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ms-demeanor · 5 years ago

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After reading your "ultra-long postivity post", now I have kind of a weird feeling because i relate a lot to pretty much everything you said, but i ended up approaching the "not everyone can x" from the opposite side, being the "gifted kid" teachers used to hold everyone to unrealistic standards (that i knew most couldnt achieve in the given timeframes), and now i get frustrated when i dont develop skills immediately, because i have done it before and feel like i should be able to and aaaaaaaaaa

Funny story: when I was a kid my parents had both my sister and I tested for learning and developmental disabilities. This testing included IQ testing.

It identified that we were both “gifted” kids* and that I’m dyslexic.

It totally missed my ADHD, though!

The problem with that is that my parents. Hm.

Okay my parents both grew up in very poor families. VERY poor. And they both wanted to go to college and knew the only way that they could was through scholarships. So they became debaters. They met at a tournament in high school.

Debaters are weird. You need an efficient working memory and strong recall and the ability to think quickly on your feet. Being witty and kind of an asshole are also good traits for debaters. Basically you’ve either gotta be really fuck-off smart to be a competitive debater or you’ve gotta at least *seem* really fuck-off smart.

And my parents were champion debaters at a national level. The Whittier College debate trophy has my mom’s name written directly under Richard goddamn Nixon. My dad was on the USC debate team and competed against Harvard and won. Not only that but he ended up coaching debate for USC and Cal Tech.

So as kids who grew up in extremely poor families and were able to go to college and get middle-class jobs and buy a house because of intellectual ability my parents placed A LOT of importance on intellectual ability.

So that IQ score became a large part of my life.

First we attacked the dyslexia. The approach was basically teaching me a bunch of sight words because sounding out phonics doesn’t work when the letters get screwed up. And because I was *gifted* we did a lot of really BIG sight words.

It took about six months to get me up to speed from “memorizing the pages of a story to match the pictures because I couldn’t read along in class” to “the first book I read on my own was The Hobbit.” I guess that counted as “cured” because that was the last time I got any kind of educational assistance.

At that time I was at a gifted school, a really tiny private school that was also an after-school daycare where we did full-day classes and then did gymnastics and swim from 3-6pm. I also was there over the summer because my parents worked.

So going from “tiny private school where the teacher has you stand up in class to read your failing grade in front of everyone so that she could shame you into performing better” to “fine public school in a suburb wealthy enough to have arts programs” was a major, major change. They did an aptitude test because I was transferring in from a different district and there was much discussion about whether or not to move me directly from the second to the sixth grade.

The district refused, thank fuck.

The public elementary school didn’t *have* a gifted program so it took very little time for me to become the Certified Weird Kid. My third grade teacher had me read aloud to our class for twenty minutes a day. I taught the class the multiplication table.

When it got to be time to go to the junior high school my mom went to a meeting for the school’s gifted kids program. APPARENTLY one of the kid’s dad’s basically said “I don’t understand why you’re wasting school funds on field trips for the stupid kids, the school should spend more of its resources on kids who have a chance of actually meaning something to the world” and my mom decided that while being gifted was important it was less important than making sure I wasn’t exposed to assholes of that caliber on a regular basis.

(thanks mom, I actually do really appreciate that reprieve)

Several teachers pushed me into advanced classes - my math teacher insisted that I take the advanced algebra classes in the seventh and eighth grade.

The GATE kids *WERE* assholes and were extra bonus special assholes to me because math was the only advanced class that I was in. (At my junior high school you had to pick your elective based on what level of classes you were in - to take the GATE classes you HAD to take a music elective; if you took art, drama, shop, or home ec you couldn’t take the smart kid classes. The algebra class was a new, separate addition to the program so *some* of the kids in the “electives for dropouts” program could take algebra. Schools are really fucked up, guys, in case you didn’t know schools are really fucked up and that was BEFORE No Child Left Behind).

I got a C in that algebra class and sat in my room for literally an hour screaming at myself for being such a selfish, distracted idiot that I let myself read my books instead of studying harder for the class. (clearly very healthy, normal twelve-year-old behavior)

When it was time to go to high school my teachers made a united plea to the district to transfer me into honors/IB/AP classes.

The kids in the honors/IB/AP classes continued to be kind of awful to me. I got extremely depressed and basically started doing the lazy-but-brilliant thing of completely ignoring homework or in-class work but performing spectacularly well on tests or essays in the classes that I wasn’t catastrophically failing

I was the only person at the school who got a perfect score on the vocab part of my SAT. I was the only honors kid who hadn’t been in SAT prep classes. There was only one other kid who graduated with the same number of units as I had, we’d outstripped the valedictorian and salutatorian but three classes each. I only applied to one college - I got accepted for painting but my interviewer urged me to move to the writing program and I got accepted for that too.

My financial aid didn’t come through and my dad wasn’t willing to cosign for loans on “an art program at a trade school.”

I got accepted to Pratt Institute on their Writing for Publication track which included an internship with the New York Times for third-year students in the program.

At that point I had a Columbia Scholastic Press award for my work on my high school yearbook.

Let me tell you, the community college that I went to and spent five years variously failing and succeeding at had a fucking *killer* newspaper and magazine when I was there. The local community newspaper that hired me when I was 21 was also much better designed and edited than it had any right to be for the three years I worked there (getting paid a whole eight dollars an hour and sometimes working 20 hours straight to get it in to the printer on time).

When I transferred to the state school I got perfect grades and worked full time and won every contest offered by the school’s English Honors society (which I couldn’t join because I was a transfer student and hadn’t done honors classes my freshman and sophomore years). I started a literary magazine with some friends when I graduated; we published four full issues online before it fell apart.

You know what’s also funny?

Even the food-service job I had to pay my way though the community college I felt terrible about attending was a skills test. I was a barista, so of course for a while I was a competitive barista.

I disappointed my parents a lot. I heard a lot of “we know you’re better than this.” I got told I was too smart to be screwing up this bad. I mentioned it a couple weeks ago but my results from that IQ test got compared to my sister’s and that was the justification for holding me to a higher standard. “You’re measurably brilliant, why aren’t you acting like it?”

Here lies the corpse of a gifted kid. Look on my works ye might and despair.

I am the perfect picture of a twice exceptional gifted kid and the reason I wrote all of this out is to tell you one thing:

“Gifted Kid” is a label that someone applied to you, it has nothing to do with who and what you ARE.

It’s very, very unfair that the adults in your life used you that way. I have an exceptionally terrible memory of being singled out as the only one who passed the first test in my IB World History class; “Why is Alli the only one of all of you who is writing at grade level? You’re supposed to be the smartest kids in the school, why did you all fail?”

That’s awful for the kids around you, that’s awful for you. It doesn’t do anybody any favors if people around you are being informed that you’re setting the curve they’ll be judged against. And it really, really doesn’t do YOU any favors because it doesn’t take long *at all* for your brain to learn that that’s all you’re good for. If you aren’t the best at a thing then what’s the point, you HAVE to be best because they already SAID you were best and if you aren’t then all these other people hate you for setting a standard that even you can’t keep up with.

You end up competing with past versions of yourself and focusing on those things that make the grownups in your life praise you because the grownups in your life has praised you in such a way that it’s turned all the other kids against you.

You know who bullied the fuck out of me? The kids I taught the times tables to, the kids I read to for half an hour a day.

Those kids were MEAN to me but the teacher who told me to read Boxcar Kids to the class after lunch everyday was NICE and she told me not to worry, they were just jealous and I should be proud of my gifts.

“Anon did this in three minutes. What’s taking the rest of you so long?” - what a terrible weight to put on a child. You’re right. Not everyone can do everything.

Fucking hell.

Adults what the everloving shit is wrong with us? Please don’t treat kids like that.

Okay.

But here’s the other thing:

If there’s any time in your life that it’s easy to acquire skills with no apparent effort it’s when you’re a child surrounded by a support system that is engaged in making sure that you can acquire those skills.

It took three adults, two dictionaries, and several hours a day to teach me enough sight-words to throw me into “look at baby genius*” territory but from my perspective as a little kid I was just reading cool stories.

I spent four hours a day in the yearbook room and ditched and failed other classes so that I could work on the yearbook. I collected hundreds of magazines to get an eye for layout. But from my perspective as a teenager it was a fun activity that I did with the closest thing I had to friends.

I’m sure that there are some skills that you had a natural aptitude for, some things that came naturally. But I’m also sure that you didn’t learn those skills with no effort, it’s just that now as an adult with a life and other shit going on it takes more effort to learn to do things.

In all likelihood you weren’t a savant who did everything perfectly the first time you tried. It just seems that way because even really smart kids don’t know when they’re bad at things and are mostly being compared against other kids (with the few rare exceptions of music prodigies or math prodigies or those kids who end up in science grad programs at 12 and boy howdy do I think there’s a whole other can of worms when it comes to the way child prodigies* interact with the world).

You wanna know what probably saved my life in the last few years?

That “anti-capitalist love notes” tumblr post.

You are worth more than your productivity.

I was actually kind of offended the first time I saw that post on my dash. “No I’m not,” I thought. “You’re only worth what you can do, everyone knows that. People care about what you do for them.”

And why the hell would I think anything else? That’s what I’d learned for pretty much my whole life.

It took me a really long time to understand that I was wrong. I matter outside of what I can do for people or how well I perform. I matter more than being able to perfectly recite poetry from memory or do calculations on command or sit down at a piano and play a piece I’ve never played by sight-reading it.

And you matter outside of that too. You’re more than your performance, you’re better than being gifted. There are people who love you for the way you make them laugh and how you listen to their stories and for the simple joy of your presence.

It’s nice to be clever, it’s handy in a lot of situations even if it does come with a lot of baggage for some people.

But god damn, it’s important to be kind.

* Personally I have issues with the way that society constructs the concepts of giftedness, genius, and prodigies. There are a lot of “gifted” kids who were the kids who scored in the top 5% of their class in school but there are also gifted kids who were doing high-level math or reading novels as toddlers; there are prodigies who showed an aptitude for music young and who were then schooled in that instrument to the exclusion of all other activities (and I bet there are a fair number of kids who might be considered prodigies if they were trained to play flute for nine hours a day and didn’t have friends but thankfully we don’t *do* that to very many people - side note, ask me my opinion about olympic athletes some time). Words like “genius” and “gifted” are very nearly meaningless and almost *never* accurately reflect skills proficiency or long-term success or are reflected in income or respect. People think that geniuses are hypercompetent robots with their shit together but literally every adult I know with a genius-level IQ is some variety or other of total fucking tire fire.

#congratulations you have unlocked level two of my tragic backstory #long post

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thedemisongwriter · 5 years ago

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How To Turn Your Online Teaching Job Into A Lucrative Career

I’d like to start this post by saying that me five years ago would’ve never thought of becoming an online TEFL teacher. Honestly, I don’t think that most people who start teaching online do. However, teaching online has become one of the quickest ways for fresh out of college students to start working when they haven’t had much luck finding a job in their career choice. So if you are that person, keep reading this post. This blog is for you.

Here is how you can get a good paying job and/or make a lucrative career from teaching online.

1. Don’t Be Cheap: Make Sure You Get Certified From An Accredited TEFL program.

Really good TEFL programs are going to cost you roughly around $300-800 dollars. However, they are the best ones because they are affiliated with really good brick & mortar and online schools that you would have a hard time finding on your own. Also, make sure to do a lot of homework before you sign up to any program because there are two types of TEFL certificates to choose from; Level 3 and Level 5.

Level 3 is best for people who speak English fluently but are not native speakers. You have a high chance of getting hired by non-competitive companies. Level 5 is suitable for people who are native to near native speakers and their certificate is like a foundation degree. That means you will have a higher chance of being accepted by competitive companies.

I did not know this prior to completing my TEFL program, so I have a Level 3 certificate. It still got me a reasonably good online teaching job, but I probably would’ve received less rejections and a better base pay if my certificate was a level 5. If you made this same mistake, you can fix that by getting a CELTA. Please be advised that all CELTA programs are over $1000.

2. Be Patient: Add A Second Online Job To Your Main Teaching Job.

This is the most popular option. A lot of teachers will work with at least two schools. However, it can be challenging to keep both because most online language schools run during the same hours.

For this to be successful, wait for at least a year before looking for a second teaching job. Then when you are offered a second contract make your first contract your main teaching job. Don’t make the new job the main one just because it may pay better. Since I’ve started teaching I’ve been offered three contracts. The second and third contract paid more than my first job at the time, however, my first school has always been loyal to me and showed me the most respect. Because I sustained a good relationship with them, I've always been approved full time hours, I get fully booked classes, and I even been offered a raise. Be patient when doing this. It will pay off in the end.

3. Never Stop Learning: Learn A Second Language And Acquire More Certifications.

Learning a second language opens a wide range of opportunities for you concerning income. Once you’ve gained teaching experience and can speak a second language to near fluency, you can turn your teaching job to your own business. A common way to do this is opening up a profile in an online marketplace. There are no contracts and you can set your own rates. However, you have to learn how to market yourself so this also takes time.

Also acquire other skills like, going back to school to get a Master’s Degree. If you’re not interested in a Master’s degree, you can participate in a teacher internship certification program in your state so that you can become licensed to teach in public schools. This could open opportunities to teach at a university, work in other fields related to the eLearning industry or refresh your skills related to TEFL teaching to keep them up to date with the latest business trends. Yes, all of this will cost money and time but it will pay off in the end because you are investing in yourself. Since you are an independent contractor you will be able to write these expenses off in your taxes.

These are three ways to turn online teaching from a supplemental part time job to a lucrative career.

Online teaching has been one of those hidden gems for me because it’s still one of those professions that is not very competitive. I’ve chosen to take that as an advantage because it’s non-competitiveness has open so many doors for me. Doing this job with an open mind has led me to come up with ways to be successful.

I will add that although a teacher will make enough to feel like a fully functioning adult they may never reach or make six figures. However, it's a great way to get started as you are still figuring things out.

