#I think there's different phases of life where people emphasise looks more

[itsaceokay]

I've struggled a lot throughout my life with feeling pretty as an asexual. For a very long time, I actively didn't want to be pretty and firmly believed I wasn't and was okay with that. Because being pretty meant being desired and that made me feel uncomfortable.

As I grew up, I started to feel pretty and was okay with that because I'd finally internalised that beauty doesn't have to have anything to do with attraction. Beauty is everywhere, so why couldn't I be beautiful too?

But comments like 'you're wasting your good looks', 'you're so lucky to have X features', 'you're really pretty, how are you single?', 'I bet your kids will be so cute' have started to leave me feeling like I'm unworthy of looking the way I do.

I have no desire to ever 'make use of' my appearance by having a sexual relationship or children and I wish beauty was more generally appreciated for simply what it is rather than in relation to anything else.

[scrawnytreedemon]

Well if the other ratty boy has already been done, what about Ezlo? He's so old I have to wonder what his deal is

@breath-of-the-twink

Oh god, there has to be... quite alot going on with him.

One thing that makes setting down groundwork tricky for Ezlo alone is that despite his age, we don't know anything about his past(minus your DELIGHTFUL Hero of Men!Ezlo headcanon that I cherish ever-so-much).

Ezlo's a pretty cagey person, him and Link probably only spend a couple weeks to a month or two tops~— And I feel even without that... he might not really care to talk about it. What matters is his life here and now, and that's that! The past is more a reservoir of lessons to look back on and relate to your young, inexperienced pupils more than a personally sentimental, overaching narrative(on the surface).

So I think to glean attitudes about family, we have to look more to the Minish as a whole.

The impression I get is that rearing and growth is done within the community, instead of individual family structures. I've heard someone roughly say that the Minish stay with their families for two years, then reach an adolescence where they're treated more as young adults and budding members of the community— Heavily, heavily paraphrased, and I don't know where that's from, but I'm guessing it's the manga.

I think regardless of whether this factoid is true or not, I think the picture painted by Minish communities is fairly clear. They're more aligned with professions or certain areas than particular interpersonal relationships.

Ezlo is a sage; he's used to having people come to him for wisdom, whether it be everyday advice or tutorship. As such, he's gotten an attitude where his way is correct, and it's his job to guide other people. Having all that ceaseless adoration can become overwhelming, though, and so there's a standoffish quality to Ezlo in regards to who he picks and chooses in forming more personal mentor-menteé bonds.

I don't think Vaati was his first apprentice, but perhaps he was the first one he'd had in quite awhile. Vaati has particular talents and needs a particular space to grow, but because Ezlo comes from a background which emphasises the teacher's judgement first, said needs were often ignored, compromised, or unnoticed; because as Ezlo saw it, Vaati was going through "that weird phase" that all young Minish go through— Not considering that perhaps this wasn't just that, or even if, that doesn't change the fact that if you're not careful you can cause lasting damage.

Ezlo's been alive for centuries— I don't think he remembers how it was for him, at all, and since few Minish ever get to the age he does, he lacks a peergroup to remind him of his past actions or that he'd been in a similar situation once, too. Maybe Ezlo had been in a very similar situation to Vaati, even, but because of the distance and the outlook he's earned, he doesn't realise that.

I think, if say, Ezlo hadn't been turned into a hat and took it upon himself to deal with Vaati, and then come home, it would have all-but permanently scarred his ability to entrust his teachings to others. He'd still give wisdome and advice... but teaching? You're better off elsewhere.

However, because Ezlo's been made to cooperate with Link, and thereby form a similar bond but without the inherent power imbalance, it becomes clear that things can be different; and that just because he failed Vaati, that doesn't mean he's doomed to repeat that with whoever comes next.

Depending on how much introspection Ezlo does, he may walk away with a more mindful, compassionate, and humble outlook. Oh believe me, he's still Ezlo— Still your grumpy, stiff teacher with peculiar tendencies —But he's mellowed. Ideally, he'll have learned not just the importance of being careful with magical power, but interpersonal power, too.

I think family for Ezlo is like gardening; sometimes you have wide, sweeping beds largely capable of tending to themselves; othertimes, it's a shootling in a pot. It does well to remember you were once this small, too.

[othersideoftheparadise]

Tampered [3/?]

Sam Wilson x cis fem! reader

Warnings: Spoilers for TFAWS. Mentions of blood, alcohol poisoning, graphic mentions of violence. This is the first time I'm ever writing something like this, so I'm open to constructive criticism.

Word count: 4.3 k ish.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 here.

2000

Dull pain thrummed between your eyes as the butt of the gun connected your forehead, almost making your vision black. It felt like needles pricking the skin all at once. You had to finish the mission. Your recovered, maintaining your balance back again, ignoring the pulsing pain, gripping the knife tucked in behind the belt, you dodged the punch aimed at your gut. You kicked your feet off the wall behind, as the boost gave you enough height to strike down the enemy, slashing his neck open right by the artery. Killing the very last attacker in the room. He slumps down with a thud, with blood splaying everywhere.

As the adrenaline rush wearied off, you were hungry now rather than being nervous about your mission. It was your duty to clear off the path for the Soldat and always look behind his back, just in case. More like a worm pierced onto the fishing hook for fishing. It was more like being assigned to be a bait for clearing the path.

You had to report back to the assigned rendezvous point, as you were told to be, but hunger made your ears ring. You did not have time to dwell upon in the middle of the mission, but the sweet aroma of freshly baked, warm bread and the sight of a boy around your age licking his fingers as he gobbled down plum pie definitely wanted you to think twice. Searing waves of hunger pangs hit, subconsciously leading your feet towards the boy. Hearing another set of footsteps approaching, you tried to shimmy behind the garbage bin behind, only to be yanked out by the man you never wanted to deal with.

The Soldat.

He looked down at you with his eyes reflecting no expression behind the mask. He dragged you by your hand as you protested.

“Let me go!” you trashed in, kicking and grunting against his firm grip.

‘Салдат, принеси с собой цечку, немедленно.,’ You heard the voice on the other side through the earpiece.

“N-No, No, I don’t want to go, it is so dark and p—please.” Blood was rushing to your head all at once, pulsing every beat. You didn’t want to go back. You wanted to stall as the feeling of fear overwhelmed sank into the gut.

Confusion was written all over his face; you could sense his hesitation. Previous mission with the Soldat ended up with him screaming for minutes in pain and agony when he had disobeyed. The people in the base never threatened but always made sure that you were present during the electroconvulsive therapy and when he was kept in cryo till the next session.

Shifting weight from one leg to another, your heart lurched, and your stomach tugged as you were closer to the destination. He was bruised and was limping by the time he had found you, but now he was straight up rigid, listening to the command. You remembered his gut-wrenching screams piercing in, and he took you back to the rendezvous point before the cleaning crew showed up.

“I’m sorry. I was just fascinated by this. I don’t know what to call it, but this part seems to be important. Who is Nakajima?” where he was pressing all the wrong buttons. Zemo was one of those only men; you were eager to know what was going on in his head.

Here he was playing the role of sugar-daddy, prodding over. What was more important was how Bucky never told you that your neighbour Nakajima was one of the people on the list of his amends. It was on you that you had expected him to tell you; he had no obligation that he had to.

“If you touch that again, I’ll kill you.” Bucky let-go of Zemo’s neck.

Sam visibly tensed up, looking at them, “I’m sorry. I understand that list of names. People you’ve wronged as the Winter Soldier.”

So, this was the reason why he wanted to move in.

Part of you was disappointed, but you had no right to have expectations. It was his own decision, and you had to respect it.

On the other hand, it was Zemo. It made you wondering for a while about how he was able to sit in the same room as you did. He should be angry, angry for rotting in prison after avenging his family’s death. This guy was surely a good spy and was very skilled; this was another reason you had to keep an eye on him.

Zemo devised a plan, laying out different people to meet in and around, starting from Madripoor. The city that had loose laws hence had better leverage for things to go according to him.

“It’s kept its lawless ways. But we cannot exactly walk in as ourselves. James, you will have to become someone you claim is gone.” Zemo let Bucky know.

“That is not going to work.”, this plan was going to fail; Bucky can become the Winter Soldier but cannot act like one.

“And why would you say that?” his interest piqued. He obviously knew this better than anyone else. If this was one of his mind-games to rile you up, it was not happening anymore.

“Well, it was something that he was conditioned to do in his subconscious. Not in his real-time. He does not know to pretend like one.”

“Alas, we do not have a better plan, do we?” he replied back.

Knives, Check.

Guns, Check.

You found yourself scrolling aimlessly through the local television, making sure that your eyes did not skitter over to the suit that was draped over him, fitting neat and tight.

Holy fucking shit.

You had to physically make sure that you were not watching him, straining your vision onto the screen. He looked like a mafia drug lord. You knew that you would be floored if he had opted to wear the shirt with his sleeves rolled up. You wanted to have more of the Sambal and rice that was served in the morning. The appetite had appeared out of nowhere.

“Alright, I’ll be leaving now. Ping me when you’re done with your business or in case of an emergency. I’ll be looking over from the second floor, from the lodge opposite to the pub.” Part of you did not trust Zemo, but you were sure that Sam and Bucky would be able to handle themselves.

Mentally slapped yourself, ignoring the looks thrown at you. All of this would be over for once and all if the plan had worked out, and you would tell Sam that you would be leaving.

Putting the food on the plate you waited, you made sure that table was all set up before Sam came back from his jog. Things were awkward, to say the least, and tiring as well. You couldn’t care less about how people showed false compassion at Nat’s funeral, making you roll your eyes. One thing that always made you regret that you did not have anything that belonged to Nat other than her memories. Everything had burned down once Bruce snapped, even before the team could comprehend her death. It was so unfair that everything that belonged to her had been destroyed, wiping out her entire existence as if she had never existed in the first place.

Another headache was pulsing in, beating in the hollow space with every heartbeat. You heard the door slam shut, reminding you that Sam had indeed returned from the run. Here you were, preparing breakfast, soaking in the domesticity in the world where she was already forgotten. She deserved to live, live a good life after all of this with Steve. Sunlight shimmying into the house made it look like the future that you had always wanted. This was too good to be true; the team was still recovering from the loss.

Sam and you both were still managing to barely keep the relationship tied together as the honeymoon phase after the blip had ended. The real world was settling in. You had seen him struggling to set into the new world, where people had moved on without him. You tried your best to ignore it because it always ended with ‘let me handle it’ ending the conversation.

“Hey, are you listening to me?”, He asked digging in, looking over for a response. “I said that the food is delicious. It is terrific.”, He reassured after seeing you cock an eyebrow.

“I appreciate it, Sammy.”, you smiled, remembering how Nat opened up to you saying that she always wanted a family with Steve, wanted a life, a life that you were living now.

“Hey, look at me.”, he hooked your chin with his finger, lifting up. “Thinking about her is not going to bring her back alright, but you can talk to me. I’m right here. It is okay, not to be okay.”, He looked at you with all sincerity that he could muster.

All you wanted was to scoff, scoff at how he was always ready to help others but dealt with his problems all by himself.

“They were supposed to get married!”, This was when the heaviness in chest grew heavy. He was physically taken back by the new information. Maybe he didn’t know about it yet.

Shit.

“And really, Sammy? I could say the same to you. I get it, alright. I get it that we both are going through a tough phase, but I have wanted to say the same to you. All you say is ‘I can do this and shut me out.” You emphasize with your fingers, seeing his tense shoulders.

“You are so careful around me all the time that you physically look like you’re embracing yourself for shit to collapse.”, This was it; you had been waiting for weeks to say this. You saw his jaw tick with all the tension that he had been gritting in and holding back.

“N-no, No, I don’t want to go in there. Do you understand? I get what you are trying to say, but it is just that I need some time to open up about everything. The world did not wait for anyone and has been running even in all those five years.”, He said, pointing at the window.

“I need some time, m’kay? I need some time to adjust to all of this.”, He was ambiguous.

“This is how our relationship is, Sammy. We don’t talk. This-this is why you are always on alert mode whenever you are with me because you think you have to keep reasoning every time anything happens. Y-You also think that you’re better off without telling anyone about your problems.”, Emphasising the conversation, you sat looking dead in his eyes. This flared anger in him, flickering like a spark staring out a fire.

“Why does every conversation we have, has to end up about our relationship? And no, you’re wrong this time; it is not that I don’t want to talk to you about it. It is just that I need some time.”, He reasoned, trying to explain, taking deep breaths.

You both had arguments almost every single day. It was emotionally exhausting. You could not imagine what he must be going through now that everything had resumed.

“This is what I am talking about. We both have grown out of this relationship, and we have different opinions, which is absolutely fine.”, He was positive, scrapping the chair away. “But I need a break; I need a break from all of this. It is just that you and I are dealing with different things, and I’m tired of explaining this to you every time.”, He said with certainty.

It really did take some time for his words to sink in, but he was crystal clear. He approached you, instantly regretting his words.

“You’re right, Sam.”, You stared aimlessly, getting up.

“H-Hey, I did not mean it.”, his voice dropped, lacing with sadness, looking at you.

“Stay there and sit down; this is your house.”, you emphasized, motioning him. He looked distraught as seriousness stetted in.

“No, Wilson. I understand; you are right. We need a break, and this is not working out because we both need time. I’m sorry. I’m sorry that I was selfish and insensitive about what you are going through right now.”, Sighing you carried yourself to pack up, ignoring the headache pounding in. He didn’t deserve any of it. He deserved someone better than this.

“It is just that I’m not in the right headspace right now. I’m sorry.” You repeated again, walking out. You were too afraid to think how different life would have been if the snap had never happened. Simultaneously, you imagined how Nat would have cussed you back and forth for ruining your relationship.

“Hey James, do you have a spare room to crash in for few days?”, You whispered into the phone, hearing the beep sound.

Before you knew, you saw Zemo, Sam, and Bucky scrambling around, confused. You sighed, loading your gun, firing off people who were attacking them right away. Another line of fire came out of the window beside yours, halting immediately after the attackers were down.

What the hell?

“Wow, look at you all dressed down to take out the bad guys.”, you had sensed her but not this close. Maybe you were getting slow.

You looked up at the women, who had saved Steve and Sam back in the day. To be honest, you had forgotten about her and knew why she was ignorant about the whole situation, “I know why you’re all bitter. I’m sorry that we did not come back.”, you signified, raising up for hands, surrendering.

“Oh please, there is a difference. It is always easy for people like you to say ‘sorry’ not knowing what someone else had to go through.”, Sharon scoffed, pointing the gun.

You were also curious about what she was going to do further, as she pressed the gun to for back, guiding you to lead the way. The whole situation turned around when Sharon agreed to help in for the next lead.

Sam looked far by uncomfortable as he tugged his collar out for more air. He was sweltering down as he reached the condo.

“What’s wrong, Sam?”, You asked as he looked like he was going to collapse, unable to walk. He huffed, struggling to take out the phone that was buzzing in his pant pocket.

“Wait, let me take it out for you.”, You knew that something was wrong, but you did not want to use your powers to find out without his consent. You heard his breath hitch as you moved closer to him.

This was definitely weird.

“Just do it soon.”, His voice turned hoarse, gritting his teeth. He visibly shivered as you skimmed your fingers into the pocket to take out his phone. It was Sarah. You saw his eyes glistening as he grabbed his phone, walking straight into the room, shutting the door with a loud bang.

You almost heard Bucky snort, making you sharply turn around in his direction. What had happened down there, pushing Sam into a situation like this?

“Bucky, what did you do?” you marched as Sharon huffed, settling down to look at the show you all were putting up.

“I-I didn’t do anything. It was not me, okay.”, He stammered, with his eyes wide. He was practically pressing himself into the sofa.

“It was wine. The snake wine he drank.”, Zemo quipped in, shifting your attention.

“What? What on the fresh hell is a snake wine?” you were bewildered, to say in the least.

You heard, Oh-s and Aah-s, as Sharon spoke up, “Snake wine is assumed to be an aphrodisiac and is believed to make people strong.”, She said, gesturing at her biceps.

“It is a what?!”

“Hey, calm down, listen to me; I’ll arrange someone to buy sex toys with lots of food and hydration. It can go on for hours, but who knows.”, She nodded looking at you.

“Okay”

“No wonder he couldn’t run in those heels.”, Bucky muttered, looking around, shifting around.

You all discussed your next lead that was tipped off in the bar, hearing Sam throw up. This was not a good sign.

“Bucky, please hand me over the medicine kit. I’ll take care of him.”, You rushed in, locking the door.

The whole room was a mess, with everything strewn all over the place. The acrid smell of vomit filled in your lungs as you saw a tired Sam collapsed on the floor.

Oh my god.

“Sammy, hey, look at me.”, you were trying to shake him into consciousness. His eyes were rimmed red as he looked at you. Wiping him down with a warm washcloth, you could feel pain rattle his lungs, and somehow, it had only become worse.

“Come on, Sammy.”, You helped him lay down on the bed, ignoring his burning skin. You knew what you had to do; he was just at the brink of passing out and threw up almost everything you tried to make him drink.

This was not a good sign; with the mind racing with endless possibilities, you did not want to be terrified. You had seen what death was, but looking at Sam right now, did make you remember when he was dusted away during the snap. Living through all the madness, running from one place to another, it was Sam who made you feel human.

“Sam, do you trust me?”, You knew that this was not entirely consensual, but he was only a human after all.

“I—I do. I do.”, he was dazed by all the alcohol and the dehydration.

Removing the wristwatch, you concentrated on the energy from the center, carmine red flickers spasmed through your palms. Pressing them to his warm chest, you imagined him healing from inside as you felt the energy radiating off his body.

He had visibly calmed down, looking down at you. “Is this how you saved Pietro?.,” He looked at you incredulously.

“What?” you were the one staring back in shock, moving away.

Oh no.

“Don’t worry, Wanda accidentally slipped when she was talking about Ultron, but I didn’t know you it was going to be something like this.”, he huffed. The furrow of his eyebrow explained for itself. He did not push it further as he got up to clean the mess, not looking back.

“Sam, I can explain,” “No Y/N, you don’t have to. You don’t owe one.”, He said, not looking up.

“Talk to me Sam, I know that look on your face. You’re angry.”, You tried talking to him, rushing on your feet, closer to him.

“I’m angry because I’m an idiot. Just like I said, you don’t owe me an explanation. I had my doubts after the blip when things were quickly found and how everything is always rearranged like the clappers. You look more alive than ever but older at the same time, and I don’t understand a damn thing.”, he said, chucking the sheets into the laundry basket.

