And now I present to you James B. Madonna and the Reverend Dr. William J. Eisenman. There were a lot of Palestinians. Well, there were too many, let's put it that way, Muslim Americans celebrating on 9-11 in the United States. That's it, period, without putting a specific number on it. But the story did not suggest that thousands were observed celebrating or that the reports of such a scene were true. They were true and it was a great deal celebrating. Other accounts from that time concluded the allegations were unfounded. Oh gosh. Kavaleski has arthrogiposis. Arthogiposis. Hey Kavaleski, I saw the celebrating with my own eyes.  Stop covering it up. A congenital condition that restricts joint movement in his speech Trump cited the 2001 story written by a nice reporter and went on, now the poor guy, you ought to see this guy. I don't know what I said. I don't remember. He's going like, I don't remember. With the hand, with the claw. On Thursday, Trump posted a statement on his Twitter saying that I have no idea who Kavaleski is. Oh my gosh. No idea. Trouble is he's still getting away with these things. It's like, I think they learned it all from Ronald Reagan when he used to say, I don't well, I don't recall. They learned it from Goebbels. Goebbels didn't recall either? Goebbels said telling the lie, make it a big lie and people will believe you. So if I keep on saying over and over again that this crown has magical powers and whoever touches it will be like Rumpelstiltskin, I mean, or no, King Midas and everything will turn to gold and everything.  And if you die, Rumpelstiltskin. If you die. Yeah.  And this story was heard by younger people. It will be carried on. That's correct. It will become a legend. Hey, I thought the Holy Grail was this golden chalice with gems around it because that's how Hollywood portrayed the Holy Grail.  Well, obviously, that's why Jesus and the Apostles had to get money from other people to support themselves. Well, I'm sure. Because they didn't have golden gems. Well, I'm sure Jesus' cup was not ordinary looking like my thermos cup. I'm sure it was nicer than this. It had to be. It was Jesus drinking out of it. So. Come on, come on. The multitudes did not know Jesus was Jesus at that particular time. So it might have been an ordinary cup. He even told his followers and et cetera when he healed people and told the people, don't say anything about this. And don't tell anyone, I am the Christ, the Messiah. Could you imagine how he would freak out today worried about somebody putting, filming his visits and putting it on YouTube and worried about it going viral like if Jesus was here today. Oh, no, no, no, no videos, no videos. Oh, please, don't put it on YouTube. Because you know why? Because it would have hurried his death and it would have also brought about the personality cult. Well, Kings at that time and his work. The royal family, the biggest welfare cheats whoever lived, the royal family, except for the Republican Congress, the royal family, they were very paranoid about losing their position of power. Is that correct? Anybody was rich. Very paranoid.  Is that the right money?  Apio? No, down south, not Arizona. Oh, yeah? Oh, so he's like really freaking out. Yeah. My name's not the only one, of course, down there. Maybe it's like Mandingo when the white, when the white female slave owner used to grab the, used to test out the black guys by grabbing them by the crotch before she purchased the male slave. That's true. The Bible does not like that. Oh, you mean the mixing of the racist?   Oh, jeez. I read the Bible about 150 times. Well, how do people end up copulating if nobody grabs anybody? Not that woman. A woman, you know, in battle or things of that nature. Not a lover.  Oh, jeez. Well, it sounds like...  Or to breed so that the massa don't have to buy slaves anymore and have his own. He would want his own wife to get pregnant by one of the slaves. No, breed to other black men.  I'm talking about the movie Mendingo where the white woman was testing the shlong. But that's not why the guy buys a breeding slave. Oh, you mean they separated the breeding slave? Oh, yeah, they did do that. They did select the breeding. And Jimmy the Greek Snyder was right. It's just that... They wanted hard workers, man. Hard workers. It's just that you couldn't say that in American media at the time. You can't say it now. But he said it wrongly. I know.  The way he said it, he didn't put it in a scientific way. Thank you.  Excuse me?  He also accused President Obama of living in a fantasy land. Oh gee, the guy that came around and helped him out after a storm Sandy were stronger than a storm. Oh, he forgot about that.  I don't know yet. The balloon boy. Okay. This raised my level of concern about the electorate in the United States. The voting public seems to embrace rather than reject the urban street language used by presidential candidates when they attack their opponents.  I would just say it's inappropriate for a man, political man in a spotlight like that to do it. There is no defining event that one can point to and say this is when candidates personal attacks cross the line of decency. It's insidious. Yeah, it's like saying only my opinion counts so keep quiet and listen to me. The change happens unnoticed over time. In 1988, during the vice presidential candidates debate, Dan Quayle compared himself to former president John F. Kennedy. Oh, that's because his haircut was similar. Yeah, but didn't they make a big deal about him spelling potato or tomato? That's correct.  It took up so much media time. Lloyd Benson countered by saying that he knew Jack Kennedy and speaking directly to Dan Quayle, he said, you're no Jack Kennedy. I remember that. He didn't say to Quayle that he was living in a fantasy land or to shut up. He used the language of respected political leader. Well, Chris Christie has sort of a thug-like demeanor about him. Hey, what are you doing?  