobile shopping!

#bmw z3

[mwagneto]

yknow what, people shit on tumblr for stuff like putting hellsite (affectionate) in the app description bc Silence Brand and i agree but at the same time like....... these mfers are really out here using this site and reading posts like the entire rest of the userbase. they cant make a working site to save their lives but they ARE using it and most importantly still have absolutely no way to monetise it. like if facebook or twitter or whatever had memes like tumblr does which the site owners then attempted to use THAT would suck ass coz they're literally soulless corporations but tumblr is run by 4 raccoons in a basement who are actively losing money every time a user even thinks about their site and they are just as trapped as we are

#idk it's just nice that tumblr is like‚ aware of what the expectations are #it's my only social media and im so glad. like it rly is the best one let's be real #ah yes the alternatives ummmmm middle aged people conspiracy theory hell or #argument upon argument where important politicians and other famous people can #just randomly join out of nowhere to yell at you or uhhh video site where #people put their real life humans faces next to their godawful braindead takes #or site created specifically to make you feel bad about every aspect of yourself #and all of these work based on an algorithm that tracks and steals your data #tumblr just asks you. #barking #hellsite #tumblr #instagram #facebook

[itsmoonpeaches]

Raya and the Last Dragon: The Importance of Water in Southeast Asia

Disclaimer: The following is from the perspective of a Filipino SEA. Please feel free to add or edit from other perspectives. There are *spoilers* below.

Though Raya and the Last Dragon has its flaws, what it did well, it did really well. Out of every cultural reference that I spotted in this film, the one that stood out the most was the portrayal of water. 

In the end credits song, Lead the Way, originally sung in English by Jhené Aiko, there is one lyric that stands out as a nod to this culture of water:

There's an energy in the water There is magic deep in our heart There's a legacy that we honor When we bring the light to the dark Whatever brings us together Can nevеr tear us apart We becomе stronger than ever

There are beautiful views of bodies of water in the movie, and scenes that deliberately look over them. But, it’s much more than that.

The geography of SEA is already so rooted with water. The lands that make up the region are either located on a peninsula and cut through with rivers, or made up of hundreds of islands in the middle of the ocean. 

So, let’s talk about water in SEA and in this movie. Below is an in-depth analysis of the cultural significance of water whether it is rain, rivers, oceans, or mythological aspects alluded to in the film.

Nagas and other myths

Let’s start with mythology because this is the basis of much of Raya and the Last Dragon. I want to first point out that this is not an opinion post, so I will not be touching much on my opinions on how the dragons looked like. (TLDR: Disney could’ve done better.) 

So many myths in SEA are connected to water besides the dragons, but let’s focus on those.

I did mention briefly about naga and water dragons in my long analysis post on the final international trailer. However, I will go in a little deeper here.

Naga The dragons in this movie are based on the SEA version of a dragon. More specifically a sea serpent or a water serpent. They don’t breathe fire. In fact, they have nothing to do with fire. Their powers all influence water (and sometimes create earthquakes). Their powers include typical influence over water, creating rain, causing winds, and shape-shifting.  They are incredibly powerful and revered. Sometimes they are even seen as deities like the Bakunawa in the Philippines. In RATLD, these nagas have a long horn at the front most prominent in Thai and Laotian versions of nagas. They are scaly and might have a kind of crown on their head, or gold jewelry around them. In most portions of SEA, nagas don’t have legs. It looks like the dragons here were partially inspired by an East Asian dragon or maybe the Vietnamese dragon. Other depictions can have them with multiple heads. Nagas also appear in South Asian culture. Here’s a quote from my initial long analysis post to add to this:

Naga are so important within SEA cultures that we have multiple places (and a river) named after them all over SEA and particularly a few times in the Philippines. 

What I can tell you is mostly the Philippine version, but a naga is a serpentine creature that lives deep in the ocean, and are often associated with water. Sometimes they are depicted as having the upper half of a woman. 

...

In the southern islands of the Philippines, depictions of naga are seen carved throughout buildings, particularly on roofs. A typical dance movement where you keep your hands curved and your fingers bent toward yourself is called “naga hands” and is supposed to be reminiscent of a naga’s graceful claws.

Bakunawa Just to highlight why nagas are so revered, I’m going further into the myth of Bakunawa. Specifically, the Bakunawa story comes from around the Visayas and Bicol regions of the Philippines which is south of the main island of Luzon. Bakunawa is said to be a giant sea dragon with a mouth as large as a lake. It lives deep in the ocean and has influence over the sea and earthquakes, in the depths of the underworld. There are a few versions of the story including that the Bakunawa is a naga that was enthralled by the beauty of the 7 moons and ate them until there was only 1 left.  In some versions the god Bathala stopped Bakunawa from devouring the last moon. In other versions, the people down below made loud noises with pots and pans to scare Bakunawa from eating it. There are also another version in which the Bakunawa was once a beautiful goddess. It is also known as a man-eater in other tales. There are similar versions of a giant serpent or dragon-like bird causing eclipses (whether lunar or solar) in other parts of the Philippines.

Rain

I can’t tell you how important rain is in SEA. It’s not that it never rains, but that it rains a lot. Much of SEA is rainforests, which is an attribute that contributes so the rich biodiversity. 

In RATLD, rain is depicted as a positive event...because it is. Raya and her friends are shown happy and laughing when Sisu makes rain. Sure, rain can be bad. Too much of it comes with typhoons and floods, but rain means a lot more than the bad things.

But enough rain means that the rivers aren’t dried out. Take the desert region of Kumandra for example. Raya goes there to the end of a dried up river. At the end when the dragons all come back, rain falls and the river is alive again. The people in that region can prosper again.

Rain symbolizes new life Now, this story I’m about to tell you is completely from oral tradition and was passed down to me by a culture bearer from from the island of Mindanao in the Philippines.  This person said that when they were young, they did not have to worry about buying food because it was always available around them. If it rained, that was a good thing because it meant that the next day when the grass was damp, there would be mushrooms sprouting that they could pick. (There is an umbrella dance coming from this region that depicts mushrooms popping up after a storm.) If it was windy from the rain, it meant that there were fruit that would shake out of the trees.   Rain also means food will grow. Staples like rice need a lot of water. Rice paddies need to be to be constantly flooded so that they can grow, and water means food whether it is in the form of rain, rivers, or the ocean. It means fresh drinking water and abundance.

Nagas and rain Remember how above I said that nagas can influence rainfall? Well, Sisu does just that in this movie. She says that one of her siblings originally had this power, and Sisu gained it because she came into contact with a piece of the dragon gem.  This adds to the positivity of rain because nagas are already so revered because of the magic they can do in the movie (and in mythology), that the people that witness it are in absolute awe. 

Rivers

Besides the ocean, rivers are the heart of SEA. From the Mekong River that runs through 5 SEA countries including Vietnam, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia, to the UNESCO site of the underground river in Palawan, Philippines...rivers are just part of the lay of the land. 

They are shown to be all of those things in RATLD. There are streams and tributaries that flow into mountains and underground where the dragon gem was originally hidden in Heart. Additionally, there is the incredibly long river that separates the land in the shape of a dragon that flows through all the regions of Kumandra, reminiscent of the Mekong.  Rivers are so important that there is even a region in the Philippines called Pampanga that is named after the Tagalog translation of the word “river” seen in the first part of the region’s name, “pampang.” They are the people of the river. 

There are whole fishing villages throughout SEA that are built on a river. In fact, there’s one in RATLD. 

Rivers are a source of many things, including food and drinking water. When there is a flood during wet season, the land will be full of silt, making the land prime for planting.

I don’t have to tell you how important a water dragon is at this point, but the fact that the movie chose to have that be the shape of the river is significant because nagas live in rivers too. 

Transportation This should be a no-brainer, but in case you forgot, rivers mean boats. Boats mean people will want to get around and trade. And, boat culture is so important in SEA.  There are all kinds of boats in the region from the huge deep-water kind, to the fishing boats, to thin canoe-like ones, to coracles. You can see them especially showcased in the river town in Tail in Kumandra. 

Oceans

Honestly, there wasn’t much about the sea in RATLD, but it’s important to note because nagas in and of themselves have origins in the ocean as well. 

The sea is another very important core of SEA culture. Its waters are more unforgiving than rivers, and more unpredictable. Magical, mythological sea creatures tend to be more violent here, and will only be kind to those who are kind first.

In island nations like the Philippines and Indonesia, the people rely on the ocean for so many things. Especially if they live right on the water, some can be fantastic swimmers and can dive and fish for their own food. The ocean is respected, and it is feared.

Though there is no explicit ocean in RATLD, there are elements from port cities and towns that exist including the deep-water boats. In the movie and in SEA, seafood is important.

There’s a scene where Raya and Sisu meet Boun and he offers them shrimp congee. Shrimp is a popular food in SEA, and can be seen in many dishes besides congee or any rice-based dishes. 

In the river town, we also see elements of passing fish baskets through the water after a day of fishing, and eating and buying fresh foods to cook later in a water-side market.

Irrigation

It’s pretty obvious that water is needed for irrigation, but just think about how earlier I pointed out how deeply water is utilized. Much of the food in SEA needs water to survive, a lot more than in landlocked countries. 

Rice terraces Remember rice? It needs a heck ton of irrigation in order to survive. This means a lot of rain and a lot of soil cultivating. If you take a look at the rice terraces that surround Fang, and even the picture of more overgrown terraces next to the river in the transportation section of this analysis, you can see that rice paddies are supposed to be flooded. Rice terraces are all over Asia, but there are so many of them in SEA that are ancient and still work including the Tagalalang rice terraces in Bali, Indonesia and the Banaue rice terraces in Banaue, Philippines. Honestly I could talk about the importance of rice and water for ages. Sure, rice is a staple in all of Asia, not just in SEA, but in East Asia as well. However, I would argue that it is even more of a staple in SEA.  Sure, there are noodle dishes, and bread, but rice is so ridiculously important that in the Philippines, it’s not considered a real meal if there is no rice. There is even a word for food eaten with rice, “ulam.” In fact, in the entire movie, I don’t think I can recall one eating scene in which the characters are not also eating rice with their food. Unless of course, it’s just a snack like fruit. (Maybe there was a stew only scene?) There is a scene towards the beginning of the movie when Raya asks Namaari, “Stew or rice?” when asking which she would prefer. Namaari never answers the question, but she says that it is her first time eating rice in a while. Though it’s never explicitly said, it could be implied that it is because they did not have as much rainwater for irrigation at the time. 

Protection

I’ve talked about rivers and the ocean, but I haven’t talked about water as a barrier. Though water as a barrier isn’t an infallible one, it is still important to note.

Protecting from intruders SEA is separated by water. It is also a region that had wars within their own countries in pre-colonial times, and of course, when they were colonized. (Though shout out to Thailand for being lucky in that regard. It remains the only country in SEA not colonized by Europeans.)  There were wars between chiefs in the Philippines, and often they had to traverse the ocean or cross bodies of waters to get to the lands they needed to fight on. It ended up becoming a process with a lot of planning. Though SEAs are people of the water, they obviously can’t breathe under it.  Nagas here are also important because in RATLD they are seen as powerful, respected protectors. And of course, they are borne of the water.

If you take a look at the picture above, it shows that part of the movie when the water starts disappearing because Sisu disappears. As the last water dragon, her connection to the water was keeping the land alive. With Sisu gone, so was the water, and therefore the protection for the people. The Druun spirit came in with no more hindrances because there was no water to stop them. 

The power of the water and the magical energy of the water dragon really showcased itself here.

Interconnectedness

SEA used to be an interconnected region that traded with each other. Of course, not that SEA countries don’t trade now, but it isn’t at the same level as before. The borders now were created after centuries of colonialization. 

Water is what connected all the countries of SEA. 

Just take a look at the map of SEA above (in red). There is no other region of the world that’s quite like this, except maybe Oceania and around the Mediterranean. It’s relatively easy for these countries and people to trade and share cultures and traditions with one another. Manila, Philippines and the Tondo region was once one of the most frequented ports in SEA. Trade was done with China, India, Africa, and the Middle East. The same kind of trade occurred in other SEA countries as well.

Because of the history of trade over water that is rich in its pre-colonial past, SEA shares many similar cultural aspects and even similar words in languages. Though of course, though there are similarities, there are a lot of differences as well. SEA is not a monolith.

If you want to think of it this way...that Korea, China, and Japan share so many things with each other including having a history of being able to share Chinese characters (the different names including hanzi, kanji, hanja), but that each country and culture is very different...that is what SEA is too. 

This aspect of interconnectedness, yet with differences is emulated in RATLD. In the lore for Kumandra, the movie notes that all the regions were once one, but were separated after something broke them (that something being the malice of the Druun spirit). Yet, if they worked together they could become Kumandra once again. 

It is shown in RATLD that the best way to make the spicy stew that is pops up multiple times, is to add all the spices and ingredients from all the regions of the land that was once Kumandra. This showcases that just like SEA, Kumandra was once a land of incredible interconnected communication and trade.

Kumandra wasn’t colonized, but it was separated by 500 years of land. The people didn’t use the water the same way. SEA was colonized (and actually, 500 years to the date on March 15, 1521 to March 15, 2021—the Philippines was “discovered” by the Spaniards so I wonder if that was a conscious choice on Disney’s part), and broken apart. I’m sure that without European colonialization, SEA could’ve been one huge interconnected country. Or bigger countries with different dialects. 

Spirituality 

Lastly, let’s talk about the spirituality of water. In RATLD, there are no other spirits besides the Druun which is made of discord and malice created from human malcontent. Yet, the Druun cannot go near water. I don’t know the exact reason for why it can’t or if it was inspired by a piece of mythology from an SEA country, but that is significant. (If you do know the reasoning behind this, please feel free to add onto this.)

SEA is full to the brim with myths and legends of nature spirits. From spirits that live in trees, to spirits that live in the water. And yes, they are spirits. They can be spirits of ancestors too.  The way Chief Benja pours a bowl of water on Raya’s head as beads of it float into the air...it is a great touch to highlight the energy that water just inherently has in any SEA tradition.

Though it’s probably a little reaching to point this out, the fact that Sisu was said to be washed to the end of a river is so interesting when Raya is looking for her. This is because in some SEA myths the river takes your spirit to the underworld. Raya finds Sisu at the end of a river and she is made of stone, her spirit stolen until her power is unleashed again with the dragon gem. 

