#(cause she could be either my book related OR my language learning apps)

[star-mum]

tis time for me to change my phone theme (took longer than I thought it would tbh)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Pluralistic: 13 Mar 2020 (The third Little Brother book, Where I write, stream global news, AT&T's CEO gets millions for his failures, Chelsea Manning freed, Katie Porter vs CDC, Trump's scientific nihilism, Covid-malware co-evolution, Siennese solidarity)

Today's links

Announcing the third Little Brother book, Attack Surface: And a new Little Brother/Homeland reissue, with an intro by Ed Snowden!

Where I Write: A column for the CBC that's really about how I write.

Stream 200+ global news channels: Each hand-picked, no registration required.

AT&T's CEO fired 23,000 workers and gave himself a 10% raise: Life on the easiest setting.

Chelsea Manning is free: But she's been fined $256K for refusing to testify to the Grand Jury.

Rep Katie Porter forces CDC boss to commit to free testing: Literally the most effective questioner in Congress.

Trump's unfitness in a plague: It's not because he's an ignoramus, it's because he's a nihilist.

Malware that hides behind a realtime Covid-19 map: Peter Watts' prophecy comes true.

Locked-down Siennese sing their city's hymn: A cause for hope in the dark.

This day in history: 2015, 2019

Colophon: Recent publications, current writing projects, upcoming appearances, current reading

Announcing the third Little Brother book, Attack Surface (permalink)

Attack Surface is the third Little Brother book, coming out next October.

It's told from the point of view of Masha, the young woman who is Marcus Yallow's frenemy who works first for the DHS and then for a private spook outfit. It's a book about how good people talk themselves into doing bad things, and how they redeem themselves. It ranges from Iraq to the color revolutions of the former USSR, to Oakland and the Movement for Black Lives.

The story turns on cutting-edge surveillance and counter-surveillance: self-driving cars, over-the-air baseband radio malware, IMSI catchers, CV dazzle and adversarial examples, binary transparency and warrant canaries.

This week, I did a wide-ranging and deep interview with Andrew Liptak for Polygon about the book, the Little Brother series, the techlash, the tech workers' uprising (and #TechWontBuildIt), and the future of technological self-determination.

We also revealed the cover for Attack Surface, which was designed by the incomparable Will Staehle (who is eligible for a Best Artist Hugo – nominations close today!).

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250757531

Not only that, but Staehle has also designed a cover for a new omnibus edition of Little Brother and Homeland that comes out this July, and as you can see from that cover, the book has an all-new introduction by none other than Ed Snowden!

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583

(In 2017, Staehle also designed all-new covers for my adult backlist)

https://www.tor.com/2017/10/18/cory-doctorow-will-staehle-covers/

The Little Brother books are neither optimistic nor pessimistic about technology: instead, they are hopeful. Hope is the belief that you can materially improve your life if you take action. A belief in human agency and the power of self-determination.

The message of Little Brother is neither "Things will all be fine" nor "We are all doomed."

It's: "This will be so great…if we don't screw it up."

Where I Write (permalink)

I learned to be a writer while my life was in total chaos. Decades later, I have a beautiful office to work in, but I still do my best writing typing hurriedly on subway trains, in taxi-cabs, and airport lounges.

https://www.cbc.ca/arts/finding-comfort-in-the-chaos-how-cory-doctorow-learned-to-write-from-literally-anywhere-1.5489363

My CBC column on where I write is really a primer on how I write: what it takes to be able to write when you're sad, or anxious, or wracked with self-doubt.

Unquestionably the most important skill I've acquired as a writer.

"Even though there were days when the writing felt unbearably awful, and some when it felt like I was mainlining some kind of powdered genius and sweating it out through my fingertips, there was no relation between the way I felt about the words I was writing and their objective quality, assessed in the cold light of day at a safe distance from the day I wrote them. The biggest predictor of how I felt about my writing was how I felt about me. If I was stressed, underslept, insecure, sad, hungry or hungover, my writing felt terrible. If I was brimming over with joy, the writing felt brilliant."

Stream 200+ global news channels (permalink)

TV News is an Android app that pulls like Youtube streams from 200+ global news channels in 50 languages, each manually selected by the app's creator, Steven Clift, whose work I've previously admired.

http://tvnewsapp.com/

You can filter the feeds by country and language and watch them as floating windows that let you continue to use your device while you watch. No registration required, either.

They're shooting for 1000+ channels soon.

AT&T's CEO fired 23,000 workers and gave himself a 10% raise (permalink)

Randall Stephenson is CEO of AT&T. Ajit Pai killed Net Neutrality so that Stephenson could legally slow down the services we requested to extort bribes from us. Then, Trump gave his company a $20B tax cut.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/nepxeg/atandt-preps-for-new-layoffs-despite-billions-in-tax-breaks-and-regulatory-favors

Stephenson used that money to raise exec pay, buy back his company's stock to juice its price and to pay off debts from earlier, disastrous mergers. He cut 23,000 jobs and slashed capital spending (America has the worst broadband of any rich country).

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/05/att-promised-7000-new-jobs-to-get-tax-break-it-cut-23000-jobs-instead/

After all that, Stephenson congratulated himself on a job well done by giving himself a 10% raise in 2019, bringing his total compensation up to 32 million dollars.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/03/att-ceo-pay-rose-to-32-million-in-2019-while-he-cut-20000-jobs/

I mean the guy earned it. He blew billions of dollars buying Warner and Directv, and then lost billions more on the failed aftermath. If that doesn't warrant a raise, what does?

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/10/att-loses-another-1-3-million-tv-customers-as-directv-freefall-continues/

Chelsea Manning is free (permalink)

A judge has ordered that Chelsea Manning be released from jail, a day after her latest suicide attempt. She was jailed last March for refusing to testify before a grand jury, held in solitary for two months, then jailed again a few days later, in May, She's been inside ever since.

The judge ordered her release because the Grand Jury had finished its work.

https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.vaed.412520/gov.uscourts.vaed.412520.41.0.pdf

It's fantastic to that Manning got her freedom back, but she has been fined $256,000 for her noncompliance. I just donated to her fund:

https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-chelsea-pay-her-court-fines

(Image: Tim Travers Hawkins, CC BY-SA)

Rep Katie Porter forces CDC boss to commit to free testing (permalink)

I am a huge fan of Rep Katie Porter. Her outstanding questioning techniques and unwillingness to countenance bullshit from the people she questions are such a delight to watch.

Here she is demolishing billionaire finance criminal Jamie Dimon:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WLuuCM6Ej0

Oh, Ben Carson, you never stood a chance:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVWy3q2kmNM

Steve Mnuchin always looks like a colossal asshole, but rarely this comprehensively:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78zpa0hQ1aw

I almost feel sorry for this Trumpkin from the Consumer Finance Protection Board as she faces Porter's withering fire.

Almost.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBaCc5VUHS8

Porter – an Elizabeth Warren protege – doesn't do this to grandstand. Like AOC, she uses her spectacular skills to elicit admissions and get them on the record, and to hold Congressional witnesses to account.