Listen to me. I'm the dictator of the universe. It's disturbing that Donald Trump and Christie are letting the street-language genie out of the bottle. They are very similar when you think about it and personality and poisonality. Except Donald Trump has better skin on the face than Christie. Donald Trump, yes, yes.  Yeah, yeah, yeah. He must have had acomy. Acomy when he was young. It's more disturbing that the American voter accepts this abuse of rhetoric as commonplace. Well, it's entertaining for the general public in the media, you know what I'm saying. As this trend continues, after all, you can't put the genie back in the bottle. The new normal will be that a candidate has to be un-presidential to get elected president. Well, we're living in a bizarre world. What's up is down. What's right is left. What's insane is normal. It's just totally out of control, man. It's just totally out of control. Our world, you know, and, I don't know, people are just not using common sense. You don't even have to be brilliant. You just use... There's a lack of common sense. Use good common sense, man. You know, like, when you read in the Bible proverbs in the Old Testament, there was a lot of things blurted out there that were common sense. Common sense. You know what I mean? Look, you could be a person who has, like, photographic memory and who can memorize encyclopedia Britannica or the library of Congress or something, whatever. You can memorize anything you want.   But anyway, oh, I hear the company Tesla has a battery for homes that will allow people to live off the grid. You know, every week that goes by, I am just amazed at science, man. It's advancing at such a rapid rate. Well, I mean, it's incredible.  Hey, the kids, if you thought the kids were in another world as it is now, they will be in another world. You won't be able to contact them with virtual reality.  You'll feel like you're in another world. It's not good. At least when I was a kid. I like the hologram on the Star Trek Generator. The holodeck. The holodeck, yeah. No, I don't have a problem with high technology, but I have a problem with putting the flora and the fauna and mother nature and all that meaningful stuff, life itself on the back burner. Me and my friends, all of them, even Dr. Bill, we used to play outside. We used to be outside, you know? And yes, we had very simple, by today's standards, very boring toys, but we were outside doing stuff. We knew about nature. We had aquariums. We went fishing. I had my, you know, like I said many times before, I had my tricycle. Then I had training wheels on my first bike. I was down at the park. We played sports.  I mean, today the kids are all shut-ins with their, I guess, their tablets now. We're all heading to be Jabba the Huts. Lay around and press buttons. You mean, is that why the kids are becoming more obese as the years fly by? Yeah, they're counting potatoes. Right. So it's going to be like the Star Trek episode where the alien species was pure intellect, pure thought waves. That could be too, yeah. The little mushrooms. Telekinesis. Everything was telekinesis. Anyway, we're going to break for lunch. Yeah. We'll see you. I'm going to have leftovers, baby. We'll see you in the following video. When this video ends, you're going to see the next part. Of course, before you see the next part, you'll see our voiceover artist, William Hamilton Morrow the Third doing promo. Yeah. All right. We'll see you. Don't forget, man, look for that other part. One production. Hi, this is William H. Morrow. The best way to join our organization is to get your free annual subscription to Newsletter Censored with your gift to support this work. The newsletter of hard-hitting truth and news fighting censorship and conservative propaganda since 1977. There is nothing out there like the Newsletter Censored in the mainstream media or the press. This newsletter is the very best way to join and be a part of our organization. We're living the end times, so you need Newsletter Censored. Go to www.newslettercensored.com. Hi, I'm William Morrow. Wake up, people, because the truth is often, very often, a very, very hard pill to swallow. Hey, listen, for the real hard-hitting truth, you need Newsletter Censored. And now, back in the show by Mike.


Rocksteady's latest follow-up to the Arkham series, Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League, is something very different entirely. A radical departure for a studio that has built a reputation on tight-focused single-player narratives, the new Suicide Squad instead attempts to marry classic Rocksteady gameplay with live-service multiplayer community elements. The result is a little bit messy, to say the least. Despite its, or perhaps because of, its status as one of the most anticipated games of the year, Suicide Squad has received something of a negative reaction from fans, many of whom have flooded the internet with comments saying that this game just did not live up to their expectations. Indeed, the writing has been on the wall for a while, with fans expressing concern that the project didn't seem to live up to Rocksteady's normally very high standard of quality. Before I go any further into this, I want to say an enormous thank you to my friend James, aka Hot Sider, who has helped tremendously with this project. Not only did he film all of the gameplay footage that you see in this video, he also bounced some ideas back and forth with me as I was working on the video script and gave me some excellent quotes that you'll be hearing later on. You may not know Hot Sider by name, but you've definitely seen his work because he is the go-to guy for video essay thumbnails in the video game sphere. He has his own channel and has made his own video on Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League, and I absolutely recommend that you go and watch that one as well. Here we'll be covering the development of the game and things that may or may not have happened