#Maslow but apocalyptic

[chargetheintruder]

Things you need to know, before society ends.

I had originally planned something else for today.  A whole lot of it actually.  More tactics and the like to get my neighbors in the USA to actually care and VOTE this coming Tuesday.  Obviously I didn’t make it because my health has been disruptive--keeping me from getting proper sleep and interfering with other basics like keeping food in my body.  So be it, I will get to what I can tomorrow, or later today (Monday) actually.

Be that as it may . . . I’ve been watching some Emergency Alert Service fiction, analog horror things.  The “Alert World” channel is good for casuals on Youtube, and I found something called the Atlas Foundation, which is good too.  And something’s occurred to me.

Whether we win this particular Election Day or not, whether Democrats can hold on to Congress and/or Governor’s Offices or not, the truth of the matter is, good, decent people, even a majority, can only hold out against Everything for so long.  I’m not talking about the alt-right here.  I am talking about everything else: climate change, the possible end of technological advancement, the possible rise of A.I. and algorithms, overpopulation, Peak Water, the possibility of non-friendly alien contact (by extra-terrestrials, from outside of our solar system).  We have LOTS of problems here on Earth and politics as such can only address a few of them, and even then it can end up being in the lame, “too little too late” sense of the addressing of it.

What I’m saying is, nobody’s ever had to solve for everything ever, in human history.  It might not be possible.  We can do everything right and society as we know it might still collapse.  So here are five things to consider before society ends.

1--Make more than one plan.  It’s that simple, and that hard.  Some situations might want to make you check out and not live through them, but that doesn’t let you off the hook for everything.  Make a few specific plans for a) things you can handle, or survive, b) things you can overcome, or actually change for the better, and c) things that really are a “nope, I’m absolutely fucked, bye now” scenario.

2--Learn who your enemies really are, and get ready to KILL them as needed.  This should be a small and specific list, that you only have to use as a last resort.  If it’s your first option and the list is huge OR vague, consider that you might be the problem, or one of them.

3--Consider being absolutely and relentlessly KIND to everyone who is not a dedicated foe or enemy.  Not just polite or nice.  Be ready to show up and help others.  Be ready to care for others and to walk with, or if need be to walk under and CARRY others until they can stand on their own.  Understand that while some selfishness is needed for you to survive, pure selfishness alone is going to poison your mind.  Don’t bury more people than you need to.  Reach out to who you can, when you can.  When there is no society, BE social, and BE society.

4--Set aside time to be alive, while you can, while society persists still.  Get OFF the internet for a few hours.  Get out in some sunlight if you can.  Feel some rain or snow touch you if you can’t.  Pick a flower if you want to.  Call your friends or family--talk with your people.  Tell them you love them if you can.  If you can cook outdoors on a grill, do so.  If you can head to the beach, go for it.  Buy the little thing you’ve always put off getting, that you’ve wanted.  Finish reading, or writing, that book of yours.

Make some time to do things that feel GOOD while you can do that still.  There will always be plenty of time to suffer later once society isn’t a thing any more.

5--Not all endings happen instantly.  That needs to be said  How many people here actually HAVE resumed a) going to the library, b) going out to see a movie at a theater, c) going out to eat at a restaurant, dine-in, d) actually going out to a party with friends and crowds, and/or e) going out to a shopping mall (if you have access to one that’s still active and in business)?  Post-pandemic, how many social errands and outings have you lost?  If you still have family and/or children with you, how much of THEIR social life is either gone or not happening in the first place, thanks to pandemics?

Societies aren’t at risk of collapse, usually, over one big sudden thing.  Instead they die slowly as functions die and drop off, one by one as the places where you live and the places where you go become defunct and fade away and/or get outright taken away from you by so-called “progress” from out-of-state, corporate landlords newly come to town.  The death by a thousand cuts usually IS slow, always proceeds ONE loss at a time.

Prepare accordingly.  Note your losses and replace what you can.  Or you know, raise hell as you mourn the losses you can’t replace.

What I’m saying in all of this is: the end of society doesn’t change the fact that you’re a human being.  Sure, prepare and have food, water, shelter and weapons ready.  But beyond that, understand that you will need more as a thinking being.  Spending your whole life just surviving doesn’t make you the best--it just means you’re as good at being dirt-poor and miserable as everyone else surviving the shit-show.  Doing better means doing more than the least.

And if nothing else?  Thank you kindly for your time and patience.

[stevensaus]

Stages Of Grief At The Brink Of The Apocalypse

All the content warnings for climate change, nihilism, and existential dread. All of them. This is a unique time for humanity. It is not the apocalyptic sentiment. There are literally dozens of predicted apocalypses in the various Christian traditions alone, and there's recorded warnings of the ending of the world going back to 2800 BCE. What is unique is that for the first time in human history, there's a damn good chance that they're correct. The effects of climate change are larger and worse than expected, happening faster than expected, and in ways that we didn't expect. After several years in Maslow's basement, the entirety of our species finds itself finally unable to ignore the real state of the world. Unable to ignore the onrushing realization of our own mortality. The change in climate -- and weather -- has become large enough that it is inescapably obvious. Suicide rates keep climbing among youth, and it's not difficult to imagine why. Their future has already been destroyed to feed other's greed. Equally obvious are those who have deliberately and intentionally traded human lives and health -- your life and health, your children's life and health -- just so they could get a few more millions, even though they've known the effects of climate change and pollution for decades. They are not nameless, faceless business executives or politicians.

We know who they are. We know, for example, that Shell's Wael Sawan, who, according to Bloomberg {1} "quietly ended the world’s biggest corporate plan to develop carbon offsets, the environmental projects designed to counteract the warming effects of CO2 emissions" in June 2023, just before it was ranked the hottest month on record... before being dethroned only a month later by July's temperatures. Or we could look at Manchin's long history of fighting anything resembling dealing with the climate crisis. There are plenty of examples, stretching back years. These are not nameless and faceless people who chose to enrich themselves at the cost of human lives. They are actual people, who have made actual decisions. Decisions that will bring harm to you, your children. To literally everyone you care about. Finding their names and faces is trivial. It's easy to find the lists of those on the board of directors and executive committees for, say, Shell (1, 2), Exxon (1, 2), BP (1, 2), and Chevron (1, 2). It's easy to find the politicians that have been corrupted and subverted. For example, you can see the top 20 Congressional recipients of oil & gas money during the 2022 election cycle in one nice list. There are charts of lobbying spending of oil & gas companies in the United States during election cycles from 1990 to 2022, by receiving political party. Feature articles lay out which House members, for example, got the most cash from the fossil fuel industry. And we know that fossil fuel companies -- and their individual executives -- were aware of climate change, its effects, and their role in it decades ago. We know that they've actively worked to subvert, delay, and derail work to slow or stop climate change. We know who they have bought off in both state and national capitols. We know their names. We know their faces. We know exactly who has -- and who continues to -- murder thousands of people simply to fatten their wallets. We know exactly who is responsible for every death caused by climate change. They're proud of it. Remember this. The people you're trying to step on, we're everyone you depend on. We're the people who do your laundry and cook your food and serve your dinner. We make your bed. We guard you while you're asleep. We drive the ambulances. We direct your call. We are cooks and taxi drivers and we know everything about you. We process your insurance claims and credit card charges. We control every part of your life. {2} We are the final children of history, raised to believe that we will have a future. But we won't. And we're just learning that fact. Anger is a stage of grief. {1} Full text at https://pastebin.com/raw/sKdGDaY0 {2} From Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk. Yes, I'm aware of the problematic elements of the work. You're missing the point. Featured Image by Marcin from Pixabay Read the full article

[cathygeha]

REVIEW

Acquired by E.S. Tremayne

The X/X Pandemic #1

Dark look at what could happen if a new virus attacked and changed the population gender balance on Earth. A bit dystopian, apocalyptic, and intriguing as there is a dark romance included.

What I Liked: * That it made me think “what if” and then think “how would I cope if I was one of the survivors?” Also, what biological mutation might be out there now…that make this reality?

* Zinnia “Zen” Davis Browning: RN, mother, wife, survivor, had a rough encounter around her second decade  that had a huge impact on her life, strong, has a temper, willing to do what it takes, protective, loves her children, interesting

* Cyan “Cy” Caldwell: military then paramilitary/mercenary after the pandemic, has a sideline that is rather dark but works for him, is drawn to Zen at first and then again when he sees her decades later, intriguing, strong, dark, deadly, force to be reckoned with, but…saw some other sides of him

* The idea of a gender-specific virus and the impact it would have on society…what if all of any gender was impacted not by war, a gender-neutral virus, or played no favorites…and how would it appear

* Zen’s twins impact on her life and how different they were from one another – hope to hear more about them in future books in the series

* That Zen’s husband, Mark, was “exposed” for the person he really was

* That I could see Zen and Cy together and hoped they would find a way forward in the future

* The plot, pacing, setting, and writing – drew me in and made me care

* That there were shades of gray rather than clearcut black and white…even within some of the main characters…some that I want to know more about.

* That Cy’s name took me back to watercolor classes and paintings I created

* Thinking about what I would be willing to do in Zen’s situation and wondering how hard it would be to survive

What I didn’t like: * Who and what I was meant to dislike

* Thinking about how people might change and let their will to survive take over with predatory and self-centered people becoming dominant in a world gone awry…we all have to survive…or usually want to…or so says Maslow

* Wondering what makes a person “good” or “bad” and how some can be both, depending on the situation, or good/bad to one person but not to another…grayscale thoughts abounded

Did I enjoy this book? Yes

Would I read more in this series? Definitely

Thank you to NetGalley and the author for the ARC – This is my honest review.

5 Stars

BLURB

In a world where nine out of every ten females have been taken by a virus, the surviving females scramble to maintain their autonomy—to evade the collectors who have been commissioned by the government to bring in survivors for internment in shelters, and to hide from those who are actively hunting them. Zinnia Zen is determined to keep her children alive in the aftermath of the breakdown of civilization. She was one of the lucky—or unlucky—ones to be immune to the virus, as was her only daughter. When they are captured and separated after years spent in hiding, Zen’s sole purpose is to escape the forced confinement and locate her children. When she commits a desperate act, she is turned out of the shelter, only to come face-to-face with her past. Cyan The pandemic that wrecked life as everyone knew it only made business better for Cy and his teams. When her name bled across the screen in his hand, he didn’t hesitate to take the contract. Of all the women in the world, she had survived. It took him twenty years to find her - she wasn't getting away from him again.

[superrmutant]

James breathes out from beside him; Kendall watches, tilts his head as the faintest contour of smoke slinks twiny from his lips. Watches him decide, “It’s pointless.” Words of history spoken on a cloud of toxins, a memory embracing fumes. Ghosts that shift disturbed.

Kendall’s eyes fall from them, down to the crude designs on James’ torso.

“Isn’t all of it?”

[lindwurm-prince]

im mcfeeling it tonight lads

[allisoooon]

"He's a little softer toward Vanya, but not in any way that does her any favors." can you elaborate on this more? because i agree and i also have mixed feelings about how this relationship is portrayed sometimes by the show and fandom.

Five is not good at the empathy thing, but he…tries. On occasion. Probably only on occasion because he knows he’s not good at it. And he tries with Vanya most often. The specific instance I’m thinking of is when she asks him how the apocalypse happened and he lies to her. You can see the softness in his eyes as he lies. He’s doing it to try to be kind to her. It still turns out to be the exact wrong thing to do. Not his fault--I don’t think he’s equipped to predict that. Luther knows her better and has more practice at this stuff, so he can tell that the last thing Vanya would want would be to be lied to again. This doesn’t mean Five isn’t trying to be kind, it means he’s not very good at it yet.

I object to the idea that Five’s love for his siblings gives him insight into them. I see so many fanfics where he’s the best advisor, where he will do anything to spare any of his siblings any pain, but what we see in the show is a man who is so out of practice with all of this that it’s kind of a massive blind spot. He seems to know it, too. I kind of feel like that could be a major reason he insists on trying to save the world while leaving them out of it as much as possible. He knows he has this handicap, that his attempts to love his siblings come out awkward at the best of times and tend to devolve into arguing half the time, so a saved world is kind of his one chance to show his care in the one way he knows he’s good at: violence!

Kinda puts his statement “I don’t think I’m better than you, Number One, I know I am” in an ironic light. I don’t think he has that much confidence in any of his abilities that aren’t either violence or calculus.

Naturally, we have a want vs. need conflict—the basis of good character development. He wants to save the world for his siblings, but he needs to learn how to be a member of the family again. That’s why he couldn’t be one of the ones to save the world. He was pursuing what he wanted to avoid what he needed. We see this in all of them, but one of the best examples I can think of is Klaus’ drugs vs. actually growing as a person, and later on, his inability to move past Dave. Another great example is Diego avenging Patch vs. being the kind of person she would want him to be. If the world is ever in danger again, I’m guessing Five won’t be able to save it until he stops seeing his siblings as cats to be herded and becomes a fully-cooperating member of the team.

My biggest worry is that he’ll give up trying if he keeps being bad at it. All he needs is practice, but practice is hard work and I’m pretty sure he still thinks the giant mutated cockroaches from the apocalyptic future are going to eat him if he closes his eyes, so it may take time even to get to that level of Maslow’s hierarchy.

Fanfic idea from this: a series of awkward attempts at showing affection from Five (think Ron Swanson giving April a plastic bag full of lipsticks as a get-well gift). His siblings are bewildered until they work out that he’s actually trying to be affectionate to them. Ends with one of them offhandedly thanking him and him trying very, very hard not to show how pleased that makes him.

[dippedanddripped]

While research can help us understand our generation’s new morality and its changed consumption habits, the impact that the Covid-19 crisis will have on how our future looks and feels remains the most unclear. While times of crisis are when clothes seem to matter least, the irony is that fashion has been making itself at home with the idea of apocalypse as an aesthetic for quite some time.

