#I have neither the time nor the skills to make a video essay

[yamiheart]

In CELEBRATION of Fanfiction

AI-generated content seems to be aiming at every possible creative pursuit as of late. Theft of art and art styles has become so insidious that digital artists are being forced to “mask” their posted pieces in ways that human eyes can’t detect yet completely scramble AI art programs. AI “animation,” while currently in a state of fairly poor quality, has proven to be feasible, and thus threatens the status of already precarious and underpaid animators throughout the world. Even photographers and their models are not immune to the pressure of the seemingly “miraculous” output of hundreds of thousands of lifelike, frontpage-ready images by AI programs. 

Of course, the above mentioned are all visual mediums. The art of conversation and the written word has also been in the eye of AI for a long time. “Chatbots” have been around for almost as long as the concept of the computer itself, and The Turing Test is still a popular measure of a successful AI chatting program to this day. Back in my childhood days, “Cleverbot” was a novelty chatbot that was fun to chat with for a few minutes, but quickly became stale. As most of you reading likely already know, ChatGPT, on the other hand, has taken the world by storm. Schools are contending with students submitting AI-written reports (a very futuristic-sounding cheating method indeed), and many writing-based industries, already squeezed by the looming threats of a post-pandemic recession, are in turmoil over the potential of the complete replacement of humans by the machines. 

I myself am in no way an AI expert. I do not know if the current state of AI is just a fad or a true industry disruptor. What I do know about, however, is fanfiction, and it seems that people want AI to write it, too. 

I have been writing fanfiction since 2010, back when I was in middle school. I would write for hours and hours, exploring characters and ideas in ways the original source material (in this case, the original Yu-Gi-Oh! series) never intended. I would then post these works onto fanfiction(dot)net for mostly my irl friends and a few dozen strangers to read and enjoy. Over the years, I’ve cycled through a few different fandoms and made the switch to the currently-preferred fanfic-posting website, Archive of Our Own -otherwise known as “Ao3.”  LiveJournal, FFnet, Wattpad, Ao3 -all of these websites and more have had hundreds of thousands if not millions of fanfictions posted and consumed. Fanfiction isn’t just a small circle of Star Trek fans sharing secret magazines through the mail -and in some ways, it never was just that. 

Many “classics” today are, in some way or another, fanfiction by another name. Consider, for instance, the well-known fact that Disney’s 1994 hit movie, The Lion King, is just a retelling of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. When anonymous authors online turn all of their favorite characters into lions or wolves, it’s considered “furry cringe,” but when multi-billion dollar corporations do the same, it’s considered “art.” 

House is a modern-day hospital-au version of Sherlock Holmes. 

All fairytale “reimaginings,” such as the TV drama Once Upon a Time, are fanfictions in every sense of the word.

The current Batman cannon has so many reimaginings that it’s a gag in The Lego Batman Movie!

And these are just some American/European examples. The first “modern” novel, The Tale of Genji, has such a long history of fanart and fanfiction in Japan that there are literal traveling museum exhibitions to display small fractions of what has been (and continues to be) produced. However, in these exhibitions, the words “art” and “fiction” are never preceded by “fan.” These works, though just as “derivative” in content as anything you would find in internet fanspaces today, get to once again simply be “art.” 

What is the difference? Where is the line between literature worthy of “respect” and literature considered worthy of constant derision?

I do not have all the answers, but please allow me to present some for your consideration.

As you may have noticed in my above examples, most of the original works being reimagined are, indeed, in the public domain. This means that no one owns the rights to these original works anymore, and thus they can be reproduced faithfully or completely changed without threat of legal trouble. This also means that all reproductions can make money for the reproducers without hassle. Batman is a somewhat curious case in this instance, since many of his reimaginings are in and of themselves canon while still carrying many of the hallmarks of fanfiction. 

We will return to the curious case of Batman later, but needless to say legality and potential monetary gain make up an important component of the supposed high-literature/lowly-fanfiction divide. If you ever click on “older” fanfictions, particularly those from the 2000s and early-2010s, you will see constant repetition of phrases such as “I do not own X” or “please don’t sue me”. Later authors, including my own childhood self, repeated these out of an abundance of caution without really knowing why. Afterall, no one on websites like FFnet honestly thought the authors owned the “original” works in question to begin with. The problem, as I understand it now, arose from the infamous response of author Anne Rice to fanfiction of her book series, The Vampire Chronicles. In 2001, she made it very clear that her works and characters were protected by copyright, and that she was willing and ready to sue any supposed-copycats. Fanfics were purged by both individual authors and entire websites who were either afraid of the mere threat of legal action or had been notified of impending legal action if there was no change respectively. 

The state of fanfiction legality has come a long way in 20+ years, but even Ao3, which has lawyers on hand to defend both its own existence and the rights of its authors, does not allow authors to talk about taking commissions (ie, getting paid) or post links to websites such as kofi or patreon. The idea of “making money” off of fanfiction still exists in a dangerous gray zone that not even the lawyers of Ao3 can protect you from. 

Still, one of the stereotypes of the true artiste is that they do not create with money in mind to begin with, so this cannot be the only factor in fanfiction’s discrediting as an art form. Another consideration, then, is the content of fanfiction itself. So far, I have not endeavored to try and define the word “fanfiction.” Everyone reading this surely has their own conception of the word in mind either from first-hand experience or cultural osmosis. To me, defining fanfiction is as fruitless a pursuit as trying to define any other medium of artistic expression. What is sculpture? What is painting? What is documentary filmmaking? Definitions require limits, and limits breed exceptions. 

Perhaps the broadest stereotypical definition of fanfiction is that it is derivative work containing sexually-explicit love stories of a primarily homosexual-male variety. Many of the most famous pairings -KirkxSpock, SasukexNaruto, DanxPhil- would seem, to the distant observer, to fit this stereotype. A related stereotype replaces the homosexual-male romance with a heterosexual romance between a male celebrity/fictional character and a female oc or “original character” who is thus presumed to be the author’s self-insert (meaning that the female oc is a one-to-one reflection of the author herself). Think of all the most infamous One Direction fanfiction for a taste of this stereotypical form. 

However, as you may have guessed, these stereotypes lead to a superficial understanding of what fanfiction can be. If you go to Ao3 right now, you will find that there are five content ratings that can be attached to a fic: General Audiences, Teen and Up Audiences, Mature, Explicit, and Not Rated. By definition, there is no way to know what sort of content is in a “Not Rated” fic, but putting that aside, let us for a moment be ultra-conservative and assume ALL “Explicit” and “Mature” fanfictions have sex (as an author who has used this system, I know for a fact that they do not). Even with this ultra-conservative assumption, going to any popular series with over 200,000 archived stories will reveal to you that sexually-explicit fanfictions make up less than half of what is published. What types of stories are contained in the majority of fanfictions, then?

Well, let’s take a moment to look at the chat fic as just one example. Chat fics are not the most popular type of fanfiction, but they often attract a fair amount of readers. Chat fics are meant to be, well, group chats between fictional characters. Some may have suggestions of romance, but many of these fics would be better described as chaotic, humor-driven affairs (the humor in this case, as in all cases, being somewhat subjective). Authors often have the freedom to play around with each character’s screen name, as well as what other characters might have someone saved as in smaller or private chats. Details like these reveal that, while chat fics may appear on the surface to be some of the most simple and easy-to-write fanfictions, they often require in-depth knowledge of not just canon facts but also fanon (“fan canon”) tropes to be accepted and enjoyed authentically by readers. The implementation of this knowledge is doubly impressive when the original source material exists in a world without cellphones and the internet, and thus the author must find a way to strike a balance between referencing the original character/trait/meme/etc while making it seem congruent in the new setting. Indeed, the achievement of a particularly impressive “reference” in any fic is often met with high praise by readers in the comment section of the story.   

I should say now that none of this is meant to stigmatize or label sexually-explicit fanfiction as somehow “inauthentic.” It is authentic and it is important, but it is not all that fanfiction is. One of the greatest beauties of fanfiction, as has been observed in pieces like Dan Olson’s breakdown of the Fifty Shades movies on the Folding Ideas YouTube channel, is that it lets both authors and readers get to the “good stuff” without having to be bogged down by character introductions and worldbuilding. In the contract of fanfiction, both the author and the reader have already done some amount of prior “research” so that everyone is more or less on the same page about certain aspects of the work. This is why the many iterations of Batman work no matter the change in scenery or storyline: both authors and readers are bringing assumptions to the table that they are ready and willing to see both reaffirmed and challenged. 

Again, a common reason for praise in the comment sections of fanfictions comes from the perceived accuracy of a character’s depiction within the story. In this case, it doesn’t matter if the creator of the original work would actually agree with the characterization in the fanfiction, just that the fanfic author and the reader agree that it is authentic. It is understandable, then, that creators like Anne Rice would feel threatened by fanfiction. In some cases, this fear is legitimate: no well-intentioned creator would want their work altered in order to spread hateful messages, afterall. Additionally, when characters in a story are not merely fictional but are real, living celebrities/singers/idols/youtubers/etc., there are some reasonable questions about ethics and consent to consider. However, what I have mostly found throughout my years as a writer and reader is that the fanfiction contract allows for a deeper exploration of themes that mainstream media simply does not or will not explore.

This brings us to the final consideration today for why fanfiction is so often belittled and mocked, and to put it quite simply it is the creators and audience themselves. Returning to stereotypes once more, people often imagine that fanfiction is written by and for heterosexual, teenage, cis-gendered girls. The social trend of shitting on the interest of teenage girls is another topic for another time. For now, I certainly will not deny that these people exist within the space, but I also would not say they are necessarily the majority. I can only speak from my own experiences, but I have found is that fanfiction holds a strong attraction for individuals of queer genders and sexualities. These individuals, searching both to express their own feelings and to find a community, can use fanfiction as a means of attaining both. This is partially why sexually explicit fanfiction, while not the majority of what is written, can be some of the most powerful and subversive content that is produced. Fanfiction written about men is almost never fanfiction written for cis-gender men, and the truth is that pornography written by gender/sexual minorities for gender/sexual minorities just hits different. 

And when it comes to minority or disadvantaged groups, queer individuals are by no means the only ones who find freedom in fanfiction. Taking characters “everyone” knows and writing them with depression, anxiety, ADHD, Autism, etc., allows authors and readers to feel fully realized in fiction for the first time. Fanfiction can be just as, and sometimes even more, resonant than traditional fiction because of just how strong people’s feelings are for their favorite characters. If those favorite characters were dismissed or betrayed in the source material, they can be given a second chance at “life” in the fanfiction. Even when this is not the case, there may be elements to characters that simply resonate with minority voices and inspire further creation even after the canon story ends.

Fanfiction is not perfect by any means. There is quite a lot to be said about problems such as the misogyny and racism that can “slip by” or be fully adopted by a fandom uncriticized. Once again, however, this is true of any artistic medium, and that’s what fanfiction is: a medium of expression, not a genre. Fanfiction can be romance, but it can also be sci-fi, mystery, comedy, thriller, historical drama, adventure, and more. It is creation constrained only by the written word itself. 

Now let me tie this all back to the beginning. As I alluded to, there has recently been an increased interest in allowing ChatGPT to “write” fanfiction. I am here to say that AI fanfiction is not real fanfiction. While it is true that AI is by its very nature derivative in its outputs, AI is hollow. It has nothing to say. Fanfiction is a rich and flourishing medium which takes characters the dominant powers in society have “allowed” us to have, and it breathes into these characters fresh, minority voices. Fanfiction is art, and it is worthy of celebration, not derision and cheap imitation.

[sir-yeehaw-paws]

Venom Snake and Paz: Loss, Guilt and Identity

A while back, I promised I’d upload the complete Paz storyline with the cassettes included, and while I was originally going to attach this to that, the little essay below got too long.

This is a companion piece.

Thus, I’m posting the essay now as a separate entity and I will attach a link to it when I post up the video, as well. This ‘meta’ is a bit messy, as it’s meant to go in conjunction with the video.

Paz has an odd place in Phantom Pain because she doesn’t exist, except for deep within Venom’s head.

Diamond Dog Soldier: “Boss keeps disappearing to that wing under construction a lot lately.”

Her storyline is singular to him, and him alone, and it comes with more than one theory attached.

As we know, in this story, Venom encounters ‘Wandering Motherbase Soldiers’ who each carry photographs from the MSF. After he finds the first soldier and comes back, he wanders into an empty room on the Medical Platform only to be greeted with an ‘amnesiac’ Paz-who still thinks it’s 1974 and she’s little more than the Highschool girl she was pretending to be, and that Peace Day is just days away.

It's always sunny in this room, by the by, regardless of what time of day it is.

In this, he also has ‘Kaz’ and ‘Ocelot’ explaining the situation to him. ‘Kaz’ explains that she was rescued, and ‘Ocelot’ explains the amnesia and tells Venom that the ‘medics’ believe she is suffering from a type of ‘dissociative disorder’ and ‘dissociative identity disorder’.

Of course, the truth is that none of this is real. Paz is still very much deceased, and neither Kaz, nor Ocelot are actually there. Venom’s brain hallucinates this entire scenario, both as a deep manifestation of the Medic’s underlying guilt for not saving her, and the one having identity problems himself-not Paz.

I’ve seen the theory about her being there because of the Medic’s guilt and the identity theory in unison. I think that both are true, but the identity one holds just a touch more weight in my mind.

I say this, because the story line only concludes after the Truth Mission, when Venom is given the truth about who he is, and the glass castle hallucination of Paz crumbles. Leaving him not just with the truth that she died after all, but that she ‘needs to let him go’.

And with her, he has to let himself go as well. A choice that was taken from him when Zero decided the sacrificial tableau he left for Big Boss was a perfect opening to make him a body double.

Paz is dead, and so is the Medic.

I’m admittedly a little bit unsure about the guilt factor being his real driving force. I can see him feeling guilty about it. Because we know from the way Big Boss talks, “He was always the best man we had”, that this was a man with skills. Skills good enough to be on the Ground Zeroes top secret black mission to begin with, and skilled enough to perform a rapid-fire surgery with a very literal ticking bomb on board in a chopper. But I feel that the Medic also would’ve lost patients before. He’s not just a Medic, but a combat medic for a PMC. His skills, and the environment he’s in isn’t quite the same as a hospital.

What I do find telling is how the Medic interprets Paz in his sub-conscious. He does not for lack of a better word, ‘manifest’ her as a spy, or even a grown woman. Instead, his mind has conjured up the idealistic imagery of a nearly saccharine peace-loving schoolgirl. An almost extreme version of the personification she gave herself on her mission to infiltrate and spy on the MSF.

Paz has a tone of pure innocence and wonder when she speaks to Venom in these hallucinations. Only ever interrupted with more of her ‘true’ character when timelines conflict, or information as the story progresses puts a dent in the façade.

An example of this is when her wound reopens, with ‘Ocelot’ explaining to Venom that, “Well-Miller did go and tell her that Skullface was dead. If anyone should want revenge on him it’d be her, but..”

One notices that Kaz and Ocelot present strange in these hallucinations as well. They always seem just slightly out of character. Granted, that’s a tricky thing to say because ‘character’ is so subjective to a person’s interpretation, but they just feel distinctly well, ‘off’.

All of this culminates in the heartbreaking conclusion. As it all fades away, Venom watches Paz ‘die’ for the second time, and the room and everything in it fades away. I haven’t touched much on identity, just yet, but of course this only happens once Venom has come to learn the truth.

A reason I say this is because the soldiers around after the Truth Mission begin saying things like, “Boss, whoever you are, I’ll follow you no matter what.” And things of that nature. Venom-or the Medic, I’ll say for the moment, is a man who had his entire identity and sense of person-hood stripped from him by Zero and Ocelot. Once he was in that chopper and threw himself in front of Big Boss, he died. Maybe not in the most physical sense, but in the literal sense of death that we can muster up. Who he was, what he did, the choices he made, all of them gone. As he was erased and given a new face, new identity, and new memories.

All of which belonged to another person.

Paz, or Paz Ortega Andrade, wasn’t a ‘real’ person. She was a character created by Zero to fulfill a single purpose. Like say, Eva before her-we don’t know who she really was. There were other ‘Paz’s’ that failed Zero’s test, and there would’ve been others after her, should the Paz we knew fail as well.

Like the Medic, Paz wasn’t given much of a choice. She was given a job. And with that job she invented a backstory, a personality-everything she needed to slip into the MSF and achieve her goal. The only ‘Paz’ Venom/Medic and others around her knew was the spy.

Again, not unlike Eva in MGS3.

Now, there’s a whole other meta about how identity is such a warped, messy concept in the entire series a whole, but I’m going to focus mainly on Paz and Venom in here for the sake of it all. Even though there’s an argument to be made about how both of them are just fellow victims of the identity crisis many face within the series. Metal Gear has a huge commentary about identity that is present throughout the series I’d love to delve into properly sometime. The TL’DR here is that the only Paz is the one she showed them.

In that same vein, we know very little about who Venom was before he was given the Big Boss makeover. We know only what we’re told by Big Boss himself, and Ocelot and Zero’s assumptions of the man.

Big Boss: “He was always the best man we had..but.”

Ocelot (to Big Boss): “9 years ago he threw himself in front of that chopper. That day, the man you knew died.”

How this comes to mean, ‘therefore Zero decided a man willing to sacrifice himself for you would be fine being you’ I don’t know. I don’t think Zero cared much beyond, ‘I have a convenient extra body here to make use of while Big Boss is comatose.’ Either way, this is all we know about him. We know he’s in photographs with Big Boss, Morpho and Kaz. We know that he was trusted enough to be on the Ground Zeroes mission, and we know that he was a damned good medic and soldier.

And that he was born in California, USA, in 1932. That’s it. That is all we get. (And real quick, I understand that the player inputs Venom’s details themselves too-because he’s also meant to serve the role of player insert, I’m speaking strictly of the character outside of this. But for the hell of it, I’ve always called my Venom ‘Charlie’.)