“I did not want to tell it to anyone because I’m already an outcast for not being normal. People look at me in fear and disgust after knowing who I am.”, You tried explaining to him. This was wrong; finding out something like this made the situation worse.

“Look, I get it; I’m really thankful that you saved my life today.”, You signaled him to be quiet as you scanned around. Flares shimmered away from you throughout the room, creating dark midnight hues, with a glint of yellow flaring over them.

He looked more confused than ever.

“Ah, it keeps happening all the time. I don’t know why the colors keep changing, but this one is always prominent.”, you explained, gesturing at the blue orb.

“How long have you been doing this?”, he asked putting on his clothes.

“It was in 2012. I acquired them when I was trying to get Loki off from smuggling the tesseract. I don’t know how but I understood that he was possessed. I tried negotiating, talking sense into him. I told him that I knew what was going on and was trying to help him out. He told me that he would kill me, so I threatened to destroy the tesseract out of stupidity. One thing led to another, and I crushed it with his scepter. The next thing that I knew, that was I was in a hospital bed out for almost a month.” You summarized.

“Wait, and no one knew about it?” Sam was surprised processing in. “No signs of any radiation, damage, or anything?”

“No, it turned out that Loki had used his powers and transferred the blow to the other side of the portal. On the other hand, I did not show any remains of radiation. I don’t know how.”, he was more concerned.

“So, you’re saying that Loki’s intentions were not to destroy New York.”, He sat down, rubbing his palms together.

“No, it was Thanos. He had caught Loki wandering off in space when he committed suicide jumping off the rainbow bridge in Asgard. He made a negotiation by torturing Loki to bring Tesseract and the Septer to him.”

“Which is around two stones, right? Then why would he send Loki, when he could do the job himself?”, he was trying to come out with a possible explanation.

“I don’t know what his true intentions were, but when we’re doing our research on stones during the time heist, we came to a conclusion that he had done the same with the power stone as well. He negotiated with Ronan to wipe out half of Xandar in exchange for the power stone. He did the same thing with Loki too. Give him an army to invade and rule the earth in exchange for the stones.”

“So, this was more like killing two birds in a stone.”, he completed your sentence looking up at you.

“It was also another reason why I never initiated any interest, even though I really liked you a lot when you let us into your home for the first time.”, you confessed, picking upon the fabric of your pants.

“What?” he was letting the new information sink in.

“Technically, it was in the closet when we were trying to set up Steve and Nat together.”, You were feeling guilty that you did not give him any time to process the information.

“Do you regret it?”, He had an unreadable expression on his face.

“I regret a lot of things, Sam. You have to be more specific.”, From what life had thrown you into different situations, one thing that you were sure about having a life with normalcy was that you liked Sam. As a person, a friend, and someone you could rely upon.

“You know what I mean.”, the hardness in his stare threw you off. It was something that was never directed at you.

“I do, Sam. I do. Call it fate or whatever you want; I had hope before the blast had happened. Retire one day and have a normal life. I was convinced that I would not use my powers because I was tired of people exploiting me.”, There were times when blood samples were taken, right before and after having meals. It mostly ended up you hearing gossip about how the blood work always turned out to be normal as guards walked down the narrow corridor, assuming you were asleep.

“From H.Y.D.R.A.to SHEILD, I do not want anyone come after me, and then I met you.”, pinching out splinters from the window, you give yourself a second to continue. “I almost convinced myself that I would always avenge and fight for the rest of my life. This is going to sound really cheesy, you know?”

“It is all kinds of normal; that is what makes us human.” He was looking at the wool rug spread across the floor, nodding at you to continue.

Well then.

“When I met you, I started liking you throughout the years after we met. For who you are, you’re your maturity, goofiness with a pinch of cockiness that comes out every now and then, but you are also respectful at the same time.”

He was looking up at you with a calm look on his face. On the other hand, you were almost shaking because it was always him before the snap who initiated everything. Initiated talks, initiated to join into conversations when Steve and Nat bickered around, initiated to go out for a date in Wakanda and the night you two had before the battle. This was new, but the burden of carrying all of these secrets alleviated your shoulders; maybe this could give you closure. Closure on how you can never change what had happened but only move on.

‘One step at a time,’ like Steve said.

“It is just- I was so scared, I guess. I was not decisive, and my feelings just grew stronger.” You sat down, with eyes swimming all over the room, landing at Sam, who was now sitting down across you. It was like he had heard your thoughts, now that you noticed him in a black turtle neck cotton shirt. This was your Sam sitting close to you, but not close enough. You wanted to be confused as to why you longed for his presence, but it was crystal clear. With realization seeping into bones, you had to accept that you deserved an ordinary life, but Sam deserved better. Better than all of this mess. What if someone had come looking out for him because of you?

“I need some time away from you, Y/N, so that I can decide when we both sort out about this because I don’t want to swing back and forth if I’m honest with you. This is about me, deciding for myself.”, dissolving the encased power that had kept you both from prying ears, Sam jumped when he heard strings of notifications pinging in.

You heard the sound of your ringtone to see Sarah calling in.

“Do you want to talk to her? I, uh—meant that she called you hours ago.”,

“Nah, just talk to her. She might be calling you for a reason.”

Next part

Taglist: @wanniiieeee

[scripttorture]

Medical Testing Part 1: a quick introduction to drug testing

I get a fair number of asks based around this classic sci fi scenario: a person is captured and held in a scientific facility for ‘testing’.

Usually I suggest authors choose between writing this as a pseudo-scientific torture scenario* or as an unethical experimentation scenario. But I haven’t actually discussed what ethical testing practices look like or how they differ from unethical ones. In fact I haven’t really spoken about what medical testing looks like at all. So I thought I’d put together a quick introduction to medical testing and the ethics surrounding it.

I ended up splitting this in two, because it’s a complex topic and the original post ended up rather long.

It’s probably helpful to start with the basics: the scientific method.

We tend to use the word ‘science’ to talk about technological advancements or discoveries but what the word really means to scientists is this: we learn more about the way things work by testing our ideas.

Science is effectively a demand for proof. If you think a particular treatment or medicine would help someone a logical argument isn’t enough. You need to back up the claim.

Backing up that claim now is tougher then it was historically because our understanding of how we interact with our work and how patients respond to doctors has improved.

Experiments and medical trials now acknowledge the fact that scientists and doctors are flawed individuals: we’re biased because we want treatments to succeed. Which means even if we don’t think we’re manipulating data we tend to emphasise the positives in our results.

One of the ways we try to avoid this is by involving more people, so that the people analysing the data didn’t generate it. Another is with double blind trials, which means that no one involved in a medical study knows which patient is tacking the medicine being tested.

Most (but not all) medical trials also use placebos, which in this context means something that looks like the real medicine but doesn’t contain anything which will have a medicinal effect. So if the medicine being tested was in an inhaler the placebo group would have identical inhalers, which contain no medicine.

Some medical tests will use a licensed drug (ie one that’s already passed testing and been shown to work) instead of a placebo. So you’re comparing a new potential medicine against an established medicine.

I’ve mentioned it before but for those of you who don’t know I work in the pharmaceutical industry. My day job is testing inhalers. The part of it I focus on is whether or not a medicine can actually be inhaled by a patient and where in the lungs it would end up.

There are quite a few practical reasons for using a particular delivery method (ie taking a medicine in a specific way such as a pill, an IV or an inhaler). If you’re sending the medicine directly to the part of the body it effects you can (usually) reduce the dose and this reduces the side effects.

Some ways of taking medicines are also easier to use then others: any one can use an inhaler, it’s a lot more difficult to inject yourself or someone else.

A lot of the things I’m going to describe here are UK based: I’ve worked in drug testing for a while but only in the UK, laws and standard procedures vary by country.

I’m also not going to talk about animal testing. I realise a lot of people have strong feelings about it and that’s not an argument I want to get involved in. The most I’m going to do is describe when animal testing would typically take place and how long it would last for. The focus here is on in vitro (‘in glass’, chemical testing) and human trials.

Developing a drug to the point where it’s used by patients can take around 15-20 years. Here’s what it looks like.

Drug Discovery and Preclinical testing

How do scientists find new medicines? Well- most of the time we guess.

Some scientists build up a database of diverse compounds. Often they'll be taken from bacteria, fungi or plants and purified.

Some scientists will work from existing drugs or compounds that almost passed the testing stage. They'll make a selection of modifications and build up a database of related compounds that way.

Sometimes if we have a 'target' for a particular disease, usually an enzyme or protein we need the drug to interact with, drugs can be designed to increase the chance of interaction.

But whatever the initial approach the majority of drug testing today relies getting a lot of chemical compounds, throwing them at a disease causing agent and seeing what kills it. Potential drugs are mixed with cancerous human cells, normal human cells, bacteria cultures, fungal cultures, parasites etc and the list of what kills a disease (or diseased cell), without killing normal tissue is where we get potential drugs.

Leads that are considered promising usually go on to animal testing of some description. This overall process of identifying a potential drug can take anything from 5-10 years and most promising leads won't end up as useful drugs.

Clinical testing

This is when things get serious and expensive.

Typically testing begins with a small group of healthy volunteers. About 100 people will be given the drug to see- well if it poisons them or causes serious side effects that would stop it being useful as a treatment. This is often called a Phase 1 trial.

Depending on the kind of drug ‘serious’ side effects can be a pretty broad term. A friend of mine takes medication which can, potentially, make someone’s skin die and start to fall off in big chunks. But because this happens rarely, because his illness is serious and because there are very few other treatment options- this is considered an acceptable risk.

On a similar note modern cancer treatments include mustard gas. Because it works and it’s better then dying.

Phase 1 can take 1-2 years.

The next stage of testing is generally when patients start getting the drug. They typically involve a few hundred people. This is called Phase 2.

Part of the initial testing with patients is about finding out how helpful the drug is in practice. It’s giving it to a small group of people, in small doses, and monitoring them for improvements and side effects. This will be done several times in different groups to control for as many factors as possible.

Imagine a medicine designed to treat a particular kind of infection (bacterial, yeast, fungal etc). Lots of different people might be prone to the infection especially if the infection occurs with other diseases or conditions. So one test group might be patients who only have the infection and the second test group might be patients who have the infection and are taking immune-suppressant drugs (for example organ transplant patients). Another group might be patients who have the infection and use particular kinds of medical equipment, like respirators.

This is the stage of testing where placebos come in.

It’s well known that giving people something that looks like a treatment can result in a clinical improvement. Modern medical testing requires doctors and scientists to show that a drug or treatment is better then faking it.

And the way we typically test this is with double blind trials. Patients are randomly assigned to a group that’s given the drug and a group that’s given- something that looks like the drug.

Which can be more complicated then you’d think. I say as someone who has never been involved in a discussion about how on earth we could make a placebo that thick and yellow.

The ‘double blind’ part means that both the patients and the people conducting the study don’t know who is taking the placebo and who is taking the drug.

This means any significant improvement (or the opposite) that takes place across an entire group is definitely due to what the patients were taking.

Phase 2 can take 2-3 years.

The final stage of clinical testing involves a lot more people, sometimes several thousand. This is when researchers look at effects across a larger population, ways patients might misuse drugs (ie not store them or take them properly) and whether the drug is actually better then drugs we already have. It’s generally called Phase 3.

Phase 3 is usually the final hurdle before a drug can be used. If a medicine passes Phase 3 all the remaining hurdles are to do with legal reviews and approval.

Testing lasts a lot longer and it can also include what happens when patients stop taking the drug.

This stage is the cumulation of all previous testing. It’s about showing that the medicine helps most patients, doesn’t have severe side effects, is consistently better then other treatments (or has advantages other treatments don’t). It’s about collecting as much data on the medicine, from as wide a group of patients as possible.

And then analysing all of that data to (hopefully) show a statistically significant improvement for the vast majority of patients.

It can take anything from 3-5 years.

Additional Testing

Everything I’ve described will be repeated at different dose levels, with different formulas and sometimes different methods of delivery.

Even if the drug passes testing doesn’t stop. Shelf life is tested in different conditions. Rapid temperature changes are used to mimic being transported by air. The crystal structure of the drug is examined. So is the way it interacts with other materials, such as the bulking agents in most pills.

And this testing is important. Subtle changes, such as in the crystal structure of a drug, can have a big effect on how useful the medicine actually is.

Ritonavir was found to change crystal structure when it was stored. Which changed how easily it dissolved and how easily it was absorbed into patient’s bodies. This made the difference between an effective treatment and a dose so low it had no real impact.

Some studies will also monitor patients for years after Phase 3 to check that more long term use of the medicine over years doesn’t cause problems.

Compassionate Use

Compassionate use trials are when doctors make an ethical argument for using a drug before testing has finished.

What that tends to mean is that a patient is in a terminal condition and every other available treatment has failed. But there’s something part-way through testing that might help.

These trials aren’t scientific, we actually consider them anecdotal evidence. They don’t involve enough patients to be statistically valid and there’s no placebo or control group.

And most of the time they don’t work any better then the other treatments doctors have tried. But sometimes they do.

Compassionate use is the argument that sometimes, rarely, the ethical thing to do is break the rules so that patients can have every possible chance to live.

What does all this mean?

Possibly an obvious point but medical testing, done right, is hard. It takes a lot of time and effort and money.

We had a presentation on a compassionate use study for one of the drugs my company tested a few days ago. About a hundred people who’d been involved in the testing or supporting it turned up.

There will have been at least another dozen in the hospital running the study. Another dozen people were involved in the original discovery of the compound.

The drug is working incredibly well and it’s being fast tracked. It’s probably only going to have been 10-12 years work in total.

Science takes time, but it also takes team work.

And that’s an important thing to consider if you want to write something that actually looks scientific: the effort involved. The people, the specialist set up of the building, the equipment, the records and the time.

Fiction has a tendency to present scientific advances as the work of lone geniuses. In reality it’s usually dozens of small groups of people, each with different specialist areas, getting together to try and do something incredible. We move forward, not in bounds but in inches.

And we do it by carefully recording, controlling and analysing everything, from the quality of light to the temperature of the room**.

So if you want your villain to be a scientist, think about everything that implies. Not just their intelligence but their attention to detail, their record keeping and above all their ability to work with others.

Available on Wordpress.

Disclaimer

*For previous discussions of my problems with portraying torture as high tech see here.

**Both of these factors have had measurable effects on compounds I’ve worked with.

[musingsofanewbienurse]

Transitioning to Veganism

In January 2019 I decided to take part in veganuary with the intention of being fully vegan afterward (bar what was already in my cupboard and needed eating up). It wasn’t a sudden decision, in fact, it had been a gradual choice that I had been considering for months at this point. I had been vegetarian since July 2017 and had been gradually decreasing my intake of animal products so that by the end of 2018 my diet was 80-90% plant based already. I had been avoiding dairy for the most part anyway as it causes my skin to break out badly and cheese was an expensive luxury on a furgal university budget. The only thing that really let me down in that aspect was when I ate out or by not checking labels.

Like most people I had watched the world-famous Netflix document ‘What the Health’ in the spring of 2017 and that was probably one of the first major catalyst that lead to me analysing and changing my diet. I had grown up on a small, rural island off the mainland of England, one of its main agricultures being farming. Every-day I would see cows and sheep grazing in fields both outside my bedroom window and on the way to school, I saw these animals had a good quality of life (in a way that they do not always in larger areas of Britain and the US), and like many people, never really questioned the connection between that and my dinner plate.

I was also notoriously fussy, and although I liked most varieties of meat, the same could not be said of vegetables. In fact I hated every single one until I was 16 and then I could just about stomach carrots. A healthy diet I did not have, despite how much my parents tried to push otherwise. Going vegetarian was simply not a viable option for me back then; but on joining university I started to cook for myself and my taste matured, leading me to today, where I now love 99% of veg (broccoli is legitimately my favourite food) and it makes up the bulk of my diet.

It meant, that when I watched the documentary I was able to genuinely consider becoming vegetarian, and started to slowly phase meat out of my diet. Even then, I knew that ultimately I did want to become vegan, after seeing the impact the meat and dairy industry has on our health*, the environment and on the animals who are subjected to it. But I wanted to do it the right way and for the long-term. If I cut out everything at once I knew after a week or two I would revert back to my usual diet, my body craving things that had always been present. I also wanted to be educated about things I substituted meat for; I go to the gym regularly and I wanted to know that what I was eating would have a good variety of nutrients. And most importantly, I didn’t want my mental health to suffer.

Like most young women growing up in this century I have had issues with food and my body. Although I have never received any formal help or diagnosis I definitely had an unhealthy relationship with food, especially in my mid-teens, though even now some days are harder than others. For the most part I am a lot better, but I was wary that if I suddenly cut out a lot of different foods and placed a lot of restrictive rules on my diet that I would be taking a huge step backwards, that I would go back to obsessing over every little thing that I eat. I didn’t want to sacrifice my health and knew that if I was to do this safely, then gradually converting my diet was the only answer.

And that is what I did. First it was dairy milk, an easy swap as there are so many alternatives on the market. I mainly go for soya at home because it’s the cheapest and I really don’t need anything fancy in my bowl of porridge, but oat is by far my favourite and go-to when I’ve gone out for a coffee.

Eggs was one of the biggest changes. In my second year of uni I had eggs for breakfast nearly everyday that I wasn’t on placement, and I genuinely didn’t see myself as able to give them up. But in third year I found a love of porridge and overnight oats, or tofu scramble if I fancied something closer to what I usually had eaten. And eventually I was only having eggs when eating out, there is nothing nicer than an eggs benedict (and if anyone can link me to a good vegan recipe for it, I will love them forever).

Like I previously mentioned, cheese wasn’t a large part of my diet, because as a university student it just wasn’t worth budgeting for. I’ve never had a problem with any of the vegan alternatives I’ve tried, though this may be because I ate cheese so rarely that I couldn’t really directly compare the two.

Chocolate, the crux for many people, was a big one. “But how do you live without chocolate?” I’m normally asked by my horrified coworkers, and the answer is that I don’t. In fact, I probably have it in some form everyday, it just took a bit of getting used to looking for the vegan friendly alternatives in tescos. But there are plenty, and even some of the major brands are accidently vegan (looking at you bourbons).

Eventually it just left occasions where I was eating out (laziness would sometimes lead to me choosing the vegetarian option, and other times it was simply because that was what I wanted to eat), and items where I had not checked the label for hidden ingredients. Milk powder is in bloody everything, and if it’s not that, it’s normally eggs. Quorn in particular is well-known for this, though their vegan range is steadily growing.