Today, Porter attained a new peak in a short, illustrious career. That's because today was the day she questioned CDC assistant secretary for preparedness and response Robert Kadlec, asking him to clarify Trump's televised lie last night that insurers would pay for Covid-19 testing.

https://twitter.com/RepKatiePorter/status/1238147835859779584

Porter doggedly held Kadlec to account, forcing him to acknowledge that the cost of a Covid-19 test – $1,331 – was so high that many would forego it, and then to admit that these Americans could go on to transmit the disease to others, making it a matter of public concern.

Then she forced CDC Director Robert Redfield to admit – as she had informed him in writing the week before – that the CDC had the authority to simply pay those fees, universally, for any American seeking testing, under 42 CFR 71.30:

https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CFR-2019-title42-vol1/xml/CFR-2019-title42-vol1-part71.xml#seqnum71.30

Having laid this factual record, Porter insisted that Redfield commit to using that authority. Not to consider it, study it, or consult on it. To use it to help save the country. Whenever Redfield waffled, she reclaimed her time and forced him back on point.

KP: Dr. Redfield, will you commit to the CDC, right now, using that existing authority to pay for diagnostic testing, free to every American, regardless of insurance?

RR: Well, I can say that we're going to do everything to make sure everybody can get the care they need –"

KP: Nope, not good enough. Yes or no?

RR: What I'm going to say is, I'm going to review it in detail with CDC and the department —

KP: No, reclaiming my time [repeats the question]

RR: What I was trying to say is that CDC is working with HHS now to see how we operationalize that

KP: Dr. Redfield, I hope that that answer weighs heavily on you, because it is going to weigh very heavily on me and on every American family

RR: Our intent is to make sure that every American family gets the care and treatment they need at this time in this major epidemic and I am currently working with HHS to see how to best operationalize it.

KP: Excellent! Everybody in America hear that — you are eligible to go get tested for coronavirus and have that covered, regardless of insurance

[Curtain]

Trump's unfitness in a plague (permalink)

In this editorial, Science editor-in-chief H Holden Thorp makes a compelling case that Trump is not capable of leading the American response to Covid-19.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/367/6483/1169

Trump has spent years denigrating and ignoring science before taking office, and it's only gotten worse, since.

As Thorp writes, "You can't insult science when you don't like it and then suddenly insist on something that science can't give on demand."

His policy track-record is even worse: "deep cuts to science, including cuts to funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the NIH…nearly 4 years of harming and ignoring science."

This reminds me of an argument I often have with digital rights activists who attribute bad technology policy to the inability of clueless lawmakers to understand the technical nuance. I think that's wrong. The fact that we're not all dead of cholera, even though there are no microbiologists in Congress proves that you don't need to be a domain expert to make good policy.

Good policy comes from truth-seeking exercises in which experts with different views present their best evidence to neutral adjudicators who make determinations in public, showing their work in explicit, written, public reasoning. These processes are made legitimate – and hence robust and reliable – by procedural rules. The adjudicators – regulators, staffers, etc – are not allowed to have conflicts of interest. Their conclusions are subject to the rule of law, with mandatory transparency and a process for appeal.

It has to be this way: there's no way that – say – a president could be an expert on all the different issues that might arise during their tenure.

This, then, is the problem with inequality and market concentration: it merges the referees with the players. When an industry only has a handful of players, they all end up with common lobbying positions – a common position on what is truth. That's because the C-suites of these five companies are filled with people who've worked at two, three or four of the competitors, and are married to others who've worked at the remainder. They're godparents to one anothers' kids, executors of each others' wills.

There's no way for there NOT to be collusion in these circumstances.

And when an industry is that concentrated, the only people who understand it well enough are those same execs, so inevitably the regulators are drawn from the industry.

That's why Obama's "good" FCC Chair, Tom Wheeler, was a former Comcast lobbyist, and why Ajit Pai, Trump's "bad" FCC chair, is a former Verizon lawyer. Apart from Susan Crawford, there's not really anyone who's not from the top ranks of Big Telco qualified to regulate them.

So many of us saw the photo of Trump meeting with all the tech leaders and were dismayed that they were throwing their lot in with him.

But we should also be aghast that all the leaders of the industry fit around one modest board-room table.

https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/14/donald-trump-meets-with-tech-leaders/

The problem with Trump's Covid-19 response is that he does not believe in a legitimate process with neutral referees. The refereeship, in trumpland, is an open-field auction, a transactional process that works best when it enriches Trump and his party.

The problem of Trump taking charge of the epidemiological crisis of Covid-19 isn't that he doesn't understand science: it's that he doesn't believe in evidence-based policy.

He is part of the cult of "Public Choice Theory," the belief that there is no one who can serve as referee without eventually colluding with the players for their mutual enrichment, a cynical, nihilistic philosophy that holds that there's no point in seeking to govern well. These people project their own moral vacuum onto all of humanity, a kind of cartoon Homo Economicus who is incapable of anything except maximizing personal utility.

For these people, the existence of bridges that don't fall down and water that doesn't give you cholera are lucky accidents, not results of sound policy and careful truth-seeking. They reason that since they would take bribes to poison the water of Flint, so would everyone.

Trump isn't just a non-expert, he's an ignoranamus, but that's not the problem. The problem is that he is a nihilist, someone who doesn't believe that truth-seeking is even possible.

Malware that hides behind a realtime Covid-19 map (permalink)

Hackers have developed a malware-as-a-service that packages up realtime Covid-19 maps with malware droppers that infect people who load them.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/03/live-coronavirus-map-used-to-spread-malware/

This reminds me intensely of Peter Watts's 2002 novel Maelstrom, in which Watts uses his background as an evolutionary biologist to posit an eerily plausible and devilishly clever way that a digital and a human virus could co-evolve.

https://rifters.com/real/MAELSTROM.htm

This has stuck with me! In May 2018, I wrote about it in Locus Magazine:

http://locusmag.com/2018/05/cory-doctorow-the-engagement-maximization-presidency/

Maelstrom is concerned with a pandemic that is started by its protago­nist, Lenie Clark, who returns from a deep ocean rift bearing an ancient, devastating pathogen that burns its way through the human race, felling people by the millions.

As Clark walks across the world on a mission of her own, her presence in a message or news story becomes a signal of the utmost urgency. The filters are firewalls that give priority to some packets and suppress others as potentially malicious are programmed to give highest priority to any news that might pertain to Lenie Clark, as the authorities try to stop her from bringing death wherever she goes.

Here's where Watt's evolutionary bi­ology shines: he posits a piece of self-modifying malicious software – something that really exists in the world today – that automatically generates variations on its tactics to find computers to run on and reproduce itself. The more computers it colonizes, the more strategies it can try and the more computational power it can devote to analyzing these experiments and directing its randomwalk through the space of all possible messages to find the strategies that penetrate more firewalls and give it more computational power to devote to its task.

Through the kind of blind evolution that produces predator-fooling false eyes on the tails of tropical fish, the virus begins to pretend that it is Lenie Clark, sending messages of increasing convincingness as it learns to impersonate patient zero. The better it gets at this, the more welcoming it finds the firewalls and the more computers it infects.