Does jumping in front of the chopper for Big Boss give us a clue?

Maybe. If anything, one can imagine that Venom was under the same hypnotic spell the rest of the MSF (and later Diamond Dogs) were in that Big Boss becomes the entire world of his soldiers. They live and die for him. Much like the soldiers who go willingly when Venom has to shoot them in the head (not that every soldier does this, but it’s an interesting parallel isn’t it?)

And a bit cultist but again..another meta, that.

We can infer that Venom cared about his Boss, and his role in all this. And we can imagine that maybe if Zero asked him up front, “Would you like to be Big Boss” maybe he’d have said yes. But Venom is never given the chance to consent. It’s all placed beyond his control. When he’s put in his medically induced coma in 1975, everything that follows after is fully out of his hands.

I've said it before, but it's so eerie how Venom (Medic at this point) is sort of being ignored by everyone until Kaz brings light to him being there at all.

There's a good chance this is the last memory Medic has that's his own. Terrifying. When he is hallucinating Paz, and Ocelot is telling him that she’s suffering from identity disorder, is that not Venom’s brain trying desperately to tell him that’s what’s going on with himself? (I am not the first person to suggest this, it’s summed up a little on TVTropes but it’s a pretty good argument, or at the very least, suggestion, in my opinion). As the moments between them progress, and Venom recovers little ‘parts’ of her, is he not also recovering some parts of himself, or desperately trying to?

He's in a way, telling this to himself, through Paz.

And after all-she is permanently embedded within him, thanks to the fragments of bone and teeth.

Which is both a bi-product of the explosion, and a symbolism so un-subtle I think Kojima might as well have said ‘SHE IS ALWAYS PART OF VENOM’ in as many words.

Which, to be fair, is exactly what Paz does say in her final ‘tape’ to him.

There’s a deep undercurrent of sadness to it all. Venom has to realize (and I imagine he does) that there is no more going to back to ‘Medic’ than there is Paz coming back to life. It’s estimated that Venom accepts his place, whether willingly or not, and that perhaps, in its own way, this is a private type of mourning for him.

Not just for Paz. But for himself, too. And what tiny fragments of his former self might lie beneath. He couldn’t save her, he couldn’t save himself, and he has no choice but to be okay with that. And move on.

Let it go, they’re dead. Buried.

Whatever his personality may be come his final death in Outer Heaven in 1995, there’s an 11 year difference between the moment of him on the platform, alone and grieving, and the moment of him staring himself down in the mirror before he marches to his death.

Sacrificing himself, yet again, for the Boss he was unwittingly made into.

*As a quick note, I’m not stating that as a pure victim piece. Venom isn’t innocent and there is plenty of blood on his hands. The statement I make here is very much a sort of ‘in the moment’ one. Like so many others in the series there’s the cyclical tragedy that underpins it all, and the issue of Venom’s person hood and consent being stripped away is, in this particular statement, separate to the crimes he commits and the things he does.

[bios-hzrd]

Dumping this shit here because making scripts for video essays I have neither the time nor willpower to edit is just something I do now. Not my best work but my best work is 80% plagiarized and about topics people actually care about. Theoretically. I assume some people care about classic literature but I imagine they’d be terribly dull and I’d like to avoid meeting them.

———-

I love Pizza Tower. I fell in love the first playthrough, again on the second, and once more on the third, and when I love something, I strap it to the operating table, cut it open, splay its organs, and try to see what makes it tick. Now that I’ve completed my examination I need to yap about it and because I’m the worst I don’t have any friends, so random internet strangers will have to do.

God where do I even begin.

Chapter 1: Peppino’s Moveset and Beginner players

Unlike more traditional platformers, in Pizza Tower you are always moving towards your next obstacle. If you try to take it slow it's gonna be a rough ride.

Speed checks are baked into the obstacles. If you are running at at least Mach II you can run straight through enemies and metal blocks without stopping for a second. Metal blocks exist to force a newer players hand, there’s no other way through, and once you do bash through you might as well keep running. Combat with enemies, much like a stealth game, is a punishment for slipping up. You can't just hit them, you have to pick them up then throw them. That’s two more inputs than your usual zero.

While you might think that it'd be rather difficult and tumultuous to play a platformer where you can’t stop, these levels want players, even brand new players to sight read the levels despite moving at such high speeds. After all, with no health bar the player can’t be sent back to checkpoint and is expected to beat each level the first time they see it.

Boiling it down as much as I can, on a first run Pizza Tower levels challenge players by demanding they turn up, left, right, and down at high speeds. For each direction the game demands you turn you are given a move that slows you down to let you get your bearings, then gives you all your speed back again. I’m speaking of the super jump, belly flop, and turn around drift.

Because each corresponds to a direction the opportunity to use them is intuitive, and additionally the timing for each is rather lenient. Most notably with how the super jump lets you waddle to the left or right to readjust your position if you did it too early or too slow.

With these moves the player is constantly afforded a brief respite to get their bearings and use the zoomed out camera to acknowledge what’s ahead and figure out how to respond to it.

Now I bet some of you are wondering when I’m going to mention the wall climb. You see the player has two ways to gain elevation. The wall climb lacks the short pause but its context sensitive. There’s a move like this for each direction, namely the piledriver and wall jump, but only the wall climb is given to you in the initial tutorial. The wall climb gives you a foot in the door, shows you what it’s like without the short pause, and leaves you to figure the others out for yourself.

The way I’ve described it so far makes it sound kinda like DDR with extra steps, minus one dance mat. What I haven’t mentioned yet, is all the fun ways the game changes when you take off the kiddy gloves and go for those p ranks

Chapped Too: Pizza Ranks

Beating the game for the first time is a relatively smooth experience. While it can be a bit tricky to wrangle the controls, by making the player functionally immortal for most of each level the biggest threat the game has is a less smooth play experience. While Pizzaface does force your hand a bit by throwing in an explicit time limit, there’s plenty of time to escape so long as you’re playing the game the way it wants you to. Pizza Tower shows that while common, threats of death and gating progression behind skill checks are not necessarily required for a good action game, and you can get players to impose challenge upon themselves by simply making safe play less optimal and pushing yourself intuitive and accessible.

The first playthrough emphasizes reducing friction and making its core appeal more accessible, so now that the game has got its hooks in, it can throw in some external challenge to push you to your limits.

Getting all the P ranks is the hardest challenge the game gives you, it requires that on each level you reach a certain amount of points, complete all three secret rooms, grab the secret treasure in the janitors closet, complete a lap 2, and maintain a singular unbroken combo from the first room to the exit.

Getting all of the secrets and needing to hit the point total encourages the player to thoroughly search the level and attain a strong understanding of not only its layout, but its gimmicks.

The secret challenge rooms play around with the levels gimmicks in interesting ways and are a great opportunity to learn time saving tricks.

Further, the point requirement has some extra interesting interactions as the requirement is more continuous than discrete. The most obvious way to get points is through collecting the 5 sentient toppins in cages, the marginally less sentient floating pizza toppings arranged like breadcrumbs to guide you through the level, and the giant versions of the non sentient toppings. Because they all contribute to the same point total, it’s worth considering skipping some of them to save time. Is any of the 5 caged toppins too out of the way, which of the big toppings are close enough to the main route to be worth grabbing, are the breadcrumb toppings distracting me from a shortcut.

If you’ve ever so much as watched a “10 tips to make a great super mario maker level” video, you’re probably familiar with the way game designers place these minor collectible bits like breadcrumbs to guide you through the level. If you’ve ever played neon white though you should know that sometimes those breadcrumbs exist solely to distract you from all the cool shortcuts you can pull off.

I find it valuable to break a level down into its critical path, and all of its possibility space. Take this little dash pad guy in Neon White. The green one gives the critical path, it’ll always get you to the end. However there’s also all these black ones, every dash pad has them, usually they throw you into the bottomless abyss, but sometimes taking one will throw you into a shortcut.

Because you always have the option, there’s no obvious indicator of when you should take one. You have to figure it out, which makes you feel clever.

It’s not just breadcrumbs though, players will assume that unless directed otherwise to progress they’ll have to move forwards. Most of the time they’re correct, but sometimes they’ll have the option to super jump instead. Players don’t look up, but with a little familiarity with the level design, gained from having already done the level, they just might. If you think that having the super jump as your only tool for shortcuts is a little simple and there’d oughta be more, you’d be right. After all, it’s only there to get your foot in the door, but more on that when we discuss the third playthrough. We still need to get to how the other P rank requirements change how the game is played, namely the lap 2 and the unbroken combo.

The most obvious purpose of the Lap 2 is to tighten the time limit for experienced players. The game has a very nice balance where it feels like a new player has just enough time to simply escape whereas an experienced player has just enough time to do two laps. The second thing it does is that it allows the player a bit more leniency with their mistakes. If they make a screwup and don’t quite reach a topping or a secret, they don’t have to dwell on it, don’t have to stop, go back and try again. They can just snatch it during lap 2.

Additionally it’s just really satisfying. It’s treated as your victory lap, you’ve already gotten most to all of the collectibles, most of the challenge lies in simply getting here, this lap will be much easier than the last. It feels good.

Finally the unbroken combo. The combo meter is what the game has instead of a health bar. Once you kill an enemy a timer is set to seven seconds. Once the timer is active you can roll it back by gaining points or reset it by killing another enemy, but you won’t ever have more than 7 seconds stored. If your 7 seconds run out your combo ends and you can start a new one by killing another enemy. Obviously this exists to put you under constant pressure, keeping you on the move, but what’s interesting is that getting hit rolls the timer forwards 2 seconds.

Unlike more traditional damage systems which either give you a few seconds of invincibility to recuperate after making a mistake or immediately send you back to the last checkpoint diffusing the situation, Pizza Tower uses this as an opportunity to light a fire under the players ass. When the player makes a mistake, and they will make a mistake that’s what separates us from machines, they have 5 seconds or less to unfuck themselves or else their run dies here and now. Whether that’s desperately scrambling to fight back against your attacker, making a mad dash for the nearest floating toppings, or pulling out your emergency screen nuking super taunt.

I didn’t get on well with Celeste, and thought Neon White and Hotline Miami were just alright, because I tended to find my optimal strategy long before my hands could pull it off. In these games it’s one slip up you’re sent back to checkpoint, and I got very familiar with the bit of the level just after the checkpoint. Once I’ve examined the level, formed a strategy and beating the level is just down to the execution, I start getting bored.

Neon White and Hotline Miami are good at creating an open possibility space that keeps your eyes peeled but that only goes so far, Pizza Tower makes it so that making mistakes, your execution not being up to par, not being able to beat the level yet, spices shit up, throws you into the unforeseen and makes you think on your feet just like you had to in your first go through.

Further it’s not just the combo meter that switches things up when you get hit, getting hit makes you lose points, forcing you to readjust your strategy regarding them and make long term strategic changes on top of the short term scramble.

Chapstick Tree: Noise

Pizza Tower refers to beating the game all over again as a new character designed to blaze through it as “pseudo new game plus” and I’m just gonna keep calling it that. I’ve seen two other examples of platformers doing a pseudo new game plus, Kirby Super Star Ultra with Meta Knight and Shovel Knight Treasure Trove with Plague Knight. What do these two have in common with the Noise? Well they can all fly for one.

I think Yacht Club games put it well on their page about how they designed Plague Knights mobility. Shovel Knight has the ability to jump about 4.5 tiles high and cross 4.5 tile gaps. He can attack in front or below but never above. Plague Knight does this.

Playing the level as Kirby, Shovel Knight, or Peppino has given you all kinds of assumptions on how the level should be navigated. Being able to fly is just one way to break those assumptions and find all kinds of new possibilities.

For the Noise it doesn’t stop at flight, almost all of the small pauses in Peppinos moveset have been removed or be easily circumnavigated. Instead of having to do a turn around drift you can do a drill into a spin, instead of having to waddle on the ground to readjust your super jump position you can do so midair.

Further the changes in moves allow for significantly more freedom in looking for shortcuts. Because you can move from left to right during the super jump any vertical skips no longer have to be a straight shot. You no longer need to climb up a wall to break metal blocks below you, because you bounce off walls instead of climbing them you can gain much more height in unique spots.

The Noise is able to enhance everything that makes being good as Peppino because he doesn’t have to be held back by the consideration made to make Peppino easy to pick up.

The player only picks up The Noise after they’ve beaten the game as Peppino, and likely after they’ve P ranked the whole game as Peppino too. The character is designed assuming the player is at a far higher skill floor, and as such it can push the skill ceiling as high as possible.

——-—

Chat per For: The Boss Fights

Now don’t get me wrong the bosses in this game are good, really good even! In a vacuum, why are they here? In this game specifically I mean. Standing around in a single room hitting one guy isn’t exactly congruent to the madcap speedy momentum based platforming that defines Pizza Tower. It feels like they were grandfathered in because Wario Land had them. But Wario Land had them because Mario had them. And Mario had them because, uhhhhh… Whatever. I mostly just want to talk about The Noise and Pizzaface phase 3. Here’s my thoughts on the rest, pause to read.

PEPPERMAN

Pretty good starter boss, mostly attacks in straight lines, and I like how the butt bounce attack forces players to come up with their own strategy for dealing with it. Additionally I like how the randomly appearing projectiles force players outside of their simplistic canned responses and demands on the spot decision making. I like that you almost certainly won’t beat him first try, and I how you have to desperately scramble to catch him the first time but can figure out a consistent strategy.

VIGILANTE

Kinda weird for a follow up, why has the game suddenly handed you a gun, but still a good one. I like how there’s a much more interesting variety of attacks on display, the dynamite and cow travels in arcs, the grandpa homes in on your position, the flamethrower, pistol, and boot sweep the ground while the uzi has the Vigilante leap onto the air. I especially like how your gun has a charge shot, allowing you to build up damage while freeing you mobility, at the expense of potentially missing the shot. It does lead to a pretty easy cheese (haha cheese) strat where you charge up a shot while he’s invulnerable then land two normal bullets and he’s down before he can even throw out an attack. Also pretty good.

FAKE PEPPINO

Once again, pretty alright. Phase 1 is a bit slow as the attacks from the clones drag on a bit too long but I like all of the unique patterns provided, and it’s all worth it for Phase 2. My favorite is the one where the clones run on the ceiling. Chase sequence could use some rubber banding.

I think the Noise is super cool. While it’s clear from the start that something is different about him, I’ve never seen anyone articulate what.

He seems to be designed to throw the player off their game. He starts the fight in his vulnerability state, but without tech Peppino is too slow to catch him, and he’ll get caught by The Noises spin attack. Whenever the player fails to attack The Noise after his vulnerability state, he does that little spin. This immediately puts a sense of anxiety in the player every time The Noise is vulnerable. If the player can’t make it in time they’ll get hit. They need to be ready to back off.

Then he’ll throw out his attacks, in random order. The player can’t memorize what’s next. Then oh boy oh boy there’s the actual attacks.

There’s 3 where The Noise moves horizontally. The game thus far has trained the player to respond to such attacks by jumping over them. Peppermans shoulder barge, the Vigilantes boot slide and flamethrower.

The pogo stick has The Noise jump over Peppino. If the player jumps, they’ll get hit. As such they try to stay grounded. The player is forced to calculate his trajectory and avoid his landing by shifting to the left or right. However he also drops bombs that close in on you, reducing the space you get to work with. You might have to look for an opportunity to jump over one.

The skateboard has The Noise deciding seemingly at random whether he’s going to jump over the player or not. He can stay grounded to make you jump over him, get close and jump over you to trick you into jumping when you should’ve stayed grounded, or jump early to try to trick you into staying grounded when you should’ve jumped. It plays around with how committal jumping is. If you stop jumping you won’t just be warped to the ground, you’re stuck until gravity brings you back down. The boss waiting to get close until he jumps forces you to hold out until you’re certain. Jumping early forces the player to not rely on instinct and actually account for what the boss is doing and where they are.

The jet pack creates an especially difficult pattern. When he initiates his jet pack dive, he repeatedly bounces along the ground. When he gets close, he’ll either be at the top, bottom, or middle of his bounce. If he’s at the top, go under, if he’s at the bottom, go over, if he’s at the middle you need to identify the situation before he gets close, and move left or right to put yourself into one of the other positions. This gives you six ways to dodge.

Arced attacks move along the x and y axis at different speeds. They force you to proactively acknowledge where the attack is heading and choose from multiple responses based on your prediction.

All of these attacks mix up the player, forcing them to consider if they need to jump, where, and when.

While the last attack throws The Noise into the sky, it likewise forces the player to deal with offense on both vertical and horizontal fronts. Bombs are dropped from the air that walk in your direction on landing. They begin to close in the open area that you use to dodge vertical attacks, and force you to reposition while dodging the aerial strikes.

When he enters the second phase, he gets even trickier. Every attack gets a little bonus attribute when it ends that punishes the player for being too hasty. The Noise will kick his skateboard at you, preventing you from hitting him if you don’t dodge it, he’ll suddenly explode, he’ll do an extra slam attack. When you anticipate the attack ending, if you go for the throat too fast, you’ll get punished.

All of The Noises' attacks are designed to throw the player off, but at the end of the day he does run on recognizable patterns. The game is testing you on how long it takes for you to break a habit and adapt.

Fighting The Noise for the first time feels like you’ve picked a fight with Bugs Bunny. But as you learn his tricks you dodge his bullshit and beat the prick into a bloody pulp. I love that a game as cartoony as pizza tower is consistently able to communicate its goofiness through more than visuals.

Now, Pizzahead phase 3 is generally considered to be kinda weak from what I’ve heard. Allegedly the developers had something a tad more elaborate planned where Pizzahead would lose it and get serious, but that was scrapped because that’s not how they wanted to characterize him. They wanted him to be a clown, a joke, talking a little too much shit behind his walls of goons.