By December 2018 I felt ready to take on Veganuary. I no longer felt like my diet, or lifestyle would be negatively impacted by it and I saw it as a great chance to draw a line under the sand. When speaking to my dad on the phone two weeks in he asked if I was struggling yet. And honestly? I hadn’t even noticed, as there had been so few occasions where I would have chosen the non-vegan option anyway. To me it just made sense that after January I continued to eat plant based, and now, at the end of February I haven’t regretted it once. I am a giant advocator of eating a vegan diet. I feel so much healthier than when I ate meat, am more active than ever and can’t remember the last time I fell ill. I do understand it’s not possible for everyone, people who have had or have eating disorders may definitely struggle, and placing a load of rules on what they can and can’t eat wouldn’t be beneficial to their mental health in the slightest (just as it wouldn’t have been for me once upon a time).

I also understand that if you’re not educated about nutrition and the aspects of a healthy diet, then becoming vegetarian/vegan doesn’t automatically mean you’ll be any healthier, especially with the wide range of plant based foods and meals now out in supermarkets (I’m not berating any of these releases in the slightest, it’s amazing to see so many options and makes it a lot more accessible than it once was, it just means navigating for a healthy option isn’t always the easiest thing). Being vegan is still a privilege, I only have to support myself on my wage and it leaves plenty of room to opt for the more expensive meat alternatives and keep my diet balanced. A single parent with two kids however doesn’t have this option, and places like Lidl and Aldi are brilliant for selling a large quantity of meat for a relatively low price.  

But reducing your meat and animal product intake is good for the planet, and I do think that every little thing, whether that be partaking in Meatless Monday or swapping dairy milk for soya helps. No-one has to be perfect or commit to the most severe of changes, especially if they feel it is what they should do because Instagram told them to, but making a substitution here and there helps massively.

*I am not saying that meat and dairy cannot make up a healthy diet, though like anything in large quantities it isn’t beneficial. There is also plenty of evidence against cows milk and how we digest it. In early 2019 the Eat-Lancet commission (linked below) was published, outlining global targets for the world population to achieve a healthy, nutritionally balanced diet whilst keeping food production sustainable. The diet consists mainly of fruit, vegetables, grains and legumes, with a small amount of meat and fish. It is fairly similar to the Mediterranean diet, and emphasises that you don’t need to cut all animal products out, but reducing them would be highly beneficial on a number of levels!

Walter, W., Rockstrom, J., Loken, B. et al (2019) Food in the Anthropocene: the EAT-Lancet Commission on Healthy Diets from Sustainable Food Products. The Lancet. [online] Available at: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(18)31788-4/fulltext#seccestitle10

[tim-cahyanto-bct]

Assessment #2 | Reflective Journaling

As per usual, I left this assignment up until the final dying days that we had available. Now in all fairness, this was due mostly to the fact that I did not even know about the existence of the assignment until today (Saturday 27th). However while I was racking my brain trying to think of something to write about, this very experience about being lost and confused had inspired me to write about our latest CT assignment - data objects. You may have read that last sentence and assumed the worst for the data objects assignment, however all is not lost as we somehow managed to claw our way into some form of success throughout these holidays. However, what I do want to write about was our experiences before then, where my faith and motivation for the data objects assignment was as fleeting as days left to do this reflective journaling. Experience So to begin with, our group was primarily made up of people who had no real group that related to their initial ideas. We had people with ideas to do with gaming, skateboarding, space etc. All in all, it was a real mixed bag of different people with different ideas. Our biggest issue off the bat was deciding upon and maintaining a data set. Believe it or not, it took until the very last week before the holidays for us to finally have a definitive data set which we were all working off, and even then we eventually changed it over the holidays anyway. A big reason for this hesitation and lack of progression, I think, comes down to the lack of any real motivation from the majority of our group. 

I'll be the first to admit that this assignment wasn't something that I was really excited by, especially compared to "cards for play" which I actually enjoyed quite a bit. Upon first hearing about this brief I actually thought it would be something I would be really into. Having done sculpture in high school, I thought this would be quite similar to the projects that I did for that. However, I was somewhat disappointed that we were restrained by the limitations of hard data and the one-directional emphasis on altering physical objects, which eliminated most of my ideas that I was excited to try. Much of our group looked like as if they felt the same- lost and unmotivated. 

It wasn't really until the last couple days where I think we realised how little time we had, and how we needed to actually make some form of progress. We all finally decided to choose and focus on a definitive data set we would all work on, and we came up with an object that we all liked the idea of. We wanted to make coasters and if we had time, cups to map deforestation data. I personally loved the idea, it would be both visual and interactive and I thought that it would be quite impactful. Even though we eventually changed ideas and data sets yet again, it was this point where we really progressed as a group. We finally had a direction to work towards together, and I think that was our pivotal turning point. We ended up using the holidays to knock out the rest of our project out. All of us, I think, happy with what we managed to achieve especially given how rocky our start was. 

Observation

Our biggest problem of the lack of motivation was, in my opinion, because most of the group wanted to do their own thing. I know for me that our original data set of renewable energy was not at all interesting to me, however it was something that the majority of the group kind of just went with. As stated by Amabile, T. M. (1998), "people will be most creative when they feel motivated primarily by the interest, satisfaction, and challenge of the work itself-and not by external pressures" It was just bound to happen that we couldn't come up with anything, intrinsically, most of us were not motivated. Even the looming external motivation of our potentially horrible grades did not seem to phase us. Since we all originally had our own wildly different ideas in the beginning, I think it was hard for us to just completely ditch our old ideas and adapt to a new one which we didn't really care for. While other groups were already deep into prototyping and testing, we seemed to still be stuck up on what data we should even focus on. Alternating between objects with each conversation and data sets with each class, our ideas never seeming to stick. 

A big reason that this happened in the first place, I believe, was because of a lack of leadership and effective communication. I say effective communication as opposed to just communication as we did communicate- quite a lot actually. However, with those ideas that we all came up with together, we never progressed it further. This for me highlights the completely nonexistent leadership shown by anyone in our group; me included. We had the ideas, but never did anything with them. 

This unfortunate experience has allowed me to learn and realise how volatile team projects can be. For the most part, all our group needed to progress much sooner was someone to just gather everybody’s attentions and allow everyone to come to a mutual agreement about what we want to do, and how we should do it. That one simple action could have saved many wasted days. 

Analysis

Ultimately, I think our problems arose from the absence of leadership. 

After having participated in Outdoor Education which heavily emphasises the importance of strong leadership, especially in the often life endangering scenarios we would often find ourselves in, it quickly became quite obvious how our team had absolutely no direction during those first few weeks of the project. “The study concluded that leadership plays a positive role in the transformation success. This conclusion was supported by correlation results which revealed that there is a positive correlation between leadership and transformation success.”  Kendi, B., & Kamaria, K. (2017). This study shows the direct and positive correlation between leadership and success. And on the contrary, how a lack of leadership can also be a contributor to a team’s failures. Additionally, the study conducted by Müller, R., Geraldi, J., & Turner, J. R. (2012) "found an impact of EQ [emotional intelligence] and MQ [managerial intelligence] on project success, but not so from IQ [intellectual intelligence]" From both these studies, we can conclude how effective leadership has a positive correlation to project success; however the latter study also shows how the most important traits are primarily emotional and managerial intelligence. For me, I interpret this study as showing us that effective leadership does not always have to do with outright intellect, but it's more about being able to practically assess the given situation to give the team some direction and focus. This was something I think anyone in our group could have easily done.

Additionally, Jung, D. I. (2001) writes how his study's "Results indicated that transformational leadership promoted higher levels of creativity measured by divergent thinking among group members" In this study, Jung compares transactional leadership to transformative leadership. Basically transformational leadership aims to intrinsically motivate followers to work towards a common goal while transactional leadership focuses on extrinsic motivation using things such as diminishing rewards or punishments. The study highlights the importance of intrinsic motivation over extrinsic motivation when it comes to, in this case, creativity; something a good leader should be able to help facilitate to achieve greater creativity and ultimately greater success. Although it is not solely up to the leader all the time, intrinsic motivation is something that fundamentally only us as individuals can achieve.

This experience with our latest Creative Technologies Studio project has highlighted to me the importance of effective leadership and communication. In the future, I think my aim in these group projects would be to focus more on the group itself rather than solely on the content of the projects. Having someone to steer the group in the correct way in a practical sense would have heavily benefited my latest group, and I have no doubt that it will continue to be necessary for future group projects too. 

References Amabile, T. M. (1998). How to kill creativity (Vol. 87). Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Publishing.

Kendi, B., & Kamaria, K. (2017). AN INVESTIGATION OF THE ROLE OF LEADERSHIP IN THE TRANSFORMATION PROCESS OF MICROFINANCE ORGANIZATIONS IN KENYA INTO DEPOSIT TAKING INSTITUTIONS. International Journal of Business Strategies, 1(2), 22-42. Müller, R., Geraldi, J., & Turner, J. R. (2012). Relationships between leadership and success in different types of project complexities. IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, 59(1), 77-90. Jung, D. I. (2001). Transformational and transactional leadership and their effects on creativity in groups. Creativity Research Journal, 13(2), 185-195.

[yasuda-yoshiya]

EP2 reread notes, Part 1

It’s been a long time, but my Umineko reread has been slowly progressing! Here is a long-overdue update.

My readthrough of Episode 2 has actually been complete for months. This episode is both particularly important to me and covers a lot of particularly sensitive material, and as such I was hesitant to just post my rough notes in mostly unedited form as I did with the first episode; I really wanted to make sure I could properly express a lot of things about this episode in particular, and to that end I’ve been fleshing out my notes into a more substantial commentary this time.

As such, it seems appropriate to split this one into multiple posts. I’d like to hope I can get the others out fairly soon, now that a lot of the draft has been fleshed out! But for now, here’s the first part of this episode, focusing on Shannon’s half of the flashback arc.

Prologue

* The way George's narration in the intro is worded really does emphasise just how much he values his relationship with Shannon primarily as feeding into his own self-worth, making him feel like he can play the part of the "guy teasing the girl he likes" when that's always been something that he's only been able to look at enviously from the outside before. It practically comes across like he's using her to act out his own pre-existing personal script for his "dream romance" a lot of the time. It always bothers me that Ryukishi captures these disturbing nuances so well, but doesn't really seem interested in following through on critically exploring them with George the way he does with his other characters...

* Well, I suppose you could say that Yasu values George for basically the same reason, that he makes her feel like "someone who can know love" when she sees that as an unattainable dream for herself. It's sort of interesting to me in theory to think of the George/Shannon relationship through the (very cynical) lens that it basically amounts to two people both using the other as a piece to achieve happiness for themselves, but it's hard for me to really see that as an equal thing when the whole dynamic is so transparently skewed towards George happily getting to achieve his dreams and play out all his personal fantasies with no worries while Yasu is quietly making all kinds of agonising internal compromises with herself in the background.

* The metaphor that Shannon uses about the huge tank at the aquarium "being no different from an infinite sea to the fish swimming inside" always really gets to me. I think the whole concept of being able to define your own reality and the idea that "if I just believe I'm happy, then I am happy" is one that feels very personally familiar and important to me, so Yasu's particular idea of "magic" and the way Umineko is built around exploring that is a big part of what makes it resonate so much with me. I always have mixed feelings about what Shannon expresses here; I think there's a lot of genuine truth and power in the sentiment (a lot of the value of life really does come down to what you perceive it to be), but at the same time I sort of feel like if you've reached the point of consciously telling yourself "my world is complete to me as long as I don't know what I'm missing" as a coping strategy, then by necessity that means you've already kind of gone past the point of being able to wholeheartedly believe in that illusion. In a way, that's what Beatrice ultimately breaking Shannon down represents. But at the same time, I still sort of find myself wanting to say that consciously struggling to "build a self-contained world for yourself" in that way can still lead to a valid and genuine sense of fulfilment, even so - and in a broad sense I think being able to find peace and satisfaction in something that you know to be imperfect is a skill that everyone has to learn to an extent.

* This idea also pretty much sets the stage for one of the main themes of the episode as a whole. The fish tank metaphor represents Shannon's attitude to her relationship with George that amounts to "This love can obviously never really happen, but I can create an illusion of love that will be real to us", and trying to convince herself that that's fine; much of the conflict between Shannon, Kanon and Beatrice that follows in the rest of the episode is centred around Yasu fighting with herself over whether she really can feel content with that much or not. In contrast, George's immediate thought in response is basically "However big it might be, it still just looks like a tank to me", which...well, it's no surprise that Yasu is so afraid of what might happen if he finds out that his relationship with her isn't really his dream come true, but an attempt to create an indistinguishable illusion of that dream being possible. It's vital for him to remain ignorant of the fact that their "tank" isn't actually an infinite sea.

* God, George is awful. That's all I've got to say about the rest of this sequence. I'm tired of talking about George.

* The whole scene at the shrine is really powerfully written, and possibly the first part of the series where we really hear the unfiltered voice of "Yasu" speaking. The symbol of the shrine mirror as a metaphor for Shannon's unchanging fate and the obstacle to Beatrice's resurrection takes on all kinds of new dimensions given everything that mirrors mean to Yasu; the thing that Yasu needs to destroy in order to become "human" in her eyes is "her self", her own reflection in the mirror. The physical reality of her own body prevents her from being the person she wants to be - a sentiment that goes way back to Yasu's feeling as a child that the reality of her own pitiful face reflected in the mirror was a threat to her image of herself as the great witch Beatrice. The way Yasu translates these pre-established parts of her personal mythology into a new context to convey how she feels about her present situation always feels very authentic to me.

“Furniture”

* And now we flash back to the origins of Shannon's feelings for George. I do find it a little easier this time to understand why George noticing and unobtrusively helping to smooth things over for Shannon when she made mistakes was so touching to her; she's so used to being unnoticed and taken for granted as a servant that it would mean a lot when George showed consideration for her as a person. And I do appreciate that his "humble-bragging" moment afterwards is framed as totally transparent and that he's willing to laugh at himself when Jessica mocks him for it too; I can see why a little flaw like that could seem endearing and humanising to Shannon from her perspective at the time, in the sense that it makes him feel approachably human and not just "admirable".

* Well, like I think yumeta said on Goats, Shannon and George's dynamic actually seems okay when they're allowed to mutually acknowledge and laugh about each other's "childish points" together, but it's when George gets in the creepily patronising role of talking about "rules" and "orders" and gleefully enjoying one-sidedly making her uncomfortable that it gets really gross to me... Unfortunately, George is really specifically invested in feeling like he's "becoming an adult" and "overcoming his childish phase" through this relationship, so it feels like he ends up actively working to stay securely in control of their dynamic as much as he can to prove that he's "a real man" or whatever. Being honest about his immature aspects and letting Shannon poke at his "cute points" too much probably hits too close to his insecurities for him to be willing to keep it up for all that long - which is a shame because I think that's probably the kind of relationship Yasu feels most comfortable with, as you can see from BeaBato.

* The way the narrative transitions between these two scenes gives a lot of insight into how things like this must have influenced Yasu's current view of herself. The memory of Eva's whole "you're not worthy of George, know your place you servant" rant in the past becomes a reminder to Yasu in the present, something she uses to reinforce to herself that she was foolish to think she could be anything more than furniture; this scene really makes it easy to see how Yasu finding out the truth about her body would have just fed even deeper into reinforcing these kinds of messages about her "inferior, unworthy, subhuman" position that she'd already been receiving her whole life because of her social status. Those two parallel aspects of her seeing herself as "furniture" definitely feed into each other a lot, and the subsequent scene with Natsuhi abusing her just goes on to further hammer this home; the idea that Yasu is less than human is something that her environment has drilled into her for a very long time, even without taking into account the issue of her body.

* At the same time, though, I think it's important to note the implication that Yasu evidently refused to meekly accept Eva's words at the time and did keep pursuing her relationship with George regardless. It's clear that Yasu's lifelong mistreatment as a servant alone *wasn't* enough to totally crush Yasu's sense of self-worth; continuing to pursue a relationship with someone so "far above her station" shows that despite everything around her reinforcing her inferior position, Yasu was still able to believe strongly enough in her own right to happiness that she was able to actively reject that deeply ingrained impulse to resign herself to her current misery on the grounds that she should just be grateful for what she had. A big part of the tragedy here is that it feels like Yasu having her status as subhuman and unworthy of love physically "confirmed" to her when she solved the epitaph really pushed her straight back into those terrible thought patterns, just as she was starting to cast them off.

* But even after enduring all of that, Yasu still can't bring herself to totally give up and accept that she can do nothing but resign herself to a fate of being furniture - instead she ends up fighting with all she has to overcome that subhuman status in a different way, as portrayed through Shannon's use of "Beatrice's magic" here. Much as it might be easy at first glance to dismiss Yasu's concept of herself as furniture as passive and self-defeating, I think it's important to note that her narrative is specifically centred around her desperately fighting AGAINST that perception of herself and trying to overcome it in whatever way she can, even with everything around her constantly trying to push her back down into the resignation and stagnation that "Shannon" represents. I feel like it's really missing the point to frame Yasu's pessimism about herself as primarily a problem of her own innate personality, rather than a problem of her initially strong hopes for herself being slowly crushed and eroded as an inevitable consequence of her brutal circumstances and the awful environment she's had to adapt to.

* The particular way that Beatrice tempts Shannon into breaking the shrine mirror - in other words, into going through with testing the explosives - is very illuminating in terms of what pushed Yasu over the edge. If love is the all-important "single element" and the only thing that can make a person's life worthwhile, then continuing to live in her "body incapable of love" would be dooming Yasu to a hollow and meaningless life, as far as she's concerned. On the other hand, if Shannon continues to "deceive" George by hiding the truth about her body, using "magic" to make that illusion real, then she can live as if she was a real human for a time - but the further she goes with that, the further she goes past the point of no return and commits herself to having to create the catbox in the end to preserve that love, because it can't last indefinitely. But as Beatrice puts forth, isn't that still better than living a hollow life forever?

* And of course the wonderful Kanon-kun comes to the rescue, driving Beatrice off and telling her to stop trying to lead Shannon astray. But Beatrice isn't concerned, because she knows her words have left their mark - as evidenced by the butterfly marks on Shannon and Kanon's hands. Even the framing of the narrative itself is designed to reinforce that sense of inevitability; at this point we've already witnessed the scene where Shannon breaks the mirror, so we "know" - as Yasu "knows" - that Shannon isn't going to be able to resist in the long run. Yasu just isn't able to resign herself to being unhappy forever; she'll take her chance at happiness even knowing it's likely to lead to ruin.