At the same time, the actual pathogen that Lenie Clark brought up from the deeps is finding more and more hospitable hosts to reproduce in: thanks to the computer virus, which is directing public health authorities to take countermeasures in all the wrong places. The more effective the computer virus is at neutralizing public health authorities, the more the biological virus spreads. The more the biological virus spreads, the more anxious the public health authorities become for news of its progress, and the more computers there are trying to suck in any intelligence that seems to emanate from Lenie Clark, supercharging the computer virus.

Together, this computer virus and biological virus co-evolve, symbiotes who cooperate without ever intending to, like the predator that kills the prey that feeds the scavenging pathogen that weakens other prey to make it easier for predators to catch them.

Locked-down Siennese sing their city's hymn (permalink)

In times of crisis, we typically pull together, but elite panic's pervasive mythology holds that these moments are when the poors reveal their inner beast and attack their social betters. That libel on humanity is disproved regularly by our everyday experience. As common as these incidents of solidarity are, they still warrant our notice.

The Song of the Verbena is the hymn of the Italian city of Sienna, currently on lockdown.

https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canto_della_Verbena

This video of Siennese people singing their hymn from the windows of their houses, into their empty street, is one of the most beautiful, hopeful things I've seen this week.

Truly, it is a tonic.

https://twitter.com/valemercurii/status/1238234518508777473

This day in history (permalink)

#5yrsago NYPD caught wikiwashing Wikipedia entries on police brutality https://web.archive.org/web/20150313150951/http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/city-hall/2015/03/8563947/edits-wikipedia-pages-bell-garner-diallo-traced-1-police-plaza

#1yrago Gimlet staff announce unionization plan following Spotify acquisition https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/13/18263957/gimlet-media-union-spotify-recognition-podcasts

#1yrago With days to go until the #CopyrightDirective vote, #Article13's father admits it requires filters and says he's OK with killing Youtube https://www.golem.de/news/uploadfilter-voss-stellt-existenz-von-youtube-infrage-1903-139992.html

#1yrago Spotify's antitrust complaint against Apple is a neat parable about Big Tech's monopoly https://www.wired.com/story/spotify-apple-complaint-warren-antitrust-issue/

#1yrago A critical flaw in Switzerland's e-voting system is a microcosm of everything wrong with e-voting, security practice, and auditing firms https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/zmakk3/researchers-find-critical-backdoor-in-swiss-online-voting-system

#1yrago McMansion Hell tours the homes of the "meritocratic" one-percenters who allegedly bought their thickwitted kids' way into top universities in the college admissions scandal https://mcmansionhell.com/post/183417051691/in-honor-of-the-college-admissions-scandal

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: Empty Wheel (https://www.emptywheel.net/), CNN (https://cnn.com), Memex 1.1 (https://memex.naughtons.org/), Slashdot (https://slashdot.org).

Hugo nominators! My story "Unauthorized Bread" is eligible in the Novella category and you can read it free on Ars Technica: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/

Currently writing: I've just finished rewrites on a short story, "The Canadian Miracle," for MIT Tech Review. It's a story set in the world of my next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel about truth and reconciliation. I've also just completed "Baby Twitter," a piece of design fiction also set in The Lost Cause's prehistory, for a British think-tank. I'm getting geared up to start work on the novel next.

Currently reading: Just started Lauren Beukes's forthcoming Afterland: it's Y the Last Man plus plus, and two chapters in, it's amazeballs. Last month, I finished Andrea Bernstein's "American Oligarchs"; it's a magnificent history of the Kushner and Trump families, showing how they cheated, stole and lied their way into power. I'm getting really into Anna Weiner's memoir about tech, "Uncanny Valley." I just loaded Matt Stoller's "Goliath" onto my underwater MP3 player and I'm listening to it as I swim laps.

Latest podcast: A Lever Without a Fulcrum Is Just a Stick https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_330/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_330_-_A_Lever_Without_a_Fulcrum_Is_Just_a_Stick.mp3

Upcoming books: "Poesy the Monster Slayer" (Jul 2020), a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Pre-order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627?utm_source=socialmedia&utm_medium=socialpost&utm_term=na-poesycorypreorder&utm_content=na-preorder-buynow&utm_campaign=9781626723627

(we're having a launch for it in Burbank on July 11 at Dark Delicacies and you can get me AND Poesy to sign it and Dark Del will ship it to the monster kids in your life in time for the release date).

"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother book, Oct 20, 2020. https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250757531

"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583

[charlottelan01]

When thoughts control machines

Mankind has invested in machines for many centuries. From the first labor-saving device from what has become artificial intelligence. The world is run by machines and we have given our power away to them.

Proof of this statement is evident in the dependency of which we've on our computers and cell phones. Tied to these realities it is challenging to conceive of a world without them, particularly for the younger generations and the children who were born into this world with no recollection or experience of a life without mobile phones.

Machines have and will have varied little minds. Long before we can make machines with human capability, we will have many machines that cannot be understood except in mental terms. Learn more about On-Demand App Development Company, Best App Developers in Toronto, and much more related to the app development company.

All of these technological advancements, when stripped down to what it truly is, becomes a life-enhancement device. A vehicle for adding to one's life. Joined with other technologies, it creates an interpersonal environment of devices that are orchestrated by mankind. Men and women use these to project themselves onto the globe stage. Albeit hiding behind these altered personalities. Who lives behind these realities?

Where I am going with this is the idea that this is actually the same manifestation that has been created by mankind in the beginning. Interesting idea, you ask? Consider the concept of thought and what that is as well as the role it has played in the overall evolution of the human race. We have recorded our thoughts in our minds and have transmitted them to each other through the vehicle of communication. Language passed from person to person forms a continuity of a dialogue that begun in ones own head as thoughts. Saved in the form of written books, the thoughts live for as long as the book does, often superseding the person who originated it. As time goes on, perhaps a face remains and a guess as to who the person was. His or her thoughts remain though.

Like a computer program these thoughts can travel the world, reaching all of its inhabitants. Well, not quite all. These are types whom I want to focus on, for they are certainly in the minority. People who have not been caught up in the western world of the last fifty years at least are at an advantage if they choose to explore the potentiality. These individuals coming into the western globe can make the juxtaposition of thoughts and the information age.

People are able to think faster than a computer does, but the tools which he or she was taught to express the thinking is limited to its creator. Each word has an association and each association brings with it an image that creates a deeper association depending upon the person's history be it cultural, educational, religious, etc. These boxes, are connected and could be viewed as personal websites. Communication between two people could become seen as websites interacting with each other. As they do information is passed back and forth. Sometimes one problems it and then it branches out into another website. All of it creating a complex dialogue of interconnected websites.

On the surface it may appear that ıdeas and their expressions are unlimited but in truth, like the borders of a website, they are not. The parameters are there and if not really seen for what they are then thoughts will forever be a machine that runs in your mind and entangles with your emotions and causes a third entity which provided the tumultuous tendencies of feelings and mental entanglements either within oneself or with another person will cause disharmonies or disease within the body. The body is the resting place for thoughts. Consider that for a moment, and thank your body, or apologise to it.

Machines play out programs, as I've said before. Thoughts play out applications too. What stops a machine? Who has the power to stop thoughts? There was something smarter that developed the machine or the computer. There is something wiser that allows the thoughts to run amok in the mind.