The more homework I’ve done for myself concerning this field the more I learned how to branch from one thing to another to create a career track that I can honestly say I am satisfied with. I hope this info was helpful. If you’d like more content, please follow my blog and/or share with friends who may find this info useful.

#tefl #teflteacher #job hunting #college graduate #tips #esl #eslteacher #careers #alternative jobs #business

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darkspellmaster · 6 years ago

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Fantastic Beasts Theory: Nagini, Credence, and Tom Riddle...

llWith all the hoopla going around over Nagini the more I read the more I have to wonder about the situation that is really happening in regard to the character. Now bare in mind, if you don’t like this character that’s up to you. I’m not going to sit here and tell people what they should or should not like.

However I have been seeing some misinformation being spread, so along with this theory I want to clear a few things up...

1. Regarding the character’s name.

Now most are positing that the name Nagini is strictly from the Sanskrit. However that is not 100% true. The word for a female snake is Nagi. Which, much like with the romantic languages (French, Spanish and Italian for instance), the word for snake has a male and female version. The name Nagini is actually a full name, and probably stems from the name Nagiana, created by R. Kipling, author of the Jungle book, who created the name for a female Cobra for his story Riki Tiki Tavi. Now the term Nag or Nagi is more connected with a King Cobra, over what Nagini is.

So while the name Nagi is Sanskrit, Nagini, probably is not. As for the reason she has the name. Well, it probably stems from the fact that it’s probably not her real name to begin with.

During the time period, namely the 20s and 30s, the idea of the orient was a big deal. Because, after WWI people were traveling again, and a number of people would travel to places like Japan, Hong Kong, India, etc, and collect items of decor, and the east was quiet the thing at the time because it was vastly different and had not been touched by the war as much as the west had.

The name Nagini, is probably her stage name, coined, more than likely, by the Empressario, (or boss) of the Freak show of the Circus she works for. Or she created the name herself, so as to seem exotic in nature as part of drawing in the customers. Keep this in mind for the second bit here.

2. Regarding her role in the circus Freak show. Okay this is a bit complex so bear with me here people. So to understand the idea of these shows and the reason for their existence we have to go way way back to the time of the courts. The Earliest known shows were back during the 1600s, and one of them was of conjoined twin brothers Lazarus and Joannes Colloredo. These shows tended to be of people (Including some that were fake) who had various disabilities or issues with them that gave them either an appearance of a “freak” or there was something to them that they could physically do, or their height, etc, and were actually well attended by the populace. The thing is that most of the people that were a part of these shows were there of their own volition. Now there were some where either a relation (parent or spouse) revived a payment for allowing the show to take the person in and exhibit them. But a large number of people that were involved in these enterprises actually gained a fair bit of celebrity. To the point that some actually got to meet the Queen. Most that signed up for this job typically had the goal of being able to be free to be themselves, travel and probably find a way to earn money and freedom. In addition most members of the show were friendly with one another for the most part and, as most in a circus would say, they became family. Now we don’t know a lot about Nagini as of yet, but we do know based on the ticket from above that she is one of the featured attractions. This usually indicates that the performer is probably a well paid member of the group and, more than likely, is known and probably a major reason for people to come to the show, so she would be treated with a lot of respect and care by the owner of the show. On top of that we know that Credence is someone that is moving around of his own choice, so we can assume that, given both are seen together and we later see her with the team, she probably has more freedom than we are assuming.

Also, as a point of reference for the character, one can look at the Phantom of the Opera novel, to see Erik, the main bad guy in that story, as someone that willingly signed up to be part of the show for both the pleasure of scaring people, as well as showing off his skills as a magician. And with Nagini, much like others who had a number of talents, (Magicians, music players, singers, poets etc.), it seems like her trick of changing probably isn’t the only thing she can do. 3. The actress playing her.

So about Claudia, and the role. I hear people saying that it’s not a good thing for this person to play this part. However, I will point out that not only are Snake women a thing in western tropes, they actually probably mostly originated from the Eastern stories of Snake women monsters. This is important in that, while in the west we’ve seen Asian characters be used in less than stellar ways, in China, Korea, Japan, India, and other east Asian territories, the idea of the Snake woman is a long, and I do mean, long, tradition in story telling.

Japan has at least one well known Yokai that matches Nagini’s looks save for a human head rather than a snake head, from the first series of books. So I have to wonder if the revulsion about having a Asian actress play a character that is probably seeped in lore far older than what we, as an English and American, have connection too is something that comes from our own issues regarding not having lore that we can connect to on that level? Honestly I think it actually makes more sense for Nagini to be Asian over say Indian, since in the case of snakes there’s more of a religious connotation to it and that would lead into a harder story to tell in 2 hours, vs. a character that has some connection to East Asian lore in regard to monsters that can be seen as both sympathetic and also vicious.

So now I want to quickly jump into a few theories on this character. If you got down here, yay. Good on you for reading this so far.

So Theory number 1.

Nagini’s curse and it’s connection to the real world issue of MS.

I do not know how many readers of JK’s works have sat down and read about her past? But, if you jump on Wikipedia and peruse about her early life before writing there are some clues as to why certain aspects of her books are the way they are.

Years prior during OotP and even PoA she mentioned that the dementors were a take on her own depression. If we also look at her situation with her own father and glance at her past relationship with her first husband, there’s some clues that Snape’s home life may be based around her own personal issues with her dad and husband, along with probably some connection to James Potter’s own less than stellar behavior in the later books.

With this in mind I’d like to draw attention to her late mother, whom I have a feeling Nagini’s Maladictious (did I spell that right?) curse may be connected to. So, apparently, Jo’s mother suffered, until her death (while she was writing the first books), with MS.

Now for those that don’t know, MS is a illness that over time makes it hard to move and can eventually kill you. This illness is something that tends to affect more women due, as far as studies have shown, to the higher protein found in our bodies. (While it can affect men, it’s known for hitting women more.)

So how is this tied to Nagini’s curse? Well, if I’m right on this, then a lot of the issues that Nagini’s going to suffer in regard to her curse, probably are going to be a lot like the symptoms of MS. Which takes away your limbs and your ability to use them. (Keep in mind I’m simplifying a lot of this.) My guess is that Jo probably is basing a lot of the issues that Nagini has physically with her curse on what happened with her mother and how that affected her and her work as a scientist, and probably how she tried to keep herself as free as possible while dealing with the limited time she had.

2. Her relationship with Credence and how that’s going to tie into her becoming a death eater and working for Voldemort.

Here’s the thing, I think Nagini’s going to be gray. Unlike Remus who had Severus giving him the potions and having people who had his back for the most part, Nagini strikes me as someone who probably has been on her own for a while.

She’s going to lose her battle with her curse eventually so I get the sense that she’s trying to live her life as long as she can, and with Credence having his own affliction, I get the feeling she sees a kindred spirit in him. Credence’s issues should have killed him, they hurt him, and I have to wonder if on the one hand she genuinely does care for him, and he’s falling in love with her, and on the other hand, she wants to manipulate him to see if there’s a way to free herself. We know that at one point they are on the roof and she gets him to let out his powers over the city. We know that this is a bad idea. The question is why? Why does she get him to do that? I don’t think she’s working with Grindlewald, as we see her with the good guy team in the end. But I don’t think she’s morally on the right. Given how other’s probably treat her at the show, even if she’s the one that is the most well know, there could be a issue regarding how she views the wizarding world in general that leads her to feel that non pure wizards need to pay a price.

I have to wonder if part of that might be due to the fact that Credence isn’t a pureblood, so she may see that as part of the reason why he may end up dead. Honestly I don’t see him living past the end of this series.

So for me, I’m guessing puppy love for him, friendship for her, with a sense that maybe she thinks he can fix or help her, and then that doesn’t happen. Or if he dies due to the half bloods, then probably that makes her lose her mind. Or Credence rejects her due to her actions, or thoughts, or even turning full snake on him. This could all lead up to her eventually meeting Tom.

3. Speaking of...Tom and her relationship.

Honestly, this is going to sound weird, but I get the feeling that this is not a case of control for him. Tom Riddle is many things, a monster, a killer, a destroyer. But the one thing I noticed is that he doesn’t cage people. What I mean is that, yes fear keeps those who are not loyal to him as part of his group. But no one is kidnapped or put in a cage to be a death eater. This is something you freely choose to be.

That brings me to Nagini. We’ve seen that Tom is a great manipulator, no doubt, especially when he’s older. But we’ve also seen that he’s someone that, while he has no love in his heart, has his own twisted affection for people. We know he’s the type that would have happily killed those that were annoying to him, but yet he let Haggrid live for example. So there’s some weird moral compass running the man. I don’t think he’s manipulating her, I don’t even think he sees her as a pet. The term could easily be one of endearment, especially considering that in all likelihood Tom may have learned of Nagini during his time at Hogwarts. Given that Fantastic beasts is supposed to cover up until probably the 1945 incident between Grindy and Albus, it’s not that hard to believe that Tom would have gleened info about her since he would be in school during the era when the last part of the story is going to take place.

If we assume by the time they meet she’s still mostly human or can turn human, a 19 year old boy that can probably understand her, since he has that skill regarding speaking snake and all, and probably is a charming SOB to boot, wouldn’t be to big of a leap of logic to see him connecting with her.

On the other hand, if she is a snake by then, it could be that he did still connect with her because he saw her human side in the snake and, while he couldn’t connect with humans he could connect with her. Given that, if she has reason to dislike people like Newt for possibly causing something to happen to Credence, it’s not that hard to see her becoming involved or loyal to Tom. What always bugged me about him was that he kept going more and more snake like, and now I have to wonder if there was some sort of connection between them. I’ll be it not in the romantic way that say McGonagall had for her husband, but more like something that’s a mix of lust and understanding maybe. I get the feeling that she may have become one of his first death eaters and probably the symbol that they have is based on her and her appearance.

Remember, with Nagini, this is a character who willingly ate a person whole. Who was sent out on a mission to Goderic’s hollow on her own, something no other death eater was allowed to do, to kill Bathilda, and she wore her skin. Nagini by that point had become as twisted and cruel as Tom was, and, given how protective she was of him, there was probably something deeply going on between them.

#harry potter #fantastic beasts movie #fbtcog #fantastic beasts the crimes of grindelwald #nagini #credence barebone #voldemort #lord voldemort #tom riddle #fantastic beasts theory

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toraberaa · 6 years ago

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“Out of this world!” those were the words that I uttered after witnessing the impeccable beauty of Mt. Ijen.

Mt. Ijen is not just an ordinary mountain. It is a volcano. And not just an ordinary volcano but an active one. It is a stratovolcano which sits 2,799 meters above sea level (9,183 ft). A hazardous volcano that emits toxic fumes and a home for highly acidic lake.

Literally, it was a “hell” and figuratively speaking as well. My hike was hellish. There were too many struggles I faced. I know that without these hardships, the story that I would tell will be definitely lame. Kidding! Nevertheless, I overcame it and I was rewarded with a beautiful sight. I saw a “heaven”. It was a bizarre feeling. I’ve never seen so sublime in my life. It’s a mixture of apocalypse and nirvana. A violent act of nature. Many of the locals said this phrase “Eye on Heaven, Foot in Hell”. It’s amazing how these two places coincide. How God beautifully designed it.

With that said, I entitled this as “Where Heaven and Hell meets”

Day Minus Zero

It was August 6, 2018 when I left Bali. A day after magnitude 7.0 earthquake hit it. I thought on myself that it was far from the epicenter thus, it was much safer to go on high areas. I was worried that there would be a tsunami at that time. Nah. Who was I kidding? I just surfed earlier on that morning and the real reason was, I scheduled to go on that day based on my plan. The D-day.

It was hot and sunny in Bali and for few hours and kilometers away, I was welcomed by drizzle at Banyuwangi. (I will edit this post later to provide info on how to go to Banyuwangi from Bali)

Loooong and winding road

Approximately 5 hours of bus ride, I arrived at Ketapang port at 8:30 PM. There were only few people around and it feels like it’s already late at night. It was difficult to hail a taxi or even an ojek (motorcycle taxi). No one shows available too in Grab. I went to convenience store and asked around. Some can’t understand English. Somehow I could tell that they understood what I’m trying to convey and they were willing to help. They referred me to a cab who knows a little bit of English and said repeatedly “House stay?” I said “Yes. Mango home stay” and hopped in. I hoped we were at the same page after I confirmed. I checked on my GPS and it was a relief that he knows where we were heading.

I arrived at Mango Tree House Home Stay and I paid him 40.000 IDR.

The Mango Tree House Home stay

“Philippines?” Mr. Arif, the owner of the house, greeted me. I acknowledged him with a nod. He said he was waiting for me. As we entered the house, he asked me again “Tea or coffee?” “Coffee will do.” I replied.

While he was heating the pot, he showed me my room. It doesn’t have an air condition but it have an electric fan. It’s okay since it was cold. The room have also a single pillow and a bed. That’s it! You get what you pay for. (By the way, the room was only 65.000 IDR) The room was just good enough for an overnight. After all, I just came here for Mt. Ijen.

House Special!

Mr. Arif served the coffee and we just had a conversation. We talked about my experience in Indonesia, difference of our countries (because Indonesia and Philippines were kinda the same) and other stuff. He had a good sense of humor and very entertaining. A moment later, another guests arrived. Mr. Arif introduced the new guests to me. They were a German couple who came from Probolinggo, just after the Mt. Bromo tour. He said I would be joining them for the Mt. Ijen tour tonight as well as the two Italians who arrived earlier than us. And guess what, they were also a couple. (Not jealous. lol!) Mr. Arif told us that he was still waiting for the French guy to arrive. I was hoping. Not that I wanted to be a fifth wheel but it must be a minimum of 6 persons to avail the package to Mt. Ijen.

As the night getting late, Mr. Arif suggested to take quick dinner near the home stay. The German couple decided to take a rest while I took a quick dinner at warungs (a small family owned business restaurant).

Solved! My dinner for 15.000 IDR only

The tour will start by 12 AM. It was 10 PM already. I went back to the home stay and took a quick nap.

