[Community Organised!] February 2014: - Ferdielance

The MotM is an interview that the team does at the end of each month. It's a fun way of finding out about respected members of the community.

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Gumpei
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Re: MotM February 2014: Ferdielance

Post by Gumpei »

That's understandable, but there's always going to be SOME overlap in the general problems with fiction in various mediums since similar kinds of people make these things. Not that I'm disputing it as a problem, it's just unsurprising that it exists here as well.
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Re: MotM February 2014: Ferdielance

Post by Bad Player »

Tsk tsk, you wormed your way out of the manga question! So, do you read more manga than Death Note, or watch any anime? (Anything by Kaitani Shinobu, Nobuyuki Fukumoto, or Naoki Urasawa?)
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Re: MotM February 2014: Ferdielance

Post by Ami »

Congrats!
Wolf Speaker wrote:I loved this. I do think that asking the same questions all the same gets a bit dull. It's nice that not all interviews would have the same structure.

I'm glad someone pointed out how bad AAO is with original female characters in general. I mean, first of all, I can only think of a single original female main character of a case. There aren't even that many cases starring canon female characters. And female OCs usually give off the feel that they were created explicitly and solely for a very specific role in the trial. Actually, I suppose how 'fixed' and unnatural characters are treated bothers me in general. You usually always have some idea of what role a character will play in the he mystery, which isn't my favourite thing. But back to female characters... There doesn't seem to be many of them who are touted as geniuses or legends, in fan cases. I mean, that wouldn't usually be a big deal, but AA/AAO stories tend to introduce a 'zomgsuperskilledlegendaryprodigyprosecutor' or something similar pretty often. This might be influenced by AA canon, but... eh. I guess the main problem is just how female characters often aren't an integral part to the story the same way other characters are. I mean, even in Turnabout Tomorrow, which I loved, the female prosecutor (I forgot her name whoops) wasn't really part of the same crowd as the other characters, and she wasn't related to the plot. Now, that can be interesting, except her character wasn't really written to her full potential, and DWaM even admitted that he wasn't sure where to go or what to do with her. I seem to see a lot of female characters in the same situations and roles, too... I just think AAO needs to work on its female characters. (Although, personally I'd like to see the community work on its characters in general...)

Well, I have no doubt some will think of me as a silly sjw maniac due to what I just typed. :p But oh well. What you said just suddenly made me want to discuss it. On other topics... What is your favorite language, Ferdie? Why? And are there any languages that you'd like to learn in the future?


Ferdie, Wolf? You're awesome. Incoming rant.

As for the quoted above, this is why Ami and Victoria was perfect to be in the fangames that never really got off the ground. >__> I try to put Ami's tropes into that of anything one would normally write for a male, and then just put Ami's sarcastic spin on it. She's a person first, and the traits flow from that, not the other way around. I think that while it happens disproportionately to female characters (and of fewer to choose from) than male characters, it happens a lot. Just look at any soon-to-fail weekday lineup show on basic cable: everyone are made up of traits first, personalities second. While I find Big Bang Theory has its funny parts, that's my main problem with the show: they're geeks first, characters second. Furthermore, there's a huge under-representation of female gay characters, which is why Ami and Tori are usually in a relationship when they're in the same work. Back when they started, I'll admit that it was mostly just "flirty one and shy one", but they've grown a lot from that- and I make sure not to over-sexualize. It's hard to describe them in an abridged way without using traits, but... Ami is forward, and blunt- to a fault- but she is far from a gadfly (when in non-supernatural sci-fi settings... when IN those fantasy settings, she tends to be a little wackier), respecting her version of honesty in others, and tends to have an ego. While her ego is more than deserved in anything she's in, she has the problem most smart people do: the compulsion to exercise it at every single juncture. Victoria is more self-assured in her success and intellect, and is much quieter as a result. She's not shy, she just doesn't have all that much to say at any given time- so her terse, yet eloquent nature allows her a large audience whenever she speaks. And neither are sexual objects, but sexual subjects: both act on their desires instead of being simply characters that exist to be available. That's why whenever they're /not/ together in works, their stories aren't entirely about dating (though I do tend to gravitate towards romantic subplots because I'm dumb), and when they are, it's never "oh I hope they notice me, I'll just sit here and be pretty", it's "hey, wanna go out? No? Okay, later." Furthermore, I never (try, I've probably failed at this somewhere at least once) have the other characters react to their personalities as "lol women". Ami's anger towards people isn't that she is "difficult" or "bossy", but a frustration at a world that doesn't meet her ideals of blunt honesty, wit, and most of all tends to not give her the recognition she wants (though at times, she is abrasive). How many times have we seen that with male characters, but it's mentioned as I've put it- but when it's a woman, she's got to be "frustrated". >=/ Nor is Ami here to help you with her problems because of her free spirit. She's not the manic pixie girl to solve all problems, though it's perhaps because of her sometimes wacky tendencies that she causes problems for herself and those around her. It's like all the qualities that make Bender (Futurama, Breakfast Club, take your pick) an endearing rogue that does cause damage in their wake, we'd take that into the female character as just "free spirited", and everything she does is treated with a wink and a nod.