Floating flowers Perhaps the most beautiful aspect of the movie and as it relates to water is the fact that the animators made a conscious choice to show so much imagery of characters making flowers float upon water. And of course, to use floating flowers as decoration. Characters like Raya, Boun, and Sisu float flowers that look like orchids or jasmine flowers to remember their lost loved ones. The choice of flowers is significant too. These are flowers that are native to SEA. There are flowers everywhere and that is so pretty and so accurate. To have them used as decoration floating in pools is also so nice too, because it is something that is done in households and not just in a palace. You can float a gardenia flower in a bowl of water to make the scent spread in a room, and it makes the flower last longer.

End 

I’m sure there is a lot more I missed or things I got wrong. If you see anything you want to add or fix, please feel free to write it in any future reblogs!

#raya #raya and the last dragon #raya and the last dragon spoilers #raya analysis #analysis #disney #ratld #ratld spoilers #raya spoilers #sisu #namaari #boun #long post #water #naga #kumandra #sea #southeast asia #asia #philippines

[fimflamfilosophy]

“Is DnD Still Popular?”

To some of you giant nerds, the question, “Is DnD still popular,” is probably one of the stranger things you’ll read today, but within a specific context it makes a lot of sense. Speaking of, the show “Stranger Things” presented a popular, physical look at what DnD beasties might feel like, even if it didn’t present an honest view of what DnD games really play like. Along with more online media referencing the game and sites like Roll20 making it easier to join a group, it makes sense. Is this a temporary boom or has the roleplaying community seen a lot of permanent additions to its nerdy hobby?

I wouldn’t have numbers to say, myself, but for what it’s worth, roleplaying is always a very personal experience. And for a few of us, the question isn’t, “Are people still playing DnD?” Of course they are - it’s all anyone plays! The question is, “Can you get anyone to play anything else?”

What Is DnD?

For some people, Dungeons & Dragons has become so intertwined with the concept of roleplaying that people think DnD and roleplaying are synonymous. If you roleplay, you play DnD. Originally, this had a kernel of truth. There are articles about the history of the system, and during its inception the game had a hard time taking off. Fundamentally it was asking people to play make-believe, but with a system of mathematical rules and designs. We know now that this type of thing is like catnip to massive dork-faced neckbeards, but at the time it wasn’t expected to have much appeal.

Eventually it did get off the ground, and it became the standard for the entire concept of a roleplaying game. And as with all “firsts to the market”, there have been many competitors and copycats, but it’s difficult to pry the audience away when you need everyone to use the same system. In economics they call this “network utility value” - that is, a fax machine is useless if only one person owns one. You can only send faxes to other people with fax machines, so if another company tries to invent their own offshoot of the fax machine, they’ll never get anyone to adopt it because everyone is already using the existing fax machine network. Everybody knows DnD, which means that if you go to a convention or look for games online, you know you’re going to find more players for that system than any other.

Why Does DnD Continue to Work?

In early editions of DnD, there were a lot more rules, and as a result more freedom to design your characters. When I first started roleplaying, it was during the 3rd edition of the system, where you could still allocate skill points to become better or worse at specific skills like lying, climbing, forgery, or crafting. This meant that with good planning, you could play a sub-optimal wizard and make up for it somewhat by investing a lot in your “persuasion” skills to rely on talk more than magic.

But being the system that everyone has to learn isn’t enough to stay on top forever. Other systems like GURPS have taken hold by now, and some types of popular nerd media have introduced their own completely unique systems designed to simulate their specific media universes. The owners of DnD had two choices: either make the game more open and try to eat the lunch of other companies, or make all of DnD easier to play in general to capture a broader audience.

So they released 4th edition! We don’t talk about 4th edition. And then they quickly released 5th edition (and a few mumbled apologies), which streamlined a lot of things about the game to the extent I’m not sure why they even let you control your character stats at all now. Skills became baked in with your level, and most of the game is about choosing abilities when you level up. It’s become very similar to playing an MMO, and I believe that’s the point.

One of the big things you always see in a complicated roleplaying system is players spending hours putting together a character. For your experienced player, this is a labor of love. You really care about the small details and want to make sure you get it right, or you’re a Win-At-All-Costs type who wants to make sure you’re rolling the biggest numbers. Either way you’re familiar and know what you’re doing, but it presents a hurdle to new players, and that hurdle has been largely done away with in 5th edition.

No matter how old you are, how experienced you are, how creative you are (or aren’t), or how much you know about any aspect of the game, you can play 5e DnD. I think you could play as young as seven years old and have minimal problems, because all you have to do is choose a job and virtually everything else is filled in for you, as if by a program, as if a video game. An experienced player can help a new one whip up a character within fifteen minutes, and that new guy will be rolling dice at the dragon about as well as everyone else.

DnD is the Worst System

But DnD’s accessibility is also its greatest downfall. Because everything is sort of programmed out, you find a lot of players eventually growing bored with the same-old, and they try to find ways to inject new life into the system. They invent new races, new classes, new abilities, and so on - they call this “homebrew”. yet many people are bad at creating balance and fairness for something they personally intend to play, and DnD recognizes this problem. It has a lot of supplemental books telling you all you need to know about other races and classes you might want to play, and in theory they are as fair and powerful as anything in the base system.

Yet no amount of homebrew or supplementary material will solve DnD’s core problem: it’s rigid. If you want to play, you need a battle mat, because every spell, every action, can travel or act within a certain number of squares and you always need to know exactly where you’re standing. Players are expected to be able to take a certain number of actions per turn based on their level, and do an expected amount of damage. Monster encounters are built loosely around the concept of “Challenge Rating”, which is meant to imply a group of four players will find a CR of 5 suitably challenging if they are all level five. Basically it plays like “X-Com”.

And as you lock people in these mechanical, video game-styled designs, you find people champing at the bit. Not everyone wants to choose their abilities at level up or have their skill proficiencies dictated by what level they are. Some people want to express truly outlandish concepts, or play something that isn’t specifically designed around the idea of walking room to room blasting monsters. You’ll see people in roleplaying communities often asking, “Does anyone have any good ideas to homebrew [this idea] and make it work?”

Fans of DnD argue the homebrew approach works. Yes, it’s complicated and frustrating to invent entirely new classes and races for a single game where you don’t know how long you’ll play or what level you’ll reach, but DnD’s strict rules and design philosophy is a perk to those people, not a drawback.

Yet a fact of note is that a quote from a game I run got into a popular “Out of Context DnD” blog. The quote was, “ Mecha-Jesus unleashes a barrage of flames from his palms, but the train-snake martially dodges out of the way!”

It received 337 notes, and I was a little surprised by that. The game is a post-apocalyptic Road Warrior setting where the team boss decided to kill God as revenge for one of the gang members dying. Also featured in that day’s session was a battle between two men operating bucket cranes in a duel to the death above a giant grain silo, among eight other equally implausible events based loosely on Dante’s Inferno. For me, Mecha-Jesus is not a 300 notes event - it’s literally every other Friday.

What Do You Want to Play?

In my view, DnD often poses the question, “Are you even roleplaying?” I mean really. A lot of players feel like they are because they do an accent and come up with a backstory, but if you set yourself next to another player who has the same character stats and you’re playing together in the same game, has the system really given you the tools to solve problems all that differently? And the answer is is broadly, no.

I understand the counter-argument. Every player is unique. But in their way each Paladin in “World of Warcraft” is unique too. They have different gear, different competencies of player, and may take different abilities, but fundamentally they’re expected to crash dungeons and use what they’re given to kill monsters. The only advantage DnD has is that the GM can allow his players to interact with scenery items or talk to things, and you’ll see debate on exactly how much leniency a GM should give his players to act outside DnD’s base mechanics.

That’s a mentality. Some people like the safety of the system. They like to know what all the monsters are, what the risks are, what the rewards are, and have it all neatly lined up where you can see it. They want to join an Adventuring Guild that will bureaucratically assign a dungeon for them to attack so they always have something to do and a sure reward for doing it. The GM went through the trouble of drawing that dungeon out, after all. DnD is extremely safe.

And then there’s the alternative. I actually learned to roleplay among theater nerds who were already big into the concept of improv and narrative. One of them used to joke, “If you think DnD is the best system for the game, you know it’s not character-driven,” because any time you’re fine with trying to build an actual human around a set of level-up choices, you’re probably not designing the strongest possible personality.

Going back to media making DnD more popular, the first televised introduction to DnD I can personally recall is an episode of “Dexter’s Lab” where they address exactly this conflict. In it, Dexter runs a game where he forces his friends to play by his rules, where he wins. When Dexter rolls poorly, he turns the dice over to a better number and declares his evil wizard “fried” the team of adventurers. Then his sister, Dee Dee, takes over, and with no knowledge of the game’s rules at all, embarks on an improvised session of pure roleplaying where the guys tell her what they do and she tells them what happens. The sheets are just guidelines for them, and if they say they can do something Dee Dee accepts it.

Dee Dee’s roleplaying is open. It’s a void, and for some people, when you look into the void it looks back. How do you control everyone when they can do anything? It requires a certain level of trust that some players have a difficult time not abusing, yet weirdly everyone I’ve ever known who would lie and cheat during a roleplaying game actually preferred DnD, and I think I know why.

Rules Can Be Broken, but the Suspension of Disbelief is Immutable

The grognards that break the rules in DnD do so because the rules are so strict that they ironically can be easily broken. If the system says people take a certain amount of damage when they fall, and you find a way to throw to them that elevation consistently, by gum they’ll damn well take that damage. It’s in the rules! A friend I know combats this by saying if his players exploit the rules, then the monsters will start exploiting them too, to discourage arms races of bullshit.

What I’m describing is often called “rules lawyering”. So named because it involves finding a rules passage, interpreting the rule so the wording sounds like it favors an exploit, and then leveraging that into a powerful ability players were not meant to have. Because DnD requires you to know absolutely everything about your relative locations and words like “Attack” can have important diverging meanings depending on context, it’s a system extremely vulnerable to lawyering.

But with a more open system based on narrative and characters, it becomes harder to lawyer something you shouldn’t. In an open system, you build what the game calls for without consulting a bunch of charts and level guides. If you’re super heroes, you build super heroes. Cyborgs are cyborgs, Orcs are orcs - it’s whatever, and if you try to do anything outside the believability of the game, the GM tells you no. He has more authority in a more narrative game because the GM leads the narrative.

I’m personally fond of the Hero System, which ascribes massive ranges to all forms of weapons (a gun or eye laser can reach you down a long hallway) so the only general questions that need to be asked are, “Are you close enough to punch a guy?” and “Are you bunched up close enough to all be hit by this grenade?” You don’t need battle mats and the games play a lot more intuitively. There are two books of rules in Hero and they can be specific, but most of the rules revolve around character design rather than how to play, and fiddly things like physics or bursting through walls are meant to be decided depending on the type of game, at the GM’s discretion. There are guidelines, but they’re only that.

So if someone tells you they can punch through a wall in your noir investigator game, you tell them no, because the rules are just guidelines and in this game you can’t just drive your fist through a concrete brick even if you can find figures in the book that say maybe you can, because the book also says maybe you can’t - you’re expected to play the narrative, not the game. You can punch through walls in the super hero game where that’s typical, but not in this one.

From DnD to Anything Else

Of course, the open systems also present an opportunity for players to be very different in skill sets and abilities. You could imagine DnD is like “Power Rangers”, where everyone’s a different color and has different weapons but they’re basically all pretty much on the same level. An open system will wind up more like “Avatar the Last Airbender”, where one player is going to be Toph and someone else is going to be playing Sokka. 

It’s important in DnD that everyone be the same, because a lot of the game is spent in a 20ft x 20ft room full of skeletons (or Putties) - Toph would single-handedly dominate every challenge. Whereas in a narrative-driven game the ability to crush everything with a rock doesn’t actually solve half your problems and whoever’s playing Sokka probably winds up more active than the person playing Toph.

At the end of it all, that’s why the question for me is whether you can take the players out of DnD and take DnD out of the players. Everyone plays DnD, but can you get people to play Sokka and have a good time if Toph is in the party? Personally I think it helps to start people on systems other than DnD, and then they can go into DnD if they like being in small rooms full of skeletons.

Of course, trying to start people on anything but DnD is usually defeated by the network utility! Everyone knows DnD! It’s THE system synonymous with the hobby! A few too many times I’ve seen people play a DnD game and say roleplaying just isn’t for them because it’s boring. All you do is wait for your turn and then roll dice at goblins.

But all I can say to that is, you never roleplayed, man. You joined a pen-and-paper video game. I agree, throwing dice at goblins sucks. I used to have a friend who would compulsively roll dice when he got bored waiting for turns in games like that, and when asked what he was rolling for, he’d joke, “I’m killing the dragon! I’m killing the dragon!” Him, enjoying the experience of DnD combat in between other people’s turns.

In many groups that’s all DnD is, silly accents and go-nowhere backstories aside. Acting is hard. But if you’re very lucky, and you know just the right people, it’s possible to land in a game that is pure story and character, and those things are a rare treasure and a real blast.

[elv--eyera]

A GIF-by-GIF Analysis of the 2013 Revival of Jekyll & Hyde’s version of “Transformation.”

TRIGGER WARNINGS: talk of needles / injections. Mention of potential bodily harm / death. Some bad language.

The 2013 revival went in a very, very different direction than how the scene is normally staged, so I wasn’t originally going to start this little series with analyzing this one. This “Transformation” goes far, far beyond the usual bad lab safety, and I felt like it’s be especially weird to apply any sense of realism to this production, where the concepts seemed to be all over the place. People wanted this one, though, and I’m going to give the people what they want, dammit.

This writeup could actually make the case that based on this HJ7 setup, 2013Revival!Jekyll is the most mad-scientist-esque interpretation of Jekyll that the musical’s ever featured.

A disclaimer: I’m not a doctor or a scientist. I’m just one (1) smartass that did a bit of research and is taking things both far too seriously and not quite seriously enough. I am not pointing out every single issue here... just the absolute worst ones. And yes, it’s dumb to apply medical / scientific standards to a theatrical production. But it’s also fun, on occasion!

You can watch the scene here! 

Let’s get this started with a bang!!

For starters, Jekyll really should put on protective gear like a lab coat, safety goggles and gloves if he’s going to be working with a chemical formula.  He doesn’t do those things, but Constantine at least puts on an apron halfway through This Is The Moment. (It’s a leather apron because this is the 2013 revival, so of course, it’s leather. Because... ~aesthetic~ and ~steampunk~ and ~sexy~.) 

“delicious. finally, some good fucking gloves.”

I watched this video after watching about 10 ish other Jekylls not wear gloves or ANYTHING protective, so I was absolutely rejoicing to see someone finally have them. Also, I like the kind of endearingly awkward way Constantine fiddles with them in between This Is The Moment and Transformation, but that’s not lab safety related, so, moving on-

Now we’re getting to the bad lab safety - all these gigantic flasks of chemicals were all open and unattended when he came back! Leaving it open is just making it so easy for your freakin’ formula to get contaminated!  Not only has that probably ruined the shelf life of the chemicals, you definitely shouldn’t just leave them bubbling.