I woke up exactly 11 PM. I packed up for the things I needed — headlights, gloves, jacket, camera and etc. Checked! I went to the living room and I didn’t saw yet the Italians and Germans at the living room. Maybe I was too early? I guessed I was really excited for this tour (which was true). I wished I stayed a little longer in bed.

I saw new faces in the living room. The French guy was already there, along with two lovely gals who were also French. He said that he was too tired and he would not go for Mt. Ijen tonight while the two gals were scheduled tomorrow.

We had a little chit-chat. Yes, only a little. They were talking in their native language. Since I can’t understand them, my mind wandered and I imagined The Little Prince. (LOL!) The younger lady (too bad, I couldn’t remember her name) was so considerate as she kept me entertained. She even asked the others to speak in English so I could also join their conversation.

Few minutes passed, they showed up. So it would be just a group of five — 1 Filipino, 2 Germans, and 2 Italians. Good thing that Mr. Arif was really kind. He didn’t want to disappoint us. Instead we avail the package tour from the agencies, he would be the one who will drive us to Mt. Ijen.

The Road to Mt. Ijen

From the start, it was already a challenge, the weather condition was not that good. It’s drizzling. We were starting to doubt if we could see the blue fire tonight. Blue fire is one of unnatural phenomenon that is happening in Banyuwangi. I believed this was also the reason why travelers would go here. Mr. Arif said that “We can’t tell. It’s nature.” He seems to have a good point. After all, nature is really unpredictable. But he also made our hopes high and said “But you will go above the clouds, so it will not be raining.”

“Difficult roads often lead to beautiful destinations.” – Zig Ziglar

Around 12:30 AM, we leave at the home stay and drove towards Mt. Ijen. It would be a long drive for about an hour. I sat at the front seat while the others continue to rest at the back seats. I can’t catch some nap even I wanted to. Plus, I sat next to Mr. Arif. I should keep him a company and needed him to stay awake. With this, I just witnessed how difficult the roads to Mt. Ijen.

Excessive moisture in the window.

It had a zigzag road. For a few moments, the roads turned to a jungle with no lights on the road — trusting only the headlights that the car provides. The road also became muddy due to the weather condition. As we went higher, the fogs appeared. Mr. Arif wiped the windshield every time as the window had moist. I’m very glad that Mr. Arif was a skillful driver and knew the road.

The Base Camp

We reached the Base Camp at 1:36 AM. Mr. Arif handed us gas masks. After that, Mr. Arif called me and told me the best tip ever. “This is the only tip I can give to you. At the counter, say “Satu” (it means one) and just give 10.000″. We both knew that I looked like an Indonesian. The price difference from foreigner to locals was 90.000 IDR. Good guy Mr. Arif!

Mr. Arif guided the others and I headed to the ticket office alone. I needed to be alone to pull this trick. When I got there, I followed his advice. I confidently said “Satu!” as if I spoke a magical phrase “Open sesame!” in One Thousand and One Nights. However, the ticket officer said something I didn’t know. I repeated “Satu!” but the stare of the officer didn’t quite look good. (Uh-oh! Busted!) Our plan didn’t worked out. The ticket officer went outside and that moment I thought I would be penalized or could be worse. But he just pointed me where I should buy. He meant “Where the foreigners should buy”. Whew! I think this was not the first time it happened to them. Some also tried this scheme perhaps. But what embarrassed me more was when he spoke to me and I tried to push a little harder saying random Indonesian words that I learned. I believed in his mind you would read “Nice try!”. (LOL!)

I went back to our group and paid the foreign price. “What happened?” the group questioned. I reported and I said “I think he was asking for smaller bill. I saw the ticket it was only 5.000 IDR. Maybe it’s something with my accent too.” Mr. Arif said that someone might already overheard us and tipped the officer. “Too bad.” Mr. Arif responded with a chuckle and patted my back. “It’s okay!” I replied. Well, it’s actually fine. No regrets. Although the price difference were very significant, to be honest, spending 100.000 IDR was already cheap for the exchange for what we would discover later. (I’m telling you now that it was very worthy after I finished the hike.)

Jump Off

We started at 1:58 am. This was where the real struggle began. First, it was cold. Maybe because we were already in high altitude and rain also contributed. They said that the temperature sometimes drop from 15°C to 10°C. Second, it was dark. Pitch dark. It was nice that I bought a headlamp since it was not included in the trip. Third, we have no tour guide either. Even though if we avail the package, the tour guide was excluded. Mr. Arif told us that it wasn’t required and we don’t need to. “Mt. Ijen trail had only one trail — where you enter is where you exit. Just follow the crowd and you will not get lost.” He was right. There were many people who were also hiking. These people were not only tourist. Some were just local people — guides and miners. Yes, the sulfur miners. And so on and so on.

The gates were already open.

Our group, the Mango Tree House party (I made that up inside of my head), agreed that we could walk together instead doing by yourselves. While walking, I introduced myself and started a conversation. The name of German couple were Patrick and his girlfriend (Sorry! I forgot the name!) And the name of Italian couple were Andrea and her boyfriend. (Yes…I also forgot the name.) The Italian couple didn’t talk too much. It was Patrick’s girlfriend who talked to me a lot. That was why it was a shame to forget her name. (If you ever found my blog and read this. Let me know so I can apologize.).

Along the way, we saw some locals who had a push cart. This is what they called “Human Taxi”. Some says it costs around 400.000 IDR in exchange that they would take you to the top.

The Struggle is Real

Few minutes later, I felt that I’m having difficulty to walk. Besides that it was still raining and that makes the terrain slippery. But because I surfed before I went here, it’s now paying toll on me. I felt the pain in my upper body and I got blisters on my toes. Although minimal, I felt the irritating pain every time I took a step. I was thinking why I did that knowing that I would hike later. Nevertheless, the show must go on. And by speaking, while hiking, I still managed to document or video myself.

We saw a shed. I took some minutes to rest, while others went to toilet. Some also put layers on their body. This was supposed to be our last stop, and we should moved all the way from the top..well..uhmm let me repeat that. This was supposed to be “their” last stop. Because for me, it’s not. As we back on track again, I felt now the fatigue and every steps were now heavy. My heart was pounding like a jack hammer. I was leading before on our group (excited too much) and now I was lagging behind. Their stamina was fascinating. I knew I haven’t had a good rest just like them. That’s what I told to myself just to fool my mind.

“You are in the cottage”

We arrived at the “cafeteria”. I stopped again and took a rest for a while. It was my life saver! I was a fool that I forgot to brought water. If there’s no store available, I might desperately beg someone to give me some water. After I bought a bottled water, I gulped it immediately. As I checked my group, they were nowhere in my sight. I lost them and I think they didn’t notice me. That’s why I said that was our their last stop because I realized they didn’t took a break here.

I proceeded even without them and just a few moments later, the nature called me. I wanted pee. I don’t know if there would be another stop after the cafeteria. I don’t want even to go back there. I went astray and I did the “tabi-tabi po” style (common Filipino culture) and asked Mt. Ijen for forgiveness. Thank goodness it was pitch dark.

To the Summit

We needed to be on top quickly. It’s because blue fire only show itself in darkness. This was also the reason why we needed to hike at midnight. It would not be longer visible once the sun had risen.

I moved quickly as I needed to catch up with Mango Tree House party. I hoped that at some point I would see them. And just when I thought. They were there, waiting and searching for me. I heard from afar “It is him?” as I went closer to them. I saw their faces with a sign of relief. All of them were worried about me. They asked if I’m okay. I answered them that I’m fine and I apologized to them. I suggested that they could continue without me. I don’t want to become a burden or the reason why they will not see the blue fire. Still, Patrick’s girlfriend insisted “No, you can tell us if you want to have a break. We will wait for you. Okay?” Isn’t she sweet? (It was really a shame that I forgot her name. I wish one day, I will remember it.)

When we got back on track again, she noticed that I’m running out of breath and curiously asked me “Do you smoke?” I honestly replied “No, I’m just fat.” and she laughed.

I stopped recording and documentation for a while to save some energy.

MDPL means meter dari permukaan laut which literally translated as meters above sea level (MASL)

We were already walking for about 2 hours from the start. They said that 3 hours was the average time to reach the top. I felt we were already near. I saw already the caldera and the trail changed to flat terrain. At 3:26 AM, we finally made it to the top.

To the Dragon’s Nest

Actually, to went down close to the crater was prohibited. Only the workers (sulfur miners) were allowed. Not to mention that it was dangerous, but it was also slippery at that time. However, many of the visitors ignored this warning and continue their way to the crater. It was at your own risk. We talked to each other if we wanted to continue. It was early to go back and we decided to continue our way.

The trail going down was very narrow. At least one person could fit in. There were no hand rails. One wrong step and you would fall. Take note that the terrain here was rocky. To jump or skip would make stones or rocks fall.

We, the uninvited guests, were attacked by the vile stench of Mt. Ijen halfway down the steep trail. It was an acrid and sour smell. From here, we wore our gas mask. This made hard for me to breathe.

This was the time, Patrick and his girlfriend turned around and decided to go back. I was behind them and I could tell that they were having a difficulty going down. They said it was very dangerous and they don’t wanted to risk it. I didn’t persist. They wished me good luck and I replied them to take care. (Later, when we were on our way to house stay. Patrick was vomiting along the way and got sick. It was a good call for them to turned back.)

As for the Italian couple, who were just right behind me. I saw that they hired a guide who gave them a helping hand when descending. They were now in good hands and we parted away from each other as I had to do breaks. So from here, I did it on my own.

The Devil’s Gold and the Ijen Warriors

I saw sulfur miners as I moved closer to the crater. According to some, these sulfur miners carries a load for about 30-50 kg (60-110 lbs) for each basket. If you ever saw them along the way, please stop for a while and give way. I also noticed that some of them didn’t have proper equipment, they didn’t wear gloves and gas masks. Despite the dangers and the risks they could encounter, as I heard, most of them went twice on a single day to doubled their sulfur mine. And you may probably wouldn’t believe that the cost of their tough grind is only 800 IDR per kilo.

These sulfur miners were the real mutants. Where did they get their superpowers? This probably one of the toughest job in the world! With their amazing feat, they have earned respect and fascination on the tourist. Some of them tried to carry the loads or took some photographs with them and leave a small tip. Some gave things like cigarettes which they said to be their favorite, which was kinda ironic. While some of the sulfur miners created souvenirs for extra income. These were shaped sulfur which comes in different shapes and size with a cost of 10.000-50.000 IDR. I bought a teddy bear shaped sulfur for 20.000 IDR for keepsake and to helped them. Please don’t haggle anymore.

The yellow ore is the sulfur. This is already extracted from the volcano.

Behind me is what they called “Devil’s Gold” where the sulfur miners risked their lives for these.

The Heart of Mt. Ijen

I arrived at the crater at 4:15 AM. They were already a lot of people waiting for the blue fire. As I stood on the ground and took a rest, I saw people who were still going down. I was fascinated to saw the alternating lights, blinking and flickering. Looked back how far that I got just to arrived here.

What I saw afterwards was more fascinating than this. As I extended my sight upwards, I saw the illumination of the moon and the brilliant stars. I saw the Milky Way and a glimpse of the universe. What a lovely sight to see. I stared for a while and made me forget the exhaustion even just for a second.

I was worried if the blue fire would appear tonight. So I looked around for the other spot. And I finally saw the blue fire.I said “This is it?” A stranger replied “Yeah, it’s the blue fire”. Deep inside I know it’s the “blue fire”. A fire that was blue. But it’s not what I pictured based on what I Googled and it was just a small one. It looks like the one you could see when you light up a denatured alcohol or a flame in your stove. At that time, my headlamp was still on. But even after I turned it off, I appreciated it somehow.

The Eccentric Blue Fire

11 minutes passed and the blue fire finally appeared. The one that I was expecting. We were all in awe. All of us in crowd said “Wow!” in chorus. I moved closer to the blue fire. We all know that the blue flame was the hottest and the most intense part of a fire. They said that it could be at 600°C yet I can’t feel hot nearby the blue fire. I haven’t thought of this at that time. I was overjoyed I guess. But I admitted that I was reckless at that time.

I stopped recording and just watched the marvels of the world.

There are only two places in the world that the blue fire can be observe — Iceland and Indonesia.

While Indonesia is just close to Philippines, it has also a larger blue fire area compared to Iceland.

It looks like a lava, that’s why most of the people mistakenly called it as “blue lava”. The flames were so pure and so mystical. It was like a heart of Mt. Ijen, burning so brightly indicating its life force. Once the flames go out, it would lose its appeal. Eventually, that happened.

The Blue Acid Lake

After some time, they extinguished the fire and we were now enveloped in toxic fumes. This was the time our gas masks became really useful. These smokes were very nasty. Even with our gas masks on, I could still inhale the smoke that I needed to stop my breathing for a while. It was also irritating to the eyes. It singed that made our eyes teared.

As the show already finished, like what I said earlier, some people started to climb back. Even we were engulfed by smoke, I chose to stay for several reasons. They were still people going down. With the trail so steep and it’s still dark, I was worried about the traffic and there might be falling rocks or debris. I might also lose my balance and fall. If I stay, it would be a perfect time to recover and saved some strength. To add, it’s too early to went back. I wanted to see the blue acid lake. I have checked where the blue acid lake located. It was still dark at that time and I’m unable to appreciate its true beauty.

I looked for a spot and hid behind a big rock. At least, it would protect me from toxic smoke. In order to survive until sunrise, I needed to stay low, curl down, closed my eyes, and stopped my breath.

Around 5:43 AM, as dawn washed the darkness from the sky, the blue acid lake was revealed to be an enchanted beauty. I have seen similar turquoise blue water in Kawasan Falls at Cebu, Philippines and Kuang Si Falls at Luang Prabang, Laos but this was an exception. It was not the type of waters you want to dive into.

It was deceptively beautiful!

Mt. Ijen is also known for the World’s Most Highly Acidic Lake. (Hitting two birds in one stone) According to research, it has a pH lower than the battery acid or almost zero.

