~CHANNEL & CONTENT:~
SEEKER TO SEEKER (S2S) is a unique English-language YouTube channel exploring insights from psychology, religion, and philosophy. The channel is nearing 80 000 subscribers.
The S2S video essays aim to not only inform the viewer, but also inspire them. The goal is to produce evocative pieces of film that connect with the viewer on an emotional level. The video essays employ an ‘old film’ look through the use of old etchings/prints/drawings and archival footage as B-roll. The content is almost entirely black and white. Music plays a central role in the atmosphere and pacing.

~JOB DESCRIPTION:~
I am looking for a craft-oriented video editor to partner with on a long-term basis.
As S2S video editor, you will be working closely with me on producing evocative, well-crafted video essays. Initially, your task will be to adapt to the already established style of the content. (Please see reference videos below.) As someone passionate about editing, I will be going over the final edits in Adobe Premiere Pro for final adjustments. I will be giving you thorough feedback and I am looking forward to receiving fresh ideas from you. We will be communicating remotely through video calls once or twice a week. I am based in Sofia, Bulgaria, working within the Central European Time Zone (CET).
Once you master the existing style (which I expect will happen by the time you’ve edited 3-5 videos), you will gradually have more creative freedom to improve on the format with your own stylistic contributions. My hope is that you enjoy the work and be proud with what you produce for the channel. You will be credited in the description of every video you work on (unless you prefer otherwise).
The video essays on S2S do not require expert skills or knowledge, but they do require attention to detail and a keen sense for tone/atmosphere. I am looking for a creative partner passionate about creating meaningful work that inspires people.
As of now:

• I will be providing you with audio (voiceover + music) and you will work on the B-roll, titles, and sound effects
• the edits you will be working on will be between 20 and 40 minutes in length
• you will have between 1 and 2 weeks to finish your edits, depending on the length
• you will be editing 1 video per month for the first 3 months; we will be striving for 2 videos per month after that

The above are subject to change and negotiation as our work together moves forward.

~REFERENCE VIDEOS:~
https://youtu.be/HF9Ye5cwYV4?si=YrOD7BdcXkwhUIkV
https://youtu.be/V3MtVoPUUYE?si=6DcA0D8Fd6IWWxLQ
https://youtu.be/uNnd6VXHTEo?si=UBOyJs8-PlNA0P33

~RESPONSIBILITIES~~:~

• Edit English-language video essays using Adobe Premiere Pro.
• Edit video B-roll, titles, and sound effects after being provided with the voiceover and music tracks for every video.
• You will have access to my extensive library of previously used images and footage, but you will need to also find/generate some amount of new B-roll for every video. (I will provide you with access to Adobe Firefly and Kaiber for AI image/video generation.)
• Work closely with me to develop and refine the video style.

~REQUIREMENTS:~

• Proficiency in Adobe Premiere Pro.
• Written and spoken fluency in English.
• Grasp of video editing for YouTube retention.
• Craft-oriented approach to editing. (S2S videos must be not only informative, but also aesthetic pieces in their own right.)
• Ability to adapt to the existing style and expand on it with original ideas.
• Openness to communication, feedback, and mutual constructive criticism.
• Interest in long-term partnership, potentially leading to full-time work as channel video editor (with significant increase in compensation).

~COMPENSATION:~

• As of now, I can offer $11 per minute of final video edit (e.g., $220 to $440 per video for videos ranging between 20 and 40 minutes). The rate is subject to increase with the growth of the channel.

~BONUSES:~
20% bonus to the original payment for a video when it passes 100k views
50% bonus to the original payment for a video when it passes 300k views
75% bonus to the original payment for a video when it passes 500k views
100% bonus to the original payment for a video when it passes 1 million views
~(Valid within one year of video publish date.)~

~HOW TO APPLY:~
Please send your application to [editorial@seekertoseeker.com](mailto:editorial@seekertoseeker.com) with the subject line "Video Editor Application - [Your Name]". Please write a paragraph or two about your interest in working with me on SEEKER TO SEEKER and include links to your 3 favourite videos you’ve edited. I look forward to reviewing your application and discussing the possibility of working together via online video call.
($220-$440 per video + bonuses)

I can’t see why technology replacing creative jobs should be treated as new when this has happened in other industries for all history. The following roles have been made significantly more efficient, reducing (or eliminating) their jobs.
Bank Tellers Ticket sellers Retail till attendants Calculators (yes this used to be a job title) Technical drawings (there used to be halls of people copying these - quite a difficult role requiring significant training) Manufacturing workers Scribes (made redundant by the printing press) The list can go on…
I understand that many people think it is different because these creative jobs take years to train and hone, and some of these mentioned roles don’t. However, lots do require training (scribes took years to train how to write, and the same for technical drawings).
I agree that it is sad and financially difficult for the people affected, and a shame that the creativity of humans is being made redundant, but I still can’t see why this is anything new.

I’m asked to go in and interview this week with a well known international firm, the role is for a Project Architect / BIM Manager. In the email they mentioned to bring printed drawing sets.
I have about 10 years of experience and have worked on a lot of projects, but I only have drawing sets of 1 or 2, and these aren’t the projects I wish I could be speaking on and had sets to show for.
At my last firm we couldn’t take any pdfs, we could only request images. I wasn’t able to download any before I left and I don’t know anyone that still works there. This may be naive but I thought because we weren’t allowed to take drawing sets that I would never be asked for them, I also never was asked while interviewing for past jobs.
I have nice photographs and drawings of the projects I’ve worked on in my portfolio, and I can speak to my involvement on drawing sets, but how should I approach that I don’t have many when I get asked in the interview?

Hi,
I'm looking for a single frame comic style drawing, to print onto a few thank you cards for friends & colleagues.
Two characters (from a photo I'll provide) drawn from the rear standing facing down a Melbourne laneway, with graffiti on the walls and a few neon signs, incorporating a small number of bar and company logos (which I'll also provide) as graffiti elements, signs, doors or whatever.
I don't really know how to describe exactly what I'm after style wise; somewhere between DC comics and Banksy, with a bit of Beneath a Steel Sky thrown in! Not anime/manga, not cartoon-style comic. A little dark/noir, like a comic version of bladerunner?
No clue what the going rate is for something like this - $100? $150?
The catch is I need it quickly as I'll need to get it printed over the weekend so I can hand them to people next week before I leave town.

Hey fellow Cosmere fans,
I need some help coming up with the perfect message for a congratulations card. My friend has just been appointed as a judge, and to celebrate, I bought him a Shardblade (3D printed) and a Lasting Integrity picture from the series. I want the message to reflect the themes of Honor and honorspren, tying in with his new role. Spoilers don't matter, as he's read it all (and so have I! :D).
Any suggestions on how to craft a cool and meaningful message that draws from the Stormlight Archive (or Mistborn + Warbreaker) while also celebrating his achievement and dedication would be amazing. Thanks in advance for your creative ideas!

This is part number 3 of my story of how I started to (and still am) dating my platoon leader. As I've said before, I'm on my way into the civilian sector after completing my contract with the Army, and Matt and I are still happily dating. As always, I'm open to feedback/critiques/polite constructive criticism. This is a fairly tame chapter with one of many "firsts" we've conquered as a couple. I recommend starting at the 1st chapter so you can get the whole story, or else you'll miss some descrptions/details. I've tried to be a little more detailed with the naughty bits, so I hope you all enjoy! ♡Avery
After spending a second night in Matt's bed, this time naked, with his cum leaking out of me following last night's massage turned naughty, I woke up looking like a hot mess. I caught a glimpse of myself in his bedside mirror and decided I had to run down to the car to get my well thought out overnight bag that somehow never actually made it into the house last night. I throw on some of Matt's gym shorts and a tee, leaving the discarded purple thong from last night's massage on his night stand. He seemed to like it, so why not leave him the souvenir right?
When I get back inside, my handsome hunk (yes, mine. He asked me out last night, still have butterflies!) Has gotten out of bed and has moved into the kitchen to fix breakfast for us. I told you he's a gentleman when he wants to be. Anyway, over breakfast he asks me if I'd like to go out on an actual date with him today. Nothing fancy, but a walk down along the river trail a few miles from his appartment after a coffee.
I'm super excited to hear that he wants actual dates, not just stuff we hide over at his appartment and I agree right away. I head upstairs and in a minute....or 30....I'm back downstairs in my favorite pale blue sundress with a cute print design, that fairly reasonably accentuated my toned butt, and shows off what cleavage my B cup breasts can produce.
He's clearly happy about my outfit when I come downstairs, as he looks me up and down. All through the car ride and coffee, he can't keep his hands off me and I love it! A hand around my waist as I go through a door he's held for me, gently holding my hand in line, or his fingers brushing my legs at the hem of my dress as he holds my hand while he drives. Our conversation is all over the place as we get to know eachother on a deeper level, and eventually it makes it's way to "experience ". As it turns out, we're both relatively inexperienced in terms of anything crazy but we have similar fantasies and things we'd want to try.
As we finish coffee and head out to the river, one of those "things we'd want to try" comes up again, and it seems as though we're headed somewhere that we might just pull it off. We both want to experiment with trying something in a public place. The trail along the river is relatively quiet....okay just about as private as you can get without actually going inside. But its outside and it's new and so I get a rush just thinking about fooling around with him out here. I'm definitely not brave enough to try actual sex out anywhere, but who knows, maybe I could have some fun out here?
We get out of the car and walk maybe a half mile down the trail without seeing anyone. Matt takes my hand and leads me off the trail and into the woods aways before pulling me close and kissing me. I fall into his embrace and let my tongue explore his mouth as his hands explore my body. As the minutes pass and our make out intensifies, his hands make their way into my dress, pulling out my breasts and gently squeezing my small, dark brown nipples as I moan into his mouth and run my fingers through his hair.
This continues until a feel a hand under the hem of my dress, gently caressing it's way up my thigh and I'm acutely aware that I'm outside and vulnerable. I whisper into Matt's ear to touch me but don't take anything off. Next thing I feel is a finger pushing my panties (pink lace with a cheeky, not quite thong back) to the side, running their way between the damp parted lips of my vagina. A finger slips inside me while his thumb massages my clit, drawing heavy breaths and moans begging him not to stop. His pace increases and my legs begin to tremble as he brings me to orgasm with two fingers buried deep inside me and a thumb massaging my clit. I bite into his neck, hard enough to leave a mark as I try to keep from crying out at his touch.
As I come back down I realize that he has fully devoted his attention to my pleasure, and this has caused an increase of it's own in his shorts. I ask Matt if he's comfortable pulling himself out here, since it's not like me who has a dress to provide a minimal sense of modesty. He nods a yes and I drop to my knees in front of him, unbuckling his shorts and letting them fall away.
I kneel there with his six or seven inches (i don't walk around with a ruler guys) in front of me, and I want nothing more than to give him the same pleasure he just gave me. I grasp his shaft in one hand as I lick him from base to tip with the tip of my tongue. After a few more wet, sloppy licks to lube him up, I press my head down on his shaft, taking in to the back of my throat as I begin to work his cock in my hand. I bob my head up hand down, as deep as I can take him, almost to the base as I try to keep myself from gagging on this healthy cock that brings me so much pleasure. I work his shaft with a twisting motion as I try to bring him closer to the edge of cumming for me, and I feel his hands in my hair pressing my head down to take him deep.
My pace increases as I feel him start to swell. I twist and suck, trying to being him sweet release until he takes his hand to the back of my head and holds me down to the base of his cock and shoots a thick rope of cum down the back of my throat. I swallow it down and continue to pump his cock into my mouth, being sure not to spray any onto my dress. I swallow every last drop of him before getting up and helping him get his shorts up to make us both modest once again.
We continue our walk for another hour or so, both loving the fact that we each just had our first public sexual experience, and talking more about all the things we'd like to try going forward in the future.
Thanks for reading guys! I'm sorry this didn't have full on sex, but I promise our story gets steamy as we go forward! Again, I appreciate any feedback and critiques, just be polite!
♡Avery