during the period of development, whereas in his video he talks specifically about what it's like to play the game and where he feels that it doesn't quite hold up. If I were to pick either this video or his to watch, I would probably recommend watching his instead, but then that's because I don't like looking at my own face. Someone in the comments already typing, yeah, I don't like looking at your face either. With that out of the way, what went wrong with Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League? In my opinion, they tried to do too much and tried to please too many people and ended up upsetting everybody in the process. Chapter 1. Crisis on Infinite Earths. Or is this a thing? I think this is a thing. There are a lot of rabbit holes that one could fall down when trying to research the development of a game, especially when trying to figure out exactly why a game failed to live up to its potential.  In researching this video I found myself wondering whether it was relevant, for example, that fans are convinced that Rocksteady's latest game had started life as a Justice League or Superman game instead, even though industry insiders have insisted that this is not the case. Or is it relevant, for example, that then-head of DC Jeff Jones announced a Suicide Squad game all the way back in 2012 when people assumed that it would tie into the David Ayer Suicide Squad film that released in 2016? Is it relevant, then, that Warner Bros. has been trying to get a Suicide Squad game out the door for over a decade at this point, whether or not they've got the resources in the studios available to do it? That being the case, is it then relevant that Warner Bros. Montreal, the developers of Arkham Origins, were at one point making a Suicide Squad game before that project was cancelled and Rocksteady started work on their own game? Is it relevant that Rocksteady co-founders Sefton Hill and Jamie Walker left the studio in 2022 and the game was mostly but not quite finished? Is it relevant that the game was delayed in 2023, ostensibly to add an extra level of polish immediately after an early preview led to widespread online backlash? And perhaps most alarmingly of all, is it relevant that in 2018, 10 of the 16 women employed by Rocksteady signed a letter calling out workplace harassment and a toxic environment? Or that former Rocksteady scriptwriter Kim McCaskill has since publicly claimed that she lost her job as a punishment for writing that letter and ultimately asked her name to be removed from the credits of Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League and withdrew from consideration for the Women in Games Lifetime Achievement Award because Rocksteady is one of the awards more prominent sponsors. Is any of this strictly relevant? Perhaps and perhaps not, it's difficult to be certain and it's easy in hindsight to filter Rocksteady's rather tumultuous decade through the lens of an unpopular finished product. If Kill the Justice League had released a widespread critical and commercial acclaim, no one would be particularly concerned about reports of lead developers leaving the project or machinations within Warner Bros. or even toxic workplace harassment complaints. These things are just part of game development. If the end product turns out well, the ends justify the means, right? As it is, the Suicide Squad game has fallen short of many fans' expectations and with that comes a desire to find someone or something to blame. How much weight I really want to ascribe to any of the aforementioned factors is difficult to say, except that the kind of behaviour reported by Kim McCaskill is inappropriate in any workplace. I don't care if you really are making the best game ever. With all of that said, and bearing in mind that it is impossible to puzzle out everything that happened in any games development, whether good or bad, I find myself stuck looking at a single interview given to Play Magazine earlier this year. An interview in which studio project director Darius Sadegion makes two completely contradictory statements about what Kill the Justice League is even supposed to be. Because in reading Sadegion's words, it does sound awfully like Rocksteady bit off a bit more than they could chew, attempting to make a game that appealed to everyone, everywhere, no matter their gaming preferences. And as is very common in failed computer and video games, if you attempt to please everyone, you end up pleasing no one. Chapter Two. Identity Crisis. Or what even is this? Before we go any further, I feel that we need to address the different types of players that are coming to Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League. With a studio like Rocksteady that develops its own signature style, there comes a dedicated fan base. These kinds of fans are a two-edged sword for developers. On the one hand, they'll be a bit more forgiving of some things than the wider general masses, and on the other hand, they'll have very specific needs and desires, and will complain vociferously if they don't get exactly what they're asking for. These fans will be following a game's development very closely, eager for every new piece of news, and they will be the very first ones through the gate when the game is released, eager to try out something that they know has come from a studio that has proven successful in the past. Beyond that, you've got the laity, the less well-read mainstream audience. The vast majority of a consumer base will know significantly less about a product than the hardcore Die Hard fans. They won't necessarily be following the entire story of the development of a game, and once the game is out they will play it for a while while it is fun, and then be happy to move on to something else, where the Die Hards may stick around for a bit longer and build more of a community around a game. Neither of these approaches to a game is wrong, and we as gamers are a mainstream audience for