Also, watch how in the above gif he has to pour the green formula in each tube individually, one at a time...

... but the red formula affects all the tubes after only one drop. 

Make it make sense ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

After making me SO happy by wearing gloves, he just flings them on the damn floor. That made me sad! I cared about those gloves, Constantine. Those gloves didn’t deserve that, Constantine! My disappointment is immeasurable, and my day is ruined. 

After he wheels the giant tubes of formula up to the sky, he starts to go all stabby on his neck and wrist, putting the IV tubes with injection needles in the little holes of the metal gauntlets. I wanted to try and not try to push realism on this too much because that’s obviously not what they’re going for, but this in particular would fuck someone up and I just gotta go into that. 

The neck is literally the most high-risk place to inject a human. It’s so easy to fuck up your breathing or heartbeat or brain by injecting into the wrong spot and hitting the arteries. Putting on the gauntlet thing would make it super hard to locate and inject into a vein, making it super easy to trigger all the issues that happen when you miss a vein and just go all stabbity stabbity on your friggin’ neck. Also, if he was going to do this on someone else, how does he account for where their veins are? 

Okay, I’ve gotta address this - Six different tubes / injection sites with ten giant jugs of evil juice is WAY too much HJ7 going into one person at one time!! Your body is going to be 100% flooded with chemical evil juice!! You’re gonna OD on the fateful brew!! And it’s bubbling - for god’s sake, Jekyll, if you inject a liquid with tons and tons of air bubbles, you are going to get an air embolism and fuck yourself up!!!

*deep breath*

It’s becoming super clear that they went for a cool-looking steampunk aesthetic, and I get that, and that’s valid... but along the way they created something that would horribly, absolutely fuck up an actual human person. I don’t want to get too far into all of the different reasons and ways it would unless someone asks for more detail (which I kinda hope someone does, honestly). I’ll just leave it at this: with this setup, Henry Jekyll is actually incredibly lucky that he somehow became a physically healthy but murderous dude, as opposed to dying painfully. 

Back to the action - this really bugs me, and let me know how you feel about this - why is everything already set up for him to administer the treatment to himself when he didn’t plan on doing that until right before this song? Specifically, why on earth would the lever to administer the treatment be placed on the chair of the person who’s receiving the treatment?

Also looking at his reaction - geez, maybe it hurts cause you’re injecting gallons of evil juice into your body without even looking for one vein!

OK, so when he (as Jekyll) put in the little IV things, he winces a bit, right. But he just flings them off as Hyde! That’s got to HURT!! 

IN CONCLUSION: 

There’s so much to say here. The designers seemed to want to create a thrilling, interesting-looking showpiece for Transformation, when the actual interesting thing about the scene is not the formula itself or how it’s administered, but how Jekyll reacts to it. This setup is absolutely, insanely bonkers, but somehow the most ridiculous thing about this isn’t the absolute overkill of the tubes and LED lights and giant bubbling flasks and electricity sound effects. No. The most ridiculous, gobsmacking thing about this, is that he lives.

It’s interesting to think about this, though - The unprecedented, dangerous aspect of Jekyll’s research, and the mad-scientist angle isn’t usually something played up in the musical. I think that’s worth exploring. I wonder what the creative team’s thought process was when conceiving this whole thing. 

Thanks for everyone that read this and huge special thanks to those who reblogged the Henry Jekyll Lab Safety Discourse and who encouraged me to write this. I hope you enjoyed reading this. I know too much about injections now, and it’s because of you. 

#Jekyll & Hyde #jekyll & hyde the musical #henry jekyll #jekyll and hyde #constantine maroulis #jekyll #I cant watch this without going OWWWW #Thanks y'all #j&h lab safety discourse #my j&h shitposts #THAT'S TOO MUCH FATEFUL BREW

[singleflat95-blog]

What You Need To Find Out About Bettering On your own

It sometimes can appear difficult to basically know what you ought to do to increase your standard of living. The single thing you must notice is to try to gain as much info as you can which can help you enhance yourself. Using this type of post you could do simply that. There are a lot of ideas on this page you are able to implement to yourself-help desired goals. A great self-help hint which can help you make positive changes to life is to find a cat. Getting a feline or even a canine is capable of doing miracles to suit your needs stress levels. The easy work of petting a pet dog can help reduce your stress levels. Developing a dog is helpful for you and for them. Often we experience days and nights exactly where we certainly have self doubt. Should this be that day for you, locate a nice and clean sheet of paper and create positive thoughts on it. Such as, I wrote an excellent write-up today, the weather is stunning nowadays, or my travel to function was clean, and so on. Please read on each of the positive ideas up until you are feeling better, you will discover this performs rapidly to improve your view and frame of mind. Appear the part! Apparel options are a significant part of your respective appearance. If you volunteer to help in your child's college occasion, gown in ways that instills assurance and demonstrates college character. Alternatively, in case you are in control at greeting guests at an important operate conference you then ought to probably attire much more appropriately. Modern technology and also the world wide web make it easier than ever to deliver frustration and resentment very quickly whatsoever. Unfortunately, this pattern has created it more challenging than in the past to train self-censure. Speaking your anger via e-email, social networking sites, text message, or blog site should be eliminated without exception. If you are compelled to go over the offending event, do this only personally or on the phone. Turn this a habit. Don't get stuck on the idea that all your private goals needs to be linked to your skilled daily life. You happen to be full people and is particularly wonderful to get healthy in other locations also. This will consist of things like taking up a new sport or even studying some kind of art. Get prepared. Organize your things nightly before heading to bed so you are prepared to take on the following day. This will help you coordinate your feelings for the upcoming time when you are obtaining points collectively. This will aid minimize pressure simply because you will have your entire day presented before you. Don't forget about the power of positive contemplating. It is needed to retain the appropriate state of mind on your own way to self improvement and negativity is only going to thwart your very best attempts. Practice beneficial thinking to obtain good results. When development courses remain good about every thing that you just do, great things will follow. For some people, the true secret to improving personal development is keeping wholesome connections. By being in an abusive or unhealthy connection, the other individual will enable you to get downward and make you feel as if you happen to be not good enough. Be with someone that loves you unconditionally. Irrespective of how difficult it might seem to accomplish your desired goals, do not give up. Daily life is about possessing persistence, so by attaching out from the challenging times, you may be rewarded ultimately. Just snapshot the final aim in your mind and maintain it there when instances seem challenging. As we say, before you could really like anybody else, you must discover how to really like on your own. This is correct as you can come prior to other folks and just how do you adore them should you not enjoy yourself? Try to concentrate on the excellent things about on your own rather than adverse, and recall, nobody is perfect! Make acceptable desired goals so that you can steadily inspire your personal development. Don't tell on your own that you need to implement a specific trait by the following month. That's not affordable in any way. Allow yourself enough time to discover as well as try out issues out. Reasonable desired goals are much better to obtain. Will not hesitate to try interesting things. If you want to try out one thing, you almost certainly know inside which you will enjoy it or otherwise. When someone is pressuring you into striving some thing, you should consider what you truly desire to perform. An incredible tip for personal improvement is to determine your bad guidelines and attempt to correct them. Behaviours, practices, and values are the vital elements of rules. Should you be deficient in one of these simple regions, you then are lacking inside your concepts. Correcting your rules is actually a stage toward enhancing oneself. An excellent personal development idea is usually to be confident you regenerate your body regularly. You must workout the body to get energy, endurance, and strength. These characteristics are what give your entire body to replenish by itself. Therefore, you need to attempt to get some exercise regularly for those aspects, not for vain reasons. View video clips, study publications, and tune in to interview with personal development specialists like Wayne Dyer and Dave Ramsey. Even unless you are in agreement with all their concepts, you can use the data and knowledge they supply to enhance the areas of your life you are focusing on. With personal development, make certain you accept alter regardless how a lot problems it may well lead to. This is very important for the reason that planet is obviously shifting so when you acknowledge transform you agree to every one of the inevitability in this particular lifestyle. You ought to be conscious of techniques you may need to improve and actions you will need to take to accomplish this. When you have discovered at first of your write-up the greater you understand the better it becomes to help yourself. Make sure you don't reduce you to ultimately the information you learned right here. Ingest the information you figured out on this page and utilize prior understanding and check out your very best to help you yourself. Eventually use any suggestion you might have learned and discover what meets your needs that's the easiest way to be successful.

#data-science #development

[aleatoryw]

okay, so, the bella sara tarot deck. below the cut because it’s a LONG post.

My process: I decided to limit this to cards I physically own, even though all the newer cards do seem to be archived pretty well on the wiki, because I think shuffling and touching the cards is an important tarot aspect, and I wanted the deck to be functional. Not counting item cards and shiny variations, there are a total of 90 unique cards in the first and second series, the only ones I ever purchased, and luckily I have all 90!

Since there are 78 cards in a tarot deck, I had to pick out 12 to discard. I settled on several non horses (artemis the zebra, pedro the donkey, dino the dinosaur, kio the lion, treasure the seahorse, wavebreaker the dolphin), three foals (bellisimo, beauty, spottie), cajus for including a merman in the artwork, friends for featuring two horses and only one name, and dynamo because i simply felt the art style wasn’t very realistic and didn’t fit in with the rest of the deck.

From there I divided the remaining cards up by their “symbol” at the top. conveniently, there are four suits! I decided the heart best fit with the cups, the flower with wands, the moon with pentacles, and the horseshoe with the sword. Great. Then I dug through every pile and pulled cards I thought best fit each major arcana card, while keeping 14 of each suit to represent the minor arcana.

For the unfamiliar, bella sara cards feature a horse portrait, but also a little message of positivity. A little horse motto. It’s a strange franchise but 2007 was a weird time for all of us. I mainly used the messages to sort these horses, but aesthetics and name played a small role. I used this site’s description of each major arcana card to help because I don’t know that much about tarot tbh. all images from the bella sara wiki.

The Fool - Luna - “A wonderful and exciting world awaits you.” a few other cards mention having the heart of a child or seeing the world as a child, but this one really expresses the beginning of a journey, the openness to the world that the fool offers, if slightly more uplifting because. well. it’s bella sara.

The Magician - Tao - “The whole world is at your feet.”  i was kind of hoping for a card that was more about being unique. but the magician also represents having what you need to accomplish your goals and should set forth. world’s your oyster. at your feet.

The High Priestess - Santos - “Be mindful of your senses and your intuition.” was slightly wary of assigning a stallion to this role but gender is dead and the high priestess is all about intuition

The Empress - Honey - “Create something beautiful. It will make you feel peaceful.” my first instinct was to make the titular bella the empress. But honey’s message about beauty, and her portrait surrounded by nature, won out.

The Emperor - Cantaro - “Develop your ability to lead. Ask a wise person for advice.” This card specifically mentions leadership and wisdom, a relatively easy pick.

The Hierophant - Angel - “Angel is coming. Make space and let heaven help you.” another pretty easy one, very few cards mention heaven or spirituality.

The Lovers - Yin & Yang - “You always have a choice.” i considered discarding these two early on, but felt the message was too tarot-relevant to discard, and they fit very well here. the only card in our deck with two horses who aren’t a mare and foal, reminding you of choices.

The Chariot - Tai - “Be resolute and energetic in what you do.” wavered on this one for a while but I think resolve and energy are related to determination and drive enough for this to work.

Strength - Thunder - “I give you courage. Now you can release your fears.” this is one where the portrait was pretty relevant - a few cards mention courage but this one is the most forceful and strong about it.

The Hermit - Mushu - “Find a peaceful place where you can gather new energy.” big hermit card energy, back away from it all and recharge

The Wheel of Fortune - Eagle - “See the world from above like an eagle.” fuck this card in particular. took me ages to find something that kind of matches, and even then it’s a stretch. the only real match here is that the wheel of fortune urges perspective, and so does this eagle colored horse.

Justice - Grey - “If you really want it, it will come to you.” this was a tough one too. The vaguely karmic aspect is appealing to pair this one with justice, but it’s still not the best match in the deck. i’m trying my best.

The Hanged Man - Yasmin - “Retreat and gather new energy for taking steps on the road.” the hanged man is about cutting your losses, sacrificing something small to move forward, and letting go of what’s not working. retreat seems like a good fit.

Death - Chung - “Let go of pain and sorrow. The road will open and everything will go right.” assigning a horse trading card to death was not a task i thought i would face. but i kinda vibe with this pick - death is about endings and new beginnings, so it’s important to move past your pain and onto new roads. also, traditionally, death rides a white horse.

Temperence - Peace - “Those who don’t think of winning or losing have peace in mind.” kind of a weird one, hard to find a good match, but I think this patient, peaceful war horse fits.

The Devil - Parlez - “Make a plan and commit completely to it.” crazy enough there really aren’t any uhhhhhh demonic horses in this children’s trading card series from ‘07. went with the interpretation that what traps you is your own unwillingness to move forward. also there is a skull on this horse’s forehead. kinda metal?

The Tower - Macon - “It is wise to accept that there are things you can’t do.” this card is one of very few that isn’t relentlessly positive and instead encourages you to accept failure. Let that tower, or stable i guess, crumble.

The Star - Star - “It is not what you do but who you are that is important.” i simply had to. nice healing message.

The Moon - Sheng - “Understand the past. Hold onto the great things and move forward alone.” the description for this bad boy mentions not allowing worry to cloud your past or future, and this horse is all about parsing your past to move clear-headed towards the future. nice moon colored palette.

The Sun - Bella - “Think positive every day! Feel the bliss of joy and energy that comes with it.” here she is, the figurehead of our series, the queen of happiness, joy, optimism, energy... our sun.

Judgement - Starfighter - “Believe in your vision and make it come true.” this was another tough match, i had to focus on the “you can change yourself and your future” aspect of judgement to make any of them fit, and this was my fave card that mentions vision.

The World - Sunny - “The wind blows. The sun is shining. Surround yourself with positive friends.” it’s not my favorite match, but it does have a certain element of being in the right place in the world, with a sense of completion.

Okay! so that’s the major arcana. For the minor arcana, while i did put the cards within each deck into an order I thought fit the ace through king, I was far less particular than with our major deck. Went with vague associations instead of real connection to each card. I’m also not gonna list out all my reasons, because while I may be an insane person, I’m not quite ready to dedicate that much time to this weird, niche late night project. Pictured below is the ace of each deck.

Suit of Wands/Flowers:

Ace - Shaman - “You are more powerful than you realize. It is safe and good for you to be powerful.”