“Survivalism” isn’t a word one normally lumps in with others like “glamour” and “style,” but according to the strategist and writer Lucas Mascatello, the idea of braving a dangerous future is one that has been a central pillar to many trends for quite some time (and will continue to be). Here, he explores the myriad ideas of the apocalyptic aesthetic — from dystopian to utopian — in our past, present, and future.

What Is Survivalism?

“Survivalism is a mentality. More than the daily practice of preparing for some unknown disaster, war, famine, or disease, it’s a complete worldview unto itself. Survivalism is a kind of reasoning that invites paranoia in, hammering your senses for warning signs and cranking your adrenaline into hyper-vigilance. In nature, we see the armored hides of armadillos and the scales of fish as practical choices made by mother nature, tactical choices that create an aesthetic. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs introduced the concept of tiered values, saying that at their most base, people first satisfy physiological needs like food, water, and sleep. These needs are followed by safety needs (security and shelter), then belonging and love, followed by self esteem and, finally, self-actualization. As a luxury market, fashion largely considers this top tier need: How can I achieve my full potential and what does that look like? It’s a far cry from where we started, concerned with security and defense ideas that inform military design and created armored organisms like turtles, serpents, and dinosaurs.”

Thirst for Annihilation

“Thinking about the end of the world is a romantic idea. And similarly, believing that you are living in the end of times is a great way to add meaning to one’s life. Fashion trends such as chest-packs, camouflage, and tactical gear all gesture toward survivalism as an aesthetic, one that feels like a rebelling against the classic luxury object (even if it’s just as expensive). There’s a long menu of world ending possibilities, each inspiring designers, authors and artists to consider what it might look like if the ice caps melted, if an asteroid hit, if locusts wiped out the crops and we were forced to live off of dehydrated proteins. The thirst for annihilation has helped propagate an array of disaster-based looks.”

Cyberpunk and Tech Gibberish

“Dystopia has its own aesthetic, one reaching deep into fetish and counterculture, mashing sex against sexlessness, turning nerds into heroes, and flipping the paradigm. The incel-meets-BDSM style of The Matrix was the brainchild of costumer designer Kym Barrett. And now, violent models dressed in spandex at a Burning Man-style orgy is how we imagine dealing with a hostile future. In Hackers, costume designer Roger Burton created the most everlasting pop-cultural reality for cyberpunk, featuring club kids rollerblading through New York City. This idea of a post-apocalyptic youth culture would later be echoed in the work of Alexander McQueen, in particular his FW99 collection for Givenchy, a collection created for the eve of Y2K that explores the possibility of a post-human type of glamour. Even in the face of disaster, there’s optimism.”

Disaster Chic

“Trend forecasting is about predicting the future, or at least making a bet on outcomes. Yet style is almost always about being ahead of the curve. At a citizen level, many of us want to be first: stockpiling, prepping, or wearing a mask before everyone is else wearing one are different ways of signaling a truth to come that most are too stupid to recognize. Crises are always a surprise, and yet they always feel inevitable in a way that hangs over even the quiet times. And it’s not always as straightforward as Diesel’s famous 2007 ads Diesel-ifying global warming. Brands like Acronym, Maharishi, and Stone Island have made their bread and butter by sexing up survivalism as a type of high tech roleplay. The apocalypse is stylish because it communicates pessimism, irony, and indifference — like being a smoker or drinking hard because we’re all going to die anyway. Rather than the classic outsider stance of ‘Fuck the World,’ it’s infinitely cooler to say, ‘The World is Fucked.'”

The Dirty Future

“If you zoom ahead 20 years, it is very unlikely that we will all be Errolson Hugh-style cyber ninjas. For while the future is generally tied to the idea of progress — the notion that things develop over time in some cumulative type of way — the unfortunate thing is that beings tend to decay. Colossal world events create the kind of disruption that upends progress, causing fissures and deltas in place of what was once stable. Films such as Mad Max show a world filled with skin rash, poverty, and violence. Kanye West’s first Yeezy Season collections (despite their flaws) were an example of embracing this kind of back to roots, spartan future. Martin Margiela’s first runway show on a playground in Paris’ 20th arrondissement was arguably the first to propose this dirty future in the context of fashion, an idea that began as something romantic and would later spin out into heroin chic. The idea of fashion role-playing destitution is so seminal that it plays a central role in the most famous fashion parody of all time, Zoolander, whose creative director villain Mugatu is planning a homelessness-inspired runway show called ‘Derelicte.'”

Hypothetical Optimism

“Having spent considerable resources imagining the apocalyptic future in its various manifestations, generations of designers and thinkers have proposed speculative solutions that point toward an apocalyptic brand of optimism. Geniuses like Issey Miyake explored survivalism as a pure function through conceptual brands like Final Home and APOC — both dedicated to innovating adaptive solutions for the barren earth to come. Founded in 1992, by Lica and Masahiro Nakagawa, the label 20471120 epitomized Harajuku maximalism while showcasing a future aesthetic based in recycling old products, fighting industry waste, and setting up studios where fans could donate old clothes to be remade as one-of-a kind pieces. Yet even in their most earnest, these future-facing solutions were at best speculative, never made to scale and living firmly within the realm of academia.”

Conclusion: Predictions About Our Real Future

“In the face of our present global disaster, we find ourselves in a situation that feels as though we’ve skipped the bells and whistles of dystopia and gone straight into decline. Few would imagine that New York City would be enduring a shortage of medical supplies and pondering the creation of mass graves — and, for now, the future looks more like looted Wal-Marts and canned tuna than flying cars and floating cities. Today, we’ve become focused solely on what we know works, turning away from novel aesthetics and how things look and returning to our most basic instincts. The real future involves catering to our physiological needs, making masks from old dish towels, draping ourselves in plastic, and wearing latex gloves. These are the aesthetics of coping, one where many of us are considering our own survival for the first time. Rather than replace the expressive and aspirational elements of style, fashion will likely come to play dual roles — both as the expression of our fantasy self and as the reality of who we are today.”

[saltyobjecttheorist]

Close Reading ‘The Path’ Season 1 Episode 1.

This is not really a recap. More of a series of observations regarding the storytelling, symbolism, and subliminal foreshadowing in The Path.

 I’m not an academic and this may all be obvious stuff to you guys but the show made an impression on me for its use of visual symbolism. I thought I’d start at the beginning but I’ll be referencing future plot lines and episodes. There is a LOT of foreshadowing in this series, appropriate given that prophesy is a major theme and I will be talking about what is being foreshadowed. so if you haven’t watched both seasons you might want to stay away from spoilers. 

 For more erudite discussion of symbolism on the show please see the wonderful @theyellowsnake who says all perfectly. 

So The First Episode of Season one of the The Path is pretty much the perfect Pilot. It sets the scene and leaves you hungry for more.

There is a little too much exposition in there . But it also, almost subliminally,  tells you everything you need to know about… Well… Everything. Every twist, every character, every hidden agenda is right there in the pilot. If you’re looking closely enough. 

SPOILERS from here on in folks. For both Season 1 and 2.

Intro Scene: Rindge Trailer Park.  

The Trailer Park. Symbol of American poverty, destroyed by a literal act of God.

The ‘ Church of Faith’ sign, Church destroyed, useless and empty

The Schoolbus on its side destroyed.

Both Church and School as institutions have failed this society, a ruined society as symbolised by the trailer park. They are unable to offer sanctuary or comfort to these people. They have not been able to fulfil their purpose. IE. to prevent people from sliding to the bottom of the economic and spiritual ‘ladder’ in the first place.

A woman clutches her baby and literally cries “Somebody help me!” Into the chaos. “Oh God!”

We meet Mary. Crawling through the trash. She looks for water and finds antifreeze or similar poison.  She tries to drink again from a pipe and someone stops her, that water is also poison.

Poisoned water is a huge part of the Book of Revelation in regard to the Apocolypse.

“ Revelation 8:11

The name of the star is Wormwood. A third of the waters turned bitter like wormwood oil, and many people died from the bitter waters.”

We hear the sound of Horns. Like the horns of angels at Armageddon. ( Also Revelation 8-11)  It’s no wonder Mary later compares Cal to an angel.

Mary climbs the garbage heap. Metaphorically this is the start of he rise from the ashes of her old life. As well as an early climbing metaphor.  She sees Cal from the top of the trash mountain. This is their first moment of connection. Even though he doesn’t see her. Something about him is compelling to her.

Here come the Meyerists into this apocalyptic scene. But to them it’s no metaphor. They believe the end times are really coming. The Tornado is, for them, a real harbinger of doom.

Its a curious thing that when institutions fail people. When the Law, Healthcare, Schools and Church fail to provide what they should. That is when religious cults step in to fill the gap. This is well illustrated here.

Mary gets what she needs the most at the at moment. Not water (she barely drinks it). She gets her salvation, her Angel. We don’t know yet that she’s been waiting for him since she was a little girl. 

The Woman with the baby gets her prayer answered.

“What do you need’? Cal asks the shocky old man. He wants the picture of his wife- all he has left of her memory. Cal doesn’t try to get him to calm down. Or lead him away from the carnage like an EMT would. “Help this man find his wife!” He shouts, as though its the most important thing he can imagine. Because he knows in a spiritual sense , it really is.  In that moment the old man needs that scrap of paper more than water or medical care. 

The Meyerist eye is prominent. They “See” the people’s need. “Need” is often reference thought the series. “There is so much Need!” the characters say repeatedly.  The Church, the School, the Hospitals, the Society itself have all metaphorically failed us. 

We ( humans)  are let down in a spiritual sense by religion that offers no real substance, physically by bad or absent food and medicine, mentally by a schooling system that doesn’t educate the whole person. The list goes on. The Meyerists think they are the answer to this very real need. In this way the show is quite a scathing social commentary. 

As a viewer I’m subconsciously  pumping my fist in the air saying “ Yay Cult!” Although I don’t even realise how I’m being manipulated yet.

Animated Credits Scene:

Four figures climb a mountain, presumably this is an interpretation of Meyerism’s origin myth and the figures are Steve, Silas, Felicia and Bill. With Steve reaching enlightenment at the summit of Huayna Picchu. 

But there is an alternative interpretation: 

Look at the placements of the credits:

The close up of the climbing figure’s hands as he struggles up the rocks in the rain remind you of anything?  Mary’s climb up the garbage heap visually mirrors the climb in the intro. 

Emma Greenwell - Mary’s real name.

This is not an easy climb. Its a struggle. The man makes it to the top, stands at the summit and raises his arms in victory. He made it.

Hugh Dancy Cal’s real name. 

The figure could just as easily be Cal, who, like Mary ( except in a  more metaphorical sense), has struggled to the ‘top of the heap’ through his own personal suffering and stands victorious. Having finally made it into a position of power. This is one of many themes that connect Mary and Cal. (More on that later.) 

We see The Future : Tornado -Fire - Flood.

A Tornado ( the one that levels the trailer park.)  Is the opening of Season 1.

There is a prominent flash of lightning. Which is perhaps a portent to the lighting that scars Eddie and kills Steve.

The Fire ( Richard’s self immolation and burning of records room) closes Season 2.

The Flood… Could be foreshadowing of season 3. It seems to wash away the structure of the burning building. Much like the water scandal coverup helped wash away Sarah’s trouble regarding the blackmail ( using tapes Richard set on fire in same building). 

 Or it could be a symbolic flood washing away the movement forever?

We see the barns, the compound growing in size and number.

A figure running in room - Eddie in the therapy room?

Snake wrapped around Steve’s corpse. Open to interpretation as the Yellow snake symbolises psychic ability as well as betrayal in folklore. It also symbolises Cal at various points in the tale. (Hugh Dancy even starts to look snakelike toward the end of season 2.)  A lot has been said on this elsewhere. It is perhaps not an accident that is portrayed wrapped so closely around Steve. Snakes are rarely positive symbols to a western audience. In a religious context we are reminded of the serpent in Eden. ( More on that later too.) 

Speaking of Eden. Heres Adam and Eve. Or Eddie and Sarah or whichever archetype you choose. Accompanied by the name of the literal creator God of this particular universe: Jessica Goldberg. have I mentioned that I love symbolism?

Scene: Dinner at The Lanes:

Lane means Path… Glad thats out of the way. Now on to saying grace.

“Thank you for this gift of bread to sustain these vessels, our bodies, so that we may have the energy to create a more beautiful world and break through our blocks and barriers in this life and ascend the ladder of enlightenment so that someday we may be free of these earthly forms and live as light together in the garden. We express deepest gratitude for this day, and every day, for the gift of this passage, and that we found the ladder. There is one spirit whose name is Truth.”

So this sums up their whole belief system in a few seconds and its great because the show doesn’t hammer you over the head with the basic tennants every five minutes after that. they just assume you get it. It also has beauty and a sinister undertone, lets never forget that they’re a doomsday Cult.

But lets look closer:

“Give us this day our daily bread” says the Lords Prayer. The daily bread is just what sustains us for this  day. Its the bare minimum of care, which so many people don’t get.

And whom we see in this comfortable scene, the Lanes have a comfortable life, if not extravagant. They have what they need. Their needs are met.

Have you guys heard of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs?  it’s a motivational theory in psychology comprising a five tier model of human needs often depicted as hierarchical levels within a pyramid… Sound familiar? 

Someone Like Mary doesn’t even have the lowest level of needs met. She couldn’t even get clean water. Her basic safely was compromised and she was terribly abused by the people who should have loved her.

Sarah has her Psysiological, Safely and Love/Belonging needs met. It’s debatable if at this point in the series she has fully achieved the Esteem level but she’s well on her way there being an 8R and well respected within the community. It’s the last level. Self- Actualisation, which is problematic for her (and all the characters). Because its the level no Cult can allow its members to reach. Particularly that pesky ‘ Acceptance of Facts’ one.

Eddie, upon his return from Peru is struggling with this level. With his own Self-Actualisation. He knows his Esteem needs are at odds with the truth. And while he lives a ‘Life of Lies’ he isn’t getting his needs met. He NEEDS to live an authentic life. Its the only thing he can do. His ‘path’ leads toward truth one way or another. Hence the great irony of the Meyerist creed: “There is one spirit whose name is Truth.” … That, at least, is a lie. The Truth in this series is multifaceted and subjective. 