I spent my years as a little girl trying so hard to be anything else OTHER than "just a little girl" because I was raised in a heavily religious and Latino household where being born a girl basically determined that you'd be forgotten and ignored. Any accomplishments you put in the effort to complete in the hopes of maybe some sort of parental attention was almost always steamrolled over to make room for other sub-par things your brother, uncles, or nephews did.
So I became this little angry girl who studied hard. Up until puberty at 11 quickly beat my spirit to pieces with a wave of depression that wouldn't ever fully go away or recede far enough into the horizon enough for me to get comfortable ever again in my skin without fear of drowning in my own emotions that at that time I simply labeled "useless and stupid."
I was 5 years old when I remember my Dad ripping and cutting these little heart shaped dangly charms off of the hem of a pastel printed dress I really liked. He didn't like that they skimmed my little kid ankles. He called the outfit "whore practice" clothing and made sure I knew only girls "asking for bad attention" wore "outfits like that." I quickly stopped wearing my earrings too as he once yelled at my mom so hard about the size of these tiny hoop earrings she had once put on me. He accused my mom of buying me "adult" earrings so after that she never got me another pair. To make matters worse he abused my mother, oftentimes ruining her dresses and outfits too because he claimed she was "dressing to get another man" so she could leave.
I had to be the strong one, at 7 years old. I would sometimes watch Cardcaptor Sakura (when it aired in English in the U.S., late 90s/early 00's) or Sailor Moon and I would draw pictures of what I imagined I would look like if I had a cool magical dress. These girls got to fight crime while being pretty. Pam Grier could fight crime and look gorgeous, but I had to watch her in secret on my own time. Tarantino really hit me hard with how strong he makes his female leads too. I mean sure yeah weirdo foot stuff, but Uma Thurman is depicted as this angel faced beautiful charming woman but who is dedicated and deadly and can kill if her life is at stake or anyone tries to get in her way. The women in Death Proof totally kicked ass while being pretty at the same time. I had a girl crush on She-Ra and also on Star Fire and Lady Death from the horror comics my uncle would borrow and I'd find, not even realizing how raunchy the art was. The women were strong. The women were fiercely beautiful. They could fight.
My mom would then marry another idiot when I was 10. A conservative raised little mommy's boy shit stain of a man who took joy in picking on literal children for things they could not control. Total narcissist. His mom was a 1950's housewife who had passed away but her control over how he dressed and acted eventually spilled onto me. Why am I in a dress today? which boy am I trying to impress? Nevermind that it's 96 degrees Fahrenheit in a middle school with no A/C, I MUST be wearing a knee length skirt at 12 because OBVIOUSLY a boy told me to wear it so he could touch me.....there was no rational thinking. I was taught that being even a little feminine or expressing femininity was a definite horrendous declaration of "omgeee please touch me, I'm stupid and want 100 babies!!!" By 14 years old I didn't own a single other skirt or dress except for some black dresses meant for funerals and one white skirt I buried in the back of the closet.
I ate my feelings. I ate and ate and ate and ate because I felt so empty. I was limited from 14 to 17 to only big flared oversized jeans and boys tshirts. My stepfather was a big believer in clearing your plate plus he just loved food. He was over 400 lbs himself, and while my siblings and I didn't go to regular doctors exams we simply just gained weight recklessly as we would be punished for leaving anything behind on our plates while our stepfather would make weekly $300 purchases on more and more and more just food food food. So then, at 14, I just had no idea I would never see 225lbs again until over a decade later. By 16 I was nearing 300 lbs and wanted to die. I was watching other more normal healthy weighted girls grow into beautiful women all around me. Filling out dresses, wearing cute tops, actually being able to purchase clothing they liked with no worries. I'll never forget shopping for the dress I wore for my Senior Yearbook photos. My mom planned a "girls day out" for us to go and find a dress at a mall. I was ecstatic. I asked my mother maybe 15 times if she was SURE and CERTAIN we were going to get me a dress. The literal DAY OF the trip my stepfather had a "change of heart" and insisted the entire family go to the mall together. I found a dress. Bright Teal/Blue. Checker patterned. It had a wide rounded scoop neck, a very flowy skater-type skirt, and the Mannequin at the store had the dress paired with red flats and these beautiful blue-bird earrings. I put the dress on and in that instant I just felt so pretty that I almost forgot who I was and out loud asked "are you FUCKING serious?!" when I stepped out of the fitting room with it on and my stepdad just kept loudly snorting and laughing at me. He made me put that beautiful dress back and honestly my heart was so broken that even 7 years ago when I was 25 I was still actively looking for it on Mercari and at other Plus Size secondhand clothing sites. I ended up wearing this absolutely hideous brown and beige old woman slip style wrap dress with this ugly tacky red border. I looked like someone's secretary job having mom and the dress just further highlighted my lack of actual breasts and lack of a waist. So when Prom rolled around and my stepfather even TRIED suggesting this big shiny pretty pearlescent pink ballgown for me I bit back and DEMANDED all black. I was pissed. I had no date. I let my mom buy the Prom dress out of spite and even afterwards I cut it to pieces just for shits and giggles because I was so angry.
Then one day I actually followed through with my threats and ran away from home. I was free for the first time at 17! I could wear what I wanted!
Except I couldn't because I proceeded to pursue toxic relationships with controlling narcissistic men because of the way I was raised. The first guy insisted that me wearing a dress meant he could just have me be "free use" which I hated back then, I didn't know anything much about sex at all as I was sheltered and constantly grounded for minor shit. I totally just was not ready to be cutting potatoes for breakfast in a nightgown at 5 a.m. just to find myself mid-sex with potato skins still stuck on my hand while I'm trying to get the person to just STOP for like ONE SECOND so I can get on with wtf I was doing. FFs. The second guy decided that me wanting to wear a lot of bright colors meant he could belittle me for "listening to goth music but dressing like a total narc fed", except he would hit me. Like we were once just walking. Literally JUST walking. I was wearing just plain old brown flipflops and ran out of clothes so I threw on my old white skirt. I forgot it had little sequins sewn onto the hems. It started raining so I asked for his jacket so I could cover the skirt so it wouldn't get wet and become see through and he proceeded to slap and punch me "for making stupid decisions" and then belittled the sequins and shit as "little girly" details and decorations that I apparently should have known better than to dare to throw on just to walk to the corner store at 6 in the evening on a summer day. The skirt was ankle length, long as shit. Then I met the third guy who decided that any time I so much as wore anything that wasn't pants, it meant I was cheating. I stuck around in THAT relationship for 6 long grueling years. We didn't sleep in the same bed anymore after the second year as he would belittle me for my weight and lack of femininity, but then anytime I wore a dress it would turn into a fist fight. He would say that me wearing a dress in the house was me feeling guilty for cheating and trying to "look cuter than I normally am" so he wouldn't hurt me. He really messed my brain up. Around that time I was so desperately alone and withdrawn from everyone and everything that I would often spend weeks and weeks with no positive human interaction other than cashiering at my job I hated. I would lie and say I was working just to actually take the bus freely all over the city and I would buy cheap nightgowns from secondhand stores to wear in my room at night while I did college homework. I wasn't allowed to wear makeup with him, I wasn't allowed to wear dresses or anything pretty. Like a sad little child I would time when I knew he had to get online to play his video games and I would use that time to put on a whole face of makeup, shave my legs and wear the nightgowns just to "pretend" I was a very feminine and pretty woman in her own apartment enjoying life. It always made me cry to have to shower afterwards and take the makeup off.
I was 31 and had just been fired from one job while working my first day at a new one. I'm not sure what happened in that instant or maybe if I just had an "oh shit" moment but I just had a strong urge at that moment to just wear a dress again. I had a long week of nonstop dreaming and thinking about my 20s. How sad is it that society tries as hard as it can to make us think that our 20s are supposed to be this MAGICAL time you can NEVER get back? My 20s were so bad I'd literally probably actually toss myself off a bridge if I woke up and realized this was a dream and I'm actually still 22, homeless, dating a total shitbag who hits me, and being too traumatized to just stand up and DO SOMETHING. I also feel like there needs to be more of an understanding that not everyone's 20s are going to be awesome. My mother is a jealous asshole and didn't like that I dated three men in my 20s. She straight up believed it should be one and done since she hated herself for divorcing my Dad but SHE needed to understand that not everyone is just hunky dory OKAY with settling for the first smarmy toad that lands in their pond. I'll never forget her little shit eating grin and face when I brought #4 home and she said "oh sweetie I just hope you one day find someone who can just get your toes to curl." She thought all the break ups were strictly sex related. I asked her and she just steamrolled over it with "well you cant just dump everyone the second they turn you down for sex or ask for more, sometimes you need to be patient!" Like excuse me? Ah yes because as a woman in her 20s it was *impossible* for anyone to think that most of my break ups were about my money being stolen, people not keeping a job, apartments always having "surprise new roommates" that never clean their messes, or straight up abuse. Nope. Both of my parents and most of my relatives apparently assumed any break up between 20-somethings is just "lol, the sex is bad." As if we don't have any sort of character depth to us.
So I guess the point of this is that I am beyond grateful that 31 and 32 coming soon here are bringing me these sudden realizations that I probably should've had in my 20s. Its liberating to wear a damned dress to work and not WORRY about 1478349237498743987 scenarios that can go wrong. Its so much fun to finally fully dive into makeup and what different things do and what they're for. I feel like when I dress up and feel good about myself its truly just for me and it brings me joy. Not even 6 years ago I would have been absolutely panicking about the dresses in my closet I've collected but today I finally wore one outside. Its a skater dress and very flowy and I feel pretty and unafraid. I feel like I can do anything even dressed this way. I feel like this is what being in your 30s is supposed to be. Finally not giving a shit what other people think and accepting that different people feel pretty doing different things. Wearing a dress or dressing up shouldnt make you feel powerless

Alright, first of all, I want to start by saying that I love the Pokémon card game. It's my favorite card game, and I adore most of its mechanics, which makes its flaws even more frustrating for me, especially those that can't be fixed because they are too deeply embedded in the game's rules.
As you saw in the title, I really don't like the energy system in this game. Contrary to what many might think, it's not because you have to draw them to play (a common criticism I've seen). It's actually a mechanic I quite like, and it has some advantages for me:

It allows you to include as many different types in the deck, automatically regulating consistency based on the number of types you're trying to include. It enables the creation of original and creative decks, such as the Gardevoir ex deck that completely transforms how energies work or the Meowscarada ex deck that uses energies to activate its ability. It allows for the creation of special energies that really add something to the game. 

No, my problem with energies is something else entirely: it's the fact that you can only attach one per turn, and they are all discarded when the Pokémon is knocked out.
This system causes multiple problems. The first is that casual decks are often very bad simply because it takes them three turns just to charge an attacker, and once it dies, those three turns have been wasted. And we can consider that a mechanic isn't very serious as long as it doesn't affect competitive play, but I think it does affect competitive play simply because all cards that require more than two energies become unplayable unless they fit into one of the specific archetypes that allow for extreme energy acceleration. Honestly, it's very frustrating to look at all the new cards and think for each card that costs at least three energies, "Too bad, this will never be played."
I can sense the comments coming, so I'll address them directly:
"You can attach more energies with abilities or items."
Yes, that's true, but TPC insists on printing no more than one energy accelerator per set when we're lucky. Some types, like Grass or Fighting, have no good way to accelerate energy, and for casual players just trying to build decks with their cards, it's really hard to find energy accelerators.
"Without it, the game would just be about who has the most energies in hand."
There are plenty of ways to prevent that, such as making a special deck for energies (and draw a increasing number of them through the game ) or allowing any card to be used as energy (of the corresponding Pokémon type).
"You could charge a massive attack on turn 2 and potentially win the game with luck."
We could also limit it to one energy per turn per Pokémon, which would diversify decks because people would play early Pokémon and later Pokémon that would have time to charge throughout the game.
Or simply, the solution that would fix the problem: print more energy accelerators. Honestly, we should have at least one accelerator per type per set, which could have different conditions and effects. But I feel this game only works thanks to energy acceleration, and TPC likes to give the impression that it's an advanced mechanic by printing two good energy accelerators per year.

Welcome to the raspberry_pi Helpdesk and Frequently Asked Questions!