Two - Feng - “This moment is full of opportunities.”

Three - Nanna - “Think positively. Your happy thoughts will grow.”

Four - Walter - “I love your company. Let’s have a good time together.”

Five - Shakira - “Goodness and generosity create loving energy.”

Six - Yung - “Don’t be afraid. Show who you are.”

Seven - Tiffi - “Paradise is a state of mind.”

Eight - Bosi - “Use all your abilities to make this a beautiful place.”

Nine - Jewel - “I will help you stay in a steady flow of abundance.”

Ten - Flipper - “I will embrace you with extra energy and magic. Then you don’t have to be afraid.”

Page - Pink Lady - “I am the spirit of your inner child. Be joyful and see the world as a magical place.”

Knight - Sarah - “Take a chance and follow your heart.”

Queen - Misla - “With me you will be safe and protected by heaven.”

King - Halloween - “I will keep you safe.”

Suit of Cups/Hearts:

Ace - Pegasus - “Your dreams are coming through. I am here to help you trust.”

Two - Saga - “Join me and we will be happy together.”

Three - Nikita - “You may join us if you like.”

Four - Sasha - “Make your goals magnificent.”

Five - Roxy - “Magical opportunities surround you.”

Six - Sung - “Retreat from conflicts and go where you feel safe.”

Seven - Fiona - “Be the hero in your own story.”

Eight - Lancelot - “Be patient. Wait for the right moment before you take action.”

Nine - Misty - “You have Misty’s touch right now, and everything you start turns to gold.”

Ten - King - “I will help you spread peace and unity throughout the world.”

Page - Skipper - “Believe in your worth. You are valuable.”

Knight - Filippa - “Enjoy what you have got. You don’t need what you have not.”

Queen - Ghost - “Your beauty comes from within.”

King - Lucas - “Run with me and you will feel the strength and power inside you.”

Suit of Swords/Horseshoes:

Ace - Konfu - “Move towards your goals. The road is open.”

Two - Alibi - “Find new ways to be with others.”

Three - Yellow - “Spend time with me and you will get your heart’s desire.”

Four - Freja - “Close your eyes and hear the sound around you.”

Five - Ninja - “Be careful every minute.”

Six - Cascadeur - “The things you have lost will come back by themselves.”

Seven - Jojo - “You create your own reality.”

Eight - Ming - “Be open and take care of what is necessary.”

Nine - Sweety - “You are a perfect child. Believe it.”

Ten - Moonlight - “Trust the moon and the stars. Then your dreams are coming through.”

Page - Colour - “Feel the joy in what you see, hear, and sense.”

Knight - Flame - “I run faster than the wind. Follow me and we will find a magical place.”

Queen - Blackie - “Follow your dreams. Feel the happiness it brings.”

King - Bello - “Life is a gift. Receive it and love it.”

Suit of Pentacles/Moons:

Ace - Sokki - “Seize the day.”

Two - Rose - “Listen to your dreams. What they tell you is important.”

Three - Rain - “Run with me and feel the power.”

Four - Leonard - “Your life is a sundance.”

Five - Charlie - “Make time to listen to your friends.”

Six - Leonardo - “When you hear me neigh you will feel the joy we have.”

Seven - Hummingbird - “Go after the point of life.”

Eight - Hercules - “Don’t be afraid to ask for help.”

Nine - Mermaid - “Laugh from your heart and feel the joy.”

Ten - Mandalay - “This is a magical moment. You can make a wish.”

Page - Jonathan - “It is time for joyful playing. Joy creates miracles.”

Knight - Lucky Light - “Always be clear and brave.”

Queen - Shadow - “Look withing yourself and love what you find there.”

King - Balto - “Happiness is a decision. Decide to be happy.”

And there you have it. the bella sara. tarot. deck. If you’re still here you’re either way too invested in assigning things to other things, procrastinating, or have fond bella sara memories from when the company was still out there, convincing us to spend several hours a day brushing virtual horses. PLEASE message me with your fond bella sara memories, or if you know about tarot and have suggestions/comments.

despite the insane time investment this took, i really enjoyed looking at all the messages and comparing them to tarot meanings. maybe i’ll actually do some kind of reading with it sometime! i don’t know a lot about tarot but i think it’s really cool and the concept of using silly horse trading cards to divine my future delights me.

#bella sara #tarot cards #can you tell that i'm unemployed? #horses

[gamesto245]

Which video gaming controller is pc

Gaming Grabs The High Score On Twitter

Twitter is where game publishers, the gaming media, well known game streamers and entertainers, esports leagues, teams, players and commentators interact with their most engaged fans and with a single an additional. So what is with the lack of inclusion in the gaming planet? In addition to the normally hostile world of desktop and console games (see the GamerGate controversy as just one particular instance), there is nevertheless somewhat of an business perception that women merely don't play video games. But, that's far from true - females are actually gaming far more than ever prior to, specifically on mobile.

The gaming WordPress themes consist of some one of a kind traits like style and options. And most of the themes that are featured here supplies you with a total option for your gaming website. The Seo choices, social network tools, a variety of solutions, and multiple colors will make you a lot easier to begin your new website. All these themes are customizable where you can alter every and each aspect of the themes devoid of touching any of the codes.

Luca is operating in the field of gaming for six years, initially as an indie one particular-man-team junior developer and, the latter five years, as gameplay programmer and software architect in a enterprise where he created video games for all main mobile platforms, Pc, Steam, PS4 and Xbox One, as nicely as minor gaming consoles, increasing as a qualified. Lately he founded Twin Wolves, an indie video games improvement studio, where he's the CTO.

Paul: In 2009, the concept for Green Man Gaming came about when we were thinking of exactly where the games market place was going to go and what was going to happen next. There was a robust small business model in trading in games in the business and there was the start of the move to a completely digital marketplace. The coupling of these two market mechanisms were supported by study from London Enterprise College displaying that a customer's propensity to buy is heightened when provided the choice to trade-in a solution or recoup some of its value. So the huge idea” was to combine digital and trade-in into the similar platform, properly being a retailer and a marketplace on 1 global digital platform.

Due to mobile game development outsourcing , the most up-to-date indie games developed by compact studios or person programmers get lots of interest and constructive feedback from each players and journalists. With the assist of application outsourcing companies, each particular person, with suitable understanding, can develop and market gaming apps with out any obstacles.

Don't you want you have been really sitting on a racecar seat each and every time you play Forza, Gran Turismo, or any other racing game? With the racing seat style of the Ficmax Swivel Gaming Chair , finding this practical experience is now a reality. The totally ergonomic Ficmax is made with a fully retractable footrest to support sooth tired lower limbs and enable facilitate the additional effective circulation of blood. It also comes with a lumbar massage help to support protect against or even handle low back pain which is very popular among persons who sit in an office chair for unusually lengthy period. Our handy guide to the best ergonomic workplace chairs functions additional great products like this.

World Order Tools Make UP FOR Push Button Easy

The Atlantic Gaming Desk is a piece of steel furniture that is especially built for today's contemporary gamer or even a property workplace owner. Its sturdy legs come totally integrated with cup holders and other attachments that are just ideal for organizing a range of your pc accessories and peripherals. The Atlantic Gaming Desk also attributes a one of a kind cable management method that organizes the unique wires and cables that your devices possess. There is a charging station, a monitor stand, game storage rack, game controller hooks, gaming speaker trays, and a complete lot much more. Its padded feet will not also scratch your floor.

Today's games are bigger, superior, and a lot more immersive than ever. You can discover incredible games across a wide variety of genres. Most significant game franchises are available on both PlayStation four and Xbox One, although the Nintendo Switch delivers a massive selection of games suited for little ones and families. For the most realistic visual experiences, upgrade to the PlayStation 4 Pro or Xbox One S to enjoy breathtaking 4K and HDR gaming. Exclusive titles are available for each console, which further underscores the need to plan ahead and choose up the right technique for your have to-own games. Discover the massive collections of previously played games at terrific deals and give your older consoles like the PlayStation 3 , Xbox 360 , and Nintendo Wii U continued life.

Avantura has 1 of the finest creating blocks we've noticed for constructing a gaming site, it supports exceptional colour categories ( a will have to for any serious gaming magazine), can be combined with popular widgets, can be colour customized per web page, has numerous choices for the header and footer and it has an incredible good looking weblog post design. Also, it has a pretty good about the author module and some nice next and previous article hooks. On prime of it all, it supports a nice mega menu with photos.

Keep in mind these annoying 8-bit tones the old web-sites employed to have? If your web-site is aimed towards the retro gaming community or if you really feel like implementing a nostalgia-inducing site style, this theme is ideal for you. You can also use this awesome theme to construct a retro-themed arcade, a blog site for reviewing older games or newer indie games and appeal to the nostalgia aspect of the 80s to the late 90s gaming sector.

So, to support you monitor and fix these troubles, we've chosen some incredible WordPress Gaming themes we can personally advocate. They are highly accommodating to a wide variety of purposes for your internet sites. For your comfort, we've highlighted all their core features, areas of usages and essential elements for these great gaming themes. Moreover, the list also includes excellent absolutely free WordPress gaming themes so you can start off your gaming web site with minimal expenses. So without further ado, let's take a look at our list of each premium WordPress Gaming Themes and free Gaming WordPress themes.

Ask yourself why you happen to be considering starting a gaming blog or youtube channel? If it's mainly because you assume you have what it requires to be the next PewDiePie or DanTDM (or TheTechieGuy ), Extra resources then you happen to be not alone. However, your main reason really should be that you have an overwhelming appreciate for gaming. It doesn't hurt to have a good voice and something to contribute to the gaming network. (Of course, the perks ain't bad when they start off rolling in, either).

Previously, N'Gai Croal wrote articles for Newsweek, Croal left Newsweek back in March since he wanted to follow his passions slanted far more towards the improvement finish of gaming. Croal describes himself as a creative maverick that identified himself sidetracked in journalism, but this short-term exploration became one particular of the most awesome items that Croal has ever done. As a journalist, Croal has enriched his personal perspective and enhanced his information by means of journalism mainly because he has written about a assortment of subjects.

Normally utilised to refer to games that are made by major studios with a substantial budget, requiring a higher sales volume and substantial software program expansions to keep profitability. Like hollywood, these games tend to rely on fairly low-risk sequels over larger-danger artistic projects, so anticipate to see your work all more than billboards and Television advertisements. You'll be focused primarily on Pc, Playstation and Xbox gaming for AAA titles.

IGN (Consider Games Network) has emerged as the hot favored game web page on a global level. Launched 21 years ago, IGN is mostly focused on video game & entertainment enthusiast markets. The game web page is one quit on line location for gaming, films, Television Shows, Comics and every thing you can assume of. You can uncover not too long ago launched video game news, critiques, videos, gaming information, recommendations, and so substantially more.

[thesealfriend]

*puts on Serious Game Dev Hat"

This one might get really rambly so it's going under a read more. Main topics are Games, Crunch and University.

(For folk seeing this who are curious but completely divorced from the games world, because even though it's in the news a lot lately it's hardly the universal topic people think it is, Crunch is the term for when creative studios, in this particular case games studios, overwork their employees by "incentivising" them to work longer hours or produce more content for little to no compensation, usually towards the end of a development cycle when deadlines are looming. I put "incentivising" in quotes because a lot of companies say they don't force workers to crunch, it's voluntary and workers are just so passionate! But actually, taking a stand and enforcing boundaries can often come with consequences within the workplace - workers who stand up to crunch might be first for layoffs or receive bad references from employers when trying to move jobs. It's hardly as "voluntary" as they make it seem.)

Anyway, rambling already! Let's begin...

So I studied game design at uni. This is no surprise to those who know me or note my "game dev hat" tag. I don't work in the industry right now for Reasons™ but I plan to one day.

My across my degree, grades were based on about 70% coursework, 30% exams/class tests. Funnily enough, the best way to learn games is to make games. So out of that coursework, I'd say the fair majority was, if not "make a game", then at least "produce a design document"/"prototype a game"/"create a level". There was a decent amount of essay-based coursework, writing about the psychology of games or theory of play etc, as well as reports on projects, but I'd say at least half of my grade came down to some aspect of actually creating games.

And that was a lot. It's understandable for the kind of course it is, but we often found ourselves working on 2-3 games or levels in 12 weeks. Which, when you vaguely run the numbers and compare the expected output to the time, was about doable. We weren't making AAA masterpieces of course, we were working in groups of 2-4 usually to make a vertical slice prototype (all functionality of a game across a small segment of the content) or a level or two to fit a brief. But!

We were expected to put in 40 hours a week for uni, as though it were a full time job. That explicit expectation means I can try and step around trying to calculate hours in the day and subtract for travel, leisure, eating etc. I'm using the numbers we were given. So that's 40hrs total, over 12 weeks, but that's including all the time we spend

Depending on the semester we had about 12-16hrs of teaching time, sometimes plus up to 4 hours unsupervised lab time to work on class exercises, so let's call that 16 hours overall in uni. That leaves 24 hours per week, to work on usually 3 classes at a time. That's 8 hours, per class, per week. Multiply that by 12 and you get 96 hours. 96 hours in which to complete each class, assuming we spend the exact amount of time we're meant to on uni work.

Now that sounds fine, right? That's two whole Global Game Jams* for each class, and that's not including time one would spend at a jam eating, sleeping or resting. People make pretty impressive stuff at jams, so why not be able to do that over the course of 2 jams comfortably?

(*for the uninitiated, GGJ is an annual event where game developers (including designers, programmers, artists and musicians etc) cram into a room for 48hrs straight, get given a surprise theme and make a game out of it. It's entirely for fun and I love them. Also some jam sites give you free pizza.)

Well, the thing is, I've led you all down a bit of a rabbit hole going purely by the numbers. I've not gotten into the nature of some of the work, and the overall system, which makes a difference. See, unis want to teach us good time management, and they want to actually steer us away from crunch. I've been verbally told many times that Crunch Is Bad And We Shouldn't Let It Happen. So they build in systems like interim reports, and enforced team meetings with minutes taken and then rating your team members' performance, appointments with tutors throughout the year for bigger stuff. These are all meant to ensure that you're working on projects at the "right rate" and keeping up with deadlines. And honestly? For some of the less game-specific coursework (psychology projects, essays on theory of design etc) this works fairly well. Universities have been structuring courses the same way for decades, why change it now?