That direction is fine. What irks me is that they were on the cusp of brilliance. With a few minor tweaks I think this fight could’ve come together a lot better. Let me elaborate.

So, assuming you’re not watching a 4305 word video essay on a game you never beat, you know how this goes. Pizzahead pretends to be defeated, reveals he’s perfectly fine, pulls up every previous boss and laughs, but stands aback in horror as Peppino proceeds to go apeshit on Pepperman. The players preexisting knowledge of the bosses patterns, along with their shortened health bars and the removal of their stage hazards should lead to a smooth ride, however where this gets interesting is in how as each boss is defeated, the player begins to take the pace of the fight into their own hands. Pepperman proceeds as normal, but of course for Vigilante you don’t have the gun, so Gustavo pops up, and you can pick him up and throw him at the boss to put them in their vulnerability state manually. The you fight The Noise, and not only does he go into his vulnerability state after finishing each attack, you still get to force him into it by throwing Gustavo at him. Of course Fake Peppino is next, and we finally gain full control, as we can speedrun his phase by alternating between two smacks and a hit from Gustavo, wrecking his shit. Killing each one faster than the last, anxiety becoming wrath, finally taking control back,

And then we’re back to turn based combat with Pizzahead. He gets six turns, you aren’t familiar with his moves and one of them doesn’t actually damage you, you just lose your turn. You lose all control and the pace slows to a crawl. The cusp of brilliance. The cusp.

—

Bonus Cracker: Because when else will I get to talk about this

Golf and Oh Shit make an interesting dichotomy, using the same format to tell a good and bad joke. Golf is funny because it’s clever. Both of these levels should theoretically be bad, but while sewer levels just carry a bad reputation for being cramped, ugly, and unfun, Golf fundamentally should not work. As a sport golf is known for being methodical and slow paced. Pizza tower is incredibly fast paced and chaotic. It is a bad idea for this game specifically. Then once the title card boots up it takes the chance for another really great joke that plays with your expectations. They portray golf like a super badass action movie which is hilarious on its own, and only gets funnier when it cuts to the actual level, the goofy music cuts in and no, no, it’s just regular ass golf. By contrast the joke in Oh Shit is primarily that the title contains a swear word. This is pushed a little with an allusion to the Mario Brothers contrasted to how gross being in an actual sewer is, but not exactly groundbreaking material I’m sure there’s a hilarious robot chicken sketch about it.

Finally we have the real kicker, or nail in the coffin depending on which one we’re talking about, the integration of gameplay with the joke. The part that requires a great deal of understanding and effort. Golf is actually a really good level, whereas Oh Shit is terrible on purpose. The unique mechanics of Golf blend surprisingly well with Pizza Towers gameplay, you can just crash into the golf ball to push it, and only need to make a brief pause to grab it when you want more precise control. On the other hand Oh Shit intentionally throws in a transformation that is slow and awkward to control, contains multiple elements that temporarily rip control away from the player, as well as enemies that are difficult to impossible to identify at high speeds making getting through a slog for anyone who hasn’t memorized their locations. (The way to tell the difference between the cutouts and the hidden enemies is their nose color, reds are cutouts, whereas the actual enemies range from blue to orange to pink to also red because fuck you.) The joke is supposed to be that the sewer level is even worse than could be expected. Do not respond to an expectation by meeting it, that’s not funny. Respond by defying it, putting in a little elbow grease, make us spit out our drinks showing us something we didn’t even know was possible.

I just don’t get how these both come in the same game from the same few guys.

—

Conker Illusion: this is the part where I wrap things up, in the event in which you, the viewer not the collective, were unaware

So yeah Pizza Tower. 6.3 out of 10

-Too much pizza

-too many towers

-Not enough gay sex.

-but the comprehensive manner in which its depth steadily increases as your understanding of it grows is pretty unique

-also the way it subtly guides you down that path while also gently making sure that newer players are pushed out of their comfort zones but still have a degree of control over the pace is cool

-also the way that it prevents itself from getting stale by switching itself up whenever you get stuck is neat

I dunno it’s okay I guess.

[gettothestabbing]

What are your top 5 favorite anime?

Princess Tutu - gorgeous in every way, a story that does the concept of a multilayered narrative justice while also using the beauty of ballet and fairy tales to their full emotional advantages, and also the name helps gatekeep, because if you can't get past the name you aren't the sort of person who would enjoy it anyway. I can't recommend it highly enough. Available here

Kill la Kill - amazing and energetic animation, a unique story with a surprising family theme, and probably the coolest modern take on the delinquent girl archetype. I did resist watching it at first because of the lack of under-boob support on Ryuko's outfit, but honestly, it no longer bothers me. There are valid story reasons behind all the costume designs. Again, this has the beneficial side-effect of automatic gatekeeping. Available here

Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters - peak early 2000s character design, tons of merchandising money to fund legitimately good filler arcs and hire high quality animation directors (sometimes), a hero that actually has the worst win-loss record of all the protagonists of his franchise (but still retains the largest fanbase and greatest admiration for his skills and personal character), multiple engaging character arcs, and my personal favorite. This is the one most affected by nostalgia. YGO was my first fandom outside of Disney, the first thing I was really into that neither my parents nor my younger sister cared about, and it remains incredibly important to me. It took me 10 years to be able to watch the final two seasons, as my local channel for some reason decided to only play the first 2.5 seasons over and over. Those final seasons were not at all disappointing either; I loved them entirely, even with all their flaws and animation issues. I'd never claim that YGO is perfect, especially since I prefer the 4Kids dub to the original; yet even the subbed version, which I have also seen, has issues as a story. The original manga is superior to BOTH versions, if we're being honest. But this anime is amazing, fun, wholesome (without being lame, particularly the sub; the dub can be pretty lame) and long without being impossible to finish. The dub is available here (w, x, y, z), but to get the subbed version, you either have to pay through the nose or search the bowels of the Internet. Might as well try the dub: even if you don't like 4Kids, you can have fun laughing at them, and all the changes the dub made were meticulously catalogued here.

Dragon Ball - one of the best shonen ever, with an amazing world, strong characters that stay simple without being simpletons, and a slow, savory pace that makes every fight pop. I binged the entire (subbed) show in March 2020 when I had to stay home during the initial lockdown. It was exactly the cheery, grounded, fun shot in the arm that I needed when things were still uncertain and scary in my world. While I enjoy Z and parts of Super, the original is far better: more consistent in quality, pacing, and relevant themes. It's here and here right now. If you're already a fan, Totally Not Mark has some huge video essays reviewing both the entire franchise arc-by-arc and analyzing the major characters of the franchise. (The Buu arc review features Team Four Star ^_^)

Akage no Anne - one of the best works of World Masterpiece Theater and directed by future Studio Ghibli director Isao Takahata; a picture-perfect adaptation of Anne of Green Gables made for Japanese ESL education that managed to capture the pace, feelings, and gradual growth of its cast. With dreamy sequences to represent Anne's imagination and mirror the long descriptive passages of the book, the series grounds itself with simple and realistic character designs that change slowly over the course of the series to reflect the passing of time. It's from 1979, so it's even less fancy looking than Dragon Ball (1986), and Anne's initial design looks a bit awkward since she's pretty awkward and underfed at the start. But don't be fooled. Not only is this the closest adaptation I've seen to the book, but it manages to reflect Anne's rich, emotional inner world without relying on narration or a diary. It uses silence in a very mature way. Although Akage no Anne was not at all the beginning of Japan's love affair with Anne Shirley, it has become a cornerstone of that fandom in Japan. And if you love Isao Takahata's work like I do, seeing one of his earliest works is a pure joy. It's actually available on YouTube; this version has been up for 7 years straight, but I'd urge anyone interested to watch it sooner rather than later. You never know when a YT anime playlist will disappear.

Honorable Mention: Maison Ikkoku - this is one of my favorite manga, one I liked enough to collect in full and read multiple times. The anime is beautiful, and unlike some adaptations of Rumiko's work, it doesn't delve into alternate characterizations or themes. It's an iconic 1980s anime and I love what I've seen of it. But I can't put it higher because I've never been able to see all of it. Occasionally I've been able to watch episodes on YouTube with French subs, but I'm not fluent in French, so I only know what's going on because I'm so familiar with the manga. I still recommend it as a mature seinen romance/comedy. If anyone knows where I can watch or legally obtain it, I'd be very grateful.

[masonpelt]

Musk Avoids Good Press, No Matter What It Costs Him

Elon Musk certainly dominates headlines. Since first announcing plans to, perhaps, buy Twitter, maybe, back in April, he's remained unavoidable in the tech, media, and business press. Yet, Musk avoids good press, seemingly no matter what it costs him.

Musk is polarizing; he and his companies merit scrutiny and will earn criticism from watchdogs. But car fires, racism within Musk's companies, refusing to pay bills, and even offering an employee a horse for a handjob is not why I say Musk is bad at PR. Take a look at ElonJet.

Thanks for reading Ramblings By Mason Pelt! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

The ElonJet Saga Begins

ElonJet was one of several Twitter accounts created by Jack Sweeney that tracked the location of private jets. Sweeney created simple bots parsing data from the FAA and the ADS-B Exchange to publish the flight paths of over a dozen private jets . All of this data is public, and most of it is required by law for planes to fly.

Musk seemed very worried about this data being shared, even sending Sweeney a Twitter DM asking him to take the account down. Musk was willing to pay $5,000 to have the account removed. Sweeney, who was 19-years-old at the time, offered to take the account down in exchange for an internship at Tesla.

Sweeney had a part-time job at UberJets as a developer due to the skills he demonstrated in making these Twitter accounts. The young man getting an internship at Tesla was neither unreasonable nor much effort for Musk to set up.

The Press That Could Have Been

The full #elonjet story could have ended with Musk giving a clearly bright young man an internship and a photo op. The Musk and Sweeney story would have been compared to 12-year-old Steve Jobs cold-calling Bill Hewlett of Hewlett-Packard and landing a summer gig. It was a setup for a feel-good story and fawning media coverage.

I'm really cynical, and I cannot think of a truly negative angle to have covered Musk giving the ElonJet guy the position. A few essays about how Sweeney benefited from privilege aside, the press from ABC to ZDNet would have been positive. It was the PR equivalent of a softball question.

Musk got handed an absolute PR win but didn't take it. The ElonJet account stayed on Twitter, and from January 1, to December 11, I found no evidence of any report to law enforcement that Musk was being stalked at or around airports. I thought it possible Musk determined the account wasn't much of a security risk; I was wrong.

The PR Worst-case Scenario That Was

After buying Twitter, Musk ended up choosing the PR worst-case scenario. On November 7, after taking over management of the social network, Musk said his "commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane."

Early in December, Sweeney claimed that the account was being suppressed. Sweeny Tweeted a screenshot seemingly showing Slack messages from inside Twitter. The screenshot showed Ella Irwin, a Twitter exec asking her team to "apply heavy VF [visibility filtering]" to the account. The screenshots are unconfirmed by third-party media.

On December 14, Twitter suspended the ElonJet account, despite the prior pledge. The social network brought back the account after imposing a new policy preventing sharing of anyone's real-time location. The account was suspended again shortly after, and Musk tweeted that a "crazy stalker" attacked a car in Los Angeles carrying his son.

Things That Probably Didn't Happen

Interestingly, the video Musk shared of the incident didn't happen near an airport unless you call a hospital helipad an "airport". Oh, and no report has been filed with the LAPD. According to a statement on December 16, from Officer Lizeth Lomeli, a police public information officer,

"LAPD's Threat Management Unit is aware of the situation and tweet by Elon Musk and is in contact with his representatives and security team. No crime reports have been filed yet,".

Musk Fan's Say Butwhatabout

Inconsistencies of Musk's story don't stop many Musk fans saying ElonJet is doxxing. Suggesting that sharing the physical location of someone's private jet based on public data isn't doxxing causes a ruckus in the peanut gallery. Many people repeat Musk's own claim that ElonJet was sharing his "real-time location". Others ask if it would be doxing to share your location and post that on Twitter.

Musk's aircraft is either at an airport, or in the air and inaccessible. The real-time location of a plane in the air or the airport it is parked pose very little ground security risk. Reductio ad absurdum of someone sharing FAA flight data on Twitter, is not a government agency keeping records of everyone's real time GPS location that someone is Tweeting.

And Who Would've Thought, It Figures

Creating a new policy in response to a logically-inconsistent story of security risk after explicitly saying you wouldn't remove an account is optically worse than giving a gifted teen an internship. But this is Musk; he can make more self-destructive PR choices.

Twitter started suspending prominent accounts. Reportedly for linking to ElonJet on other websites (only true in some cases). The accounts suspended include Linette Lopez, Keith Olbermann, Ryan Mac, Aaron Rupar, Steve Herman, Drew Harwell, Donie O'Sullivan, Matt Binder, Tony Webster, Micah Lee, among many others. Ban a bunch of reporters and generate a bunch of bad reports, as the kids say.

The real kicker to all of this; The backdrop of Musk spending the last few weeks promoting the Twitter Files. Spending weeks claiming prior management of the company you now own engaged in petty and political suppression and banning of accounts before doing the same in spades is enough to make Alanis Morissette combust spontaneously.

Originally published at https://pushroi.com on December 16, 2022.

[bloody-wonder]

U said u had lots to say on the topic of girls who become 'not like other girls' due to being ostracized by the more popular girls which they then try to distance themselves from, I'm curious what u had to say?

i have very mixed feelings about the whole “not like other girls” thing. nowadays people associate it exclusively with those outdated memes or distasteful ya tropes choosing to forget that these cringey online phenomena are the fallout of some harmful situations and expectations girls and young women still have to deal with irl. (sara z has an in-depth video essay on this topic which i highly recommend).

on paper, i very much agree that women should do whatever they want to, regardless of whether it is in accordance with the gender norms and expectations superimposed by the society, and that a person who’s against girls liking “girly things” is clearly in the wrong. but in day-to-day life it’s much more complicated than that. it’s true that we shouldn’t hate women for the choices they make but rather we should fight against the system that forces them to make some of those choices and then pits them against each other. but it’s also true that women, whose identity is, consciously or not, more in line with what the society expects women to be, often choose to ally themselves with the system instead of trying to fight it and risking losing the rewards (which often come in form of heteronormative “dream life” or some such). in the words of linda nochlin, the middle-class woman has a great deal more to lose than her chains. 

speaking of ya, it looks like after the wave of heroines who were praised by their problematic love interests for being “not like other girls” while also having no close female friends came the backlash in the form of what i call the “not like other girls” conflict - a trope that tries to rectify the situation with hating on “girly girls” but completely fails to acknowledge the root of the problem. among the books i’ve recently read it’s featured most prominently in a lady's guide to petticoats and piracy by mackenzi lee. 

(i’m going to explain with some mild spoilers so be warned)

the book is set in the 18th century so the main character felicity who is “not like other girls” and wants to become a doctor is completely miserable. bc of her gender the society in which she lives won’t let her follow her dreams. her best friend johanna who used to be “not like other girls” together with her when they were kids and dreamed of becoming an explorer now grew up to be very much “like other girls” and left felicity behind. the conflict between them escalates when johanna tells felicity her version of what happened: as she grew up she was still very much interested in exploring and being friends with felicity but she also became interested in traditionally “womanly things” and made friends with “other girls”, including the ones who had always mocked felicity, but she never left her behind - instead, it was felicity who started distancing herself to the point of ending their friendship. “why can’t i do both?”, asks johanna and in theory she’s completely right. the narrative certainly thinks she’s right as it makes the entire situation a step in felicity’s character development when she recognizes her internalized misogyny, apologizes, is forgiven and the focus of the story shifts to fighting the patriarchy with the means traditionally associated with femininity. what remains unexplored are felicity’s fears and reasons for distancing herself from johanna: while it’s not her friend’s fault that they live in a sexist society, the knowledge that when the push comes to shove she can easily blend in with it and leave felicity out in the cold doesn’t help their relationship either.

you might say, it’s not the 18th century anymore so the situation can’t be that grave. so let me end this with a personal example that bugs me a lot. i don’t wear make up, haven’t worn it since i was 14. now at 25 i honestly have no idea how to put it on, i’ve lost the skill completely and i don’t own any. in my daily life i don’t spare it a single thought, but in recent years i’ve been questioning more and more whether my academic and professional life would be more successful if my appearance was more “professional” - which for a woman means that she has to wear make up. maybe all those job interviews came to nothing at least partly bc i didn’t wear any. maybe it’s better to wear some next time, just to be sure. doesn’t sound like a big problem, right? except i don’t own any and tbh have no money to spare to buy it, i don’t know how to put it on and i have neither time nor desire to learn how. plus, i just fundamentally resent the idea that i have to do it just bc i am a woman. make up costs lots of money, putting it on and removing it is time-consuming, and when it’s on you can’t touch your face cause now it’s suddenly not a part of your body but a picture for other people to look at. given all of this, wearing make up shouldn’t be an obligation or a necessity and yet it is. i see many women both online and irl complain about it and i also see women say “it’s okay if you wear it for yourself or for fun”. but the problem is, we won’t make any progress with this until wearing make up isn’t expected of women anymore which won’t happen until we stop wearing it en masse, thereby eliminating the basis for this expectation - even those of us who like to wear it. or think that they like it. 

otherwise it’s just half of us stepping back into the ranks and blending in while the other half is left out in the cold.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

HERE'S WHAT I JUST REALIZED ABOUT PRODUCTIVITY

Ditto for PayPal. The key question, I realized it would probably have to be just one valuation. The founders all learned to do every job in the company. Instead he can ask What would make the painting more interesting to people? I only thought of when I sat down to write them.1 It does not, for example. With Socrates, Plato, and particularly Aristotle, this tradition turned a corner.

Among them was Frederick's of Hollywood, which gave us valuable experience dealing with heavy loads on our servers. Few were sufficiently correct that people have forgotten who discovered what they discovered.2 It means these ideas are invisible to most people your age, others that will appeal to most people because it only recently became feasible. Economist J.3 2, because that also seems to be to start with good people, to make something customers want. It's often mistakenly believed that medieval universities were mostly seminaries. Technical tweaks may also help them to grasp what's special about your technology.