This is why every female character I write in my zombie comic (that was stalled thanks to Sai not being free and the free trial blocking access to files) has a purpose and brings something to the group in terms of usefulness in survival situations and battle- and their personalities, body types, ages are all over the place.

But back to the point: there are few strong AA characters in both canon and fanon that are female. Most of them tend to be only useful in certain situations (Maya, Trucy, Ema), Franziska is a genius that never wins when she's around (Heck, the only case she would have won IS TAKEN FROM HER by a gunshot wound to the shoulder), and is constantly put in her place by the strong men, and Athena is the only female lead character that has much agency in a LONG time, the other being Mia.

Though I would disagree with one thing in all this: I think that sometimes the characteristics are there (not necessarily for AA fan cases, I've not played many of the recent ilk), but there's a staunch defining of the female "label". When a man is forward, he's "cool", but when a woman is, she's a "slut". When a man is in command and shouting at his men, he's "a commanding leader, if a bit of a jerk", but when it's a woman? "Little miss bossy that thinks she runs things". Sexy women are also "sluts", thin women are "anorexic" (not to say that some aren't, but there is skinny shaming), fat women are almost invariably "depressed" or "funny" or both (actually saw a Lifetime movie trailer that had the line that went something like "You're fat, either be funny or b***y, you can't be both").

So it's hard to have a female character that's anything because that's "stock woman". Y'know what, if a character is flirty, they're flirty! Now, when a character is only defined by two or three traits, yeah- that's where we run into problems. But characters are many traits! A tomboy can have girly tendencies, the smart business woman can be a hardline beer drinker, an attractive woman can be *gasp* awkward or even (dare I say it) asexual not sexually available to male and female characters- whether it's because she's focusing on other things in her life, or is even (the dreaded) asexual. It's why when someone tries to present a female character in general, she's going to be scrutinized because she's either a grossly offensive stereotype or not feminist enough for some arbitrary reason or another. This is a no-win situation for women- fictional or not.


... Though as for AAO culture being insular, I can see that. Though I do think it was funny that Ferdie complains about such hard focuses on Umineko and Dangan Ronpa and they instantly switch the conversation to one of the other budding influences of AAO: Hatoful.
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Re: MotM February 2014: Ferdielance

Post by SwagmaWampyr »

Vera Night (CHEW)

From what I've heard, at least. Nothing but praise for the character although I didn't even know she was in Burial until the OC awards.
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Re: MotM February 2014: Ferdielance

Post by Wolf Speaker »

The thing where characters that demonstrate certain traits are immediately placed into stock archetypes is a thing that's found a lot in anime, actually. Like.... that's pretty much what's going on with the forms of moe, like 'tsundere', 'yandere', the 'ojou', etc. It doesn't help that most characters used for moe are female. This kind of thing actually very nearly stops and prevents development altogether. There are even physical traits associated with these archetypes now, which goes to show you just how much it can limit your characters.

I wouldn't quite say this is a problem on AAO, which I think tries to imitate AA's way of giving all characters a certain quirk. In a way, this problem applies to all characters, not just female ones. The problem asides from that is that the female characters are usually not given the crucial roles in a story except for the ones typically imagined, so they get less development and you can do less interesting things with them. I'd like to see how an AAO trial would look like if we turned all the men into women and vice versa. That could be fun. As things stand, most fan cases don't even pass the Bechdel test. Which is... pretty disappointing.

