I sometimes wonder if it might be harder for people who didn’t grow up until after the internet and social media and 24 hour news cycles etc. were a huge part of daily life to understand where Light is coming from with some of his naivete and sheltered ignorance in canon. Speaking from the experience of being a child in the 90s with strict parents who was sent to a very strict private school and surrounded by a very homogenous culture where everybody was pretty similar and had similar backgrounds and worldviews, I just think it was MUCH easier to be kept in a little bubble of ignorance like that in those days. When you’re growing up in those specific circumstances then the only influences you are getting to shape your views are what your family believes and does, what the people at your school believe and do, and whatever other information you’re somehow able to glean by the books you read, the websites you somehow manage to find and visit (though there wasn’t much of any social media to use then, and you might not even have access to a family computer) or the movies and shows you watch (way fewer of those to watch and access easily back then as well).
You couldn’t look up a YouTube video to learn more about a topic, because YouTube didn’t exist. Podcasts weren’t really a thing either, you mostly would be listening to your local radio stations or the CDs that you owned. If your library didn’t have books about a subject or your parents didn’t allow you to take in certain media then you were mostly plum out of luck for learning more about it. And even getting recommendations for things from other people online or learning more about people from other backgrounds and cultures to help you expand your mind wouldn’t be easy because of the lack of social media hubs for people of similar interests to find each other and congregate.
I think a lot about how the death note as a concept for a story could really only be interesting when paired with technology. Ryuk says that Light is the first to write so many names, but he also is coincidentally in the timeframe where information is starting to become more accessible to common people through the internet - if the last death note had been dropped even a few decades earlier, or maybe even centuries earlier, of course no one would/could write as many? How accessible or easy would it have been to look up or find the people you think should die without having to physically seek that information out? How much more inconvenient might it have been if you were limited to names of people you knew or physically associated with, granted that you didn’t get the eyes, and granted you lived in an era that did not have rigorous identification records yet you could conceivably access?
I find it horrifyingly #relatable how Light coming to the decision to kill was paired with him Staring At The TV (“the world can’t go on like this”) cuz it’s something of an entirely unique problem to a blooming modern era of technology to feel entirely overwhelmed by Suddenly Witnessing Everything Bad Happening At Once when individuals did not necessarily have to deal with that mental or emotional overwhelm of having constant informational access no one person had been expected to handle before now. Is the world actually getting more morally deprived as it ages, or does it merely feel like it is when you increasingly have less means to be blissfully ignorant of what’s going on outside of your immediate environment?
Now increasingly after 2010s, we can witness the infuriating circumstances of harm or suffering caused to people halfway around the world we otherwise wouldn’t even know existed. Now, we can feel the overwhelming sense of helplessness, because knowledge begets empathy. It begets a sense you must do something to alleviate that suffering you now have the burden of knowing paired with the curse of little or no conceivable means of acting on in a substantial way:
Until you get a death note. Until the impossible becomes possible when you now know exactly who did what, exactly who is in positions of responsibility to stop or punish them for certain preventable tragedies when they were otherwise untouchable from your distance. But even then, it can become extremely easy to reduce a person’s existence to an abstract concept behind a screen that, if given a means to commit violence without having to physically enact it, is a HORRIFIC COMBO - you don’t have to witness the pain you’re inflicting, you don’t have to perceive someone’s being in the form of the violence you’d normally have to commit against their body. You are basing the worth of someone’s life on nothing but what could have been the lowest, weakest points of their lives without any regard for the truth of their entire self: and you couldn’t always know, when the anonymity and noise of the internet thrives off of outrage and tumult of often confused, misinformed, or ignorant opinion when you’re flooded with just so much info.
The death note as an already deadly weapon is only made infinitely deadlier by the era it is dropped in. I very much think Light Yagami’s goal or psyche could likely only be conceived as a direct product of his time, and the relationship between the two is something I find fascinating underexplored territory in terms of DN’s timeframe: whether Light is someone still in a era of that sheltered ignorant bubble, or if he were instead right at the cusp of when that bubble could evolve and eventually pop.