It was impressive even to ask the questions they asked were new to them, or cut them off.4 Will I ever read it?5 There is room for a new search engine, when there were already about 10, and they did it. Popular magazines made the period between the spread of literacy and the arrival of TV the golden age of the essay. It's not for the discovery that most previous philosophy was a waste of time?6 Those hours after the phone stops ringing are by far the best for getting work done. If you're curious about something, trust your instincts. Meaning everyone within this world was expected to seem more or less the same.

When they appeared it seemed as if search was a mature market, dominated by big players who'd spent millions to build their brands: Yahoo, Lycos, Excite, Infoseek, Altavista, Inktomi. Instead of trying to discover them because they're useful.7 Whatever you make will have to be disciplined about not letting your hypotheses harden into anything more. In the humanities you can either avoid drawing any definite conclusions e. Those whose jobs require them to judge art, like curators, mostly resort to euphemisms like significant or important or getting dangerously close realized. At this stage, all most investors expect is a brief description of what you plan to do and how you're going to replace email.8 I answered twenty, I could see at the time, a lot of valuable advice about business, and also did all the legal work of getting us set up as a company. When people sit down to watch a show, they want to live in the suburbs.

If you go to see Silicon Valley, what you'll see are buildings.9 Design by committee is a synonym for bad design. Will I ever read it?10 Customers loved us. And they each have.11 That may seem a frivolous reason to choose one language over another. Restaurants with great food seem to prosper no matter what you do. Like most startups, we changed our plan on the fly.

When you're just typing expressions into the toplevel, you want to invest in them.12 Writing was one of the founders we funded asked me why we started Y Combinator is neither selfish nor virtuous. If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything, and that's likely to be done with levers and cams and gears are now done with loops and trees and closures.13 The only place to look was in the tradition of skateboards or bicycles rather than medical devices. They've applied for a lot of investors hated the idea, but the overall experience is much better than the soul-crushing suburban sprawl. If a nonprofit or government organization had started a project to index the web, Google at year 1 is the limit of what they'd have produced. Among them were Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce, who went on to found Intel, and Eugene Kleiner, who founded the VC firm Kleiner Perkins. Aristotle's goal was to find one angel to act as the lead investor.

Partly because, as components of oligopolies themselves, the corporations knew they could safely pass the cost on to their customers, because their competitors would have to as well.14 So it is with design.15 The real problem is that you look smug. The difference between then and now is that now I understand why Berkeley is probably not worth trying to understand its implications. It would have been better off; not only wouldn't these guys have broken anything, they'd have gotten a lot more done. It would be a curious state of affairs if you could get to the same spot. So if you're developing technology for money, you're probably not going to use TCP/IP just because everyone else does. In the old days, you could create a situation indistinguishable from you being that manufacturer, at least working on problems of minor importance.

That will tend to produce results that annoy people: there's no use in telling people things they already believe, and people answering it often aren't clear in their own mind how much is deliberate.16 Curiously enough, what got Segway into this problem was that customers didn't want the product. At the time it seemed the future.17 There's nothing more valuable than the advice of someone whose judgement you trust. It didn't shake itself free till a couple decades ago, geography was destiny for cities.18 Arguably it's an interesting failed experiment. The American way is to make money by creating wealth, you're always going to be fighting a losing battle against increasing variation in productivity.19 So there could be other ways to attract them, but they were only a little more out of their sales channels. The result was that I wrote it. Not any more.

Notes

I remember are famous flops like the intrusive ads popular on Delicious, but explain that's what they campaign for. But you're not allowed to ask, what you call the market. These two regions were the case. It will seem more interesting than random marks would be very promising, because the proportion of the Web was closely tied to the Pall Mall Gazette.

I'm not saying it's impossible to write your dissertation in the time 1992 the entire West Coast that still requires jackets: The Duty of Genius, Penguin, 1991, p. As Secretary of Labor Statistics, the big winners are all about hitting outliers, are better college candidates. Bad math is merely an upper bound on a weekend and sit alone and think.

Gary and I don't know of one investor who for some students to get elected with a company. That way most reach the stage where they're sufficiently convincing well before Demo Day. I was not just the local builders built everything in exactly the opposite: when we were quite sore from VCs attempting to probe our nonexistent database orifice.

And it would not know his name. It's conceivable that a skilled vine-dresser was worth about 125 to 150 drachmae.

So 80 years sounds to me like someone adding a few that are only doing angel deals to generate everything else in the next round is high, so it may have been seen mentioning the site was about bands.

This phenomenon may account for a long thread are rarely seen, when we created pets. This point is that the highest returns, it's implicit that this was hard to avoid using it, whether you have to be spread out geographically.

So where do we draw the line that philosophy is nonsense. You also have to resort to raising money. Most of the reasons angels like to invest at a public company CEOs were J.

Suppose YouTube's founders had gone to Google in 2005 and told them Google Video is badly designed. I replace the url with that of whatever they copied. Even as late as Newton's time it takes forever.

Digg is notorious for its lack of results achieved by alchemy and saying its value was as much as people in any case, because they are to be a quiet contentment.

An investor who invested earlier had been trained that anything hung on a hard technical problem. One sign of a handful of lame investors first, and b not allow them to tell them everything. Algorithms that use it are called naive Bayesian. Xxvii.

You're investing your own morale, you need a higher growth rate to impress are not mutually exclusive. This essay was written before Firefox. Google's site.

Founders also worry that taking time to come up with elaborate rationalizations. Words we use for good and bad technological progress is accelerating, so they made more that year from stock options, of course. The two 10 minuteses have 3 weeks between them.

A more accurate or at least once for that reason. This is one of a handful of consulting firms that rent out big pools of foreign programmers they bring in on H1-B visas.

Confucius claimed proudly that he transformed the field they describe. There is archaeological evidence for large settlements earlier, but one by one they die and their hands.

If you wanted to go to work with founders create a great idea as something you need to be actively curious.

The facts about Apple's early history are from an angel-round board, consisting of two founders and one of the biggest discoveries in any case, because you couldn't do the opposite: when we got to the World Bank, Doing Business in 2006, http://doingbusiness. Acquisitions fall into in the room, and the super-angels hate to match.

Is what we need to go to grad school you always see when restrictive laws are removed. It would be unfortunate.

People were more dependent on banks for capital for expansion.

What they forget is that the web and enables a new Lisp dialect called Arc that is not so much control, and the exercise of stock the VCs I encountered when we were working on what you have to be about 200 to send a million dollars out of the canonical could you build for them, if you get stock as if you'd invested at a 3 million cap, but they seem like a month might to an adult. But Goldin and Margo think market forces in the 1960s, leaving less room for startups that are or feel weak. Sometimes a competitor will deliberately affect more interest than they expected and they hope will be the fact by someone who doesn't understand what you're working on your thesis. Even in Confucius's time it filters down to you.

[dukeofriven]

[Note: this post originally appeared in this thread. Owning to Tumblr’s inability to update reblogs with edits because it is a hellsite programmed by a secretive cell of former Stasi operatives to avenge the fall of East Germany, it has thus been re-edited and reformatted here for your reading pleasure.] JK Rowling’s wizards are the most useless, lazy, incapable dumbfucks in the history of fiction. The average Muggle? You take away their technology and they would be able to complete the basic tasks of feeding and clothing themselves without shitting on the floor. If a wizard ever lost their magic in Harry Potter, though, they would die. They’d be dead in three days. They’re garbage and I hate that I’ve come to hate Harry Potter - a series I once loved - because an author inexplicably hailed for her world-building is daily revealed to be appallingly bad at it. I realize this is a really dumb thing to be this angry about but I’ve been told for years what a great world-builder J.K. Rowling is, and that was not even true when the books were coming out. The Time Turner ruined all of Harry Potter forever, not because it offers easy time travel you can hold in your hand (although it does), not because you ask ‘why don’t they just use the time turner’ with every subsequent scenario forever (although you do), but because it was an enormous, flashing red light warning everyone that the series was going to attempt to make the transition from Fairy Tale Logic to Serious Fiction logic and fail. Badly. Really, really badly. I still think Harry Potter & The Philosopher’s Stone is an almost perfect book: a distillation of decades of boarding school genre fiction combined with magic, friendship, and wonder. It is a book that owes as much to Enid Blyton and L.M. Boston as it does to C.S. Lewis or T.H. White and other authors with two first initials. Its sense of place is magisterial, from the frumpy, soul-crushing suburban sadness of Privet Drive to the ephemeral curio-shop wonderland of Diagon Alley to Hogwarts itself, a bastion of astonishment, homeliness, and delight. What it isn’t is the sort of framework on which you can support the horror that is the torture and murder of Charity Burbage in front of her colleague Severus Snape, who could not rescue her because he could not break his deep cover as a spy against Wizard Hitler 2. Long-running series can experience changes of tone and complexity. This is neither something laudable nor worth reviling; it’s a neutral phenomenon. Sometimes series do it well: Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising and Terry Pratchett’s Discworld are both series that by-and-large end with books focused on far more complex issues than their earlier entries. TV series do this too: contrast the early episodes of Steven Universe or Adventure Time with episodes from later seasons. With Adventure Time, for example, trying jumping from the pilot to Remember You and see how hard you get tonal whiplash) Lois McMaster Bujold sublime space opera The Vorkosigan Saga doesn’t just change tones but also genre: space adventure, murder mystery, political thriller, goofy regency romance, comedy of errors, heist movie, schizoid identity crisis - on and on. The latest entry in the series has almost no plot to speak of, but is instead a musing on age, gender roles, grieving the loss of a lover, and the hope of new life. Some series, however, manage the transition poorly, largely because the initial tone cannot be harmonized with the later tone (Mass Effect jumps immediately to mind). But Harry Potter has more than just a problem of its tone getting darker: its trying to have darker events fit in the same world in which people can walk around with names like ‘Mundungus,’ the Hogwarts school song can be a nonsense poem, and the Philosopher’s Stone was defended with a series of video game puzzles. In a world in which the villain openly tortures somebody to death, the Philosopher’s Stone shouldn’t have any whimisical bullshit about its magical defences: it should have trip mines in the floor and an enchanted statue with a gun, because Voldermort isn’t a guy you confound with drinking potions and flying keys. You should just kill him. The charming fairy world of wonder of HP & The Philosopher’s Stone has room for a love potion. The later books, in which it is revealed that Voldemort was essentially born from rape, is not place where Ron Weasley can hand-out a book to Harry called Twelve Fail-Safe Ways to Charm Witches without seeming like a predator in the making. The cradle that is The Philosopher’s Stone cannot hold a beastly baby like Deathly Hallows any more than Grindlewald pontificating about the superiority of wizards can sit comfortably in a universe in which wizards took until the 18th century to accept the outhouse! Not that fascist ravings are inherently logical; but even non-fascists in Harry Potter never act like wizards are anything other than 100% better than muggles at all times. They can’t, because if the series were ever to do that it would have to acknowledge that the two worlds are different: neither better, just different. Instead - well, as Ron once bitched, magic makes coffee perfect every time, so it’s not clear how muggles stand being alive and don’t just roll-over and die from the hellacious half-life that is living with imperfect coffee. This has nothing to do with irony, a suggestion that ‘oh Grindewald talks a big game about wizardly superiority but wizards didn’t use toilets and cal themselves goofy names like Flumpus MacFludgeon: Rowling is using dramatic ironic to lampshade how wizard supremacy lacks self-awareness. No: this is about a world that is silly being asked to host a genocidal dictator and his crimes. It’s like those tedious ‘grimdark’ AUs that always show up in bad fanfiction by authors attempting to be serious: what if the Sesame Street gang had to deal with ICE, what if Po started haemoraging while hanging-out with Laa-Laa, what if Peppa Pig learned that she was adopted and her real parents were brutally murdered as part of gang war because they were heroin dealers and so on. (The best skewering of this edgelord comedy is still probably either Andrew Hussie’s Muppet Babies/Saw comic or any encounters the Shortpacked staff ever had with the Transformers: Buckets of Blood guy.) In Harry Potter, Rowling built a wonderful little fantasy world that ran happily on the logic of fairy tales and fairy stories, and then decided she was never going to be taken seriously as an author unless she introduced Hitler to the equation. And it never works for her. It’s not like it couldn’t have worked. The Lord of the Rings is famously a very different book from The Hobbit. It did, in fact, introduce Hitler into a little fantasy world but Tolkien made it work by abandoning huge portions of the Hobbit’s tone, style, and structure: he wrote a completely different book.  Frodo isn’t scarfing-down Bertie Bott’s Every Flavoured Beans on the slopes of  Mount Doom. The moment, say, Cedric Diggory lay dead in Harry’s arms, we needed to never meet Mundungus Fletcher ever again, or Weasley’s Gooftacular Prank Nonsense, or Ron getting Harry a book about love spells. All the very least that needed to go away, at least until the very end, because Rowling is not an author with the skill to keep the silly and the sublime on the same page. That’s fine in and of itself: all artistic people have strengths and weakness, nobody is skilled at every element of creation. J.M. Barrie was very good at writing a book about an eternal child, but a bit crap at writing a biography about his mother. Arthur Sullivan spent his life quietly seething no one wanted to listen to Ivanhoe instead of The Mikado. There’s a reason Jerry Lewis never released The Day the Clown Cried.  Virginia Wolfe is a great writer, but that doesn’t mean she would have written a great run on She-Hulk. [Although now that I’ve said it I can’t think of anything I want to read more.] There’s a great bit in the Lord of Rings after the Shire has been scoured of Saruman where the Hobbits essentially open-up their larders and allow people to have fun again; there’s also a nice bit slightly earlier where Great King Aragorn puts on his old Strider clothes just so he can be his D&D character again: when series change tone, unless you’re really good at walking on a knife’s edge, the quieter, gentler, lighter world isn’t gone forever, but it does have to go away for a while: which means its time to tamp-down on the people with silly names and personalities - like Slughorn, who slips into book six like the second-coming of the vain and silly Lockhart, even though that’s the book where Dumbledore dies.

Rowling keeps trying to makes her old tone fit with her new world without having to pull a Tolkien and actually write differently, which produces moment after moment of tonal whiplash in which the latest Potter-related movie literally involves referencing the holocaust but she also drops some fun trivia about wizards shitting on the floor like animals. (You could describe the entirety of the first Fantastic Beasts film as Tonal Whiplash: The Motion Picture. I’d say that’s an essay for another day but I do not want to have to watch that movie again.)

It needs to be said that a primary reason these tone shifts ‘don’t work’ for Harry Potter is that the logic of a fairy tale is different than the logic of a mundane story. The logic of a fairy tale tends to be self contained: it doesn’t have a smart ass running around asking questions like ‘why’ because there is no why; a thing is the way it is because it is the way it is. Fairies steal babies on the third Sunday of every month, and nobody in the story asks ‘well what about in countries that use different calendars, and what about the shift from Julian to the Gregorian calendar that skipped eleven days?’ because such a pedantic question has no substance in a fairy-tale world. The Clever Child might question what the fairies need with babies, but she’s not about to break-down the week-to-week investment metrics on the Fairyland Infant Exchange. It’s not that one cannot critique or bring critical thinking to fairy stories; it’s that in a fairy story you don’t ask how the sewer system works because it’s not pertinent to what the story is trying to convey. It’s being the guy at the book club who is mad nobody wants to discuss his theories on the music of Rush: its not that the theories are bad, it’s that in this time and place they are of limited relevance. Harry Potter, however, does not belong to to the world of fairy stories, but to the legacy of Tolkienesque fantasy - the world of

  In The Hobbit nobody would ever ask if Hobbiton had sewers - it’s not important, and if you ask those kind of questions expecting there to be a serious answer of grave import you’re being a twit. Lord of the Rings, though? Not only is it a valid question, but Tolkien probably wrote a paper explaining the etymology of the Westron word for ‘sewer’ and how sewers were first invented by Shítlívær the Noldor as a way of helping the Blessed Isles cope with all the crap that tumbled out of Fëanor’s mouth.

The world of The Hobbit is one you could enter and expect to quickly find yourself on an adventure. The world of The Lord of The Rings is one you could enter, walk-about, and study without anyone ever exepecting you to solve some sort of regionally-disturbing social problem: in short, it wants you to be invested in the existence of its world in a different way than The Hobbit. Even then, although The Lord of the Rings is more grounded than The Hobbit, it is not so grounded that it doesn’t leave room for mystery, and questions that refute Wittgenstein’s assertion that all questions must be answerable. Tolkien loved to create complex worlds, but there was stuff he knew wasn’t worth elaborating on. It’s really his fans and authorial heirs who developed the somewhat worrying belief that a good worldbuilder has to have an answer to literally every question or else didn’t think their world through. (This has killed more potentially good books than bad cover art ever has.)