I think we should stop taking up Ferdie's MotM space for this discussion, though. xP That is, unless Ferdie wants to join in. Otherwise we're deviating slightly off topic.
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Re: MotM February 2014: Ferdielance

Post by Bad Player »

Wolf Speaker wrote:As things stand, most fan cases don't even pass the Bechdel test. Which is... pretty disappointing.
I don't want to get into the whole feminism debate, but I just want to say that I don't think the Bechdel test is very good to apply to fancases. Most fancases follow the attorney from start to end, and then a fair number of them use Nick or Polly as the attorney, so... the game basically has no room to pass the Bechdel test at all, simply because the only "viable" female attorney from the canon games is dead. Of course, just because the main character/attorney is a man doesn't mean you can't have compelling female characters. (Not that many fangames do... Basically, because of the structure of the fangames and general resources available, I don't feel like the Bechdel test is a good indicator of anything in terms of fancases, although that isn't to say they don't have their problems... (There's also a question of how much you extend the discussion of a "man"; if the victim is male, does talking about the murder count as talking about a man?))


On-topic: Ferdie, musical tastes?
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Re: MotM February 2014: Ferdielance

Post by Gav »

Going off BP (congrats by the way!): Favorite musical?
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Re: MotM February 2014: Ferdielance

Post by E.D.Revolution »

Congrats, Ferdielance.
There are a few questions I want to ask.
  1. What kind of biology (or biological topics) do you like to teach? What are some topics that you have to teach but don't like teaching?
  2. What can you say to people who are thinking about taking up a Biology major? I did read an article that pure Bio majors have a hard time getting jobs after college due to the topic being too broad and the skills of those majors are not defined.
  3. You said something about insularity. Could you extend that to AAO (besides certain references)?
-------------------------

Suggestions for the team:
  • Have a set of topics to mainly hit upon. It's alright to get into other topics, but there should be a focus on the interview. Look at how news organizations do it.
  • Stream of consciousness doesn't work in an interview. Likewise, an interview is not a chatroom. This interview reads a lot like a chatroom log. See the last point on why it reads like one.
  • Cut out some of the material that doesn't add to the interview. This one was a huge block of text with a lot of unnecessary chatter.
  • Need to differentiate between who's talking. On any online interview, the interviewer (And his/her question) is always bolded while the interviewee is in regular text. Meph and Tap did their signature color as interviewer.
  • Introductions are a must. Pretend a totally new person is reading this and doesn't know who this person is.
  • As Tap mentioned, work on the presentation of it. If there's distinct topics, separate the parts of the interview. This is probably why it reads like a chatroom log instead of an interview.
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Re: MotM February 2014: Ferdielance

Post by Ferdielance »

Okay, question-answering time!
1. Do you prefer sushi with wasabi and/or soy sauce?
2. Least favourite character out of all AA games?
3. Why?
4. Favourite colour?
5. Favourite AA case?
6. Least favourite AA case?
7. Least favourite colour?
8. Favourite character out of all AA games?
9. Faaaavourite type of mushroom?
10. Favourite bird in Hatoful?
11. Favourite or favorite? (HINT: Your personal preference doesn't matter. It's always the one with the u. True story.)
1. Both, yes.

2.
Spoiler : DD spoilers :
Florent L'Belle.
3.
Spoiler : DD spoilers :
Well, it wasn't enough to portray the gay/ambiguously effeminate dude as "freaky", like Armstrong - now they had to make him a one-dimensional villain? A villain whose character design is based on Klaus Nomi?
4. Ultraviolet.

5. 1-4.

6. 2-3 gets a lot of justified flak, but at least it was memorable! AAI-2 was pretty forgettable. The "plane that is not really a plane in any way relevant to the case, except for one or two details" was disappointing, the villain was dull, and the secondary characters so-so.