* And honestly, even though Yasu frames that as Shannon giving into an evil temptation, is it really so evil to want some level of happiness? What Shannon wants is only what any "normal" person would automatically be entitled to. I think Yasu's "Beatrice" in this episode generally becomes a lot more sympathetic when you understand that her anger at Shannon basically comes down to her refusing to accept her assertion that her miserable situation is fine as it is, and that she doesn't need or deserve anything more - because, frankly, Shannon *is* wrong about that. That genuinely is a messed up attitude. But of course, the other side of that is that, in the course of arguing that Shannon isn't fine as she is, she's also putting forth that her current state is truly miserable and pathetic and unfixable without resorting to drastic measures - and there's obviously a ton of unealthy self-loathing in that too, in a different way.

Wonderful Utopia

* Aaand then we flash forward into the future to show that George and Shannon's relationship is going smoothly, and Jessica and Shannon are talking together happily about it. This is a little dark when you consider the implication in light of the preceding scene (because Shannon gave in and accepted Beatrice's "magic", everything is going fine).

* This is really yet another thing that shows a huge amount of courage from Yasu when you think about it; Yasu was totally aware that going on an overnight trip with George could easily lead to her body being exposed, but she still went along with it. She was willing to risk "breaking the magic", even though that should have been unthinkable if she totally believed Beatrice was right about her relationship with George. Like Ryukishi said in the Answer interview, it must have been a very complicated feeling for Yasu when she found out that George booked separate rooms for them after all; of course she'd be glad not to be exposed in the short term, but in a way, it might have been a relief for her to have been "forced" into confessing the truth and taking the reaction as it came, to have the choice taken away from her. This is pretty much the same mindset on which Yasu ends up building the whole mystery roulette - deep down, she wants someone to stop her and "make her confess", so she gives the survivors all kinds of openings to "expose her", but she still needs someone to corner her into revealing everything. The fear of the consequences makes it impossible for her to step up and do it of her own accord. Even so, taking that kind of gamble with George here at all must have taken a lot of bravery...

* In contrast with Beatrice's mockery and derision of Shannon in the previous scene, now that Shannon has "accepted her" Beatrice is very friendly to her. The whole arc here, with Beatrice acting at first like she's truly happy for Shannon and George and has their best interests at heart and Shannon coming to see her as a friend, but then eventually revealing her true nature as an evil sadistic witch who was deliberately tormenting Shannon by making her know a happiness that she couldn't ever really be allowed to have...it totally works as its own story on the surface level, so nothing seems "off" about it on first read, but it really does hurt so much when you understand that it's Yasu reflecting back on her decision to keep pursuing love despite knowing she's "furniture", and how she tried to pretend to herself that that was a pure and noble thing when it really ended up being just a cruel way to increase her pain and deceive both George and herself with the false promise of a relationship that could never be fulfilled.

* The way Beatrice is so persistent, even while still maintaining her friendly facade, in reminding Shannon not to "get too full of herself" and forget that her love is only possible because of Beatrice's magic - in other words, not to delude herself into thinking that George and Shannon's love might actually go deep enough to survive the revelation about her body - is extremely upsetting. I don't actually think she's wrong about this (that George is really in love with an "illusion" of Shannon rather than Yasu herself), though to me that's more a testament to George being a jerk than to Yasu being fundamentally unlovable - but I think the genuine truth in what she's saying makes it a lot harder for Yasu to shrug it off.

* This part makes it clear that Shannon's attitude has changed quite a bit since we saw her hopelessly lamenting earlier. She concedes to Beatrice that her relationship with George could only have started because of her magic - but she wants to believe that, now that their relationship has progressed this far, she doesn't need that magic any more. She wants to believe that their love has become strong enough that it can survive George finding out the truth. And that “should” be the case, right? If everything George says about the strength of their love is true, it should be able to overcome that kind of barrier easily. That's why Shannon was willing to take that risk of going on an overnight trip with George. Beatrice sort of indulgently agrees for now, but she also insists that Shannon keeps the brooch around just in case she does want to use it again; as much as Yasu would like to totally believe that George would accept her, she can't abandon the catbox as a fall-back option.

* It really hurts to read this because Yasu obviously really, really wanted to believe in what Shannon is saying - it's really easy, and heartbreaking, for me to imagine Yasu originally choosing to keep going with George knowing that she was only constructing an "illusion" and that the magic would have to end some day, but then as things went on, to start to let herself believe that, you know what, maybe love could conquer everything! Maybe there's hope for her to live as a human after all! But it also makes perfect sense to me that Shannon ultimately "loses" to Beatrice on this, because the reality of the signals George was giving her (laughing off and dismissing any tentative attempts Shannon made to bring up her issues or to question his perception of their relationship and the picture he was painting of their future) make it very, very hard to believe he would really react well to hearing the truth.

*Another aspect of this is that...well, from Yasu’s perspective, the longer she goes without revealing the truth to George, the more chance there is for George to become strongly  invested in her as a person and to develop the kinds of resilient feelings that could theoretically withstand the revelation about her body - but also, the more devastating the potential fallout becomes when George finds out about her “keeping this secret for so long” and “letting things proceed this far without telling him”. I’m hesitant to talk too firmly about this, but I think that kind of uncomfortable balancing act in terms of considering "when to tell your partner” is probably something a lot of people in similar situations to Yasu can relate to, and it’s remarkable to me that Ryukishi is able to capture the stress of that kind of situation so well.

* The way Shannon reflects on Beatrice's underlying loneliness and how she becomes a lot more approachable when you get to know her is really sweet and endearing! The way Yasu writes Beatrice's character here in her "friendship" with Shannon is very consistent with the image of Beatrice we get from Maria's (and even Natsuhi's) scenes with her later - of someone who seems like an intimidating, all-powerful witch on the surface, but actually has a lot of endearingly cute and childish traits once you get to know her, getting all excited over the sweets Shannon brings her from Okinawa. It really comes across here, just as it does with Maria, that she's really desperate for company and genuinely overjoyed to have someone to talk to since she's been trapped on the island for so long - she may be "all-powerful" in magical terms, but the loneliness of living in an environment where no one else can recognise or acknowledge that power, and the unexpected joy of having someone who can actually see it and be grateful for her use of it, is also evident.

* I really like how those things that Beatrice's character expresses about Yasu still translate so strongly when she's being written into a completely fictional, metaphorical scenario - the person who Beatrice is enjoying being able to help with her magic and receiving gratitude from here is...well, uh, herself, in pure physical terms, but the reaction that Beatrice would theoretically have to Shannon as a separate person in this fictional narrative also expresses important things about her character. Aah, I just really love the unique way Yasu is characterised through these constructs, it's so clever and multilayered and I could gush about it endlessly, ahaha.

* And once again, Kanon comes along to break up this chat and scold Shannon for listening to the witch. God, Kanon and Beatrice's mutual antagonism in this episode is really intense. I'll talk about it a lot more when we get to the more Kanon-centric parts of this episode, but they really do hate each other a lot, and the things that mutual hatred expresses about Yasu's self-loathing always hit me particularly hard.

* It's amazing how easy it is in hindsight to read this scene as Yasu wrestling with herself; it all flows very naturally once you understand what they're really talking about. Yasu really wants to believe she can overcome her being "furniture" by achieving love, but Kanon represents the part of her that remains cynical about that possibility; he believes that she's letting Beatrice delude her into mistaking the illusion of love she's created for something real. He's kind of right, too; though I absolutely don’t believe it’s impossible for a strong love to withstand something like Yasu’s secret in principle, Kanon is right that George and Shannon's relationship isn't really the perfect fairytale love that Shannon would like it to be, and Shannon really has put herself in a very dangerous and precarious position by letting her relationship with George proceed this far. At this point, though, Shannon seems stronger than Kanon; she's optimistic enough about George right now that she wants to believe she doesn't need Beatrice's magic any more.

* It's sort of important to note that Kanon and Beatrice are pretty much aligned on their view of Yasu's situation - yeah, it sucks and it's hopeless, she's totally furniture, George won't accept her at all - but their opinions on how Yasu should respond to that are very different. Again, though, that's probably best saved for when we get more into their interaction...

* Regardless, for now, while Shannon is in this positive frame of mind, she decides to give Kanon a chance at Beatrice's "magic" too, lending him the brooch. And note the implication here - if Yasu is really so happy and optimistic about Shannon's relationship with George, as this scene tries to push so hard, then why does Kanon still need to be given a chance? This sort of implies to me that Yasu's not as confident in George's acceptance as she might want to admit; it's kind of ugly to say that Yasu might have been partly thinking of Jessica as a "backup plan", as Confession puts it, but there is an element of that in here. But I'd also argue that Yasu wants Kanon to try to pursue love because the idea of gaining happiness as Kanon specifically is so important to her that she needs to check out that possibility too.

* Kanon grudgingly decides that "maybe he might learn something if he tries this magic" - in other words, despite his skepticism, maybe if Yasu did seriously try living as Kanon, it could make him happy in a way he didn't foresee. This gains even more weight in light of Confession - we know that hearing Jessica express interest in Kanon gave Yasu a totally unexpected rush of euphoria. This new gambit, to give Kanon a chance of "magic", is informed by that - Yasu has to try to pursue and explore that new sense of happiness she experienced back then, even with Shannon already being in such a committed relationship with George.

* In a way, it's sort of interesting that Yasu's decision to pursue love with Kanon comes at a point when Yasu is feeling more optimistic about herself - at the point where she's able to try to tell herself that "love can overcome being furniture", and where she's willing to take risks like the overnight trip with George on that basis, even though Kanon and Beato's words of warning obviously represent her lingering doubts about that. Kanon normally shows so much pessimism about himself that trying to achieve love himself would be unthinkable - if Yasu's unable to even fully believe in Shannon being able to achieve love, when Shannon is so intentionally designed to be lovable and to compromise Yasu's internal self to that end, then how could Kanon possibly have a chance? But when Shannon momentarily experiences hope through her own relationship and becomes more optimistic about herself for a while, that sort of serves as a stepping stone to letting herself believe that maybe Kanon’s chances might not be so remote either. I guess you could say that's something good that came out of the George/Shannon relationship, although when all was said and done Yasu probably regretted making things even more complicated for herself by opening up this avenue too...

* And that’s as good a stopping point as any. Next time, I get to talk more about Kanon-kun, which is always very exciting!

[tidethreads]

i love that you've read the womf books, i feel like they're not as popular as her other books on here. are you more of a sam/grace or isabel/cole person?

Ohh wow thank you for sending me this and saving me from my boring day. Be prepared this will be a long answer.

I feel like for me this is a very complex question, one which the answer to has changed a great deal over the past years, from the first time I read the books to my latest reread. For several reasons no one cares about but which I’m going to list anyway.

The first time I read the books (the trilogy) was around winter 2010/11. We always had this book exhibition at my school to encourage students to read books in a foreign language (mainly English) and I discovered Shiver. I bought Shiver and Linger together (and Forever a couple of months later when it was published) pretty soon afterwards. You have to understand I was eleven years old at the time and had only taken English classes for about a year and a half so my understanding was pretty rudimentary. I could follow the plot but the intricacies were lost on me.

Anyway, so that first time I read the books, I liked Grace and Sam. They seemed like quite typical main characters, I identified with Grace’s love for reading. I did, however, not like Isabel and Cole. At all. And at first it wasn’t so much that I disliked them but that I found their chapters annoying and rather unnecessary. Isabel was too cold for me to empathise with and I thought Cole was a heartless narcissistic jerk. 

The second time I read the trilogy was when I was around 15. There wasn’t a particular reason for it I think I was just bored. Anyway, my mindset at the time was a complete 180 compared to a few years before. I think we all went through that phase as a teenager when you see those relationships à la D*lena and idolise them because you’re too young to understand how a healthy relationship is supposed to work. I want to emphasise at this point - I will come back to this later - that Isabel and Cole’s dynamic is different to that type of relationship in ways I probably didn’t quite comprehend back then, and I also probably didn’t really care much. Cole was the type of guy I went for, this concept of a not-quite-relationship-yet dynamic was something I was experiencing first-hand in my own life, and I have to admit I idolised it. Since I already knew the main story I didn’t pay much attention to it and with it Grace and Sam’s relationship. I didn’t relate to Grace’s life and personality other than certain traits and I couldn’t imagine being that co-dependent. Their entire relationship felt like playing it safe and I found that boring.

The third time I read the books (trilogy + Sinner, a little more than a year ago I think) was prompted by researching how YA literature aimed at a teen female audience treated the topic of sex. I came across this article saying how Maggie Stiefvater forayed into this and caught flack for implying that Grace and Sam were sleeping together. That is something I didn’t catch the first time I read Shiver because of my lack of language skills and the second time presumably due to my inattention so I reread the books to see it myself (that was also when I found out there was a separate Isabel/Cole-centred book.

After getting a little burned by someone quite like Cole in some ways, I found a sort of quiet comfort in Grace and Sam’s relationship. There was never any incertainty, they could count on each other all the time in every situation and I thought I would much rather have that type of relationship than one where you are constantly on edge and can rarely relax your mind and enjoy the “pure” parts of sweet declarations and being just generally comfortable.

However, that’s not what Isabel and Cole’s relationship is like, and it took me maturing to realise that. It’s not fair to them to set them in relation to that aforementioned relationship or ones like them (the kind that are being picked apart constantly for being borderline mentally abusive). It felt like I was finally able to understand the complexity of the relationship but also of the individual characters themselves.

Because yes, Cole is a conceited self-serving type A personality who relies on his looks and charms to get what he wants and has done morally condemnable things, but that’s not all there is to him. You have to keep in mind how his privileged upbringing by a famous scientist made him subconsciously adopt the values his family pushed onto him, his need to rebel and denounce that lifestyle but also how his strive for his father’s approval and living up to his expectations pushes him in his own scientific experiments. He’s not a heartless narcissist and he’s also not a “bad boy with a heart of gold”, he’s misguided and confused by the opposition of his upbringing with his fame and who that makes him as a person. This is further elaborated on in Sinner but I have to honestly say I don’t have enough experiences with what Cole’s going through there to really comment on it.

Now to Isabel. First I thought she was an asshole, then I liked her ability to banter with Cole. Out of all the books I’ve read in my lifetime, her character is one of the ones I relate to most strongly. Like with Cole, it was the ways external factors influenced her character that was the hardest to grasp when I was younger but those are so important. Yes, they also influenced the story (her father being involved in the hunt, her brother dying) but her character is so much more. It’s easy to label her a vain conceited rich bitch using examples of her saying she runs because it makes her legs look nice and wearing expensive clothes, but again there’s so much more. She is the way she is because of her equally privileged upbringing, yes, with materialism engrained into her since that’s the way her parents solve marital problems. Her real issues, however, are things like feeling trapped in that “image” she had created for herself and the pressure to maintain it - and with that what people perceive her to be like. This is expicitly discussed when she admits her sexual inexperience even though that doesn’t fit what people think of her.

Speaking of that scene with her and Cole (excerpt here - it’s a tumblr post), it’s exactly what I meant when I said you shouldn’t compare their relationship to others people think are similar. What makes Cole and Isabel stand out is that behind their “mean” banter and perceived antipathy there’s a lot of room for vulnerability and trust and genuine respect. This is the scene where Isabel opens up emotionally and ends up practically begging Cole to sleep with her just so she can say she’s had sex while underneath she thinks she’s not worth someone’s genuine affection and its physical manifestation. The reason Cole doesn’t do it is not because he’s an inherently good person - he would have done it if it had been anyone else - but because he knows she’ll regret it and he doesn’t want that for her.

Their relationship in Sinner is even more complicated and intense, the change of location and new characters playing a big part of it, and it makes it seem like Isabel “hates” Cole. For the first time their relationship seems to regress and like in the trilogy, it’s Cole who has to show his vulnerability first and talk about his feelings that makes progress even possible (if I remember correctly). I could talk about this forever if I read the books again I think.

Anyway, to actually answer your question, I am more of a Cole/Isabel person but I do appreciate the emotional stability and infinite trust Sam and Grace have.

[aletman262]

User persona for Digital Product

I created a User persona for my digital product. The persona I created was Gary. By creating this user persona it gave me a visual guide of what I need to be including and considering when creating my digital product.

What are user personas?

Personas are fictional characters, which you create based upon your research in order to represent the different user types that might use your service, product, site, or brand in a similar way. Creating personas will help you to understand your users’ needs, experiences, behaviours and goals. Creating personas can help you step out of yourself. It can help you to recognise that different people have different needs and expectations, and it can also help you to identify with the user you’re designing for. Personas make the design task at hand less complex, they guide your ideation processes, and they can help you to achieve the goal of creating a good user experience for your target user group.

As opposed to designing products, services, and solutions based upon the preferences of the design team, it has become standard practice within many human centred design disciplines to collate research and personify certain trends and patterns in the data as personas. Hence, personas do not describe real people, but you compose your personas based on real data collected from multiple individuals. Personas add the human touch to what would largely remain cold facts in your research. When you create persona profiles of typical or atypical (extreme) users, it will help you to understand patterns in your research, which synthesises the types of people you seek to design for. Personas are also known as model characters or composite characters.

Personas provide meaningful archetypes which you can use to assess your design development against. Constructing personas will help you ask the right questions and answer those questions in line with the users you are designing for. For example, “How would Peter, Joe, and Jessica experience, react, and behave in relation to feature X or change Y within the given context?” and “What do Peter, Joe, and Jessica think, feel, do and say?” and “What are their underlying needs we are trying to fulfill?”

Personas in Design Thinking

In the Design Thinking process, designers will often start creating personas during the second phase, the Define phase. In the Define phase, Design Thinkers synthesise their research and findings from the very first phase, the Empathise phase. Using personas is just one method, among others, that can help designers move on to the third phase, the Ideation phase. The personas will be used as a guide for ideation sessions such as Brainstorm, Worst Possible Idea and SCAMPER.

Four Different Perspectives on Personas

In her Interaction Design Foundation encyclopedia article, Personas, Ph.D and specialist in personas, Lene Nielsen, describes four perspectives that your personas can take to ensure that they add the most value to your design project and the fiction-based perspective. Let’s take a look at each of them:

1. Goal-directed Personas

This persona cuts straight to the nitty-gritty. “It focusses on: What does my typical user want to do with my product?”. The objective of a goal-directed persona is to examine the process and workflow that your user would prefer to utilise in order to achieve their objectives in interacting with your product or service. There is an implicit assumption that you have already done enough user research to recognise that your product has value to the user, and that by examining their goals, you can bring their requirements to life. The goal-directed personas are based upon the perspectives of Alan Cooper, an American software designer and programmer who is widely recognized as the “Father of Visual Basics”.