some games, and a very niche audience for some other games depending on our own personal preferences. When building a community around a game, it's those Die Hards that really cement the bedrock of it, but it's the mainstream audience that keeps a game profitable for the long term. Of the two groups it is the mainstream gamers that make up the vast majority of the player base, and for that reason game studios often will aim at a mainstream audience first and foremost, and that can sometimes be to their detriment. After all, the Die Hards are probably going to buy your game either way, so you don't really need to worry too much about what they think of it, and even if they are turned off by a completely different radical change in the gameplay style, it doesn't matter because they're a small piece of the pie compared to that wider mainstream audience. In Making Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League, Rocksteady were definitely attempting to appeal to a mainstream audience, and were also attempting to appeal to their hardcore fans, and herein lies the problem. Because the incumbent Rocksteady fanbase were interested in a tight, focused single-player narrative, and Warner Bros. Games were interested in appealing to a wider fanbase, a wider audience who were less tolerant of long cutscenes and just wanted something where buddies could kind of pal around together and joke in and explore in a space that didn't feel too bogged down in continuity. Said Sedeckian of the project brief for Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League, Our goal is to build a community with this game. We want each player to feel like they're a part of Suicide Squad, and more broadly, a global Suicide Squad community. This has been at the core of our development, and the game has been built from the ground up as an experience that can be shared with friends. We have a variety of social features, rival taunts, the social squad, the friendly competition within the leaderboards, and we wanted to make a game where each player is connected to that larger community, and where we as developers get the opportunity to invite the community to evolve this game together with us. This focus on the community aspect of the game came up in another interview with Rocksteady Studios' production manager Jack Hackett, who said, When I'm playing online with my friends, I like to mess with them. I like to compete with them. I like to make fun of them. I like to taunt them. And if that makes sense when you're playing online as the squad, you can almost sort of roleplay as the squad, and that's really entertaining. They can do silly emotes, they can mess with each other, they can leave each other hanging for high fives and send taunts to the other players. I think that's a fun atmosphere to let people inhabit in a comic book world. Play with their friends, have fun, poke fun at each other, while still living authentically in that comic book world and feeling like you're inhabiting it. This is the kind of game that Rocksteady was building this time around, a game filled with co-op player interactions, with banter and taunts and palli jokes so that a group of friends can play this game endlessly night after night without getting bored. This game was meant as a community hub, and in this kind of game, the story, the characters, the narrative all kind of fade into the background to allow the players to fill in as much of their own story and narrative as they choose. But you know what, I imagine that if Rocksteady had just stuck to making that kind of game, they might have got a better reception from Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League. If they had actually fully committed to making something that was entirely devoted to online play, to cooperative play, to friends just getting along together and having fun, and not really worrying about the story or the environment or the wider context of why they were doing everything, then I think that this game probably wouldn't have necessarily appealed to that hardcore dedicated Rocksteady audience, but it would have found more widespread mainstream appeal. Whether you think that's a good thing or a bad thing will depend on your personal preferences and how much you like the earlier Rocksteady titles. But as Sadegian points out in another quote from that Play Magazine interview, this game was not meant to be a GTA or a Fortnite. They wanted this to also have that Arkham flavour, and that meant a strong emphasis on story. He said, The foundation for all of our games is about understanding the characters and their unique personalities and using that as the core to build our gameplay systems. With a story driven game like ours, I think it's important to strike a balance that pushes the narrative forward but also gives you the choice to go off and explore other things if you feel like it. We don't really think of our games as fitting with any particular label. It's still full of the DNA that infuses the Batman Arkham series. Those foundations of story and character are absolutely central to our process. When Sadegian talks about this game it is clear just how important the story is meant to be within this title. He's hesitant to even call this a live service game because in the minds of Rocksteady employees this wasn't meant to be that. It was meant to be akin to that and maybe borrow ideas from other games of this kind of genre, but in their own unique Rocksteady way which still meant giving everybody a very strong narrative to follow and that in our essence is kind of where things clashed. Indeed from the sounds of it, that balance, getting the right ratio of story driven stuff and kind of more live service stuff is really where the challenge came in building this game for Rocksteady and where they might not have necessarily succeeded right off the bat is in getting that balance just right so that everybody is appeased. Here's another quote, this time from advanced