Link to last week's thread
Having a hard time searching for answers to your Raspberry Pi questions? Let the raspberry_pi community members search for answers for you!^† Looking for help getting started with a project? Have a question that you need answered? Was it not answered last week? Did not get a satisfying answer? A question that you've only done basic research for? Maybe something you think everyone but you knows? Ask your question in the comments on this page, operators are standing by!
This helpdesk and idea thread is here so that the front page won't be filled with these same questions day in and day out:

1. Q: What's a Raspberry Pi? What can I do with it? How powerful is it? A: Check out this great overview
2. Q: Does anyone have any ideas for what I can do with my Pi? A: Sure, look right here!^‡
3. Q: My Pi is behaving strangely/crashing/freezing, giving low voltage warnings, ethernet/wifi stops working, USB devices don't behave correctly, what do I do? A: 99.999% of the time it's either a bad SD card or power problems. Use a USB power meter or measure the 5V on the GPIO pins with a multimeter while the Pi is busy (such as playing h265/x265 video) and/or get a new SD card 1 2 3. If the voltage is less than 5V your power supply and/or cabling is not adequate. When your Pi is doing lots of work it will draw more power. Even if your power supply claims to provide sufficient amperage, it may be mislabeled or the cable you're using to connect the power supply to the Pi may have too much resistance. You can use a USB load tester to test your power supply and cable. Some power supplies require negotiation to provide more than 500mA, which the Pi does not do. If you're plugging in USB devices try using a powered USB hub with its own power supply and plug your devices into the hub and plug the hub into the Pi.
4. Q: I'm having a hard time finding a place to purchase a Raspberry Pi for an affordable price. Where's the secret place to buy one without paying more than MSRP? A: https://rpilocator.com/
5. Q: I just did a fresh install with the latest Raspberry Pi OS and I keep getting errors when trying to ssh in, what could be wrong? A: There are only 4 things that could be the problem:
   1. The ssh daemon isn't running
   2. You're trying to ssh to the wrong host
   3. You're specifying the wrong username
   4. You're typing in the wrong password
6. Q: I'm trying to install packages with pip but I keep getting error: externally-managed-environment A: This is not a problem unique to the Raspberry Pi. The best practice is to use a Python venv, however if you're sure you know what you're doing there are two alternatives documented in this stack overflow answer:
   • --break-system-packages
   • sudo rm a specific file as detailed in the stack overflow answer
7. Q: The only way to troubleshoot my problem is using a multimeter but I don't have one. What can I do? A: Get a basic multimeter, they are not expensive.
8. Q: My Pi won't boot, how do I fix it? A: Step by step guide for boot problems
9. Q: I want to watch Netflix/Hulu/Amazon/Vudu/Disney+ on a Pi but the tutorial I followed didn't work, does someone have a working tutorial? A: Use a Fire Stick/AppleTV/Roku. Pi tutorials used tricks that no longer work or are fake click bait.
10. Q: What model of Raspberry Pi do I need so I can watch YouTube in a browser? A: No model of Raspberry Pi is capable of watching YouTube smoothly through a web browser, you need to use VLC.
11. Q: I want to know how to do a thing, not have a blog/tutorial/video/teachebook explain how to do a thing. Can someone explain to me how to do that thing? A: Uh... What?
12. Q: Is it possible to use a single Raspberry Pi to do multiple things? Can a Raspberry Pi run Pi-hole and something else at the same time? A: YES. Pi-hole uses almost no resources. You can run Pi-hole at the same time on a Pi running Minecraft which is one of the biggest resource hogs. The Pi is capable of multitasking and can run more than one program and service at the same time. (Also known as "workload consolidation" by Intel people.) You're not going to damage your Pi by running too many things at once, so try running all your programs before worrying about needing more processing power or multiple Pis.
13. Q: Why is transferring things to from disks/SSDs/LAN/internet so slow? A: If you have a Pi 4 or 5 with SSD, please check this post on the Pi forums. Otherwise it's a networking problem and/or disk & filesystem problem, please go to HomeNetworking or LinuxQuestions.
14. Q: I only have one outlet and I need to plug in several devices, what do I do? A: They make things called power strips aka multi-tap extensions.
15. Q: The red and green LEDs are on/off/blinking or the screen is just black or blank or saying no signal, what do I do? A: Start here
16. Q: I'm trying to run x86 software on my Raspberry Pi but it doesn't work, how do I fix it? A: Get an x86 computer. A Raspberry Pi is ARM based, not x86.
17. Q: How can I run a script at boot/cron or why isn't the script I'm trying to run at boot/cron working? A: Try one of these numerous solutions
18. Q: Can I use this screen that came from ____ ? A: No
19. Q: I run my Pi headless and there's a problem with my Pi and the best way to diagnose it or fix it is to plug in a monitor & keyboard, what do I do? A: Plug in a monitor & keyboard.
20. Q: My Pi seems to be causing interference preventing the WiFi/Bluetooth from working A. Using USB 3 cables that are not properly shielded can cause interference and the Pi 4 can also cause interference when HDMI is used at high resolutions.
21. Q: I'm trying to use the built-in composite video output that is available on the Pi 2/3/4 headphone jack, do I need a special cable? A. Make sure your cable is wired correctly and you are using the correct RCA plug. Composite video cables for mp3 players will not work, the common ground goes to the wrong pin. Camcorder cables will often work, but red and yellow will be swapped on the Raspberry Pi.
22. Q: I'm running my Pi with no monitor connected, how can I use VNC? A: First, do you really need a remote GUI? Try using ssh instead. If you're sure you want to access the GUI remotely then ssh in, type vncserver -depth 24 -geometry 1920x1080 and see what port it prints such as :1, :2, etc. Now connect your client to that.
23. Q: I want to do something that has been well documented and there are numerous tutorials showing how to do it on Linux. How can I do it on a Raspberry Pi? A: A Raspberry Pi is a full computer running Linux and doesn't use special stripped down embedded microcontroller versions of standard Linux software. Follow one of the tutorials for doing it on Linux. Also see question #1.
24. Q: I want to do something that has been well documented and there are numerous tutorials showing how to do it with an Arduino. How can I do it on a Raspberry Pi Pico? A: Follow one of the tutorials for doing it on Arduino, a Pico can be used with the Arduino IDE.
25. Q: I'm trying to do something with Bluetooth and it's not working, how do I fix it? A: It's well established that Bluetooth and Linux don't get along, this problem is not unique to the Raspberry Pi.

Before posting your question think about if it's really about the Raspberry Pi or not. If you were using a Raspberry Pi to display recipes, do you really think raspberry_pi is the place to ask for cooking help? There may be better places to ask your question, such as:

• /AskElectronics
• /AskProgramming
• /HomeNetworking
• /LearnPython
• /LinuxQuestions
• /RetroPie
• The Official Raspberry Pi Forums

Asking in a forum more specific to your question will likely get better answers!
† See the /raspberry_pi rules. While /raspberry_pi should not be considered your personal search engine, some exceptions will be made in this help thread. ‡ If the link doesn't work it's because you're using a broken buggy mobile client. Please contact the developer of your mobile client and let them know they should fix their bug. In the meantime use a web browser in desktop mode instead.

Hey guys, I'm a long-time player who has been playing HS on and off since the beta in 2013. I've recently been feeling nostalgic about certain eras of the game and going back and looking at old sets. This got me thinking about some of my favourite card/card package designs throughout the game's history.
First off, the Librams for Paladin from Ashes of Outland. Few other sets/packages of cards stood the test of time like these cards. Librams were viable/powerful the entire time they were in the standard rotation. They were strong, but not so strong as to need nerfs or excessive changes. The package could be included in almost any Paladin deck, even when other powerful win conditions were printed for the class later. The cards are flavourful, stick to Paladin themes/identities, and reducing the cost of anything in Hearthstone FEELS REALLY DAMN GOOD. We love to see expensive cards go to 0 and we love to play a bunch of cards in one turn. Liadrin is a great payoff card and leads to some fun/chaotic turns. In HS sometimes decks are good but so boring that nobody feels inspired to play them (lots of Paladin decks and Hunter decks throughout the game's history fall victim to this). I feel like the fact that the playrate of this package was high the entire time it was in rotation indicates a very successful design: it was strong, flavourful and players really loved to play it.
I'd say Librams also exemplified a Paladin core identity, at least historically: starting off a little slow, getting behind a little in the mid game, stabilizing, then building up to a payoff with Libram of Hope and Liadrin.
And speaking of Hunter, next I want to talk about Wildseeds!
Hunter got the Wildseed package in their Murder at Castle Nathria set. Unlike the aforementioned Librams, Wildseeds were not the namesake or "point" of a deck, rather a package of cards to include in a deck with some other win condition. Secret Hunter, Highlander Hunter, and every aggro deck included them. They were certainly very powerful, so powerful that stat adjustments needed to be made to 2 of the Wildseeds.
I think Wildseeds are an example of successful design because summoning them feels good and feels interesting. It's random, but each random choice is individually powerful. Which one will I get? How will it impact the game? Did you I get what I wanted or not? We don't always realize it but players love cards designed like this.
Additionally, Wildseeds were very versatile and could go into just about any Hunter deck. This to me is one of the most important things when I think of successful design. If a card can only go into one specific type of deck (think of the plethora of failed tribal synergy cards/decks) it severely limits deckbuilding and creativity. It also feels terrible to open tribal synergy cards when the entire archetype fails due to lack of power or lack of support. The devs seem to love printing an entire set of tribal synergies, then forgetting about the archetype completely for the rest of the time it's in standard. Talk about a waste! But I'm digressing. The point is, flexible packages like Wildseeds should be the standard for great design because they're not pigeonholed to any certain deck archetype. Better, more fun deckbuilding and more variety.
I've rambled enough, but other packages/sets I've really loved over the games history are Concoctions for Rogue in March of the Lich King, Summoning demons for Warlock in Kobolds & Catacombs (Cubelock is one of my favourite decks ever). I also love the design of the Colossals from Voyage to the Sunken City, Titans from TITANS, Dual-class cards that began in I believe Scholomance Academy (fantastic idea).
What card/set designs stand out for you?

One of leading worries when Anomaly was announced and than released was that it is a one-time side content that will be ignored in regular playthrough. From there, some threads appeared doubling up on those concerns with claims of mediocre reward for completing the Anomaly questline. However, I would like to postulate, that the real rewards from engaging with Anomaly content is the research. Every colony can benefit greatly from unlocking related archotechs and is heavily incentivised to engage with Anomaly.
Note the list below omits prerequisites and things that are just needed to deal with Anomaly content in first place.
S tier: You would want to engage with Anomaly just to get one of those

• Mind-numb serum - Trivialises mood management, outclasses all drugs and at a small cost of 5% consciousness gives you a “ignore half of dangers to colony” button.
• Ghoul tech - Good in early game, good in midgame, reduces downtime in endgame. Outclasses melee mechs, combat animals and “incapable of violence doesn’t mean incapable of getting punched in the face” pawns. Biotech and Royalty content can make them even stronger, without the usual drawbacks. Their only downside is player morality.

A tier: Good for any playthrough, you want to engage with Anomaly to unlock those

• Productivity tech: Sleep suppressor, Frenzy inducer, Neurosis pulse - greatly help late game colony, where you just want to mass produce advanced components and mood management is not a concern. In case of emergency - see Mind-numb serum. Always violet breaks is still a concern, in case of a slip-up, but can be countered by Dead Calm gene. You likely always want this infrastructure, when mood is under control. Greatly outclasses Ideology-based productivity options.
• Bioferrite generator - Stable and reliable power. At the cost of containing 4-2 entities produces more power than a geothermal generator. One is sufficient to power early game colony, and it can easily be scaled up. Toxifier generators are still a contender, but in a long run they require more research and potentially micromanagement when dealing with waste.
• Insanity weaponry (Shard animal pulser, insanity lance and shock lance) - Craftable archotech. Those items are usually worth buying from traders. If you are going for large colony, shock lance is the main way to get more recruits. While shards are not super rare, it is still a limited resource. With that you might have other priorities for them and no longer want to mass produce consumables when you have resources.
• Psychic sensitivity bonuses - Psychophagy - good mostly due how long it lasts. Toss it twice a year to boost your other rituals, your psycasters and your merchants. Equivalent to gaining a psychically sensitive trait with prestige armor and helmet. Voidsight serum adds a mood malus, but is still worth it.
• Summon fleshbeast - best ‘summon’ ritual. Good to counter sieges and enemy ritualists.