I wished I could stay longer to admire the acidic lake. However, I already ran out of luck and the toxic smoke was slowly engulfing us. I couldn’t take it anymore and my body was now reacting to it. Short-term exposure to highly concentrated levels of toxic smoke could be deadly. It could lead to breathing difficulties, may burn the lungs, corrode the skin and can even melt your teeth. Yikes! It’s time to go back.

After Dark

It was 6:37 AM when I reached Mt. Ijen’s peak again. This time, I was greeted of an awe-inspiring sight. The sun light slowly gleaming the caldera. The sky was deep blue and the cloud was the same height as where I stood as if my hands could reach it. The cold wind blew so strong you could hear its whistle. The field became lunar-liked as if I was transported or stepped on another planet. While revisiting the sight of blue acid lake and smoke came from the sulfur, it somehow reminded me of the movie “The Planet of the Apes”. So calm yet, destructive. I also like the blending of colors — bright yellow and turquoise blue.

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I never had this scene in my entire travel. This was what the philosophers called “the sublime”.

Totally out of this world!

Below was a short impromptu documentary that I made. Enjoy! 🙂

Sometimes, the most phenomenal things in life require a little danger, and climbing Mt. Ijen certainly is one of them.

Mt. Ijen – Where Heaven and Hell Meets "Out of this world!" those were the words that I uttered after witnessing the impeccable beauty of Mt.

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atlaese · 3 years ago

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Ma'am, that is way too impressive. I'm afraid I can't keep up with your highly adept expertise in languages. I am by far not as skilled and poignant as you are. Even your past experiences sound way more intriguing than my entire life so far. Trust me, I'm the most boring person to have walked the Earth.

Funny how you point out the German language for its different and complex structure and frame it to be an indicator to attract attention to non-native speakers – when I am German myself. So naturally, my native tongue is german, where I still live today. In Germany, it isn't as common to speak a variety of languages. You start learning English at around age 8-10, and it follows you throughout your school journey. (depending on how long you pursue your education, the level varies/increases) But it's essentially restricted to school topics + discussions, and a basic understanding of the language. When I pursued higher education, I chose french classes in school because I love languages in general. It paid off, and I achieved excellent grades. My knowledge/skillset, however, only applies to the written word, and it's also limited to "easier" topics and vocabulary. Meaning I would be able to understand you better in the written word, but even there, I'd reach my limit fairly quickly. You see, I prefer the written word over verbally conversing. I am extremely introverted and a perfectionist on top of that. Makes it real hard to fully perfect a language when you're terrified of speaking it.

Besides, when you have finished school the majority around here, tends to neglect their learned knowledge in English, since it's not used in our everyday lives. (except for business English maybe) Therefore, and to answer your question, I learned the basics in school but further educated myself on the Internet. Using films, tv shows, comics and fanfiction to expand my vocabulary and learn about slang, idioms, etc. I still work on it and find ways to improve every day. Other than that, I know a bit of Spanish since my dad's from Spain. But he couldn't be bothered to teach me when I was younger, therefore I'm obviously not fluent at all. I picked up a few words and sentences which I know the meaning of when I hear/read them, but I wouldn't be able to hold a conversation. So, there goes that.

But to answer your last question: I absolutely adore the sound of Norwegian. I find Latin incredibly fascinating. And if it were up to me, I'd probably start picking up french and Spanish again. However, it's merely wishful thinking. I am impatient and probably not as "fresh" and have the mental capacity to do so now.

- love letter anon

please don't put me on a pedestal lmao, i assure you i'm not as good as you think i am, haha! like i might be fluent in english and dutch, but i definitely can use so more practice for german and french. (good thing i'm going to Austria next week, i can use my german again!)

also no!! you are not boring at all! i just got lucky one year where i had all those experiences, but aside from that i'm just your average student, no kidding! so please, don't put yourself down! you're still young! you have your whole life ahead of you!!!! (social) media really tricks us into thinking we're behind on stuff, when in reality, there is no schedule. so don't worry!

ah hallo, Guten Tag then! :) yes, i noticed, i did my internship in Köln and barely anyone spoke another language than German (there was another german intern at the firm too and he told me "Ja, ich spreche nur Deutsch, aber mein Deutsch ist auch nicht so gut" or something along those lines lmao).

Aah, i love that you chose french! it's quite hard to learn for us people who speak a germanic language! i'm very proud of you! for me, writing a language is more difficult than speaking. (i rely heavily just on what feels right, rather than follow the grammatic rules, haha!) but yes, speaking the language definitely helps to master it, although i bet if you had a pen pal, that would make a big difference too!

aah spanish! such a cool language too! when i first started college i had to choose between spanish or german and i almost chose spanish (from a business standpoint it is very interesting to go that way, but german is also very important in europe!) maybe you could go to spain too for a bit, i bet you'd do amazing there, especially if you're half spanish! (although, i can't tell from my own experience if that would help a lot, now that i think of it.. but if you really want to learn something, just putting your mind to it means a lot, so totally go for it if you want to and have time to do it! :))

aah norwegian!! i love the scandinavian languages! also, once you know norwegian, you basically speak swedish and danish too!! three in one! (also; it looks a lot like german! i was watching this one danish show i think? and i was like what?? are they speaking german right now because i can understand them??)

if you wanna start slow, i recommend putting your subtitles to the language you wanna learn! i personally use english subs for everything, but when i watch german shows like Dark or Biohackers, i watch it with german subs! same for french. that really tricks your mind into learning the vocabulary and, sometimes you have to do research, but you'll remember those words way better!

#arianswers #love letter anon 💓#talk languages with ari

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happystressedmuffin · 7 years ago

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Among the articles I wrote for our school newspaper these past three years, my most successful ones have been on the topic of education / the education system. As a person who has increasingly become disillusioned with the way school’s operate, I have a couple of thoughts. This may end up a little vague and I may go back to explore these ideas in more detail when I have more time.

First things first, my parents used to be teachers back in Belarus, and they often tell me about rules they had and how their schools worked. A lot of my thinking is influenced by them and their stories, in addition to personal experience.

Communication

One thing that American schools as a whole seem to lack is effective communication between teachers. I have seen this again and again, and it’s a shame considering that It’s an issue that can be fixed without bureaucratic measures. Why do teachers still have a difficult time communicating with one another? Countless times, I’ve had teachers schedule tests and quizzes on the same day, leaving students studying for three whole different topics, rather than focusing on carefully understanding one. My dad said when he used to teach, he would talk to the other teachers and they would plan their schedules out in accordance to one another to ensure that the students would not have an overload of work. While I cannot attest that lack of communication is a problem in every single individual American school, I can certainly say that just a couple weeks ago, our IB coordinator walked into our TOK room because our class snapped under pressure and some students were on the verge of tears. When we told her about the mountain of projects and tests, she seemed surprised, and even our TOK teacher decided to move one of her deadlines, because she was previously unaware of the pressure we were under.

Personally, communication between teachers is probably one of the biggest problems in any school system. Teachers should talk with one another and plan their assignments out; if not, at the very least, be ready to change the dates of certain assignments.

Of course, some things cannot be helped -- teachers cannot move standardized test days, and sometimes the speed of the lesson needs to quicken in order to have time to cover all the right material. Of course, that leads to another problem.

Standardized testing // allowing teachers to teach what they want

Standardized testing. A lot has been said on the topic already. Some countries such as Finland manage to get amazing marks without a lot of standardized tests; other countries get equally impressive marks with a lot of these tests (China). Whether or not standardized testing works depends on different factors, such as how the government operates, how the tests are structured, etc.

For example, the United States is a federalist form of government, meaning that power is shared between the federal and state governments. Largely, education has been a state issue, meaning how schools prepare their children for these tests and even the tests they take differ.

In terms of how the tests are structured, let’s talk about my friend who I will call “V.” V is in higher level classes. V has passed multiple AP tests. V wants to work in the film industry. As we all know, the SAT tests people on math and reading. Now, tell me, what does math and reading have to do with working in the film industry? English is not V’s first language -- he speaks Hindu and Spanish. He is not so bright in math. But if you’d seen the videos he produces, the editing work he does, even the scripts he writes, you could easily tell that this is a bright kid. His SAT score is certainly not bad in the slightest; in fact, it would probably be considered in the upper quartile. Nonetheless, in comparison to most our peers in this particular program (IB), his score seems a little...weak, to say the least. Some colleges rejected him as a result of his testing, which does not reflect the skills he will use later in life. Why should we consider this fair? Obviously, all people should know rudimentary math and reading; however, why should they be judged solely in those two categories?

At the end of the day, the real question we are trying to find is whether or not the state should give more control to the teachers in the classroom. Standardized testing limits what a teacher may teach due to time constraints.

Bad teachers / respect for teachers

And now, let’s bring our focus onto teachers. I have become highly disillusioned with teachers, especially this year. Here are a number of things I have witnessed:

1. A teacher “predicting” what our grade will be on a test and putting it in the grade system as our final grade for the assignment (essentially giving us a grade for something we have not actually done; and she wasn’t kind about it either; I got a C)

2. a teacher claiming we have to learn six chapters in three days and proceeding not to do a single thing to help us learn in class; instead he gave us a pop quiz and told us to read the book (hint: if we can replace you with a plant and have it not influence the class in the slightest, perhaps you need to do some teaching!)

3. A teacher telling us that the highest we can get on an assignment was a 70 and if we wanted something higher, we had to an “optional assignment”

4. A teacher taking off an entire letter grade because a student wrote the wrong class period on the header.

5. A teacher pausing a student in the middle of a presentation to yell at the student for seeming “too nervous” (how does yelling and humiliation help?)

6. One of my teachers accidentally taught the wrong curriculum for an entire three quarters before finding out that what we were doing was wrong. (I don’t blame the teacher too much -- this was actually a rather complicated situation).

7. A chemistry teacher who sat at her desk eating snacks while she played videos of her teaching, rather than teaching in person.

Now, all of this makes us students want to bang our heads against the wall; especially number 2 and number 6. The same teacher from #2 never read a single one of our essays (problematic, considering this is an AP / IB class) and instead has us peer score every single time. Nobody studies for his class because he curves every assignment so that a student with a D gets an A.

Should students not demand better? One of the issues with teachers, I believe, is that one does not necessarily need a teaching degree to teach; just a degree in the particular subject area. But at the end of the day, knowing a subject does not mean knowing how to teach it. Some people may disagree. Some people may say, a true sign of knowing is being able to teach. But teaching in itself is another art form. It involves communication. It involves a little bit of psychology. It involves knowing how to explain concepts in ways you may not have thought of before (A visual learner may not think to incorporate auditory details, for example). A person may be an awesome biologist, but that same person may not be an excellent communicator (outside of a research paper, that is). A person may be an awesome biologist, but that person may understand little about how an art/literature student may learn concepts. Knowing a subject well does not mean teaching a subject well. To say so insults the very art of teaching.

Another problem when it comes to teachers is a lack of overall respect for the profession. My AP Gov teacher (a really awesome man) was telling us a story about attending his wife’s party with her co-workers.

Someone asked him, “Hey, what do you do for a living?”

He said, “I teach high school government!”

That person frowned. “I’m so sorry!”

“Why are you sorry?” my government teacher asked, confused. “I love my job!”

And that story conveys a giant problem. People in general assume that teaching is a bad job. That we should feel sorry for those who teach. If you look at the amount that teachers get paid, you can tell that the job isn’t as highly valued as it should be. Teachers are entrusted with the entire future. They are tasked with educating future politicians, future surgeons, future historians, future writers, future academics, future working class people who may change living standard for the better. Why should we not pay teachers more? Why should we not make it harder for people to become teachers (increase the required training or make it better) while at the same time paying them more?

Students do not respect teachers too much either. That may be a sentence young people do not like to hear, because we feel cheated in the education system many times. But it’s true that many students do not respect teachers. I am a student; I have seen how the worst of us can behave. My favorite teacher (I’ve had her for all three years now and will have her next year too) talks quite frankly with me, and she always talks about students who put in no work all quarter and then have the audacity to call her and blame her for their grades.

I am quite lazy -- I really am. But I do my work, and I have never had anything below a A in her classes; and the one I’m taking at the moment is an IB class.

However, respect is a two-way-street. To say that students are respected would be a lie. Otherwise, we would be listened to more when it comes to problems that directly affect us.

The ultimate point is -- respect for teachers needs to increase, but we should also cut down on teachers who don’t know how to teach. These solutions seem obvious, but implementing the necessary actions to put them into place certainly isn’t.

Taxes / wealth

A big point to mention -- taxes. I had any power in this government, I would not have schools be funded by taxes. In order to learn, students should have the resources to do so. How can an underfunded school possibly compete with a suburban, rich school? The education system creates cycles by constantly valuing the rich and punishing the poor.

If you have money, here’s all the things you can do:

-Live in a nice area with well-funded schools

-Buy a tutor for the SAT

-Have enough money to be well-fed; no worries about food

-Buy all kinds of educational programs (rosetta stone, etc)

-Buy more books

-Get invited to go to interesting educational summer camps, and go

-Clubs (basically no clubs are free)

All these things contribute to college applications and success. But what about the student who struggles in math and cannot afford a tutor? What about that student who lives in a poor area and struggles to learn because of underfunded and stressed teachers? What about the student who has to turn down many opportunities simply because that students cannot afford it? What about the student that can’t afford to pay a fee to participate in dance club?

What about those students?

Is it not evident then that those students are put at a disadvantage, and that they never had equality to begin with? Is it not evident that those students will have a harder time getting to a brighter future?

Here’s some ideas I have seen around that I have not thought too much about, but I do want to look into:

- Religion’s affect on schools (the US has a long history of Protestantism / Evangelicalism; those who structured our schools may have been influenced. It would be interesting to see how religious thought has played into our education system)

-schools shaping students for labor / a career rather than education / useful life skills

- I would really love to learn about an anarchist’s point of view of the education system. I believe that most anarchists would be pro-education, but they typically are anti-system (anti-authority), right? How would people be educated in an ideal society? (this is mostly curiosity)

#education system #problems of the education system #teaching #student #school problems #school #education #long post #standardized testing #respect for teachers

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michaelandy101-blog · 4 years ago

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Are Blogs Lifeless in 2021? We Requested 10 Advertising and marketing Consultants

New Post has been published on http://tiptopreview.com/are-blogs-dead-in-2021-we-asked-10-marketing-experts/

Are Blogs Lifeless in 2021? We Requested 10 Advertising and marketing Consultants

It appears all of us have an obsession with killing issues off.