By seeing thoughts as machines, you are afforded the opportunity to see them from the limited opinion that they truly have. People get lost in their thoughts because they do not understand their background nor their origin. By relabeling your thoughts into something other than what they are conventionally believed as allows for new light to end up being shone upon them.

At that moment you can ask yourself, do I want to set my cell phone aside and spend time with what is most important to me, or do I wish to continue scanning through the social media page that I have been on for the past half hour? Are your ideas any different? This is your choice; it really is your limited period here. Choose how you spend it properly. Be the expert of your mind, not its slave.

[preservationandruin]

Part Four: Storm’s Illumination

Update! I downloaded the nook app, killed my phone’s storage, and have accepted that reading too much on this will fry my already-bad eyes. 

But, on the plus side, I can read more WoK. 

Point of views back out to be Dalinar, Kaladin, Adolin, and Navani for this section. Featuring Dalinar deciding not to do a stupid thing but to keep trusting Sadeas, the fact that Dalinar isn’t hallucinating, Kaladin learning about his powers, and Dalinar and Navani finally smooching. Also, this is really fucking long, my apologies. 

We start seeing the epigraphs be death rattles again. Meanwhile, Adolin has realized that trying to get his father to see that he’s going mad has resulted in Dalinar deciding to abdicate in favor of Adolin--which is not what Adolin wanted at all. You done fucked up, Adolin. 

Dalinar has another vision, where he sees the Recreance--the Shardbearers giving up their swords. Interestingly, he also feels the hurt and betrayal of the spren: “A terrible feeling struck him. A sense of immense tragedy, of pain and betrayal. [...] What was happening? What was that dreadful feeling, that screaming he swore he could almost hear?” Also, the blades were glowing, but they dimmed and dimmed over time--the spren dying. Yikes. 

So there’s a big hint as to what the Shards actually are. And one of the Radiants--probably Tanavast taking their shape, although it’s hard to tell and it could be a former Bondsmith or something--tells Dalinar that the Night of Sorrows, True Desolation, and Everstorm are coming, and to read the book and “unite them.” 

Ren’s also having either a panic attack or an epileptic moment--all Dalinar classes it as is “an episode of weakness” but he’s pale, his legs are shaking, and he immediately sits down and rests his head in his hands. 

...I wonder when Renarin started awakening his powers, as a note. Also Renarin accepts the Old Magic as existing easily, while Adolin claims it’s a myth (Dalinar shuts that down). 

Adolin and Dalinar start fighting about whether or not Dalinar should step down and Renarin interrupts with “uh...guys...we could, like test to see if the visions are legitimate or not??” and both of them are like “?????” 

So they decide to have Navani write down the visions as Dalinar sees them, because they know they can trust her and their first choice--Jasnah--isn’t there. 

“The visions had told him to trust Sadeas” DALINAR NO

Navani is going out of her way to help Adolin with his flirting attempts she’s such a good aunt I love her. Also it gets him out of the room so Navani and Dalinar can talk privately. 

Navani tries yet again to convince Dalinar they can be together but Dalinar is a bit too tired and confused and uncertain to be able to do this right now, which she recognizes and does leave.

Back to Bridge Four!!! They’re on another bridge run, and Dunny dies--hit by two arrows and trampled by horses. Moash has to pin Kaladin down to stop him from running out after the kid which, thank god Kaladin has some people who are willing to act as his self-preservation. And so instead of helping Dunny, he goes around and tries to heal Bridgemen from other crews. 

Kaladin is too good and pure. He’s just furious that nobody cares about the dead Bridgemen. 

Kaladin runs off of righteous anger and like, coffee, probably. 

Anyway he fucking tears the Bridge Four gang a new one when they refuse to help someone from another bridge because people from other bridges were mean to them--and in the process states that his father was the only man with honor that he ever knew. 

Listen, this is why Kaladin is dangerous--he cares about everyone, that makes them surprised and grateful, especially on the bridge teams where nobody gives a shit about anybody, and then they become slightly more loyal to him. And then suddenly he has like, an army of loyal people. 

He’s such a hufflepuff. 

Also Teft is dropping the world’s least subtle clues here like “wooow its so weird we keep not getting hit....funny that that happens when you run point...just keep carrying lit spheres with you......they’re good luck....oh they went dun again wow that’s so strange kaladin” 

Meanwhile, Kaladin’s own grazed arrow wound is completely gone, and he’s getting a little freaked out. 

Another death rattle: “the burdens of nine become mine. Why must I carry the madness of them all? Oh, Almighty, release me.” This is absolutely Taln (or, uh, whichever of them is the one who was left behind). 

Dalinar’s at a feast again, and Wit isn’t there--Dalinar notes it’s probably because he doesn’t want to become predictable. Also Dalinar notes that noblewomen competing to draw the same person has the same social function as duels between noblemen, although they don’t use the same word. Wit does show up, just casually sitting next to Dalinar--and Dalinar notes that Adolin’s judgement of Wit was more accurate than his was. 

I gotta say, Adolin is hella perceptive. I’ve said it before, I know, but he’s a smart kid. 

Wit quietly--and accurately--depicts the relation between Dalinar and Sadeas:  “The foolishness of men who care, Dalinar, and the brilliance of those who do not. The second depend on the first--but also exploit the first--while the first misunderstand the second, hoping that the second are more like the first.” 

Also Wit ponders if you can pull a person apart and put him back together into something else “Like a Dysian Aimian” (but also, unsaid, like a Radiant.) This whole conversation is Wit trying to gauge exactly how much Dalinar knows--possibly because Wit doesn’t know exactly what Tanavast is telling Dalinar. Interesting. 

Sadeas is going to pull Some Bullshit (as always) and Elhokar is getting more and more paranoid, so all of that is interesting. 

Dalinar voice: Sadeas is going to cause Bullshit re: the investigation so I’m just going to go up and ask him about it. 

I’m not sure if this is a good or a bad idea but regardless it’s going to possibly throw Sadeas off. Unfortunately, Sadeas’ plan is to lull Dalinar into a false sense of security--claiming the most likely suspect is someone who dislikes Dalinar. 

Adolin cannot fucking believe that Sadeas is exonerating Dalinar (which, again, Adolin should stick to his intuition that Sadeas is a sneaky bastard). So Dalinar and Sadeas start plans to ally, which of course GOES HORRIBLY WRONG DALINAR DON’T TRUST SADEAS. 

Skar, about Amaram: Were you with him when he won his shards? Kaladin, quietly, but with great internal salt: No. Nobody was. 

BECAUSE AMARAM DIDN’T FUCKING WIN ANY SHARDS HE STOLE THEM LIKE A FUCKING ASSHOLE I HATE AMARAM SO MUCH

Rock: You can’t fucking swallow a broam Moash: I bet I can Kaladin: Don’t do that, because if you do that, you will die

Kaladin as Bridge Four’s tired Team Mom is very real

Also Moash is still showing signs of wanting to go too far--a la “we could just take everything” until Kaladin shuts that down for being stupid and likely to get them caught. Moash isn’t a tactical thinker. 

Also Kal baits Rock into revealing that he can use a bow and arrow. 