2. Role-Based Personas

The role-based perspective is also goal-directed and it also focusses on behaviour. The personas of the role-based perspectives are massively data-driven and incorporate data from both qualitative and quantitative sources. The role-based perspective focusses on the user’s role in the organisation. In some cases, our designs need to reflect upon the part that our users play in their organisations or wider lives. An examination of the roles that our users typically play in real life can help inform better product design decisions. Where will the product be used? What’s this role’s purpose? What business objectives are required of this role? Who else is impacted by the duties of this role? What functions are served by this role? Jonathan Grudin, John Pruitt, and Tamara Adlin are advocates for the role-based perspective.

“The engaging perspective is rooted in the ability of stories to produce involvement and insight. Through an understanding of characters and stories, it is possible to create a vivid and realistic description of fictitious people. The purpose of the engaging perspective is to move from designers seeing the user as a stereotype with whom they are unable to identify and whose life they cannot envision, to designers actively involving themselves in the lives of the personas. The other persona perspectives are criticized for causing a risk of stereotypical descriptions by not looking at the whole person, but instead focusing only on behavior.”

– Lene Nielsen

Engaging personas can incorporate both goal and role-directed personas, as well as the more traditional rounded personas. These engaging personas are designed so that the designers who use them can become more engaged with them. The idea is to create a 3D rendering of a user through the use of personas. The more people engage with the persona and see them as ’real’, the more likely they will be to consider them during the process design and want to serve them with the best product. These personas examine the emotions of the user, their psychology, backgrounds and make them relevant to the task in hand. The perspective emphasises how stories can engage and bring the personas to life. One of the advocates for this perspective is Lene Nielsen.

One of the main difficulties of the persona method is getting participants to use it (Browne, 2011). In a short while, we’ll let you in on Lene Nielsen’s model, which sets out to cover this problem though a 10‑step process of creating an engaging persona.

Author/Copyright holder: Terri Phillips. Copyright terms and licence: All rights reserved. Img Source

4. Fictional Personas

The fictional persona does not emerge from user research (unlike the other personas) but it emerges from the experience of the UX design team. It requires the team to make assumptions based upon past interactions with the user base, and products to deliver a picture of what, perhaps, typical users look like. There’s no doubt that these personas can be deeply flawed (and there are endless debates on just how flawed). You may be able to use them as an initial sketch of user needs. They allow for early involvement with your users in the UX design process, but they should not, of course, be trusted as a guide for your development of products or services.

10 steps to Creating Your Engaging Personas and Scenarios

As described above, engaging personas can incorporate both goal and role-directed personas, as well as the more traditional rounded personas. Engaging personas emphasise how stories can engage and bring the personas to life. This 10-step process covers the entire process from preliminary data collection, through active use, to continued development of personas.

The 10 steps are an ideal process but sometimes it is not possible to include all the steps in the project. Here we outline the 10-step process as described by Lene Nielsen in her Interaction Design Foundation encyclopedia article, Personas.

1. Collect data. Collect as much knowledge about the users as possible. Perform high-quality user research of actual users in your target user group. In Design Thinking, the research phase is the first phase, also known as the Empathise phase.

2. Form a hypothesis. Based upon your initial research, you will form a general idea of the various users within the focus area of the project, including the ways users differ from one another – For instance, you can use Affinity Diagrams and Empathy Maps.

3. Everyone accepts the hypothesis. The goal is to support or reject the first hypothesis about the differences between the users. You can do this by confronting project participants with the hypothesis and comparing it to existing knowledge.

4. Establish a number. You will decide upon the final number of personas, which it makes sense to create. Most often, you would want to create more than one persona for each product or service, but you should always choose just one persona as your primary focus.

5. Describe the personas. The purpose of working with personas is to be able to develop solutions, products and services based upon the needs and goals of your users. Be sure to describe personas in a such way so as to express enough understanding and empathy to understand the users.

You should include details about the user’s education, lifestyle, interests, values, goals, needs, limitations, desires, attitudes, and patterns of behaviour.

Add a few fictional personal details to make the persona a realistic character.

Give each of your personas a name.

Create 1–2-pages of descriptions for each persona.

6. Prepare situations or scenarios for your personas. This engaging persona method is directed at creating scenarios that describe solutions. For this purpose, you should describe a number of specific situations that could trigger use of the product or service you are designing. In other words, situations are the basis of a scenario. You can give each of your personas life by creating scenarios that feature them in the role of a user. Scenarios usually start by placing the persona in a specific context with a problem they want to or have to solve.

[aliceachia]

03.10.2017

Curiosity Abounded

I have always been intrigued by processes.  Not so much the outcome itself, nor what it is used for but rather how something came to be and why.  I am interested in ways of presenting the processes or the construction of the norm to the public, forming a spectacle of it all.  

The possibility of being able to witness the transformation and production of a form enables one to think critically about the act that is then carried out (with the product) at the end.  This is fundamental to the kind of architecture I am passionate about - architecture that is dependent on the functionality and ability to manipulate the way we go about things.  I am curious about how architecture can be created to encompass and emphasise processes, of which when seen, changes our behaviour and everyday habits. 

“(They are) the beginnings of new ways of THINKING, LIVING and SHAPING SPACES arising from INDIVIDUALITY and INVENTION.” - Lebbeus Woods

How has education and technology opened up a chasm fraught with dangers and opportunities?

At this point, I have thought about technology as a catalyst for education.  In the context of enabling the transparency of a process, this could give rise to more opportunities.  Opportunities that could lead to a consciousness of mind, affecting behaviour, understanding and routine. 

During my final undergraduate year, I studied the nature of the supermarket phenomenon and how it has dominated the food industry; how it has influenced everyday life by reeling us with the convenience of ready meals and ‘perfect’ produce.  While one may wonder what the problem is with a place that allows one to obtain necessities (that is food, to survive) so easily, the underlying issue is that supermarkets are slowly phasing out local businesses and traditional markets.  As a solution, I looked into designing an educational market - where the stages involved in the production and the consumption of food was made visible to the public.  The movement and circulation of the food essentially became the key characteristic of the building; a theatrical element.  I wanted to design a place where people could understand how and where what they ate came from.  Different stages from production to consumption of food i.e. trading, eating, cooking and harvesting, were integrated with one another so you were constantly aware of what happens before or after the current experience.  I wanted people to appreciate food in its rawest form and to see that eating healthily was not necessarily inconvenient or difficult, to see that imperfect food could still be eaten and not discarded just because of a bump or bruise on its skin.  The aim was to rebuild this relationship between people and food that once was.  

Thus, this project was the beginning of my curiosity towards the world of unconventional ways of performing the conventional.  How can we find the balance between the use of technology to create new means of dealing with the conventional, while maintaining the essence of what it truly is?

Deptford: Opportunities

As I read more into the history of Deptford, I began to realise how rich a place it is.  Rich in character, rich in culture and tradition.  The ethnic groups that make up the community there are predominantly from Africa and the Caribbean, as well as South and East Asia.  

Drawing upon the information I had gathered, I have started to understand how and why Deptford has come to be.  The big question now is: what does Deptford need and how can we utilise the charm and character that it has?

I am especially curious about how Deptford was once such an important port in London.  It was heavily involved in ship-making, cables, masts and anchors; all of which were in high demand at a time. The act of MAKING was apparent throughout this town.  If its any consolation, I suppose this act of making still exists in Deptford, just on a much smaller scale.  Many organisations over the years have actively made art a big part of the local culture.  Various exhibitions and events are held every year as a PLATFORM for artists’ to showcase their work.  

How then can this current (art) culture be used as a way of educating and helping people reconnect with the history of Deptford?

Would the divide between the different ethnic groups need to be resolved first?

What could diminish the parallels between the ethnic groups?

Would a system or platform for different races, religions and backgrounds to come together constitute the regeneration of Deptford in a new and exciting way?

[theoveldsman]

DESIGNING FUTURE-PROOF, FIT-FOR-PURPOSE ORGANISATIONS (4) The Life Cycle of Organisational Design Interventions

In my previous article the basic Organisational Design (OD) vocabulary and language were established to inform a constructive and productive OD discourse in the organisation. It was argued that the basic OD vocabulary and language must be made up of at least the following: (i) provide an appropriate Organisational Model as thinking framework; (ii) specify the OD Levels and Dimensions; (iii) list the essential OD Building Blocks; and (iv) map the basic, generic OD Process.    

The purpose of my fourth article in this series of articles - entitled Designing Future-Proof, Fit-for-Purpose Organisations - is to walk through the critical life cycle phases of a typical OD intervention. This is, provide a high level overview of the ‘How’, ‘Who’, ‘When’ and ‘Where’ of OD as process. This article serves as a handy, high level tour guide - or ‘Google map’ - to the OD process in its totality.

 The typical life cycle phases of an OD intervention are:

Phase 1: Recognise the need for Organisational (re)Design

Phase 2: Scope and set up the OD assignment  

Phase 3: Craft a fit-for-purpose OD solution  

Phase 4: Implement the signed off OD solution and assess its value-add

Phase 5: Close out 

The above Phases are typical to most if not all organisational change interventions. In my discussion of these Phases at a high level, I will emphasise the unique features of the Phases with reference to an OD intervention. The usual, underlying principles for the Phases with respect to organisational change interventions in general will be assumed to apply.  

Phase 1: Recognise the need for an Organisational (re)Design

To be effective an OD intervention must be triggered by a properly identified and well formulated need for a reconceived/new OD for the organisation (or part thereof), as well as clearly specified, expected benefits the new design must bring about. I.e., the value-adding difference of the new design in making the organisation more efficient, effective, competitive, successful, and a better citizen.  In short, bring about a fit-for-purpose organisation.

In general, two types of OD needs exist: (i) a brownfield design need that relates to the redesign of an existing organisation or a unit thereof, or (ii) a greenfield design need which pertains to a new design  where nothing exists at present.  An identified OD need must be translated into the type of change required, hence the nature of the change navigation strategy and plan necessary to enable and support the OD process.

The table below provides examples of typical OD needs within the framework of the overall OD purpose and objectives.  

 Phase 2: Scope and set up the OD assignment  

A properly identified need for an OD intervention with clearly specified expected benefits was demarcated in Phase 1. Phase 2 is about properly scoping and setting up the OD assignment. This has to occur between the leader(s) who identified the need with expected benefits, and whoever is going to conduct the OD assignment. This could be the leader(s) him/herself; a designated leader or leadership team requested to address the need; and/or an OD Expert(s). To simplify the ensuing discussion, the party who identified the need will be called the Client, and the party responsible for the execution of the OD assignment, the OD Expert.    

Phase 2 consists of eight sub-phases as outlined below. Given space constraints, only Sub-phases 2.1, 2.3, and 2.4 will be discussed in greater detail because of their criticality w.r.t. an OD intervention.  

Phase 2.1: Demarcate the boundaries of the OD intervention

The client must clearly demarcate the boundaries of the OD intervention to the OD Expert. The boundaries are set by the focus of the OD intervention - either the total organisation or an organisational area:

Horizontally: from where to where in terms of the core/enabling/ support work process(es) concerned? 

Vertically: which organisational levels are included? 

Phase 2.2: Contract the mutual expectations between the Client and OD Expert  

The mutual expectations between the parties involved must be contracted clearly to avoid any possible misunderstandings. 

Phase 2.3: Assess the organisational readiness to undertake the OD intervention

A thorough upfront assessment must be co-conducted by the Client and OD Expert to determine whether favourable readiness factors, the critical preconditions to a successful OD intervention, are in place:  

The sponsorship for the intended OD intervention must be at the right organisational level relative to the organisation or organisational area to be (re)designed. 

A well-articulated need and scope with clearly specified expected benefits have been formulated and clearly communicated. 

The Client, as the key leader of the organisation/organisational area affected and the final decision maker with regard to the proposed OD solution, must have a permanent appointment. This key role cannot be filled by an acting person.

The expected benefits of the new design must outweigh the costs of the OD intervention, including both the hard and soft benefits and costs. If the latter does not outweigh the former by a significant margin – I would argue by at least 30% – the OD intervention is not worth the effort. 

Shared agreement must exist on the Strategic Intent as an element of the Organisation’s Identity among the senior leadership group of the affected area. The Strategic Intent forms the departure point for a fit-for-purpose design. 

 A well-functioning leadership community/team with a healthy dynamic within the affected area. An effective design process and robust design need fierce, zero-based conversations with no holy cows.

 An integrated, comprehensive and systematic design process, informed by leading OD practices, must be used. This process needs to be enabled by sound project management and change navigation. If leadership wants a superficial, quick fix job, the design assignment must not be undertaken.  

The necessary resources (e.g., time, people, funds) must be allocated to the OD intervention. 

The OD Expert has genuine OD expertise, at the requisite level of design complexity, as necessitated by the OD need to be addressed. Design needs vary in complexity. Hence the necessary OD expertise must be matched to the need. 

If the above readiness preconditions are not in place, the likelihood of a successful OD intervention will be slim. The OD intervention will cause more harm than benefit; more organisational agony than be a constructive organisational re-invention; more confusion and chaos than clarity and focus; more passive or active resistance and sabotage than support and ownership; and more bad than good organisational politics.

If preconditions are unfavourable, actions must be taken to change them. Or, the intervention must be delayed until preconditions become favourable. E.g., the appointment of a permanent CEO to replace an acting CEO.  

Phase 2.4: The Client and OD Expert jointly decide on the most appropriate OD intervention process option

The execution of the OD intervention process can be set up in different ways. The importance of deciding on the appropriate option cannot be overstressed. It must suit the preference of the Client; the typical decision-making culture of the organisation; the available resources; and the speed at which the intervention must move relative to the strategic window of opportunity for the roll out of the OD solution.

 The table below gives the four possible execution options with each’s applicability.

Phase 2.5: Establish the ground rules to frame the OD intervention correctly

The ground rules to frame the OD intervention must established upfront, as these set the parameters for the kind of OD solution that can be considered by the OD Expert.  Typical ground rules are such as a zero-based look at the Design to be reviewed: ‘If we had to set up this business again…’. Or, no Holy Cow: everything is open for reconsideration and questioning.  

Phase 2.6: Set-up a proper intervention governance structure and process

Given the OD process execution option selected in Phase 2.4, a sound governance structure and process must be set up to oversee the OD intervention: who is to meet when to discuss, review, and approve what.  

Step 2.7: Sign-off on a Client Memorandum of Understanding

The Client must sign-off on a MOU with the OD Expert to ensure that a written, shared understanding exists on what the OD assignment entails within the agreed upon parameters.

Phase 2.8: Prepare and distribute a communication brief

A communication brief under the Client’s name – which can be drafted by the OD Expert on behalf of the Client – must be compiled and circulated throughout the affected organisational area and key stakeholders, even customers and suppliers. The importance of early communication to counter fears of retrenchments; stop speculation and rumours; and pro-actively minimise destructive personal and organisational dynamics, cannot be overstated.  The moment this brief is the released, the change navigation must commence in all earnestly in support of the intervention.  

Phase 3: Craft a fit-for-purpose OD solution

Within the signed Client Memorandum of Understanding as the basic frame of reference for the OD intervention, the intervention can now proceed. Three sub-phases make up this phase:  

Phase 3.1: the OD Expert obtains the relevant information on the client system from the Client and peruses it.

Phase 3.2: In terms of the chosen OD process execution option, the OD Expert crafts a fit-for-purpose OD solution, by following the relevant design route map(s). 

In terms of the three Design Levels, three Design route maps can be discerned:   -  Stage A:  The Strategic Design route map;

-  Stage B:  The Tactical Design route map; and/or

-   Stage C: The Operational Design route map

The respective route maps will be discussed in greater detail in subsequent articles.  However, three general points are worth making, which are applicable to all three route maps. First, the OD Expert must enlighten the Client at a high level of the major design steps – given a specific route map – that will be followed in architecting the Design Solution. An informed and capacitated Client is a great bonus to the success of the process. 

Second, in order to take the Client along in terms of thinking as the OD Expert moves through the route map, regardless of the chosen OD process execution option followed, it is of critical importance to obtain progressive client sign-off at key points as one moves through the sequential steps of the route map. In this way, progressive consensus and agreement are achieved. 

Third, though the route maps appear to only move in one direction, in practice the design process moves iteratively, backwards and forward, as progressively, deeper insights are gained.

Phase 3.3: OD Expert submits his/her report to the Client who signs off on the complete, proposed OD solution.  

Phase 3.3: OD Expert submits his/her report to the Client who signs off on the proposed, complete OD solution  

Phase 3 concludes with the submission of a report to the client of the proposed, complete OD solution to consider. The report produced by the OD Expert forms the basis of implementation, i.e., Phase 4. Without proper documentation, the implementation has a high likelihood of derailment given the intensity of the personal and organisational dynamics that OD invokes. The importance cannot be over-stressed of the proper documentation of the proposed, and finally client approved, OD solution.

Phase 4: Implement the signed-off OD solution and assess its value-add

Although each of the design route maps describe the implementation of the final step for completeness, implementation can only really commence once the proposed solution has been signed off. The responsibility of the OD Expert concludes when he/she has delivered an approved solution. 

Now the client has to take over in terms of full accountability for implementation. The OD Expert has no authority to do this, even if he/she is part of the formal leadership of the organisation concerned. However, the OD Expert can advise on the roll out of the OD solution, because he/she knows it intimately, having architected it.  

If all Design Levels are covered, a low risk implementation strategy to avoid organisational chaos would be to progressively roll out the approved designs by organisational level. In other words, first implement the complete Strategic Design, followed by the Tactical and Operational Designs in parallel. The rationale for this implementation sequence will be discussed later.  

Phase 5: Close out

This phase relates to the OD Expert exiting the client system at the end of Phase 3. Or, if requested, to provide advice during implementation after Phase 4. The usual close-out actions apply, like finalising the OD Intervention Project File and closing it; and, meeting with the Client to sign-off on the OD intervention against the Memorandum of Understanding.

TAKE-AWAYS

The typical life cycle phases of an OD intervention are:

          - Phase 1: Recognise the need for Organisational (re)Design

          - Phase 2: Scope and set up the OD assignment  

          - Phase 3: Craft a fit-for-purpose OD solution  

          -  Phase 4: Implement the signed off OD solution and assess its value-add          -   Phase 5: Close out

 The need, expected benefits of an OD must be clearly specified and demarcated, informed by explicit ground rules. 