If you have seen Ted Lasso you may have noticed these unusual microphones used by the football commentators.
Despite being a microphone nerd, I had never seen anything like them before. So I decided to go into research mode and discovered these microphones are quite fascinating.
They are called “Lip-Ribbon” or “Commentator’s” microphones.
They were specially designed by the BBC in the 1950s for extremely noisy environments. Soccer Football stadiums have peaked at 130 decibels so they needed something that would not get overwhelmed in that circumstance.
They use several very clever techniques to make sure only the voice is picked up and everything else is rejected.
First, they use a bidirectional polar pattern.
That means it will accept sound from two directions, but reject any sound coming in from the sides. And since the diaphragm is only exposed on one side, that helps reject sound coming from the other direction.
Next, the microphone is not very sensitive so you literally have to hold it up to your lips (hence “lip-ribbon”) in order for your voice to have enough sound energy to vibrate the diaphragm.
That top part rests directly on your lip and there is a little pop filter to keep your plosives in check.
There is a built-in high pass filter so it rejects any sound below the frequencies typically used by the human voice.
But my favorite trick… a labyrinthian internal baffle system.
(I found a diagram of this when researching but then I lost the tab and I cannot find it again. So you’ll just have to accept this crude photoshop I did in 30 seconds to help you understand.)
Sound is energy. And that energy is diminished the farther it travels. The inverse square law for sound states that the intensity of sound decreases by approximately 6 dB for each doubling of distance from the sound source. Sound also diminishes when it reflects off a surface.
That is a very sciency way of saying… make sounds go through a tiny maze and only sounds with the most energy will prevail.
So if you have your lip pressed up against the front of the mic, your voice’s energy will make it through the labyrinth of baffles without issue. But every other sound in the stadium will have a much harder time getting through.
These mics may even be vuvuzela-proof.
And even more amazing… this microphone was designed in the 1950s and they have yet to create anything better for incredibly noisy environments.
A few facts for you as we contemplate all things [sub]marine today:
- more than 600 people, many of them Afghans and Pakistanis, may have drowned in the Mediterranean last week after Greek authorities allegedly chose not to intervene when they encountered the vessel in distress to avoid the politically toxic spectacle of allowing so many migrants ashore.
- $250,000 in the right hands could arrange asylum for up to 12 refugees or, alternatively, support an Afghan family for about 80 years.
first day as a second century warlord i have my men tie branches to their horses’ tails to stir up dust and make it look like there’s a lot of us but i forget it just rained so there isn’t any dust and the enemy can clearly see there’s like twenty of us all spread out in a line
second day as a second century warlord i bribe a bunch of kids to start singing a nursery rhyme i carefully crafted to spread misinformation and further my strategic ends but they change the lyrics to be about poop and the enemy isn’t misdirected at all
third day as a second century warlord i lure my enemy into a narrow valley and send a team of archers to shoot them from the high ground but there was a feral hog napping on the trail up to the overlook and they couldn’t decide whether to try and shoot it or just go around and by the time the hog woke up and left on its own the enemy had already passed safely below
fourth day as a second century warlord we attempt to join a battle on the side of the guy we want to ally with but he and the guy he’s fighting have really similar names and it’s finally dusty and i misread the standards and attack the wrong guy. so now we’re stuck with this total loser of a liege lord, because how the fuck do you explain that after a battle?