combat designer Noel Chamberlain. At the core of Rocksteady's values is we want something really narrative driven and we're really story oriented. I think fans expect Rocksteady to do something slightly different and having you have to fight the Justice League and overcome this insurmountable challenge as a player and as a character in the story is really interesting. I think it's really exciting for players to experience. I think once players play it they'll know why this is our choice for the game. So this is Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League, an attempt to marry live service elements with more traditional storytelling in games. That's a difficult balance to get right. There are not many games that really manage to marry the kind of co-op buddy type gameplay of a live service game with the kind of sprawling narratives that Rocksteady is famous for. Too much narrative, too many cutscenes and it's going to drag for people who really just want to play with their friends. Too little of those things and it's not going to feel satisfying or weighty enough for the fans who really just want a classic Arkham game. This being the case, this marriage being so difficult to achieve, why would Rocksteady attempt to do it in the first place? Why indeed? Chapter 3. Death in the Family or unrest in the House of Warner. In the 2023 third quarter earnings call for Warner Brothers Discovery, President and CEO David Zaslav had some very optimistic things to say about Warner Brothers games. He said, quote, we have worked really hard on our games business in the last year and a half. Oh, if you're wondering why the last year and a half in particular is relevant, that's when Warner Brothers and Discovery merged and when David Zaslav moved to his current position as head of the company. He's making a point of saying that under his leadership things have thrived, even though he's not necessarily counting everything that has happened before and the fact that none of these games were developed within a year and a half. Anyway, carrying on. We Believe Games is a critical and very valuable asset for the company with a great deal of potential for growth. Games has consistently enjoyed among the highest return of investments of any of our businesses. And while we're smaller than some of the leading pure play gaming companies, our operating margins are comparable to the best of the public companies. We're clearly punching above our weight and we're just getting started. Our focus is on transforming our biggest franchises from largely console and PC based, with three to four year release schedules, to include more always on gameplay through live services, multi-platform and free to play extensions, with the goal to have more players spending more time on more platforms. Ultimately, we want to drive engagement and monetization of longer cycles and at higher levels. It's worth mentioning that no matter how hard Warner Brothers has been working on games in the last year and a half, things are not ideal for the company as a whole. Zaslav has been somewhat, shall we say, aggressive with the decisions that he's made as the head of the company and has ended up axing entire finished films or at least almost finished films simply because he didn't feel like they were going to make enough money or revenue at the box office or even on streaming services to justify their completion and publication. While there have been several high profile films that have been axed by Warner Brothers before release, none sting quite as much as Batgirl starring Leslie Grace and Michael Keaton. This was a film which, by all counts, was not universally beloved by those who saw it early, but it was certainly one that fans were definitely looking forward to. While this is tremendously disappointing for comic book fans, you can kind of see where Warner Brothers is coming from given that only one of their superhero films released since 2019 has made more than five hundred million dollars at the box office, that one being The Batman starring Robert Pattinson. This indeed is not just a Warner Brothers problem, Marvel Studios also had a particularly bad year in 2023 amid rumblings and concerns among the industry that maybe fans are just kind of over superhero movies in general. This certainly does not just extend to comic book films, Spider-Man 2 has done very well for Sony, but Marvel's The Avengers hasn't really gone down very well and just so happens to also feature a large number of live service elements. With this being the case and with people increasingly treating these superhero multimedia outings as kind of the flavour of the week, kind of one and done, you enjoy it for a moment and then you move on to the next one without giving it another thought, you can kind of see the appeal of a live service game that would keep people coming back over and over and over over the course of several years. I mean obviously from a player perspective we absolutely love revisiting games that are well built, well made, have good stories and engaging gameplay, but it doesn't quite count the same for the companies if people aren't purchasing that game over and over in the way that you might get a live service game just kind of squeezing extra coins out of people as time goes on. All of this being the case, you can understand why Warner Brothers thought it was a good idea to try and get Rocksteady to make a Fortnite style game. There's logic there even if that logic is absolutely terrible from a consumer perspective. It's also just a little bit late because just as the superhero market feels very oversaturated and people kind of shift from one thing to another without really thinking about it or just allow things to pass them by entirely or think to themselves I'll catch that on Disney Plus or whatever, people have just kind of gone off the idea of investing everything they have into multiple different live service games. It's possible that the live