 A thorough upfront assessment must be co-conducted to determine whether favourable readiness factors, the critical preconditions to a successful OD intervention, are in place. 

The appropriate OD process option must be chosen that fits the organisation and circumstances. 

Complete OD route maps must exit to direct and guide the architecting of OD solutions. 

Change navigation kicks in the moment the OD intervention is announced.    

NEXT TOPIC:  Strategic Design

Source

The article has been extracted from my book, entitled Designing Fit-for-Purpose Organisations. A comprehensive, integrated route map. The book was published in the first week of June 2019 by Knowledge Resources. Go to www.kr.co.za  

[katlangforddaily]

13 Reasons Why actor Katherine Langford: 'I feel lucky to have this platform'

Just three short months ago, the world had no idea who Katherine Langford was.

But playing the lead role in the controversial Netflix drama, 13 Reasons Why, which tells the story of teenager Hannah Baker, who takes her own life after sustained bullying at her northern California high school, has propelled Katherine to international stardom.

In the wake of her critically acclaimed performance, the 21-year-old from Perth has garnered six million Instagram followers and appeared on both the Jimmy Fallon and Ellen DeGeneres talk shows in the US.

However it was the loveheart tweet from her idol Lady Gaga that brought home just how big 13 Reasons Why – and Katherine herself – had become. "This woman, this artist, performer, who I love and admire so much, knows who I am," Katherine says, still sounding slightly amazed. "That's when I was like, 'Okay, this is big because she's seen it. Lady Gaga watches the show.' "

By tackling the potent adolescent issues of social media, bullying, rape, mental illness and suicide in an unflinching manner, 13 Reasons Why is very much a show for, and of, the times. Katherine is still digesting the profound impact it has had on viewers, the overnight fame it has delivered, and the life lessons it has taught her.

"I think my story is a bit bizarre," she confesses. "I don't think anyone had any idea [13 Reasons Why] was going to be as big as it has been. I feel like it happened for a reason, and I know that sounds silly. It's definitely been the hardest – but it's been the best – first job I could have ever asked for."

When I meet Katherine during her fleeting visit to Sydney earlier this month, she's dressed down in jeans and a black cord jacket. But even in casual clothes she has a prettiness that is reminiscent of a medieval princess, with her trademark brunette curls cascading down her back, breathtakingly beautiful porcelain skin and clear green eyes that meet yours.

She dips her head in a sort of curtsey when she shakes hands, is quick to laugh, and given to long, thoughtful pauses as she ponders her answers to questions.

Katherine's own high school experience at Perth Modern, a school for gifted and talented children in innercity Subiaco, was vastly different from Hannah Baker's. The stress of year 12 exams was as bad as it got for her, although she was aware that slut-shaming and bullying – exacerbated by social media – existed.

"Playing Hannah brought back the feeling of everyone watching you," she reflects. "I think no matter where you are, high school is always going to be a tough experience, however I think there are things that we can do to make it less painful."

While Katherine says she doesn't possess the quick wit or sarcasm of Hannah, she does relate to her character's persistent desire to believe in the goodness of others, even if their actions prove otherwise. She also identifies with Hannah's non-conformist nature. "I was never bothered about fitting in," she says.

The daughter of two "extremely intelligent, and very, very hard-working" doctors, Katherine originally had plans to follow in her parents' footsteps. She told a careers adviser in year 10 that her first preference was medicine, followed by politics. Third on her list of career choices was musical theatre.

"Even though those first two options were very different, I always wanted to do something that was going to make a difference and/or help people and/or help the world."

By the time she graduated from high school, Katherine knew she wanted to be an actor. "I like being able to give voices to characters who are people who don't have a voice, and telling stories that are relevant and reflect on society." But she was rejected from every acting school she applied to, on the grounds she was too young and didn't have enough life experience.

So she knuckled down to teach herself everything she could about the craft, juggled three part-time jobs, and found herself an agent. The agent arranged a meeting with some visiting US managers, who set up two video auditions. One turned out to be for 13 Reasons Why.

Her casting as the lead is especially remarkable because not only did she win the role based solely on audition tapes she sent over to LA, it is her first professional acting job, and she narrates the series in an American accent.

"From what they told me, they auditioned a lot of girls and I think the one thing they wanted to do was capture the essence [of Hannah's character], and they didn't want or need to cast people with a name because it's not a network, it's Netflix."

13 Reasons Why has so skilfully tapped into the adolescent zeitgeist that it is reportedly the most popular Netflix series to date, and the most tweeted about show of the year. But the show has also attracted controversy for the way it depicts bullying, rape and suicide. It has been criticised for sensationalising suicide and being overly simplistic about the reasons people kill themselves.  

American mental health experts have warned it could have a suicide contagion effect, while in Australia, youth mental health service Headspace has reported a "growing number" of calls and emails relating to the show, and cautioned that its content could be upsetting to underage viewers.

Some Sydney private schools have banned their students from watching it, while New Zealand introduced a new classification specifically for the show, requiring children under 18 to watch it with a parent or guardian.

Katherine says everyone involved in 13 Reasons Why knew it would be controversial, and she welcomes the discussions it has sparked about difficult topics. "The discussion is the important part about the show. It's about looking at issues and instigating conversation that is needed."

Despite the backlash, Katherine takes great pride in the impact 13 Reasons Why has had, particularly in the way its authentic depiction of adolescent issues has resonated with viewers. Among fans waiting when she touched down in Sydney was a girl who thrust a letter into her hands which described the difference the show had made to her own life. "To me, that is the most rewarding part," Katherine explains.

"I think we cover a lot of different issues in the show which people relate to differently depending on their own personal history and context. I feel very lucky to be able to have a platform from the show to talk about issues that are important."

Being thrust into the public eye so suddenly and so early in her career has meant a steep learning curve for Katherine, who now finds herself walking the red carpet at Hollywood events like the MTV Awards and being approached by strangers in the street. "Suddenly it feels like everybody knows me, and I've just done one thing!" she laughs.

Despite being involved in such a massive hit, Katherine displays little of the egocentrism for which the selfie generation is renowned. Unlike many of her peers, she's not particularly invested in the size of her following on social media.

"It's not something that I feel I need affirmation for," she says. "For me, it doesn't matter how many followers I have, but if my followers love the show and I'm able to interact with them, that is the biggest pay-off."

The attention is still such a novelty that Katherine is yet to become jaded by it – nor has she let it turn her head, to the surprise of even her closest friends back in Perth. "I'm pretty low key, and I definitely don't consider myself super famous or well known. It's still at the point where it's kind of cool."

Amid all the tumult of the past 18 months of her life, the piano has been a refuge of sorts for Katherine. She taught herself to play when she was 16 after she saw Lady Gaga in concert and quickly joined the elite music program at school.

When she moved to California to shoot 13 Reasons Why, one of the first things she did was buy a piano for $50. After a tough day filming, she'd come home and play to decompress.

"If there's ever a piano in a room, I find it," she says. "I think music is a very personal medium, especially when you write your own songs, which I do. Right now, music is something I'm keeping for myself."

She's also keeping other elements of her life private. She reveals she has a 19-year-old sister, but shies away from providing any more detail on her family. And she won't single out any 13 Reasons Why cast members she has become particularly close to during filming, saying only, "All of the cast get along so well, we're all going to be friends for a very, very long time". Asked about boys, she shoots back: "You got anyone you want to suggest?" (She does nominate Winnie the Pooh's Christopher Robin as her first childhood crush, and Orlando Bloom as her second.)

Notwithstanding her new-found celebrity status, Katherine says the greatest impact 13 Reasons Why has had on her own life is what she has learnt from playing Hannah Baker.

"I think it emphasised for me the importance of bravery and being bold and unique. It also affirmed that those things are great, they're good things."

Armed with that knowledge, Katherine is moving into the next phase of her career. Her first feature film, a screen adaptation of the young-adult novel Simon vs The Homo Sapiens Agenda, which also stars Jennifer Garner, comes out next March. She is now back in the US to shoot the second season of 13 Reasons Why, wiser and more experienced this time around.

"There's not really a handbook for being on a Netflix show," she says with a grin. "I know it sounds cheesy, but I just hope to be the best Katherine Langford I can."

Source: The Sydney Morning Herald

[csprofstudy]

Goya Blog 2

Goya Blog

 Monday 12/11

Although I am fascinated by Goya’s work, I have never actually seen an original painting. Have therefore decided to see what I can find in London. So far I can only track Goya down at the National Gallery. https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/artists/francisco-de-goya

There are just 5 paintings to be seen and earlier than the Black Paintings. However, it will be interesting to see some of his contrasting pieces, such as ‘A Picnic’, as well as his formal portraiture, including ‘The Duke of Wellington’! This should give me an insight into how and when his work changed, as well as help me to clarify the reasons for these changes, tying in with my project.

Unfortunately, the Black Paintings are in the Prado, but I have sent off for the Museum ‘Gallery Guide’ which catalogues each of the paintings. Not quite the same as being there, nevertheless I hope it will give me more of an authentic feel, compared to just looking at them on the internet.

 Tuesday 13/11

Having put together a bibliography, I have decided also to explore some podcast material to help my research on Goya and give me a different perspective. These two links below look worthwhile. The Radio 3 interview could be especially interesting as it explores the work of Goya from the curator’s point of view. Will set time aside to listen on Thursday.

BBC Radio 4 - Great Lives, Series 27, Goya

Diana Athill joins Matthew to explore the life of the Spanish painter Francisco de Goya.

BBC Radio 3 - Sunday Feature, Doing Goya Justice: The Curator's Story

Feature following the work of Xavier Bray as he curates an exhibition of Goya's paintings.

Sunday 30/12

As there is hardly any Goya available to view in this country, I was looking forward to watching a DVD, which reports on the National Gallery Exhibition of 2015. Goya: Visions of Flesh and blood. 

It wasn’t quite what I expected as I had hoped to get more of a feel of the Black Paintings and there was far more focus on his portraits. However, I like the way that Goya was dramatized as it brought him to life and made me feel a bit more connected to him and Gabriele Finaldi’s observation that Goya: ‘Dealt with the human soul’ captures a sense of why we are still very moved by Goya’s work today. Reference was made to both his complicated historical journey and his personal/artistic journey – which relates to my investigation for the contextual study – and to his complicated character..

There was quite a lot of interesting back ground that I was unaware of (including his relationship with Martin Zapater which was an intense and intimate friendship) and I think in my essay I might develop my section on his early work that I plan to use to show his developing style, in line with political and personal events that affected him. 

His path to royal painter was clearly laid out by a number of art historians during the film:

1775 Goya was invited to court as King Charles III wanted to show that he was in touch with the Spanish people. He was asked to create tapestries of every day scenes for royal residences, and at this point he was heavily influenced by the naturalistic style of Velázquez. His first Royal Patron was Don Luis de Bourbon; he entered the inner sanctum of the family.

By 1785 his modern approach to portraiture won him more commissions and I learned that he was praised for being unconventional. Instead of small details of a particular scene, he went for face, character, expression - strong physicality – trying to convey the emotional life of his subjects. Understood personality and body language.

This is maybe an early indication of his daring? In his letters he said: ‘There are no rules in painting’, which is something I will bear in mind when I look at his later work. I hadn’t really thought much about Goya the man until this point, but he was obviously ambitious and passionate.

 In 1788 the death of Charles III brought nervousness. Charles IV - succeeded and appointed Goya in the position of court painter and conserver. This is Goya the Royalist and respectful servant, his loyalty and talent winning him a reward.

In 1793 he became unwell and travelled to Cadiz to recover but he would be deaf – for the rest of life. Was this due to lead poisoning? (Another avenue to explore?). Whatever the cause, it must have had a dramatic effect on Goya as he loved music and conversation, so how far did it affect the way he worked and the content of his work? Dr Bray suggests this marked a turning point – that Goya had become liberated and more independent. He drew more freely. New subjects were chosen.

Rebellion from France spilled into Spain. Inquisition active. Duchess of Alba had huge influence and he had a close relationship. How far did she influence him?

1993 Spain was defeated by France and Goya became Director of the Academy of Fine Art. ‘Los Caprichos’ – examination of ‘Vices’ marked the beginning of a darker phase with Goya becoming a critical observer. Followed by ‘Disasters of War.’ Sarah Symmons claims Goya was not overtly political, but events and the development in his art seem to prove otherwise.

The beginning of the 19th Century brought further disruption. The film helpfully summarised main events, which helped to emphasise and clarify the background against which Goya was working.

Napoleon declared war on Britain and invaded Spain in 1808 to control European relationships with Britain.

Unrest. Charles IV abdicated in favour of son, Ferdinand VII.

 French troops entered Madrid and consequences were brutal.

Spain now under French rule with Napoleon’s brother Joseph declared King.

6 year bloody war. Cruelty Captured by Goya in ‘Disasters of War’. Taste of Black Paintings to follow?

Madrid liberated by British. Ferdinand VII reinstated. Goya continued royal duties.

Had access to French and Spanish – left him vulnerable – but political stance not obvious in portraits at this point.

In later life as commissions decreased, Goya turned to friends/family for portraits.

New reign, suspected French sympathisers questioned by Holy Office, including Goya.

Bought Quinta del Sordo. In 1820 self-portrait with doctor. Near death experience.

Black paintings seem like ‘an exorcism’ (Dr Xavier Bray - who curated the exhibition). Why? Was it a personal statement? Were they an anti-war statement? Were they meant to be seen? No-one seems sure and this is the focal point of my study.

Goya says in his letters: ‘I refuse to do the same thing all the time’.

Complexity and variety are key to trying tounderstand his work. 

January 18th

I listened to BBC Great Lives today where Goya was being discussed by Matthew Parris and Sarah Symmons. Although there was some information - especially about historical events – that I had heard before e.g. Napoleon’s invasion of Spain, there were also some useful discussion/quotes that made me think about Goya the man – his motivation, his suffering and people who have influenced him. I might be able to incorporate some of these things into my essay and it will definitely strengthen my ‘Personal’ chapter on Goya the man – and how the complexity of his psyche, relationships and experiences shaped his later work.

Diana Athill. Said she was struck by Goya’s ‘honesty’ – the way he is ‘Always responding to how things really are’. This is interesting in relation to the BPs and the view they convey of man.

Sarah Symmons reminded listeners of his age when creating his masterpieces. He drew ‘Disasters of War’ in his 60s and the ‘Black Paintings’ in his 70s! She points out that for him, ‘The truth was the most important thing.’ Honesty and truth appear to be the driving qualities for his art.

All agreed he was not too interested in the sacred, or heaven. Doesn’t romanticise evil. Perhaps that help to explain the grotesque quality of the BPs?

Something I didn’t know was that all his children died except one and there were many miscarriages. 6 of 7 live births died. This must have been devastating for him and his wife and he must have been touched by this tragedy.

They touched upon his deafness/illness and the theory this was caused because he was an unorthodox painter who often used his hands. As paint was so toxic, this appears to have had a terrible effect. So this will also have had some bearing on his state of mind when he was painting the walls of the Quinto del Sardo with his black paintings.

Some powerful ‘people’ influences were mentioned – the Duchess of Alba was like a Muse and it is said that he loved Martin Zabater passionately. If I have time I might look at some of his letters to Zabater.

Goya worked for Court and Joseph 1 but was inspired by the atrocities of war and Matthew Parris described him as a ‘War reporter’, which is a useful angle/quote for me.

Finally, Athill’s statement that he drew ‘For us’ is an interesting one as I am really interested in Goya’s intentions and his audience – and in why we relate so strongly to him today. Athill’s quote that he was ‘ultra modern’ highlights his ability to cross the centuries and we can relate today both to the idea of civil unrest, and also to mental health issues and the powerful effect these can have.

[notes-from-a-small-english-woman]

Kindness Is Key

As part of the Huffington Post’s “All Women Everywhere” project, which aims to reflect the diversity of the British female experiences and voices through journalistic articles throughout March, actress Emilia Clarke wrote an article entitled “The New Sexy”. In this article, she approaches the topic of feminism and her own place within it with tact and grace. She recognises and admits that her own upbringing, grounded in equality, gave her a privilege that not all women have; the confidence and opportunity to have a voice that can be heard. She also addresses the problem of how women in her position who hold feminist views are made to feel like “guilty feminists” because they have not experienced oppressive sexism as strongly as others, but again approaches this issue tactfully, explaining that her situation has given her opportunity to understand the oppression of other women and the means to stand up against this. Moving on to the crux of her article, Clarke emphasises the importance of kindness in the fight for equality, to eradicate hate from our society where people are so used to tearing each other down (and being torn down themselves). It was at this point during my reading of her piece that I really began to engage with what she was saying, because it was a philosophy I already try to live by.  

There’s a phrase I’ve seen circulating around Facebook, on those “inspirational quotes” pages, which really strikes me: “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” This quote, while not directly reflecting Clarke’s argument, outlines the basic aim I believe everybody should try to have within their lives: to make other people feel good around you. This may seem like an obvious ideal, as everybody likes to be liked, but in eighteen years of life I have had so many experiences with people who seem to live to tear other people down. Sadly, this is one big issue in social justice groups such as feminists, as women (thought they are fighting for equality) have this sense of competitiveness and individualism ingrained so deeply within them that they often fight among themselves about who actually deserves to be called a “real feminist”. In this sense, Clarke’s argument comes into play, with the idea of building other people up, as she says that “one woman’s success, is every woman’s gain”. If every woman in the world decided to stop fighting with each other and sectioning themselves off into sub-categories of “women”, the equality movement would move a whole lot more smoothly as its opponents would find it much harder to fight a unified force than a fragmented and dissonant one.