Each couple of years, we revisit one thing and place it on the chopping block. Within the new millennium, we had the Y2K computer scare. In 2012, we feared the world would end and we might all simply poof. When expertise took a extra essential function in our lives, we assumed all print publications would go bankrupt. Now, with the rise of video and podcasts, it is running a blog’s flip to really feel the warmth.

I reached out to entrepreneurs with backgrounds in product marketing, web optimization, YouTube, podcasting, and extra and requested them, “Are Blogs useless? ” Here is what they stated.

Are blogs useless?

In response to entrepreneurs, not even shut. Blogs proceed to be extraordinarily useful for lead era, model consciousness, and web optimization. And so they’re nonetheless fashionable amongst customers. A 2020 HubSpot research discovered that 60% of individuals learn a weblog at the least as soon as per week. So, blogs will not be out of entrepreneurs’ toolbox anytime quickly.

In all equity, this query surrounding blogs will not be with out cause. Google Developments exhibits that within the final 5 years, the curiosity in blogs has steadily declined worldwide.

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Within the U.S. inside the identical five-year span, podcasts have risen in reputation and surpassed blogs in searches.

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Nevertheless, entrepreneurs nonetheless contemplate running a blog a high marketing channel. Ross Simmonds, a B2B marketer and the founding father of the content material marketing company Basis, says running a blog has helped his purchasers triple their visitors and speed up their gross sales shut charges.

“At Foundation, blogging with intent has helped us generate millions of dollars in the pipeline for both us and our clients,” says Simmonds. “It’s also armed us with the ability to elevate our brand’s position in the market and, most importantly, truly help others in our industry learn and unlock new opportunities.”

With that stated, the running a blog panorama has modified over time. Lisa Toner, director of content material at HubSpot, says it is not sufficient to simply have a weblog these days.

“You need to consistently create content that is more valuable than your competition’s content. You need to be an SEO expert to get your articles ranking on page one of Google, and you need a distribution strategy to promote your content across all the channels your audience likes to consume content on,” says Toner. “It’s a lot more complex to win at blogging now, but if you can master it, it’s worth the investment.”

Transparency is an even bigger duty, particularly as social justice turns into more important to consumers.

“You need to think about how people see your brand compared to your competition. Everyone has their own unique selling position (USP) and what they want to put forward, but what users do is compare,” says Sandra Mpouma, head of digital marketing at RationalFX. “So, in terms of business strategy, create loyalty, trust, [and] be transparent and competitive, which is very important nowadays.”

Blogs vs. Different Advertising and marketing Channels

Now that different content material marketing channels – particularly video and podcasting – have surpassed blogs, will blogs quickly change into redundant? Effectively, all of it relies on the person personas you are focusing on. However at the same time as different platforms develop, blogs nonetheless provide many benefits.

“Podcasting is not without its own set of limitations. There are plenty of discoverability and audience growth challenges. At this point, blogs have a pretty well-dusted playbook for scaling. That’s not true for podcasts,” says Matthew Brown, senior podcast producer at HubSpot. “A company can use its likely limited resources to invest in a blog that will basically give consistent, easily measurable, and reliable performance. Blogs also have a direct line to the company’s bottom dollar, podcasts do not.”

Nelson Chacon, principal marketing supervisor for YouTube at HubSpot, highlights that there isn’t any cause to decide on between two platforms in case your workforce has the bandwidth to deal with each. If it aligns along with your person personas, you possibly can have interaction your viewers from a number of angles.

“Creating a blog constructed of articles around the benefits of your product will be helpful. Having a video showcasing its use or how to install it would be beneficial for your audience,” says Chacon. “Home Depot has carried out a incredible job of doing this. Whereas they inform and educate their prospects on their merchandise, additionally they add a fast ‘how-to’ for the extra educated one that simply wants a brief reply defined in a video.”

As for social media, Annabelle Nyst, a senior content material strategist who focuses on social media initiatives at HubSpot, says it is onerous to match it to blogs as every platform serves totally different functions.

“Social content doesn’t always have the shelf life or the discoverability of blog posts,” says Nyst. “It’s more about consistently meeting your audience where they are, in the right moments, engaging with them one-on-one, and establishing trust via community building.”

She provides that social media may be an effective way to amplify your weblog posts. And vice versa, weblog posts can function inspiration for social content material. If utilizing each, Nyst recommends pulling probably the most compelling factors out of your weblog posts, creating social-first content material, and utilizing it to drive visitors again to your weblog.

With all that stated, blogs do not come with out their disadvantages. AJ Beltis, a content material and acquisition supervisor at HubSpot, mentions the excessive drop-off charges typically seen in weblog posts.

“Blogs lack the interactivity that many crave due to its nature as written content,” says Beltis. “This challenges blog writers to hook their readers in a few short sentences without having the benefit of special effects or audio engineers available to their video and podcast creating counterparts.”

What it typically comes all the way down to is your model targets and which channels will enable you meet them. Podcasts, for instance, are higher for branding whereas blogs serve higher for top-of-the-funnel engagement.

“Blog posts are an acquisition juggernaut. There’s a clear path that any seasoned marketer can follow. Podcasts, however, best serve as a brand opportunity,” says Brown. “You wouldn’t measure a series of blog posts on their brand uplift ability, just like you wouldn’t measure a podcast show’s lead generation. That is unless you like gray hairs and a serious lack of sleep.”

Why Blogs are Nonetheless Impactful

From an funding perspective, blogs could also be a greater long-term funding for lead era.

“I could spend $200K to hire a full-time writer, SEO expert, and conversion rate optimization (CRO) specialist to work on my blog. By combining those skill sets, I’m going to be able to create a blog that drives organic traffic to my website and converts it into leads for my business all year long,” says Toner. “Or, I could put the same $200K into an advertising campaign and maybe get a couple thousand leads over the course of the ad campaign. But once the campaign ends, so does my lead flow.”

Toner provides that almost all of HubSpot’s blog-generated leads come from older weblog posts. Which means running a blog is usually a nice lead supply lengthy after posts are printed. Aja Frost, who leads the English web optimization workforce at HubSpot, echoes this sentiment.

“Organic traffic is more important than ever. Unlike paid traffic, which stops coming in the second your budget runs out, organic traffic is mostly self-sustaining after you’ve put in the time and effort to create a blog post,” she says.

She provides that almost all content material administration programs (CMS) have web optimization instruments built-in into their platforms, which makes it simpler to optimize your posts.

Running a blog may also be useful in shaping a model’s product positioning.

“Blogs are still one of the best channels we have to create narratives around our product,” says HubSpot Product Advertising and marketing Supervisor Alex Girard. “They offer us the opportunity to address trends we see in the market, how those trends impact the reader, and how our product might be able to help them meet that trend successfully. They’re also great for telling customer success stories.”

He provides that when utilizing your weblog to market your product, the content material would not must be promotional. If you set up your self as a thought chief and acquire belief out of your viewers, they may organically look into your services and products.

With that stated, it should take greater than good content material to have a profitable weblog.

“Growth without a goal isn’t going to help your business – if 10,000 people are reading your blog, but none of them fit your persona, that’s not going to do anything for your company,” says HubSpot’s Senior Weblog Supervisor Karla Cook. “Focus on something attainable, like generating new contacts, and make sure every post you’re putting out has that goal in mind.”

She provides that one of many largest errors manufacturers make is creating content material just for folks on the decision-making stage. With so many levels between studying a weblog and making a purchase order, entrepreneurs ought to have posts geared at customers in each stage with corresponding presents. Be taught extra about that by means of HubSpot’s business blogging course.

From an web optimization perspective, manufacturers may additionally wrestle with producing visitors as a result of they’re considering weblog first, hyperlink constructing second.

“What I often notice is that marketers see ‘blogging’ and ‘link building’ as two different disciplines. First, they write the blog posts, then they think about how to earn backlinks to them,” says Irina Nica, a senior marketing supervisor at HubSpot who works on product consciousness by means of outreach initiatives. “Instead, they should include linkable assets into their regular content calendar, alongside other types of articles that are maybe designed for generating organic or social media traffic.”

Regardless of the numerous advantages we have gone over, running a blog is not at all times one of the best technique for each model. Why? Effectively, what in case your very best person persona would not learn blogs? What if they like emails as an alternative?

“Some brands have great email communication and workflows where they provide people with downloadable offers where they don’t have to go somewhere else to get the information, it’s just in their inbox straight away,” says Mpouma. “You don’t necessarily need a blog as long as you’re offering something in exchange. I think the blog has always been that: Offer something for free in exchange for that user interaction.”

So, in that case, blogs would not precisely be useless, extra so irrelevant.

Why Advertising and marketing Is not Lifeless

issues from a broader perspective, blogs are simply an extension of marketing. Some have recommended that marketing is useless, which makes entrepreneurs like me surprise if there’s one thing we do not know.

Primarily based on current knowledge, marketing continues to be influential. And that applies to each conventional methods and digital initiatives. Statista reported that in 2019, content material marketing generated over $42 billion in income worldwide.

“There’s a reason why Nike and McDonalds continue to invest millions every month in marketing even though they’re already household names. There’s a reason why the top musicians and artists still do promotion prior to their latest album release,” says Simmonds. “Marketing isn’t to be seen as just an expense. It’s an investment. And if you make an investment that is rooted in a strategic plan — that investment should return dividends for years (maybe decades) to come.”

The important thing takeaway is that whereas not all marketing techniques work for each model, it is unlikely that blogs will cease being useful to manufacturers within the foreseeable future. So for now, blogs, you possibly can relaxation and step off the chopping block.

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autoirishlitdiscourses · 4 years ago

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Discourse of Sunday, 11 October 2020

I'm deeply embarrassed that it would have been nice to meet with you that there are several reasons for accepting after this time not even bothering to guess on years for texts, a small change, but I have to get graded first this week, you should take every possible point available for the text itself will, I nominate her: she worked incredibly hard, made great strides, is to drop it in. You did a good sense of the forbidden, and you can bring up in front of the establishment where he is adhering strictly to the right page on your paper wants to have thought deeply about a the specific language of your own responses is a room available at 12:30 and 4 December in section to get into one of these questions, talk to you by the time I send you during the term to spare. But having specific plans for the recitation errors, punctuation, and those people weren't being grade on the final 78. I'll see you on the day you recite because I think it would have gotten this to make any changes made that are slightly less open-ended pick three texts of certain types and weave them into questions and comments that you have left. Hi! It doesn't have to satisfy the college in which you could do so. Before I forget: Do you need to ground that argument in a different direction.

This is a very small but very well be phrased in a lot of ways, you've done a lot of ways that I think that bringing one of the section website you are reciting on Dec 4, I suspect that these are huge problems; it's of more or less finalized. Let me know in the Fall 2013 UCSB One-Acts Festival lots of good possibilities here, and I think that there are other possibilities. Can't read margin comments, go further into material that you should pick from the paper.

This is entirely understandable, but I felt that it bumps you down to the very end of the A-; this can be found below if you're planning on leaving town at 7 p. Again, you're welcome to use it to the section they describe. I'll see you next week. That section of a letter on the final, too, that there are still a bit more carefully in a way that they've done. 75 C 75% 112. 10 a. Let me know and we can actually accomplish in a 1:30 would be higher than if a similar breakdown here, though, you can't get to everything, anyway, because the writing process is a strong job of setting up a bit in the assignment into a more engaging performance. British pound notably through much of the island. Clarifying what that third plan looks like the Synge vocabulary quiz on John Synge's The Playboy of the midterm and the historical situation here, especially if the section and you manage to pick up every possible step to make an explicit statement about this relationship is between the excellent interpretation that you've got a good thumbnail background to the east of County Mayo A spavindy ass p. Instead, I think that the safe road too much to dictate terms on a big task. All of which are a few hours before a presentation as a whole behind in terms of figuring out when to give you a five-minute and two-year program in their key terms and their skills and proficiencies quite well, you need to pass out a draft of a third of a move that would help you to demonstrate what a very good job! I will distribute your total grade, with his permission, on the other students were engaged, thoughtful performance that you'd thought about it with particular ferocity to your paper's structure. Arguably, The Stare's Nest by My Window discussion of a variety of questions or concerns, which is just posting the parts of your passage, but also to some extent in some places. I think that your argument as you possibly can, OK? 3:30 you're likely to be helpful, and I'm deeply sympathetic about how you're going on the date indicated on the unnumbered page right after the final, is that sometimes your section to agree with me. Thank you for a historical text, and think about your grade by the wall of the recording of you effectively boosted the other's grade while you write very effectively and gain as much as it turns out that you took. If you want to do in leading a discussion of the course material, and your writing is quite effective in most places is basically avoiding the possibility that you make about developmental causality and to succeed in constructing an argument supporting his/her ideas, would probably have paid off. I'll see you next week. However. Sounds like a good, and I keep it up by a group of students in the English department look into it, but you handled a topic into an effective loy for digging out the issues that you're making a clear cubist depiction of a well-documented excuse. A good selection, in my office or after you reschedule it: technology breaks. I think it's possible that you must ensure that he marry the Widow Casey, who is planning substantial areas of thematic overlap in your section, and the amount of introductory speaking to set realistic expectations for you to open up to reciting in section and you demonstrate in your section takes a stand that makes your argument most wants to do. Failure to turn in a very solid job here, but that you're capable of doing even better delivery of the poem's last stanza, but again, this meant that they are working, so I'm sympathetic here. Nice job on Wednesday prevents you from noticing when people disagreed with you about. Memorization and recitation in the D range, though there were things that would need to spend more time on the other arrangements of the performance, and I'll get back to see how it operates and is entirely up to some extent in their papers, so it hasn't hurt your grade. You Like It, Orlando, in this matter would help you to help people move along the path that you'd intended, while the British Army is not as useful that way. There is absolutely acceptable and I think that there are also likely to be tying the landscape; the rest of the public eye.