Rock: that shot is nearly impossible

Rock: effortlessly makes the shot

Dalinar is trying to figure out Parshendi gender. “The clean-shaven ones didn’t have much in the way of breasts” weLL IM PRETTY SURE THEYRE NOT MAMMALS so THANK GOD. But Dalinar has noticed that the fighting pairs are usually a man and a woman, and also wonders why in six years of fighting nobody thought to investigate what gender their opponents were. 

I mean, honestly, given how much we depersonalize our enemies, I can believe that. 

And Dalinar’s having problems with the Thrill again. Notably, it doesn’t make him a less effective fighter--it just cuts off the bloodlust and glee. 

Dalinar literally saves Sadeas’ fucking life and later in the book Sadeas repays him by leaving him and Adolin to die. 

To quote a D&D show I watch, SOME PEOPLE HAVE NO SENSE OF FUCKING HONOR. 

Descriptions of the thrill remain disturbingly...sexual, almost. At least in the sense that the vocabulary we have to describe a visceral glee and desire tends to be reminiscent of sexual language. (”He nearly choked on it, the joy, the pleasure, the desire. The danger.”)

Sadeas: tonight, all of my soldiers will feast as if they were lighteyes Me, full of salt: BET THAT DOESN���T INCLUDE THE BRIDGEMEN YOU COLOSSAL ASSHOLE

Another bridgeman has died and Kaladin is not taking it well. Gaz didn’t come to the bridge run--he might have deserted by this point. Kaladin also notices that the Parshendi revere their dead. Kal also still doesn’t believe that Dalinar is as good as people say he is. 

And Teft just got Kaladin to inhale stormlight and use it instinctively, leading to him glowing. Kaladin is lowkey freaking out about having the powers of the Radiants. 

Kaladin and Hoid are interacting for the first time and it’s great. We also get the story of a group of people who would kill any who did something wrong because the emperor wouldn’t tolerate it, and then discovered the emperor was dead all along and had to live with the guilt of knowing that those murders were on their hands, not the emperor’s. 

...which could be a metaphor for all of Vorinism learning that Honor is dead. Or not. As with most things with Hoid, it’s very ambiguous. Also, Syl doesn’t like Hoid, which is understandable. I can see an Honorspren thinking he was strange and wrong. 

Kaladin, thinking, also realizes that his “Emperor” is the apathy--the belief that he can’t change anything. He holds onto that instead of looking for other reasons things could be happening, or acknowledging that he can change things. 

And so he decides to actually start working with and using his powers. 

Honestly from the point of anyone else this story is lowkey ridiculous like “yeah a slave turned out to be a new radiant and so his team of bridgerunners helped him train in the chasms and literally nobody noticed, really” in-universe it makes sense because nobody pays attention to the bridgemen but still you have someone who CAN FLY

A death rattle mentions “Re-Shephir, the Midnight Mother, giving birth to abominations with her essence, so dark, so terrible, so consuming.” Another of the unmade? Hard to tell. 

Adolin is talking to Jakamav, who I unfortunately can only ever see as a fratbro. On the other hand, that’s not an inaccurate interpretation. Adolin is also casually Judging other people’s fashion choices someone let this boy dress in the pretty clothes he wants to dress in instead of his uniform

Also Adolin is grumbling about how other people always want dark hair, which he thinks is stupid. He also claims he forgot that Humility existed, which is probably true. 

Also Jakamav’s girlfriend insulted Dalinar and Adolin is just. ready to FIGHT. 

“Adolin liked to be familiar with a large number of people, but not terribly close with any of them.” That’s just interesting. He’s only really close with his family, especially Renarin, at this point. 

Also, Adolin starts to see the purpose behind the Codes--he starts to see that it’s not just about pure practicality, but also about treating war and the death that comes with it with a measure of seriousness, and also giving people commanders they can trust. It’s about the importance of symbols. 

Dalinar is reciting the Way of Kings to Sadeas and Elhokar, who don’t really get it. We also get “all save the Heralds themselves must dine with the Nightwatcher,” implying that she’s seen as some sort of death entity. 

Also, Dalinar is me:  “And you have this entire passage memorized?”  “I likely got a few of the words wrong”  “Knowing you, that means you might have forgotten a singled “an’ or ‘the.”  Also Sadeas does give Dalinar the honest advice that literally nobody else naturally talks like him, so other people assume he’s putting it on as a self-righteous act (...again, Dalinar, I feel you on that one.) 

Dalinar is staring at Navani again. And Sadeas is judging people’s fashion sense now. 

Time for Adolin to crush it in the duelling ring. Also the line “And so Adolin--in a moderately subtle move” is killing me like. Welp. It was moderately subtle which is the best we can expect from him. Anyway, Adolin obviously just annihilates his opponent, because Adolin is incredible. 

“They’re trying to kill me,” Elhokar said softly, huddling down in his armor. “They’ll see me dead, like my father.”   Highprinces: Look we made a strong king Me: Look at what you did to him! he has anxiety!!!

I retain a soft spot for Elhokar. And he mentions seeing “Symbols, twisted, inhuman” in mirrors--sounds a lot like Cryptics. I almost wrote Cryptids. Wonderful. And Elhokar and Sadeas bully Dalinar into using Sadeas’ fast and costly bridges--which Kaladin later takes as a sign of Dalinar not having as much honor as people say, if I remember right. 

Also, Dalinar’s opinion on fights: “When you won, it was always better to win quickly and with extreme advantage.” Amen to that. 

Kal’s trying to intentionally inhale stormlight now. And we get Teft’s explanation of the Words, which i like, although one of them is pretty much word-for-word “Dying is easy, young man, living is harder” from Hamilton. 

And now, Bridge Four is being put on Bridge duty every single day, which is just the brightlords flat-up wanting them killed. “Consider it an...honor” they say, and Kaladin has to stop himself from swearing. He also learns that he has to inhale the Stormlight in, he can’t just...will it inside of him. 

And Kaladin forms the “parshendi carapace” idea to protect them. We also get some examination of Kaladin’s agnosticism. 

Also he tried to walk on a wall and fell on his ass, nice going Kaladin. 

But he’s getting the hang of having a lot of power and exploiting that to smuggle things out of the chasms. Including surviving a 40-foot fall. 

Back to Dalinar and Adolin, Dalinar has decided not to abdicate. Navani is also the one most aware of Elhokar’s weakness, while Dalinar still denies it. Also, Renarin is fascinated by Navani’s fabrials. So am I--fabrials are really cool. 

And Dalinar is talking with Nohadon in his vision. Also, Navani realizes he’s speaking, instead of gibberish, an ancient dialect of the Dawnchant. Which Dalinar doesn’t know, and thus can’t have hallucinated--the visions are genuine. 

Navani is realizing she might have just figured out how to translate the Dawnchant, which is also incredible. 

Navani and Dalinar are, yet again, alone, and Dalinar is even like “Navani you’re doing it again” and Navani is just like. yep. you caught me. Also she explains that being the old queen basically means she’s placeless in the world and everyone only sees her as the wife of a dead man, and she’s furious seeing it from Dalinar as well, who knew her even before Gavilar did. 

And so Dalinar kisses her because of course he does. There are even passionspren. And then she starts talking business and important things but Dal is also like, distracted because holy shit she’s so pretty aaaaa which, is, relateable, i too cannot function around pretty people. 