Extending this idea past feminism and equality movements into a general philosophy of life, simply the idea that everybody should just try to be kind to each other speaks to me on a very personal level. As a person who feels a bigger rush of happiness and achievement from making somebody smile than from getting a high grade on an essay, I can completely say that kindness is underrated in our society. I don’t think for one second that people are innately cruel, or that we as a species are becoming unkind – there are so many examples of some amazing acts of kindness by so many people – but I feel like maybe we have lost sight of the little everyday things we could do to make everybody’s lives just that little bit more pleasant. Something that really struck me was the influx of stories coming out about George Michael, after he died, detailing hundreds of his anonymous acts of incredible generosity. The sheer number of people who had these experiences with him really overwhelmed me, to think that this amazingly talented artist had a legacy of such kindness and pure humanity really gave me faith that there is a true essence of goodness in us. One thing that people seem to say in stories about George Michael or other celebrities who they have had similar experiences with is “I will always remember them as the person who did ...” It got me thinking about what I want to be remembered for when I die and the truth is, I would much rather be remembered as a kind-hearted person who made people who met them feel good than as a successful artist or professional. As a university student, I think sometimes about how the people I know now will remember me in ten, twenty, thirty years’ time. I hope they remember me as being the girl who wasn’t afraid to speak her mind, whether it be to say something contrary to popular opinion (as an English literature student with not much experience with the classics, I often have different views on the literary canon to my fellow students) or to simply tell someone I enjoyed their presentation or love their outfit today. If someone is looking back through their yearbook in the year 2047 with their children, sees my picture and says “Oh that’s Kesi, I remember her, lovely girl”, I will be ecstatic. Too often I see people trying their utmost to impress everyone with their intellectual remarks, but there is a fine line between intellectual and pretentious, and they often fall to the side of the latter. At the end of the day, nobody will remember you for the grades you got, they’ll remember how you made them feel.

I used the example of large-scale random acts of generosity by celebrities because these are the things we hear about through social media, it’s something we are aware of as a collective. An issue with this is the distance it creates between the individuals and the acts of kindness, as they are often too big to be done by people who don’t have millions of pounds to give to strangers or the superstar status to perform a free concert for NHS staff. Because of this distance, people possibly feel like there is nothing they can do to help others and so they don’t bother. This is why I love movements such as “pay it forward” or “random acts of kindness”, which encourage little, achievable gestures towards others which, while only really requiring minimal effort to do, can have a huge impact on the person on the receiving end. I mean, I once spent the last three hours of a shift at work with a huge grin on my face and a spring in my step because some customers (an elderly couple) told me I had a beautiful smile. Working in retail, I tried to make my interaction time with customers as pleasant as possible, which involved generally being polite, making conversation and smiling a lot. Receiving that once compliment made my entire work ethic feel validated in a job where most of the time it felt pointless (people can be quite rude to minimum wage retail workers), and it made my day a million times better. To refer to my earlier point about how people remember you, I will always remember that couple as the lovely people who made me feel so happy when they complimented me at work, whereas I have some people who I will always recognise on the street as people who made me miserable when they were rude to me as customers.

The idea that people remember traits such as kindness more than anything else about you was introduced to me, funnily enough, through Harry Potter. One of the few things Harry is told about his mother, that is repeated constantly throughout the series, is her kindness. In the film of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Remus Lupin tells Harry that his mother was “ an uncommonly kind woman” who had “a way of seeing the beauty in others, even, and perhaps most especially, when that person couldn't see it in themselves.” The series also presents a certain value of kindness, with Dumbledore telling Harry that he is “ unfailingly kind: a trait people never fail to undervalue”, comparing him to his mother. Growing up seeing these kind of traits celebrated in the stories I loved so much, I started to absorb these kinds of values myself. My moral education is ongoing, of course. I am one of those people who spent a lot of time watching YouTubers during my teenage years (and currently into my adult years) and one YouTuber I have continued to be inspired by is Carrie Hope Fletcher (her channel is called ItsWayPastMyBedtime if you want to check it out). She is one of my idols for many different reasons, but the one I want to focus on here is her philosophy that she first talked about in her video “Nice for No Reason”, where she encouraged her audience to carry post-it notes and a pen around and leave nice messages in public places to brighten other people’s days. She often talks about how she tries to be polite and friendly to service staff and strangers, the importance of smiling and the power in a simple act of kindness such as saying “have a nice day” to somebody. Watching her videos from the age of around fourteen, the values she promotes helped to shape my attitudes towards others and inspired me to try to be as kind as she encourages people to be.

Another inspiration I had for aspiring to kindness was my mother. Having grown up in the USA, she has a quite bubbly, outgoing personality compared to the slightly more reserved manner of the typical English person, so I was always very aware of how her behaviour towards others was different – she will just chat and joke with random strangers next to us in a queue or with service staff. I remember asking her why she did this, when I was probably around twelve or thirteen and in that moody hormonal phase where your family’s very existence is embarrassing, and she said “they’re a human being, not just a machine that’s there to serve me”. Her answer stuck with me. I had never really thought about that before. I wasn’t rude to customer service people or anything, I just got away with the bare minimum of communication and then left (in my defence, I was a shy child, but even so I probably should have said thank you more than I did). She made me realise that the bare minimum really isn’t enough, that being a kind person requires putting in that tiny bit of extra effort in your daily interactions with others. I remember once walking around a supermarket with my family when I was quite young and seeing this older teenage girl, probably around seventeen years old, who looked absolutely stunning. I can’t remember exactly what she was wearing, but I remember her entire outfit and her hair and makeup were just beautiful. I really wanted to go up to her and tell her how amazing she looked, but I didn’t because I felt like that would be weird and unappreciated. Looking back on that now, I realise that a lot of people are probably stopped by that fear, which is crazy really because what seventeen-year-old girl would be offended by a ten-year-old coming up to them and telling them they’re beautiful? I feel like the world would be a lot nicer to live in if people said more of the nice things that they thought about others and less of the negative.

A great thing I think we could all try this year is to do something nice for someone every day. It doesn’t have to be something big, simply saying “thank you” and “have a nice day” to the driver as you walk off the bus would be a start. Complimenting people’s outfits is always a nice thing to do, and it doesn’t mean you have to lie, if you don’t like someone’s outfit don’t say you do, but you are very unlikely to legitimately think that everybody around you is dressed poorly. Just make someone smile. It’s not difficult, it doesn’t put you out in any way. It can only be a positive thing.

Make someone smile today.

Until next time, folks!

[elizabethrobertajones]

Ha! Sorry , yeah I forgot to put in Cas's name (and it's coming from a LOT of Cas fans in a "I get why they're happier to see their mum- just as someone without blood relations it makes me super sad to see people act this way about bio parents- same reason I can't watch Once Upon a Time which is super gross about that)

Aah, I get you >.> Yeah, I understand now. But I haven’t been on my dash at all so I have no idea what people are saying about this or how they have been interpreting it. I’m so far behind despite it being like 2 days since the episode I’m still in the fresh eyes episode reaction phase >.> I’d like to know what people are saying before, like, the next episode, but I suppose I can offer my perspective without any idea what everyone else is saying about this :P 

To my eyes I didn’t think they were “happier” to see their Mom - they called Cas and Mary came too and they didn’t have an expectation she’d be there. Using Sam as a control group because Dean is definitely acting weirder in that scene, Sam just sort of stumbles on both of their other immediate family in the wood and glomps onto both of them. 

I have read a fair amount of meta now suggesting Dean’s weirdness about Mary being there was because he hadn’t expected her and the whole deal thing - which we don’t know the terms of yet when they see her for the first time - being a real problem. Now I rewatch it Dean definitely seems much shiftier about it all so I read HIS reaction to seeing Mary as not letting go of Cas and rushing off to her because he cares more to see her, but he is distracted by her presence because he hadn’t counted on it.

(It all relies on Cas and Mary bonding while Sam n Dean are locked up - I don’t think they knew really that Cas and Mary had been as close as they were even before they both split off on their own things, because they talked alone at night. Mary IS Cas’s emergency contact and that should be fairly obvious but Dean made a point of calling Cas and only Cas over and over when they got out so his behaviour excludes Mary and remembering 12x06 I think he would have feared exactly what nearly happened, involving her in the deal even if he couldn’t have been sure the terms covered her, Winchesters tend to sacrifice for each other and the last time they saw her her vulnerability there was emphasised.)

Buuut the camera from Cas’s perspective tells us he’s THINKING Sam and Dean are prioritising Mary, so that’s a valid thing to discuss, but I do think Cas’s self esteem was literally the subplot of the episode for him, so his judgement on these matters is impaired - 12x03 with the conversation about belonging is so important and he thinks Mary belongs (and she assumes he does), but when Cas sees something like Sam and Dean rushing to hug Mary, despite how we see how happy they are to see him, he can’t process it properly; we’re getting Cas’s perspective but it’s only a perspective. So I think Cas is actually feeling what you are about the sad and isolating feeling of blood family winning over found family (as he expressed in 12x03 about Mary belonging just because she was their mom) and he feels like he’s seeing it in action there.

But the show has ALWAYS stressed these messages about what blood is and how that includes people who aren’t literally blood at all (and in Cas’s case are angel grace instead of blood :P)… Crowley’s one thing in the episode was to remind us how he cares (even though he says he doesn’t) and Dean gave him the family don’t end in blood (or begin there) speech about HIS newly discovered Mom back in 10x17, which is now pretty eerie. It looks like we’re coming up to conflict about Mary in 12x12, and her choices, and while I think there’s a very very low chance the Winchesters disown her, I do think the actual bonds of closeness between them all need to be really forged in fire through all the stupid decision making Winchesters do :P I just watched the end of season 6 yesterday, and Cas making all his stupid decisions, and Dean saying he considered Cas family to try and talk him out of it… The knock on effect of that long down the line when Dean and Cas reconcile, is a bond that’s far stronger than it was before, because it’s come through all that pain into forgiveness. 

And not to say Mary isn’t important to them because although she hasn’t been in their lives, the comparison to Rowena is obviously nothing like how Mary was to her sons when she was alive and they were small… The tragedy aspect of her dying changes the way in which she wasn’t there for them and how they relate to that… It’s an emotional stake they have in each other that people literally can’t have in real life so the melodrama attached is very heightened and weird… Anyway, the way Mary has been written in the past, to go right back to episodes like Home, shows a huge sacrifice and love for her sons, so though she hasn’t had many chances in the narrative, their one encounter with the “real” her in the whole story before season 12, she did one of the big Winchester sacrifice plays out of love for them, so though she doesn’t remember it, in a way I would suppose to them it seems like she has been tested and her true self demonstrated to them in a way that would make them very happy to accept Mary as-is, as both blood and someone who would earn their total respect and trust, even taking the tragedy and subsequent canonisation of Mary aspect out of it.

Buuut yeah while Mary has been this constant presence in the show, Cas HAS physically shown up for them more… I don’t wanna get into points scoring or saying who is more deserving because they both have very different relationships to the brothers, and they have been put in the narrative in a neat sort of parallel to each other walking a similar path but with their own baggage, and the direct parallel in 12x03 of how they felt about belonging started this off. The narrative is therefore treating them as equals both needing to come to the same place and feel the same way in SOME ways, about belonging and finding a family (and they’re doing it with each other as well as bonding with Sam and Dean which is great because the family dynamic will work best with all 4 of them sharing love in all directions)… But it all needs to be tailored to the ways they’re approaching it. To take that 10x17 speech again, Cas is “family don’t end in blood” and Mary is “but it doesn’t start there either” and they’re working through those two extreme opposite ends of the mantra side by side, so in moments like this, it’s demonstrating where we’re at with this. (Mary seems to find some belonging but now is desperate to protect her family even more; Cas’s actions not just here but in the speech after killing Billie, clearly paint him as an outsider looking in, and admiring “the Winchesters” while not feeling like a part of the family unit - the three standing together and him addressing them)… This is not the end of this arc by a long shot, so while Sam and Dean are relatively stable and when it comes to THEIR relationship absolutely a fluid duo who move and think together (have they EVER been this good?) Cas and Mary have been thrust to extreme ends of their approach to belonging right now… 

So I think to compare them by how much history they have with the Winchesters is a bit one-sided whichever character you are favouring, because these stories are parallel lines on the same emotional quest, and you need to consider both to understand the other. I don’t think it’s really a competition for family? Cas’s found family side is equally a valid part as Mary’s blood relationship but to reconcile both to the core family unit has to deal with the issues of both, which from Cas’s perspective is Mary having less history but easier acceptance into the family and from Mary’s perspective is reconciling being in this family by blood with properly feeling herself as part of the family unit with the same bonds that the forged in fire found family relationships have - in 12x03 her problem is she’s feeling like an outsider because “her” family is babies and married to John, not two gruff hunters and their angel. She HAS the blood connection and it seems to give her an “in” but she’s struggling so much with what is “more” than that. 

… I hope this rambling makes any sense and maybe makes you feel better about whatever’s going on here. I definitely don’t think the show is betraying its age old mottos about family that I assume would make it so appealing when you have a lot of found family. 

[thecoroutfitters]

The Personal Research study Animation Coursework

This homework document appeared to be undertaken to learn and examine character acting in computer animation, and the different methods used to express feeling and way of thinking. The post is focused all around how some sort of audience is actually influenced by just techniques with character representing, and what things contribute to its believability. Analysis of various novels, articles and also online methods have been ventured to aid the main analysis together with conclusion.

The research researched, shows that thought process have got to occur prior to an action comes together by the charm. Developing a charm with responsiveness through their very own emotions aids the audience relate to them all, contributing to the richer, a tad bit more believable outcome. Various approaches are used to communicate thought process along with emotion, nonetheless discovery has resulted in the knowning that body language might be just as expressive without debate. Internal spirit is best portrayed through a people eye actions in conjunction with body gesture.

Intro to probiotics benefits

The essence this analysis document would be to gain the deeper expertise and knowledge of how drama methods in character spirits can be utilised and articulated to express emotional baggage through the showcase of inside thought steps in a character. This research will look into the methods used by animators to produce the ‘illusion of life’ and discover the best way it can become believable and engaging for those audience.homework helper

“Acting is defined as the ability of practise about representing a character on a time or in advance of cameras and also derives from your Latin word ‘agere’, indicating to do… an out of date meaning for those word performing is living. ” (John Kundert-Gibbs, 2009, p4)

Analysis will be utilized on specific ways of real/stage performing to develop an understanding of acting in character animation.

Background towards Research

“Animate instant verb /annimayt/ 1 . bring to life or activity. a couple of give (a film or character) seen movement by using animation.

coordinating conjunction /annimt/ to life; having daily life.

Derives, animator noun.

Source, Latin animare, from espiritu ‘life, soul’. ” (Oxford English Dictionary)

Animation is actually thought to get originated above 35, 000 years ago, as soon as the discovery regarding ancient retaining wall paintings around places just like Altamira and also Lascaux; which inturn depicted a variety of humans, materials and critters as Richard Williams (2001, p13) makes clear, sometimes utilizing four twos of hip and legs to show actions. In the early on 1800’s, Williams shows (2001, p14-15) there were many different tools developed for your sole aim of creating some sort of illusion of motion such as the Thaumatrope, the Phenakistoscope, the Zoetrope, the Paxinoscope and the Flipper book. All of these devices were based on the rediscovery, in 1824, of ‘The persistence for vision’ by simply Peter Tag Roget. The essential of this breaks,

“…on the truth that our vision temporarily offer the image associated with anything they’ve just viewed. ” (Williams, 2001, p13)

In 1896, this sparked the interest associated with Thomas Edison, who finished up publicly relieving a combination of blueprints, drawn by means of James Stuart Blackton, in succession, one after another, continually called ‘Humorous Phases for Funny Faces’.

Since then, we have seen a variety of approaches to the very genre connected with animation. Together with the rise of Disney animation studios, throughout 1928, ‘Steamboat Willie’ had been introduced having synchronised perfectly a new personality, Mickey Mouse. Just by 1936, ‘Snow White and then the Seven Dwarfs’ was released which often received impressive success. It was the starting point of the ‘Golden Age’ associated with animation that had been shortly accompanied by the popular Disney titles: Pinocchio, Dumbo, Bambi and Fantasia.

It was not until December, 1995 this Toy Narrative, the first full-length computer super-hero film was released by Pixar Animation Broadcasters. This sparked another completely new era associated with animation. Ateliers like Dreamworks and Glowing blue Sky in the near future followed.

Acting in sprightliness has been obtained as the important thing for developing believability in an animated string,

“But to build these styles work, the very movements needs to be believable — which leads back in realism… The devices we want to attain isn’t realism, it’s believability. ” (Williams, 2001, delaware. 34)

All of animated performing is designed to provide a character individuality and believability. Just like around stage appearing. Doron Meir (2008) makes clear that believable acting is caused by the customers feeling the character’s things of some inner ulterior motives. Williams (2001) notes this animation ideas that were created Disney Ateliers very early, are still being utilized today in every types of spirits to bring roles to life.

Research Query

How are emotions along with internal considered processes depicted through procedures of drama in individuality animation to generate characters believable and engaging on the audience?

Survey regarding Literature & Works

Acting is definitely an broad subject matter, and can be utilized on many different types of appearing for step and surveillance camera. Animation has brought a direct affect by the strategies and finds on how to portray a character with movement. Because of this , ‘To the particular Actor: Around the Technique of Acting’ by Meters Chekhov is a perfect choice of which links directly to acting. Chekhov is notoriously known for her in-depth appearing methods, and features stood as an iconic educator for widely known actors presently. Chekhov reflects on the methods which is used to call up feelings, develop people and tone awareness as an actor. Every one of things help to develop specified ‘Psychological Gestures’ that he stated within the e-book, that demonstrate audience exactly what character is wanting to express via body language, which is the key to some character’s believability in an animated sequence.

To obtain a more precise understanding of ways characters move, and the principles surrounding charm animation being an art, ‘The Animators Medical Guide’ just by Richard Williams is an thorough manual around the style and techniques associated with hand-drawn animation. Containing the precise principles searched by animators to get believable activity.

“Williams have been one of the legitimate innovators, and also serves as a traffic between the glowing age of movement by hand and also new personal pc animation successes. ” (Williams, 2001, blurb)

Everything during this book pertains to the overall goal of producing a persona that techniques in a believable way. Representing relies on these types of techniques that can be shown through drawing tips to consider frame by frame computer animation. By taking on these skills, animators are usually taught to hit the books the information of the body to further discover how to produce thriving animated personas.

The evaluation of how heroes display passion needs to be factored in throughout the following research. ‘Acting for Animators’ by Edward Hooks describes the thouroughly tested methods around acting that reflect personality and experiencing within a nature. This ebook takes us through Hook’s lessons at acting as well as the theoretical tactic behind the techniques. Agreement occurs a lot in this reserve, answering the need to create personalities with emotion, for the target audience to empathise with.

Examination into identity movement as well as acting just by example permits the breakthrough of solutions used in common film. ‘Acting in Animation: A Look at fjorton Films’ is usually a second book by Ed Hooks, exactly where he examen twelve distinct animated video clips, going through segment by segment, describing the main expressive and even emotive methods used in each and every scene. Directed by all these film cases, the procedures discovered via research, may be firmly a suitable.