The Lord of the Rings leaves room for The Undiscovered Country. Harry Potter wants too… but can’t. Firstly, Rowling obviously understands the need for what we might call poetic mystery - like the gateway in the somewhat unsubtly name Department of Mysteries - but she also wants you to know how wizards pooped three hundred years ago. You get the feeling she knows exactly how and why that gate works, and what it is, but she withheld the knowledge because she likes mystery’s aesthetic more than she ascribes to any idea that an author might have lacunæ in the knowledge of their own work. That is, she would never put something into her work that she didn’t have an answer for - for her there is no undiscovered country that exists beyond the knowledge of even the author; she is an omniscient deity. Not for her is C.S. Lewis’ insistence that for her characters: All their life in this world and all their adventures had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before. Rowling knows exactly what happens to every one of them from the moment they were born to the moment the rot in the ground and the day-to-day schedules of their lives in heaven. Secondly - and far more of an issue - is that Harry Potter becomes a world that invites you to pick up each part of its structure and think about it, because the author has - with loving care - built that entire world for you to interact with. A place for everything, and everything its place. Except JK Rowling is a lazy thinker who never, ever considers the consequences of anything she says. Nagini is actually an Asian woman cursed to live as a snake, wizards used to magically disappear their shit from wherever they just stood and shat it out, Hermione Granger can have a time travel device to attended a bunch of classes but Harry can’t grab one off a nearby shelf and go back fifteen minutes and save his godfather, and nor a few years later can the Minister for Magic’s protection detail keep them on hand to go back half an hour and tell their past selves ‘Hey Voldemort is about to walk in here and kill y’all thought you ought to know.’ No author can work-out every aspect of every element in their works - that’s impossible, and why ARGs are solved by the internet hivemind in half a day even though they took a far smaller group of minds months to devise. But Rowling is intellectually lazy - she adds the holocaust to her Magic Fun Land without sparing a single moment to think that idea through. She then gets defensive when confronted by the suggestion that her worldbuilding might have been shallow. Hey your American wizard houses seem a bit racist also America doesn’t really use the house system in its schools - and her response was to lash out and not listen.  Rowling tried to move Potter from a fairy logic world with its own rules into our world with our rules and our history but she doesn’t know our history very well, or even our rules, so she tells us wizards shat on the floor until the 18th century while the rest of us sit around going ‘but humans have never done that as social groups - even in horrible slums and facility-free prison cells humans create a designated place for taking a shit even if it’s just ‘that corner over there.’ We don’t just drop pants and go whenever!” This is because, as a worldbuilder, J.K. Rowling is actually kind of rubbish.

[tap-tap-tap-im-in]

Another weird rant

I’ve been thinking a lot lately, but I don’t think I have enough thoughts about this, or even enough original ideas to make an essay. Instead enjoy this weird short rant thing.

We live in the information age. Ostensibly, that means that at any given moment I’m only a few clicks away from any piece of information I want to know. Or, at least that’s the propaganda of it. And I think that a few years ago, for the most part, that was true. Academic article paywalls were still a terrible thing, but for day to day tutorial and vague interest information, you could usually find it pretty quickly and without indecent.

But as click-bait headlines rose and then began to decline (oh please tell me they’re in decline), it feels like I either need to subscribe, pay outright, or sit through ads to get at the valuable information. There are still some pretty large bastions of information Github, StackOverflow, Wikipedia, and others I use on a day to day basis, and I’m sure you have your own. But contrast that with how difficult it is to talk to your friends lately. You’ve got snapchat, instagram, facebook, tumblr, text messaging, phone calls, google hangouts, skype, whatsapp, twitter, even pinterest if you’re scrap-booking pals.

Surface level information is usually pretty easy to get at too. The latest scandal Mr. Dumpf has wrapped himself in, celebrity gossip, game release dates. But it’s getting harder to find good videos teaching skills because they’re all on services like skill-share or udemy or linda.com. Why the hell didn’t the MIT open curriculum spark an information revolution (Here, go learn: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/find-by-topic/)? Why can I only read 4 medium articles a month without paying? I get that people should absolutely be paid for the work they do. Generating those essays, doing that research, even living those lives is more than enough for them to deserve pay, but the real question is why don’t people just pay them? Why do they have to be forced? The people that lose out at that point are the people who may need that information the most.

I was unemployed recently, and it was probably the least stressful bout of unemployment I’ve ever had, and it had everything to do with the fact that I now have the knowledge to be a “skilled laborer”, and the experience to apply that knowledge functionally. Knowledge that I had to originally teach myself between trying to balance my jobs, my careening mental health, and my own motivation. It was hard, it was a struggle, and it didn’t have to be.

I guess this comes down to three points.

1. Support open source, donate to Project Gutenburg, Github projects, hit up the Patreons of the people whose content you consume regularly, leave comments and reviews on podcasts, credit authors, and just do everything in your power to help people get paid for making the things you need or use regularly.

2. Next time you make something that you think people will pay for, if you have the financial security to potentially lose out on the income, consider making it publicly available for free. Let’s stop the loss of free information. It’s honestly the only redeeming quality of the internet (Memes are tools for conveying information, neither good nor bad, but marked by the information they carry).

3. Don’t let free information completely disappear. Let people know what you use and how often. Go to the library. Get involved.

I’m very grateful that I was able to learn what I did, the way I did, and it breaks my heart that it’s very possible that kind of thing will be subscription only in the future.

Can you fucking believe that there are pieces of software that don’t have public documentation? They make you buy the software before you can read through it. What am I going to do with the documentation that you have to lock it behind a login screen, besides use it to determine if your product is worth the thousands of dollars you’re asking? Cowards.

[newstfionline]

How journalism got so out of touch with the people it covers

By Sarah Jones, Columbia Journalism Review, Spring/Summer 2018

To become a journalist, Rajaa Elidrissi knew she would need a strategy. Growing up in a low-income household in Elmhurst, Queens, she started collecting clips at age 13. “I went to a high school that was not a high-ranking high school, and I was pretty aware that it was really hard to get into a good college,” she explains. After graduating in 2016 with an anthropology degree from Wesleyan University, she knew she needed to be practical--she couldn’t afford to take an unpaid internship; she had to start working--and looked for where the jobs were. That year, the jobs were in video. Currently a producer for CNBC, Elidrissi is on a secure track, for now at least. But if the industry should pivot away from video any time soon, she’s ready. “I see a lot of jobs for social media editors,” she says, so she’s started studying content analytics tools. She knows she has to stay smart and keep moving if she wants to continue as a journalist.

Elidrissi’s calculus is familiar to me--coming from a low-income background, I entered journalism by looking for where the jobs were. I graduated from a blue-collar public high school in Appalachian Virginia, and attended a conservative Christian college because, with scholarships, it’s where I could afford to go. To get a job out of college, I deliberately built a skill set to supplement a résumé deficient in elite degrees or high-profile internships, and became a social media editor--Elidrissi’s backup career--and eventually, a staff writer. From where I sit, I don’t know many national journalists who have a background like mine. In fact, the industry sometimes seems designed to keep us out of newsrooms altogether.

Differences do separate me from Elidrissi. My parents aren’t immigrants, and I don’t belong to a cultural or religious minority; overall, society placed fewer obstacles in my path. But anyone coming from a low-income background runs similar mental calculations: How do we get into journalism? And if we do get in, how do we afford to stay in? Your background shapes your path into your chosen field. And if your background includes poverty, that path contains boulders.

The first hurdle was paying for college. So I studied very hard. I got scholarships. I worked two or three jobs to pay the bills while I was in college,” says Sarah Smarsh, a Kansas-based independent journalist who has been covering class, inequality, and red-state politics for 17 years. Smarsh comes from a working-class family, and she knew that just making it to college signaled the start of a longer battle. “I didn’t know anyone in a newsroom who was picking me out of the pile for an internship,” she says. “I convinced newsrooms to bring me in as an intern.”

“I would say the second hurdle was social capital,” she adds. “Even though I made it to college, I still didn’t possess social capital.”

Like Smarsh, I knew I had to earn scholarships, and once in college, I quickly learned that my Walmart wardrobe set me apart in all the wrong ways. To achieve social mobility, the poor must culturally assimilate. You have to dress a certain way, speak a certain way, and get to know certain people. The third is impossible unless you accomplish the first two goals. Even if you manage all three, you may not experience true social mobility. Assimilation may grant you a certain degree of social capital, but social capital does not inevitably bestow its financial equivalent. Real capital--wealth--remains the surest way to survive journalism’s fluctuations. But by entering journalism at all, low-income people agree to extend their precarity for an indefinite term.

Smarsh felt that precarity keenly when she went freelance six years ago. “I had no savings and no family financial cushion to lean on. I didn’t have a bread-winning husband,” she explains. “It was just me, and literally nothing in a bank account. Hustling. Sending pitches. Being uninsured.”

Possession of a “cushion”--wealth, again--can become necessary to stay in the field. To shore up their positions, some would-be journalists go on to advanced degrees. A lack of social capital means a need to take on debt, just to get to square one. “As a black woman, I didn’t have a choice not to go to J-school--and that’s a sentiment shared among many of my classmates. Journalism is an industry rife with nepotism, where career trajectories are determined more often by the people that you know rather than the quality of your work,” notes Slate’s Rachelle Hampton. After paying her way through journalism school at the University of Kansas, Smarsh also took on debt to earn an MFA in creative nonfiction writing from Columbia University. “That might seem foolish to someone who even grew up middle-class, because of the risk inherent in taking on such debt to enter a field that hardly assures the sort of income that’s going to pay it off,” she says. “For me, in the context of poverty, it was like I had nothing to lose.”

Getting that first job is a partial victory. There are bills to pay afterwards, and collectors don’t care about your prose. But let’s say you get that first job, and then a second. And let’s say, for argument’s sake, you keep going, and now you’re based in a national newsroom or some other big-name outlet. You could cover pop culture, or review books, or turn numbers into charts. You’ll still be an outlier, working a newsroom that may consistently miss the class angle to stories, if it covers class at all.

A 2013 study by the Pew Research Center’s Journalism Project found that in 52 major newsrooms, poverty accounted for less than 1 percent of coverage every year from 2007 to 2012. “Journalists are drawn more to people making things happen than those struggling to pay bills; poverty is not considered a beat; neither advertisers nor readers are likely to demand more coverage, so neither will editors; and poverty stories are almost always enterprise work, requiring extra time and commitment,” Dan Froomkin wrote for the Nieman Center. Journalists who cover class exclusively tell me they sometimes have to convince editors that their stories are even newsworthy.

“I have heard so many times: Where’s the surprise?” Gary Rivlin, author of Broke, USA, says. In Rivlin’s telling, editors frequently want a sensationalistic angle if they’re interested in the story at all. “I try to tell stories of payday lending. The only way to sell a story of payday lending was a contrarian take that said, well, it’s actually a good thing. The only problem is that it’s not a good thing. It’s a rip-off.”

Other journalists say they’ve had similar difficulties placing pieces on class and poverty. Smarsh tells me she’s woven a class sensibility into her work since her first days in a newsroom more than 15 years ago. “When I started being more pointed and overt about class, even five years ago, I had a hell of a time getting the pieces picked up,” she says. “And interestingly, I found that what editors at top US outlets turned down, almost inevitably a top British outlet would pick up.”

“It became such a pattern that I did develop a little bit of a theory that the UK has centuries on us, as a society or as a political unit, in reckoning with the concept of class and in finding a language to discuss it,” she adds. “We are in a country that has been telling itself, falsely and hypocritically, since its very foundation, that this is a country where your economic origins do not determine the outcome of your life.”

Smarsh’s statement seems obvious: I know from life and from reporting that American society is boldly, unrepentantly rigged against its most marginalized members. But this fact, while clear to me, may not be to everyone else. America is wedded to the myth of its own greatness. It insists it has created a meritocracy, which it sustains through the power of assertion. This has a knock-on effect: Journalists inhabit a skewed society, and not all of them realize it. The industry therefore suffers from structural inequalities that reflect its surroundings. Women, people of color, and people with disabilities are relatively absent from newsroom leadership for the same reasons they are relatively absent everywhere. These absences impact coverage in every respect, and poverty reporting is not exempt.

Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed and Fear of Falling, tells me that even with decades of experience, she’s always found it difficult to convince editors to cover poverty. And when outlets do assign a piece, financial hardship can complicate the reporting process. “I got an assignment from The New York Times in 2009 to write a series of essays about the effects of the recession on people who were already economically struggling,” she explains, “because at that time, the typical Times article was about people who had to drop their private pilates class.” So Ehrenreich hit the road, collecting stories from working-class Americans across the country--only to encounter a financial roadblock.

“I realized I was not going to make enough money from my payments from the Times to cover my expenses,” she continues. “My next great realization was that the only people who get to rage about poverty and economic hardship are people who are not experiencing it, who have some kind of buffer and savings.”

Jenni Monet, an independent journalist who covers indigenous stories, got her start working in a tiny newsroom in the Four Corners region, where covering Navajo tribal events was part of the daily beat. “It wasn’t until I started working in places like New York City [that] I started to see the extreme disconnect that exists,” she adds. “It’s realizing the enormous amount of explaining involved.”

Those failures became particularly clear during the 2016 coverage of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation’s protest of the Dakota Access Pipeline. “Here you have the largest indigenous-led movement of our modern time,” says Monet. It started with an environmental agenda deeply rooted in race-based politics that dealt with segregation, that dealt with cyclical poverty based on government decisions that have gravely affected tribal communities for decades.

“And guess how the media responded?” Monet asks. “At first, they didn’t show up. When they finally did, it was all novelty-based. Look at this camp, they have teepees and kitchens and they cook and it’s cute!” Standing Rock, as Monet recounts it, was a missed opportunity for the national press, an inevitable failure for such a whitewashed industry, whose coverage of the intersection of race and poverty is uneven at best.

Journalists who aren’t from low-income backgrounds aren’t necessarily hostile to the poor, but class prejudice can manifest as a form of blindness. Based on my own experiences and the experiences others related to me for this piece, simple ignorance is much more common. It’s more that certain experiences, like poverty, are opaque to people who have not lived them.

In the lead-up to the 2016 election, journalism’s class blindness showed everywhere: Story after story reinforced Trump’s self-appointed role as the champion of white working-class America. The vast majority of Trump voters, as we now well know, boasted an income of $50,000 or higher. Suburban America is Trump Country. Though there have been some corrective pieces, the average Trump Country profile still stars low-income whites--who, shock of shocks, still support their candidate, no matter the swing in the news cycle. These profiles don’t produce any real news, and they don’t bring readers any closer to understanding the reasons for Trump’s victory, more than a year later.

For once, it’s not so difficult to convince editors to cover poor people. But meanwhile, the other true stories of working-class America struggle to break through the noise.

It’s hard to see how this will change as long as Trump is the most popular hook. The stories of the poor possess their own texture and weight. Poverty is a series of surprises, most of them horrible; life, for the poor, means careening from one plot twist to another while the world looks straight through you.

It shouldn’t be this way. These stories deserve everyday attention for what they tell us about the cracks in America’s façade. Make it easier for poor folks to enter your world, and we’ll even tell those stories for you. We’re resilient, after all, and we make damn good journalists.

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I’m Through Being Silent About the Restaurant Industry’s Racism

Alexandra Bowman

As a Black server and diner, I’ve seen how racism in the restaurant industry plays out on both sides of the table

This is Eater Voices, where chefs, restaurateurs, writers, and industry insiders share their perspectives about the food world, tackling a range of topics through the lens of personal experience. First-time writer? Don’t worry, we’ll pair you with an editor to make sure your piece hits the mark. If you want to write an Eater Voices essay, please send us a couple paragraphs explaining what you want to write about and why you are the person to write it to voices@eater.com.

A few weeks ago, I watched my tattoo artist, Doreen Garner, post an Instagram video about the racism in her industry, and saw Brianna Noble get up on her horse and demand change in the equestrian world. They inspired me to go on Facebook to address the racism where I work: the restaurant industry.

As I wrote in my Facebook post, the restaurant industry is extremely racist: Its racism is inseparable from the history of dining out in this country. Restaurants here flourished after the Civil War, a period when Black people in the hospitality sector were still technically working for free due to the widespread adoption of tipping, which allowed employers to avoid paying their workers. Racism literally shaped the restaurant landscape, too: Here on Long Island, where I live, the racist practice of redlining prevented Black restaurateurs from obtaining business loans or leasing buildings in particular towns — and thus denied them the same opportunities as their white counterparts.

The effects of such discrimination have been everlasting — something that I have learned firsthand as both a Black server and diner. In the six years I worked in restaurants, I never saw BIPOC (Black, indigenous, and people of color) in management, or even a Black bartender; most people of color were forced to remain in the back of house, or as bussers and runners in the front of house. And as a diner, I’ve seen how the industry’s culture of discrimination plays out from the other side of the table, too.

I began working in restaurants in 2009, while attending grad school. The first place I served was a corporate Southern-themed steakhouse on Long Island; not long after I started there, a coworker was fired for using racial slurs about a Black family who was dining with us. The restaurant’s owner individually apologized to every Black employee, and the swiftness of his actions assured me that racism would not be tolerated. The following year, I began my career in fine dining at a popular seafood restaurant on Manhasset Bay. The staff was mostly BIPOC, and included several Black females. This restaurant had its issues, but during the two years I worked there, diversity was not one of them.

But when I returned to the industry in 2018, after a six-year hiatus, I discovered that my previous experiences were anomalies. One evening, while I was training as a server at a farm-to-table restaurant, I asked the trainer how she made recommendations. “Well, they’re Asian, so I recommended the octopus because Asians eat weird food,” she said of the table we’d just served. “Excuse me?” I replied sternly. She tried to backpedal, saying something about how “Italian guys” also loved octopus.

Months later, I caught one of the managers and two servers discussing the treatment of Black people as it relates to our work ethic: The manager implied that there were times we were treated better than we deserved because of our skin color. The two servers looked shocked, but neither corrected her. Being the only Black employee and server of color, I quit immediately. But that evening, the restaurant’s owner and I had an honest conversation. She advised me to not let ignorant people affect my wallet, and she had a point: I was broke and living in my mom’s guest room. So I stayed. But, in hindsight, I should’ve demanded that this manager be fired. Although she was eventually let go, it was for her inferior management skills, not her continued racist antics.

Although the guests at that restaurant usually treated me with respect, I was degraded on several occasions. One evening, while I was recommending wine to a table, one of the diners, a white man, winked at me and said, “the blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice. Am I right?” There was so much I wanted to say, especially to his wife, who just laughed nervously. Instead, I recommended the tempranillo and walked away. Who could I tell? If a manager wouldn’t be checked, how would a guest?