B tier: Nice bonuses, but you would not want to do the Anomaly questline just to get those.

• Bioferrite (as material) - Bioferrite longsword is the best craftable melee weapon, and psychic sensitivity boost is great for psycasters. Bioferrite is an ok building material, but nothing you would go out of your way to grab.
• Biomutation lance - While it is an upgrade to insanity lance, even the insanity lance crafting is unlocked a bit too late. By the time you have biomutation lances, you possibly don’t need them as much.
• Atmospheric heater - counters cold snaps, allows for some terraforming playthroughs, but nothing you would always want.
• Disruptor flares - large AoE stun turns out to be useful more often than I expected.
• Chronophagy - good to occasionally reduce age of a pawn, without taking as long as with biosculpturers.
• Death refusal - With shard cost hard to perform at scale, but another good piece of archotech.
• Pleasure Pulse - counter psychic droners. Would be higher if not for the fact that mind numb serum is so much stronger. Usually you would want boost from ideology ritual first, and fall back to pleasure pulse only if that fails.
• Brainwipe - recruit unwaveringly loyal and remove inhumanization from captured cultists. Due to shard cost you might not want to use it for regular recruitment.
• Combat serums - Tough is for some best trait in game, you can now get it on demand (stacking if you already have it). Move bonus from juggernaut is also nice. However, the usefulness of both is reduced due to fact that you are better of using ghouls as damage sponges / melee blockers.
• Revenant invisibility - same usefulness and duration as invisibility psycast. Decent for psycasters, to reduce psychic heat / psyfocus cost when comboing spells. Guess its also a spine replacement without advanced components and research.

C tier: Anything has its uses, but generally disappointing or very niche.

• Bioferrite weapons - quite disappointing. Stun from nerve spiker is ok, but usually you would like just more firepower. Fire weapons remain to have only niche uses and usually are more trouble than it is worth.
• Bioferrite hood and mask - nothing special.
• Electroharvester - small amounts of power, can be used in emergency but often not worth the reduced containment and research speed.
• Draw Shamblers - appear in random location and with somehow long delay. It can be used to deal with mech clusters, but with bad RNG it does more harm than good.
• Philophagy - Can give few skill levels, but in early game when it would be most useful, it is not worth the shard cost and the mood malus. Later on the shard is still valuable, your prisoners will not always have the highest skill that you want and gains are still meh
• Blood Rain - For me too much collateral damage, but maybe I’m undervaluing this.
• Bliss lobotomy - I thought it would be good for my shooting specialists, but it also applies -50% global learning factor, it truly makes any pawn truly useless.

Jury is out:

• Draw animals - maybe useful on extreme biomes? Tribal starts? In my playstyle I never had use for it.
• Skip abduction - maybe some creative uses, but lack of prisoners is usually not a problem for longer periods of time.
• Provoke Pit Gate - Good for farming / getting rid of wastepacks?
• Deadlife dust - many reddit threads singing its praises, for me a bit gimmicky.

Acquisition:
Note, that most Anomaly tech is much faster to unlock than regular research. It also takes less pawn time. The following part is more of speculation on my side, but for ‘standard’ gameplay I see Anomaly as “pass this side quest to get some really strong technology”.
The general thought for this post was formulated before Ambient Mode was added to the game. However, with the fact that anomaly events are harder to deal with and often less rewarding than regular ones, you likely don’t want to play on Ambient Mode from a min-max perspective. The standard Anomaly mode gives you option to ‘shut down’ Anomaly events, once you got everything you wanted. However, maybe the best way to interact with anomaly content in regular playthrough is to play on standard and not activate the monolith. Instead, get void provocation from one of the rare events or a book. From there you can maintain full control and get only as many anomaly events as you need to unlock everything, without needing to deal with constant threats.

Queen Parvati is known for being the primary alliance maker of the Black Widow Brigade, using a flat hierarchy to draw upon all the women's assets: Cirie's strategy, Natalie and Amanda's relationship with Erik, etc.
But c'mon, that's not that interesting of a season to watch. Not more than once anyway. Not the case with HvV, the definitive best season of Survivor ever aired.
Now all these haters say that other than the double idol play, she was "riding the coattails" of Russell Hantz's strategies, just like how Parvati haters feel about her Micronesia win in regards to Cirie's strategy. But that's stupid.
Not one single one of Russell's plays could have been made without Parvati acting as the perfect smokescreen. And in fact that's probably Parvati's game changing power, even more so that Boston Rob (and perhaps he learned from playing with her in his RI run), and that's using the legacy of her previous Survivor career to influence the win. Everyone was sure that Parvati would be running BWB 2.0 but really she was just playing lieutenant to Russell.
The Tyson outplay? Tyson had to think Parvati was the greater threat and believe when Russell said he was done with her.
The Boston Rob outplay? Parvati was the one who had to win Jerri over, because Jerri thought Parvati was a threat.
And, of course, the infamous JT tribal self-destruct. Not possible if they didn't think Parvati was in charge.
The real power is in having a believable smokescreen. Sometimes it lands on your lap with a poor challenge performance, sometimes it has to be cultivated by making people angry and/or letting people be angry at each other (see: the cultivation of Philip Shepard), and sometimes, just sometimes, in perhaps a Jonny Fairplay kind of way, you become your own smokescreen.
Which finally brings us to Q.
I don't think there's been another singular smokescreen in Survivor which has accomplished so much. I mean, he not only snuffed out three idols in a row, he also snuffed out his own idol by being such a convincing smokescreen that he could not even see when he, himself, was the target. But he'd already doomed his game long ago with an unforced error. Martyrdom. Drop a live grenade when killed.
But he thought he could come back.
He really did. He thought by successfully self-smokescreening three idols out in a row, he could make a last ditch alliance to Maria by appealing to her as the perfect goat, and then somehow climb back from his attempt to save Tiff after trying to blindside her the whole day (???) by making it to FTC and then claiming he knew what he was doing all along.
Could he have come back???
So I ask you, survivor:

1. What does it take to be a perfect self-smokescreen?
   
2. If that is even possible in the first place, how do you avoid the gigantic target you put on your back, inherent in being a smokescreen? I mean, that's what being a smokescreen is. Having a gigantic target on your back.
   
3. If that is not even possible in the first place, how do you climb back from a successful self-smokescreen? Like, how does Jonny Fairplay or Russell Hantz redeem themselves in a jury? How does Philip Shepard win? How does Q win? How does Sugar win?
   

This, survivor, is the question that really needs to be asked, because Q has just proven (at least to some stans) that it just might be possible (it probably isn't)