7. Neon anything, unless on a living organism.

8. Ema Skye.

9. Ophiocordyceps. Look it up... or don't! Actually, don't unless you have a strong tolerance for the bizarre!

10. Nageki, once we take the sequel into account. Without the sequel, I guess it's Ryouta or Shuu.

11. American spelling.

---
If somebody came to you for advice on how to plan their AAO trial, what would you tell them?
Leave plenty of time for thorough testing, no matter what you do, and don't get too ambitious for your own good! Consider the situation from your player's point of view, and try to work backwards from the key scenes you want to see in your case. Every single puzzle requires both setup and payoff. When in doubt, be clear rather than cryptic!

---
On other topics... What is your favorite language, Ferdie? Why? And are there any languages that you'd like to learn in the future?
Human language or programming language? I like Python and Lua, but there's a special place in my heart for Scheme/LISP, which I learned as an undergrad. I would like to get better at Python or Lisp. In terms of human languages, I want to learn Chinese properly; I started, but never got far due to lack of time. I should probably improve my Spanish first, though.

----
Tsk tsk, you wormed your way out of the manga question! So, do you read more manga than Death Note, or watch any anime? (Anything by Kaitani Shinobu, Nobuyuki Fukumoto, or Naoki Urasawa?)
Not as much as I used to! But that reminds me that I need to make time to finish Monster someday. The manga that got me into manga was Tokyo Babylon, and, in spite of its problems, there's still a special place in my heart for it.

---
I think we should stop taking up Ferdie's MotM space for this discussion, though. xP That is, unless Ferdie wants to join in. Otherwise we're deviating slightly off topic.
I'm glad the discussion is happening! My own thoughts were stated in the interview, I think, but to be clearer: it's not a problem, in my eyes, for female characters to be flawed. The problem is when they're defined solely by one or two flat stereotyped traits, as I think Ami has gotten at.

----
On-topic: Ferdie, musical tastes?
I tend to love lyrics more than music, for whatever reason! I suppose I'm just more verbal? I like Gilbert and Sullivan operettas and some musicals, but only the ones with particularly sharp writing, and I tend to favor lyrics that show deliberate craft. Whether we're talking about hip-hop ("A child is born with no state of mind, blind to the ways of mankind") or Noel Coward ("We are spirited, carefully filleted souls."), lyrics make a song for me.

---
1. What kind of biology (or biological topics) do you like to teach? What are some topics that you have to teach but don't like teaching?
2. What can you say to people who are thinking about taking up a Biology major? I did read an article that pure Bio majors have a hard time getting jobs after college due to the topic being too broad and the skills of those majors are not defined.
3. You said something about insularity. Could you extend that to AAO (besides certain references)?
1. I like to teach all biology. I dislike teaching any biology I am not interested in. This would be pretty much none of it! Now, I don't care for pure, brute-force memorization (LEARN EVERY BONE IN THE BODY BY NAME), but I find ways to work around that and put the facts to learn in a practical context! So if I don't want to teach something, I turn it into something I want to teach.

2. It's good to have a specialty for that reason! Do you particularly like genetics? Developmental bio? Neuro? The best way to find out is to do work for a lab over a summer on a real research project. Just make sure you have intellectual involvement, and aren't just a glass-washer.

3. Yes. AAO is strangely split-off from other Ace Attorney fandom sites, but also from the community of game designers in general. So we don't see as much cross-pollination from, say, the text adventure community or the indie games community as I'd like! There's a "closed clubhouse" atmosphere, at times, which was exacerbated by a string of very hard, high-profile cases. Because some of the better cases also assume some familiarity with mystery tropes and a punishing difficulty level, they're not accessible to most AA fans!

I'm not saying that AAO cases or authors should play to the crowd. But it would be nice to draw from a broader pool of people and sources. But we grow to take these barriers for granted. "Need to use Firefox," "need to be willing to cope with reference X or Y," etc.

-----
Going off BP (congrats by the way!): Favorite musical?
If we ignore light operas (Ruddigore!), I'd say My Fair Lady. Boring choice, but there you go.