But the thing is, game development is game development whether you're in the "controlled environment" of a university or the Real World™ of the games industry. Quite frankly put, shit happens. And this goes for all university courses, not just games. You get the usual tech issues ("my computer broke and I'm having to do this work at the library/elsewhere on campus", "my internet is down and I can't collaborate with my group" etc etc) as well as the personal life interruptions, both of which are highly tied to class and that's a whole other essay ramble. You also just get that one person who assigns themself task XYZ then never does it, which you could have managed to do yourself if you'd known they weren't going to do anything, but they assured you they would! These are the things we're warned about, told to give extra time to account for, and if it's really bad most unis have some kind of "oh shit something outside my control happened" form you can fill in for extra consideration, as well as individual tutors offering extensions.

But on top of that you also get the games-specific issues.

You get that one animation that, no matter how much skill and effort you put in, you're not happy with. You get that weird code that won't compile, and nobody on StackOverflow can recreate. You get the creative block. My god, the creative block. And then, you get the last minute changes to the brief or structure, or if you're unlucky enough to be working for a real world client, you get *weekly* changes to the brief or structure. You get the fact that the software you've been given doesn't fit what you've been told to do. You get the natural period of downtime because you've worked on your character model, and you're waiting for another group member to finish an animation and there's bugger all you can do in the lull. Most of these are just, things that happen, and we're expected to work around them because they happen in the real world too.

But in the Real World™, whenever "shit happens", that's when a studio, if it's a good one, can work around the issues. They hire the right people, and the right number of people for each role, knowing the kind of work that's expected, rather than just going "ok we have more programmers than artists this year so the teams will reflect that, good luck". They vet the software to ensure it meets the needs of the employees and their tasks. They have producers to keep on top of the brief, and liase with clients to make sure everyone knows what they're going to be doing ahead of time and throughout. And on top of all that, they remove the time pressure. They set goals, that "we'd like to have XYZ done in 6 weeks, and a beta released in the coming months" but they don't expect the workers to perform miracles.

But universities can't, or won't, do that. At the end of it all, the end of the semester is approaching and you've been putting your best work in all term, but there's 2 weeks to go and so much left to do if you want to submit something you're happy to be graded on. You could ask for an extension, but if everyone who was in that situation did so there just wouldn't be deadlines. You could just push ahead at normal pace, and submit what you have and hope for the best, but then you're risking failing the class and having it all be for nothing. And some people will do either of these things + they'll sacrifice a grade and do a resit in order to give themselves more time to finish another concurrent project, or they'll glean a few days' extension for a very specific issue, but for a lot of folk, you do what feels natural when deadlines loom and you're behind. You crunch.

And much like industry, uni society encourages crunch implicitly, even though it explicitly shames it. The tutor tells you, "last year's students managed this project in the same length of time!" but they don't mention how all of them probably crunched too. They blame your time management, not realising that if 75% of the class are having to work around this then the issue probably isn't with individuals' time management. The students talk among themselves about who got the least sleep over the last two weeks of term, and it's a badge of honour (again, not necessarily game dev-specific, but there's definitely an enhanced culture of it there) and who put in 8hr shifts after uni to crush the bugs.

And we're taught about passion. One of my tutors, who is the most Explicitly Anti-Crunch man I know, was also the first one who told me that "If you aren't working on other stuff in your personal time you can't expect to get a job easily". He didn't say it in a positive way, but he knew it was the case and didn't encourage us to fight it. And sure, if game dev is something you enjoy as a hobby that will stand you in good stead. But if every student or young dev is told they have to go "above and beyond" to succeed, then that shifts the bar for what "above and beyond" means. Exactly the same as companies "incentivising" 60 hour weeks, so that everyone works 60 hours to prove they're passionate, and then 80 hours is above and beyond.

And you know the worst part about all this? From a purely productive standpoint, it works. For every class I got a good grade in, I'd crunched. And sure, I'd have probably just about passed most of them if I hadn't, but crunch in my case (and other folk I've spoken to) isn't the difference between an A and a B in games courses, it's the difference between an A and a D. Because sure, I'd submit 80% of the work, but without that final 20% tying it together that 80% of the work might make up 40-50% of the grade requirements. It's a very all-or-nothing discipline, except you can't physically do "all" because if you satisfy all the grade requirements, you get 80-90% because "there's always something more you could add to make it better". Which is also a whole other rant.

Anyway, my point with all of this is that, despite how it seems, studying game design at uni sets prospective employees up for crunch. The magnitude is lower, but the attitude is there. They know that they've done it before, that if they can just pull through a couple of weeks doing double time, they'll get it out the way. And so far, that has worked for them, because deadlines rarely do move. But in industry, they work their two weeks double time only for the worst of the studios to say "actually we see you working hard but also we're not gonna make it, you've got another month". And then they have to pull that time for another month. And maybe again after that. As a student, that kind of extension happened to me once - my 3D coursework was meant to be due before the Christmas break, and with 2 weeks to go, the lecturer announced we had til the start of the exam period (mid-January). But because we had that extra time, he expected the quality to reflect it. We weren't getting extra time so we could do the same amount of work without crunching - we were getting it so we could do more work. Again, the exact same pattern we see in industry right now.

So what's the solution? Honestly, I don't have one. Reviewing workload for students in creative subjects is a sticking plaster, and removing time pressure from coursework would require an overhaul of the system that I can't see coming any time soon. Acknowledgement of the problem is the best we can do for now. If you or someone you know is in or studying for an industry prone to this kind of behaviour, talk about it. Push the idea that the institution is flawed, and that whatever kind of unhealthy habits people pick up while studying don't have to become their life.

Look after each other. Peace out!

#game dev hat #long post under cut #ramblings #mild rant #game dev #crunch #this got away from me once more

[ma9l]

Research Project: Instagram Use and Depression

It’s fascinating. Isn’t it fascinating? What our world has become? The world is so different now compared to even a couple hundred years ago. It has advanced--especially when it comes to technology and the internet. Think about it. Social media used to be non-existent. Now it is booming with billions of users. This is proof that people are entertained by these types of platforms. However, aside from all their pros, they also hold many faults. For example, a survey (#StatusOfMind survey) was published in 2017 by the Royal Society for Public Health. They discovered that “Out of five social networks included in the survey, YouTube received the highest marks for health and well being and was the only site that received a net positive score by respondents. Twitter came in second, followed by Facebook and then Snapchat—with Instagram bringing up the rear.” Basically, Instagram was ranked as the worst social media for mental health. Although some may believe that Instagram doesn’t pose any issues, depression and Instagram actually share correlations. I believe the way Instagram is used plays a role in one’s well being and that symptoms of depression can arise if users are not careful. The world has enough issues, mental health being one of the most serious with the increase in suicides over more recent years. If we determine whether or not social media (particularly Instagram) is a contributor to depression, we could potentially end the epidemic, or at least avoid making things worse.

In the past, I would normally go about my research by googling and trying to find reliable sources that way. Usually this would present decent info, but hardly ever would it be in-depth. When I took ENGL 1010 last year, I was informed that my school’s library had a website full of databases holding a plethora of scholarly articles. My mind was blown. It was a bit overwhelming at first, but as I became familiar with the tools and resources, I learned how to properly navigate and refine my searches to produce the results I was looking for. I didn’t use the databases as effectively as I could have, but this year in ENGL 2010, I was encouraged to and I learned a lot more about how to read and interpret the articles to find relevant information. I did this by closely studying the abstract, methods, and results sections. Google searches aren’t necessarily bad. In fact, they can be used to compare and contrast with scholarly articles in order to find similarities and differences. I have also been told to use outside sources like physical books and newspapers or to try and perform my own research by creating a survey or poll. Overall, I am pleased with my education in research and feel that it has been and will be very beneficial for assisting me in my writing.

Before doing any research, I had a preconceived idea that Instagram was bad, but the more I looked into it, the more my opinion shifted from believing Instagram itself is unhealthy to believing the users of Instagram are the ones creating unhealthy habits. I came to this conclusion by reading various articles in relation to this topic and assessing my personal Instagram use.

One of the articles I read was “Instagram: Friend or Foe”. It revolves around a study from 2017 where 204 participants ages 18-48 were recruited through social media where the study was advertised. They were asked to complete an online survey regardless of whether or not they had an Instagram account. Authors actually hoped some wouldn’t so they could compare results between users and nonusers. Throughout the survey, participants (users only) were measured on seven things: anxiety, depression, loneliness, self-esteem, body image, social comparison, and time spent on Instagram. Using number scales, they would rank how they felt based on each category. In short, the authors’ hypotheses were correct for all but two of these categories: body image and social comparison where there was no significant difference between users and nonusers of Instagram. What surprised me most from the results was that those who had an Instagram account were less depressed than those who did not. I thought it would be the opposite, but I guess a reason for this could be because Instagram allows you to feel included and not so lonely with all the social interaction that goes on. “Contrary to expectation, Instagram anxiety was significantly, negatively associated with depression in this analysis. In addition, time spent , self-esteem, and anxiety were significant predictors of depression. Of note, social comparison was marginally associated with depression in the expected direction”.

The article “Instagram #Instasad?: Exploring Associations Among Instagram Use, Depressive Symptoms, Negative Social Comparison, and Strangers Followed”, held a set of online questionnaires for 117 individuals ages 18-29 who, like the previous study, were also voluntarily recruited through an online post that was shared. The questions asked were based on Instagram use, the number of strangers followed, social comparison, and depressive symptoms. Authors sought to identify the relationship between the different aspects of Instagram use. After completing the questionnaire, the following results were observed:  the more one uses Instagram, the more depressed they are, but only if they follow a large number of strangers, otherwise Instagram and depression were not related. As far as social comparison goes, it was positively associated with greater instagram use meaning social comparison on Instagram is inevitable. Results demonstrated that the social comparison was more positive when users didn’t follow strangers. In conclusion, “people using Instagram or other SNS to keep in touch solely with people they know personally are not at risk for negative consequences. However, following strangers may lead to or reinforce already existing negative feelings about the self by triggering negative social comparisons.”

“Why Social Comparison on Instagram Matters: Its Impact on Depression” by Ha Sung Hwang is all about the relationship between various types of activities on social media that motivate one to participate in social comparisons and how those influence college students’ moods. It specifically focuses on Instagram for the social platform and depression for the mental illness which is exactly what I was looking for in my research. The study was carried out as 245 college students were surveyed on the types of activities they take part in on Instagram and how they felt in doing each of those. Instagram usage, activity, social comparison, and depression were individually measured. Demographics of the participants were also taken into account. The author seemed to be interested in the social comparison theory where there are three different kinds of comparisons: upward, downward, and horizontal. Upward is comparing yourself to someone who appears to be superior to you, downward is comparing yourself to someone who is inferior to you, and horizontal comparison is relating yourself to someone who is equal to you. The results presented three outcomes: “(1) looking at other people's status updates and commenting on other people's photos influences upward social comparison, (2) frequency of Instagram use predicts upward/downward/horizontal social comparison, and (3) upward social comparison was positively associated with depression, while downward social comparison was negatively associated with depression.”

One of the biggest similarities between these three sources is that the participants in each experiment were all college aged. That’s because according to “Instagram: Friend or Foe? The application’s association with psychological well-being”, “Approximately 90% of young adults use social media.” This is significant because you are college-aged and an adult, so these effects couldn’t apply to you more! Each article also agreed that users of Instagram deal with social comparison to some degree each time they interact with the app. Social comparison was measured in every case. The first article confirms that it took place-but they also expected that to happen. Many of us could probably assume the same. Article #2 concludes that social comparisons only have an effect on depression when you follow strangers. Now, because the author in article #3 performed a more specific measurement with her participants, she found that social comparison does contribute to depression, but only when it falls into the upward comparison category. A final similarity amongst these reports is support in the idea that the activities you do on Instagram will determine how depressed you become along with the amount of time you take part in them. Those activities combined include: looking at or commenting on other people’s photos and following strangers. The main difference in the studies was that they each took at least one more thing into account when analyzing what aspects of Instagram play a role in depressed moods. #1 compares users with non users. #2 wonders if gender makes a difference. #3 again, implements the social comparison theory. Limitations inevitably happened which could have hindered results, like how in the third article, the survey only took place at a Korean University. How would the results differ if UVU students took the survey? For the most part, the results were in sync. In summary, all the studies are on the same page when it comes to social comparison and activities on Instagram-believing that they tend to elevate depression. The authors also all realized that college students are most at risk for developing depressive symptoms due to their population’s heavy usage of the network.

I strongly believe that the way individuals use social media has an impact on how they feel. Instagram seems to be a culprit for influencing the rise of many negative feelings with depressive symptoms being some of many. Coincidentally, depression correlates with more frequent Instagram use which presents a predicament we ought to be concerned with because if we don’t pinpoint the epicenter of this relationship, it’s only going to get worse… and depression is going to become even more common than it already is. 

According to an NBC article, Harvard University and the University of Vermont designed a computer program for spotting depressed individuals on Instagram with 70% accuracy. It was programmed to search for certain qualities of their photos in order to determine if someone was depressed or not. “Researchers found depressed individuals posted photos that were bluer, darker and grayer than images posted by others.” (Pawlowski). This demonstrates Instagram being used as an outlet for expressing one’s emotions. Elyse Fox struggled with depression and found relief in sharing her state of mind through this outlet because it helped her get things out of her system. This represents Instagram as a helpful tool. Others might not do it for relief, but simply because they are at an all time low. That’s when it becomes unhealthy and when you would need to reach out to someone you trust for help.

“In several recent studies, teenage and young adult users who spend the most time on Instagram, Facebook and other platforms were shown to have a substantially (from 13 to 66 percent) higher rate of reported depression than those who spent the least time.” This is proof of the correlation taking place.

Some may claim that it’s social media’s fault that people are suffering from mental illnesses. More specifically, that it’s Instagram’s fault if someone that uses it gets depressed. They might say it has nothing to do with the users actions because all of the potential negatives are automatically accessible before them and say that whatever happens is directly caused by the app. The blame is put on a non-living, non-physical, inanimate thing. To our knowledge, Instagram itself is not capable of causing anything. Studies show a correlation, not a causation. However, “One reason the correlation seems more than coincidental is that an increase in depression occurred in tandem with the rise in smartphone use.” (Miller). “By 2015,... 92 percent of teens and young adults owned a smartphone. The rise in depressive symptoms correlates with smartphone adoption during that period.” (Miller). The author of this write-up also mentions that there was a rise in the number of college students visiting counselors for anxiety and depression. Just so you know, UVU has counseling services available on campus if you are seeking further assistance with your mental health. (Student Health Services |[phone]| Room SC-221).

What should we do about it? What can we do about it? Personally? As a student body? I think it is a very personal issue because everyone has their agency and freedom to do what they want and really, it is up to them to decide how they will spend their time on Instagram. But we can suggest tips for those who are seeking help or for those who don’t realize what’s affecting them and want to change.