service ecosystem is just a bit too crowded though this point, you've got the big hitters surely, but not every single game can be a hit because gamers only have a finite amount of time and they can't possibly play in every single game that they're offered. With these live service games it's almost so much less about the content of the game itself as it is about the camaraderie and the friendship of playing with your friends and so people aren't going to necessarily change to another one simply because a new game has a different set of skins or a different set of characters or a different type of gameplay when really all they're there for is something to keep their hands busy while they're chatting with their friends. I mean maybe I'm oversimplifying things but personally when I play a multiplayer online game I play for my friends rather than for the game itself. I couldn't actually care what we're playing I just want to spend time with people that I like. Indeed it's telling that in 2023 a lot of attention was heaped onto single player focused narrative games. Games like Spider-Man 2, a superhero game but also like Baldur's Gate 3 which doesn't feature any live service elements at all it's just pure solid single player action and there has been something of an increased desire and demand for these kinds of games almost as a response to the proliferation of live service titles. Indeed in his earnings call David Zaslav made a point of drawing attention to one of Warner Brothers biggest games of recent years Hogwarts Legacy which just so happens to be a single player narrative focused game. He said of this title quote, Our Harry Potter fans have immersed themselves in Hogwarts Legacy playing more than 700 million hours to date. That engagement helps not only our games business but also helps build and revitalize the entire Harry Potter franchise and we know our fans want even more. It is worth pointing out by the way that Harry Potter much like DC in general has been in a bit of a slump in recent years. Leaving aside entirely the controversy surrounding Harry Potter's author there's also been the issue that the Fantastic Beasts films just failed to find an audience and were somewhat lacklustre and unimpressive in general and this led to a slump and a decline in interest in Harry Potter across the board. As David Zaslav has pointed out Hogwarts Legacy has done something to correct this and there's been a lot more attention in Harry Potter of all varieties and across all different media as a result of the success of that game. With the DC films in something of a transitional period at the moment as things are reassessed and rebooted and reworked it would be really interesting to see how a very good DC game could potentially correct things for Warner Brothers in general and help their superhero division to thrive again and it would have been wonderful to see that with Suicide Squad kill the Justice League had this game not attempted to appeal to everyone and instead focused on what Rocksteady are really good at delivering. But that's just my two cents or indeed my one giant penny in the back cave. The moral of this story is twofold. One make sure that if you are good at something if you are enjoying something and if you are having a wonderful time making something you don't get too distracted by other people's expectations. Make sure that you focus on what you like to do rather than worrying about whether or not it'll appeal to absolutely everyone because you can't please absolutely everyone. Number two workplace harassment is inappropriate no matter the circumstances. That might not be the only thing that's been going on with Rocksteady in recent years but personally I can forgive a lackluster video game a lot easier than I can forgive allegations of inappropriate behavior in the workplace. Thank you for watching.


Today my topic will be pandas and red pandas from the animal names in Yardz to the etymology of panda in different languages. So you may have the question what is Yardz and what is the language speaking there. So here's the content today and before going into our topic I would like to show you a video about the background of Yardz because you can have a concept of how the Yardz people are living and how Yardz people are speaking. So now I believe all of us have known how the people in Yardz are living a life with a very close relationship with like the nature, the environment and wild animals including pandas. So we can have a look at the background of Yardz. So where is Yardz? Here we can see a map of Sichuan. So we can see Yardz in the middle which is in Baoxing County, Yan Profecture. And I did a field work last summer in Yardz. So here are some photos that took in the field. We can see the houses in the mountains and we can also see the Yardz people. They are dancing and singing with their own clothes. And I also saw some animals in the fields like the cow, the yak. And here we can see a monkey in the mountain. Looks very cute. And now we know that there are many wild animals in the farm. And we may also know that Sichuan is always caught as the hometown of pandas maybe. But maybe no one knows where was the first panda discovered. So we can have a look of a story of the first discovery of pandas. In the 19th century, a French missionary, Arman David, he discovered panda in Dengchi, Baoxing County, which is right next to Yardz, which means that the people living there are also using this local language Yardz. And it is the first time that the outside world became aware of this kind of species. And in 1869, David, he sent back a fur and skeletal specimen to France. So here we can see this specimen. And also, David, he had a record of panda. And we will come back to this story later. And we will have a look of this record in detail. So I will also talk about something about Yardz language. So what is this kind of Yardz language? Actually, it is a situ dialect in the Garnik branch in the