Cal pretends to be at the top ( of The Ladder and The Pyramid.) But he ascended in a dishonest way. Though nepotism, prostitution and maybe blackmail.

So while he struggles with morality, problem solving and the sad acceptance of facts he is also struggling with the Esteem level. He so desperately wants to be respected and he has no real confidence ( see his self help tapes for evidence.) And while he struggles with that he is also struggling with the Love/Belonging level. Because the one thing he really can’t have is intimacy. For reasons that later become clear. He is a lonely person. he has no real friends , no family and no sexual intimacy, ( he’s either a virgin or celibate when we meet him.) His image is one of a Self- Actualised leader. But he is living a lie. In truth he’s still a child desperate for safety.

In fact I speculate that the truth of the matter is that each Meyerist convert entered the Movement while struggling with Need. I think that If they left the movement they would revert back to the same point they entered it. Because the movement provides for them ( or should) but it doesn’t give them Self- Actualisation, which is what they need in order to be independent and masters of their own fate.  

So we have the usual Exposotional Dinner Talk. we learn that Eddies just back from Peru. Cal is coming, Steve is writing and Russell is a useless asshole. Also that for a person to ascend the latter all the way they probably shouldn’t get married. Hawk isn’t old enough to start the Ladder yet and everyone feels bad about the tornado.

We like these guys, weird Peruvian drug trip religion aside they seem like our kind of people. (Except Joy though , she’s goddam annoying.) We find ourselves identifying with and liking members of a closed religious cult. This is quite an achievement for the writers.

Sex Scene 1:

Until the slip scene. because no one in history, male or female has ever been aroused by a slip.

The sex though. is it necessary? Not really… But yes really. Much like in real life, the way people fuck on this show tells us a lot about their emotional state. Its code for all the things they can’t say.  If that happens to line up nicely with a networks desire for lots of sex on their show then… Cool I guess. Also. the eye is front and centre because Meyerism is at the centre of their personal life in an uncomfortably voyeristic way. No one has privacy in this place. Not really. There is a disturbing disrespect for boundaries within the extended Lane family and within Meyerism in general. and maybe cults in general too.

Eddie and Sarah are emotional sex havers. They laugh, they cry, they make eye contact. The whole things very uncomfortable for the viewer who may be watching with their parents, but very intimate. Contrast and compare:

Scene: Cal’s return:  

Cal. The no sex haver who reunites with old flame Sarah. He pretends to be over it. He isn’t. She broke his heart by leaving him for  Eddie when they were young. How young? We never know,  Eddie and Sarah were  likely in their mid- late teens when they Met. We don’t know how long Sarah and Cal were together or when they met.

Can we assume that they grew up on the compound together? I think so. Cal mentions to his mother on Episode 3 that, while they used to live in tents, they now have a campus. So he probably grew up there with Sarah, Russell and Tessa. But he’s been in California for three years happily avoiding the East Coast winters. ( he doesn’t like the cold because his drunken sot of a father did, in fact, keep him in a tent in the middle of winter.) Its perhaps worth noting here that he is returning to his childhood home. This is important because its where his neurosis re- surfaces. Its where his pain lives.

Anyway he meets Sarah, knows her well enough to see something wrong and immediately twists it to his advantage. Its the first, rather obvious , look at his manipulative personality. But he’s sincere when he says its good to see her. And that he’s going to “come stalk you , like old times.” He probably did too. hanging out with Eddie and Sarah to be close to her, or maybe to them both, for friendship but certainly with an agenda of infiltrating their relationship. Which is probably why Eddie doesn’t trust him. We don’t either. Because he’s always acting. Pretending to be someone he’s not (  Self- Actualised leader of men. ) We only rarely see glimpses of the real man beneath.

School: Hawk and Eddie scene.

No Symbolism here but I love the relationship between these two. Hawk is annoying in the way teenagers actually are annoying not in the way precocious “ Talk like adults with philosophy degrees” teenagers on TV usually are. Both he and Summer are excellently written in this respect. Eddie is a real dad, not a perfect dad. Just a guy who enjoys time with his kids. Hawk hates school. Didn’t we all?

Scene:  Mary Sees Cal again/Conversation with Eddie:

So like so many scenes on this show , what appears to be a throwaway moment of filler is actually telling us something. While the music and stylised camera work distracts us from the dialogue between Cal and Eddie this is what they’re saying (according to the closed captions.) 

Cal: “Hey, man, I’ll come join you later. Sit in on your testimonial.”

Eddie: “Oh, no. You don’t have to do that. Same old story. You’ve heard it a million times.”

Cal: “Are you kidding? I love your story.

Gets me fired up every time.”

Cal wants to sit in on Eddie’s testimonial, despite the fact that he’s heard it many times and its depressing as holy hell. Eddie would rather he didn’t. Why?

Skip ahead to Eddie telling his story. Interesting, isn’t it that we barely learn anything about Eddie’s life before Meyerism?  So lets look at the facts. What do we know about Eddie Lane at this point?

He had an unhappy home life. We know this because he lived with his older brother instead of his parents ( The original script had a line about his mother being mentally ill which they later edited out, because I believe it would have made future twists too obvious. The subtext is still there.)

He loved his brother. His brother killed himself. Eddie Has. Not. Dealt. With. It. This is so clear. His own dialogue tells us this. He ran. Ran from the situation and straight into a cult.

He starts telling his story. His relationship with his brother was “the one thing he had.” And when he lost it he lost part of himself. He breaks down, he can’t finish the story. Meyerism didn’t heal this particular pain. Cal to the rescue!

“ Oh yeah and then you found us and it was all cool right?” He essentially says.

So Cal does probably step in here to help Eddie. But at the same time theres something censorious about it. He is clearly steering the story in a different direction than it was going? Something is missing from Eddies narrative. Perhaps the fact that he is still suffering, that despite the ladder, his brother’s death is still an open wound for him. ( This kind of adds a layer of creepy to Cal’s assertion that he “Loves him like a brother” Later on.) Also…What happened between ‘Discovered Johnny’s dead body’ and ‘ Ended up in a bookshop’?

Something smells fishy.  But we are told enough to piece a few things together. There was some mental illness in his family, he doesn’t want to look too deeply at his past. He had a lot of anger. (When he arrived he was murderously angry. (We learn this later from Sarah.) That’s not what he looks like now though. Not at all. Meyerism’s victory or his own? Was Sarah his saving grace?

In a way Eddie is the biggest enigma on the show. Maybe even moreso than Steve.

Which brings us to…

Scene: Sarah talks about Steve. 

And the fact that she thinks the light shines out of his ass. Literally. 

So this is our first proper introduction to Steve:

We are told that he lives so deeply in truth that he is one with the Light. His followers believe him to be an ascended master of sorts and therefore an immortal spiritual being rather than just a man. and once again and one of many times… There is a dichotomy between what we are being told and what we are seeing. The sound and the visuals are often at odds on this show. 

Because hanging behind her on the wall is a picture of a dude. A dude named Steve. and he’s handsome, charismatic looking I guess but just as prosaic as his name ( Which incidentally means’ Light Bringer’ in Hebrew.) . (He also has that same high collar, uptight shirt thing going on as Cal does.) This is one of may times that the placement of the Steve photo is telling us something. 

Later Eddie reads to Summer from the junior edition of The Ladder. Whilst having a very confusing existential crisis.

 And we learn about Steve’s past. What do we know about Steve?

He was a military doctor, who did terrible things to soldiers at a hospital. Had a crisis of confidence, lost his shit and took a very long walk… Also I dare anyone to say that isn’t Kodiak in the illustration. 

Sooo… What do you guys know about Project MK Ultra? 

From Wikipedia: 

“Project MKUltra – sometimes referred to as the CIA’s mind control program – is the code name given to a program of experiments on human subjects, at times illegal, designed and undertaken by the United States Central Intelligence Agency.[1] Experiments on humans were intended to identify and develop drugs and procedures to be used in interrogations and torture, in order to weaken the individual to force confessions through mind control. Organized through the Scientific Intelligence Division of the CIA, the project coordinated with the Special Operations Division of the U.S. Army’s Chemical Corps.[2]

The operation began in the early 1950s, was officially sanctioned in 1953, was reduced in scope in 1964, further curtailed in 1967, and officially halted in 1973.[3] The program engaged in many illegal activities,[4][5][6] including the use of unwitting U.S. and Canadian citizens as its test subjects, which led to controversy regarding its legitimacy.[4](p74)[7][8][9] MKUltra used numerous methodologies to manipulate people’s mental states and alter brain functions, including the surreptitious administration of drugs (especially LSD) and other chemicals, hypnosis,[citation needed]sensory deprivation, isolation and verbal abuse, as well as other forms of psychological torture.” 

Read more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKUltra

Lovely. 

So… You guys Steve was totally one of those mad scientists. Who tortured Vietnam soldiers to try an achieve mind control with drugs ( and also sarin gas and other agonizing tortures. This isn’t a bit of weed and a walk in the woods. These people were psychopaths of the highest order.) 

Lets me just repeat that… To  achieve mind control… With Drugs. Does this throw up any red flags for anyone else? 

What else do we know about Steve? I mean FOR SURE He went to Peru and started a cult. Which used Ayahuasca and other drugs to induce hallucinatory states. 

Manipulation into shared delusions? Maybe. Theres no doubt Felicia believes she burned her hands on a Burning Ladder of Truth. But her husband Bill reminds her that there was a bonfire… And that they were ‘Really High.” He wouldn’t have had to convince many people, just a handful, to engender belief in many. 

Ok so lets give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he did have an ethical crisis while working for the CIA… He still used drugs on people… Afterwards. 

And then theres the trope of the Morally questionable doctor who runs to South America. Don’t tell me we’re not supposed to get slightly Megele-ish vibes from this guy. 

Then we cut from Eddies Life of Lies directly to Cal’s life of lies:

Scene: Cal and Mary.

So this scene has a lot going on in it but I think the main takeaway the first time I saw it was that Cal was married to The Ladder. We’re not sure exactly how much he believes in it at this point or how much he’s manipulating Mary into becoming an acolyte. But upon Re-Watch… Oh boy.

So Cal doesn’t have personal relationships. Certainly not with newbies. So why does he go out of his way so much for Mary?

Well the thing is that she has now met her basic needs. Remember our pyramid of pop psychology?

So she’s no longer about to die, she’s physically safe, had a shower, has a place to stay. Now she wants a sense of love and belonging. Which she tries to get by the only means she knows. Sex. Boy did she ever pick the wrong guy.

Or did she?

Heres the thing. Cal is also stuck at this level. He and Mary have the same need. Officially there is a huge power disparity in the relationship and its highly inappropriate. He may be a leader and she may only be a possible. But under the skin they are both needful of the same thing and can’t ever get it because they’ve been damaged so badly. It’s doubtful that either of them will ever move beyond this need.

This scene tells us everything we need to know. Though the performances mostly. Theres a disturbingly childlike quality to both of them. Visually compounded by Mary’s little girl nightie and butterfly underpants.

When Cal gently rebuffs her advances, Dancy’s performance tells us a few things. (In interviews from Season 1 era He described Cal’s relationship with Steve as ‘Complicated.’ I’m sure they had the back story planned from the outset.)

For those into micro gestures. When he said the word ‘ Sex” he flinches and wrinkles his nose in disgust. There is a lot of barely repressed anger in that tiny moment. Because he understands Mary’s Damage. Really understands it. Unfortunately.

They are also reflected in the window, and refections of one another figuratively speaking. Which is why they both love and hate each other at various points. But never, ever do we get the feeling that they don’t understand one another.

Mary says “ All my life I’ve had this fantasy that one day an angel would fly down from the sky and save me.” She feels as though she is fulfilling her destiny. This may be the only time in her life that an authority figure hasn’t taken advantage of her. 

At that point there is a moment of recognition, almost elation from Cal. That could be interpreted as religious fervour at having saved a soul. But I believe it’s meant to be identification, the discovery of a kindred spirit.

“We were meant to find each other.” He says. he doesn’t say “ You were meant to find us” or “the movement”. But “Each other.”

Where was his Angel? Who does he call an Angel later in the series?

“My colleague is a fucking angel.!” He tells John Ridge in episode 5 and to Sarah in Season 2 “I miss your light. The way you looked at me that saved me as a kid.” Suddenly his obsession with Sarah takes on a more tragic, if more disturbing angle. She was a ray of light in his otherwise miserable childhood. He sees her, we learn later, as a role model for what is good and right behaviour. What does this tell us about his other role models in the movement?

Scene: Eddie’s Retreat.

We see the retreat at the Cousco compound. Which appears to be a converted Spanish church. Interestingly a lot of Catholic imagery is associated with Eddie on the show.  In the courtyard Silas is helping a bald dude, Miranda Frank is dancing, and Eddie is tripping balls.

Ayahuasca as a therapeutic substance helps people come to term with their past trauma. Causing them to re-live it. In a Arthur Janov “Primal Scream”, cleansing sort of way. They come out of the experience feeling reborn and with neurosis cured.  It is not a particularly safe drug cocktail however. It can be an especially strong potential trigger for those predisposed to Bipolar Disorder, Schizophrenia, Dissociative Disorder and other psychosis.

So we can see what Eddie might not be having a particularly good trip, what with his past trauma and all. And unsurprisingly his brother comes back to haunt him. With a secret message. In the hallway to Steve’s room is an Owl sculpture. 

Silas’ totem is an owl. Presumably this is his main hangout. As well as a shamanic symbol of wisdom the owl is a Gnostic symbol of demons, illness, disease and death. There are some oil painting on the wall which look like Steve might have painted them ( They look a bit like his ‘flowers’ from season 2.)  