fifth day as a second century warlord and some sort of wizard wanders into camp, my loser liege lord wants to execute him for being a wizard but i convince him to let the wizard stay, because i want to do more weather-based strategies and i’m pretty sure having a camp wizard can help with that. after the welcome to the team banquet the wizard steals half the treasury and my liege lord’s wife and leaves
sixth day as a second century warlord my loser liege lord sends me to reinforce a city he’s taken, but in the confusion of leaving i forgot to take the token that would have gotten us into the city, so my men have to wait outside the city walls for like eight hours while i ride back to get it
seventh day as a second century warlord and my loser liege lord finally joins me in the city, it turns out he’s actually a pretty cool guy, and he isn’t even that mad at me for letting the wizard steal his wife. i decide to shoot my shot but i’m really nervous and keep on stalling because what if i mess up our relationship and by extension jeopardize the security of my men, and eventually he just says goodnight and goes back to his room, where an assassin is in the process of setting up to kill him
eighth day as a second century warlord and my loser liege lord tells me to fake defect to his rival warlord, the one i originally wanted to ally with, to find out if he was the one who sent the assassin and why. but my whole way over to the rival warlord i’m worried that this has something to do with the wizard thing or how awkward i made it last night
End of Part 1 This comic was made independently from the creator, I’m just a fan and these are my own interpretations. Notes under the cut:
if you want me to consume a new media you MUST catch me at the exact moment when the stars are aligned and the air pressure is equal to the current degree of the sun’s peak against the horizon and all the cosmic energies are perfectly unified (aka my old interest is fading out) or i will nod and say “im adding that to my list!” Knowing theres no chance i will check it out
“unless its a book!” “unless you tell me it has gay people in it!” “this but only for live action shows” “theres a good chance i’ll get to it eventually” no wrong this post is not for you this post is ONLY for bitches who could have a treasured friend recommend them something that sounds grown in a lab to be your personal catnip and, with no choice in the matter, immediately know it will never be the right time to watch/read/listen to it
Take Grater Divide, 2002. The work is ridiculous: a standing metal cheese grater more than six feet high. Installed in a gallery, it works as a room divider, but the holes make privacy impossible. The wall is a weapon rather than a shield: A person undressing behind it could be cut as well as peeped at, opened up by sharp edges made for shredding. The work is not only an enlargement of a grater, however, but also a miniaturization of a divide, prototyping, in particular, the West Bank barrier Israel had begun to construct on appropriated Palestinian land. A person traveling through a border checkpoint may be asked to undress—strip searches are not prohibited by Israeli law. In the United States, they have been allowed ever since the 1985 Supreme Court case United States v. Rosa Elvira Montoya de Hernandez, which originated with the cavity search of Hernandez, who was traveling to Los Angeles from Colombia. In both countries, the coercive invasion of bodies is more likely to be visited on people of color, who are disproportionately singled out for selective or heightened “screening.” This word’s very meaning is reframed, or enlarged, by the Grater Divide. Gloria Anzaldúa, the queer Chicana theorist of Borderlands/La Frontera (1987), called the United States–Mexico border an “open wound” where “the Third World grates against the first and bleeds.” All borders are graters: not solid walls but permeable ones whose pores are sharpened to pierce what passes through.
one of my personal favorite dichotomies in atla is how iroh, once the top strategist and highest-ranking general of the fire nation, now directs all his energy and considerable tactical experience towards attempting to keep his teenage nephew from throwing himself into life-threatening situations AND IROH REGULARLY FAILS TO PREVENT HIM FROM DOING SO.
he lead a six-hundred day siege and now iroh can’t keep up with a sixteen-year-old armed with two swords and a passionate deathwish. zuko’s motto is “act first, think never” and he’s running rings around his uncle. it’s like!!! who’s gonna come out on top, iroh’s west point education vs. zuko’s deep and abiding commitment to always choosing the stupidest possible course of action, and zuko manages to win every single time
y'all are straight up EVISCERATING that boy in the tags
Not to downplay just how committed to self destructive stupidity Zuko is, but Iroh still managed to keep him alive and in one piece. He lost literally every battle but he won that war.
Not to step on the knife, but also figuratively losing every fight as long as it means the child who is like a son to him is alive is the exact opposite of literally winning every battle and losing his son which is what he did when he was young so that’s probably why he keeps so chill 90% of the time around the Zukoness of it all.
Stepping on the knife? Reading that was stepping on a RAKE made of FEELINGS and being SIDESHOW BOBBED by my own EMOTIONS