Central Tibetan language family. So if you remember Shria speech, you will also know something about Garnik languages. So I will also talk a little bit because Garnik languages are very special for their very complex phonological and morphological systems. And here I want to show you the Yardz phonological system. So there are like 40 consonants and six vowels. And I think what is also special for Yardz is that Yardz language has many animal terms that are not found in other Garnik languages. For example, it has many rare animals, such as the woodpecker, the tag king, because we know that because of Yardz's environment, it is home to many rare wild animals. And what I want to focus on today is that the Yardz language is the only one language found in Garnik language family, which has the word for panda and red panda, which they will call it as the gongbrong and red. So we may have the question that why only Yardz has these two animal terms? Because we can have a look of these two distribution maps for pandas and red pandas. So we know that pandas and red pandas only inhabited in the right areas. So we know in Sichuan, both pandas and red pandas inhabited the transitional zone between mountains and plains. So now if we have a look of the Garnik language distribution map, we can notice that Yardz is spoken in the southernmost part of the Garnik language distribution area, which is right at the transitional zone between mountains and plains. So we know that only Yardz people can have the chance to look at these two kinds of animals. And now we may have more questions. For example, why in Yardz, we use two different words, the gongbrong and red, to totally different pronunciation for panda and red panda. But why in English, we use panda and red panda to similar names for these two different animals? And why in other languages, in other Santa Tibetan languages, for example, in Chinese, we use xiongma and xiaoxiongma for these two different animals? And how do people speaking different languages regard these two animals? Will people regard these as two similar animals? Or will people see the mass to totally different animals? So firstly, I want to say something about the etymology of this, the gongbrong in Yardz. So now we know that Yardz people will call panda as the gongbrong. But what does it mean? Actually, the gong means bear and brong means wet. So this term for bear, the gong in Yardz is also a cognate in Santa Tibetan language family. For example, in other Garant languages in Brock bar, it is called the warm. In style, it is called wet. And in Tibetan, it is called something like dong. And in Chinese, it is reconstructed as like warm in old Chinese by big star ncr. And so we can know that panda is seen as a type of bear with red color in Yardz. But what about red panda? Red panda is called red. So we know that panda and red panda are seen as two completely different animals, because there is no connection for them for naming them. And I think that is very valuable for Yardz, because in most modern languages, the term for red panda has not been preserved, but Yardz has preserved it. For example, in Red and Tibetan, it is not called as a be la dong chun, something like that, which means a small cat bear. And in Mandarin, it is called xiao chun ma. We know it is also a compound. And in modern Nepali, it is called rato panda. So I think only Yardz has preserved this kind of animal name. And here I want to say something about the etymology of panda in other Tibetan languages for more resources. So we know apart from Yardz, the term for panda is only found in few Chanic and Loloish languages. For example, in Mianchi Chanic, it is called dip shi, which means bear and wet. And in Liangshan Loloish, it is called something also like wet bear. And we know that we have a master here who is specializing in Chanic in Loloish language. Really? So, okay, okay. So if you have more information about how the Loloish people are calling this, okay, thanks. And so we know in these languages in Tibetan-Berman languages, pandas are always regarded as a type of bear just like Yardz. But we may think that why don't English just use a compound like black and white bear to describe this kind of animal. So we can have a look of the etymology of panda in English. So actually, the English term panda is borrowed from French. So in 1848, it appeared when an ethnologist, he documented his discovery of red panda in Nepal. And he also recorded the local name for the red panda as this Ngoia Ponya, something like this. And the English term panda originates from the later part of the local name Ngoia Ponya. And this word refers to the red panda at first, but now the giant panda we know now. But we may think that what does this word, this Ngoia Ponya mean in the local language? And what is this local language? Is it a kind of Nepali language? Or is it another language? So if we search this question in Google, we may get an explanation, which is that the term Ngoia Ponya comes from Nepali, where the first part means bamboo and the later part means cloud. For example, we can see the word for bamboo in Nepali is Bonsa, and the word for cloud is Ponya. So we can notice that this word for cloud Ponya looks very like this Ponya. But we can also see a very significant difference in pronunciation between the Nepali words for bamboo, this Bonsa, and this Ngoia. So I think it cannot explain the origin of the term Ngoia Ponya. And I also want to mention here is that Nepali is an Indo-European language, so that is why Bonsa looks very like this bamboo. And now if we have a look in Tibetan languages, we can see there are the terms Mugma for bamboo and Ponya for messenger. So this term for the red panda Ngoia Ponya looks more like Tibetan instead of Nepali. So I think this term seems to be derived from a Tibetan language spoken in Nepal. For example, we can know that Sherba, a kind of Tibetan language spoken in Nepal, the term for bamboo is