Heres the thing… Is Eddie experiencing a moment of genuine clairvoyance here? I thought at first it was all a drug trip and he hadn’t really moved from the courtyard. His brother’s ghost certainly leads him to the room. But…

Isn’t this compound actually where the movement is storing Steve? Could Eddie conceivably have wandered of while tripping and stumbled into Steve’s room? We do find out later that he literally got up and walked off somewhere for a while because Miranda Tells Cal so in Episode 4. Once again the truth is subjective but maybe less so if witnessed by more than one person. He also, quite possibly saw more rooms on the way.

Eddie sees a vision of Johnny twice more in the series. Once on the shore at Coney Island in S1  and once in his near death vision of the garden in S2. All three times Johnny is guiding him towards a major spiritual decision. But two out of the tree times Eddie was tripping on Ayahuasca. The time at the shore could be a genuine moment of psychosis, we don’t know. Eddie doesn’t either. It seems real to him, and he wasn’t expecting it.  

Either way. He knows  Steve isn’t a immortal ascended ball of light. And those extra rungs that were supposed to enable them to ascend to the garden ‘aint coming, and by extension Cal is lying to them all. Thats a lot of doubts for one day.  

Scene: Eddie and Sarah fight:

The thing about Meyerists is that there supposed to be 100% honest at all times, as a result they are actually secretive as hell. Eddie lies repeatedly to Sarah during this scene, she assumes he’s sleeping with someone else, specifically Miranada Frank. , and he lets her think that because its less painful than the truth.  

There is curious bit of dialogue here.

“ Sarah: All right, I love you, and I chose you.

Eddie: You chose me?

Sarah:  I chose you.

Eddie: What do you mean, you chose me? Chose me over Cal? Is that what this is?

Sarah:  No, no! That is not what I am saying.”

What does this tell us about their relationship? It’s important to her that she “Chose” him. But everyone chooses their partners right? I mean, unless they have an arranged marriage. and the Meyerists don’t… Do they? ( more on this later. I have a theory.)

In any event. She clearly feels that she took a risk on him ( maybe because he was a convert, an outsider, and she was the golden girl of Meyerism who was ‘supposed’ to end up with Cal? Eddie reacts so strongly to this, perhaps because it implies that he held her back from her birthright somehow?

So maybe the subtext here is “ I sacrificed so much to be with you, how could you cheat on me after that?”

” Look at me.

You are everything to me, okay? You’re it.

I remember the day.

I never imagined a future for myself before you,

but then there there you were with that glass of water,

and I didn’t have to try to imagine one anymore.

I had it.” 

Reassuring her, she is the be all and end all for him. She is his salvation. Period. He was suicidal when he met her and she saved him. ( Much like she ‘saved’ Cal as a child.) Sarah as saviour figure is also a running theme on the show. (NB:We'll see Eddie as "Chosen One" again too)

‘There you were” he tells her , remembering when they met ‘ With that glass of water…”

Oh hello WATER my old friend! 

 We can imagine a young Eddie, bereft and suicidal, thirsty being given comfort by the Meyerist movement. Water. the shows favourite symbol of salvation. Actually the shows favourite symbol period. Besides Ladders. She pulled him out of his private apocalypse. Just like Mary at the trailer park. They gave him survival. His doubt is a very big deal. He stands to lose everything.  As he says to Allison in the next scene:

“I don’t know what the hell I’m doing here.

You know,

I was high as a kite,

so what I saw, or what I think I saw, was it real?

You know, I mean, was the vision of my brother even real?

I mean, am I gonna blow up my life,

a life that I love,

because of something I don’t even know if I really saw?”

Yes he is. Because he feels the truth of it in his bones and he can’t live his life without Self- Actualisation. He is willing to give it all up for his personal truth. He loves her more than anything. But he will give her up if he has to. Contrast with Cal who holds onto his past infatuation and can’t let it go. 

Speaking of which: 

Scene: Sarah visits Cal. 

Ok so this scene tells us an awful lot and is pretty damn creepy.

The Meyerists have no boundaries, we knew this, so Sarah going to tell her friend Cal about her marital problems is disturbingly par for the course. 

Also I think Cal painted that bird. Remember he used to enjoy art once?

Then theres the dialogue:

“I was so scared of you when we were young.

Before Eddie.

You’d sneak into my bed.

Your hands were like fire.

I thought, “This guy could never really love a person.

Not for the years.

He needs too much.”

Firstly… WHAT??? He sneaked into her bed and felt her up? And she was scared? Ok so she seems to be implying that it was exciting but… Also HOW young are we talking here. This seems like a rather strange normalisation of something dark. 

So Cal was probably sexually inappropriate with other kids his age. No surprises there its a classic sign of sexual abuse. We also learn that he couldn’t be emotionally intimate in the way she Wanted because he NEEDED too much. 

Hello Pyramid my old friend.

 He was stunted forever in survival mode because of Steve and couldn’t quite crack the sex and romance thing. And the horrible thing is that he remains silent the whole scene and literally can’t seem to respond to her because the dude is literally so full of secrets if he speaks he will open the floodgates and destroy the Earth. 

So this is where we come to my theory: 

That terrible dialogue: 

Its so out of place. It doesn’t sound like her. ( She even quotes it like someone else said it.) 

But you know who does sound like that?  “ Flowers on Your Walls of Doom”, arch manipulator of the young, Steve.

On the few occasions we hear Steve speak in flashback. He sounds theatrical. Almost Shakesperian. 

My theory is… That Cal’s later behaviour with Mary and Sean the ‘arranged marriage’  is part of an abusive cycle. I think he repeats what was done to him. I think maybe Steve sent a young Cal to Sarah’s bed in the first place.

 In the same way Cal later sends Mary to Sean. Then gets a full report from her. THAT scene in ep 4 is very reminiscent of incest or something like it. 

Oh and would you look at who’s watching them from the photo on the wall Behind Cal?

Hence why Sarah “Chose” Eddie. But for some reason didn’t have the agency to “Choose” Cal.  Maybe Choosing Eddie was her one act of real agency within the movement? Lets not forget she nearly ran away with her sister. We might want to ask why? 

Then perhaps Steve sent Cal away. Because he couldn’t have him getting to close to anyone. Offering him a life of vocation instead.

I don’t know for sure  but it seems like something like this might have happened. And here’s why… 

Scene: Cal and Mary visit Dad/ Plato’s Cave:

Right after this scene, Cal goes straight to Mary and suggests they “make it better” with a visit to her dad. Going to Mary is  something he often does when his past comes back to haunt him, because she is,to him, like his inner child. She is his past writ large, open and honest and bleeding on the floor. No secrets. He acts out through her, processes his own trauma through her. How self aware he is about it is debatable. But his meeting with Sarah seems to have triggered him.

When you understand a bit more about Meyerism it’s shocking just how off the script Cal went by going to her Dad’s place and beating the shit out of him. Why did he feel the need to do it rather than just give her some Ladder Therapy? If he believed in Meyerism wouldn’t he try and get her  to forgive? to move beyond it?

Because when she says the Ladder won’t help make it better he knows thats true, even if he can’t admit it to himself yet. And he goes very, very transgressive. Almost as though the act of violence is a rebellion against everything Steve stood for. Although at first all he wants is an apology. Demanding Mr. Cox to kneel and grovel in the dirt for forgiveness. ( Which is actually pretty Meyerist of him.) Its also possibly exactly what he would like from Steve.

But the turning point comes when Mr. Cox spits in his face. THEN he loses it. We find out later that Cal used to hand out flyers on the street as a kid and people used to spit on him. He may have a neurosis about it. But the whole confrontation with Mr. Cox becomes more about him than Mary at this point. If it ever was about her at all. But he does give her exactly what she needs. Vengence, justice, closure. And as a viewer, honestly. I was cheering the crazy bastard on. 

So what do we know about Cal at this point?

He doesn’t believe, deep down, in what he’s preaching.

He has a lot in common with Mary.

He has a terrible temper.

He is capable of extreme violence.

He doesn’t appreciate being spat on. At all.

This does not make for a safe cult leader.

But it does beg the question whats more dangerous, a cult leader who doesn’t believe in his own propaganda, or one who does? Think of The Branch Davidians or Heavens Gate. Or the very Steven Meyer-esque David Berg and The Children of God cult? Belief can be a very dangerous thing too.

The scene is beautifully edited with Cal’s Plato Speech. Illustrating his hypocrisy even while he preaches.

Plato’s cave.

My favourite scene. Ironic and the perfect analogy.  Cal essentially narrates his own life story without knowing it. The guy is somewhat less self aware than he pretends to be… And now we know it for sure.  It ties into the episode title;  “What The Fire Throws.”

Shadows of reality. We all live in our own version of reality with our own version of truth. Eddie has decided he’s had enough of this one. Cal is actually heading in the same direction, belief wise, as Eddie but he’s trapped in the institution in a way that Eddie isn’t. Steve literally made him paint a false reality for himself and without it he’s staring into the abyss. 

Sarah has never even questioned her shadows. She was born in that cave. He presents the perfect argument against religion, and closed communities in particular. All the while railing against regular society and the untruths therein. The point is. There are many cults and we all live in one. Do we put our faith in a person to lead us? Eddies path is a lonely one, because the Room of Truth can only fit one person at a time. Would I let him lead me? Well.. I’m not pumping my fist and yelling “ Yay Cult!” anymore. 

And as a viewer? We are presented with a reality on screen. And we are manipulated by that reality and shown shadows of reality, angles on things. This story isn’t all it seems. Theres an element of 4th wall breaking here too. Because it looks , at points, like he’s preaching right out of the screen. 

And speaking of TRUTH:

Eddie admits his. But not to the people he loves. To a stranger in a motel room. Because sometimes the lie you’re living is the one you love the most. 

[mustinvestigate]

stream of consciousness headcanon…ish…thing…

...which owes entire countries’ national debts to @niceteeth-nastysmile‘s health & food canon post and @adistraughtthought‘s on MacCready’s teeth and why Lucy was just beyond brilliant.

And this is all fic-related ponderings of general standards of personal upkeep in post-apocalyptia and their divergence from vault or pre-war sensibilities and how exactly romance could surmount this, which doesn’t really earn “above the fold” status, so…

So it’s generally held in fandom lore that folk are too busy surviving to truck much with hygiene, a thought which derails the sexiness of many T+ fics before they start. Like, “We’ve been trekking across the desert nurturing a deadly two-person epidemic of UST and, oops, convenient cave-in, we’re trapped together…carrying several days’ worth of sweat and battle muck in non-breathable armor we seemingly never change, without water to drink or freshen up with, and, y’know, let’s just sit in opposite cave chambers and breathe through our mouths until rescue comes, ok?”

And a vault dweller or pre-war person would live in suspended state of horror at the miasma of human funk and yellowed snaggleteeth when they have any at all, unable to hold a civil conversation no matter how high their charisma stat. As for romancing, well…nope. Nope nope nope.

Except, in settlements at least, with more pooled resources and storage space and security to allow people to spend time on less essential tasks like making tallow soap and extra under-clothing to change regularly and water to wash clothing and bodies, they’d totally raise standards to at least those of a modern week-long camping trip, right? Being clean and in fresh clothing is one of those small achievable luxuries, on the level of toys and games or cards for communal entertainment, that makes a huuuuge difference in feeling like you’re living, not just surviving. And with teeth, well, humans have been cleaning their teeth (albeit sometimes in ways that could not have been kind to gums or enamel) since we’ve been human. Morning breath and stuck-in food bits have apparently always been pretty high on the short list of activities worth spending limited energy on fixing.

Also often found in human settlements? Doctors, or at least some form of medical-type professionals to push for improved sanitation and enough cleanliness to minimise the spread of disease, not to mention heal injuries or perform simple dentistry or help prevent/treat substance abuse and all sorts of other ailments that lead to one being unable to maintain a comfortable-ish body.

(Aside for ghouls: although they’re described in-game as smelling like rotting flesh, I call bullshit. The smell of rot comes from decay, and by definition, things which are decaying are in the process of existing increasingly…uh…less so. [I don’t know, I can’t word good today, ok? Ahem.] And since ghouls are canonically unplagued by senescence [see? Fancy words!], there’s no decay beyond a certain level of damage that would produce that particular offensive smell. And further still since the skin damage would probably render most of their sweat glands gone or non-functional anyway, they’d possibly even lack the traditional human eau du ew at the end of a hard day’s farming. Y’all just decided they smell bad because you don’t like how they look – real nice, post-apocalyptic humans. Real. Nice.)

People living outside of settlements, though…they might be a different story. Like, raiders? Forget it. You’d smell ‘em coming a mile away, where they may be gasping their last due to catastrophic bacterial infection from what started as a wee molar cavity. They’re not expending energy on small personal-upkeep luxuries, or value stealing them from those who do.

Non-sociopathic nomadic types, like traders or mercenaries or people who don’t have useful skills or can’t afford to buy into a settlement (however it works when there’s no pre-war savior throwing away land for free), where carrying space is very limited and they likely don’t have much time or energy for non-essential luxuries…yeah, they might be closer to what we picture as a standard post-apocalyptic citizen. Like…in today’s terms…your stereotypical European gap-year backpacker. You’d certainly bathe and wash clothes when the opportunity and supplies came to hand, but wouldn’t go out of your way unless your red and orange Maslows were all in the black, and if your yellow, green, and blue were already in the pink, why bother?

(Is that a coherent joke? Probably not. Requires googling. But we strike on!)

Hence, in a slightly roundabout way, we come to MacCready’s teeth, and, further, the impact therein on writing a romance with a pre-war character. Or, really, any of the romanceable companion options, but fanon, and Bethesda going out of their way to make him the only one with bad teeth, seem to hold that MacCready’s a special case. He grew up LARPing Lord of The Flies, defiantly proud that there were no adults to make them clean anything they didn’t want to, and he married a girl (brilliant doctor or not) who was part of the same culture and tolerant of near-toxic personal hygiene or at the very least, since they seemed to be on the road when she tragically died, was biding her time until they settled down to enforce better standards.

(And, seriously, Bethesda, just admit it’s the same character as the Lucy he was best buddies with instead of someone who just happened to have the same name…except that does mean that sweet girl died terribly…and now I no longer know what I want to believe. Huh.)