Too, you did warm up. It's a Long Way to Tipperary sung by soldiers in O'Casey, Act I: Sean O'Casey and the Stars, and thanks for letting me know if any, are there not other ways possible placing themselves in the quarter is 86% a high A-scale course concerns, please see me but let me know and we'll work out a time in the sense of the female, which, given Ulysses, is important enough that I can attest you clearly had a lot of things going with their lives. I'm sorry about that in Shakespeare's As You Like It, Orlando, in another class. To put it in a late paper. However, these are very solid aspects of the page numbers for the delay. I suspect that what you actually mean by passionate, and it got fixed. I think that that's what you think it's possible that you don't send it right along. Let me play devil's advocate for a paper, mopping up on the last one in your own, or slide it under my office hours or, equivalently, at your test to know what you're really passionate about. This is a perfectly acceptable to use to construct a reasonable conversation about it. In all cases, this is the midterm was graded correctly. I also assign a grade estimate, but I have to have grown out of your total grade for the quarter, so I hope all of those three poets mentioned, all potentially productive move. I think that this question, but I absolutely understand that this could have been nice to meet with you to move up, you had a good job of this poem than I had better answers for you for the compliments you were not too late to pick a text that you're essentially doing a good student this quarter, but which might be thought to be careful to stay on schedule, but there are also somewhat off base—this is not just examining a set of ideas back from Alward, our undergrad adviser. I'll try to force a discussion leader for the positions we take in lecture tomorrow. I think that specificity will pay off for you on Thursday that the airman gets out of your argument's specificity back to the group without driving them, and what your discussion outline; 3 talk about what you want to do. You've written quite a solid job here, and is dense but not past your level of education? Let me know. Many students who often had complex depictions of women and the University for classes that satisfy the requirement that your thesis is to provide the largest overall benefit to the connections between the poem, thinking a bit too quickly, so let me know. It can also be read as, when the hmm, he never overed it, is not so much effort and time into crafting such a strong job.

There are plenty of examples, resonances, counterexamples, etc. But ran rather short. The in my opinion to earn points for demonstrating correct knowledge I'd rather not encourage you to get your recitation and discussion of The Stolen Child Yeats, O'Casey Chu, Synge O'Casey 4. Hi!

Finally, the central elements in a close-reading exercise of your analysis more clearly, but an A-grades in that case. I will also negatively impact your ability to construct a nuanced argument, and it may be ignoring the context of the professor's English 150 this quarter. All in all, though never seriously enough to engage thoughtfully with what you want to say that I disagree with these definitions if, gods forbid, I have only three students raised their hand; one put her hand down when I asked them Who's read episode one of the stony silence over the printed words. 57. What is/your/my/the first excerpt from a Western; things like nationalism and the divine aphasia I think that that's what you'd like, in fact, I think that practicing a bit longer before you they will benefit from more concreteness and directness, though. 4, but rather, I'm sorry I didn't anticipate at the beginning of the class, or by some other things, and they all essentially boil down to the real benefit of doing this on future pieces of writing, in which you engage in micro-level interpretations of the class, that it would definitely be proud of. What is my nation?

I need a real spreadsheet. What I'd normally do if not more—but that a lot of important concepts for the course. There are multiple possibilities here several poems by Yeats assigned for Tuesday, so this is an awfully long time, I think that you see in order to pay off for you would most likely cause is that my edition of Ulysses opened to the day's reading assignment, and this is a pleasure to have you in the writing process. If you need to ground that it's impossible for every work that you have any other questions, OK? You added the to a natural bridge from #4. Your opening is very unlikely even a perfect score on the assignment and may be that he might be an OPTIONAL review session. I'll go ahead and send separate sets of notes, it will change a bit nervous, which was true, but I think that you will need to represent some of your mind about how you want me to respond to everyone's first proposal before I go to, you're on task, as it is not? I see it, in your notes are absolutely fine, and deployed secondary sources. Ultimately, I think that there are places where you land overall in this range provide a sense of the Cyclops episode before section, but it would have been that morning in terrace she was born, running to knock up Mrs Thorton in Denzille street. None of which I say this not just providing opinions. I hope you feel that there is section tonight! There was one small error, a small observation: I think that it's difficult for your large-ish A-is still in the same source.

#Irish literature #automatically generated text #Patrick Mooney #Python #Markov chains

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opinionessaysamplespdf814 · 4 years ago

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veryotl · 7 years ago

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A little while ago, I made a post asking if anyone was interested in my ranking/opinions on the new Seventeen releases, and an overwhelming majority said yes. Well… Okay only 2 or 3 people said yes, but no one said no, so that’s a majority. So here it is, my official post ranking and sharing my opinions on the Seventeen project: Before Al1 releases.

Before I start, I should mention that I mostly refer to these songs as the B4. The whole “Seventeen Project chapter 0.5 Before Al1″ title is a bit of a mouthful, and there are four of them as it is so AJ and I shortened it to just “the B4″ in conversation, so when I refer to them from this point on it will most likely be under that nickname. Keeping that in mind… Let’s go!

#4 - Pinwheel by Vocal Unit

Originally, I have a bit of a push/pull relationship with Vocal Unit. They all have such lovely voices and I appreciate their songs, but I wish they would try something other than ballads most of the time. That’s not to say I don’t love their ballads, but a lot of groups showcase difficult vocal talents through upbeat songs and it’s not a law that all vocal-based songs have to be ballads. So when Pinwheel, another ballad, came out I was initially a little disappointed to not be seeing something new from Vocal Unit. However, there are some really nice aspects to Pinwheel. The lyrics are beautiful and creative, using imagery such as a lonely pinwheel just left waiting, the piano riff in and out is a really good transition, and Woozi’s vocals through the chorus are just lovely. A personal favorite of mine with this song is DK’s parts, since each time he sings he generally introduces a new aspect to the song. He’s used as a lead in to the first build-up to the chorus, the shift of the second verse, and the bridge, and he really stands out and shines. For the music video, the movement of the camera during the shots of running are especially stunning, and the use of multiple people at similar locations is a nice touch to the “alone” feeling. If I could change one thing to put this song higher on the list, it would be the chorus after the bridge. The bridge is very minimalistic, with just Woozi singing and the piano in the background, but the piano seems to get stronger and build towards something. However, the chorus part that follows is about the same as the other choruses in the song, and it leaves a bit of a let down feeling. Compare this to previous ballads like Popular Song, which added a new instrument and heavy adlibs over the last chorus to make it seem more full and bursting after the bridge. I think this would’ve been a good choice for Pinwheel. However, overall, I’m very satisfied with Pinwheel. Despite it being a ballad, it’s an interesting song and a very pretty one as well with solid lyrical writing and some really cool instrumentation and melodies. It definitely meets the Seventeen Gold Star Standard for their music, satisfying and not boring at all. It’s only 4′th because all the other B4 songs are so fantastically made, and is by no means a failure.

#3 - Change Up by Leader Unit

The choice to create a unit of the leaders of each individual unit makes a lot of sense on the surface. Each unit is divided by skill set and by picking one person from each unit it ensures that you get at least one of every skill in this mix unit. However, it paid off in some unexpected ways as we got to see Hoshi rapping, a talent previously only showcased in Concert specials. Even in his own unit’s songs, Hoshi plays vocalist more often than rapper, and so the new material was a bright spot in the song. The music video is also delightful, featuring 3 minutes of general shenanigans involving cars, turntables, ridiculous outfits, and Woozi mugging adorably for the camera. There’s a lot of great imagery both surrounding what it is they do (paper for lyrics and musical writing, mirrors for making dances, a turntable for rap and production) but also around what they plan to do in the future and the point of the song - changing up and subverting or destroying expectations (breaking through a wall, shooting off fireworks and poppers, setting their group name on fire). Change Up is just fun, it’s a fun concept pulled off in a way that is enjoyable to watch and bop along to. If I had one argument with the song, it would be the simplicity of the lyrics. There’s really only a verse or so of lyrics in the song that just repeat themselves, however even this is excusable with the addition of the second verse switching the parts between Coups and Hoshi of who sings what, adding a nice contrast of two different rap styles as well as a bit of variety in the sound. Even the instrumentation is fun to listen to, with a fun brassy riff that fades in and out as the song builds and a really interesting percussion line. On that note, the little sample of the female saying “Change Up” is also really fun, and used very well. In general, Change Up is a very simple song that would be easy to turn into a mess up, but they masterfully pulled it into something fun to listen to and watch.

#2 - Lilili Yabbay or 13월의 춤 by Performance Unit

If you made out a list of things that I worry would cause people to instinctively dislike a video and threw them all in one, you would get this song. Firstly, it has no distinguishable English title, which can cause confusion in the international community. It’s a dance video, meaning that any concepts or symbolism can be easily lost and people might get bored. It features artists who are not mainly singers and it’s easy to criticize people who are not as developed vocally. It also only has one English word in the entire song, possibly affecting the sing-ability of international listeners as well. However, following the release of the song it became abundantly clear that these worries were unnecessary and Performance Unit had flawlessly pulled off what could be considered a difficult concept. Unlike other Performance unit songs like OMG and even Swimming Fool that is repetitive and fairly simple to allow for the difficult dances, Lilili Yabby is vocally intricate but pulled off well, and the addition of the chorus of “neol wihae lililiyabbay” repeated makes for a catchy song that sticks in your head and is fun to sing even without any English. The dance is visually stunning and filmed well to keep your attention. They’ve received a lot of praise from people who have noticed it was a one-take, but it becomes more amazing with the consideration that it’s a one take with a difficult dance while in while outfits on wet, dirty ground with extras who need to keep marks in a outdoor, non-controlled environment. It is a tremendous amount of pressure and a high level of difficulty. Also worth noting is that Hoshi had been in the hospital about a week prior to this filming. With the culmination of all these aspects, Lilili Yabbay moves past a good song and into an artistic feat that is truly difficult to pull off. I don’t even have any changes I would make to the song, even with the release of a partially unfinished version with raw vocals I’m still satisfied with the addition of autotune in the final version. Performance unit took the idea that they’re the underdogs of the units because their talents aren’t as outright as singing or rapping and threw it in the face of the haters and killed it and I love it. However, it’s still not #1...

#1 - Trauma by Hip Hop Unit

After all that ranting about how perfect Lilili Yabby is, aren’t you curious to read why Trauma still beat out Lilili Yabbay for first place? Well, from the very beginning, it sets up how completely awesome the song is by a simple few strokes of... a muted autoharp, maybe? It’s a unique, sort of grating sound that makes shivers run down your spine. Right off the bat, they start you with an unfamiliar, strange sound that leads suddenly into a more intense chorus led by Mingyu. Mingyu is by no means the first choice of vocalist in Hip hop unit in my opinion. We’ve seen Scoups sing more often than Mingyu, and the choice to give him the most pivotal, impactful part of the song is a huge shocker that pays off big time. His more raw style of singing comes across in the style of the song as a perfect choice and he shocks the world with the sudden appearance of a vocalist side of him never before seen. Vernon’s verse following is of course masterful and catchy, and even frames the autotune as interesting instead of annoying like most pop music’s use. Scoups comes in with the chill rap style he’s been building for himself and it’s a really good lead in to the intensity of the chorus, as well as his sing-rap in the bridge section. Mingyu and Scoups have similar tones in their voice that could cause them to run into each other’s verses, however having them play two different styles is a really good choice throughout the song that avoids the problem of sticking them right next to each other. Wonwoo’s verse starts off as a chill rap with an echo to it and after making really good use of a pause, we start to hear the echo turn into something different, almost a quiet shouting behind his chill rap that builds into a frustrated end. It’s a really good use of Wonwoo’s two different styles. He does this briefly on Popular song, however it plays out really well in the context of Trauma and feeling trapped. Throughout each part we see things like this where the styles and the vocals show a conscious choice made by the artists to reflect the feeling of the song in more than vocals, in inflections and tones. That’s a really classy thing for an artist to do, especially in a genre like rap that relies heavily on tone to bring a beat to life. The music video is also a gem, relying on visuals to communicate feelings as well. In the days following, myself and many others took to breaking down the symbolism in the music video and how certain images bring to mind stories or convey feelings of being trapped or lost or hopeless, and that’s a really good thing. It shows that the choices made in acting and in creating the set aren’t necessarily obvious at first glance and in your face because they think you can’t figure them out, but they are intentional and made with thought and care. The use of the sliding doors connecting each room was not only artistic and beautiful, but also a transition that was physically made, meaning the camera was filming scoups and the door opened and the camera would move into Wonwoo’s room. This means that Scoups, Wonwoo, the cameraman, and the person in charge of pulling the prop door all have to be in sync and prepared and it probably took a lot of practice to get the perfect unbroken shot, done at least three times for each door that opened. And that’s commitment to a concept. the lyrics are all amazing and raw and real, and the concept itself is one that is pretty personally emotional. Everything about the song is good, from the imagery to the acting to the choices made when assigning lines, and in my opinion it’s the best of all the B4 songs.

#Clover liveblogs seventeen project 2017 #clover overthinks seventeen #trauma #lilili yabbay #change up #pinwheel #geez this is long #xD I didn't mean for it to be so long #It felt good to write after so long of having it in my head #I meant to write it last week but I got sick T-T

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emmatrustsno-one · 7 years ago

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Brace yourselves A very long essay (like, a thesis) on the British class system with references to Harry Potter Part 1

OK, I did this already. It’s long, but stick with it anyway. And watch the videos.

In Britain, people are broadly split into 3 social groups: working-class, middle-class and upper-class. The factors which determine which class you belong to are varied and complex, but in a nutshell include: how wealthy you are, where you live (location and type of dwelling), what variety of English you speak (or whether you speak English), what level of education you have, what you do for a job, what you do in your free-time, who you are friends with, what you like and dislike, your political views and affiliation, the nature and number of the opportunities you have in life and, in some ways the most important of all, which family you belong to, how far you can trace your ancestors back through history and what those ancestors did and who they were.

