#2.1.1

[randomwholocker]

[tamapalace]

Bandai Releases Tamagotchi Uni 2.1.1 to Fix Tama Arena Issue

Software drama, but Bandai is quick to fix. Bandai has announced version 2.1.1 update for all Tamagotchi Uni’s which has been released on Friday, September 20th, 2024. The update will improve issues with characters appearing in the Tamaverse, fix a bug preventing users from playing in the Tama Arena Bunny Jump game (error 403), and fix bugs that have prevented the download area from being swapped.

After the update, the server situation will gradually improve, so if the error continues to occur, please wait a while and try again.

As an apology Bandai has announced that they’ll be giving away the UFO Ballon A prize from the event to ALL Tamagotchi Uni owners as a gift at a later date. Very thoughtful, very mindful!

[jelepermets]

Babe wake up, Waterloo chapter just dropped

[thesebloodydays]

Genuinely love when Victor Hugo includes a personal anecdote. Like yes king, tell me more about your wild ass life.

[fremedon]

Brickclub 2.1.1, “What One Sees on the Road From Nivelles”

And here we are at H(o)ugomont, with the narrator present and acknowledged in a way he has not yet been. Hugo leads us past another roadside inn, with another cart out front and another young girl at work, but we don’t stop there—that story isn’t our concern right now. We are about to set foot on the battlefield of Waterloo.

Which means we are about to finally meet Napoleon, who has been present, just offstage, for the entire book.

We met him briefly in the very first chapter, where he had the first line of dialog: “Who is this good man looking at me?” Myriel’s reply—“Sire, you are looking at a good man and I at a great one. May we both be the better for it.”—sets up one of the book’s principal concerns, the difference between good men and great men and what they can do. We’re going to come back to that soon.

But Napoleon’s shadow has continued to hang over the book. We are introduced to Valjean by watching him recreate Napoleon’s progress inland at the start of the Hundred Days, and find a cold reception in every place Napoleon found support. Before we know anything else about Valjean, we know that his fortune is a strangely exact mirror of Napoleon’s. His chain had been forged the day of Napoleon’s first major victory. He re-enters French society—he sleeps again on French soil, after nineteen years of being housed on a prison ship in the harbor—only after Napoleon has not only fallen from power, but been removed from French soil and French sovereignty and taken ship for St. Helena.

And when Valjean leaves Digne, as @meta-squash points out, we don’t follow him: we follow Napoleon, to Paris, to join Fantine. And, like Valjean, like Myriel—like Thenardier, like Marius—she is introduced through her relation to the Emperor.

Napoleon is omnipresent in “The Year 1817.”  The Ns are coming off the Louvre; the empress’s name is coming off the theater; the occupying Austrians are still bivouacked in the Champs-Elysées. There’s a double erasure of the Napoleonic era going on—the public is embracing the Bourbons and repudiating him, but even the details of that repudiation have been largely forgotten or jumbled by history and memory.

Parisian and French society are turning their backs on the Empire and the Republic. That’s the setting in which a man who will be a pillar of that society publicly jilts Fantine and abandons Cosette—Fantine, the child of France and the people, who is born under the Directory right around the time Valjean goes to prison and Napoleon begins his ascendency—and Cosette, who is conceived during or right after Waterloo.

And then, during the years of Madeleine’s success, the Napoleonic allusions…stop. Javert—ominously, in hindsight—is introduced without any reference to him at all. He is a person who somehow exists in a world independent of Napoleon, and that alone makes him a strange abstraction, unmoored from the world as it is.

Napoleon returns to the story, all at once, during the trial, in Cochepaille’s tattoo—Cochepaille, the inarticulate, brutish peasant who among the three forçats most resembles pre-bagne Valjean—of the date of the landing at Cannes. Madeleine cannot exist in a world with the Emperor, because Madeleine—at a small scale—is the Emperor, the one man whose outsize influence cannot be sustained and whose system cannot outlive him.

We’ve just watched him fall. We’ve seen the results of that relayed in gossip and newspaper articles—“The Year 1817” writ small—explicitly tying his fall to Napoleon’s. We’ve seen him abandoned by society as Fantine was.