And a pre-war professional lady, one who’d’ve had to maintain a polished image as a non-negotiable element of her career, she’d get past this…how?

Actually…even writing this out, it still doesn’t seem insurmountable. For years, I shared a very small office with a large, manly fellow who didn’t wear deodorant, worked out before work, and ate a lot of fish-heavy lunches. It’s amazing how quickly the human nose shrugs and moves the goal-posts, particularly for lovely people you get on with, or when everyone around you’s more or less at the same level of smell, or when you’re also working out and coming in kinda sweaty and, you know, we’re all human here, right, why are we so dang picky?

And my version of Nora, for all she prefers pretty dresses and parties, isn’t averse to dirty fingernails. She was in the military, had all her hair shaved off and slogged through muddy obstacle courses and dug latrines and everything; she went hunting with her father and helped out in his plumbing shop, getting elbow-deep in animal viscera and worse. A filthy soldier-type would definitely be on her experience spectrum with probably no more judgement than welp, try to stay upwind when possible, even that forgotten after she’s been in the same outfit herself for a couple of weeks.

But the teeth, man, there’s something moreish about bad teeth, right? There’s not just the aesthetics of non-white, non-straight teeth (trust me…having moved to a country [unfairly] famous for poor-quality dentistry, I can report that uniformly white, straight chompers quickly become the weird-looking alternative) but the visceral reaction to class comma lack of, to an indicator not just of “poor” but “poor and not trying to do better.”

Like, I grew up what’s politely called white working class (in a family that mostly passes leisure time with drinking, Fox News, and stockpiling weapons of dubious origins, so, y’know, shruggy-emoticon), and you bet all of us cousins had braces. We were going to get good grades and have office jobs. Our parents were real touchy about terms like “redneck” or “okie” and wouldn’t admit to liking country music. There was something different about the kids who lived in the same area but didn’t get braces. We weren’t encouraged to make friends of them, and as for dating…well…the bad teeth on a significant other brought home would carefully, one could say pointedly, not be mentioned, but every other possible flaw would be.

In college, I dated a mysterious guy I met on Match.com, who wasn’t white and who had the worst teeth I’d ever seen in real life. They were somewhere between ferengi and pirate and I’m sad to say they were the first thing anyone would notice about him. We ended up dating for two bloody years, even talked about marriage, and the funny thing? I never found out what the deal was with those awful, awful teeth.

At first, I didn’t bring it up because, well…how bad did his childhood have to be, that no one made him brush, no one took out a loan to get him in braces? Like, bad teeth were so intrinsically linked with lower-class deprivation in my mind that I just could not even broach the topic with someone of a different ethnic background. And, anyway, he turned out to be solidly middle-class from birth, held two degrees and a software engineering cubicle job that required a tie, even on Fridays. And by that point, well…if the teeth were the first thing you noticed, the second was that he was bubbly and goofy and sweet, and when months later someone looked at a photo of us and asked, “Oh dear, what happened to that poor boy’s teeth?”, it genuinely took me a minute to figure out what she was talking about.

So, my conclusion: even when one’s brought up to see poor hygiene and bad teeth as viscerally, mockably horrifying…as romantic obstacles, they’re quite surmountable. Like, there’d be some half-hearted stocking up of new brushes and mouthwash, nagging to go see the dentist no I don’t care that your childhood dentist looked like Ted Bundy, and probably a collateral raising of their bathing frequency through shared living routines, and it’d be fine, you guys. Totally fine.

Anyway.

This is what happens after a few months without drinking, y’all. These are the brain cells that’d usually get culled off by the friendly gin hammer.

[sarakwasna]

A couple of years ago, I decided to keep a list of all the books I read in a year. After recording the twenty-somewhat books of that year, my competitive nature showed itself and I decided I would read more the following year. I set a goal to read at least 25 books in 2018. I ended up reading 38. In addition to those titles I completed, I also abandoned a few. When I was younger, I wouldn’t have dared to not finish something I’d started, but I’ve come to that place in life where I no longer feel I’ve got something to prove. Life’s too short and there are far too many books out there to waste time on the ones that don’t thrill me.

This year, unlike last with My 18 Resolutions for 2018, I haven’t been able to decide what my goals for the new year will be yet. Sure, I want to get more fit and eat healthier, but that’s nothing new. I’d like to replace screen-time with face-time or even just me-time, but as for the big goals, this year I am going to have to wait to see what life unfolds. Whatever my intentions end up being, I know reading will be a part of it, so for those of you who also enjoy curling up with a good book, here (in no particular order) are the top 10 books from my year of reading.

The Untethered Soul by Michael A. Singer (Non-fiction/Self-Help)

“You are capable of ceasing the absurdity of listening to the perpetual problems of your psyche. You can put an end to it. You can wake up in the morning, look forward to the day, and not worry about what will happen. Your daily life can be like a vacation. Work can be fun; family can be fun; you can just enjoy all of it.”

I’d first heard about this book when I listened to an episode of Oprah’s SuperSoul Conversations; I’d written about that experience in To Forgive, Divine, but at that time, I hadn’t read the book yet. Well, as the second book read last year, this one deserves a place on the list; it’s actually a great choice for starting a new year. This is the type of book you will want to read with a pen in hand. You’ll underline a phrase here and a quote there, and then eventually half of the page will be highlighted. You’ll write “WOW” in the margin or you’ll bracket off whole paragraphs that speak to you. There’s a reason it is a #1 New York Times Bestseller with more than one million copies sold.

The Serpent King by Jeff Zentner (YA Fiction)

“If you’re going to live, you might as well do painful, brave, and beautiful things.”

I’d had students who had read this book in the past and really enjoyed it, but I hadn’t read it myself until I planned to include it as a book club choice for my students last year. The story centers around three teens who are unlikely friends in a small, southern town, but it’s more than just a book about friendship. The protagonist’s father is a religious man who is in prison, but the story behind his imprisonment is disturbing, to say the least.

At one point, I had to put the book down, then pick it up and reread, then put it down again. “Did that just happen?” I asked my husband who wasn’t reading the book and therefore had no idea what I was talking about. “I can’t believe that just happened.” Later, when my students were reading it, they’d come into my classroom at lunch or in the morning to ask me, “Did that really happen?” While it is a YA book, it certainly doesn’t read like one.

Educated by Tara Westover (Memoir)

“I was an incurious student that semester. Curiosity is a luxury reserved for the financially secure; my mind was absorbed with more immediate concerns, such as the exact balance of my bank account, who I owed how much, and whether there was anything in my room I could sell for ten or twenty dollars.” 

 Every now and again, I read a memoir that depicts a life that is so incredibly different from my own and from anyone else’s with whom I am acquainted that I have to keep reminding myself that it isn’t a work of fiction. Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs was one, The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls was another, and Tara Westover’s Educated was a third. Westover beautifully tells the story of her childhood growing up in the mountains of Idaho with a father who did not believe in public education. She was seventeen when she first entered a traditional classroom yet ends up with a PhD from Cambridge University– although it came a a cost.

The quote above is a great example of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and a good reminder that not all students have the “luxury” of being engaged in school. This book has garnered a lot of praise and publicity this year, and it is definitely one that is worth the read.

The Book of the Unnamed Midwife by Meg Elison (Sci-Fi)

“It does no good to tell a beautiful woman how beautiful she is. If she already knows, it gives her power over the fool who tells her. If she does not, there is nothing that can be said to make her believe it.” 

Sci-Fi is not usually my genre of choice, but a girl who I went to high school with (who is now a librarian) posted about this book on social media and I thought, if a librarian is posting about a book, then it’s worth a shot. It was. This was one of those picked-it-up-and-read-it-in-a-day kind of books. It’s a post-apocalyptic world where any woman who attempts to bear a child dies, as does that child. The protagonist, the midwife, is a fiercely independent woman determined to help save humanity.

This is Book 1 in The Road to Nowhere series, but despite liking this one a lot, I haven’t checked out any of the others.

Girls Burn Brighter by Shobha Rao (Fiction)

“We girls. Afraid of the wrong things, at the wrong times. Afraid of a burned face, when outside, outside waiting for you are fires you cannot imagine. Men, holding matches up to your gasoline eyes. Flames, flames all around you, licking at your just-born breasts, your just-bled body. And infernos. Infernos as wide as the world. Waiting to impoverish you, make you ash, and even the wind, even the wind. Even the wind, my dear, she thought, watching you burn, willing it, passing over you, and through you. Scattering you, because you are a girl, and because you are ash.” 

If I had to pick ONE book that was my favorite read of the entire year, this would be it.

Girls Burn Brighter was not only beautifully written, but also told a story of friendship, love, and female empowerment unlike any other I’ve read. It was disturbing and heart-breaking, powerful and poignant. Every woman should add this book their list, then read it, then cry about it, then get together with friends and drink wine and talk about it together.

There There by Tommy Orange (Fiction)

“This is the thing: If you have the option to not think about or even consider history, whether you learned it right or not, or whether it even deserves consideration, that’s how you know you’re on board the ship that serves hors d’oeuvres and fluffs your pillows, while others are out at sea, swimming or drowning, or clinging to little inflatable rafts that they have to take turns keeping inflated, people short of breath, who’ve never even heard of the words hors d’oeuvres or fluff.” 

This book has harvested a lot of accolades this year. Told from the perspective of ten different characters whose stories come together in the end at the Big Oakland Powwow, Tommy Orange gives voice to the urban American Indian, a voice not heard nearly enough in modern literature. While I loved the Indian legends and lore peppered throughout this tale, it was quotes like the one above that made me stop and re-read entire passages and then just sit with it for a few minutes only to go back to the page and read it again.

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones (Literary Fiction)

“But home isn’t where you land; home is where you launch. You can’t pick your home any more than you can choose your family. In poker, you get five cards. Three of them you can swap out, but two are yours to keep: family and native land.” 

Years ago, I read Silver Sparrow by this same author and I friggin’ loved it, so when I realized this was also by her, I knew it would be a great read. It’s a story about love and marriage and race and family and everything in between. Reading the letters sent between Roy and Celeste felt deeply intimate and immediately drew me into this story that satisfied me all the way to the very end.

What School Could Be by Ted Dintersmith (Non-fiction/Education)

“We treasure the occasional story about a child who climbs out of poverty, graduates from a prestigious university, and goes on to success. Since it’s possible for a handful, we cling to the view that nothing is broken in America. But it is. Education has become the modern American caste system. We fuzz up the issue in a sea of statistics about test-score-gaps, suggesting that social inequity is a classroom issue. We bemoan the achievement gap but dwell on the wrong ‘achievement’ and the wrong ‘gap.’ Achievement should be based on challenging real-world problems, not standardized tests that amount to little more than timed performance on crossword puzzles and Sudoku. The gap we need to face is how much more we spend to educate our rich children than our poor. We can test until the cows come home, and we won’t begin to bring meaningful equity to our youth. As an educator in the Midwest noted, ‘If a cow is starving, we don’t weigh it. We feed it.’”

I already raved about this book on social media and wrote about it in Dear Fifth-Grade Teacher, but I had to include it in my top ten list too. I found the book to be inspirational and thought-provoking for anyone who is involved in education or policy-reform. The quote above is my favorite from the book. I considered getting it as a tattoo, but it’s a tad long.

The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah (Fiction/Drama)

“In the silence, Leni wondered if one person could ever really save another, or if it was the kind of thing you had to do for yourself.”

 I still think Firefly Lane is my favorite Kristin Hannah book, but it was the first of hers I’d ever read, and I have a habit of latching on to firsts (i.e. My Sister’s Keeper is still my favorite Jodi Picoult and Looking for Alaska is still my favorite John Green). For some reason, I refused to buy this book since it was still in hardcover, and I had to wait ages for it at the library, which may be why I didn’t love it as much as I should have.

My mom read it first, and once I finally got it she kept asking me what I thought. It really was a great read, but it was also over 400 pages, and I really hated the protagonist’s father, Ernt. Somewhere in the middle of the book, I got sick of his shit and kind of lost momentum as a result. Still, it deserves a place on the list. It may not have been worth waiting months for, but it’s worth the eighteen bucks to not be cheap and buy it.

The Light We Lost by Jill Santopolo (Fiction/Romance)

“What I wanted to tell you is that there are lots of ways to love people and I know that you’ll love someone else again. Even if it’s not the same, some of it might be better.” 

Last, but not least. One of my favorite people told me about this book and I had the title written on a notes page in my phone for a few months, but then, I saw a former student post about it on social media and it reminded me to check it out from the library. It was another can’t-put-it-down book that I texted every reader in my life when I was done to tell them about. This is a book you can lose a day in, and even though I’m not a huge fan of romance novels, this book won my heart (and gave me a bit of a book-hangover too.)

Well, that’s it… for now. I’ve got The One Thing by Gary Keller and Michelle Obama’s Becoming to start off 2019.

What are you reading this year?

Note: ReadingWhileEating is not affiliated with Amazon.com. If you click on a link to purchase a book, I do not get anything, but you get a book, and books are awesome.

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My Top 10 Reads of 2018 A couple of years ago, I decided to keep a list of all the books I read in a year.

[repmywind02199]

How to decide what product to build

How to decide what product to build

Techniques for defining a product and building and managing a team.

Design is a process of making dreams come true.

THE UNIVERSAL TRAVELER

LET’S PLAY A GAME. (I’m imagining the computer voice from the movie WarGames. GREETINGS PROFESSOR FALKEN...SHALL WE PLAY A GAME? Alas, I digress.)1

How many people do you think are on the following product or feature teams?

Apple’s iMovie and iPhoto

Twitter

Instagram

Spotify

Hint: the number is definitely smaller than you think.

Apple’s iMovie and iPhoto: 3 and 5, respectively2

Twitter: 5–73

Instagram: 13 when acquired for $1 billion by Facebook4

Spotify: 85

We also know that the team that created the first iPhone prototypes was “shockingly small.”6 Even Jony Ive’s design studio at Apple—the group responsible for the industrial design of every product, as well as projects like iOS 7—is only 19 people.7 And we can surmise that this group is broken up into smaller teams to work on their own individual projects.