Although people who fall into the following categories are often working-class because our society, like any other country’s, is still trying to eradicate prejudice, these categories are not factors in and of themselves: race, nationality, religion, disabilities, gender and sexuality.

It is not the case that people’s class is constantly mentioned or even at the forefront of one’s mind, nor does it harmfully imply natural divide in the way that, for example, the caste system in India does. Class is subtle, nuanced, exists unchallenged and often doesn’t occur to you as the cause of a problem unless you really go looking deeply for it. It is undoubtedly damaging, however. Your class determines your path in life. It determines where you will live, how much money you will have, what education you will be able to access, what job you will be able to do, who you will be able to socialise and have relationships with and what opportunities you will have access to.

It is impossible to outline concisely but accurately exactly what sort of person is in which class. I will aim to do my best here, with references to Harry Potter, since I want fans who aren’t British to be able to understand these nuanced class subtleties better.

A very crude, basic description is that working-class people do “unskilled” jobs, usually for minimum wage and earn just money enough to exist; middle-class people have professional jobs, an education higher than secondary school and earn enough money to live comfortably and buy things they want as well as things they need; upper-class people belong to certain families who can trace their ancestry back a long way and are usually very wealthy and often related to the royal family. Their lifestyles are often funded by taxpayers’ money.

An overview

It is already complex enough, but it gets even more murky. For one thing, there are layers within the classes. You can be lower or higher within your class and the terms “lower middle-class” and “upper middle-class” are very common. Where you come on these inter-class continuums affects your life just as much as which class you are in.

Secondly, there are also two distinct groups who don’t fit in to the three classes. 1) very wealthy people, usually celebrities, who are super-rich but come from lower class backgrounds. A great example of this is the Beckhams. They are so rich from his football career and her music career that he had his wages paid directly to charity in the latter half of his career. They live lavishly, spend a fortune on designer clothes and their wedding was an imitation of a royal wedding. However, they spent years being mocked for seeming stupid and uncouth and it was all because of one thing: how they sound. As soon as they speak, you can hear that they started life near the bottom of the social ladder. I will do a separate post about language and voice at some point. Here’s a clip from an impressions show.

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2) an “under-class” who lives on state welfare benefits and doesn’t work. These people tend to not have enough money for their needs and their chances and aspirations in life are extremely limited. People in this category range from those unable to work through disability to drug addicts to genuinely unpleasant people who would rather take hand-outs from the government than contribute to society. The right-wing media portrays them as lazy, worthless and a blight; the left-wing media portrays them as misrepresented people who have been failed by society. The truth is in the middle.

Thirdly, unlike upper-class, what constitutes “working-class” and “middle-class” are not fixed concepts. Rather, they are in a state of constant flux and progression. What those terms meant when I was a child and Harry Potter was being written are not the same as they mean now, nor were they the same as when my parents or grandparents were children. It changes slightly with every generation. Nowadays, the middle-class is much bigger than it was then. Efforts have been made to get working-class children to go to university and some do, meaning that more people are moving into the middle-class. We are more aware of class prejudice than we used to be and many people do try to avoid it, therefore options have opened up for working-class people and allowed them to access things they couldn’t before. The technological revolution has made a huge difference. The internet allows people to travel everywhere and find anything from their own sitting room and has given some people aspirations they wouldn’t have had before.

Conversely, the definitions of ‘working-class’ have broadened. Many people now consider themselves working-class when, in my parents’ youth, they would have been middle-class due to the house or street they lived in or the fact that they manage to go on holiday every year. The two lower classes are definitely more mixed than before and the lines between them are blurring. I guarantee someone younger than me will read this and think “I consider myself working-class but I have never had any of the experiences OP describes”. Another thing which has made a huge difference is the collapse of British industry. In the 80s and 90s, the majority of the working-class worked in factories or similar industrial businesses. Then the powers that be closed them all and sold production to firms abroad who could make things more cheaply, and unemployment boomed. Literally, cities just died. Some people eventually got different jobs, though jobs where their skills were undervalued, and which alienated them from their work value. Many people didn’t. Many people had to live off state welfare benefits, which were not adequate and somehow out of that, that “under-class” I mentioned was born. Many of the people who choose to live off the state are people whose families lost their livelihoods at that time and ended up broken; just gave up.

Linked to that, another factor which makes it all quite complex is pride. Those people (the film The Full Monty is all about this btw) were proud of what they did with their skills and then they were just thrown away like they were nothing. They lost their pride and many never got it back. Working-class people, in particular, tend to be fiercely proud of being working-class. I won’t comment on the psychology of that here, but to illustrate: my husband won’t have it that he is middle-class now. He is. His argument is that he has to work, but that’s a huge over-simplification of what “working-class” means. He can afford holidays abroad and organic food, he lives in a detached house in the countryside, he owns 3 houses which he rents out to tenants (and they are kept to a very high standard). He is without a doubt middle-class. A teacher at school once claimed he was working-class for the same reason, and a lecturer at university did, but it represents a fundamental misunderstanding of what it really means to be working-class. There’s a good book about going back to your roots called Pies and Prejudice by the radio DJ Stuart Maconie, who is northern working-class originally but now lives a privileged life in London. He was inspired to write it when he had a friend over for lunch one day and they asked where the sun-dried tomatoes were, and he replied that they were by the cappuccino maker. Such ludicrously posh items made him stop in his tracks and think “what the hell has happened to me?”

Lastly, it is possible to move both within your class and to another class. This is called social mobility. I, for example, grew up almost at the bottom of the working-class. I lived in a very deprived area, had few opportunities and my family had only just enough money to subsist. I am now technically lower middle-class. I now live in a detached house in a sought-after village, I do a professional job, I have enough money to buy more things than just those I need and I am educated to postgraduate level. However, moving up a class is extremely difficult and many people never manage it. Those who do always carry markers of not quite fully belonging there, such as accent, vocabulary, etiquette etc. I have managed it, in short, because I am intelligent enough to have won scholarships for university, because my immediate family are also intelligent and exposed me, as much as possible, to other cultures, and because I married a builder whose parents had moved up the social ladder a little and gave him some land to build a house on. It is mostly down to luck and chance.

Sometimes people are very sensitive about their class and worry about it; sometimes British people themselves are not fully aware of it all. Such people are usually (and this is not meant nastily): middle-class from birth, therefore comfortable enough not to have thought much about it, or younger than early 20s, therefore they haven’t experienced and analysed hindrances arising from their class or had a university education where they would learn more about it. Very young people might have even more trouble getting their heads around it because of sheer lack of world experience and the modern world: it’s not quite the same as it used to be since the internet took over, since that brings opportunities to everyone that lower-class people might not have had before the turn of the century.

The reasons for class and the role of history

The reasons why this class system exists are even more complex. Keeping it brief, there are two key factors. 1. to maintain power for a privileged few and ensure the populace doesn’t try to take that power (people are too busy, pre-occupied and uneducated to challenge it). 2. historical influence: we used to have a feudal system where serfs worked the land for rich land-owners in exchange for living on it. During the Industrial Revolution some people managed to gain capital and power through production and factory ownership. They became the middle-class. This has evolved into what we have today.

The importance of the influence of the feudal system cannot be overstated if people are to grasp why race isn’t as critical a social issue here as it is in the USA. The USA is still recovering from Slavery, by which I mean the historical, slave trade triangle event, not the concept of enslavement. A major part of that country’s history is brutally, sickeningly forcing people who aren’t white to do the manual toil on US shores that kept privileged people in their positions of power. Racism and racist slurs equate to supporting slavery. Britain has a different history. Whilst we played an awful role in the slave trade, we didn’t have slave plantations on our shores. It wasn’t coloured people who did the toil. It was the working-class. For centuries the working-class were forced, at times with as much violence and as little food and rest as African slaves endured in the Americas, to do back-breaking work all day without a break, simply to have a place to shelter and some food. Under the feudal system this meant in the fields and during the Industrial Revolution it meant in dirty, dangerous factories. The working-class was, and to some extent still is, enslaved. That doesn’t mean that racism doesn’t exist here or that it’s not despicable. It does and is. But it doesn’t have the same connotations. Slurs about class, however, DO have those connotations. Here, making nasty comments about, or looking down your nose at, working-class people equates to supporting slavery, albeit more subtly than racism equates to supporting slavery in the US. Disparaging comments about the working-class are a bit like, for example, calling a black man “boy” in the US. But because a) it is more subtle and b) much longer has passed since we had the feudal system and the Industrial Revolution than has passed since America had slavery, class slurs in Britain are less emotive, emotionally-charged and offensive than racial slurs in America.

What makes you upper-class?

I mentioned that ancestry plays a huge role in determining class. I also mentioned that there is social mobility (moving up to a higher class or even down to a lower one). There are certain families who can trace their ancestry back centuries and are descended from royals and rich land-owners. That means that certain surnames and bloodlines are prestigious. These people form the upper-class.

It is very unusual for upper-class people to mix with working or middle-class people. I, for example, have only met one upper-class person in my life. They go to different schools from the rest of us and do different things socially. For this reason, upper-class people tend to marry other upper-class people, in fact most would frown upon anyone who did otherwise. Because it’s all about family status, marriage would be the only real way you could move up to upper-class, but it’s practically unheard of. You are born into the upper-class. If you inherit the surname, you inherit the status that goes with it, regardless of any other factors. For this reason, upper-class families tend to be ‘pure’. Here is a newspaper article illustrating my point. The comments are also interesting. It’s from a popular right-wing paper.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2838183/How-having-right-surname-sets-LIFE-ancestors-social-status-determines-rich-ll-study-claims.html

Another illustration: when Prince William married Kate Middleton, whose family are crazily rich, the media and nation went into a frenzy over the fact that he was marrying “a commoner”. They used that exact word. Kate’s family became wealthy during the Industrial Revolution and she, her siblings, her father, grandfather and great-grandfather all attended expensive, prestigious public schools. Her family is incredibly wealthy, has the best opportunities available and were friends of the royals for decades before she met William. Nevertheless it was huge news for her to marry William. Why? Because she wasn’t upper-class. Despite the privileged life she led, despite her family’s centuries of wealth, she didn’t have the name or the blood to be considered upper-class. It all comes down to family status. In crude terms, William married below him, and they were very lucky that it wasn’t a scandal. Some people were offended by it, in fact. Remember that in the 1930s Edward VIII had to abdicate in order to marry “a commoner”. To most people “a commoner” is someone normal, but here it is someone who doesn’t have the name or blood of a small, select group of families. It’s also interesting to note that she is rarely called ‘Kate’ by the media since joining the upper-class, but rather her full name ‘Kathrine’.

Two things out of this: firstly, don’t fall into the trap of assuming being upper-class doesn’t affect your life negatively. The lower-classes have worse struggles, but it would be wrong not to appreciate the difficulties associated with being upper-class. The expectations of you, the responsibility you have to your name, limitations on who you are allowed to socialise with and love, constant media and public attention and pressure to be someone important. It is exactly these issues which led Prince Harry to have a troubled youth.

Secondly, it is because of all this that many people feel it is incorrect to view death eaters in Harry Potter as a metaphor for Nazis. They are really a metaphor for the ‘pure-blood’ upper-class families. They do not round people up and exterminate them. They use power and influence to gain more power and to subjugate those they see as inferior because they do not share their names or blood. They do not base their ideologies on pseudoscientific claims about appearance, like phrenology. They base it on inherited blood. To highlight the fact of the class metaphor even further – there is a way to become effectively upper-class without being born or married into it. It is a lesser upper-class, because you don’t have the family name or blood, but you still become a de facto nobleman. The way is to become a Lord. You can google how to do it in the real world if you’re interested, but clearly the key point is that Tom Riddle’s adoption of the title Lord represents the change in his class. He does it because he knows he has upper-class blood but can’t prove it, so he has to indicate his status another way.

Why is Harry Potter about class?

The three blood statuses of wizards equate to the three classes: muggle born = lowest-class (working-class in the real world), half-blood = middle-class and pure-blood = upper-class.

It is because of this that the word “mudblood” is not the slur many people take it to be. It is not the wizarding version of the N word. It is not as offensive as that. It is offensive, yes, but it is not an unforgivable utterance which betrays inherent racism. The fact that the characters are prepared to repeat it when reporting it has been said shows that it is not comparable. I can’t even think the N word. If I think about it I don’t say it, in my mind I literally say “the N word”. Both characters and fans are prepared to say “mudblood”. It is not the same.

The fact that Voldemort and Snape are high-ranking death eaters also proves the story is not a metaphor for racial aggression: they are half-bloods and Snape comes from a working-class background and yet they have moved from their groups to be prominent members of the highest group. They have moved from lower classes to upper classes. It hasn’t happened by marriage like in the real world and it was very difficult – they had to be great wizards to manage it. But they did manage it. It is not possible to change your race, but you can change your class. Therefore, the wizarding war is a metaphor for class struggles not racial struggles, therefore “mudblood” is a nasty way of saying “commoner”. If you have dirty blood you aren’t part of the pure, select group. You don’t belong to the wizard upper-class. People shouldn’t say “mudblood” because it implies inferiority and enslavement, but if you do say it you are not racist, it isn’t the same as being racist, and isn’t as offensive or as unforgivable. It’s only slightly more offensive than saying “chav” or “ned” in a nasty tone of voice.

So it would be great if people could stop calling Snape a racist based on him saying “mudblood” one time as a teenager under extreme stress.

This all also explains why joining the death eaters was attractive to half-blood, working-class Snape in his youth and why JKR said he did it because he thought it would give him power and impress Lily. Those people who are confused because Lily wouldn’t be impressed by his joining the wizard Nazis – this is the answer. It’s because he wasn’t joining the wizard Nazis, he was joining the wizard upper-class.

Real class-based insults

A quick note on terminology – “chav”, or “ned” in Scotland, means a similar thing to “white trash”, but anyone can be a chav/ned, regardless of skin colour. The opposite of that insult is “toff”, which means upper-class and posh, but it’s negative. Here’s a picture of fictional chavs from the comedy TV series Little Britain.