Did you know that about 75,000 people go missing per year in Canada? I might’ve found another one to add to that tally, as someone by the name of Trinity Arthurs, a 20-year-old woman, disappeared seemingly without a trace on June 14th of last year, along with 19-year-old Marvin Arthurs, her brother. The question in everyone’s minds is why I’m telling you this.
It all started with a hike in the woods, on a trail, in Prince Albert National Park. I was enjoying the green, taking a deep breath from the fresh air of nature when I spotted something shining. When I looked at it, it became clearer that it was a Ziploc bag. I initially thought it was someone else tossing garbage on the forest floor, but when I picked it up, I realized something was in there. I looked closer at the bag and noticed there was a USB. I packed it into my bag and finished my hike. When I went home, I took the USB out of the Ziploc. I was very hesitant to plug it into my laptop, as I had only recently discovered it in some forest.
I plugged it in and took a deep breath, knowing of the risk of it. It didn’t affect the laptop in any way, but it did reveal only one file which says TRINITY E. ARTHUR’S ENTRIES. I clicked on it and it seems to be a bunch of Word documents, each noted as ENTRY. I couldn’t find anything else other than those files.
I decided to look up, only to find a single news article back then relating to Trinity’s case. I tried to send it to the police, but they thought of it as some sick fanfiction I wrote, so I am going to post it here, leaving it as is. To clarify, I did not write this. I hope this gains the attention of her case as it deserves.
_________________________________________________________________________
Entry 1 - Sepember 24th, 2023
Hello there, my name is Tris and this might be the very first time I have typed something personal on this laptop, like ever, maybe since elementary school, where we would write how we would feel for the day. Not really the type to socialize and not the type to write a journal, let alone digital, either, because what’s the point of it? I guess I’m just spilling out my thoughts, especially after what I’ve seen, so might as well put this to good use.
For context, this is about my father, Micheal Arthurs. I remembered him, at least before all of this, to be this big, strong guy who just simply had a nice hobby. In that case, that hobby is all about caves. He would spend some of his work money on these trips with one of his work buddies to explore cave systems. The reason? Maybe because he was fascinated with them, god knows when, maybe since he was a child. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t care about me and my two younger brothers, Marvin and James, as well as our mother, Martha.
He cared for us like any dad would, he would take us camping, tell us about his adventures in the caves, and spoil us with gifts we didn’t need but appreciated anyway. From time to time, he would give us shit if one of us tried to burn the house down by putting paper in a toaster, thinking we would automatically make some kind of magical spell, which actually happened. Hell, my middle name Edward came from him, strange for a girl like me. He used to tell me that he accidentally thought I was a boy when I was born, so that stuck. His trips also, I guess, strained his relationship with Mom, who always complained about him going somewhere for a week, worried sick for him and leaving her to care for us.
That was, until a few years ago, on the morning of May 8th, 2018 - about less than five years ago, when I was fifteen. He said that he’d be back in a week because he was going to explore a cave somewhere in Ontario. The last time I remembered him was when he and Mom made pancakes, bacon, and hashbrowns, of which the pancakes were made for me, even though I could’ve had toast instead. We joked around the table and asked what he’d be doing at the cave. Of course, he would tell his usual, like going into new passages and finding any cave paintings, if any, in the caves themselves. I could imagine the cave paintings he might discover depicting mammoths and saber-tooth cats back then, with people hunting them. After that, we cleaned up and Dad was ready to go. He each gave us a big, warm hug and shared a quick but gentle kiss with Mom. He waved us goodbye before stepping into his big grey Ford truck, all packed up, and drove through the streets of Saskatoon.
We waited. Hours turned to days, and we knew when he’d return. Those days then turned to weeks and we began to think there was something wrong. Mom was first to notice, so she called the RCMP to file a missing persons report. What we didn’t know was it became a whole mystery in itself. At first, they contacted his coworker, who usually caves with him, only to find he was equally as confused as us. That coworker was asked by my Dad if he wanted to go caving with him, only for him to abandon that plan due to a medical emergency relating to his wife. They then put up alerts for him so that anyone would come forward for his whereabouts. Some said they saw him at a local Costco store, others said he was going north, baffling us in the process as he would not go north for Ontario. At that point, there were no leads for a while.
At that time, we were waiting for him to go home. I did some investigating myself, along with my oldest brother Marvin, to find out where our Dad at. We thought this might be some alternate route he took, or that he might be going to Prince Albert to meet family. James, our youngest, seems to care less about the fact Dad is missing and more about talking to his friends. Looking back at it now, I guess this was his method of coping with the situation. Mom was not doing well. She would constantly ask the police to simply find him, but understandably they just couldn't without any new evidence.
That was until a surveillance camera at some gas station store in Blaire Lake spotted Dad. At first, he got out of the truck and put the nozzle in to fuel up. Once his truck was fueled up, he went inside the near-empty store, saved for a few guys, grabbed a few beef jerky and Gatoraids, and went to the cashier to pay for them. After that, he went through the door and back to his truck, driving off. That blew our minds and the crazier thing was that his truck was found, abandoned at a campsite in Martins Lake. The truck was later towed for investigation and found no evidence that he was killed or kidnapped at the truck, meaning he went somewhere. A few more people said they saw him carrying his bags and went into the woods to the west, assuming he was going on a hike. Hearing that news, they searched the woods, looking for any signs he was there without any sort of luck. The search was called off and the trail ran cold.
During that time, I was exhausted and realised I felt like nothing without him. I was in a spiral, always mad at everyone and expecting everyone to find my Dad, but at the same time, I was also beginning to be one of those people. The same people I expect to find my Dad. I then felt defeated and helpless, without purpose, begging whatever god was up there to bring my Dad back, hoping he was not hurt, at least alive. I hoped he found his way out of the woods. I hoped he survived an animal attack. It was only as days went by that I realised this was taking over me, wasting my life and mentality, and that was when I decided he wasn’t coming back. I decided that he might be dead, somewhere in those woods. I hoped that someone would find his remains one day. I guess I did move on, without knowing what happened to him.
Marv, on the other hand, never really accepted. He continued to find him, even to this day. He would do other things, of course, but would argue with someone once our Dad’s name was heard, saying he might still be alive. He did get into a few fights because of this. He now accepts he is dead, but holds onto the belief we should still look for him, to relieve us. Mom was doing worse than the rest of us. She would blame herself for not being with him and usually buys drinks to forget about it. Eventually, she would put a lot of pressure on me and criticize everything I did, putting a lot of stress on me. It got to the point where we would go into screaming matches about the simplest of things, drawing me down to regret ever getting mad at her in the first place. It was so bad that my aunt had to take me out of there for my safety. That was nearly three years ago and I didn’t even hear a word from her. One side of me hoped that she would get arrested for drunk driving, and the other hoped she’d get help.
James seemed to be the one least affected by this, surrounded by friends we didn’t have. The last time I heard of my little brother after his high school graduation, he was beginning to do some cave stuff, like our father. Matter of fact, he began his own small club of cavers a few years before he left. I never really knew what went on in his mind, but I guess he felt just as fucked-up as the rest of us, just that he had enough distractions to easily get away from those thoughts.
As for me, I eventually moved into an apartment with Marv and got a job as a security guard at some mall, at the suggestion of my aunt’s friend, a few years ago. Working there has improved me, even though I worked nights. It has given me some purpose and gets my mind off of the things that happen during the day.
You might ask me, mind to mind, why I’m giving myself some sob story to talk about. This morning, I was riding my electrical tricycle from work to my apartment in the frigid air. I went in there and saw an odd package that was under Marv’s name, although without an address. The box seems to be a cereal box, sealed with package tape. The name that it’s sent to seems to be written in Sharpie in printed form. I thought it was odd that somehow this package made its way inside and at our mailing station. Thinking that it might be someone attempting to play an odd prank on my brother, I initially thought about leaving it alone. Curiosity got the cat, however, so I picked up the box and lightly shook it. I felt and heard what seemed to be something inside of it, like one big thing and a few smaller ones.
I then took it to my apartment, where I opened the door and entered, closed the door, removed my boots on the mat, and set the box on the somewhat clean kitchen counter. Looking at it, I was initially hesitant about opening it because it was under his name. I left it alone, he was home most of the time, on his computer doing a few things. Going into my room, I took off my uniform and changed my pants to a pair of boxers, turned on the TV to sit and relax on my bed. Looking through the streaming service, I tried to look for anything relating to volcanoes, one of those topics I was very interested in at the time, but the content was lacking. I went for a documentary and sat back, watching.
A few minutes in and I can hear knocking on the door. I was annoyed initially, knowing it was my brother. I opened and I could see confusion yet a look of needing to know on his messy, bearded face as he stood at eye level, staring at each other.
Marv: What’s the cereal box in the kitchen?
Me: The cereal box?
Marv: Yes, the cereal box.
Me: I just found it in the mailroom when I came in. No address, nothing other than your name, so I brought it up.
Marv: Do you know what’s inside?
Me: Your guess is as good as mine.
We looked at each other with an equally confused expression, sharing the same thoughts. The only difference is that I looked in the area beside him, empty of thought except for that little mind that reads why would someone send us this package? He was wide-eyed albeit stone-faced and standing still.
Marv: Well, I will be looking inside anyways.
We then went into the kitchen where he grabbed a knife and put it in the box.
Me: Hey, should we use the scissors?
Marv: Why? This is good enough. Not like I’m going to cut myself with it.
He then slowly cut the seams of which the packaging tape sealed, eventually cutting the tape. He then opened it to reveal a USB, an SD card, and a video recorder.
Me: That’s odd.
Marv: I don’t know who sent it, but I hope it is someone who got the wrong address, to the wrong person with my name.
Me: Should we look what's inside them?
Marv: Well, let’s find out.
We then went to his messy clothes-ridden room and he went to his PC to turn it on. There, I began to get concerned about the mysterious USB.
Me: I think we shouldn’t plug it in.
Marv: Why?
Me: Viruses, bugs, the whole deal? We don’t know wha-
Marv: Don’t worry, this PC has antivirus on here. Besides, if it did shut down, we could at least wipe out the memory.
We plugged in the USB, anticipating some sort of pop-up from an unknown digital virus. Instead, nothing happened, maybe other than the notification that a device was plugged in. Marv then sat down to look into the files and see what he could find on the PC, but it felt wrong like we were snooping around. In those files, we could see a folder that says CAVE GIANTS. He clicked on it and there was just a collection of pictures, of cave paintings. The setting all of them seemed to take place in was dark and wet, only the walls of which the cave paintings are on. The paintings themselves, which are in black, depict what seems to be somewhat stick-figure men, some holding arrows and spears, others just standing. Some of those men hunted the animals on the walls, like bison, deer, and mammoths in a group-like manner. The predators seem to be treated with a little more respect, like cougars, wolves, and bears. That was the first few pictures until we met with the first odd thing about those paintings.
The picture in question has every human on the wall holding spears and arrows. No animals were visible. In the next few pictures, we see men without spears or arrows, which said men were upscaled, massive. Long, black legs and arms attach to small bodies and small heads, of which all have un-painted orbs, depicting their eyes, which harrowed us as they stared at us through the screen. It seems some of those tall men have extra or lack of arms and legs. The saying can be said for the eyes, but most are in that somewhat humanoid body plan. The smaller men with the arrows and spears look to be battling the tall men, with some tall men holding the smaller men. In a few more pictures, below the battle scene, were red handprints, unlike those of the black they used. There are no more pictures from here, but we were stunned at whatever we stumbled upon.
Marv: What the fuck. What was that?
Me: I don’t know, maybe an archeologist's USB?
Marv then looked at the screen and saw a second file that said GIANT DOCUMENTARY.
Marv: Giant documentary? A documentary on, okay, what? Giants?
Me: That’s what seems to be like.
We clicked on the folder to see the one mp4 file with the same name. We clicked on it and it started its intro with one of those songs you’d play on a nature educational video. It was black, until it slowly faded into a scene of a forest, with the video panning across gradually and with nature sounds. There, a man with a gruff voice began to narrate.
Narrator: Ever wondered what happened here? You would assume that in a far distant time, this was a different place.
It then transitioned to a scene of a tundra, along with a slideshow of all the animals that existed during the Ice Age. It seems the documentary was made by someone using the Moviemaker application.
Narrator: A cold tundra during the Last Ice Age, of which large mammoths ruled the plains, thick-furred camels gathered in herds, and American lions roamed in their respective pride, along with the large grizzlies, the roaming caribou, and the wolves that hunt in their packs.
I then showed pictures of a tundra landscape, along with a few of the creatures mentioned.
Narrator: That was the scene until man, or Homo Sapiens came along at the end of the Ice Age, ten thousand years ago. The large glaciers that used to cover a third of North America began to melt, causing a whole dramatic series of climatic events. Man took that opportunity to hunt down the prehistoric life that existed. Eventually, those mammoths and camels became extinct, along with the American lion, who relied on them for food, along with a whole plethora of prehistoric beasts that once roamed North America. Eventually, all the ice melted and mankind settled, creating what we know as Native Americans, the Cree, Aztecs, Iroquois, and many more, telling and passing on stories as history marches on.
It then showed a slide show of historical pictures of the tribes themselves, along with depictions of a few of them taking down mammoths and going face to face with sabre tooth cats.
Narrator: I may sound reasonable, based on the evidence found by archeologists and paleontologists alike. Besides, it is only plausible that man is the only species that could drive these wonderful species to extinction. What if I told you all, watching this, that another species used to exist in North America alongside Homo sapiens?
A picture, presumably from the 1800’s or something, showed up, and later a slide show of a few news articles about them. I then began to recognize the voice, a voice all too familiar… my father’s voice. At this time, we were shocked, as this was not what I remembered him and probably not even Marv. We were more shocked at how he took this secret with him and had this under our noses. Despite that, we kept on watching.
Dad: Giants, creatures supposedly of myth and legend, larger yet primitive versions of man, have walked the Earth for many years. Most of that so-called evidence comes in the form of huge, perhaps human-like, bones discovered by farmers and amateur archeologists alike all across neighbouring America. They would claim they built the massive mounds, like the famous Serpent Mound, all across the Midwest.
The slideshow of various examples of these mounds, frame by frame, went by until it stopped at a map of the Midwest, showing where they were.
Dad: Of course, most of these skeletons would either be misidentifications of ancient animals or hoaxes. As for the mysterious mounds, they are now discovered to be built by the good ol’ Hopewell societies, the Mound Builders, who made them as burials and ritual sites. Since then, there has been no new ground evidence of their existence except for the mythologies and legends captivating our cultures. At least, until now.
It then changed to a video recording of Dad, who is sitting in a chair and began explaining it like an explorer that has seen it all.
Dad: One day, while I and John were looking for a cave at Wells Grey Park somewhere in British Columbia, sometime during July of 1994, I saw this tunnel in the snow, somewhere on a high hill at the foot of a glacier. We grabbed our gear, went up to the cave, and we just went in. It took us a few minutes underneath all of that snow before we saw this stream enter this system, melting the snow. We climbed our way down there and reached the floor. We thought we were the first humans to ever set foot in this cave.
Now, as far as I know, to the naked eye, the cave itself is pretty much invisible, especially during winter. Even if anyone did find it, it would require them hours to climb loose rock and steep valley walls. What we found in this cave is quite unusual.
The frame then shows the cave paintings - the very same cave paintings we saw in those other pictures.
Dad: We found these cave paintings on the walls. They are painted in some kind of charcoal paint mix, likely used in the creation of them. At first, the scene depicts the hunter-gatherer lifestyle of the earliest settlers themselves, hunting the woolly mammoths, bison and caribou at the time, along with the bears, cougars, and wolves that are treated with respect. Going further down the cave, we began to see fewer animals and more people with spears and bows. That is when we found the tall figures, likely exaggerated by the artists to depict their size and how they saw it. How they depicted them is very long limbs attached to a smaller body and their eyes they didn’t paint over, a hollow gaze. I felt a harrowing feeling, seeing them and gazing into their eyes. There aren’t just a few, instead, there are many of them, some have extra limbs and eyes and a few even pick up the men depicted in the paintings.
By that time, the battery went dead but we marched on deeper into the cave. We found artifacts, like pottery and arrowheads. We then stumbled upon the remains of a campsite beside the bank of the stream. As I was taking it all in, my friend pointed at something with his flashlight. The scene I saw hit me like a ton of bricks, still haunting me to this day.
There were a few human remains, so decayed that only the bone remained. I seemed to be a family of four, still wearing their fur clothes. They seem to be trying to escape a threat, and ended up here to paint this mural, only to die the hard way. I could only imagine what they went through and looking back as a family man, that fate would be worse than death, waiting for the threat to be over, which never came.
I can see him tear up, in the video, crying. Amongst the muffled cries, he said this:
Dad: I wouldn’t wish that on my family. Not even my worst enemy.
He then continued that way for a few minutes, while my initial shock slowly turned to that of sympathy for him, as this was his first time finding something like this.
Dad: Sorry, I guess I should move on.
He waited a few moments to regain composure, wiping his tears away before speaking again.
Dad: Well, after that, we climbed out of the cave. We did not tell anyone of the exact location, because we wanted to respect the people who died up there a very long time ago. My point is, that there was something that scared this family so much they made the effort to climb to the cave and paint out what is their story. There are just too many coincidences for me to think that they just went in here for the sake of it and too many of those tall beings.
That is when I believed that, long ago, something roamed these lands with us. Not some upsized human who are like us, but a horror so savage it horrified the first settlers and forced them into hiding. Now, I asked myself where they went, besides they would’ve still walked amongst us. I was looking through the libraries and saw nothing. That is when until one day, when I stopped at a gas station somewhere in Rosetown. A Cree elder was taking a smoke and told me he had a story to tell me, out of the blue. It was a weird gesture, as he had no reason to talk to me anyway. Besides, why would a Cree elder tell a white man a story?
We sat on a bench and he told me this story his tribe passed around for a very long time. He told me that, in the beginning, his ancestors feared this monster known as the Witiko. Now, today it is known as the wendigo, a solitary monster that corrupts the human soul and forces them to partake in some horrific act, usually cannibalism of their family members. Once they do that, they turn into basically thin, pale corpses with antlers on their heads and have supernatural abilities. This version also has a knack for being always hungry, constantly looking for something to eat, a metaphor for greed in most of the tribes surrounding the area.
These wendigo, or Witiko, are different. They are not the corpse zombie monster thing that was once human, but rather giant, twisted beings that came from the underworld and invaded the overworld. They ate anything for the sake of greed and malice while tormenting life on the overworld for their pleasure. It got so bad some even took it upon themselves to take their own lives. One day, their good-old Creator decided to send out his best warrior, Wisakedjak. Wisakedjak saw what the Witiko were doing and devised a plan. He banded up all the tribes and went to war with them while luring them in the process. Most, if not all, of the Witiko, were where Wisakedjak wanted them to be. The Creator then split the earth, sending them back to the underworld to which they belonged. To ensure they won’t escape again, the Creator eventually sealed the entrance of which the Witiko fell in.
I was shocked at the story, and even asking where the entrance was, only he would tell me this is a secret and that he didn’t want anyone to look for it, in fear they might be released again. After meeting him, I tried to look for genuine proof of these giants, but all I have is a few photos and a story. That is when I thought about who would cover it up, steal the bones and hide them. I guess some of those crazy conspiracy theorists might be right about the Smithsonian Museum covering them up. So I might have to cover my tracks and finish what I started. This is the show, bye.
We sat in shock, looking at each other and realising our Dad might be a nut job.
Marv: Giants? Really? This whole time?
Me: Seems like it.
That is all I could mutter out, confused at what I saw.
Me: They might be connected to his disappearance…
Marv: Okay, how is this related to his disappearance? We still don’t know where he is. Besides, he seems to be a crazy person anyway, like, he listened to one story from a random man and instantly believed him?
Marv’s inner rage became noticeable and understandable, knowing that he saw Dad as a person who cared for him through the hardest of times and now he felt like he was betrayed, like Dad went missing all over again. He eventually went to a wall and slumped against it, eventually sitting on the ground, legs carelessly splayed out and head looking down.
I felt the same way, but I was contained. I felt really sorry for him, though. I took that moment to sit beside him and hug him.
Me: It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay.
He then started to cry, giving me some urge to shed my tears. I began to think about my father. He left us, lying that he was going to Ontario and disappeared, only to find out he was secretly some conspiracy theorist who was chasing what seemed to be thin air. At the same time, he was a caring father, who cared about us, taught us and tried to be with us at the biggest moments of our lives. I then stared at the video recorder at the counter.
Me: Hey, should we take a look in the recorder? See what we could find?
He then looked up at me, looking at me in seriousness.
Marv: I guess, we are in this rabbit hole now.
He then took the dead recorder, took the memory card out and plugged it into his adaptor, plugged into the PC. The files showed up and there were multiple recordings. I was staring at the dates, only to realise that the final of these recordings was on May 8th, 2018. Marv then clicked on the recording.
At first, we were in a vibrant, evergreen forest, casting shadows upon the pine needle floor under an afternoon sun. The sounds of birds chirping dominated the soundscape until we heard a nudge, assuming the camera moved. We then saw Dad walk in front of the camera and stand there, he seemed to be nervous.
Dad: Hey all, I am at the cave, where I was when I was twelve. Took a bit of time to find it, but here we are, at the Childhood Cave. Now, John couldn’t come because his wife is having their child, which I understand. So, that is why I am here alone. Not a worry, I’ve been caving for most of my life, so this is nothing new.
He then came to pick up the recorder to show around the site. I can see the rope wrapped around a tree that descends into this hole. I can describe it as being similar to a well, except flat, stoney protrusions stick out of the walls like platforms, with the center being pure black.
Dad: Well, this is the first time entering the system. I hope to find anything down there.
He then buckled up his gear, making sure the rope was tight and the gear was in working order. He then walked over to the hole, recorder in hand, only to kneel to put the camera on the first platform.
Dad: Well, here we go.
He then began climbing down, feet first, holding onto whatever rock he could grasp, grunting as he went. As soon as he was at chest height on the first platform, he reached towards the camera. He suddenly disappeared into the hole, faster than the blink of an eye. One moment, he was there, then another moment he wasn’t. At that point, I was shaking and felt weak, but my brother sat still, like a stone, waiting for something else to happen. All that I heard afterwards was silent, very long and antagonizing silence until the camera ran out of battery, turning the screen black.