---
"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"
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Re: MotM February 2014: Ferdielance

Post by Evo »

Congratulations, Ferdie!
Bad Player wrote:
Wolf Speaker wrote:As things stand, most fan cases don't even pass the Bechdel test. Which is... pretty disappointing.
I don't want to get into the whole feminism debate, but I just want to say that I don't think the Bechdel test is very good to apply to fancases. Most fancases follow the attorney from start to end, and then a fair number of them use Nick or Polly as the attorney, so... the game basically has no room to pass the Bechdel test at all, simply because the only "viable" female attorney from the canon games is dead. Of course, just because the main character/attorney is a man doesn't mean you can't have compelling female characters. (Not that many fangames do... Basically, because of the structure of the fangames and general resources available, I don't feel like the Bechdel test is a good indicator of anything in terms of fancases, although that isn't to say they don't have their problems... (There's also a question of how much you extend the discussion of a "man"; if the victim is male, does talking about the murder count as talking about a man?))
As long as you have a female protagonist, assistant, prosecutor or judge and one female witness (and that's not really balanced yet), it should be easy to have them talk to each other once during the whole case ...
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Re: MotM February 2014: Ferdielance

Post by kwando1313 »

Unagi? Or anago?

Also, favourite book and why?
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Re: MotM February 2014: Ferdielance

Post by Blackrune »

What's the story behind your name?
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Re: MotM February 2014: Ferdielance

Post by Ami »

Did someone say Gilbert and Sullivan!? =D

I went to see Iolanthine a year or two back. It as... disappointing. One, I can almost never understand what sopranos sing at any time. I find this to be the greatest flaw of most classical musicals. Then they really half-assed modernizing the play. Like, they did the entrance of the queen at the beginning (like they had to apparently have an actor be the queen of England to- guess what? Sit there and do nothing), and the lyrics and such stayed the same- but apparently a shepherd is carrying a rake, they take out a freakin' iPad for certain parts, and the shepherd and politican's daughter carry freakin' cell phones.


More questions:

- How do you feel about AA:DD's Thought Route? I honestly thought it was a more linear version of the Climax Inference in Dangan Ronpa. I myself feel ambivalent due to genres and how things progress in the story in terms of climax. Ace Attorney is very much a mystery game, but it's also courtroom-based, as it's the central theme. Otherwise, it'd be Phoenix at crime scenes and the police kindly agree to switch suspects. In Perry Mason, Law & Order (and SVU when it still gave a crap about the courtroom side of things), and in any court episode (for example, Everybody Hates Chris), the climax is a legal trick, a battle of wits against not only the culprit and prosecutor, but against the rules of the court itself. This is what made some cases TRULY great. Like in 1-2, it's the first case (though not emphasized as much than in T&T and AJ) that you don't have any evidence that can nail the bad guy in any meaningful way. But then the list starts to be read off, and Blue loses the crowd and influence. They set up the world of court rules (three day trials, burden of proof on the defense, relationship of detective and prosecutor) within the first game, and they're very important to the gameplay. Whether it's getting around rules of evidence and using things such as guilty knowledge as evidence itself (4-1, 3-3, 3-2), finding ways to make evidence relevant (1-5), creating situations where the culprit WANTS to confess (2-4, 4-3) or just finding that one piece of evidence that puts the screws to the culprit (most cases), it's always the last, all-or-nothing gamble that ultimately wins the day. That last OBJECTION! that makes what was built up so satisfying.

Instead, Thought Route tends to be quite linear in what it wants you to do, and holds your hand quite a lot. The choices are fairly obvious, and it's rare you have to dig through evidence for it. But here's where it hits me the most: it doesn't fit in a court room. In Ace Attorney, in the shows I've mentioned above, the final blow is more of a "j'accuse!" rather than what Thought Route tends to be. To quote Adrian Monk, "Here's what happened...", is the format of detective shows and games. The process of deduction is what is essentially done in the "trials" of Dangan Ronpa, and what any most-of-the-story Sherlock, Hercule Poirot, Father Brown, Psych, Monk, CSI: Whatevers, Professor Layton, Kinadichi, Case Closed, etc. does. There's an investigation, the main body of the work, then there's some sort of deliberation where the main detective and the other sidekicks (ranging from your Lestrades, to your Gal Fridays) discuss the case, and then there's the breakthrough and/or ah-ha! moment, where the detective figures it out. Then comes the "Here's what happened".

SO, to do the original comparison. In Dangan Ronpa, which I consider more detective in court despite the trial themes, your character is essentially "the detective", and everyone else are various Watsons. They may bring clues to the case, but they can't solve it. Through arguing, they do the discussion/deliberation, and the "Here's what happened" is the final blow: not any sort of manipulation of the rules, culprit, and such, as that's already been done. This is where the pieces are put together for the Watsons (as is the role of the Watson to be the surrogate of the audience that hasn't caught on yet).