In a Ted Talk by Bailey Parnell, she suggests four tips for obtaining social media wellness. These are presented in four steps: 1. Recognize the problem. 2. Audit your social media diet. 3. Create a better online experience. 4. Model good behavior. It’s all about our awareness. If we don’t realize something’s wrong, then we aren’t going to do anything about it. After that, we are able to make adjustments based on our unique needs. For example, we could spend less time on Instagram, unfollow strangers, or make our posts more real and sincere. I, personally, need to work on all of those because I notice a difference between when my time spent on Instagram has been a waste, leaving me drained vs when it’s been productive and I’ve come away feeling enlightened or pleased with my online experience. What I consider to be a waste of time is viewing my followers profiles and engaging in social comparison where I degrade myself and wish my life was like theirs. A more productive way to spend my time would be sharing an uplifting message on my story or reach out to friends I haven’t talked to in a while to see how they are doing.

The United Kingdom’s RSPH had the great idea of teaching safe social media use in schools. (Macmillan). Because of the prevalence of social media today, it needs to be acknowledged and taught proper use. I think all schools should provide a class solely dedicated to teaching social media safety and another for teaching about mental health awareness. Instagram and depression each fall into one of those categories, so it’s perfect. These classes could be held in middle schools, high schools, and colleges since most age groups use some form of social media. I feel like a lot of students would benefit from taking these courses.

Fellow friends (A.K.A. UVU students) if you have been guilty of spending too much time on Instagram, comparing yourself to others, or following celebrities/strangers you hardly know, it’s okay!! So have I. That doesn’t mean you are a bad person, it just means that you are human. Now that you know more about what types of interactions on Instagram can make you depressed, you can choose to be more proactive and reap the rewards of “social media wellness” and obtain the happiness that comes from practicing “safe social.”

To restate my stance one more time, I will just remind you that all the research I have done and knowledge I have gained has led me to believe that Instagram use and depression correlate. Depression isn’t caused by the app, rather depression results from using the app excessively or from comparing oneself to others. I strongly believe that we have a responsibility to monitor and reflect on our Instagram behaviors in order to decrease our chances of being at risk for depression. Making simple changes can alter your perspective on life and bring you more joy. Bailey Parnell says it best: “Is social media hurting your mental health? The answer is: it does not have to.”

Google Slides (in progress): https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1jJ-aIcZZW0qCJpfWv0-SGCyrAFu7O_eLq34oCXVNsBo/edit?usp=sharing

[evwuniverse]

Animal Crossing Pocket Camp is it Still Worth it in 2020?

The main question that puzzles a lot of the Animal Crossing fan base. Is Animal Crossing Pocket Camp still worth it in May of 2020? It’s all based on opinion but I’d have to say no. I do still enjoy picking it up every now and then when boredom strikes but overall I wouldn’t suggest it. It went from an immense excitement when it first released to a money grabbing scheme from those who support the community. Everything that would be free in lets say the new Animal Crossing New Horizons game isn’t free here. The fact is so sad but true. The game released its micro transactions shortly after launch which was the beginning of the applications downfall. Now almost everything costs leaf tickets which is currency you buy with money to obtain to craft special items that could always come back or to buy fortune cookies that may return during random times throughout the year. 

However, I won’t say that you still shouldn’t play it if you want a small time waster for about 30 mins to an hour. It’s fun for the short term but definitely not the long term. If your careful and don’t buy into the micro transactions with the leaf tickets, shorter crafting times and now their latest money grabbing scheme which is the Pocket Camp Club subcriptions which I’ll get into in a moment. As you can see my main issue stems from the micro transactions. Most mobile games have them and yes! I’m one of those people who tend to easily buy into it but recently I’ve noticed that it’s not always worth it. Below I’ll have sections so you can find what you want to read easily. This is going to be another longer post for the fact that there’s a lot of information to tie into this to answer this question thoroughly. 

Pocket Camp Club Subscriptions:

Animal Crossing Pocket Camp recently debuted a subscription plan. How fun! there are two different ones depending on what type of pocket camp player you identify as. Do you like to collect rare items and furniture through fortune cookies? or do you tend to buy into the micro transactions more often then you would like? there are two different plans for two different types of players. I’m going to explain each one and what they entail. I’m by no means promoting this product I’m staying as non biased as I can with this post while arguing my point of view. 

Happy Helper Plan: 

You might think $3 a month for this plan is nothing and to be honest it’s quite appealing for someone who really does enjoy the game, collect items, and finish quests while creating their perfect camping oasis. However, this adds up with time think about it $3 a month and there are 12 months this is $36 a year. Now this might not seem bad but think about what else you could do with that $36. To be fair I had this plan for about 3-4 months after it made it’s first debute. I loved Animal Crossing Pocket Camp and still do it’s one of my favorite apps that I pull out when boredom hits as I’ve implied before. But the micro transactions just get annoying. If I’m on the go I’ll play the app if i’m home I’ll either play Animal Crossing New Leaf on my 3Ds or Animal Crossing New Horizons (my new love) on the Switch. However, if you’re someone who is really into Pocket Camp and buying a game system with the game just isn’t in the cards then this could be a nice happy little alternative for you. I completely understand that mobile applications are more affordable and most are free to start unless you want to add more premium content to your experiences. Which is why I’m going into detail my experiences, opinions, and viewing it from a different perspective as well. The Happy Helper plan was the first subscription to be released for the mobile application. It currently comes with the following perks:

60 leaf tickets per month

Ability to walk around with your camp care taker (walk around with your favorite Animal Crossing character in the mobile application)

Your care taker can complete tasks for you when you’re unable to log into the app.

Your care taker will gather items for events when you’re not on the app. 

Crafting times in the game with be shortened (depending on when you first started playing Pocket Camp).

Ability to read the new Pocket Camp journal which comes with news and events in the world of Animal Crossing for your mobile device. 

Let’s be honest $3 a month for all of this is definitely not a bad price and 60 leaf tickets with the other perks I’d say this is pretty well priced. Normally 60 leaf tickets would cost about $2 since 30 leaf tickets is $0.99 each time you buy a set of 30 leaf tickets. So they only added an extra dollar for the extra perks you recieve with the Happy Helper subscription. If you’re someone who plays often and tends to buy the leaf tickets a lot this is probably the right route to go. I also feel like you get more for less. This is my highly recommend suggestion if you want to buy one of the subscriptions in the application. This also helps somewhat save on micro transactions. Since most of the time you’re spending tickets on shorter crafting times, etc. This was the right plan for me when I was playing. 

Furniture & Fashion Plan:

I’ll be honest, I have yet to try out this subscription. This is a newer subscription that just came out for $7.99 a month and I’m not sure if it’s worth it or not yet. I’ll keep this section updated but for the time being I’m going to list what comes with this plan. It definitely feels like it comes with less then the Happy Helpers plan but from what I know this plan revolves around collecting rare items, decorating, and customization which is normally appealing to me. If I wasn’t so invested in Animal Crossing New Horizons I’d probably give this a try sooner. Below are the perks for this membership:

Choose five fortune cookies each month (each fortune cookies is 50 leaf tickets for 1 or 250 leaf tickets for a pack of 10 from one fortune cookie pack) with this you can apparently choose from past fortune cookies and current ones. Which could be great if you’re a collector of rare items, furniture, and outfits. 

Store your extra items in a warehouse so you’re not taking up space in your games inventory. 

Ability to save layouts you create to your saved sets

Crafting times will be shorter (depending on when you first started playing Pocket Camp).

Ability to read the Pocket Camp Club journal which is seen under the Happy Healper plan above.

As you can see this plan revolves around creation and customization which basically is the whole fun of this game. The whole idea of Animal Crossing that makes it so appealing is the customization, creation, and sandbox feel it provides. The getaway from reality into a virtual place that is our own. This would probably be good if you find yourself consistently spending leaf tickets to buy fortune cookies. But it doesn’t come with the 60 leaf tickets per mont instead it’s the fortune cookies. To delve a little bit into the price aspect $7.99 per month for 12 months comes out to a yearly cost of $95.88 so in this case we will round this up this is $96 per year. You’re spending almost $100 for virtual content per year. However, if you put it into the perspective that each fortune cookie for just one is 50 leaf tickets each and you get 5 per month that’s 250 leaf tickets. 200 leaf tickets cost $7.99 alone then to add 45 more is $1.99 and then to make it 50 add another dollar for 20 more. So about $11 for the same. Overall, you come out cheaper in the end with the subscription plan by a few dollars. Don’t you just love how companies do that? So in that case it would actually come out cheaper for those who love to collect and customize in pocket camp. 

Customization of Places:

Customization of Your Camp:

When customizing your camp you have restirctions. These restrictions can be somewhat annoing for anyone who wants something in a specific place. The customization system runs off of a grid system. It ran off of a grid system in New Leaf as well. Call me spoiled but in New Horizons you can precisely place things in a more intricate way for customization so something like this now bothers me in the mobile versions. For someone who has only played the application this is a small thing to overlook. You can freely wander and walk around your camp and everything you craft to invite animals over can be used to decorate the camp for all of your animal friends. This is definitely nice and I enjoy mixing, matching, and redecorating quite often. It’s the most fun in the game and I spend hours making it look perfect and the way I want it. With all of the items you obtain throughout your gameplay. Everything needs to be crafted. 

You can customize your camp in any way you would like this is what makes the application version so addicting in my opinion. I’m not going to lie I’ve shelled out money in this game for leaf tickets to obtain special items through fortune cookies. You can also spend more money through micro transactions which is super tempting to decorate the background scenery, sky, fencing, and front section of your camp. The sad fact is you can’t interact with any of it just like with most of the furniture you can’t interact with either in the application version. But your animals can and I’ll be honest it’s kinda fun to watch my animals interact with everything I place out but I wish I could do the same it would make the game so much better. Maybe it’s an idea they could use for a new subscription or something who knows? 

You have main sections that you have to decorate with a tent and ameneties that you can upgrades as you get the materials to continue crafting them up to full level. Depending on the animals on your site and what there themes are these leveled amenities can boost up your animals level as well as unlock more leveling for specific animals. An example of this is if you have animals that match the elegant theme and you buy an elegant amenity this will unlock more leveling for those characters. So if they were locked to only go up to level 10 with the amenity it allows that character to go up to level 15. This is fun, challenging, but can be annoying with the crafting times which is where the subscription might be useful for players who have played since launch or for months previous towards considering the subscription. You can also tend to your own garden which is nice. 

Customization of Cabins:

As you level up you will unlock a whole new floor to your very own cabin. I’ll be honest I’m only level 50 and I’m not 100% sure if there are more levels or rooms you can unlock yet but I’ll definitely edit this post as I continue my experience. The cabin is very similar to having a house in the console versions except this is a place for all of your animals to enjoy with you. Very similar to the camp site they interact with the furniture you place in and you’re able to decorate it in any way you see fit. 

Customization of Campers:

Yes in this game you get a camper to customize as well very similar to the homes as well except this is more your private space without any animals. It’s nice and you can upgrade and customize the outside and inside of your camper as you move forward in the game. 

Multiplayer & Playing With Friends:

So, this is something that really bothers me. I really wish that people could visit their friends in real time. This isn’t possible but you’re able to visit their islands and see a botted version of your friend standing on their island that gives you options such as giving “kudos” kind of like giving a “like” on Facebook. You also have the option to buy things from their market at whatever price their selling their items for. You can also show that you’ve been to their island and water their plants in their garden to keep them growing and healthy. When it comes to events if your collecting bugs then you can place some of your bugs on your friend flowers for them to keep when they capture them during the event before planting new flowers. It’s nice to explore other friends and players islands but I completely dislike not being able to be with them in real time and not being able to have a chat feature. This is what I love about the console version. I’m a huge advocate for virtual worlds and since Animal Crossing in general is categorized as a “social simulation” I feel like there should be some socializing in multiplayer mode. Maybe in the future they might add this but this a mystery yet to be discovered. It’s kind of sad this app has the opportunity to be something great but it always falls short with something. There’s always something missing from each category. What I’d like to see at some point is Animal Crossing for mobile that you pay one price for like for the console versions and it has everything! I’d adore that.... But these are just my thoughts and opinions on multiplayer. 

Overall, a lot of things in this app are very nice and help with my OCD a lot. Everything is organized and works in a specific way and the interactions are specific. I love chaos but I’m more the type for order. This gives that sense of order which I love, however, I enjoy the Animal Crossing console games for it’s ability to be customizeable, openworld, sandboxy, and just an escape from my everyday reality. I feel like this version is a mini game with glorified micro transactions all over the place. Which let’s be honest the application never used to be this way on launch but I do understand that Nintnedo has to make money through the app somehow and this is how they chose to do it. It’s definitely fun and enjoyable for the short term but I find myself escaping to my consoles and playing either New Horizons or the older version for the 3Ds Animal Crossing New Leaf. Everything that would be free on the console version you have to buy in the mobile. It just makes more sense in my opinion for someone who has a Switch and DS to spend the money on the game and be able to do more than I can do on the mobile app. But as i’ve said before I do understand that game consoles are expensive and your phone is what you use for both entertainment, work, etc. In this case spending the money to have a very similar experience could be worth it. Just for me and this is where I’ll be a little biased it’s not for me even though the micro transactions are always tempting because I’m always afraid the item will never come back or the fortune cookies are a one time thing making those specific items rare. I do enjoy the game but the micro transactions are my biggest problem.... If this is a small con for you then this is definitely something you will enjoy just don’t always give into those micro transactions. You can have a whole lot of fun without spending a dime in the game don’t get tempted. 

#Animal Crossing Mobile #Application #Mobileapp #Mobile #App #Animal Crossing #Animal Crossing Pocket Camp #AnimalCrossingPocketCamp #ACPC #video game #virtual world #gaming #mobilegaming #mobile gaming #microtransactions #micro transactions #worthitin2020 #worth2020 #2020 #gaming 2020 #Onthegogaming #On the go gaming

[rickythacker-blog]

Top Things to Watch for When Hiring a Marketing Agency

Questionable Tactics Choosing the right marketing agency for your business is a critical decision. Select the right one, and you may find your business reaching new heights. Pick the wrong one, and you may be living with regret for quite some time. Marketing is about more than merely a way to increase exposure, leads, and sales. The public reputation of your business is at stake. Choose poorly and, at best, you have wasted time, money, and opportunity. At worst, you may be cleaning up a giant marketing mess.

To help you avoid the nightmare of choosing the wrong firm, here are the top things to watch out for.