Link for all the chapters available here: Engines of Arachnea on Royal Road
“And you only thought to mention that now!” Rene screamed at her.
“Not my fault you’re as deaf as a dingbat,” she smarmily replied.
“Oh, shit on it!” he swore.
Rene laced up his boots in a fury of motion, balling up his tattered socks and shoving them in his pockets. Snatching up his sheathed sword and the survival kit, he kicked dirt over the remains of the fire and started to run back into the jungle. Then he did a double take and turned back to Zildiz who was still bound to the sapling, clearly torn between his sense of duty and the urge to save his own skin. His captive on her part was behaving as if she hadn’t a care in the world.
“Have you finally reached the inevitable conclusion of your thought processes?” she yawned.
“What?”
It was Zildiz’s turn to roll her eyes at him.
“I’ll help you along this once, since we haven’t the time to wait on your mental faculties. There’s only one way you’re making it out of this alive. Untie me.”
“Like blazes I will. You’ll gut me soon as you got the chance.”
“I know a place where we can hide. I camouflaged it myself. We won’t be able to escape leapers in the brush, not in the daytime, and not with eyes like theirs. My lair is the only option. If you cut me loose, I can get us there with minutes to spare. If not, you can always try outrunning them.”
Rene fumed. She had deliberately concealed this information to give him no time to think things through. By rights, as her captor, he was under no obligation to ensure her continued survival.
But she was also unerringly correct in her assessment of the situation. Rene advanced on her with an ugly snarl, drawing his sword. Zildiz calmly stared him down, ‘cool as some cucumbers’, as Lethway would have put it.
The drums were getting louder by the moment. He cut her free and Zildiz turned her back to him, presenting her bound wrists and looking at him expectantly over her shoulder.
“Absolutely not. Your arms stay tied. Chop-chop!” he said, shooing her onwards, “Lead the way.”
“I can’t run like this. Either remove the silk completely or we’re not getting anywhere.”
“You ever heard of a little thing called compromise?” Rene’s temper was so frayed at this point that his voice came out in a high squeak, “Alright! Fine! But your wings stay clipped.”
“They don’t work anyway.”
“Not taking that chance. Your blades. Pop em out.”
“Why?”
Rene vented a cry of hysterical frustration and activated the sword, holding it in both hands as if he meant to lop off her head.
“Pop em out right now, or by jimbo I’m taking em off at the elbow!”
Zildiz reluctantly complied, her serrated swords sliding out of their housings. General truce or not, she knew that the Leapers would take any chance to murder a Gallivant if they thought they thought could do it unobserved. Especially once they discovered what she had done to Kryptus and his pack. She had to get moving, even if it meant debasing herself this way.
But she immediately regretted her choice when Rene promptly snipped her swords off at the roots.
“What have you done!” Zildiz screamed as her weapons clattered to the ground. She whirled on him in outrage and Rene took a hasty step back, hefting his sword warningly.
“Don’t be overdramatic,” Rene said, scooping up the blades and chucking them into the survival kit for future use, “I’ve only disarmed you. You’ll get them back later, if you behave.”
He cut the bindings of her arms and gave her a shove.
“What are you waiting for? Ice Cream Day? Beat your feet!” he ordered.
The pair set off with Zildiz stumbling ahead, Rene dogging her heels. Ahead of them he could hear what sounded like a mutter of a rolling avalanche, the thumping growing ever more distinct as the hordes of unseen savages neared their position. Each staccato drumbeat was answered by another that varied in rhythm and pitch.
Rene was reminded of the whistles, bugles, bagpipes and drummer-boys which helped commanders give signals to line infantry regiments amid to roar of battle. If the Leaper tribes were holding a long-distance conversation, then he dearly hoped that he and Zildiz were not topic of their discussion.
Zildiz hissed in pain when she slipped and jammed her foot into a crack between the stones. Rene placed his hands on her waist to help heave her out, but she twisted out of his grip and growled at him. They eyed each other warily until her good sense won out and she allowed him to help by gouging out the rocks and digging out her ankle. They ran on, Zildiz moving with a noticeable limp that was slowing them both down. She was clearly struggling to support the added weight of her useless exomorph.
“Are we close?” he demanded of her. Zildiz was all but running on all fours, hellbent on reaching shelter as the sinister percussions rebounded through the fog, multiplying the effect so that it seemed the whole jungle was alive with them.
She’s just too slow! Rene realized. So he did the only thing he could think of and seized the woman from behind. Zildiz kicked and screeched a little, but soon lost the energy to do even that as he bundled her up in a fireman’s carry and hurried on. Stars above, she was heavy! Thankfully they were mostly moving downhill, which spared him a lot of effort.
“Just point the way. I’ll get us there,” he panted. There was no time to argue. He barreled into the heart of the fog and felt smooth pebbles clattering under his boots and heard the trickle of nearby rapids. They were back on the river’s edge, he realized.
Zildiz guided his steps until they reached a tall outcropping of red and white granite. It was topped by a pile of flotsam that’d been deposited by some past flooding. Or so it seemed.
“Here,” said the Gallivant as they climbed to its summit. She pulled aside the pile of detritus and revealed a spacious burrow cunningly disguised and cozily constructed. Rene hopped down after Zildiz and she closed the hatch of dead vegetation over them, plunging the pit into a sudden gloom. When Rene’s eyes finally adjusted, he gave a grunt of recognition. Lining the sides of the burrow was the big tent cloth that had slowed the seedpod’s plummeting descent.
“Where’d you get this?” he asked Zildiz, poking at it.
“From the same current that washed me up on the shore,” she said, “Now shut your breathing hole. The hairs on their bodies are like ears. They can sense the tiniest vibrations…”
Rene tore open a rent in the tent material and scrabbled at the stones until he had a spyhole that was just large enough for him to squint out into the smoggy murk. The avalanche of motion was upon them now, so close it made the sluggish river quiver like a spoonful of bone marrow.
As if emerging straight from the bowels of the netherworld there came rushing out of the fog a horde of ravening beasts. On countless pads and claws and hooves they skittered, hopped, crawled or bounded across the torrid current.
Rene saw herds of reptilian frillheads, the bone spurs on the herbivores’ backs rattling like sabers as they made the crossing, closely pursued by packs of buzzing daggergnats that sank their lance-like proboscises into their flanks, cruelly goading them on. Flightless chiroptadons beat on their hairless chests and swung along on the knuckles of their vestigial wing arms. Ten-meter tall ultrapods crashed through the brush and flattened whole trees with their hammerhead antlers. Swarms of rodents, timid fawnmice, flocks of birds, squealing quickpigs, rolling pollies and a host of new species he’d never even dreamed of fled before the larger animals.
Guiding the stampede northward were bands of Leapers. Most soared above the ethereal mists on airfoils of thin-sown silk streaming behind the. Others strung out ziplines between the trees and slid down them with the claws on their feet. The largest Leapers had bright colorations on their underbellies and the sides of their humps, orange and green spots upon which they had painted garish tribal signs. Rene saw swirling suns and grinning devils, or eyes pierced through with barbs and weeping tears of blood. Adolescents and children rode in pouches on the backs of their elders, beating the drums they had woven tight across their knees.
Rene curled himself into a ball and tried his hardest not to exist. For what seemed an eternity the dread host bellowed and crashed around their hiding place, until at last the drums slowly receded in the distance.
“How many?” Zildiz prodded him.
“Too many,” Rene whispered, “Armies of them, all moving with one purpose.”
“It has summoned the kindreds to the Dawning Chambers,” Zildiz told him. The Gallivant knelt at the bottom of the pit and scraped out a hole in the gravel which quickly filled with water, “The god has been roused to anger, and the world shall quake at its passing. It will come for your people, and when It is done, it shall be as though they never were at all. Not even the mute stones shall bear witness to their memory. For nothing will remain of them but dust and bones. Dust and bones.”
Having said her bit, Zildiz bent down and lapped up the water with her tongue.
Link for all the chapters available here: Engines of Arachnea on Royal Road