Also, multiple notes that the marriage between Gavilar and Navani might not have been the best--Navani notes she had reason to be unfaithful even though she wasn’t, and starts saying something that Dalinar cuts off. 

Also Navani is very smug about the fact that Dalinar kissed her first. Dalinar tries to claim that he was seduced. “What? Seduced?” She glanced back at him. “ Dalinar, I’ve never been more open and honest in my life.”  “I know,” Dalinar said, smiling. “That was the seductive part.” 

This is such a Good Ship

Anyway back with the bridgemen Moash just wants to flat-up attack Sadeas’ army and Kaladin is like. Nope. No. If we do that we will die. 

Yep, Dal is using the bridges again. I can’t remember if this is the time with the Tower or not. I’m on around the 900th page, so maybe? 

“a one-armed herdazian is still twice as useful as a nobrained Alethi. Plus, so long as I’ve got one hand, I can still do this” and then Lopen just flips off the army i love him. 

Also a soldier tries to take their water and Kal is ready to fight them. The soldier is like I don’t want to wait for our water crews and Kaladins like wow that’s too bad for you, and the soldier looks like he’s going to hit him and the entire fucking Bridge 4 gang forms up like buddy, if you punch Kaladin we’re going to have a Problem. 

The soldiers who aren’t assholes are even like, nice. 

Kaladin voice: oh god i hope they don’t notice that was a spear fighting formation WHOOPS And its time for operation Parshendi Armor. 

So everyone targets Kaladin, who can fucking dodge shit and surgebind, and not the bridges. Booyeah. All of bridge four is now yelling at him because of course they are. Matal, who is in charge of the bridges, threatens to have Kaladin strung up and Kaladin’s like yeah bc that worked so well for you guys last time. 

And Dalinar noticed that Parshendi archers were targeting Kaladin’s group and went in to save them. Dalinar is Good. And he even raised his Blade to salute Kaladin. So this time wasn’t the Tower, but that’s got to be the next full Bridge run we get. We’re close, now. 

Although Shen took this badly. Of course--these are the bodies of his people. But at the same time, Kaladin literally needs to do this to keep them all alive. All the choices here are bad, but this was the least bad. Kaladin also is trying to work out the logistics of leaving, realizing that staying is untenable, but leaving is impossible. Somehow they discount the possibility “Dalinar Kholin recruits you as a personal guard after you save his life.” 

Anyway Dalinar and Navani are now a thing. Their guards and clerks are starting to get a bit confused at how much time they spend together. And more discussion of Shshsh, who I hope we get the story of next book. God, I hope she’s not just one more fridged woman for male pain. 

Dalinar: how will we explain this to Elhokar??? Dalinar at the end of the book: yes i am fucking your mother goodbye 

...I still blame/thank Jazz for making me incapable of taking that scene seriously. 

Oh man, horns just sounded for a chasmfiend on the Tower HERE IT IS.  Kaladin, Dalinar, and Adolin are all getting ready for it, and the rate of my habitual leg-jiggle stim has like, doubled. Wonderful. 

And we also see Sadeas planning--trying to get Dalinar to commit most of his forces and leave behind his bridge crews. That sneaky bastard. Also Sadeas claims credit for the armored bridgemen idea. That dick. 

I’m gonna cut it here. I have a feeling I’ll scream a hell of a lot about the Tower. 

[zipgrowth]

How Teaching Using Mindfulness or Growth Mindset Can Backfire

Art Markman is an expert on what makes people tick. The psychology professor at UT Austin has also become a popular voice working to translate research from the lab into advice for a general audience. He’s co-authored popular books, including Brain Briefs Answers to the Most and Least Pressing Questions About Your Mind. He also writes a blog for Psychology Today magazine, and co-hosts a podcast through Austin’s NPR station called Two Guys on Your Head.

In his writings and podcasting, he’s tackled questions big and small, from commenting on the recent wave of mass shootings—to weighing in on why people like cat videos so much. And he’s full of surprising findings.

Take a recent blog post he wrote about mindfulness, for instance. Markman is not against meditation, and he agrees that taking steps to slow down and reflect without snap self-judgment can have benefits. But he also points out that such practices are not always universally positive. In a recent study done with prisoners, for instance, “the aspect of mindfulness associated with reserving judgment about the self actually increased criminogenic thinking significantly.” And even in a classroom setting, such practices are not helping creativity, according to research.

Markman recently talked with EdSurge about how his insights can help educators. He might just change the way you think about things like growth mindset, comprehensive testing, and encouraging students to make mistakes. The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. You can listen to a complete version below, or on your favorite podcast app (like iTunes or Stitcher).

EdSurge: Why do we humans seem to have so much trouble understanding ourselves? With all the advances in science, you'd think we'd have the human mind figured out a bit more.

Markman: First there’s the scientific question, shouldn't psychology be done by now? And the answer to that question is no. For one thing, psychology is a lot harder than almost any other science. I've often called cognitive science the place where Nobel laureates come to die. Somebody wins their Nobel prize in physics or chemistry and then says, "I'm gonna go fix cognitive science," and then they vanish without a trace. Because the brain is a complicated organ; it's embedded in social systems, in cultural systems, and it's constantly learning. So all of those factors make the mind and brain an extraordinarily difficult topic.

On top of that, as a science, we can't do all of the experiments we'd like to do because certain things are just unethical. You can't break people. You can split an atom; you can't split a person. You can't raise somebody in a closet so that they don't learn a language, right? So that also complicates the science.

Then there's a second half of the question, which is why is it that more people don't know more about psychology in ways that might help them to live their lives? It has to do with the fact that, when we systematized education about 120 years ago. We had to lay down a science curriculum, and the three mature sciences were biology, chemistry, and physics, so they made the cut. A lot of other sciences didn't, including psychology, which in the early 1900s barely wrested itself free of philosophy. And so we don't teach a lot of psychology.

On top of that, the structure of the brain makes it very hard for people to understand themselves well. Our motivational centers that drive a lot of our action are buried deep in the brain. They are brain structures that humans share with rats, mice and deer. All the complex reasoning and storytelling abilities that we have involve brain structures that are literally built on top of that other structure, and they don't have great access to what's going on in the motivational system. When people introspect, when they look inwards to try and understand their own behavior, they are actually telling stories about their own behavior that isn’t necessarily perfectly related to what actually drove that behavior, which is why people need to go into therapy. Because that introspection doesn't necessarily solve all your problems; sometimes you need a trained professional to help you to do it.

And so all of these factors combine to keep the brain a mystery, both to scientists and to everybody else.

One topic that you tackled recently on your blog that struck me is mindfulness. Even some colleges are trying it out as a way to help students. But you point out that research suggests mindfulness is not always positive. Could you talk a little bit about that?

As you say, mindfulness is a big trend these days, and there are a lot of great effects of mindfulness. And in particular, one of the things that mindfulness training can do is to make you more aware of some of your own thought processes and some of the emotional reactions you have to things in the world. And that is associated with better emotion regulation and greater likelihood of sticking with your long term goals. So I always like to preface this by saying I'm not making the argument that mindfulness is this a horrible thing that's being foisted on us. But I think we have to understand what it does and doesn't do. And so if you look at the research, there are a few areas where mindfulness is not helpful.