Limited or Poor Online Presence

Fortunately, a Google search can tell you a lot about any agency. In this digital age, an online presence is an essential part of a marketing plan. While the agency you choose doesn't necessarily need to have a massive digital footprint, they should demonstrate their marketing savvy through a modern, professional website and respectable search engine results. If you have trouble finding the agency online or the quality of their website leaves something to be desired, you may consider looking elsewhere.

Online reviews can also tell you a lot about a potential agency. Part of modern marketing is reputation management. By looking at online reviews, you can see how current and past clients have experienced the firm. You can also learn a lot by how the agency deals with the occasional negative review. Take a look at Yelp, Clutch.co, and other review sites to see how your potential hire stacks up. Otherwise, you may find yourself writing a negative review once you get yourself out of the mess your new agency has created.

One more thing to look for in your marketing agency is the availability of online content. If you are looking for a successful marketing strategy, you are looking for an agency that offers some amount of thought leadership. Whether they provide online material as a part of a content marketing strategy or simply to contribute to the ongoing conversation of best practices, great firms will offer blog posts, podcasts, white papers, or some other form of content. If you can't find anything written or produced by your potential agency, it might be worthwhile to ask why.

No Real References

Including words from happy clients on a website or in marketing materials is a smart marketing move. That kind of social proof may make you interested in learning more about an agency. However, before you sign a contract or write a check, you will want to go a bit deeper. We want to trust that all of those reviews are from real, happy customers, but that is a significant risk to take when your company's reputation is on the line. Ask for some names and contact information from real, paying customers. And then, contact them. If you are dealing with a reputable agency, they will be glad to share, and those references will be happy to sing their praises. If not, this firm might not be worth the risk.

Mystery Talent

Chances are if you are hiring a marketing agency for your business, you want to know the people who will be doing your work. More and more "agencies" are farming out the majority of their work to freelancers or overseas outsourcing firms. That's fine if that is what you are looking for, and the firm is upfront about it. But be aware that the person selling you the services may not be at all involved in delivering those services. So, ask to meet with, in person, or via video conference your actual marketing consultant, the person or people who will be working on your marketing. This will help you make a better decision. You will be able to tell if this individual or team speaks your language. There are plenty of jobs that can be done with excellence by overseas workers, but for the marketing of your company, you are likely looking for someone deeply immersed in your native language and culture.

Questionable Tactics

Beware of the firm that promises things that sound too good to be true. Some agencies will promise to get your website to the top of the search results in no time. However, when you dig a little bit, you will see that they are using "black hat" search engine optimization (SEO) strategies such as the use of hidden content, keyword stuffing, link farming, and other techniques. Sometimes these strategies can achieve fast results, but they quickly fall apart and cause more harm than good. Not only can they lead to harmful consequences, like search engines removing your site from their index and results pages, they may also demonstrate that the agency does not have the experience to get results the right way. When evaluating potential marketing firms, feel free to ask about their tactics and strategies to be sure they won't cause more harm than good.

Buzzwords

If you were already a marketing genius, you wouldn't be looking for a marketing consultant. So, when interviewing a potential marketing agency, if they are talking entirely over your head, maybe they don't know what they are talking about. Exceptional marketers know how to speak to people in a language they understand. So, while marketing buzzwords like omnichannel, CPP, CRM, SERPs, or other jargon might be helpful for internal marketing work, they can also mask a lack of depth. A great a marketing agency will skip the jargon and be sure you understand what they have to offer.

No Experience in Your Industry

There are many aspects of marketing that are true across all industries and niches. However, every type of business has its unique challenges and opportunities. If the agency you are looking at doesn't have experience with your type of business, you should ask some more questions. The right agency will either have the experience or be able to demonstrate their competency in moving into a new sector. Old dogs can learn new tricks, and great agencies can expand their knowledge base. Just be sure your agency is prepared for your specific needs.

No Questions for You

If you have a meeting with a marketing agency and they fail to ask any questions about your business, you might want to keep looking. A reputable firm will want to be sure that they are a good fit. They will not want to take on a client if they can't deliver. So, they should want to know about your company, your current marketing, and your goals. If an agency seems more interested in your money than your success, look for someone else.

Something Doesn't Feel Right

It may be a bad idea to pick an agency just based on your gut. That is why we have listed several red flags to keep in mind. However, before you sign on the dotted line, do a gut check. If something doesn't feel right, either ask more questions or keep looking. This agency is going to be partially responsible for the future success and reputation of your business. If it just doesn't feel like the right fit, it probably isn't.

#marketing #marketing agency

[mini-kkukkungie]

This is probably not so very important? But I just finished a game and it was a very great game but, when I looked up if anyone has made fan content for the game, nobody had? Which made me a little sad. So, I wanted to give a review for the game to see if it can spread more awareness to how wonderful the game is! Or, perhaps, how wonderful the creators are because they're releasing another game! The game I played is called

            The Monster Brothel

It's a text-based R18 Choose Your Own Adventure game where you can make choices that eventually lead to your ending. The background story is that there's this house in your town called Madame Marigold's House of Respite and it's a house shrouded in mystery. Except, I think, it also has a reputation of being a brothel. However, every so often (I'm thinking once a year), the house holds a sort of party and welcomes people in (though apparently others are welcome in any time). The playable character is invited after years of longing to be invited (because they're curious and for no other reason).

Below the cut are some pros and cons to the game as well as my overall final opinion.

So, it's a game you do pay for which isn't always fun but, if you think about it, you're supporting the creators which makes me feel just a little bit better about it. Plus, it isn't that expensive, just $5.00. The only complaint I have about that is that it's a pay per month thing? My suggestion is to pay for the one month first and then pay more if it takes you longer to complete the game. I say that because I paid for the three-month subscription (thinking that it was a huge monolith of a game) but, because of my habit of hyper fixating on things, I knocked it out in like two to three days. You could also just support the creator on Patreon which is really cool! You get extra content for the money you're giving AND you get to play this wonderful game. Not only that but you can also see content for their new upcoming game.

The price aside, I think it's worth it if you put the time into it. The story is really gripping and I was very entranced by it.

The characters are all very lovable and very seductive. I found myself completely falling in love with them. There's a part of the website where you can see drawings of them and all of them are wonderful and amazing. They're all drawn by the lovely @doe-eyed-monster-draws whose art is just so well drawn and detailed. The drawings are accompanied by lore about that specific monster or about that specific person. It’s all very facinating. The characters also have kinks in the profiles so that you know exactly what you're dealing with when you pursue the character's story. It's a good idea. If you have a specific kink you want to see, you can browse through the characters to see where you can find that kink. If there's a character you want to pursue, you can check if their story includes a kink you're very much not enthusiastic about.

And, man, after playing this game pretty thoroughly, I'm sure there's not a single kink they've missed. There's something in this game for all the monster fuckers out there.

My all-time favorite character is Puck (which wouldn't be a surprise since I'm pretty sure he's been dubbed the main character seeing as his face is the first one you see on the mobile site). I'm always a sucker for charming bastards like him. Like a lot of popular male characters, he has a sad backstory and you're exactly the playable character that helps him.

Not to say that the playable character is the usual useless one either. In fact, I was surprised by how sassy and strong-willed the playable character is (since I'm so used to playing games with weak-willed damsels in distress). The playable character does meet some distress here and there (they have a penchant for getting into sticky situations, literally and metaphorically) but they're rarely saved by other people. The playable character is clever and smart and doesn't let anyone stomp over them unless they want to be stomped over.

This is, however, where I have to address one of the unfortunate (or maybe fortunate?) features of the game. One of the things the writer has done is change the gender of the playable character often throughout the game. One wonderful encounter with Puck makes the playable character a trans man that uses a packer but the epilogue of the game (which features another encounter with Puck) features a playable character who is a packless woman without any dysphoria about her private parts. This is very confusing and can prevent the player/reader from really connecting with the main character. I, myself, as a person who doesn't favor being either a Male or a Female, didn't mind the gender changes at all. I ended up enjoying all of the scenes, whether the playable character was a woman or a man. This might not be the same as everyone else.

Another complaint I had was that the game wasn't very... fluid? I don't exactly know how to word this but, maybe, it would be easier to give specific examples. Giving exact examples is going to reveal certain events in the game, though, so I give fair warning. There's going to be spoilers if you keep reading. They’re minor though and the spoilers don’t spoil any endings.

Basically, when you're finally invited into the house and you receive your welcome, you're given a lovely silver pin and then you can make a choice as to where you want to go in the house. You can choose to curiously gaze at a willow tree nearby which prompts Puck to invite you to the party near the willow tree. If you pick certain choices, you will eventually leave the party at the willow tree. When you find yourself coming back to the willow tree, however, it will prompt the same event all over again. Puck will act as if he hadn't met you before and everyone will act as if they had never even seen you.

This discontinuity can be irritating, especially when you get confused by the plot because of it. 

There's a mushroom that the playable character can have a fun time with (for those who favor tentacles over limbs) and, afterwards, they're found by one of the employees of the house (who is oddly not listed in the character page or so I think?). The employee of the house then leads the character to Marigold who gives them a task. If the playable character follows the task, it leads them to a wonderful mothboy (mothman???). Except, you end up not talking to him about the task at all. Instead, he talks to the character about how they're turning invisible like a ghost? It's very confusing to say the least.

Also, if the playable character goes exploring into the woods, the event will state that they've run away from the willow tree party? Except, sometimes, that's not the case at all. I had come across the woods once while exploring the mansion grounds and had been confused at the mention of the willow tree party since I hadn’t even checked that out yet.

The most annoying one is a part where they require an item. The playable character either has to have the fairy boon or the curse. I thought that having one would result in one thing and then having the other would result in a different outcome. I was mistaken. Instead, having the curse only lead to the exact same thing as having the fairy boon. It was annoying because 1.) I had to do a lot to get the curse and 2.) the result still described the scene as if you had the fairy boon.

I managed to sleuth out the true storylines after playing so thoroughly, of course, but it does take away from being able to really immerse yourself into what you're playing. It can also make you have to repeat events more than once if you don't have an item you need or if you want to read every single scene in the game.

I don't think this discontinuity is the fault of the creators, though. As someone familiar with creating CYOA games, it's hard to make a scene for literally everything in the game. If you make too many paths, the storylines can get tangled up or get so big that it'd be hard to keep track of. A good shortcut to prevent this is to reuse certain scenes. Knowing that makes the repetitions much more tolerable in a sense. It’s also hard to really double and triple check pathways since there might be so many of them so it’s easy to imagine why these mistakes happened.

There’s also another thing about the game. Specifically, the writing. I enjoyed the writing thoroughly and I thought that it was really great. All of the sex scenes were absolutely enjoyable and I loved the plot and how the story unfolded. However, the game does rely heavily on the pictures of the characters in the Characters page of the website. 

One of the stories that I loved the most involved the werewolf pack. There were descriptors for them but, when it came to Julio, the leader of the pack, and his human form, it was a bit lacking. I get that since the game probably wants to focus on the monster aspects so it isn’t really a big complaint. It’s just that the game has this habit of being extremely descriptive in some places and then not that descriptive in others. 

Maybe that’s just me, though, since I am much more used to big long CYOA games that take forever to describe even the smallest things. I’m not saying that the writing is bad. I really did enjoy the writing. However, I know some people who enjoy those really long CYOA kind of games and so, if that’s you, I just wanted to give a warning.

I do think, however, that, despite these cons, the story itself is wonderful and certainly worth the $5.00 you'd spend (and perhaps the $13.00 I had spent). It really is an enjoyable and arousing game with a complex and interesting storyline that you can't help but want to follow. The music is immersive and the writing is good (though there are one or two grammar mistakes) For monster fuckers and for people who love stories about faeries, its certainly a delight. The writer is good, the artist is great. Why not support and get to read an intriguing and enchanting story too?

the game's tumblr: @geekinglikeaboss

#monster brothel #monster #choose your own adventure #terato #terato love #monster boyfriend #monster girlfriend #monster boy #monster girl

[ruminativerabbi]

As the Holidays Approach

Elul, the month that leads directly into the High Holiday season, should be ideally devoted to the thoughtful, principled introspection that can serve as the foundation upon which the spiritual work of the whole holiday season should then come to rest. And that only makes sense: to come before Judge God and successfully to negotiate the experience requires, at the very least, knowing yourself well enough to speak honestly and authoritatively on your own behalf and in your own defense. And that level of self-awareness comes to most of us, possibly even to all of us, solely as the result of the kind of wholly honest self-scrutiny that yields the unvarnished truth about ourselves and our lives.

The problem is that most of us find any sort of serious self-analysis off-putting, unnerving, and, to say the very least, deeply anxiety-provoking. And yet, that is precisely what otherwise halcyon Elul offers: week after week of days unburdened by any other holidays or special observances that may therefore be given over to thinking carefully about ourselves and our lives and our deeds…and, painful though the process may be, also in identifying our own moral shortcomings, errors of judgment, ethical missteps, and unnecessarily missed opportunities to do good in the world. It is a pleasant experience for almost none, but it can be a productive one.

To assist in making the whole Elul experience as positive as possible, it has been my custom in recent years to recommend to my readers a single book that might prove helpful in framing otherwise amorphous thoughts and regrets in a productive way, in confronting the larger paintings of which the details of our personal lives are the brushstrokes, in setting our personal stories into the larger saga of humankind and its foibles and flaws, and, generally speaking, in coming to terms with the lives we have constructed and owning up to the various ways in which those lives have been characterized more often than not by decisions that, for all they seemed reasonable at the time, feel flawed and inconsistent with the values we claim to hold dear when viewed in the rearview mirror.

Last year, I recommended a remarkable novel that I had just read, Marcos Aguinis’s book Against the Inquisition, which I found both moving, intelligent, and stimulating. (To revisit my thoughts from last Elul, click here.) This year, however, I would like to recommend a book that I first read decades ago, and which wasn’t that new a work even then: Clark Moustakas’s book, Loneliness.

Moustakas’s renown has faded in the years following his death in 2012 at age eighty-nine, but in his day he was one of America’s foremost psychologist/authors and was widely acclaimed specifically as an expert in humanistic and clinical psychology. He published prodigiously throughout his career, but the book I wish to recommend was one of his earlier works that first appeared in 1961. (I read it when I was a student at JTS more than a decade after it first came out.) I would like to introduce it to you in this week’s letter and suggest why I feel it would make an excellent choice for Elul reading.

The book isn’t long at all, a mere 107 pages in the first print edition. Yet the author manages in those few pages to speak almost amazingly deeply and provocatively about the human condition…and in a way that is somehow both reassuring and challenging. I just finished re-reading the book and, even after all these years was struck again by its remarkable profundity. If there is one book you can find the time to read this Elul, Loneliness is the one I recommend you consider. (Nor is this a pricey investment: you can find used copies online for $2 a book.)