I stayed at the restaurant for a year and a half. Shortly before my departure, one of my customers, a senior citizen, grabbed me. “You know what they say about Black women?” he whispered in my ear. “You taste like chocolate.” He then attempted to kiss me. I pulled away, but I didn’t want to hurt him — I could already imagine the headline: “Black Server Abused Elderly White Man at Long Island Restaurant.” So again, I walked away. But this time, I cried in the hallway while my coworker consoled me. Others seemed to think I was overreacting, as if the customer had complimented me. I didn’t have the energy to point out that Black women are neither a fetish nor a fantasy, and that the sexual harassment we often experience is linked to the ways we’ve been hypersexualized throughout history.

Most recently, until the pandemic began, I was working as a server and marketing consultant at a new Long Island steakhouse. Three of my coworkers were equal-opportunity racists who made derogatory comments about everybody: from the Latinx staff members to a table of Black people, no one was off limits. Almost everyone who worked there was aware of it, but the attitude was one of “You know how this industry is.” One time, when I defended some guests whom one of these coworkers presumed were Jewish, he asked if I was a “Black Jew.” In response, I referenced “First they came...” and expressed that I stand up for everyone, and then politely told him to shut the hell up. He did, but continued to be openly racist towards me — the restaurant’s lone Black employee — and the Latinx bartender.

When you’re the only Black employee at a business, you realize that you’re an exception to its discriminatory hiring practices.

While the restaurant’s clientele was generally kind, there were still the middle-aged white men thinking they were Tupac, telling me I was the prettiest Black girl they’d ever seen. And the white women who felt the need to be “down” when I approached the table. “Hey girl!” one of them told me. “Your makeup is on fleek. We’re trying to get lit.” Know that I am laughing at you, I thought. You sound like Len from 30 Rock. You are 45 years old in a Talbot’s pant suit. Please stop.

When you’re the only Black employee at a business, you realize that you’re an exception to its discriminatory hiring practices. It is debilitating to constantly defend yourself while remaining professional, and exhausting to become a representative for the entire community. One elevated pitch in your tone may verify a stereotype. And so for your own self-preservation, you learn to ignore it and not react. No matter the profession, we’re conditioned to be silent.

But as a patron, I do not have the same restraint. I always inform the manager. When I do, I’m sometimes offered a discount or a free round of drinks. I appreciate that, but still wonder: Did they hear me or were they just trying to appease me?

Because ignorant servers have tells. The finger across the neck, signaling that you do not want me in your section. The “couldn’t care less” attitude when greeting my table after making me wait for 10 minutes. The interactions with me in comparison to the white people next to me. We all have bad days as servers. But I am one of you, and I know the difference between a bad day and bad behavior. And so I’d ask you to recognize that your low tip is not a derivative of a guest’s skin color, but often, the result of your behavior toward them because of their skin color.

And to my fellow Black female servers, especially those in fine dining, remember you are worthy and your integrity is priceless. I am broke and tired too, but change is no longer a request — it is an ultimatum. Many servers are currently in a position of power; as restaurants try to reopen, employers are struggling to staff up. So before you literally risk your life by returning to work, make sure your professional environment is safe from health risks and racism.

To non-Black restaurant owners, I’d ask you to be introspective. Acknowledge that you benefit from a problematic system, and that your restaurant isn’t immune to racism. And if you still haven’t developed and posted a Black Lives Matter action plan of solidarity, do so. I am empathetic to the fact that you recently took a hit from COVID-19, but racism is also a deadly virus. You cannot plead for pandemic support by posting “We’re all in this together,” but choose to remain silent now. Diversify your staff. Schedule a mandatory team meeting to discuss racism and how to personally combat it — and explicitly state that it is immediate grounds for dismissal. If you have BIPOC staff, reassure them that they are protected and supported; keep in mind that you are legally liable when employees, and guests, engage in discriminatory practices. And remember: The Black dollar is strong. It is imperative that we are appreciated and welcomed at every place of business.

I gave similar recommendations to my most recent employer. As his marketing consultant, I urged him to write a statement of solidarity; as one of his servers, I demanded that my racist coworkers be fired, and a meeting be held to discuss racism at the restaurant. Yet again, my concerns were dismissed and overlooked. But this time, I am through being silent.

Lauren Allen is an experienced marketing specialist in the live entertainment and food hospitality sectors.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/2ZLs4vY https://ift.tt/3eeV7NA

Alexandra Bowman

As a Black server and diner, I’ve seen how racism in the restaurant industry plays out on both sides of the table

This is Eater Voices, where chefs, restaurateurs, writers, and industry insiders share their perspectives about the food world, tackling a range of topics through the lens of personal experience. First-time writer? Don’t worry, we’ll pair you with an editor to make sure your piece hits the mark. If you want to write an Eater Voices essay, please send us a couple paragraphs explaining what you want to write about and why you are the person to write it to voices@eater.com.

A few weeks ago, I watched my tattoo artist, Doreen Garner, post an Instagram video about the racism in her industry, and saw Brianna Noble get up on her horse and demand change in the equestrian world. They inspired me to go on Facebook to address the racism where I work: the restaurant industry.

As I wrote in my Facebook post, the restaurant industry is extremely racist: Its racism is inseparable from the history of dining out in this country. Restaurants here flourished after the Civil War, a period when Black people in the hospitality sector were still technically working for free due to the widespread adoption of tipping, which allowed employers to avoid paying their workers. Racism literally shaped the restaurant landscape, too: Here on Long Island, where I live, the racist practice of redlining prevented Black restaurateurs from obtaining business loans or leasing buildings in particular towns — and thus denied them the same opportunities as their white counterparts.

The effects of such discrimination have been everlasting — something that I have learned firsthand as both a Black server and diner. In the six years I worked in restaurants, I never saw BIPOC (Black, indigenous, and people of color) in management, or even a Black bartender; most people of color were forced to remain in the back of house, or as bussers and runners in the front of house. And as a diner, I’ve seen how the industry’s culture of discrimination plays out from the other side of the table, too.

I began working in restaurants in 2009, while attending grad school. The first place I served was a corporate Southern-themed steakhouse on Long Island; not long after I started there, a coworker was fired for using racial slurs about a Black family who was dining with us. The restaurant’s owner individually apologized to every Black employee, and the swiftness of his actions assured me that racism would not be tolerated. The following year, I began my career in fine dining at a popular seafood restaurant on Manhasset Bay. The staff was mostly BIPOC, and included several Black females. This restaurant had its issues, but during the two years I worked there, diversity was not one of them.

But when I returned to the industry in 2018, after a six-year hiatus, I discovered that my previous experiences were anomalies. One evening, while I was training as a server at a farm-to-table restaurant, I asked the trainer how she made recommendations. “Well, they’re Asian, so I recommended the octopus because Asians eat weird food,” she said of the table we’d just served. “Excuse me?” I replied sternly. She tried to backpedal, saying something about how “Italian guys” also loved octopus.

Months later, I caught one of the managers and two servers discussing the treatment of Black people as it relates to our work ethic: The manager implied that there were times we were treated better than we deserved because of our skin color. The two servers looked shocked, but neither corrected her. Being the only Black employee and server of color, I quit immediately. But that evening, the restaurant’s owner and I had an honest conversation. She advised me to not let ignorant people affect my wallet, and she had a point: I was broke and living in my mom’s guest room. So I stayed. But, in hindsight, I should’ve demanded that this manager be fired. Although she was eventually let go, it was for her inferior management skills, not her continued racist antics.

Although the guests at that restaurant usually treated me with respect, I was degraded on several occasions. One evening, while I was recommending wine to a table, one of the diners, a white man, winked at me and said, “the blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice. Am I right?” There was so much I wanted to say, especially to his wife, who just laughed nervously. Instead, I recommended the tempranillo and walked away. Who could I tell? If a manager wouldn’t be checked, how would a guest?

I stayed at the restaurant for a year and a half. Shortly before my departure, one of my customers, a senior citizen, grabbed me. “You know what they say about Black women?” he whispered in my ear. “You taste like chocolate.” He then attempted to kiss me. I pulled away, but I didn’t want to hurt him — I could already imagine the headline: “Black Server Abused Elderly White Man at Long Island Restaurant.” So again, I walked away. But this time, I cried in the hallway while my coworker consoled me. Others seemed to think I was overreacting, as if the customer had complimented me. I didn’t have the energy to point out that Black women are neither a fetish nor a fantasy, and that the sexual harassment we often experience is linked to the ways we’ve been hypersexualized throughout history.

Most recently, until the pandemic began, I was working as a server and marketing consultant at a new Long Island steakhouse. Three of my coworkers were equal-opportunity racists who made derogatory comments about everybody: from the Latinx staff members to a table of Black people, no one was off limits. Almost everyone who worked there was aware of it, but the attitude was one of “You know how this industry is.” One time, when I defended some guests whom one of these coworkers presumed were Jewish, he asked if I was a “Black Jew.” In response, I referenced “First they came...” and expressed that I stand up for everyone, and then politely told him to shut the hell up. He did, but continued to be openly racist towards me — the restaurant’s lone Black employee — and the Latinx bartender.

When you’re the only Black employee at a business, you realize that you’re an exception to its discriminatory hiring practices.

While the restaurant’s clientele was generally kind, there were still the middle-aged white men thinking they were Tupac, telling me I was the prettiest Black girl they’d ever seen. And the white women who felt the need to be “down” when I approached the table. “Hey girl!” one of them told me. “Your makeup is on fleek. We’re trying to get lit.” Know that I am laughing at you, I thought. You sound like Len from 30 Rock. You are 45 years old in a Talbot’s pant suit. Please stop.

When you’re the only Black employee at a business, you realize that you’re an exception to its discriminatory hiring practices. It is debilitating to constantly defend yourself while remaining professional, and exhausting to become a representative for the entire community. One elevated pitch in your tone may verify a stereotype. And so for your own self-preservation, you learn to ignore it and not react. No matter the profession, we’re conditioned to be silent.

But as a patron, I do not have the same restraint. I always inform the manager. When I do, I’m sometimes offered a discount or a free round of drinks. I appreciate that, but still wonder: Did they hear me or were they just trying to appease me?

Because ignorant servers have tells. The finger across the neck, signaling that you do not want me in your section. The “couldn’t care less” attitude when greeting my table after making me wait for 10 minutes. The interactions with me in comparison to the white people next to me. We all have bad days as servers. But I am one of you, and I know the difference between a bad day and bad behavior. And so I’d ask you to recognize that your low tip is not a derivative of a guest’s skin color, but often, the result of your behavior toward them because of their skin color.

And to my fellow Black female servers, especially those in fine dining, remember you are worthy and your integrity is priceless. I am broke and tired too, but change is no longer a request — it is an ultimatum. Many servers are currently in a position of power; as restaurants try to reopen, employers are struggling to staff up. So before you literally risk your life by returning to work, make sure your professional environment is safe from health risks and racism.

To non-Black restaurant owners, I’d ask you to be introspective. Acknowledge that you benefit from a problematic system, and that your restaurant isn’t immune to racism. And if you still haven’t developed and posted a Black Lives Matter action plan of solidarity, do so. I am empathetic to the fact that you recently took a hit from COVID-19, but racism is also a deadly virus. You cannot plead for pandemic support by posting “We’re all in this together,” but choose to remain silent now. Diversify your staff. Schedule a mandatory team meeting to discuss racism and how to personally combat it — and explicitly state that it is immediate grounds for dismissal. If you have BIPOC staff, reassure them that they are protected and supported; keep in mind that you are legally liable when employees, and guests, engage in discriminatory practices. And remember: The Black dollar is strong. It is imperative that we are appreciated and welcomed at every place of business.

I gave similar recommendations to my most recent employer. As his marketing consultant, I urged him to write a statement of solidarity; as one of his servers, I demanded that my racist coworkers be fired, and a meeting be held to discuss racism at the restaurant. Yet again, my concerns were dismissed and overlooked. But this time, I am through being silent.

Lauren Allen is an experienced marketing specialist in the live entertainment and food hospitality sectors.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/2ZLs4vY via Blogger https://ift.tt/2ZcBvFu

[themjinterviews-blog]

43. ...'cause it was Bobbi with an 'i'...he isn't just one of the guys; in his pink party dress, you would never guess, he benches 335!

Have you ever wished you could start life over?: Because being an infant sounds like a jolly good time? No thanks.

…or at least go back in time?: Yeahhhh – about that…I’m not fucking with different timelines and all the intricate time-travel etiquette.

When did you last eat pizza?: Tonight actually.

Do you prefer to hear the painful truth or a beautiful lie?: Not sure it makes a difference. In the end, it only matters how I see or perceive it to be. No definite way to known for certain whether people are being honest or not. You either chose to believe they are, or not.

How many exes do you have?: “Official” exes? 4, I think?

Have you ever known a pathological or habitual liar?: Absolutely.

Do you enjoy writing?: Love it.

If so, do you prefer writing lyrics, poetry, stories or something else?: Essays, free verse poetry, quotes, quirky self-help journals, lists, song parodies, etc…

Are you angry right now?: Mildly irritated. I keep hitting typos and I am just angry to have to keep correcting stupid shit.

Have you ever punched a wall?: Don’t think so.

Have you ever lived in a motel/hotel?: Yeah for like half a year.

Do you think you would enjoy running your own business?: Hell fucking no. I have very poor follow through and virtually zero concept of or desire to properly manage finances.

What’s the average rent for a 1 bedroom apartment in your area?: I’m gonna guess like 650-800$

Do you think rentals are too expensive where you live?: We are renting from friends. Doesn’t count.

Have you ever changed a car’s alternator?: Absolutely no idea what the fuck an alternator is.

Do you have Netflix?: The couple we live with does, but personally, no I don’t.

What about Hulu Plus?: Brandon does.

Do you have an Xbox Live gold membership?: Used to.

Would you rather master Guitar Hero or a real guitar?: I don’t necessarily want to *master* either. Neither are really a skill I could myself pursuing to any proficient degree.

Have you ever used an electric drill?: Back when I helped with drama club sets in high school.

Do you know anyone who’s had brain surgery?: Not that I’m aware of.

Do you like playing FPS (First Person Shooter) video games?: I got somewhat into CoD BlackOps.

Have you ever heard of, the band, Porcupine Tree?: Errr, no.

Would you rather wear boots or sandals?: Boots!

Have you ever rescued a lost dog?: B. sorta found our dog now that way. He escaped a neighborhood yard at a friends place and the lady was trying to get rid of him because her son was throwing out some hard-core Of Mice and Men vibes.

Have you ever adopted a dog from a shelter?: Yeah – my Deandra. R.I.P.

Have you ever cleaned a cat litter box?: Yeah.

Have you ever used a machete?: I own one…never had an occasion in which I needed to use it though.

What’s the last gift you gave to someone?: A weird drink coozie thing.

What’s the last gift you received?: A gift card to Carrabba’s.

When was the last time you rode a bicycle?: Last summer when I lived at the motel I think?

Do 2 wrongs ever make a right?: Right and wrong are up for interpretation.

Are you a vengeful person at all?: No. Vengeance to me is going on with life unscathed by and unfixed upon the malicious actions of other people. Seeking vengeance literally just gives them the satisfaction of knowing they got under your skin. Which was btw, exactly what they were hoping to do.

Do you have a good memory or do you forget things often?: Hit or miss. Going to lean more towards forget things, though. I tend to live in my own little world and if I don’t use the information frequently, it quickly becomes irrelevant and eventually forgotten.

Do you know anyone who suffers from chronic fatigue?: Probably.

Have you ever felt like you “lost yourself”?: I think for the first 29-30 years of my life, I didn’t even have a self to lose.

Do you judge people based on their weight?: No, what would that accomplish?

Do you know anyone who’s hardworking but still struggles to make ends meet?: I feel like I qualify; I work my ass off but have 0 priorities or sense of financial self-discipline.

What do you think is more harmful? Cigarettes or Marijuana?: Ummm, cigarettes are widely-accepted and scientifically determined to be absolutely more harmful than weed. Regardless, I smoke both.

Is your air conditioner on?: Either that or the fan. Not sure what the friends who own the house have it set on.

Is your heater on?: The fucks wrong with you. It’s May in Southern Arizona.

Do you enjoy going on walks?: Explicitly the manageably short, non-strenuous variety.

Do you like having picnics?: They're okay. Eating inside is fine, too.

Have you ever had a panic/anxiety attack?: Yessum.

Have you ever dated a co-worker?: “Dated” isn’t exactly the word I’d go with. But I’ve done the work-mance scene. Almost always culminates to awkwardness.

Do you still buy CDs or do you just download music?:Still buy CDs. The car we just bought was old enough to still have a CD player in it.

Do you like iPod/song shuffle surveys?: Not really.

Do you suffer from social anxiety?: Not really anymore. I mean, once I realized it was all in my head, it sort of depleted the level of social anxiety noticeably.

Are you more introverted or extroverted : Introverted. But I know how to appear extroverted in situations like talking to my tables at work.

Do you enjoy organizing things?: There is no consistency when it comes to what kinda shit I like to organize, nor how frequently I do it.

Have you ever watched “Mystery Science Theater 3000”?: I have not

Do you know anyone who plays Tuba?: Random. Nope.

If you had to get a tattoo of someone’s name, who’s name would you choose?: Like maybe a pet or a family member. Or my own name.

Have you ever been to Catalina Island?: No idea where that even is.

Would you rather swim with dolphins or sharks?: Yo, what sick fucker voluntarily chooses the sharks? Is that even a serious inquiry?

Do you know how to change a vacuum belt?: You buy a new vacuum or you simply never vacuum again.

Have you ever given a business a bad online review?: “If you don’t have anything nice to say, then don’t say anything at all.”

Do you know anyone who used to be a stripper (that you know of)?: Yeah, one of the bartenders I knew from the dive bar.

Do you know anyone who’s a hoarder?: I know people with tendencies, but not full-blown hoarder-ness.

Do you know who Maynard James Keenan is?: Ummmm, no…sorry.

Do you take responsibility for your actions or tend to make excuses?: I’ve gotten better at understanding what taking responsibility for myself actually means.