On the not helpful side is creativity. So you could ask the question, if you do a lot of mindfulness training, will you become a more creative individual? And the answer seems to be not so much; it doesn't seem to hurt, but it doesn't seem to help. What really helps you to become more creative is learning a bunch of stuff and having a wide, broad base of knowledge that you can draw from, and mindfulness isn't going to help you to get there.

You’ve written quite a bit about the concept of growth mindset. What is your take on that?

I've followed this work for a long time. Carol Dweck, who developed a lot of these ideas, she and I were colleagues together at Columbia University for a while before she went to Stanford and I came here to the University of Texas. I think there's a lot of wonderful stuff about this mindset work.

The concept is that you can think about almost any skill that you engage in as either being mostly talent-based or mostly skill-based; talent-based meaning, ‘I'm born with it,’ or skill-based meaning, ‘if I work hard enough at it, I'll get it.’ And what her work suggests is that if you adopt a growth mindset, which suggests that most things are skills, that you will often work harder in the face of adversity because you will recognize that your hard work will allow you to overcome difficulties. Whereas if you believe something is purely talent-based, then when things get difficult, you think, "Well, I guess I've reached the limits of my talent. I'm gonna give up."

And that can have important consequences with student retention?

I wrote about a study not long ago that was really interesting in which they looked at students in a low socioeconomic status school in India, and looked at providing information that would help students to adopt a growth mindset there. There were two findings there that I think should cause all of us who like this kind of work to take a step back and think about it more. And to be fair, Carol Dweck has acknowledged that this is part of her research program, so I'm not criticizing her particularly. But there were two findings of interest here: The first was that the students who were most helped by the growth mindset training were the best students already.

The second thing, though, was that for some of those students, particularly those students who the teachers acknowledged were the most conscientious students, this growth mindset training actually decreased their motivation to come to school. Giving them a growth mindset training actually increased their absentees. And the speculation in this paper was that, for some kids who grow up in poor neighborhoods, they come to school because they're good at it, and so they think there's something special about them that makes them good at this, and this is a place they can go to feel special. And when you give them growth mindset training, inadvertently what you do is to say, ‘Well, it's not really that you're special; it's that you've worked hard.’ And they're not as motivated by that as to be in a place where they were actually the special one, and so it actually undermined some of their motivation to continue to come to school.

And so what this means is that we need to really think carefully about how to take the controlled laboratory studies that we do in order to demonstrate that there's something worth continuing with, and then work hard to figure out what factors affect whether this is going to have an impact on students in ways that will help us to then launch this in a way that helps students, helps the students most in need, and doesn't undermine those students who might be succeeding on other grounds. This is no different than having laboratory studies that suggest a particular treatment might cure cancer, only to find out that it doesn't work as well when you try to use that in patients. So it's the hard work of applying research.

From all of your research and careful reading of the literature, what is your biggest piece of advice for teachers—something that might surprise them about how students learn?

What I would say is that we have a conflicting set of goals when we look at the educational system. On the one hand, we want to train independent, innovative thinkers, and then we want to do that by making sure that all of them get the same answer on the state test. And I think that one of the things we need to do is to really think about how the reward structure that is part of school influences the long-term thinking of students.

A lot of what we want to do is to give students more opportunities to do things that may not be correlated with grades, right? To give students opportunities to make mistakes and to recover from those mistakes—to give students opportunities to answer questions that nobody in the room knows the answer to, give students the opportunity to read stuff that has no bearing on whatever the lesson plan is at the moment. Because those skills in the long run are the ones that are correlated with success after school, and that to me is a real tension.

In the most recent book that you co-authored, Brain Briefs: Answers to the Most (and Least) Pressing Questions about Your Mind, one of the chapters is titled "Do Schools Teach the Way Students Learn?" What is your answer to that one?

I would say is sometimes, but often not.

One of the things that schools do is that they test on material at the end of units and then not again. And one of the things that we know about short term testing is that studying in the moment for a test that's coming up will allow you to learn the material for the test, but then your brain is basically gonna decide you don't need this information anymore if you don't encounter it again. Your brain wants to keep using information when you're forced to keep pulling it out over and over again. And so, even though students hate cumulative exams, those are the ones that actually force them to keep encountering the material repeatedly over the course of a year in order to make sure that it gets in there. So actually forcing them to keep going back to things that learned before in an explicit way is really important.

I think another part of what schools do, and this gets back to something I was saying a little bit earlier, is that schools teach mistake minimization, right? So to get good grades, you have to get the answers on each test correct, which means that the kids with the best grades, generally speaking, make the fewest mistakes. And what that teaches us is really good learning is about never making mistakes. But actually, learning is failure driven; it's when surprising things happen that you're forced to learn new things. And so it's actually the recovery from mistakes that helps people to learn best.

And so what we need to be teaching is yeah, make a mistake, but then you're responsible for fixing it and for understanding the thing you didn't understand. Getting a C is just the first step in a process of actually learning something, not the demonstration that you hadn't learned it.

We focus on technology in education, and these days there’s a lot of talk about trends like adaptive learning and flipped classrooms. How helpful do you think these types of tech innovations will be, or can a low-tech solution be more helpful?

I think technology's just a tool, and so technology alone isn't going to solve problems. For example, I think some of the schools that have experimented a little the inverted [or flipped] classroom, where you have students engage with the lecture outside of the class time and then have more guided activities inside the classroom. There's a place where I think technology can have a real benefit, because why should the teacher deliver a lecture that could just have easily have been engaged with in a more interesting way outside of the classroom, and then save the teacher's expertise for helping to debug misconceptions in students. So I think some of those things can be very valuable.

In general, I think technology hasn't been used that well in classrooms, certainly at the college level where I teach. MOOCs were all the rage, these massively online courses, which have really not engaged people very much because after you watch a video screen by yourself for about five minutes, you start looking at your cellphone. There's actually something valuable to being in a classroom with other people. You're much more likely to pay attention if there are 25 other students in the room also paying attention than if there's nobody around and you can do whatever you want. I mean, when I go home, every once in awhile I will sit and watch television by myself and after five minutes, I'm on my phone, and I'm trying to be entertained.

We have to really think about how technology can fit with the way people learn rather than assuming that just putting it online, or just using a computer to present the information, is going to fix all of the problems.

How Teaching Using Mindfulness or Growth Mindset Can Backfire published first on http://ift.tt/2x05DG9

[sanguinesprout]

The sky is a beautiful blue today~ (Some updates, nicer things, random snippets of memories and why I write about weather so much lol)

I was thinking maybe I should write about something lighter, like the things I did recently, in particular the good things, my small triumphs and such c: 

I’ve spent a lot more time out with my sister (and sometimes her bf and my mum) recently, especially in the case of going shopping~! I bought quite a lot of nice tops with interesting and motivating text based designs on them (maybe I’ll photograph them sometime), and some of them were on sale too yay! :3 Usually I try and avoid going out too many times in a row or when I don’t feel mentally prepared beforehand but I went and it was alright! Though some of the times I had no choice as I had a doctors appointment, but instead of just going home I went to the shops or the supermarket afterwards and had a nice long browse around~ 

I used to remember a long long time ago when I was younger I really did not enjoy shopping and would always constantly be asking when we could go home lol but now it’s pretty fun (apart from the fact I’m actually really poor). Also a long time ago I would trail around after my sis or whoever, but now I go off on my own and look at whatever I feel but sometimes my sis trails after me instead lol and likes to moan about me looking at things too slowly quite a lot. It makes me anxious but I told her about it so she does it less or I’ll tell her to go look at something else, cause I like taking my sweet time yo >3< I don’t mean like I only started doing this recently haha, but it did take quite a few years before I felt confident enough to go around on my own and actually enjoy it. I would go shopping completely on my own and take public transport after college and uni sometimes and such, I feel I’ve kind of taken a step back since then but I’m not back at square one at least I guess, it’s something!