But as awful as that was to watch, we’re not in any doubt that it was necessary and right to sacrifice the great man for the sake of the good man.

Which brings us to Waterloo: back to the point where Fantine leaves the narrative, and Valjean and Cosette (re)enter it. Back, in fact, to the point of Cosette’s conception, starting the book with a symbolic Annunciation and cementing the maternal language around Valjean with a symbolic gestation which will end at Christmas, when he takes her from the inn of the Sergeant of Waterloo and into Paris, which is to say, into the world.

But for now, Fantine is in her grave, Valjean is in the underworld, and the young girl is still at work in the innyard—Cosette is in the womb, and we are here to see just what Waterloo will bring forth.

(Spoiler: It’s the future.)

[kingedmundsroyalmurder]

Brickclub: 2.1.1

Waterloo! Waterloo is, and I say this without a trace of irony, my favorite section of this whole book. I love it so very much, and I can’t even honestly explain why.

We open with Hugo himself appearing for the first time. His voice has been present throughout, but here he’s actually onscreen as a character we’re following. It serves to add realism to the ‘look at this story I’ve pieced together’ conceit, because this part genuinely is, at least partly, a story he has pieced together.

(Also I’m taking this ethnography class, and it’s probably going to kill me, but it makes me hyperaware of all of the things Hugo is doing here. Scene setting! Simultaneously writing about A Moment In Time and also All Moments In Time! Deliberately reminding the audience that he has actually Been To The Place and Talked To The People! Teasing the audience with information that he already knows! Presenting the narrative in the order he experienced it, rather than just opening with the important parts! Ethnography hasn’t even been invented yet. Later, we’re even going to get into the Taking Actual Data And Abstracting Out Into A Larger Concept! (And yes, I know these aren’t unique to ethnography, but it’s what I have on the brain right now.))

He’s definitely making a point to emphasize how very peaceful everything is. It’s spring, the sun is out, the birds are singing, everything is beautiful. It serves to build us up to the abrupt contrast that the description of the battle will be, and in that it reminds me a lot of what he did at the beginning of 1.3, where he goes out of his way to point out how ludicrously lovely the day of the Surprise was. Here, like there, it feels almost unnatural, especially in this book where nature is such an important character. In the world of Les Mis, it doesn’t just happen to be a glorious day. It is only glorious out in order to draw attention to the things that are not glorious, just as it is only too cloudy for stars when God Himself has turned away.

We also get a hint at what the overall thematic point of this section will be, with the emphasis on peasant women. They are the ones who survived the carnage, who keep life going and share the stories of what happened. It’s them, the ordinary people, the villagers and the peasants and the anonymous travelers, who keep life going while the Great Men are off Making History, and while no one will remember the peasant women hoeing the fields in 100 years, without them none of us would still be alive.

[umeed-e-sehr]

2.1.1

I am reminded of the post about Cosette representing the future of France, and although the second book opens with her, instead of going directly to Cosette, we need to go back to France’s past, and to Waterloo to be more specific.

The opening also reminds me of other 19th Century novels, which also start with descriptions of fields and trees, which is probably a convention of the novels of that time although Tolkien also talks of descriptions of trees and forests in detail.

We see the fields and surrounding areas as it exists in Hugo’s present time before travelling to the past with the narrator.

Hugo is also narrating this story as if he is a character in the novel. He said he came across this area quite by accident during his return, and chances across the circular hollow which has remained as a relic from the past. This place is Hougomont, the narrator tells us he is looking directly at the place where the battle of Waterloo was fought. It is a great way to open this digression, and I really really like it.

[tamapalace]

Bandai’s Working Through Tamagotchi Uni Server Issues

It’s been an interesting ride lately with the 2.1.0 software update, Bandai has been doing a great job at being transparent. The 2.1.1 was swiftly released to addresses three issues, and Bandai did promise that we would gradually see server improvement over time.

Bandai has informed followers on Twitter that due to automatic data updates of version 2.1.0 before the update, errors are likely to occur from around 10:00PM to 9:00AM JST. Bandai is working through improving the server, and will notify all on the official website.