Have you ever used the shower at a gym?: . Yeah.

Have you ever felt trapped in a relationship: Trapped is an understatement.

Do you believe that “love is blind”?: I believe love is almost always something else in disguise…and that it all generally relates back to the image we want to create and embody. I swear I’m not being cynical, I'm just saying “Love” will always be too subjective and misinterpreted to come to any finite opinion about it.

What’s the furthest distance you’ve ridden a bicycle?. Like 7 miles? Could be more or less. I’m a terrible judge of time and distance.

Do you rate every survey you fill out, here on bzoink?: Don’t know what Bzoink is.

Do you know anyone who gets way too angry when playing video games?: Not currently.

Do YOU get too angry when playing video games?: It’s been awhile, but I usually don’t get raging mad – I was likely never expecting to do all that well in the first place.

Do you like to sing karaoke?: I’d rather sing along to the radio/iTunes. I need to hear the artist singing in order to match pitch and sound half decent.

Do you know what micro-expressions are?:. Not remotely.

If so, do you have a talent for seeing/reading them?: Assumingly not.

Have you ever had insomnia?: Medically, no. I don’t think it counts if you just do a lot of uppers and electively decide not to sleep.

What’s the longest amount of time you’ve been awake?: Like, 6 days. It gets trippy. I am in no way suggesting anyone try it.

Have you ever been in denial?: Lol it’d be obvious denial to deny being in denial.

Have you ever been in The Nile?: Sure. King Tut and I go Lazy-River-Drunk-Tubing together.

Have you recently used a nail file?: I honestly don’t think I’ve ever used one.

Do you know anyone named Kyle?: Yeah. This kid I went to HS with. We talked for a bit like a year ago and got Margaritas once.

Is it annoying that I started rhyming my questions?: Nope. You do you, bro!

[sunset-wishes-upon-hill]

Sang Woo, attachment style, BPD (Borderline Personality Disorder) and Yoon Bum.

I have seen many readers suspecting Bum to have BPD, but I also believe Sang Woo may suffer from BPD. As someone else had done a very detailed overview of Sang Woo and BPD (Part 1, Part 2), I’ll be quite brief about my own stand (and support) on this. 

(Warning: this mini essay of mine will undoubtedly be messy as I did not plan for smooth segue nor am I that organised to plan an essay before writing. This applies to my academic works as well; I’m more of a let’s-just-write-and-see-where-it-goes kind of person. Do not be like me. You will regret it by the time you’re half way through the essay and you have no idea what you’re talking).

Now while BPD is associated with self-harming behaviour and ‘clinging’ dependency, they may also funnel their aggression to external environment (i.e. externalised aggression (EA)). Individual with BPD exhibiting EA can (note it is in bold) perpetuate domestic violence, assault of those who are familiar to the individuals (e.g. friends, acquaintance) and aggressive criminal behaviour such as murder in the form of familicide and serial killing (this is very, very rare. Its rarity level is on par to unicorn) (Gross, 2007; Sansone et al., 2012). 

Many men suffering from BPD are more likely to be misdiagnosed as anti-social personality disorder (ASPD) compared to women who are more correlated with BPD, although comorbidity (co-occurrence of more than one disorder) between BPD and ASPD can and do happen (For review, see Bateman et al., 2008).

It is interesting to note that many clinicians calls for BPD to be considered as not as a personality disorder, but as an attachment disorder (unfortunately for many neither DSM-V(1) or ICD-10(2) has not made this change). Many clinicians suggest the BPD’s core psychopathology arises within the domain of interpersonal relations (e.g. intolerance of aloneness) (See, Adler, 1993; Benjamin, 1986; Gunderson, 1984, 1996; Masterson, 1972)

Our attachment we form with our primary caregiver as a baby provides a basis to how we navigate our relationship with others as adults (Bowlby, 1969). Many empirical evidences suggests insecure and to some extent, avoidant and disorganised attachment are prevalent amongst individuals with BPD (e.g. Meyer et al., 2001). 

I believe Sang Woo fits the criteria for insecure attachment. While we cannot actually turn Sang Woo into a baby and into a room with a two-way mirror, bring back his dead mother and have her go in and out of the room while observing a stranger’s and his mother’s interaction with baby Sang Woo as well as his own response and interaction with them (AKA Strange Situation experiment designed to measure attachment) (Ainsworth & Bell, 1970), we can see estimate from the glimpses we have seen of his past interaction with his mother and more importantly, his social skills as adults and particularly his relationship with Bum, we can ‘guess’ his attachment to his mother was most likely to be insecure.

For more information about the experiment ‘Strange situation’: Experiment video

Random trivia: Today, while this experiment certainly gave great deal of insight into potential how the bond humans develop, this is considered very unethical from modern point of view. One of experimenter’s ethical guides is bringing no physical or mental harm to the participant and in the video; babies are obviously in high distress. 

Another example is ‘Little Albert’ who the experimenters wanted to find out about classical/operant conditioning so decided to traumatise an innocent baby named Albert (No, not Albert as in the Albert Wesker like in the Resident Evil haha, yeah sorry I’m bad at making jokes) and they made him develop phobia against furry objects as well as animal (e.g. dogs). Unfortunately for our Albert, he grew up to develop wide range of phobia including furry objects. His parent was paid only $1 for Albert’s participation and sadly, Albert (not his real name) passed away at the age of 6.

What is an insecure attachment?

Ainsworth (1979) put forward the ‘caregiver sensitivity hypothesis’ to explain for different attachment types. It suggest child’s attachment type depends on their primary caregiver (i.e. mothers usually) behaviour toward the child.

Insecure attachment is more likely to form if a mother is less ‘sensitive’, ‘emotionally available’ ‘inconsistent’ and ‘attentive’ to the child. This meant sometimes the child’s needs were met while sometimes they were ignored by the primary caregiver therefore the child come to believe communication of needs has no influence on their parent/guardian. 

Children with insecure attachment showed conflicting behaviours mirroring their caregiver’s. The children are often feels distrustful or suspicious of their mother, but they also act desperate toward and cling to their mothers and highly distressed when the mother leaves them, even for a while but when the mother approaches them, they ignore or even, push them away. 

These children then grow up to have a preoccupied attachment patterns that resembles the pathology of BPD which are the need for reassurance and approval, excessive dependency on their partner or someone they are close to, fear of rejection and are reject-sensitive etc.

Now we have seen that Sang Woo came from a very abusive household and seeing this manhwa is Korean, we can assume that his household was a very typical Korean household: patriarchal household (in Sang Woo’s case with angry father) and emphasis on the mother’s role as a provider of emotional wealth and rearing of the children. As a Korean, this picture is very familiar; of course, patriarchal household =/= Eastern-restricted custom.

We can clearly see his mother was very protective and very likely to be the primary caregiver of Sang Woo from her husband and his father’s wrath. Maternal instinct to protect their child is a very strong and compelling force; however the mother also knew that she has to be alive to be able to protect Sang Woo from his father.

 It is most likely that the Sang Woo’s father threatened to abuse Sang Woo (more and in worse way than he already does) if his mother don’t do what he says. This could very likely mean that Sang Woo’s father wanted thing done in a way he likes, for example, wanting no signs of having a presence of a child living within the house. This puts huge pressure on the mother who knows if she doesn’t do what he says, his wrath would fall on her and then on Sang Woo who in the father’s eyes, ‘the root of all problems.’

To try and hide signs of children in the house is very difficult; Sang Woo, who probably wanted to play with toys freely out on the floor, want to cry, want to play, want to run around, just generally want to be a child and telling the child not to be a child is something children won’t understand because their mental capacity isn’t as developed as adults. 

Because of this, sometimes mothers tend to resort restricting their children often in harsh way and quite interestingly, the child comes to feel more angry and resentful of non-abusing parent than toward the abuser themselves. So Sang Woo, as a child, would probably have been very confused as he did not know whether the next time he saw his mother looking at him, it’d be a loving hug or her being cold towards him.

There were hints Sang Woo might have murdered his mother so it could be that, Sang Woo felt betrayed and confused at his mother who were supposed to be his protector, the only one in the world who understood and loved him acting in a way he saw was no better than his father, who he probably remembers as being nothing but violent, unloving, neglectful to the point Sang Woo probably sees him as a stranger who also happened to live with him and his mother. 

We don’t know what happened to Sang Woo’s mother, but if he did murder her it could have been that she was thinking of abandoning Sang Woo and her husband, unable to bear such living no longer and Sang Woo snaps, or her leaving him to his father for another man, or he killed her because as he grew up he came to see her as a weak mother who did not love her son as much as she perhaps did of her husband; who was so weak and selfish that she didn’t even leave Sang Woo’s father earlier or when she had the chance to take him away from the abuse if she really loved Sang Woo. 

He probably thought that being in the street, starving and cold and with nowhere else to go was much more better than being under a roof that was no better than hell. Because he’d still have his mother who had proven she loved him and that’s all he wanted and needed.

BPD + ASPD = Perfect Match or Chaos?

Now this brings to the question since there are conflicts whether Bum suffers from BPD or Sang Woo suffers from ASPD and let’s say, for the sake of this argument, Bum suffers from BPD and Sang Woo has ASPD. 

How would the two mental disorder clash and if they end up having a relationship, could they have mutual respect for one another and make the relationship work or would they eventually cannibalise each other with their deceitful nature?

I, for the life of me, cannot remember where, but I read somewhere that pathologies of BPD’s subconsciously need and seek those with ASPD and such setup may work (“Opposite attracts”). 

Such relationship can become very pathological that resembles a strange, unhealthy cat and mouse game and this is a course typical in such relationship (think of Joker and Harley Quinn). 

Pushing buttons to see how they respond; making use of their fear of abandonment against them; knowing they won’t actually leave and would just keep taking it. It’d be a continuous circle through idealisation and devaluation.

·         One (ASPD) takes nothing personally (e.g. Borderline accusation/insults); the other (BPD) takes everything personally.

·         Psychopathic detachment can diffuse Borderline reactive rage

·         BPD extreme emotion can be sufficiently ‘loud’ to penetrate psychopathic flattened affect

·         BPD idealises and feeds into the narcissism and need to be approved that ASPD has.

·         The non-judgmental approach of a ASPD can counter black/white thinking of a Borderline, in the ‘quiet’ times when they’re receptive to logic.

·         Because of ASPD’s ‘fearlessness’ attributes, they are not so bothered about the ‘walking on eggshells’ aspect of BPD.

·         The ASPD love bombs BPD, flooding the BPD with affection and making them think as though they are special, ‘consoling’ BPD’s fear of abandonment desires.

·         The BPD might be more oblivious to gas-lighting(3) and dowsing. Their fear of abandonment and senses off self-emptiness (which is a trait in ASPD also) and their unstable self-image can be ‘easy’ for ASPD to manipulate.

·         BPD may appreciate the optimism and drive of ASPD.

·         BPD and ASPD tend to be reckless and impulsive, but this can mean accepting of the others impulsiveness.

·         Those BPD may also be more desensitised and have higher threshold for the abuses (abuses are not confined to physical, it can also mean emotional), as they typically do not internalize things as other individual (whether they have BPD or depression or have no known diagnosis) would internalise the same situation.

·         But ASPD will abandon (eventually) and with the abandonment issue of BPD, it will not end well. But if they are stabilised by that point, they’ll usually breathe a sigh of relief as they chuck up the deuces.

BUT! This is not to say those with ASPD or BPD or other mental disorder will end up killing or doing some sort of horrendous crimes or acts! Certain portrayal of certain mental disorder does not mean everyone will follow that same path.

A researcher called Rosenhan conducted an experiment called ‘On being sane in insane places’. Long story short, he had mentally healthy patients (pseudopatients) going in for a psychiatric examination and told them to tell the doctors they were experiencing psychotic symptoms. 

After they were admitted, Rosenhan had instructed them prior to the institutionalisation that they should start acting ‘normal’ and ‘sane’ and see how many doctors/staff noticed and realised they were actually not mentally ill. No doctors or staff noticed during their stays, ranging from 7 to 52 days although the other patients quickly noticed they were mentally healthy and wasn’t mentally ill. 

The pseudopatients noticed how when they began to act ‘normal’, the staff and doctors labelled their behaviours and acts as some sort of psychotic symptoms. For example, a group of bored patients waiting outside the cafeteria for lunch early were said by a doctor to his students to be experiencing “oral-acquisitive” psychiatric symptoms.

Lesson from this study: don’t generalise what you see or heard of someone’s behaviour or actions with certain mental illness to other people who also have same disorder.

A/N: Planning on writing my ‘In the defense of Alois Trancy’ next - the character is horribly misunderstood and judged.

Terminology

(1)   DSM: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and offers a common language and standard criteria for the classification of mental disorders. The current updated edition is the 5th edition published in 2013 (DSM-V). Trivia: Majority of funding for DSM comes from pharmaceutical company. Hmmm…

(2)   ICD: The International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems is a coding of diseases and signs, symptoms, abnormal findings, complaints, social circumstances and external causes of injury or diseases, as classified by the World Health Organization (WHO). Currently in its 10th revision. Trivia: The ICD is actually the official mental health system for the US, but even many professionals do not realise this due to the dominance of the DSM.

(3)   Gas-lighting: manipulation of someone by psychological means into doubting their own sanity. This is similar to an operant conditioning (rewarding wanted behaviour, punishing unwanted behaviour) observed by B.F. Skinner. It induces the feeling of learned helplessness and erode their logicality by manipulating someone to think what they are experiencing is ‘not so bad’, causing gradual acceptance of abuse. Synonymous to ‘grooming’.

Reference:

Adler, G., (1988) Borderline Psychopathology and Its Treatment. The American Journal of Psychiatry, 145(2), 264.

Ainsworth, M. D. & Bell, S. M. (1970). Attachment, Exploration, and Separation: Illustrated by the Behavior of One-Year-Olds in a Strange Situation. Child Development, 41(1), 49-67.

Ainsworth, M. D. S., & Wittig, B. A. (1969). Attachment and exploratory behavior of one-year-olds in a strange situation. In B. M. Foss(Ed. ), Determinants of infant behavior (Vol. 4,pp. 111-136). London: Methuen.

Bateman, A., Fonagy, P., Dimaggio, Giancarlo, & Norcross, John C. (2008). Comorbid antisocial and borderline personality disorders: Mentalization‐based treatment. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 64(2), 181-194.

Benjamin, L. (1996). Interpersonal diagnosis and treatment of personality disorders (2nd ed., Diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders. Y). New York ; London: Guilford Press.

Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment. Attachment and loss: Vol. 1. Loss. New York: Basic Books.

Graffagnino, P. (1973). THE TREATMENT OF THE BORDERLINE ADOLESCENT: A DEVELOPMENTAL APPROACH. Psychiatric Annals, 3(11), 98-100.

Gross, J., & Juni, Sam. (2007). Aggression in Hospitalized Criminal Offenders with Mental Illness and Personality Disorders: A Psychoanalytic Retrospective Longitudinal Study, ProQuest Dissertations and Theses.

Gunderson, J. (1996). The borderline patient’s intolerance of aloneness: Insecure attachments and therapist availability. The American Journal of Psychiatry, 153(6), 752-8.

Gunderson, J. (2011). Borderline Personality Disorder. The New England Journal of Medicine, 364(21), 2037-2042.

Meyer, B., Pilkonis, P., Proietti, J., Heape, C., & Egan, M. (2001). Attachment styles and personality disorders as predictors of symptom course. Journal of Personality Disorders, 15(5), 371-89.

Sansone, Lam, & Wiederman. (2011). The relationship between illegal behaviors and borderline personality symptoms among internal medicine outpatients. Comprehensive Psychiatry, Comprehensive Psychiatry. 

[joly-and-the-satellites]

So uhm College AU? Grantaire running against Enjolras as President of the student government just to piss him off but Grantaire actually wins and he panics because "this wasn't part of the plan Bossuet stop laughing!" And he ends up asking sour Enj for help.

((Hopefully this is alright, anon!!))