Theoretical Approach for Selecting Data

Data will likely be collected, analysed and showcased from a assortment of published legitimate sources which includes: books, article content, web article content, web and truck sites and group meetings. All information and crucial information will probably be collected when considering research, but will not all be related to the main analysis with animation. Drama technique as well as method is definitely the main subject matter source of researching, which will give a broader background ? backdrop ? setting to basic opinions, strategies and opinions discovered in second literature causes by other individuals in the industry. Novels sources that contains examples of proved practise to be used to further put in force the topic of research.

Explanation of Suggested Practise

By a long discovery and even analysis on the subject of character representing in computer animation, I propose to produce not less than six helpful and doable artefacts which will reflect the data gained with this analysis document, that will provide deeper understanding about how precisely emotion enables an customers to empathise with an cartoon character. The preliminary style practise would include the development of crucial character stances to emphasise specified emotions right influenced simply by an internal thought process. This will then simply indicate how a character will be developed additionally into a regarding believable birth sequences. Each artefact options to possess one of the six to eight basic sentiments, as stated just by Ed These sharp “claws”,

“…happiness, amazement, fear, fury, disgust as well as sadness…” (2000, p. 36)

Characters made use of will be developed and rigged by a legitimate source, that could provide a effortless, easy to use marionette for the purpose of sprightliness. Dialogue is definitely not used, since this may endure as a thoughts from the emotional baggage that are aimed to be stated through body gesture and face treatment expressions. All these artefacts will cover a clearer understanding of unconscious body routines that are normally overlooked.

Discussion

Character sprightliness can take lots of forms with the context associated with animation both in the traditional feel as well as in present day computer movement.

“The using principles have been developed plus named:

– Squash and even Stretch… charge cards Timing and even Motion… a few. Anticipation… 3. Staging… 5 various. Follow Through together with Overlapping… 4. Straight Ahead Activity and Pose-to-Pose… 7. Sluggish In and Out… 8. Arcs… 9. Exaggeration… 12. Secondary Action… 11. Appeal…Personality in identity animation is definitely the goal of all of the above. ” (John Lasseter, 1987, pp. 35-44, twenty one: 4)

Lasseter explains that these specific typical animation key points and methods developed while in the 1930’s by way of Walt Disney Studios must be incorporated in to all super-hero media “…especially character animation…” to develop figures look to cause them to become “…more practical and entertaining” (Lasseter, 1987, pp. 35-44)

Richard Williams explains,

“The old information applies to any type of approach to the particular medium no matter the advances throughout technology. ” (2001, l. 20)

That shows that flourishing, believable toon of all forms have spawned the creation of on the structure and determine of these standard principles together with techniques. Rich Williams also tells us in which, in relation to ‘classical’ and laptop animation,

“Both share the exact same problems showing how to give a new performance by using movement, bodyweight, timing and even empathy. ” (2001, v. 20)

This specific underlines a key point into the breakthroughs of systems in computer animation, showing this 3D animation software plans only behave as a technique of animating but not an easier way to help influence believable movement.

Lasseter explains,

“To make a character’s personality seem to be real in an audience, she must be different than the other characters on the tv screen. A simple way to tell apart the celebrities of your characters is by contrast of movement. No 2 characters would definitely do the similar action just like. ” (1994)

Creating a different character, produces its character. John Kricfalusi (2006) reminisced of how he or she got drawn in by Toss Jones’ characters, noticing the original expressions this individual drew. Exclusively as an example, the manner in which he takes in two whites of the vision joined together, one larger than the other in order to create a “D-uh” expression.

You observe that characteristics is very important while introducing character to a figure, Chekhov (1953, p. 83) explains with regards to characterisation, that particular features native to a character; like a regular movement, types of speech, continual habit, odd way of jogging and so on, discloses the ‘finishing touches’ to the character. Roles become more still living and more individuals with this compact feature. These sharp “claws” (2000, g. 36) clarifies, “When we tend to speak of causing the illusion with life for animation, that boils down not to gestures and naturalistic movement, but for emotion”. Tow hooks continues to suggest that theoretically engaging, emotion would be the essential portion of acting because the point with empathy for any audience. Hooks,

“Empathy is often as essential to way acting simply because oxygen will be to water. ” (2000, delaware. 9)

Personalities of all grammar, in an attempt to cause them to become believable to the audience, should have a particular temperament. The market needs to be direct affected by some sort of character’s on-screen emotion, to actually feel a sense of empathy. With out, the target audience will lose interest easily along with the objectives in the storyline will be able to diminish.

Hooks (2000, delaware. 41), proves Charlie Chaplin as one of the nearly all influential comedians that put to use a great deal of sympathy in his do the job to touch the audiences’ inner thoughts. He makes clear that the innovation in the form of performer has already established a huge effect on the associated with comics plus animation. Like Chuck Andrews has said

“I admire Chaplin very much when you could find him imagine, and prepare, and you taken care of him. ” (Hooks, 2000, p. 40)

Chaplin’s different relationship considering the audience seems to have seen a superb influence in character cartoon from the beginning associated with Walt Disney’s profession. Prick Huemer (Hooks, 2000, delaware. 40), Disney storyman, informs us Walt had an image associated with Mickey Mouse to be a little Chaplin.

In order to correctly accomplish accord within a nature, there must be elements of personality to goad ? prod ? sting emotions. These kinds of can be made through uncomplicated recurring mannerisms that correspond with the character’s thoughts and even actions. In each and every respect, typically the audience has to be the main determine when making a decision a character’s actions.

Hooks states individuals express six basic feelings,

“…happiness, amazement, fear, anger, disgust as well as sadness…” (2000, p. 36)

He also tells us that there are disagreement about whether facial foundation expression can be primarily a reflection of the intrinsic emotional express, or when it’s simply a cultural ‘display’. Hook varieties concludes it could be whether, depending on the situation. Emotion can be expressed through both cosmetic expression and even body language, although influence of each one method could be different. Williams (2001, r. 324) believes that sayings should be saved to a smallest and as a good animator, help to make everything as clear as possible through mimodrame using only the bodies cells to tell situation. The routines of the shape are thought in regards to lot more by animators than real characters, as computer animators have to ‘create’ it and not just ‘do’ this, although the external expressive nature of inner thoughts are indistinguishable. Different types of sensations can be shown easily like Chekhov programs,

“…grasping or perhaps catching (greed, avarice, cupidity, miserliness)… roughly with hands turned earthward… lusts to overpower, for getting. ” (1953, p. 67)

Equally, Chekhov (1953, r. 73) stated here which in order to build your personalities expressive design, hands in addition to arms should really act first for example; possession up near to the chin conveys unavoidability plus loneliness, palms turned outwards displays self-defense, self-protection and bit of an humour is normally evoked as soon as bending three middle fingertips of each hand. Hooks says,

“The the reality is that our hands and wrists and fists are the almost all expressive parts of our bodies”. (2000, delaware. 60)

A sample to this, These sharp “claws” demonstrates,

“Arms folded over the chest indicate that the man or women is ‘closed’, intractable… When you are embarrassed, one tend to reduce in spot. ” (2000, p. 62)

This explains that many body gesture patterns with human stats are emphasised through the movement of arms and arms. Williams (2001, p. 324) explains a method called ‘Twinning’ where arms and hands and fingers are doing it same thing, symmetrically. He will teach that this is used to show expert by preachers, leaders, political figures and so forth. Kevan Shorey confirms that,

“Symmetry is a good manner of adding drive to an measures to get a way! ” (2008)

Both animators, believe that twinning should be separated to avoid an exact mirror image of actions that would generate unbelievable information to the crowd. Jeff Lew (2004) points out that to make twinning spirits look better, the perspective of shot should be changed to make sure they don’t yourself look identical at a specific camera approach.

Walt Disney in 1930s found that will expression will work when the body is required and not only the eye,

“Movement takes place in the area of your company navel and also radiates outwards into your arms or legs. ” (Hooks, 2000, k. 60)

Jon Kricfalusi (2006) explains which animators include evolved a method that has become a great deal more stagy rather than live steps by examining characters’ thoughts through body gestures and creates. Evidentially, face treatment expressions are not enough in order to provoke a meaningful experiencing, and that the entire body needs to be articulating through palm gestures and even arm routines to match facial tour, to achieve the believable feelings through a nature.

In an case study from Gadget Story couple of, Hooks information,

“She (Jessie) doesn’t just greet Woody enthusiastically, the lady turns the pup over and presents him nuggies! She throws him in this manner and that. Her emotion is definitely leading the to animatedly celebrate. ” (2005, v. 90)

That is the specific example of how beahvior is reflecting emotion properly. If this same exact bit of working was served on the level, or facing a digicam with authentic actors rapid it would employ a different final result. The feeling may be identical, but other ways of emphasising actions applied to animation is normally through hyperbole. Shawn Kelly (2009) notifies us that he or she was trained to exceed something beyond it should be, after that double it. Exaggeration is one of the original animation principles. Lasseter (1987, pp. 35-44, 21 years old: 4) hints exaggeration associated with characters by way of the animator ought to be very carefully elected. If there is some sort of distortion it could actually result in a great unrealistic glimpse.

Looking back much early, to 1927, the classic movie “Sunrise: Some Song involving Two Humans” was released. Without the need of synchronised debate, films from this era were forced to rely on typically the character’s acting and the practice compositions when the two major elements in the story.

“Sunrise is considered among the finest shows of the tranquil era, along with Janet’s Gaynor’s performance is certainly one its biggest virtues… Your girlfriend supple experience and soulful eyes supply a range of imagination and emotional baggage that sites of talk could merely suggest. ” (DeFreitas, 2009)

Later, DeFreitas (2009) informs us that Sunrise became a success of the 1929 ‘Best Picture’ Oscar pertaining to ‘Unique plus Artistic’ Construction. This dvd sets as an evidential example of how working without discussion can have an impact on and empathise with an target audience just as good, if not more which means that.

Often for animation, Lasseter (1987, pp. 35-44) talks about that the observation can easily acquire when the movement of a character seems to kick the bucket, which can find as wanting particularly bogus and remarkable. To overwhelmed this lack of motion, Lasseter uses a ‘moving hold’ instant which is a technique used that continues the motions of a system part immediately after an action. This unique breaks up the main animation in addition to results in a new smoother and more believable pattern. Preston Blair (Hooks, 2001, p. 60), states make fish an actor must not pause without having a specific factor, and when any pause happens, it should be established for long enough so the target market can sign-up it. However these are both techniques that employ the customers into what character is acting away.

Before some movement of any organize can occur, notion processes will need to become evident through the personality. Hooks strains,

“Thinking tends to lead to data; emotion is likely to lead to steps. ” (2000, p. 1)

Hooks uses a spirit as a procedure in finding out about a finish. Lasseter (1994) mentions that many movement associated with a particular character must really exist for a rationale, and, in the end, develop thoughts in a charm through their valuable thought processes. As an remark, before a runner being positions his overall body into action, a way of thinking must happen. In toon, this spirit must be proven to the audience to show you believability of the action that features just been recently revealed. To teach a way of thinking in a character, Disney animator/teacher Eric Larson shows an approach, in Frank Thomas and even Ollie Johnson’s ‘Illusion involving Life’,

“The subject slowly lowered his particular brows into a frown aid paused rapid and then increased one brow and glanced to the side, one immediately might sense a big change from one consideration to another…” (Richard Williams, 2001, p. 320)

This action was initially discovered in the event the first Mickey Mouse shorts ended uphad been created, along with stands as being a key element straight into how switch of reflection can mirror a important thought process. Shawn Kelly (2009) expresses her ideas, telling you that there isn’t anything more essential than showing a character’s thought process and even changes of which occur in it to help provoke sentiments and tactics. It is down to these considered processes, this individual concludes, which drives almost everything we perform. Looking at figure animation on Toy Storyline 2, Tow hooks (2005, k. 87) makes clear how Woody’s realisation that Andy moved to camp out without the pup, leads him to the express despair (emotion) which in turn leads the pup to withdraw to the back spots, out of view. He includes that,

“The more specific the character’s thought process, so much the better the performance”. (2005, p. 87)

Way of thinking in personality animation, as stated, is very important meant for believability. It has been true for countless years since the beginning of Disney’s ‘Golden Age’ in spirits. Walt Disney said,

“In most occasions, the power behind the main action certainly is the mood, the very personality, the attitude in the character-or all three. Therefore , to get is the flier. We think associated with things prior to the body should them. ” (Lasseter, 1987, pp. 35-44, 21: 4)

It is widely agreed this thought process is an essential building block to be perfected together with shown effectively in any animated character. Charge Tytla (Hooks, 2005, l. 3), figured “the advertise is a a reaction to something”. Barbs refers to Aristotle,

“Aristotle observed this in the form of unity regarding action instant small activities that lead to more substantial action, or maybe objective. This specific simple rule lies with the base of most acting way of thinking. An action without getting a thought is normally impossible, along with action lacking objective is simply mechanical factor, moving parts of the body. ” (Hooks, 2005, s. 4-5)

Aristotle finds the fact that thought process on the character stands between a character through ‘life’ to a robotic, dull machine.

Many tools earlier, Joshua Larson’s a technique of showing a thought process inside a character is quite believable. And specifically, because of discovered that the exact eyes are the key parts of the character to express plus emphasis all these thoughts. Williams (2001, p. 325) states on how often the eyes are the focal point that individuals watch inside of a character. As an example, he notes,

“When jamming on the phone typically the eyes flicker around in a very Staccato manner reflecting the main listener’s moving thoughts on reaction the eyes are almost never still. ” (2001, g. 326)

The very eyes, the exact driving force guiding a character’s actions. Kelly agrees of which decisions will be reflected successfully with the eye,

“They can very often dart their sight around a tiny bit as they look at and think about their possibilities. It’s basically as if they’re reading any imaginary directory possible choices! ” (2009)

Lasseter (1987), explains which will eyes head before the steps, and that the only time they wouldn’t business lead, would be if there was an external force behaving upon the smoothness. He describes further, which the trick in order to showing way of thinking through the eye of a nature is with anticipation. The view should switch first, pursued by the head and the rest of the body.

“The sight of a personality are the home windows to it’s thoughts; the very character’s ideas are carried through the actions of their eyes. ” (Lasseter, 1987)

As well as eyesight movements, typically the timing plus speed associated with a character’s blinks can also affect the outcome of exactly what is portrayed being a thought process. Kelly (2009), details that unique blinks usually provide up some of our different perceptions of what exactly are the character is normally thinking.

“A ton connected with blinks may feel as though the type is going to weep, is worried, uncomfortable, scared, or possibly treated after a major build up; even while very little to no pulsating will sometimes feel dispatched, stoned uneasy, angry, or just very strong. ” (Kelly, 2009)

Kelly teaches that blinks really should be there for one reason to increase enhance an actual emotion. Prior to an tegnefilmstegner can even commence to animate a unique thought process, they want to know about the smoothness to be able to find out what they would end up being feeling for a certain point in time, in an attempt to achieve believable results.

The most important first step toward believable persona acting will start with figuring out about a distinct character. Williams states,

“Got to get into the character. Facing he/she/it intend? and even more intriguing – why does the character want to buy? ” (2001, p. 20)

To develop the understanding of how character will be thinking, and in order to provoke feeling in a nature, these questions need to be posed. Ed Hooks also describes to you and me that,

“Every character in a very scene are able to answer often the question. ‘What am I performing? ’ instant in a theatrical sense. To put it differently, what actions am I performing in pursuit of just what objective? And what is the obstacle/conflict? ” (2005, p. 89)

Just like this particular, in the wording of drama for an visitors, Michael Chekhov suggests to,

“Ask by yourself what the primary desires belonging to the character may be” (1953, p. 67)

This approach sinks the landscape for any individuality in order to discover exactly what the characters style is trying for you to portray in what they are considering or executing. Hooks information,

“If you would like to understand what a personality is emotion, it is best to alternative asking what character is certainly thinking and exactly his cost system is. ” (2000, delaware. 2)

To grasp how a identity must relocate, the tegnefilmstegner needs to have the atmosphere and even influence with the obstacle the fact that the character has been confronted with. Merely then can a thought process occur, as well as a feeling be evoked using a specific circumstances or clash. Jeff Lew (2004), conveys his applying for grants the development of any character’s biography before learning how a persona will reply in any cartoon scene. The develops additionally understanding of some sort of character’s track record that could be essential in impacting on the way most of their emotions happen to be expressed.

This unique evidence displays us that we now have a lot of characteristics contributing to having a character’s developmental state and to make it believable to the audience. To develop the understanding of a character and what they are really thinking, Impotence problems Hooks relies on a definition created by Erika Chekhov known as “Psychological Gesture”, which, Chekhov explains because the psychology of any character formulated with thoughts, emotions and a man free will certainly which is shown physically by external sentiments, thoughts in addition to desires. Hooks gives the illustration,

“Have anyone ever discovered someone who wrings his hands and wrists a lot while he’s speaking? … A new Bully your punches someone within the chest along with finger. That is the psychological motion. ” (2000, p. 66)

A brain gesture is an internal spirit, manifesting per se into a action to show an feelings. Chekhov gives you an drama example,

“The qualities which in turn fill along with permeate each muscle of the entire body, will probably provoke inside of you sensations of hatred and repugnance. ” (1953, p. 64)

The above, is very similar to the way animators process the cutting-edge of a character’s psychological posture by calling up concepts of how ideas can effect the emotional baggage that are exhibited.

Answer

Individuality animation, inside the traditional plus computer moderate, rely intensely on the genuine animation concepts that were identified by Disney Studios. This specific emphasises the way in which improvements in 3D animated software are employed as merely as a product for the development of sprightliness, and does not confidence the computer for making things appear believable on it’s own.

Analysis has shown us that behaving techniques in movement are almost identical to stage and also film drama. It is the hyperbole of beahvior and the capacity adapt a character in special detail the fact that sets it again apart.

It happens to be evident that the emotional assert of a persona is a direct influence associated with it’s way of thinking. Thought process is usually best stated through gesture to enhance the emotion. This unique research has produce discover that eyesight movements are among the focal points this enhance a good characters thought. Emotions need to be manifested within an external, external body action, however slight, in order to employ an customers.

The conclusion for the discussion has demonstrated that designing empathy as a result of expressing a great emotion, is the key element meant for engaging any kind of audience. Any character’s believability is successful when an target market can relate with it in some way or another. This is done by giving an character a good personality by mannerisms plus specific nonverbal communication.

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