I still feel awkward and anxious when people are blocking the way of an aisle or when they’re looking at the same rack of stuff, but I’m gonna try and push these feelings aside, be more assertive and so and so. There were also times where certain unusual situations were kind of traumatic for me and maybe I’ll write or draw about them sometime, but they’re not important and I shouldn’t keep thinking back on them and feeling hurt. I still sometimes get that ‘lost kid that has to look down every aisle and worries everyone already paid and left’ feeling after wandering around when I go to the supermarket with my parents lol, because they are all about being quick so they can go home and get ready for work and stuff, but having a phone now unlike when I was a kid and didn’t have one makes everything suck much less hah take that!

Anyways, back to the present! The weather has been pretty flip floppy lately, on some few random days the weather was real hot and some super rainy and cold and some calm and neutral, like today. I really love when it spontaneously rains so hard and immediately after the sky is such a wonderful clear blue, I feel it’s analogous to when you have are suddenly overcome with negative emotions and once they pass you feel at ease and can think with clarity again aka. the calm after the storm. I really like the weather and making weird metaphors about it as you could probably tell already lolol. The weather is just something that’s always there, something that affects mood but is also so moody itself, something everyone experiences and uses for small talk and something so mundane but also wonderful and unpredictable (unless you look at the forecast everyday, I mean it’s real easy to check on the phone widget but I don’t haha, as much as I talk about it I don’t worship the weather channel or anything lol) ^^ 

Oh also in relation to this, when I said I was going to write this blog a bit more like a diary, it made me think of a time when I was little and my mum bought me a diary book. It was a simple Winnie the Pooh diary with a gold lock and guess what I wrote in it hahahaha I wrote in huge writing on each page a 3-4 word sentence of how the weather was that day LOL It was super wasteful and my sis and mum were like what even?! XD I’ve had lots of diaries since then and lots of attempts at writing about actual things but I’ve never been able to keep it up past a few days. I just hope this blog doesn’t die out like my past diaries or become a brief weather description collection either hahaha. Today’s post title is kinda like a tribute or slightly more advanced version of my kiddie diary x3

Okay enough about that lol! One of the days recently I went to the park~! I did say I wanted to go and my sister suggested it. It was some time in the afternoon on a weekday so it wasn’t to busy. It was pleasant and refreshing to go walkies sine I hadn’t gone there for a while, even though I really really hate all kinds of bugs (and things that have bugs in them, like trees) and shriek and flail at their presence lol. I saw some pretty flowers, sat on the see saw with my sis briefly (which I was nervous about cuz there were kids around and well I’m not a kid anymore *sob* but I will always be a kid at heart and so will my sis, so I did it anyways! Yolo, gotta sit my but on all the things next time XD). I also saw the duckies! Or well I think they were actually geese but they were so pretty and derpy and their little floofy babies omg! ;w; Soooo cute!! I definitely want to go see them again sometime :D I’ve come to kind of dislike zoos (and aquariums too) because I feel so bad seeing some of them so distressed looking and it feels unfair that they have to live in such a contained and artificial space without choice, but when there’s wildlife living free like the duckies in the lake, it’s just such a pleasant thing to witness.

Oh also some good today was I cooked my own breakfast...kinda... It was just a fried egg with tuna in it pretty much and there was rice too (made in a rice cooker not by me lol) but I cooked the egg part! It takes so much convincing for me to be able to do just this. My mum and dad don’t like me hanging around the kitchen because ‘you’re too slow’ and ‘you’ll make a mess’ etc. I know they keep babying me and want things to go smoothly their way... but it needs to change! I don’t want to be dependant forever :c I was persistent this time and I’m glad! :D And I also suggested that maybe everyday I could maybe learn something new from them, whether it be just some small technique or a recipe or whatever. I am lacking in well... life skills because I was never taught or allowed to do certain things, like cooking for example. I can make something easy like instant ramen or pasta, but they usually handle all meals and don’t let me experiment or cook for reals. The only thing they really trust me with is making tea and sandwiches and the only time I cooked something from a recipe was cooking class at school a long time ago lol. Sometimes I help my sister bake stuff, but they get annoyed at her too for being in the way and stuff, but she isn’t a weak spirited person like me so she just carries on haha.

I can watch video tutorials all I want but it’ll never be useful without actual execution and practice, you know! >< My dad is a chef and is particularly prideful of his cooking, and also quick to insult and get annoyed for small mistakes, so it’s gonna be tough but I’m gonna try anyways! Lately I’ve been trying harder to just chat and bond with my dad more, we watch drama/animation series together at supper which is nice~! (Even though he feigns reluctance to watch and that he’s interested sometimes lol). Conversation is particularly hard because of the language barrier, but if I make the conversation about learning language like I did the other day and maybe now even about learning cooking stuff, then maybe things will go at a much better pace :D 

I also drew some things I was kind of happy about lately, and didn’t give up on trying to interact online even though I really wanted to! I need to get my stuff organised and start posting stuff! I feel like the longer I leave it, the less it’s making me wanna do it, stop it perfection, you’re unnecessary! x^x I really hate having an empty account, it makes me feel like a creep (like on youtube it’s okay but on other places it’s unusual, right?) ;^; Something I keep forgetting is that there is no rules and no obligations for me (or anyone else) to do anything or feel anything. There’s no right or wrong, silly self! I need to stop worrying so much and just go for it! Yolo the hell out of everything (maybe that’s not quite the right phrase lol) and just stop falling into the paralysis by analysis trap! X3 Imma try harder! ò^ó

Uh uhhh before I end this, I have some update-y stuff on my therapy situation... I have my first appointment tomorrow! I’m so nervous!! xAx The funny thing though (or well, not really), is that when my doctor was giving me options on who to see, I could either go for the general therapist who works in the same facility or to go for the referral service for a more specific recommendation. I opted for the second in hope that I could see someone with a specialism in idk... AVPD or personality disorders (if there is a such thing), but it seems I’ve ended up going full circle and ending up getting recommended to the general therapist back here >< I mean, at least it’s convenient and better than nothing I suppose... Anyways, I don’t know how it’ll go so I shouldn’t make any assumptions or have any wild expectations. I can do this! It’ll be okay! I’m glad I got a female therapist, because I get even more nervous around guys and the one I had in the past was ahhh idk... maybe I’ll write about it with whatever I write about after the app tomorrow. I just hope it goes well! 

Don’t give up! You can do it! Have a nice day~! :3