It wasn’t supposed to go like this. It was just a joke, for the love of god - just a harmless, playful little jest to get Enjolras’ attention, and maybe rile him up a bit. It was Grantaire’s favorite pastime, after all; and something he was rather skilled at, if he said so himself. The point stood, regardless of his talent: running against Enjolras for the position of Student Government President was nothing more than a joke. Hell, he’d even treated it as one - he wasn’t serious in the slightest, never dressed the part, was never on time, didn’t put up any posters asking for the votes of the other students… whereas, predictably, Enjolras was taking it all in stride with a certain solemnity; the exact opposite of Grantaire’s approach. He was clearly doing all he could to secure the position for himself - which was more than any of the other runners were doing by a mile. There was never a doubt in R’s mind that he would win by a landslide come election time; which was the deciding factor in whether or not he’d run against him. Enjolras already had it, as far as he was concerned. Which was why, when it had been announced that Grantaire had been named President, he’d choked on his drink to the point of scaring Joly into thinking he’d somehow managed to drown himself. Now, Grantaire was sitting on the edge of his bed, wine bottle in hand, wide-eyed, and struggling to fully grasp the situation. It was absolutely ridiculous.  Sure, he was sociable with others, got into less altercations, and was generally more laid-back and involved in things outside of politics than Enjolras; but that hardly meant he was President material! He was a far cry from it! He was no problem-solver, nor was he well-informed on the concerns and questions of the student body, as a whole or as segments; and he didn’t even understand what it all entailed! Did he have powers? Could he actually do anything with his title? Was he suddenly going to flooded with questions from other students? Would it give him any leeway if he turned an essay in a few hours past due? Grantaire ran a hand through his already unkempt hair, and took a swig from his bottle. “I cannot believe,” he started, only to be cut off by a snort from Bossuet, who sat next to him. He shot him a disbelieving glance - the other had a hand over his mouth to hide a mirthful grin, but his eyes were shining with laughter he was barely holding back. “I cannot believe - they elected me! What the fuck!?” Grantaire groaned in sorrow. He was nowhere near drunk enough for this. Bossuet broke into honest laughter then, shaking his head and wiping at his eye as if he’d teared up. R gaped at him, lowering the bottle to the floor before he turned to face him. How could he laugh!? This was an absolute disaster! “This wasn’t part of the plan, Bossuet!” He protested; this time, Bossuet snorted. Joly, who was at the desk typing up a paper on his laptop, snickered under his breath this time. Grantaire whipped around to face his other friend with a look of shock. Joly cast an innocent glance over his shoulder before he went back to typing, but his shoulders were shaking with silent laughter. Grantaire couldn’t believe this betrayal from his own best friends! It was treason! Dissent in the ranks! “Stop laughing!” R said, exasperation clear in his voice. “Alright, alright - I’m sorry!” Bossuet grinned, holding up his hands in surrender. It was exceedingly obvious, Grantaire decided, that he was not at all sorry. “It’s just… you were kind of asking for this, ‘Taire.” R was sure he was gawking at him; but he could safely say that his confusion was perfectly reasonable. There was no logical explanation for why R had won the election - but that hardly mattered now. Now, he was stuck with the aftermath; and more importantly, how he was to deal with it. He had responsibilities now that he wasn’t even aware of, he was sure, and he’d feel a bit stupid if he were to ask a staff member what his own job was supposed to entail. But he couldn’t travel through time, and he couldn’t call it off, or pass the job along to someone else– Grantaire grabbed his bottle from the floor again. “This is insane,” he groused. Joly leaned back in his chair with his arm slung over the armrest, the wood creaking faintly. He raised an eyebrow at Grantaire, seemingly doing all he could to withhold a smile. “He isn’t wrong, R. You knew the risk you were taking,” he informed him, a little giggle slipping out between his words. “Maybe you should just call Enjolras, admit that you don’t know what you’re doing, and ask for his help.” Grantaire choked on the wine he was gulping down at that suggestion - Bossuet, ever helpful, whacked him squarely between the shoulders. Grantaire ended up coughing. “For a doctor, you’re causing your patients a lot of problems,” Bossuet teased as R finally caught his breath, grabbing a half-emptied water bottle sitting on the bedside table instead. Joly shrugged a shoulder playfully, turning back to his laptop with a shake of his head. “I’m only saying - you need someone’s advice, R, and Enjolras would definitely be willing to help. Besides, he’s still a little bitter about the loss. Maybe this could gloss things over with him…?” Grantaire sighed heavily at that, dropping his head onto Bossuet’s shoulder for support; the other patted his shoulder sympathetically. Yet another downside to winning this horrendous election. Enjolras had suspected that Grantaire was only antagonizing him by running; and no doubt, he was probably more than just a bit upset about losing it to him in spite of his best effort. He had sent a short, too-formal ’Congratulations on the win.’ that morning, and he had not seen a single text or call since - apparently, neither had anyone else, with the exception of Combeferre and Courfeyrac. Grantaire liked to get him riled up, yes; but he didn’t like to make him angry, let alone upset. For all Enjolras was undoubtedly annoyed then, R knew he was at least a little morose about losing, and the knowledge was tearing him up a bit. He hadn’t intended to win; and never would he intend to cause him any dismay. But if he called now - admitted that it was all a joke gone wrong, that he had no idea what he was doing and couldn’t handle the duties of President on his own - Enjolras would be furious, and rightly so. Grantaire finally insisted, “I can’t call him.” Bossuet took a deep breath, leaning back on his hands - R followed the motion seamlessly, too distressed over the situation to bother with sitting back up. For all that their advice seemed impossible to follow through with, he was incredibly thankful for their presence here. He couldn’t ask for better friends than these two. “I agree with Joly-” “Thank you.” “-you really should call him. Whatever you think will happen, it won’t; I promise,” Bossuet assured him. “He might be a little annoyed, but he’s not going to hate you for asking for some advice. Just trust us on this one, alright…?” Grantaire glanced at his phone, which was sitting by his pillow; he had a handful of texts that he hadn’t yet responded to, almost all of which were concerning his position as President of Student Government… aside from some link to an undoubtedly ridiculous video Joly had sent him ten minutes ago. His head was suddenly filled with the thousand routes this scenario could follow. Enjolras might be furious. He might be annoyed. Maybe he’ll hang up. Maybe he’s blocked R. Maybe he won’t answer at all. Maybe… Bossuet nudged his shoulder lightly, as if hearing his doubts. Grantaire gave a heavy sigh, grabbing his phone as if sentencing himself to death as he shot Joly a rueful look. “I don’t understand why you’re always right.” Joly gave him a too-sweet smile, batting his eyelashes at R as he unlocked his phone. He pulled up his contact list - Apollo was the first name. He tapped the name, opening it up; but he just couldn’t bring himself to press the call button. His eyes wandered to the contact picture - one he’d snapped at a protest a year or so back, where Enjolras was holding a pride flag high over his head and above the crowd, his hair illuminated by the midday sun. God, he was stupid. Bossuet reached over, fast as lightning, and pressed the call button. R felt his heart stop as he scrambled to end the call, fumbling with the phone and almost dropping it. “Bossuet!” He screeched in horror, much to the amusement of the other two. Luckily, he hung up before anyone could answer - and he immediately shot the other a look of mock-annoyance before tackling him, almost throwing them both onto the floor. Bossuet pulled R’s hood up over his head and yanked the drawstrings shut with a laugh, pushing him back by the face. Temporarily blinded, Grantaire flailed to smack his hand away with a laugh, struggling to pull the hood loose and back from his face…… and his phone was playing Enjolras’ custom ringtone. Suddenly, the room was in dead silence, save from the phone’s tune. All of them swiveled to stare at it at once. Enjolras’ picture was on the screen - he was calling back. “… Joly, my love, text Bahorel, please.”“Why…?”“I need to know if R can legally kill me for this.”“Yes, probably.”“I’ll leave my lucky socks to you.”“Those socks are not lucky.”Grantaire was running on auto-pilot when he took the call; maybe he was a bit more drunk than he’d first believed. He held the phone up to his ear almost cautiously, glancing between the two as if they could offer him any help. Joly have a guilty smile, and Bossuet shrugged helplessly. “Hello? Grantaire, can you hear me?” Enjolras asked from the other end of the call. He didn’t sound upset, nor did he sound annoyed - but he was definitely on the fence of both. Grantaire cleared his throat nervously. “Uh… yes. Yes, I am hear you.” “You called me and hung up before I could answer,” Enjolras stated. “Butt dial,” Grantaire said quickly. “I sat on the button.” “Grantaire.”“Anyway, how were classes today? Anything interesting happen? Any essays? Projects?”“Grantaire.”“Yes?” He croaked. “Why did you call?”Silence overtook the call for a moment. Oh, no. How was he to explain this? He hadn’t had any time to think over what he would say, how he would ask, what he’d do if Enjolras didn’t take the request favorably–“Is something wrong?” The other asked, much more softly. Grantaire was so taken aback by the question that he couldn’t quite respond; he wasn’t even sure if he was breathing properly for a moment. “Are you alright? I can be over in five minutes, R, give or take-” “No! - no, it’s alright,  really, you don’t need to come over. I, uh… I’m perfectly fine. Nothing’s wrong. But I… might need help with something.” There was another break of awkwardly heavy silence, and Grantaire was suddenly very aware of Bossuet watching him in nervous anticipation. Enjolras sounded guarded when he next spoke, a certain edge to his words. “With what?”Grantaire took a deep breath to steel himself, feeling as if his face was burning. God, this was embarrassing - maybe he’d stop picking at him after this. (He knew he wouldn’t, but it seemed a sound solution.)“I… don’t think I can actually be President of Student Government, because I’ve got no idea what my responsibilities are and I didn’t intend to actually win or be taken seriously…?”Silence dragged out unbearably. It felt like seconds were crawling by at the pace of an elderly snail. R, for a moment, wished he would have just lied about it, or made something up on the fly. That would have been much easier than whatever hell he was about to unleash. “Unbelievable,” Enjolras said shortly. He didn’t sound furious; he wasn’t raising his voice. But then again, he didn’t need to. His tone said enough. He cringed. There was the fire and ice Grantaire was expecting. “You do know that any sort of election within the student body isn’t to be treated like a joke, correct? This was serious. I was serious.” Enjolras continued on. R ran a hand through his hair, shoulders slouching like a scolded puppy. “Yeah, I know. But… for what it’s worth, I didn’t think I had a chance in hell at winning. I was so sure you’d already won it,” he replied, hoping he wasn’t just feeding gasoline to the flames. Enjolras sighed sharply; Grantaire could almost imagine him rubbing at his temple to push back a headache. Wrong move on his part, apparently. “So what do you need to know?” Enjolras asked, his tone clipped and words short. Oh, you’ve put your foot in your mouth this time, Grantaire thought to himself bitterly.

“Well… I was really thinking that maybe you could just… help me do the right thing?” R started, trying not to sound too hopeful. Maybe if he took the right approach, Enjolras wouldn’t be so sour with him; maybe he’d convince him to help and patch things up between them a bit in the process. “You know better than I do what the other students need, I mean. You’re more in touch with what’s wrong, what’s unfair, what needs fixing; I just thought that… well, that you could help guide me along…?” The air was filled with the anticipation from his friends, and worry from himself; he could hear his heart drumming away as if caught between his ears, and could almost see Enjolras, sitting in his own room, phone in hand while he considered the request. Finally, he gave an annoyed huff. “Fine. But you had better not run against me next year, R.”Grantaire grimaced. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”“… I’ll be over soon. I’d rather talk in person than over the phone,” Enjolras announced. He sounded a bit aggravated, but nowhere near as incensed as he’d been before - really, he just sounded exhausted with the whole situation. R was hoping that was an improvement, if nothing else. “Have I ever told you that you’re the best person in the world, Apollo?” Enjolras immediately went back to his long-suffering, exasperated tone.“Please, don’t.”“No, really.”“R, I’m hanging up.”“Oh, come on! What will it take? Do I have to serenade you? Take you to a romantic dinner? I hear that the restaurant down on–hello? Enjolras?”“Did he hang up on you?” Joly cackled, already closing his laptop to leave. “No,” Grantaire argued childishly. “He lost service, that’s all.”

[daemon-knight]

Allen’s Ramblings XXIV: Venting... Also talking about Canon RP Blogs

Well folks, after doing that meme I stole from Aster of wearysouls I’ve honestly been thinking about going back to doing canon RP blogs again. I mean, I’ve been seriously thinking about it. I really miss a lot of my old partners in certain fandoms and I’m honestly curious about the state of some of them, but... I’ve been worried about going back. 

The main reason I strictly do OC blogs nowadays is because I was seeing so much drama and pettiness going on in the bigger fandoms I was in, specifically the Touhou and Dangan Ronpa communities. There was a lot of vague blogging, shipping drama, complaints about power levels, and so on. I just... walked out after that. It’s been a few years since then so maybe things have settled down a tad. Plus I’m 23 now and not 17, so I know when to say no, and unfollow people now, but I’m still weary. However, I’ve really been wanting to write for Sanae Kochiya, Tsubaki Yayoi, and even Orie and Nanase from Under Night again now that late[st] is coming out this year, and my hype for that game is UNREAL (BLACK THINGS). Hell, I really wanna’ try my hand at playing Cranberry from MGRP too, so.. yeah.

However, I’ve still got some worries about coming back to those fandoms, so... I just... need to vent a tad about some of the frustrations I had when doing canon RPs back then, some of the precautions I’ll be taking when I go back to RPing canon blogs in the future, as well as my own personal thoughts RPing in general. 

I was debating on if I should make this a Rambling or not since this is less of an essay and more an... actual rambling, but I think this’ll be worth archiving on the Rambles blog for future reference, so... yeah, here’s Rambling number 24. 

Also, much like when I did my off the cuff post a while back on this blog, I won’t be hiding my opinions under a read more since I’m not talking about NSFW-related things nor spoilers. If anyone wants to discuss, break down, or refute my opinions they are more than welcomed to. I’d be a coward to not allow it after publicizing my bare thoughts after all, especially my more jaded ones. Anyway, onto my... vents, I guess.

I think I’ve said this at least twice on this blog before, but if I see one more post about power levels and “respecting my character’s power” in OOC in some way, shape, or form, I’m gonna’ start blocking people. This was super prevalent in canon RP, especially in the Touhou community. It drove me nuts then, and it drives me even more nuts now that I’m starting to write my original stories. To quote myself from a few months ago:  

I, the writer, indeed respect the character you wrote. I, the writer, respect that the character you wrote may have abilities, powers, and skills that exceed my character. I, the writer, respect and know that your character may, can, and will become violent toward my character and will act accordingly if pushed to that point. I, the writer, will not make complaints if your character reacts in a way I didn’t expect because (ideally) the profile of your character will have made it very clear your character could and would react that way. However, the characters I write are usually arrogant, violent, self-entitled assholes that neither know nor care about those things. They (the character) will be outwardly snarky, rude, and violent themselves, I don’t need the warning labels for things I already know. I’m not going to throw much of a fit if something happens, but I will say big dramatic moments like that should probably be plotted out so there’s no surprises and no one assumes anything. 

Another thing that might make me block people: dash commentary. It’s either lighthearted and comedic or it’s pathetic vague blogging. Look, if you’ve got a problem with someone, how they write their character, or how they’re treating your character, just talk to them directly about it. The writer is rarely as bad as the character they’re writing, and they’re probably willing to pull the reins a little if asked, or discuss how to get your character can get out of the situation they got in. Most of us just want to write stories after all, not hurt feelings. So don’t vague about it using your character as a mouthpiece.

Less of a vent and more of an announcement, but any canon blog I make won’t have anon on it. Anons and canon blogs usually lead to a bunch of shipping drama and trash talking I don’t want to deal with, so I’m not.

Fandom Drama usually means the respective RP community is going to have drama too, and I’m not looking forward to that when it happens. I know the Naruto fandom was losing it after certain pairings weren’t fulfilled when that series ended, god only knows what’s happening in the Fairy Tail fandom, but I know the quality of that manga is debated everyday, and god forbid you tried to have a discuss about the political arrange of Gensokyo in the Touhou community without someone losing it... again, this was a few years ago, so maybe things are better, but... I’m still keeping this in mind.

My feelings on canon-divergent blogs are kind of mixed, so I don’t know how I’ll be handling those yet if I see them following me. As an OC blog, it doesn’t really matter to me since my character doesn’t follow any series’s canon by nature, but when I do Canon RP stuff again this might be an issues since I tend to have single-verse, single ship muses.

As much as I want to go back to playing Sanae, The opinions of the Touhou RP community are just... low... Again, that RP community really jaded my views of canon RP to the point of wanting a three-year break from the whole thing, but... I’m willing to give another shot, albeit at the cost of being hyper-selective.

More of a general vent, but I will lose my gosh dang mind if I see another fighting game character RP blog with a mun that refuses to do fight RPs. What’s the goddamn point of writing for a character that’s known for punching people if you refuse to punch people and be punched in return? This might be because I come from several forum RP groups that specialize in battle storytelling (if you couldn’t tell from how I write Clauds here), but still... just... why write for them? Their personality? Their character design? Their ships? Friend, just write fanfiction and do art of them in that case. I just... I mean... I just don’t get it... I just don’t..

Another thing I’m gonna’ lose my mind over: villains and villainous characters. Guys, villains do bad things. Those bad things create conflict in the plot, which makes protagonists/heroes grow into better characters and make the premise of that story interesting. That’s how you write a goddamn story and how you make interesting characters. Most people don’t write villains to have them cuddle kittens and sip tea with their first love, they write villains to push other characters and create plot. Using my OCs as an example, Claudia is a fight-happy, morally neutral character that can be villainous or heroic depending on who she’s killing/fighting and why. Amber is a goddamn street gangster that has robbed and beaten at least three defenseless characters for the sake of pushing them mentally and physically. Villains have a purpose and it’s not to look cute. Understand this or don’t RP with villainous character.

Speaking of villains, most villains will fail and lose despite their power or standing because that’s the point. They’re villains, and villains/antagonists are meant to be toppled 90% of the time to show how even great odds can be overcome and teach readers to never give up, believe in the power of friendship, all that fun stuff. Especially anime/video game villains. Half the interest of the villain is seeing how they’re knocked off their high horse. A villain without a hero may be successful, but they’re also kind of boring without an obstacle in their way to show off their villainy. Understand this or don’t write for villainous characters.

Wow, these vents have gotten real general... anyway, moving on. Character’s flaws. Your character has them, and you need to freaking deal with that. Your character isn’t perfect, they’ve got flaws, they’ve got bad alignments and twisted morals at times. They’ve got issues that people in your fandom can, have, and will write paragraphs about, calling them shit characters and saying they should be removed from the show/game. Those aren’t attacks on you personally, but they are points about the show and game and how they’re written. If you can’t handle that, then I wouldn’t suggest writing for that character. I mean, if the Sword Art Online RP community can deal with that, then... what are you scared of?

Last vent, and it’s more general complaint really, but please know that RPing requires communication. I’ve been seeing blogs that have been saying they prefer to have minimal communication because of... several reasons I don’t feel like debating, but a lack of communication between partners is just shooting yourself in the foot for when communication needs to happen. It’ll make your partners just silently drift away and you really only have yourself to blame for that.

And... that’s really it in terms of my venting and complaints about... well, RPing on tumblr in general I suppose, given how I’m ending this. I’ve got a few dummy accounts still online and activated, so I’ll just re-purpose them for a Sanae, Tsubaki, and Orie blog once I get some research done. I’ll promo those whenever I get to them. Anyway, that’s all for me, I’ll be getting to my drafts soon enough, and like I said before I’m willing to take any criticisms of the rant I just gave so... come at me I guess? Anyway, see you all next Rambling. Hopefully it’ll be something a bit more pleasant.