In Ace Attorney, the gameplay lends itself more to a few extra steps. By the time you hit the final court date, you've already got the culprit, but they go "prove it". So, your goal isn't just to simply solve the case, but the goal is to do so in a way that leads the court to the same conclusion. And so while there are elements of the case not yet solved (to create more dramatic tension), the methods to nabbing the culprit are altogether thematically and structurally different.

Your thoughts on this line of thought?




- Opinions on the following:
* Baccano!
* Psych
* Starkid musicals (Little White Lie, the A Very Potter Musical Trilogy, Twisted: The Untold Tale of a Royal Vizier, Holy Musical B@man!, etc.)



- Speaking of 5-2...
Spoiler : AA:DD Spoilers :
* What do you think about the localization starting to bite itself in the ass, so to speak? Clearly this is Japan. It could only be more Japan if Athena were wearing a schoolgirl uniform... ohwait. But yeah- at what point does localization actively hinder the work, like here? Because they take up SO MUCH TIME going "yup, those are immigrants. We're totally in America".

* Florent L'Belle is offensive, and I won't argue that fact. But wasn't Armstrong a victim of circumstance, and not evil? Furthermore, we've had "the fop" villain more times than that- Kristoph Gavin, Redd White, Matt Engarde, so why does Florent get special mention on top of all of them? The only one that I can think of that somewhat counters that are the positive "effeminate" characters Edgeworth and Klavier, and the much more sympathetic Damon Gant (a man who felt powerless top stop crime, so went to extreme measures, and actually takes his punishment with a measure of dignity). Not to say that Klavier and Edgeworth suddenly erase the alarming homophobic, transphobic, fat shaming, slut shaming, gender cap, misogyny, etc., but after my initial response of being offended, I wonder why I, too, was more offended by Florent than others.


- You say that AAO is insular, and therefore detached from the main fandom. However, on Court-Records (DISCLAIMER: THIS IS STILL A NICE PLACE IF YOU KNOW WHERE TO LOOK), I've noticed that it's not nearly as active as it used to be. There are a multitude of reasons for this. For one, CRM moved, and the forum games were taken away, and that ticked off users. Then there's the natural gap between AA games that can explain activity drops (if you haven't been to a site in a couple of years, you may be able to forget about it, or may feel too intimidated to return). There's also the fact that AAO regulates behavior a little more closely than CR- which has led to some issues amongst its own members, and the community there can seem rather insular due to how abrasive it can be at times.

- How could AAO broaden their inclusiveness? I mean, we obviously can't have the anime-hating, Japan-loathing (almost as if they don't like the fact that some video games even are produced from there) something awful crowd, as we have (gasp) roleplayers, and (horror!) people that like anime, and (oh, the humanity!) sometimes occasionally reference tropes in Japanese media. We could intensify the fetishization of gay relationships, which clearly fuels a good chunk of the Ace Attorney fanbase, but that might bring in the really intense fujoshi that rabidly and fanatically defend their ships to the exclusion of anyone else that doesn't share their fanatacism. We could put on shades and use the word XTREME a lot, but this isn't the 90's.

Really, the only way to get more people into this insular group is to have some sort of recruitment drive. Have people here go out to other AA fansites and basically befriend people for the sole purpose of recruiting them, but that seems very dishonest and unethical.


- Coke has recently come under fire by homophobes and racists for the commercial that had multilingual rendition of America the Beautiful (which is NOT our national anthem, contrary to apparently popular belief) and (oh, my stars!) a gay couple in it for like a fraction of a second (DUN DUN DUNNNN). Thoughts?


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Wolf Speaker
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Re: MotM February 2014: Ferdielance

Post by Wolf Speaker »

Something I've been curious about: how exactly does Chinese seem to a foreign newcomer? Is it really overwhelming? Is it hard? What sort of impression does it give? Did you like it? Oh, and how far did you get before you stopped?
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Re: MotM February 2014: Ferdielance

Post by KruskaTheLizard »

Congratulations Ferdie.



yes that's the whole point of this post i don't have any questions.
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