Hey everyone,
Just like the title says, what was a deck so far this year you’ve played/brewed that’s surprised you? Whether it’s power, silliness, favorite cards, synergy etc. what’s the newest deck in your collection that’s shocked you in how well it’s played?
For me it’s [[Marvo, Deep Operative]]. I built it sea monster tribal and it’s so much fun with the added mechanic from my favorite plane, Lorwyn. I put in all the Lorwyn/Shadowmoor basic lands, and added cards from that set to add more clash!
The deck is innocent at first by swinging with an innocent little 1/8 but the pay off is great. Just the other day I won a clash and dropped a [[nezahal]] for free and then started drawing cards off opponents! It’s been a great time with this 8 armed rogue!
https://www.moxfield.com/decks/-7ul2gYopE2gQ0cY0hi1Vw

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High Context
Expression takes many forms. In this book I have interpreted the word media in a broad sense and treated each form of expression that I have discussed as an independent medium. What, then, is the reason for the existence of multiple media like manga, anime, and film? Are these simply multiple forms for mediating the same reality? Not at all. Multiple media exist in order to support multiple fictions. We clearly perceive the form of a particular expression at the same time as we take in its content. The various media function as a kind of context, or a transparent and continuous totality that attaches meaning to content. In this instance the media themselves attain their own unique contextuality. For example, we are not in the least confused if a heroine who breaks down in tears in a television drama suddenly appears smiling in a commercial during the break. This is because it is very easy for us to shift instantaneously between the context of the drama and the commercial.
In an earlier work I referred to this idea of the unique contextuality of each medium as the “representation context,” in order to use it in a more limited sense. This is because it is possible to use the media form itself as a form of representation. As I explained in chapter 1, my use of the term context is based chiefly on a combination of the ideas of G. Bateson and E. T. Hall, which I Have also explained in greater detail elsewhere. For our purposes here, it is possible to understand the contexts contributing to expression as existing in hierarchical strata. In the case of manga, the first context level is that of the narrative that gives meaning to the characters’ actions. Above that is the genre of the narrative - the expressive context that determines whether it is to be taken seriously or as a gag. The representational context is one level above this. Or, if we order them from top down, the process by which we understand the content of a manga can be understood as a hierarchical series of stages beginning with the work’s representational context (manga), proceeding to its expressive context (genre), on to the narrative context, and finally to the comprehension of the content. Of course, in actual fact we have to admit that this sort of hierarchy is ultimately not valid. It goes without saying that content and context exist in a relationship based on simultaneous and mutual corroboration. Therefore I should emphasize that the notion of representation context serves only for convenience of description and is not in any sense an isolatable object.
It is possible, for example, to think of visual media in the order of their dependence on representational contextuality. Contextuality in this case refers to the degree to which the form of expression itself determines the context expressed. In order of descending contextuality, then, we have anime, manga, television, film, and photographs. The statement “I saw a photograph,” for example, conveys no meaning on its own. But the statement “I saw an anime” evokes a relatively concrete image in the listener’s mind. This is because the anime form restricts the range of content much more than does the photograph. In other words, anime has the highest level of contextuality and photography the lowest. Here I follow Hall in calling this the “high context” nature of anime. In general, we can say that more popular forms of expression tend to be higher context (as in the difference between classical and popular music). In visual media, the less information conveyed on the screen, the higher the context (this being the difference between television and film). Thus “cool” media (with low levels of detail) tend toward higher context.
Let us think more concretely about the high-context nature of anime and manga. We have already established that form and content are intricately connected in both. In the case of these expressive forms, we can easily makes guesses about the content and authorship even of works that we know nothing about. Even a single frame of the work will be enough to tell us the genre, the orientation of the content, and sometimes even the identity of the author. Moreover, the instantaneous switching between the “gag” and “serious” modes that would be unthinkable in film but forms part of the grammar of anime (its so-called yakusoku [conventions]) can be explained only on the basis of this high-context nature.
I think of high context as the sensibility that emerges when there is no sense of distance between the producer and the consumer of a given media form . Once we immerse ourselves in this high-context space, the meaning of all stimuli is grasped instantaneously. Inevitably, emotional codes are more easily transmitted here than verbal ones. This high-density transmissibility enables extremely high levels of concentration and absorption.
Intersubjective Mediation, or Media Theory
Based on what I have said above, we can identify the difference between film and anime or manga first in terms of contextuality.
Is this the place for us to move to a discussion of media theory? Is the desire for the beautiful fighting girls a sign of an internal transformation, an “implosion” and extension brought on by our contemporary media environment? In some senses this may be true, but in others it is certainly not.
The development of the media environment has in fact partly transformed the structure of our society. The development of the mass media industry itself is one manifestation of this transformation. Its influence on the economy and on education has, of course, been enormous. But to what extent does this transformation penetrate our inner worlds?
In clinical terms there has not been the slightest structural transformation. The structure of our neurotic subjectivity remains intact, just as Freud discovered it a century ago. If asked to prove this, most analysts would say that it is not their role to offer general proofs of anything. This, too, has not changed in a hundred years. Analysts can speak about the truth. But, or perhaps therefore, they cannot prove what is true. But, or perhaps therefore, they cannot prove what is true. To say that the structure of the subject is intact is to say that the structure of desire has been maintained. What needs to be emphasized here is that, in order for the structure of desire to be maintained, the object of desire must constantly change. If the object of our desire looks different than it did a hundred years ago, this is only a change in appearance that results from the continual maintenance that we as subjects have performed on the structure of that desire. Yes, the development of media has brought about an outward change, a superficial change in the objects of our desire.
From this we can derive at least two psychoanalytic hypotheses. If we use Lacan’s divisions, the stability of the subject denotes primarily the stability of the relationality between the Symbolic and the Real. Moreover, the internal transformation that Marshall McLuhan referred to as “implosion” can be considered mainly as having emerged as a change on the level of form in the Imaginary. Herein lies one of the thorniest difficulties of media theory. If voice and writing are themselves already forms of media, what exactly have modern media been able to add to the equation? The transformation of the subject in the Imaginary can always make it seem as if nothing has happened. As long as this is the case, the appearance of media theory will remain in the always-awaited future, and its conclusions will only continue to be deferred.
But perhaps there is something to be gained nonetheless by taking a detour here and considering the mutual operations of the media environment and the Imaginary. The development of media is clearly most striking in the visual realm. Already we are able in principle to see any sort of image whatsoever. If we so desire, we can also keep large numbers of images in our possession on a computer hard drive. There is no little significance in the fact that, as is so apparent in the case of the ever-increasing functionality of the personal computer, it has become very easy for us not just to preserve but to reproduce, manipulate, and transmit visual information about all sorts of experiences. Our imaginary has been dramatically expanded and accelerated by the media, or extended through “implosion.”
The diversification of methods of mediation has had a number of effects. One of these is the potential impoverishment of content and form. As was clear in the case of the beautiful fighting girls, the narratives in a diversified media environment are surprisingly similar to each other. As I pointed out in chapter 5, there are hundreds of examples of the beautiful fighting girl genre, but only thirteen story lines. From the 1990s on, no new story lines emerged, and new works were simply rearrangements of old ones. In this case at least, we can say that, while the diversification of media may contribute to the outward diversification of the works, we need to be aware of the possibility that it encourages the involution of the genre as a whole.
The more information is exchanged, the more redundancies there are and the more monotonous it becomes . For example, now that communication by personal computer has become the norm, people read and perhaps write enormous amounts of text every day . As a result, we see developing a common “computer style” of writing that is excellent for transmitting information but extremely limited in its capacity for description and definition. The impoverishment of visual information is most evident in the spread of anime-style images.
So what is this about? Increasing the level of detail or rendering movement more subtly in anime would take exponentially more money and time. But of course these luxuries are not always possible. On the other hand, too much abbreviation reduces the images to mere signs and makes for a very dreary representation (like the Saturday morning cartoons in the United States, where the only facial movements are blinking eyes and opening and closing mouths). The solution to the problem in Japan was, I believe, the introduction of the “big eyes and small mouth” that has become the tradition in Japanese anime.
The only parts of a manga that cannot be drawn by assistants are the face, and particularly the eyes, of the main characters. The author’s style appears in its most concentrated form in the facial expression and the eyes. The shortcut technique that resulted from this was to divide up the drawing of the background among assistants and make the characters like simple signs. This made possible the division of labor. Then, to avoid making the characters too much like mere signs, the facial expression, particularly the eyes, and the hands are drawn with great care. Among all the human organs, these occupy the position closest to the grammatical subject. Drawing the eyes and hands with special care has the same value as inserting text. Or, to put it the other way around, as long as the eyes and hands are carefully drawn, the rest can be abbreviated. Then one can add more facial expressions and make them more complex with manpu. This procedure enables the streamlining of the production process while also effectively communicating a wide variety of subtle emotional codes, making it easy for the viewer to identify emotionally. This is likely the origin of the too-large eyes and tiny mouth that Westerners so often point out in Japanese manga and anime. The anime image is the result of a sophisticated technique that enables a maximum of communication with a minimum of lines.
One noticeable trend in recent years, which may have to do mostly with keeping costs down, is that even as the images are drawn with greater and greater sophistication of design and coloration, they tend to move much less. The appearance of movement is skillfully produced by blurring the image, using flashes of lights, and bank sequences [19*. Bank sequences, or Bankukatto, are sequences of animation that can be used repeatedly, such as when a heroine is transforming or assuming a decisive pose.], but on closer inspection there is actually very little movement. The impact of “anime images” results from drawings so refined that this sort of thing no longer appears unnatural. Moreover, because there is no need for the drawings to be particularly intricate, they can be easily digitized, which makes it possible to transfer them into a computer game without altering them. This style of drawing, which is devoid of texture and consists only of fine lines and surfaces, helps smooth the flow of the so-called media mix as the images are transplanted from comics to anime to film, games, figurines, and toys.
The space of manga and anime has introduced easily shareable code systems into our Imaginary. This shareability, in turn, introduces elements of polymorphous perversion into that space. As a result, in the 1980s we first became aware of a very important fact, namely, that even the objects of our sexuality were shareable through the mediation of manga and anime. This realization led to the explosive growth of sexualized images in this space. Of course, the wholesome notion that manga and anime are basically for children exists even now. But even this constraint was converted into a useful technique. Depicting sex in a context that is for children almost inevitably produces undifferentiated, which to say polymorphously perverse, effects. <also, and a much darker scene between the protagonist Utena and the antagonist Akio in the episode The Prince Who Runs Through the Night, a friend pointed this out to me, in terms of what it’s depicting and how True it is. The disassociation and ambivalence that suffuses a traumatic event…>.
To create an autonomous object of desire within the fictional space of manga and anime: was this not the ultimate dream of the otaku? They sought to create fiction not as a stand-in for the “real” sexual object, but fiction that had no need to be secured by reality. For this to work, not even the most elaborately constructed fictional worlds would suffice. In order for fiction to attain its own autonomous reality, it would have to be desired for its own sake. Only then would reality bow down to fiction.
“Fiction” versus “Reality”
Earlier I referred rather casually to the contrast between “fiction” and “reality.” Of course, I do not accept this contrast naively. In fact, it is my belief that everyday reality is itself nothing more than a fiction (or fantasy) and that it is fundamentally impossible to draw a strict distinction between them. One reason that I raise the distinction nonetheless is in order to think once more about “Japan.” The art critic Sawaragi Noi has argued that Japan functions as what he calls a “bad place” and that any act of expression that attempts to escape from that place can only end up by making it worse and getting caught in a vicious circle. If such a place can be hypothesized, it is entirely possible that it could also subsume the place of manga and anime that I have been discussing here. For now I call that space “Japanese space” and contrast it with another unique representational space, which I call “Western space.”
As I pointed out earlier, in Japanese space the distinction between fiction and reality is not completely in effect. The distinction itself is in fact based on a Western idea . **In his theory of ideals Plato begins with a three-part distinction between the ideal, reality, and art, and places art at the bottom of the hierarchy because it is only an imitation of reality. In Plato’s system there is only a series of copies, with the copy of the ideal being reality and the copy of reality being art. Art must content itself with the lowly position of being a copy of a copy, an imitation of an imitation. Added to this is the influence of Judeo-Christian culture, which rejects idolatry. In “Western space,” even today “reality” is made to conform strictly to this ranking. In this context the notion of the “Reality of fiction” is already attenuated by being subjected to all sorts of constraints.
<"But I say to you that whoever looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart" Matthew 5:28.>
For example, in American popular culture the most privileged fiction form is film. To be made into a film is the ultimate proof of the success of any narrative, whether it originates as a novel or a play. Of course, there are any number of reasons for this, but one is surely the belief that live-action film is the most accurate imitation or reproduction of reality. The impact of live-action film is supported by the belief that what it portrays is a faithful reproduction of reality. In my opinion there is absolutely no difference between the fictionality of live-action film and animated ones; it is just that anime is considered more fictional because it is under the constraint of having to be drawn by someone. For this reason animated films have almost no chance of winning the Academy Award for Best Picture and will always remain a genre inferior to film.
Thinking about censorship practices makes this even clearer. Censors in Japanese space seem for the most part uninterested in the symbolic value of what they are censoring. As long as the genitals are not portrayed explicitly, they will allow even the most depraved images to be shown. In Western space, however, images are censored according to their symbolic value. The censors are not interested in the trivial question of whether or not the genitals are visible, but reserve their strictest scrutiny for obscenity and perverse content. A recent example is the cover for Marilyn Manson’s CD Mechanical Animals. In the composite photograph, Manson appears nude as he glares at the viewer, but with the smooth groin and small breasts of a young girl. This level of perversion does not cause the least problem in Japan. But in the United States it create quite a scandal, with several large music stores refusing the carry the album. One could list any number of similar examples of this difference in the way Japanese and Americans judge an image obscene. Of course, even in Japan this sort of taboo on images still lingers when it comes to the Imperial family, but even that is losing the force it once had. In fact, that taboo has become so weak that it would shock even Okuzaki Kenzo. We are now living in an age when it is possible to publish a manga depicting a bomb thrown at Princess Masako during a parade, and the romance between Princess Kiko and Prince Akishino has been made into an anime. In other words, we still do not have the slightest idea what it is that defines depravity.
One conclusion that we can draw from this comparison is that visual expression in Western space is symbolically castrated, while Japanese space there is only imaginary castration, at most. For example, in Western space any image that symbolizes the penis is censored, while in Japanese space as long as you do not portray the penis itself anything goes. In this ironic sense I would suggest that Japanese media enjoy the great freedom of expression. The problem arises with this freedom itself.
In Japanese space, fiction itself is recognized as having its own autonomous reality. As I mentioned earlier, in Western space reality is always in the superior position, and the fictional space is not allowed to encroach on it. Various prohibitions are introduced to establish and maintain this superiority. It is not permitted for example, to produce images depicting sexual perversion. This is because fiction must not be more real (riaru) than reality. Fiction must be carefully castrated so that it does not become too appealing. This is what I mean by symbolic castration.
It is often remarked that the heroines of Western comics and anime are for the most part not very cute. They often include beautiful women and naked bodies, but rarely do they directly represent characters as sexually attractive. This cannot be explained simply as a result of a discrepancy in technical skill or differing notions of beauty. In the case of an actual Hollywood actress, Japanese and American fans are likely to speak in similar ways about her sexual attractiveness. But the situation is very different when it comes to heroines who appear as drawn images. Betty Boop, for example, may be drawn in a sexy outfit (with a garter belt!), but she is more like a parody of a sexy actress. Her fans are not immediately captivated by Betty’s sexual charms.
To continue with our discussion of Western space, we might remember that 1957 saw the creation of the so-called Comics Code Authority that formulated self-regulatory codes for comics in the United States and effectively spelled the end of the golden age of American comics. At the time juvenile delinquency had become a hot-button issue, and comics were singled out as a contributing factor. Among comic fans the formation of the CCA is referred to as the “Total Disaster.” The list of restrictions is as absurdly detailed as the rules at a Japanese high school. A few items that stand out on the list are