Figuring out what product you’re going to build is an exercise in working through the research you’ve gathered, empathizing with your audience, and deciding on what you can uniquely create that’ll solve the problems you’ve found. But it’s also an exercise in deciding how big the team is and who’s on it.

Jeff Bezos of Amazon famously coined a term for teams of this size: the “two-pizza team.”8 In other words, if the number of people on a team can’t be fed by two pizzas, then it’s too big. Initially conceived to create “a decentralized, even disorganized company where independent ideas would prevail over groupthink,” there’s some surprising science that explains why teams of this size are less prone to be overconfident, communicate poorly, and take longer to get stuff done. In actuality, that probably caps this team at or around six people.

Enter the work of the late Richard Hackman, a professor at Harvard University who studied organizational psychology. He discovered that “The larger a group, the more process problems members encounter in carrying out their collective work...worse, the vulnerability of a group to such difficulties increases sharply as size increases.”9

Hackman defined “process problems” as the links—or, communication avenues—among the members in a team. As the number of members grows, the number of links grows exponentially. Using the formula n*(n–1)/2—where n is group size—Hackman found that the links among a group get hefty very quickly (Figure 1-1).

Figure 1-1. The larger a group gets, the more “process problems” a group faces. This requires increased communication and can slow down decision making. (Source: Messick and Kramer, The Psychology of Leadership.)

Even though math wasn’t my favorite subject in school, let’s go through a few team size scenarios. Let’s start with Bezos’s recommended team size of six—assuming that two pizzas are appropriate for six people (although, I’ve been known to put away a whole pizza on my own from time to time):

Bezos’s preferred team size of 6 people has only 15 links to manage.

Increase that number to 10, and you already have 45 links to manage.

If you expand to the size of where I work every day, Tinder—70 people—the number of links grows to 2,415.

But managing more communication links isn’t the only problem groups face when they increase in size.

Larger teams get overconfident. They believe they can get things done quicker, and have a tendency “to increasingly underestimate task completion time as team size grows.” In 2010, organizational behavior researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and UCLA conducted a number of field studies confirming these findings.10 In one of their experiments, they observed teams tasked with building LEGO kits. Teams with two people took 36 minutes to complete the kit, while four-person teams took over 44 percent longer.

But the four-person teams believed that they could complete the LEGO set faster than the two-person team.

That’s why the notion of the two-pizza team is so powerful. It’s a simple concept that’s easily understood by anybody within your organization, and can be used to combat the “let’s throw more bodies at the problem” mentality that some organizations might be used to using.

OK, so we’ve figured out how big your team should be. But who should be invited to the party?

Everybody loves to be in product meetings. Especially when you’re in the deciding phase of deciding what to build.

Even Steve Jobs loved being in the room during this phase. “He told me once,” said Glenn Reid, former director of engineering for consumer applications at Apple, “that part of the reason he wanted to be CEO was so that nobody could tell him that he wasn’t allowed to participate in the nitty-gritty of product design.”11

Treat this process like you’re the bouncer at Berghain nightclub in Berlin.12 (Hint: it’s practically impossible to get in if you don’t speak German. And even then, Sven the bouncer, “a post-apocalyptic bearded version of Wagner,” enforces an obscure dress code that nobody can seem to crack.)

So, who’s in the room together? How much do they know about the pains you’ve found? And how do you frame the discussion?

At this point, you should have everyone who’s going to be involved in the creation of the product on the team. An example of this could include:

The product designer or product manager (depending on how your organization is set up, and if you’ll be working with someone else who will be designing the product).

The engineer(s) with whom you’ll be working to build the product—typically frontend and backend.

A representative from the team that will be launching and promoting the product; this could be someone from marketing or public relations to create a feedback loop between what will be promised to your customers and what your product is actually capable of doing.

While at KISSMetrics, Hiten Shah structured these teams with

...a product manager, a designer, and an engineer. Sometimes it’s multiple designers, multiple engineers, and sometimes it’s an engineering manager.

At times it can even be, sometimes, someone from marketing, if that makes sense, or even someone from sales. I mean, we have tried different methods. I’d say for different things, small things, big product releases, a whole product, it’s going to be different and for the stage of the company it’s going to be different.

Party Like It’s 1991

Regis McKenna had something to say about this process. When he saw how fast technology was changing society in 1991, he realized—like our friend Neil McElroy at Proctor & Gamble—that a new role would need to be formalized. This person would be “an integrator, both internally—synthesizing technological capability with market needs—and externally—bringing the customer into the company as a participant in the development and adaptation of goods and services.”13

If your eyes glazed over reading that, well, you should read it again. Because McKenna was responsible for launching some of the hallmarks of the computer age: the first microprocessor at Intel, Apple’s first PC, and The Byte Shop, the world’s first retail computer store. Oh, and one more thing: he was the guy behind the “startup in a garage” legend first made famous with Apple’s early days.

So, did you read it again? Did anything seem familiar?

Hey, he’s describing you!

You’re the product designer. The integrator. You’re the customer’s champion, their expert, their advocate.

This process requires you to lead your team through the research; to propose product ideas to eliminate your customer’s pain or find their joy effectively.

That, of course, means that everybody involved in building the product must be intimately familiar with the research that’s been conducted on your audience.

Take the opportunity as an “integrator” to build on your strengths as a team: what innovative technologies and design can you apply to the problem at hand? Even better, what can you and your team uniquely build for this audience?

I thought Josh Elman (Greylock Partners, Zazzle, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter) had a great insight on this part of the product creation process:

The first thing is you have to trust your team. I think that sounds obvious, but it’s much harder in practice. I think a lot of structures and processes are built on the fact that there isn’t innate trust...next, get your team’s help in how to solve the problem. The team knows what they can build. The team knows how it can be developed. The designers know what kinds of things are designable and natural in the product and what kinds of things are not. All of this matters.

Don’t forget the Pain Matrix (Figure 1-2). What are the observations you made that fit into the upper-right quadrant where there is the most acute, frequent pain? How can you build your customers’ dream product? What are the pains that you’re uniquely capable of solving?

Figure 1-2. The Pain Matrix, a simple tool I created for myself. It’s intended to make sifting through and making sense of the research you’ve gathered much simpler.

The Pain Matrix is the perfect piece of collateral for when you’re hashing out what to build. This document becomes a communication device, an advocate for your customers. Everybody can see it and you can back it up with your data. Bonus points for direct quotes from your research.

“The thing to focus on is that yes, 100 percent of your users are humans,” Diogenes Brito, a product designer most recently at startup Slack, reminds us. “While technology is changing really, really rapidly, human motivations basically haven’t at all. Like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, that’s still the same. Designing around that, the closer you are to the base level of what humans desire, the more timeless it’ll be.”

To reiterate: don’t lose sight of the actual, observed, tangible pains and joys that you’ve researched. Resist the temptation to delve into hopes and dreams. Just throwing an “MVP” out into the wild to “validate” something you spend time building is a waste of time, money, and talent.

You’re better than that.

Now, all you have to do is keep everybody focused.

Keeping Everybody Focused

There’s always a big problem when the club-like euphoria from a product meeting starts to turn focus into chaos. How do you keep everybody on task and debating healthily?

I highly recommend a whiteboard for idea collection and harvesting. This serves three practical purposes:

It’s difficult to remember what was said. You don’t want good ideas getting lost simply because there were too many thrown around the room.

It allows you to be visual. Not all ideas can be verbally explained; a low-fidelity medium allows anybody to sketch the central core of the idea without unnecessary detail. This allows your team to get ideas out of their head on an equal playing field.

It lets you take advantage of the natural tendency for the group to forget which idea was contributed by whom. This naturally allows the best ideas to float to the top and the worst ones to sink to the bottom. It’s hugely beneficial, especially if the group has a lot of ideas. The key here is to avoid attaching names to ideas, so you can avoid hurt egos and the so-called not invented here syndrome. Called the Cauldron, this was a technique used by Apple—sometimes even with Steve Jobs in the room. According to Glenn Reid, the former director of engineering at Apple, the Cauldron “let us make a great soup, a great potion, without worrying about who had what idea. This was critically important, in retrospect, to decouple the CEO from the ideas. If an idea was good, we’d all eventually agree on it, and if it was bad, it just kind of sank to the bottom of the pot. We didn’t really remember whose ideas were which—it just didn’t matter.”14

There’s also the benefit of timed techniques, like one used at online publishing startup Medium. With the right group of people in the room, the problem that needs to be solved is defined and “you have two minutes to write down as many ideas as possible [to solve it],” director of product design and operations Jason Stirman told me. “Then you have five minutes to put the ideas on a whiteboard and explain them. Then you have another two minutes to add to ideas...the end result is you just get as many ideas as possible. So we do that a lot here. We brainstorm a lot.”

The “Working Backwards” Approach

There’s another technique used by Amazon that’s particularly powerful. Known as the “Working Backwards” approach, this technique calls upon the product owner to literally write a future press release for the product—as well as fake customer quotes, frequently asked questions, and a story that describes the customer’s experience using the product.

In your case, this could be a future blog post that you’d put out about your product or feature instead of a press release.

What’s particularly unique about this technique is that this document involves every part of your organization that’s required to make the product successful—not just product and engineering, but marketing, sales, support, and every other part of your company. In other words, it forces you to think about all of the aspects that can inform your product.

Werner Vogels, Amazon’s CTO, describes the rationale behind the process:

The product definition process works backwards in the following way: we start by writing the documents we’ll need at launch (the press release and the FAQ) and then work towards documents that are closer to the implementation.

The Working Backwards product definition process is all about fleshing out the concept and achieving clarity of thought about what we will ultimately go off and build.15

According to Vogels, there are four documents included in Working Backwards:

The press release

What the product does, and why it exists

The “frequently asked questions” document

Questions someone might have after reading the press release

A definition of the customer experience

A story of what the customer sees and feels when they use the product, as well as relevant mockups to aid the narrative

The user manual

What the customer would reference if they needed to learn how to use the product

This all might seem like a lot of frivolous upfront work, but the method’s been used at Amazon for over a decade. And if you use it in conjunction with the Sales Safari method outlined in Chapter 2, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more customer-centric approach to building products. That way, you’ll be working on ideas that have their foundation in what real people need, as opposed to coming up with ideas that you try to plug into an amorphous audience.

At the center of Working Backwards lies the press release. A document that should be no longer than a page and a half, it’s the guiding light and the touchstone of the product and something that can be referred to over the course of development.

“My rule of thumb is that if the press release is hard to write, then the product is probably going to suck,” writes Ian McAllister, a director at Amazon. “Keep working at it until the outline for each paragraph flows.”16

Amazon’s view is that a press release can be iterated upon at a much lower cost than the actual product. That’s because the document shines a harsh light on your answer to your customer’s pain. Solutions that aren’t compelling or are too lukewarm are easily identified. Nuke them and start over. All you’re working with at the moment is words.

“If the benefits listed don’t sound very interesting or exciting to customers, then perhaps they’re not (and shouldn’t be built),” McAllister writes. “Instead, the product manager should keep iterating on the..

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[doorrepcal33169]

How to decide what product to build

Techniques for defining a product and building and managing a team.

Design is a process of making dreams come true.

THE UNIVERSAL TRAVELER

LET’S PLAY A GAME. (I’m imagining the computer voice from the movie WarGames. GREETINGS PROFESSOR FALKEN...SHALL WE PLAY A GAME? Alas, I digress.)1

How many people do you think are on the following product or feature teams?

Apple’s iMovie and iPhoto

Twitter

Instagram

Spotify

Hint: the number is definitely smaller than you think.

Apple’s iMovie and iPhoto: 3 and 5, respectively2

Twitter: 5–73

Instagram: 13 when acquired for $1 billion by Facebook4

Spotify: 85

We also know that the team that created the first iPhone prototypes was “shockingly small.”6 Even Jony Ive’s design studio at Apple—the group responsible for the industrial design of every product, as well as projects like iOS 7—is only 19 people.7 And we can surmise that this group is broken up into smaller teams to work on their own individual projects.

Figuring out what product you’re going to build is an exercise in working through the research you’ve gathered, empathizing with your audience, and deciding on what you can uniquely create that’ll solve the problems you’ve found. But it’s also an exercise in deciding how big the team is and who’s on it.

Jeff Bezos of Amazon famously coined a term for teams of this size: the “two-pizza team.”8 In other words, if the number of people on a team can’t be fed by two pizzas, then it’s too big. Initially conceived to create “a decentralized, even disorganized company where independent ideas would prevail over groupthink,” there’s some surprising science that explains why teams of this size are less prone to be overconfident, communicate poorly, and take longer to get stuff done. In actuality, that probably caps this team at or around six people.

Enter the work of the late Richard Hackman, a professor at Harvard University who studied organizational psychology. He discovered that “The larger a group, the more process problems members encounter in carrying out their collective work...worse, the vulnerability of a group to such difficulties increases sharply as size increases.”9

Hackman defined “process problems” as the links—or, communication avenues—among the members in a team. As the number of members grows, the number of links grows exponentially. Using the formula n*(n–1)/2—where n is group size—Hackman found that the links among a group get hefty very quickly (Figure 1-1).

Figure 1-1. The larger a group gets, the more “process problems” a group faces. This requires increased communication and can slow down decision making. (Source: Messick and Kramer, The Psychology of Leadership.)

Even though math wasn’t my favorite subject in school, let’s go through a few team size scenarios. Let’s start with Bezos’s recommended team size of six—assuming that two pizzas are appropriate for six people (although, I’ve been known to put away a whole pizza on my own from time to time):

Bezos’s preferred team size of 6 people has only 15 links to manage.

Increase that number to 10, and you already have 45 links to manage.

If you expand to the size of where I work every day, Tinder—70 people—the number of links grows to 2,415.

But managing more communication links isn’t the only problem groups face when they increase in size.