Mugma, which I think it sounds more like this Ngoia. And because of this question, I also asked Dr. Tim, who is very specializing in Himalayan languages, and he said that there is no Ngoia Ponya using all this in Nepal, and it cannot be derived from Nepali. It might come from Tamangic, or other Tibetan languages, because he is very good at Tamangic. He said that the word structure looks very like a Tamangic language. And so I think this term Ngoia Ponya is not derived from Nepali, where it would be bamboo claw, but rather from a sign of Tibetan language, especially a Tibetan language spoken in Nepal, where it would mean bamboo messengers or something like that. So now we know instead of panda, the red panda was discovered earlier by the western word and panda in English is from the local term Ngoia Ponya. And I also want to mention something about the scientific name here, because we will use it very soon. And the scientific name for the red panda is named as Aloros fulgens, and Aloros means cat and fulgens means shining. I'm not very good at biology, but I can say something about the scientific name. We know that every recognized animal is given a two-part scientific name, made up of a generic name and specific name, and they are often descriptive, and they have traditionally been based on Latin or Greek roots. So I know nothing about Latin or Greek, so if you know how to pronounce these animal terms, these scientific names, please correct me. And now we may think, how is the naming of the red panda connected to the naming of panda in English? We come back to the story at first. So in 1869, the French missionary, he discovered panda in Sichuan, and at that time he gave panda a scientific name, which means white and black bear. So we can know that panda was firstly seen as black and white bear by him and also, just like in Jersey or in other Tibetan or Burma languages, all the people at that time were thinking that panda is a kind of bear. But what happened next? In 1870, after the skeletal specimen of the panda was sent back to France, a French zoologist, he saw that the features of the panda were very similar to those of the red panda. For example, both of them have a kind of, we call it as both thong. So he changed the scientific name of panda to another one, which is something like white and black-footed cat. So from then on, panda and red panda were considered as two similar animals. And in English, the term panda could refer to both the giant panda and the red panda. And also because of the increasing frame of the giant panda, the English term panda is more commonly used to refer to the giant panda rather than the red panda. And this understanding in English has also been transmitted in many other languages, especially some modern languages such as, we can see, Chinese, we use xiong mao and xiao xiong mao. And in modern Nepali, we also use panda and trato panda. So that is why in many other languages, panda and red panda are regarded as similar animals because of the English influence. And we may also have a look of the etymology of xiong mao in Chinese. Now we know that in modern Chinese, we use xiong mao and xiao xiong mao. But in old Chinese, the term for panda was more, which can be reconstructed as murak by yun zin qi. And so in shu wen jiezi, shu wen jiezi, which is a traditional like dictionary. So Xu xian said that murak looks very like bear, yellow and black in color comes from shu, which is the region of the present Sichuan. And in commentary on Shan Haijin, Guo Pu said that it looks like bear with black and white color and its copper and iron. So we can see panda was seen as a very different species from bear. But in addition to murak, panda was also referred to as bai bao, which means white leopards in old Chinese. Because like in Pre-Qin, in Aria, we can also see something like murak bai bao, more white leopards. So I think this is very interesting for us to know because panda was called white leopards and was considered a type of leopard that looks like bear but not a kind of bear. And in modern Chinese, we know that the term used for panda is shu mo, which means bear cat, and it borrowed the scientific name of panda. And how about the red panda in old Chinese? In old Chinese, the term for red panda might be this twi, but I'm not very sure because there is not enough resources. And we can see in Aria, it is said that twi, it looks like small bear and its fur is yellow. So we can see red panda is considered a different species but looks like small bear. So now we know that in modern Chinese, the term used for red panda is shu mo, small bear cat. And modern Chinese also borrowed the English term panda for the red panda. And we have known that because of the interchangeability of terms for panda and red panda in English, a similar situation has also occurred in modern Chinese and also in many modern languages. So finally, it's a conclusion. So now we know that panda and red panda, these two terms in English are from a Tibetan language, where they would call it as Ngoia Pongya, which means bamboo messenger. And in Chinese, we will use shu mo and shu mo also to similar terms for these two animals. And so in Yazi, we will use the gong bro and red to very different terms for these two different animals. So similar to other Tibetan language, in Yazi, panda is seen as a type of bear. And in Yazi, red panda is seen as a separated animal. And in English, panda and red panda are seen as two similar animals. And in old Chinese, panda and red panda are seen as two unrelated animals. And in modern Chinese, they are seen as two similar animals because of the English. So we now know that Yazi language has preserved many animal terms that are either absent or lost in modern languages, because Yazi is the home to many rare wild animals because it's a unique location and environment. So that is all for my presentation today. And I would like to thank to Irish Research Council for supporting. Thanks.