I was prompted to re-read the book by an article I noticed the other day on the website of YouGov, the U.K.-based data analysis firm, that determined—not anecdotally, but by using actual data collected this last summer and subsequently analyzed by themselves—that the millennials among us can reasonably be characterized as the loneliest generation ever. (Click here to read the article for yourself.) This came as a huge surprise to me—you would think that people raised in a world in which people are practically defined by social media that offer the possibility of maintaining not dozens or scores but hundreds or even thousands of “friendships” concurrently, you would think such people would constitute the world’s least lonely people ever. And yet, the report seemed unequivocal: 30% of millennials polled reported feeling “always or often” lonely (as opposed to half that many baby boomers such as myself) and more than one in five—22%—of millennials reported that they do not have any friends at all. A different slice of the millennial pie—27% of the total—reported having some friends but no “close” ones. Together, that’s one percentage point short of half of all Americans between the ages of twenty-two and thirty-seven reporting that they either had no friends at all…or at least no close ones. When asked why they find it difficult to make friends with others, a startling 53% responded that the fault was in their own stars—that they personally were too shy to go out there and find people to be friends with. All of this came as a huge surprise to me.

There’s more thought-provoking data on the YouGov site to consider as well, but what interested me most of all was the basic assumption of the essay’s author, Jamie Ballard, that loneliness was a bad thing that healthy people would naturally avoid (and thus a situation in which most would only find themselves accidentally or tragically). Nor was I amazed that she took that approach, which I think is probably what most people actually do think. The phenomenal success of the television series Friends, which ran for ten years starting a quarter-century ago, was probably rooted in that concept as well: the show was a little about romance and a little about life, but it was mostly about friendship—its name basically said as much—and its great success lay in the portrait it offered viewers of young urban types, the sustaining feature of whose lives was precisely the degree to which their friends watched out for them, cared for them, and, yes, loved them even when they were being otherwise disagreeable or snarly.

I think most of us subscribe to the notion that loneliness is a bad thing. And yet Moustakas’s book goes off in the precisely opposite direction, describing self-growth—and specifically the kind that leads to self-awareness and self-confidence—as an edifice almost of necessity built on a foundation of the kind of aloneness that moderns inevitably denigrate as unwanted, unworthy loneliness.

He writes anecdotally, telling us the stories of several of his patients and also telling his own story in a few intensely personal, sustained episodes. But he also writes about famous people and describes the source of their inventiveness, their creativity, their artistry, and their success in life as having been rooted in the deep sense of personal autonomy that begins with the acknowledgement that we are all alone in our lives and then goes on to create the impetus to seek the kind of companionship that, rather than denying or masking that sense of aloneness, celebrates and enhances it to the degree that we find in love the experience of being fully autonomous—and thus fully alone—in the company of a similarly autonomous individual. Among the people about whom he writes, some will be familiar to all—the sections on Abraham Lincoln, Emily Dickinson, and Admiral Richard Byrd are particularly moving—and others, like the French author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry or the German adventurer and explorer Hermann Buhl will be less well known. But, taken all together, the portraits he paints are all of individuals who found in loneliness the foundation upon which to build a social, meaningful, intensely productive life guided by principles forged by those individuals themselves in the crucible of their own autonomous selves.

Perhaps I should let the author speak for himself. In the introduction to these portraits I just mentioned, he sets forth his argument in these terms:

Every man is alone. Ultimately, each person exists in isolation. He faces himself in silence, wending his way in individual pathways, seeking companionship, reaching out to others. Forever, man moves forward stretching to the skies, searching the realization of his own capacities. In loneliness, man seeks the fulfillment of his inner nature. He maps new meanings, and perceives new patterns for old ways and habits.  Alone, the life of man passes before him. His philosophy, the meanings he attaches to his work and his relations, each significant aspect of his being comes into view as new values are formed, as man resolves to bring human significance, to bring life to each new day, to each piece of work, to each creation. In loneliness, every experience is alive and vivid and full of meaning. When one has been greatly isolated and restricted in movement, one deeply feels the value of openness, of freedom and expansiveness. Life takes on an exquisite meaning, an exhilarating richness. When one has lived in total darkness, one piercingly appreciates the sunlight, the fireside, the beacon, the beginning dawn. When one is cut off from human companionship, one discovers a deep reverence for friendship, for the one who stands by in the hour of need and shame. In the days of pain and defeat, loneliness takes on a human depth.  When one is sequestered from life, when one is purely alone and dying, when one is lost in a world of dreary emptiness, then color becomes exquisite, rich, desirable, fulfilling. When one has been sharply isolated and lonely, every moment is pure, every sound is delightful, every aspect of the universe takes on a value and meaning, an exquisite beauty. The isolated tree stretches out to meet its new neighbor; the lonely star twinkles and turns to face its emerging companions in the night; the lost child runs to loved ones with open arms.

 A mere excerpt or two won’t do justice to the book, which is remarkable both in terms of its brevity and its profundity. I recommend it wholeheartedly to all—both broadly as a very interesting, challenging way to consider the human condition and more narrowly as an Elul book that has in its handful of chapters the capacity to frame the whole experience of entering the Days of Awe almost upon us not as a burden or a test, but as an exercise in deep, sustaining self-awareness and self-knowledge.

#Clark Moustakas #Loneliness #Elul

[whitewolfofwinterfell]

Jonsa

Grab a drink and some snacks and make yourself comfy, because this is gonna be a long ride.

My opinions on Jon and Sansa as a pairing are very complex. In the time that I’ve shipped them I’ve gone through these different phases where at some points I’m hardcore for them and other times I’m not really that fussed about them. Currently, I’m somewhere in between. Before I get started, you can read what I’ve previously said about Jonsa here (just scroll to the bottom, they’re the last ship I talk about).

The thing that drew me to Jonsa as a ship is the chemistry. To me, when Kit and Sophie are on-screen together I don’t feel like I’m watching siblings (even when the dialogue and circumstances portray that), I feel like I’m watching lovers. The eye contact, the tension, the tenderness; it’s all there. Every single scene they share feels like it has an undercurrent of sexual and/or romantic tension. It was that tension that led me to stumble across the Jonsa fandom and I was immediately like, “hey, so, I’m not the only one!”. Because you know when you’re watching something and you sense that chemistry between two characters that you know probably shouldn’t be there and you think you’re going crazy? Well, that was like me with Jon and Sansa.

There are so many aspects of the ship I enjoy and their story is beautiful to me in lots of ways. The fact that they grew up estranged, then parted ways, endured awful tragedies and finally found each other and began to heal as a result of that is beautiful to me. Jon and Sansa both reserved themselves to the fact that they would never see or be with their family again, and the emotion in their reunion scene encapsulates that immense surprise and relief that they feel at having found each other. I love that Jon was amidst a deep dark depression following his resurrection and was ready to give up on everything until Sansa walked back into his life and gave him a purpose; a reason to fight. Her strength and determination that they needed to reclaim Winterfell impassioned him to join her and fight for their home, for what what rightfully belonged to them and their family. I love that despite the fact that they were each others least favourite sibling growing up they were able to have a second chance and forged an incredibly unique and special bond as unique as the bond they had with any of their other siblings.

Psychologically I find Jonsa fascinating, because I think the possibility of Jon and Sansa developing romantic feelings for each other speaks to the experiences and traumas they’ve had. They both endured so many horrors and regardless of the coldness between them when they were children, for them the Starks and Winterfell have been and always will be their safety and strength. So in each other they found that literal embodiment of home and family, of safety. For Sansa, Jon is the only man she can truly trust after being used and abused by a string of men. For Jon, Sansa is his purpose; someone he needs to protect and that’s important because Jon as a person is built to protect others, that’s what drives him at all times and without that he’s lost. There’s a reason there’s so much emphasis on Jon’s instinct and desire to keep Sansa safe (besides the fact that he loves her and wants to protect the future of House Stark), and it’s because her safety has become one of the two sole purposes of his life (the other being to end the Night King). It’s funny because whenever I see criticisms of Jonsa as a ship it’s mostly about how gross or wrong it is because they grew up as siblings and are blood related, but that connection, in my opinion, is specifically a part of why they make sense as a pairing. It’s complicated for me to explain, but I’m going to give it a try. But the way I see it is that they grew up distant enough that they didn’t develop a full brother-sister bond so there isn’t that whole “ew he/she is my brother/sister” vibe between them. However, the familiarity they have and connection to Winterfell and the Starks draws them to each other. They longed so much for home and for family that it makes sense that when they found each other their feelings for each other would become conflicted, particularly when there’s that lack of brother-sister bond from childhood.

However, despite how much I love Jonsa, I’ve realised that I like the possibilities and tropes associated with the ship more than the actual ship itself. I guess you could say that I’ve been conditioned by fanfiction and meta to perceive Jon and Sansa’s relationship in a certain way, but over time (especially recently) I’ve come to realise that in canon they’re not necessarily written that way. For example, on the show they’re written as being quite untrusting of each other and resistant to work together. Sansa calls upon the Knights of the Vale without telling Jon about her plans, Sansa constantly questions Jon’s decisions, Jon rarely listens to Sansa’s ideas and has to be told to listen to her because she might actually have valuable advice and insights, he barely writes to her when he’s away south in season 7, he bends the knee to Daenerys without consulting her first and even in the season 8 premiere, there’s still that kind of vibe between them where Sansa doubts Jon and he’s fighting for her to trust him completely. There is a lot of conflict between them and that’s not necessarily a bad thing, because all the best ships have conflict, but I think that until recently I failed to see that this conflict existed between them and projected my own perception of them (shaped by fanfiction, fanvids, meta etc.) onto their canon relationship.

Following on from that, based on 8x01 I’ve also realised that I have some issues with the way Jon and Sansa are being written. Their scene in that episode and Sansa’s behaviour generally throughout the episode is an exact repetition of what’s been going on between them since season 6. They seem to be stuck in the same cycle - Sansa picks at Jon and questions his decisions, Jon gets frustrated that she doesn’t trust him and she then confirms that she does trust him, despite all of her words and actions being the contrary. At this point, it’s just bad story-telling because it’s been established repeatedly that Sansa does trust Jon and vice versa (Jon left Winterfell in her hands, the ultimate symbol of trust), so why are they still writing them this way? If Sansa has faith in Jon and she knows it and he knows it, why is she questioning his decision to bend the knee? At this point in their relationship, Jon and Sansa should be united. They definitely needed to have a conversation about why Jon bent the knee, with Jon apologising for doing so, but immediately after that all of this tension between them should be put to bed because it’s being unnecessarily dragged on when it no longer makes any sense. However, I’m trying not to be too judgemental about their scenes in this episode, since it’s only the first episode out of 6. There’s still plenty more to come from them and it could go in a much better direction from here onwards.

Generally, I hold a lot back when it comes to shipping Jon and Sansa, because I don’t want to get caught up in the Jonsa-Jonerys ship war (I’m still too exhausted from the Stelena-Delena ship war that took up 8+ years of my life lmao), but mostly because unlike most other Jonsa shippers, I don’t have much faith that they’ll actually be endgame. I’ve over-invested in so many ships in the past and I don’t want to do that again. I always try to be realistic with my ships, regardless of how much I love them, and in my opinion, the chances of Jon and Sansa being endgame are very slim. It’s clear that D&D are invested in Jon and Daenerys, and that that’s the main love story of their show. They condensed the development of their love story into one season so that they could make it a central plot for season 8, so the chances that they’re going to completely scrap that relationship or end it abruptly and go for a Jonsa endgame doesn’t seem feasible to me. The chances of Jon and Sansa marrying for a political alliance is more likely, but still not very, because that would require Jon not only surviving the war (which, I don’t think he will) but also fully embracing his parentage and proclaiming himself King of the Seven Kingdoms. Also, if you go to other sites and read fan theories or opinions, barely anyone thinks a Jon and Sansa endgame is feasible. So I suppose you could say I’m being cautious not to become over-invested in a Jonsa endgame only to be disappointed. The ending is going to be emotional enough without the added blow of being disappointed that my ship isn’t endgame.

Having said this, you don’t choose your ships, they choose you and whether I like it or not I am a Jonsa shipper. It’s my shipper heart that wants to believe they’ll be endgame and to trust in all of the signs I’ve seen that indicate they could be. I mean can it really be a coincidence that Jon and Sansa fulfil so many romantic tropes or that so many of their scenes share characteristics with romantic ships from the show? (x) (x) (x) (x). Sometimes I think that fans put more thought into analysing the show than the people that create it do (which I definitely think is true), but nonetheless great consideration is given to every single scene that makes the final cut of an episode. We know that GOT suffers from great time constraints since they have so many characters and plots to fit in and do justice, yet Jon and Sansa consistently get scenes. Familial relationships have been important throughout the show, but from my recollection no familial/sibling relationship has had the kind of emphasis Jon and Sansa have and certainly not scenes framed in the same way that theirs are (with the romantic undercurrents). And what’s the significance of showing us not one but two scenes where Jon physically threatens people because he’s so protective of Sansa? Why is it important to show us that? If Jon is really just Sansa’s big brother (cousin), isn’t it implicit that he’s going to be protective of her? We don’t need to be shown that unless it serves some other purpose. And why is so much of their relationship saturated with this ongoing tension? Starkbowl didn’t happen in season 7 (at least not between Jon and Sansa) and I doubt it’ll happen in season 8, since there isn’t enough time to fit it in, so the only real purpose that kind of tension serves is because there’s underlying sexual tension. There are so many what ifs about the ship, so many signs that indicate that we Jonsa’s aren’t just imagining their romantic chemistry, but I’ve been very wrong about this stuff in the past, so like I say, I’m proceeding with caution.

To sum up, because I could talk about this all day, my opinion on Jon and Sansa is that I love them individually and together. Their chemistry is fantastic, I love their relationship platonically and see a lot of potential with them romantically. I adore reading and watching Jonsa content and writing Jonsa fanfiction (they’re my favourite couple to write for out of all my ships). They are potentially the most interesting couple on GOT and could have such an incredible love story. If the show was to follow through and deliver what I believe should happen (political!Jon and Jonsa) I’d be ecstatic and have no hesitancy in proclaiming them my OTP. But, unfortunately, I have reservations so for now I’m keeping my guard up because my shipper heart has been burned too many times before. Instead, for the final season I’m trying to focus more on enjoying their relationship from a platonic POV and if they are endgame I’ll be over the moon, but if not I’ll love and appreciate the depth and emotion in their relationship no matter which direction it takes in canon.

Thanks for asking!

send me a ship and i’ll give my honest opinion…

#answered #my meta #got meta