Larger teams get overconfident. They believe they can get things done quicker, and have a tendency “to increasingly underestimate task completion time as team size grows.” In 2010, organizational behavior researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and UCLA conducted a number of field studies confirming these findings.10 In one of their experiments, they observed teams tasked with building LEGO kits. Teams with two people took 36 minutes to complete the kit, while four-person teams took over 44 percent longer.

But the four-person teams believed that they could complete the LEGO set faster than the two-person team.

That’s why the notion of the two-pizza team is so powerful. It’s a simple concept that’s easily understood by anybody within your organization, and can be used to combat the “let’s throw more bodies at the problem” mentality that some organizations might be used to using.

OK, so we’ve figured out how big your team should be. But who should be invited to the party?

Everybody loves to be in product meetings. Especially when you’re in the deciding phase of deciding what to build.

Even Steve Jobs loved being in the room during this phase. “He told me once,” said Glenn Reid, former director of engineering for consumer applications at Apple, “that part of the reason he wanted to be CEO was so that nobody could tell him that he wasn’t allowed to participate in the nitty-gritty of product design.”11

Treat this process like you’re the bouncer at Berghain nightclub in Berlin.12 (Hint: it’s practically impossible to get in if you don’t speak German. And even then, Sven the bouncer, “a post-apocalyptic bearded version of Wagner,” enforces an obscure dress code that nobody can seem to crack.)

So, who’s in the room together? How much do they know about the pains you’ve found? And how do you frame the discussion?

At this point, you should have everyone who’s going to be involved in the creation of the product on the team. An example of this could include:

The product designer or product manager (depending on how your organization is set up, and if you’ll be working with someone else who will be designing the product).

The engineer(s) with whom you’ll be working to build the product—typically frontend and backend.

A representative from the team that will be launching and promoting the product; this could be someone from marketing or public relations to create a feedback loop between what will be promised to your customers and what your product is actually capable of doing.

While at KISSMetrics, Hiten Shah structured these teams with

...a product manager, a designer, and an engineer. Sometimes it’s multiple designers, multiple engineers, and sometimes it’s an engineering manager.

At times it can even be, sometimes, someone from marketing, if that makes sense, or even someone from sales. I mean, we have tried different methods. I’d say for different things, small things, big product releases, a whole product, it’s going to be different and for the stage of the company it’s going to be different.

Party Like It’s 1991

Regis McKenna had something to say about this process. When he saw how fast technology was changing society in 1991, he realized—like our friend Neil McElroy at Proctor & Gamble—that a new role would need to be formalized. This person would be “an integrator, both internally—synthesizing technological capability with market needs—and externally—bringing the customer into the company as a participant in the development and adaptation of goods and services.”13

If your eyes glazed over reading that, well, you should read it again. Because McKenna was responsible for launching some of the hallmarks of the computer age: the first microprocessor at Intel, Apple’s first PC, and The Byte Shop, the world’s first retail computer store. Oh, and one more thing: he was the guy behind the “startup in a garage” legend first made famous with Apple’s early days.

So, did you read it again? Did anything seem familiar?

Hey, he’s describing you!

You’re the product designer. The integrator. You’re the customer’s champion, their expert, their advocate.

This process requires you to lead your team through the research; to propose product ideas to eliminate your customer’s pain or find their joy effectively.

That, of course, means that everybody involved in building the product must be intimately familiar with the research that’s been conducted on your audience.

Take the opportunity as an “integrator” to build on your strengths as a team: what innovative technologies and design can you apply to the problem at hand? Even better, what can you and your team uniquely build for this audience?

I thought Josh Elman (Greylock Partners, Zazzle, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter) had a great insight on this part of the product creation process:

The first thing is you have to trust your team. I think that sounds obvious, but it’s much harder in practice. I think a lot of structures and processes are built on the fact that there isn’t innate trust...next, get your team’s help in how to solve the problem. The team knows what they can build. The team knows how it can be developed. The designers know what kinds of things are designable and natural in the product and what kinds of things are not. All of this matters.

Don’t forget the Pain Matrix (Figure 1-2). What are the observations you made that fit into the upper-right quadrant where there is the most acute, frequent pain? How can you build your customers’ dream product? What are the pains that you’re uniquely capable of solving?

Figure 1-2. The Pain Matrix, a simple tool I created for myself. It’s intended to make sifting through and making sense of the research you’ve gathered much simpler.

The Pain Matrix is the perfect piece of collateral for when you’re hashing out what to build. This document becomes a communication device, an advocate for your customers. Everybody can see it and you can back it up with your data. Bonus points for direct quotes from your research.

“The thing to focus on is that yes, 100 percent of your users are humans,” Diogenes Brito, a product designer most recently at startup Slack, reminds us. “While technology is changing really, really rapidly, human motivations basically haven’t at all. Like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, that’s still the same. Designing around that, the closer you are to the base level of what humans desire, the more timeless it’ll be.”

To reiterate: don’t lose sight of the actual, observed, tangible pains and joys that you’ve researched. Resist the temptation to delve into hopes and dreams. Just throwing an “MVP” out into the wild to “validate” something you spend time building is a waste of time, money, and talent.

You’re better than that.

Now, all you have to do is keep everybody focused.

Keeping Everybody Focused

There’s always a big problem when the club-like euphoria from a product meeting starts to turn focus into chaos. How do you keep everybody on task and debating healthily?

I highly recommend a whiteboard for idea collection and harvesting. This serves three practical purposes:

It’s difficult to remember what was said. You don’t want good ideas getting lost simply because there were too many thrown around the room.

It allows you to be visual. Not all ideas can be verbally explained; a low-fidelity medium allows anybody to sketch the central core of the idea without unnecessary detail. This allows your team to get ideas out of their head on an equal playing field.

It lets you take advantage of the natural tendency for the group to forget which idea was contributed by whom. This naturally allows the best ideas to float to the top and the worst ones to sink to the bottom. It’s hugely beneficial, especially if the group has a lot of ideas. The key here is to avoid attaching names to ideas, so you can avoid hurt egos and the so-called not invented here syndrome. Called the Cauldron, this was a technique used by Apple—sometimes even with Steve Jobs in the room. According to Glenn Reid, the former director of engineering at Apple, the Cauldron “let us make a great soup, a great potion, without worrying about who had what idea. This was critically important, in retrospect, to decouple the CEO from the ideas. If an idea was good, we’d all eventually agree on it, and if it was bad, it just kind of sank to the bottom of the pot. We didn’t really remember whose ideas were which—it just didn’t matter.”14

There’s also the benefit of timed techniques, like one used at online publishing startup Medium. With the right group of people in the room, the problem that needs to be solved is defined and “you have two minutes to write down as many ideas as possible [to solve it],” director of product design and operations Jason Stirman told me. “Then you have five minutes to put the ideas on a whiteboard and explain them. Then you have another two minutes to add to ideas...the end result is you just get as many ideas as possible. So we do that a lot here. We brainstorm a lot.”

The “Working Backwards” Approach

There’s another technique used by Amazon that’s particularly powerful. Known as the “Working Backwards” approach, this technique calls upon the product owner to literally write a future press release for the product—as well as fake customer quotes, frequently asked questions, and a story that describes the customer’s experience using the product.

In your case, this could be a future blog post that you’d put out about your product or feature instead of a press release.

What’s particularly unique about this technique is that this document involves every part of your organization that’s required to make the product successful—not just product and engineering, but marketing, sales, support, and every other part of your company. In other words, it forces you to think about all of the aspects that can inform your product.

Werner Vogels, Amazon’s CTO, describes the rationale behind the process:

The product definition process works backwards in the following way: we start by writing the documents we’ll need at launch (the press release and the FAQ) and then work towards documents that are closer to the implementation.

The Working Backwards product definition process is all about fleshing out the concept and achieving clarity of thought about what we will ultimately go off and build.15

According to Vogels, there are four documents included in Working Backwards:

The press release

What the product does, and why it exists

The “frequently asked questions” document

Questions someone might have after reading the press release

A definition of the customer experience

A story of what the customer sees and feels when they use the product, as well as relevant mockups to aid the narrative

The user manual

What the customer would reference if they needed to learn how to use the product

This all might seem like a lot of frivolous upfront work, but the method’s been used at Amazon for over a decade. And if you use it in conjunction with the Sales Safari method outlined in Chapter 2, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more customer-centric approach to building products. That way, you’ll be working on ideas that have their foundation in what real people need, as opposed to coming up with ideas that you try to plug into an amorphous audience.

At the center of Working Backwards lies the press release. A document that should be no longer than a page and a half, it’s the guiding light and the touchstone of the product and something that can be referred to over the course of development.

“My rule of thumb is that if the press release is hard to write, then the product is probably going to suck,” writes Ian McAllister, a director at Amazon. “Keep working at it until the outline for each paragraph flows.”16

Amazon’s view is that a press release can be iterated upon at a much lower cost than the actual product. That’s because the document shines a harsh light on your answer to your customer’s pain. Solutions that aren’t compelling or are too lukewarm are easily identified. Nuke them and start over. All you’re working with at the moment is words.

“If the benefits listed don’t sound very interesting or exciting to customers, then perhaps they’re not (and shouldn’t be built),” McAllister writes. “Instead, the product manager should keep iterating on the..

from FEED 10 TECHNOLOGY https://ift.tt/2JgQQtM

[csemntwinl3x0a1]

How to decide what product to build

How to decide what product to build

Techniques for defining a product and building and managing a team.

Design is a process of making dreams come true.

THE UNIVERSAL TRAVELER

LET’S PLAY A GAME. (I’m imagining the computer voice from the movie WarGames. GREETINGS PROFESSOR FALKEN...SHALL WE PLAY A GAME? Alas, I digress.)1

How many people do you think are on the following product or feature teams?

Apple’s iMovie and iPhoto

Twitter

Instagram

Spotify

Hint: the number is definitely smaller than you think.

Apple’s iMovie and iPhoto: 3 and 5, respectively2

Twitter: 5–73

Instagram: 13 when acquired for $1 billion by Facebook4

Spotify: 85

We also know that the team that created the first iPhone prototypes was “shockingly small.”6 Even Jony Ive’s design studio at Apple—the group responsible for the industrial design of every product, as well as projects like iOS 7—is only 19 people.7 And we can surmise that this group is broken up into smaller teams to work on their own individual projects.

Figuring out what product you’re going to build is an exercise in working through the research you’ve gathered, empathizing with your audience, and deciding on what you can uniquely create that’ll solve the problems you’ve found. But it’s also an exercise in deciding how big the team is and who’s on it.

Jeff Bezos of Amazon famously coined a term for teams of this size: the “two-pizza team.”8 In other words, if the number of people on a team can’t be fed by two pizzas, then it’s too big. Initially conceived to create “a decentralized, even disorganized company where independent ideas would prevail over groupthink,” there’s some surprising science that explains why teams of this size are less prone to be overconfident, communicate poorly, and take longer to get stuff done. In actuality, that probably caps this team at or around six people.

Enter the work of the late Richard Hackman, a professor at Harvard University who studied organizational psychology. He discovered that “The larger a group, the more process problems members encounter in carrying out their collective work...worse, the vulnerability of a group to such difficulties increases sharply as size increases.”9

Hackman defined “process problems” as the links—or, communication avenues—among the members in a team. As the number of members grows, the number of links grows exponentially. Using the formula n*(n–1)/2—where n is group size—Hackman found that the links among a group get hefty very quickly (Figure 1-1).

Figure 1-1. The larger a group gets, the more “process problems” a group faces. This requires increased communication and can slow down decision making. (Source: Messick and Kramer, The Psychology of Leadership.)

Even though math wasn’t my favorite subject in school, let’s go through a few team size scenarios. Let’s start with Bezos’s recommended team size of six—assuming that two pizzas are appropriate for six people (although, I’ve been known to put away a whole pizza on my own from time to time):

Bezos’s preferred team size of 6 people has only 15 links to manage.

Increase that number to 10, and you already have 45 links to manage.

If you expand to the size of where I work every day, Tinder—70 people—the number of links grows to 2,415.

But managing more communication links isn’t the only problem groups face when they increase in size.

Larger teams get overconfident. They believe they can get things done quicker, and have a tendency “to increasingly underestimate task completion time as team size grows.” In 2010, organizational behavior researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and UCLA conducted a number of field studies confirming these findings.10 In one of their experiments, they observed teams tasked with building LEGO kits. Teams with two people took 36 minutes to complete the kit, while four-person teams took over 44 percent longer.

But the four-person teams believed that they could complete the LEGO set faster than the two-person team.

That’s why the notion of the two-pizza team is so powerful. It’s a simple concept that’s easily understood by anybody within your organization, and can be used to combat the “let’s throw more bodies at the problem” mentality that some organizations might be used to using.

OK, so we’ve figured out how big your team should be. But who should be invited to the party?

Everybody loves to be in product meetings. Especially when you’re in the deciding phase of deciding what to build.

Even Steve Jobs loved being in the room during this phase. “He told me once,” said Glenn Reid, former director of engineering for consumer applications at Apple, “that part of the reason he wanted to be CEO was so that nobody could tell him that he wasn’t allowed to participate in the nitty-gritty of product design.”11

Treat this process like you’re the bouncer at Berghain nightclub in Berlin.12 (Hint: it’s practically impossible to get in if you don’t speak German. And even then, Sven the bouncer, “a post-apocalyptic bearded version of Wagner,” enforces an obscure dress code that nobody can seem to crack.)

So, who’s in the room together? How much do they know about the pains you’ve found? And how do you frame the discussion?

At this point, you should have everyone who’s going to be involved in the creation of the product on the team. An example of this could include:

The product designer or product manager (depending on how your organization is set up, and if you’ll be working with someone else who will be designing the product).

The engineer(s) with whom you’ll be working to build the product—typically frontend and backend.

A representative from the team that will be launching and promoting the product; this could be someone from marketing or public relations to create a feedback loop between what will be promised to your customers and what your product is actually capable of doing.

While at KISSMetrics, Hiten Shah structured these teams with

...a product manager, a designer, and an engineer. Sometimes it’s multiple designers, multiple engineers, and sometimes it’s an engineering manager.