• “Divorce shall not be treated humorously nor represented as desirable.”
• “If crime is depicted it shall be as a sordid and unpleasant activity.”
• “In every instance good shall triumph over evil and the criminal punished [sic] for his misdeeds.”
• “Policemen, judges, government officials and respected institutions shall never be presented in such a way as to create disrespect for established authority.”

Under the category of “Marriage and Sex” the code states that “Nudity in any form is prohibited,” “Females shall be drawn realistically without exaggeration of any physical qualities,” “Illicit sex relations are neither to be hinted at nor portrayed,” “Seduction and rape shall never be shown or suggested,” and “Sex perversion or any inference to same is strictly forbidden.” Japanese manga as harmless as Sazae-san and Doraemon might run afoul of these rules. If regulations this strict were in force in Japan, virtually every manga magazine in print would have to be shut down.
It is thus quite possible to analyze the differences between Japan and the United States from the perspective of regulations. But what I want to stress here is that these rules show all the symptoms of an excessive defense reaction. No matter how popular comics had become by the 1950s, they could hardly compete with film. Nevertheless, they were much more severely regulated, to the point of destroying an entire genre of expression. Would it be too much to see in this an echo of what we might call the West’s iconographic taboo? The highly detailed and concrete restrictions on the depictions of sexuality are particularly remarkable. In these restrictions we can clearly see operating the obsessive idea that images themselves must not be sexually attractive.
Pornography must be considered as part of this discussion of the visual expression of sexuality. Pornography, needless to say, prizes images that are realistic and highly practical. In the decline of roman poruno and the rise of adult video, for example, one can see the pursuit of convenience and practicality. Pornographic images trend toward being more suitable for private consumption, reproduction and distribution gets easier, and pornographic expression gets more and more explicit. But in the Japanese space this leads to another contradiction: namely, the existence of “porno comics.” I want to stress once again that I am speaking of pornography in general here, not of “erotic expression.” It is perhaps only in Japan that pornography has taken the form of comic books and attained a certain popularity in doing so. Of course, there are porno comics that are meant to be used as masturbation aids in the West as well, but on a scale that does not even being to compare with that of Japan.
It seems absurd that such an enormous market would emerge for pornographic comics in a country where “hair nudes” are everywhere and people are somewhat bored even of adult videos. As I pointed out earlier, anime-style drawing has been hugely influential in this genre as well. In terms of their correspondence to everyday reality, there is no less realistic style of drawing. Despite this, however, these kinds of representation have been widely preferred as a medium for pornography. This would be entirely unimaginable in Europe or the United States, and the contrast points to a significant cultural difference.
Of course, there is a historical background to this as well. According to Timon Screech of the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, the so-called shunga that were produced in such huge quantities in the Edo period were used by the masses as masturbation aids.
If that is in fact the case, we should also be able to find the roots of manga and anime in the Edo period, in a culture in which sexual desire was both stimulated and satisfied by drawn images. The issue here, needless to say, has something to do with anything like the symbolic expression of eros. The problem that we have arrived at instead is that of the immediacy of the drawn image.
As I have already pointed out, there are many fans of anime and manga in the West. But they are virtually unanimous in their hatred for so-called tentacle porn. They believe that sexuality does not belong in animation. What do Japanese otaku think about this? If they were shown this sort of pornographic work they would either give a wry smile or launch into a lengthy discussion of the history of adult anime using works like Cream Lemon (Kuriimu remon) and Legend of the Overfiend (Urotsukidoji) as examples. I cannot help but see in this difference another huge contrast between Japanese and Western otaku.
Leaving aside the question of whether it is possible to read in this the traces of taboos and repression, for now let us reiterate the minimal facts of which we can be certain. In the Western space of popular culture, it is exceedingly rare to find drawn iconic images of cute little girls and erotic nudes. In that space there is an unconscious censorship of drawn images, and their reality is kept within certain limits. The type of caricatures so conspicuous in Disney’s animations can even be considered as a technique of exaggeration for the purpose of repression. Constant and meticulous efforts are made in this space to prevent drawn images from attaining their own autonomous reality. In other words, drawn images are always kept in the position of being substitutes for objects that exist in reality.
In Japanese space, on the other hand, it is permissible for all sorts of sites to have their own autonomous reality (riariti). In other words, real (riaru ) fictions do not necessarily require the security of reality (genjitsu). There is absolutely no need in this space for fiction to imitate reality. Fiction is able to clear a space around itself for its own reality (riariti ku kan). The appeal of drawn images of little girls, for example, is a crucial element in the production of this reality (riariti). Here, fiction must establish a logic of sexuality all its own. This is because, in Japanese space, sexuality is the most important factor upholding reality (riariti). Of course, this is not true only of anime. Why else, for example, did the artistic traditions of the past put so much emphasis on the depiction of women? Why do rakugo raconteurs spend so much time extolling the pleasures of womanizing? And why do manga instruction courses always begin with how to draw a boy-girl couple? All of these things, which are particular to Japan, suggest that in this space it is sexuality that upholds the reality of fiction (kyoko no riariti).
So let us accept the autonomy of fiction and put forward the thesis that this autonomy is a necessary precondition for the beautiful fighting girl to emerge. If this is the case, we cannot in any sense see in them the reflection of “everyday reality.” It would not be permissible, for example, to infer from the popularity of beautiful fighting girls that girls are being empowered in the real world. It is the stubborn habit of seeing fiction as an imitation of reality, which is hard even for the Japanese to resist, that is at the root of this misunderstanding. The misunderstanding may be logically consistent, but that same logical consistency is also precisely what renders it invalid.
Getting back to our discussion of the image in Japanese space, I repeat that representations in this space do not undergo symbolic castration. There are some gestures toward imaginary castration with regard to sexual codes, but these are barely functional, and in the end they actually come closer to initiating a drive toward the disavowal of castration. The disavowal of castration is of course the initial condition for sexual perversion, which is why this space exhibits such an affinity for perverted objects. All sorts of images come to occupy various positions within this ecosystem of autonomous reality, and the space begins to overflow with meanings rendered through sexual and other codes. In this place, so highly charged with meaning because of this sheer verbosity of codes, context is privileged over any single disarticulated code. Meaning is transmitted instantaneously here, but its provenance can never be traced back to a single code.
This sort of high-context representational space can sometimes lose some of its reality effect if it is circulated too widely and understood too easily. How might it resist this attenuation of reality? One way is, of course, through sexuality. As I have argued several times already, sex is a necessary component for a narrative to seem real. The various struggles and manipulations surrounding sexuality (i.e., “romance”) are what introduce a core of reality into a narrative.
The widespread transgression of sexual limits in Japanese representational culture can also be interpreted in light of the high-context nature of Japanese space. High-context expressive space is, by nature, incapable of making full use of the effects of structural and formal reality. Instead it is the intensities that emerge at moments of shifting and switching from one context to another that are used to create reality effects. In the highest context spaces of anime and manga, most important are those gestures capable of transcending the context of heterosexual desire. The various characteristics of the beautiful fighting girls, which include hermaphorditism, transformation (i.e., accelerated maturation), and the strange mixture of proactivity (i.e., fighting ability) and passivity (i.e., cuteness), all help facilitate the emergence of this transcendental reality. That all manner of perversions should be evoked in their presence is only natural.
[To be continued... The Phallic Girl as a Form of Hysteria]