At times it can even be, sometimes, someone from marketing, if that makes sense, or even someone from sales. I mean, we have tried different methods. I’d say for different things, small things, big product releases, a whole product, it’s going to be different and for the stage of the company it’s going to be different.

Party Like It’s 1991

Regis McKenna had something to say about this process. When he saw how fast technology was changing society in 1991, he realized—like our friend Neil McElroy at Proctor & Gamble—that a new role would need to be formalized. This person would be “an integrator, both internally—synthesizing technological capability with market needs—and externally—bringing the customer into the company as a participant in the development and adaptation of goods and services.”13

If your eyes glazed over reading that, well, you should read it again. Because McKenna was responsible for launching some of the hallmarks of the computer age: the first microprocessor at Intel, Apple’s first PC, and The Byte Shop, the world’s first retail computer store. Oh, and one more thing: he was the guy behind the “startup in a garage” legend first made famous with Apple’s early days.

So, did you read it again? Did anything seem familiar?

Hey, he’s describing you!

You’re the product designer. The integrator. You’re the customer’s champion, their expert, their advocate.

This process requires you to lead your team through the research; to propose product ideas to eliminate your customer’s pain or find their joy effectively.

That, of course, means that everybody involved in building the product must be intimately familiar with the research that’s been conducted on your audience.

Take the opportunity as an “integrator” to build on your strengths as a team: what innovative technologies and design can you apply to the problem at hand? Even better, what can you and your team uniquely build for this audience?

I thought Josh Elman (Greylock Partners, Zazzle, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter) had a great insight on this part of the product creation process:

The first thing is you have to trust your team. I think that sounds obvious, but it’s much harder in practice. I think a lot of structures and processes are built on the fact that there isn’t innate trust...next, get your team’s help in how to solve the problem. The team knows what they can build. The team knows how it can be developed. The designers know what kinds of things are designable and natural in the product and what kinds of things are not. All of this matters.

Don’t forget the Pain Matrix (Figure 1-2). What are the observations you made that fit into the upper-right quadrant where there is the most acute, frequent pain? How can you build your customers’ dream product? What are the pains that you’re uniquely capable of solving?

Figure 1-2. The Pain Matrix, a simple tool I created for myself. It’s intended to make sifting through and making sense of the research you’ve gathered much simpler.

The Pain Matrix is the perfect piece of collateral for when you’re hashing out what to build. This document becomes a communication device, an advocate for your customers. Everybody can see it and you can back it up with your data. Bonus points for direct quotes from your research.

“The thing to focus on is that yes, 100 percent of your users are humans,” Diogenes Brito, a product designer most recently at startup Slack, reminds us. “While technology is changing really, really rapidly, human motivations basically haven’t at all. Like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, that’s still the same. Designing around that, the closer you are to the base level of what humans desire, the more timeless it’ll be.”

To reiterate: don’t lose sight of the actual, observed, tangible pains and joys that you’ve researched. Resist the temptation to delve into hopes and dreams. Just throwing an “MVP” out into the wild to “validate” something you spend time building is a waste of time, money, and talent.

You’re better than that.

Now, all you have to do is keep everybody focused.

Keeping Everybody Focused

There’s always a big problem when the club-like euphoria from a product meeting starts to turn focus into chaos. How do you keep everybody on task and debating healthily?

I highly recommend a whiteboard for idea collection and harvesting. This serves three practical purposes:

It’s difficult to remember what was said. You don’t want good ideas getting lost simply because there were too many thrown around the room.

It allows you to be visual. Not all ideas can be verbally explained; a low-fidelity medium allows anybody to sketch the central core of the idea without unnecessary detail. This allows your team to get ideas out of their head on an equal playing field.

It lets you take advantage of the natural tendency for the group to forget which idea was contributed by whom. This naturally allows the best ideas to float to the top and the worst ones to sink to the bottom. It’s hugely beneficial, especially if the group has a lot of ideas. The key here is to avoid attaching names to ideas, so you can avoid hurt egos and the so-called not invented here syndrome. Called the Cauldron, this was a technique used by Apple—sometimes even with Steve Jobs in the room. According to Glenn Reid, the former director of engineering at Apple, the Cauldron “let us make a great soup, a great potion, without worrying about who had what idea. This was critically important, in retrospect, to decouple the CEO from the ideas. If an idea was good, we’d all eventually agree on it, and if it was bad, it just kind of sank to the bottom of the pot. We didn’t really remember whose ideas were which—it just didn’t matter.”14

There’s also the benefit of timed techniques, like one used at online publishing startup Medium. With the right group of people in the room, the problem that needs to be solved is defined and “you have two minutes to write down as many ideas as possible [to solve it],” director of product design and operations Jason Stirman told me. “Then you have five minutes to put the ideas on a whiteboard and explain them. Then you have another two minutes to add to ideas...the end result is you just get as many ideas as possible. So we do that a lot here. We brainstorm a lot.”

The “Working Backwards” Approach

There’s another technique used by Amazon that’s particularly powerful. Known as the “Working Backwards” approach, this technique calls upon the product owner to literally write a future press release for the product—as well as fake customer quotes, frequently asked questions, and a story that describes the customer’s experience using the product.

In your case, this could be a future blog post that you’d put out about your product or feature instead of a press release.

What’s particularly unique about this technique is that this document involves every part of your organization that’s required to make the product successful—not just product and engineering, but marketing, sales, support, and every other part of your company. In other words, it forces you to think about all of the aspects that can inform your product.

Werner Vogels, Amazon’s CTO, describes the rationale behind the process:

The product definition process works backwards in the following way: we start by writing the documents we’ll need at launch (the press release and the FAQ) and then work towards documents that are closer to the implementation.

The Working Backwards product definition process is all about fleshing out the concept and achieving clarity of thought about what we will ultimately go off and build.15

According to Vogels, there are four documents included in Working Backwards:

The press release

What the product does, and why it exists

The “frequently asked questions” document

Questions someone might have after reading the press release

A definition of the customer experience

A story of what the customer sees and feels when they use the product, as well as relevant mockups to aid the narrative

The user manual

What the customer would reference if they needed to learn how to use the product

This all might seem like a lot of frivolous upfront work, but the method’s been used at Amazon for over a decade. And if you use it in conjunction with the Sales Safari method outlined in Chapter 2, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more customer-centric approach to building products. That way, you’ll be working on ideas that have their foundation in what real people need, as opposed to coming up with ideas that you try to plug into an amorphous audience.

At the center of Working Backwards lies the press release. A document that should be no longer than a page and a half, it’s the guiding light and the touchstone of the product and something that can be referred to over the course of development.

“My rule of thumb is that if the press release is hard to write, then the product is probably going to suck,” writes Ian McAllister, a director at Amazon. “Keep working at it until the outline for each paragraph flows.”16

Amazon’s view is that a press release can be iterated upon at a much lower cost than the actual product. That’s because the document shines a harsh light on your answer to your customer’s pain. Solutions that aren’t compelling or are too lukewarm are easily identified. Nuke them and start over. All you’re working with at the moment is words.

“If the benefits listed don’t sound very interesting or exciting to customers, then perhaps they’re not (and shouldn’t be built),” McAllister writes. “Instead, the product manager should keep iterating on the..

https://ift.tt/2JgQQtM

[nancymatias10005]

A Remix to Religion

           Interstellar an outer space science fiction film by Christopher Nolan is not a film for your average viewer. Instead, its targeted audience is the common geek obsessing over space. The film presents the viewer with the postmodern dystopian characteristic of the world coming to an end. Nolan references his imaginary end of the world as that of the Dust Bowl during the 1930s. Severe dust storms have affected the air quality continuing to kill the crops as well as human life. Humans have accepted their destiny and are only trying to maintain alive during these hard times. However, just when all seems lost, a higher power or “they” create gravitational anomalies in order to save the human race from extinction. The movie finishes with the unanswered question of who this higher power or “they” might be. The viewer is left with their own thoughts and to attach their own beliefs to bring significance to this higher power. Interstellar is the contemporary story of religion in where through the use of a dystopian world, science, and love the subject of a higher power is brought in to question.

           The film starts by focusing on the reality of our future Earth not being able to sustain life due to the climate. A global crop blight has caused a food scarce which pushed for the future generations to focus on farming for the human survival. When the basics of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs are not being met humans regress their understandings of science to focus on survival. Time then moves backwards to the caveman age where all is but food, water, and shelter. Nolan is not exactly very specific about the cause of what led Earth to be nearly uninhabitable. However, it does imply that we were the creators of our own ending. This apocalyptic beginning sets the stage for the modern judgment day or doomsday. Most religions more often than not have their own version of a judgment day which is brought upon them and more than often tends to be more on the fictional side. In this contemporary film, we find that humans themselves have turned their own world against them creating a Dust Bowl. “The world doesn’t need any more engineers” as said by the Murph’s school counselor not knowing that the engineer sitting across from him holds the key to his salvation. Even at this most vulnerable stage Nolan shows no religion being tied to the film. However, he hides religion behind the sacrifices being made throughout the movie with his own very original perspective.

           When Murph, Cooper’s younger daughter, leaves her window open during a dust storm they encounter the first gravitational anomaly. Lines of dust have aligned themselves on her bedroom floor which they soon discover to be coordinates to an unknown location. During this scene Donald, the grandpa makes a reference to religion by stating “Want to clean that up? when you are finished praying to it.” The first reference to religion as we later find in the film is what sends Cooper on his mission to space. This gravitational anomaly is the first sign to hope which is very ironic with Donald’s statement. The coordinates lead Cooper and his daughter to NASA which has now gone undercover due to the bad reputation they put themselves in by bombing civilians as a solution to the current problem. The second reference to religion is made by Dr. Brand stating The Lazarus Mission which served to collect data from space to try to save humanity. Dr. Brand then goes on to explain that Lazarus rose from the death after four days followed by Cooper saying that he had to die in the first place anyways. A miracle of Jesus is reference when is what is needed at the moment for the human race not to disappear. The miracle that has brought Cooper to NASA in order for him to fly the spaceship. The raising of Lazarus was one of the last miracles perform by Jesus which add to the idea of this being the last miracle perform by Cooper. Throughout the movie we see many references of him being a symbol or being portrayed as Jesus himself. When they are entering the wormhole, we see Brand make a connection with “they” which we later find out is Cooper himself. This moment is very important in the film because it is seen as the first connection with “they” and mimics one of the most famous paintings in religion. The Sistine chapel “The creation of Adam” painting by Michael Angelo shows a connection between man and God where their fingers don’t quite touch. Cooper therefore becomes this higher God that has managed to see or open new worlds. Knowledge in this case has led him to cross dimensions without him really knowing who has created this space for him in the black hole. A greater God seems to be controlling the life of Cooper and his daughter where both of them found themselves lured in by gravitational anomalies. Cooper has been experiencing this anomalies since his past time in NASA. The crash he had was due to one. The Indian drone that he finds that he later uses for solar panels on the tractors which end up malfunctioning due to a rare gravitational pull. It all leads to this one event in his life where he is chosen to save humanity but which we later find is his daughter the chosen one. The idea itself of having a chosen one to save humanity is very symbolistic of religion itself given that Jesus sacrifice himself to save humanity as well.

           In the film Cooper converts itself into his own superior version that guided him to where he is at now. We know now that the divine contact Brand had with “they” was nothing but the door opening to the 5-dimentional space to Cooper. The film itself presents us with more than just visual cues of religious symbols because the original score for the film has the most iconic instrument tied to it which is the Organ. The music carries itself within the film to transcend viewers beyond the space we know. However, it takes its viewers to a more than common place with its chimes it brings the comfort of religion. This only goes to show that Nolan pushed this film with religious intention without being too obvious about it. However, let’s not forget that he hired Kip Thorne to make a believable and close to reality space film. He explains that he didn’t want to drift off of true science in a hypothetical space. There is a constant debate between science and religion but Nolan took both ideas into this film and created Interstellar. There’s no doubt that the science used in this film is very close to the real world. This science fiction film holds little fiction in it given that most of it can be possible. Most importantly the film wraps around the idea of love. Brand argues that love is the force that drives us where we need to go. In the scene where Mann tries to kill Cooper he tells him that what drives us is our survival instinct which he believes grows stronger when you have kids because of the love you feel for them. We find love throughout the whole movie as the motivation behind our lives. The love between Cooper and Murph was strong enough to push them to communicate with each other. Brand states “Love isn’t something we invented. It’s observable, powerful, it has to mean something…Love is the one thing we’re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space.” Religion itself teaches that God regardless of religion is love and is everywhere. So isn’t it that if we find love so powerful in ourselves we are able to transcend dimensions just like Cooper. His love for his kids push for him to seek a higher understanding of the universe but wasn’t his love that one that open the door to save them. His love for his daughter allowed him to transcend dimensions to her room.

           In conclusion, Interstellar is a film that pushes for hypothetical questions of our universe. Nolan takes the risk of including the idea of love in a science fiction movie for an audience that very much doesn’t believe love to be a form of force in space like time and gravity. Nonetheless he does a stellar execution on clashing two of the most contradicting subjects. He succeeds by counting both as equal and not one more than the other. Religion and spirituality play a big part in the film from Zimmer’s organ to Brad’s ideas of love being able to transcend dimensions. Cues are brought throughout the film about this contemporary remix of religious stories and beliefs. It is undoubtable that Nolan was influence by his own beliefs and couldn’t deny the presence of a higher power in a science fiction space film. In the darkest moments we find our answers.

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#589. The Un-labor Monday post (1 May 2017) - The Terminator and Maslow duke it out

#589. The Un-labor Monday post (1 May 2017) – The Terminator and Maslow duke it out

Futurists have long foretold the rise of the machine. Novelists put it into words. Film makers added apocalyptic video to the narrative.  Robots crushing humans, AI taking over decision centers, you know the drill. So much so that it’s become a future we simultaneously accept (it will come) and reject (but not just yet, this is still SciFi). If you believe the star businessmen of today (Musk,…