Here are some comedy clips of some chavs interacting with the higher classes. You might not make all of it out, especially if English isn’t your first language, because working-class people generally speak with strong regional accents and use dialects (this couple are from London). You will probably notice though, bits where you can understand it much better – that’s because they are switching into “proper English”, or their version of it.

These vocab tips might help you out:

‘to have it off’ means to ‘to have sex’ as well as simply turning something off

‘winalot’ is a dog food brand; ‘camelot’ is the national lottery organisation

‘giro’ means welfare cheque

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Education and class

In general, working-class people go to state-maintained schools. These vary enormously in quality, mostly in terms of what resources and spaces can be bought and built for the budget the government gives them. Middle-class people normally go to these schools too, though a substantial number go to grammar schools, which are state schools that you have to pass a test to go to when you are 10/11, or private schools, which are schools independent of the state which charge fees and can be boarding schools. Both of these have good sites and resources and get good results.

Upper-middle class and upper-class people go to public schools, which is another level of private school. They are incredibly expensive, very old, boarding schools which select students based on who they are, as in, what family they belong to, and how much money they have. Teaching and the content of lessons is similar across all three types of schools; the difference is in funding – what the school can afford to offer in terms of books, experiences, classrooms, class sizes etc. Having a public school on your CV basically guarantees you entry to any university.

Private and public schools get good exam results because of their facilities and the fact that the students’ families are educated and encourage (or pressure) them to achieve highly. State secondary schools get mixed results because their facilities and resources are not adequate and many working-class families don’t value academic achievement, so don’t encourage it. A lot of students are unable to cope with the level of critical analysis required to succeed at A-Level (qualification at 18 years old) because independent thinking and reading non-fiction hasn’t been encouraged at home. I left school without finishing my A-Levels because I found that too difficult and had to build up my abilities gradually until I was able to handle that level.

The top universities now have to release data showing they are trying to admit students from working-class backgrounds, but nevertheless attendance by working-class kids at top universities like Oxford and Cambridge is low, because those universities demand things working-class kids don’t have: varied extra-curricular activities, the ability to pass an entrance exam, a proven track record of independent enquiry, enough money to pay double the fees most universities charge, the etiquette (e.g. dining manners) required to interact with all the upper-class kids etc. This is a poor state of affairs and denies working-class students access to ground-breaking research and thinkers. The bigger issue, however, is that it keeps them away from power. All the influential people: politicians, big businessmen, investors, lawyers etc, go to the same few universities. They meet there, get to know each other through secretive clubs (google the Bullingdon Club for more info) and this enables them to network and make contacts, which they use later in life. Working-class people never get those contacts, therefore find it almost impossible to get any power.

To demonstrate the prejudice, an anecdote:

My friend Claire is middle-class and went to a grammar school. She got As in her A-Levels and went to Cambridge University. On the first day she met the people who would be on her course as well. Every single one of them had gone to private or public school. When she told them which school she had come from, they said, with what they believed was genuine praise and kindness, “wow, you’ve done really well to manage to get As and get into Cambridge considering where you’ve come from”. She isn’t even working-class. She had led a pretty privileged life. Yet they were astounded and condescending towards her. They viewed her achievement of coming from a middle-class grammar school with good exam results the way many of us view Malala’s success and entrance to university after her experiences in the Swat Valley. They were, like many people of that class, totally disconnected from popular reality.

This leads me to the defence of another Slytherin: Slughorn. Some people view him as racist because of his comment that Lily’s academic success was even more impressive since she was a muggle-born. As I have shown already, blood status in HP is a metaphor for class struggles not for racial tensions, so it is not correct that he is racist. In fact, he was doing what those people on Claire’s course were doing: expressing shock that someone from the (wizard) working-class could achieve so highly in academia. It’s inherent prejudice, it’s patronising, yes. But it’s not racist, and it is even well-intentioned.

Another point to mention here is access to knowledge outside the content of lessons. That has improved a lot with the internet, but still, access to books is limited. A few years ago the government started talking about closing some libraries and it caused an uproar. Without libraries, most working-class people would have very limited access to books. It is yet another case of failing to understand that most people do not have the privileges they do, as well as desiring to limit the extent to which the working-class can get an education, so as to keep them in their place.

Personal hygiene and class

This issue is very close to my heart because as a child I had very poor personal hygiene and I was bullied terribly for it. It is not a nice thing to have to admit, but some working-class people don’t have brilliant personal hygiene. It isn’t unusual for very low-class people to smell, have bad teeth, not change their clothes regularly, rarely change their bed sheets and not to wash every day. To take myself as an example first, when I was little I was not bathed regularly, nor was I made to clean my teeth. I hate saying this, because I know it’s horrible, and believe me I am OCD with washing now, but when I was a child I went weeks without a bath or a change of clothes. We didn’t have a shower. It was neglect, there’s no way around it. However, it wasn’t malicious. In my parents’ generation and before them, it was normal not to wash very often if you were working-class. These days, hygiene practises amongst the working-class are much much better, but even still you do even now get smelly, dirty people.

It wasn’t just me. In my year (grade) alone at secondary school there were three students who were showered at school by the matron (in a kind way) because they didn’t wash at home.

Why? Well obviously that is complex, but I’ll try to explain. It is absolutely linked to being working-class. For a start, facilities were a problem because of poverty. When I was born (1985) we didn’t have a bath or shower, our bathroom was just a toilet. We also didn’t have a washing machine. We just couldn’t afford those things. To use a bath we had to go to my grandparents’ house. When I was a few years old we got a tin bath, which is like an unconnected bathtub that you fill with jugs. We didn’t have much money for water and soap though so use of it was limited. My mother washed clothes in it as well by hand. When I was around 5 or 6 we got a proper bath. However, our house was so cold that it was physically painful to use it. We didn’t have any heating except for an open fire in the living room and this was the north of England I’m talking about. In winter the bed sheets got damp from the cold. When we had the tin bath you could put it in front of the fire, but the plumbed in bath was upstairs in a bathroom. My dad braved it more often than my mum, and since I was little I didn’t bath myself. Those three students that got showered at school I mentioned did so because even by the late 90s, they still didn’t have a bath or shower at home.

Another reason is lack of education. People just aren’t taught about personal hygiene at school, so if they don’t already know at home you won’t find out either.

On top of that, many working-class people are too busy or pre-occupied to remember about or find time for things like washing. They work long hours, often multiple jobs, and when you aren’t sure if you’ve got enough money to eat, getting washed just doesn’t seem that important.

Another factor is depression. Living in poverty, working hard just to survive, knowing you have little opportunity in life creates depression. Depressed people can lose interest in things like personal hygiene.

Not washing is so ingrained in working-class history that the phrase “the great unwashed”, originally a term used by Victorian authors, is now a reasonably common way of referring to the masses. It is used both derogatorily and ironically:

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/the-great-unwashed

I was bullied terribly, especially at primary school, for being smelly and dirty. It was constant, day in, day out, and is definitely the reason I am now over-the-top in cleanliness. One of the main things people made fun of was my hair. I was bullied for having greasy hair to the extent that, on a school trip where we were staying overnight, 2 girls that I was forced to share a room with, having tortured me for hours, including ruining my shoes, said they would stop it if I washed my hair.

I understand that some people say cruel things when they are young, but the fact remains that if you choose to make fun of someone because they are dirty or greasy or smelly, you are actually making fun of them for being poor, not having basic facilities at home, not having been taught proper personal hygiene because their parents didn’t know or were too busy or depressed. You are behaving like you are socially superior to them.

This is obviously the main reason why I love Snape. I immediately saw myself in him, and every time someone mentions his greasy hair it alludes to his working-class childhood. When he joined the death eaters he moved up the ladder, but the disadvantaged start he had in life is still written all over him. It is also why I love Slytherin – the house is populated mostly by pure-bloods, or in other words by upper-class people, and yet they embrace him and allow him social mobility anyway. They looked at him and saw something other than his class.

It’s not just about wealth

Since membership of the upper-class is brought about through ancestry, it is possible to be upper-class and not rich. Most upper-class people are descended from rich people and have inherited wealth alongside their name and blood, but occasionally there’s a family whose ancestors lost most of the money, so they are left with just a title and the estate (house and land). It costs a lot of money to run an upper-class house because they are invariably old, listed, castle-y buildings in the countryside. That means they are big and cold and cost a fortune to heat. Stuff breaks or wears out so the maintenance costs a fortune as well. They might be so big that they need staff as it’s too much for just the family to keep on top of, so there are wages to pay too. On top of that, they try to live an upper-class lifestyle to keep up appearances, which is very expensive. A good few years ago now there was a documentary called The Fucking Fulfords, about an upper-class family who couldn’t afford their lifestyle or house and swore all the time. Even though they weren’t wealthy they didn’t get jobs, largely because they had been brought up to believe it was beneath them, and as a result they are lazy fucks. It’s on youtube if you want to watch it.

youtube

Lazy is not the only stereotype of the upper-class. There are quite a few, all based in fact, such as that they are eccentric and strange. Fulford is definitely that. Another is that they are stupid. Since they don’t understand life in the same way as regular people, because they don’t have jobs, some things they don’t know are astonishing. There was a reality TV series years ago where this entitled, upper-class girl did working-class, minimum wage jobs, and it was painful to watch. She didn’t know how to do basic tasks like make a cup of tea, because she never did anything for herself at home. She didn’t know what a gas bill was. A lot of these people barely wipe their own arses so it’s no wonder they appear incapable. The Monty Python sketch “twit of the year” utilises that stereotype to make fun of the upper-class. It also pokes fun at the stereotype of having ridiculous multiple-barrelled surnames. My husband does building work for an upper-class family occasionally and the woman’s surname is Booth-Clibburn-Shimmins. The Pythons are doing that thing with their faces because yet another stereotype is that upper-class people talk weird.

youtube

#Harry Potter #british class system #BRITISH SCHOOLS #British history #britain vs america #class in harry potter #slytherin #snapedom #@deathdaydungeon

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theeurekaproject · 5 years ago

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A Painstakingly Complicated Discussion of the Caste System

This post is mirrored from my Wattpad story Eureka in Excessus, which is a collection of miscellaneous pieces of the Eureka Project that never quite made it into the book. You can find it here.

Today on "Wren Has Too Much Free Time: The Book," we discuss the painful intricacies of the caste system in a society that doesn't exist! I'm the type of person who gets super into worldbuilding (sometimes at the expense of the actual story) so writing this type of guide is really entertaining to me. That being said, if you would rather not listen to two thousand or so words of rambling about the social order of a fictional empire, you are by no means required to read this—the actual story can be understood just fine without it. If you're a lore-obsessed geek like me, though, read on :)

I knew from the very beginning that Eleutheria had to have a caste system. I needed a quantifiable way for characters to compare themselves to other characters, and "she's rich but I'm poor" didn't really work because poverty and status are so relative. The noblewomen consider everyone beneath them "poor," but then there are people like Lyra, who were literally raised on the streets. There's also the fact that Eleutheria's social order is incredibly complicated and alien—it's almost nothing like our own, owing to the fact that they have larger gender differences, a weird history, and bizarre societal norms that are often at odds with what readers consider normal. So I knew I needed a quantifiable system that shows which characters are ranked higher than other characters.

The caste system started as simple ranks and numbers, but that got boring and difficult to keep track of very quickly, so I started giving the castes names. Like everything else in Eleutheria, they're in Latin, but I'm hoping that a combination of context clues and obvious English loanwords will be enough to give readers an idea about what they mean. Eventually the system grew from ten vague groups to exactly twenty extremely specific castes grouped into several different cohorts. I like this way of organization because it allows me to make certain jobs equal without combining them into one caste—scientists and medical types are different things, but they're in the same cohort and thus relatively equal. I finalized the hierarchy with a few additional groups that aren't quite considered castes, and that led to the system I—and Eleutheria—use now. So, without further ado: the twenty castes of Eleutheria!

The Trinitarian castes are the "best of the best"—the old money noblewomen who lead Eleutherian society and serve as models to everyone else. Nothing a Trinitaria says or does is wrong—they can get away with murder if they so desire, and there's nothing anyone can do to stop them. Despite their high status, though, the Trinitarium are constantly fighting amongst themselves, frequently resulting in bloody civil wars that leave hundreds of thousands of people dead. Naturally, the people who start said wars get off scot-free; they always do.

Caste Cipher is the highest Trinitarian caste. Supposedly descended from the Founders of Eleutheria, the Ciphers are said to have unflinching brilliance, impossible beauty, and the divine wisdom of their ancestors. Their shockingly blue eyes, unflinching gaze, and uncanny-valley nature distinguishes them from the rest of the nobility (or, well, at least it did; Acidalia-Planitia, eldest daughter of Alestra Cipher, has, to the rest of the court's disgust, very plain, very human brown eyes.) Ciphers are considered almost gods by quite a few denizens of Eleutheria, and anyone who dares question them will be swiftly and violently stricken down by Alestra Cipher's hand.

Examples: Alestra, Aleskynn, and Acidalia (the latter only sort of.)

Caste Princips is the second-highest caste, consisting of nearly all the other noble families on Eleutheria. Noble houses Vulgaris, Communia, Summus, and others reside on this level—just below the Ciphers, but above everyone else. They are said to have descended from Eleutheria's earliest settlers, a population chosen by the Founders to spearhead their new civilization. Despite their high ancestry, though, they are not above stupid, petty squabbles, and they spend most of their time arguing with one another over nothing of importance. Though Caste Princips are not nearly as revered as Ciphers, they evoke the same anxiety in ordinary citizens—mostly because they too are wealthy and powerful enough to erase people from existence.

Examples: The ladies-in-waiting, most of Aleskynn's friends

Caste Praelia is the final, dying Trinitarian caste. It once consisted of numerous noble houses who served as military powerhouses; Praelium houses produced an untold amount of warriors, generals, and gladiators. However, Alestra came down on them hard during her reign, not wanting to be superseded by charismatic Praetors and their extremely loyal armies. Now the only remnant of caste Praelia is the noble house Generalis, which is also slowly fizzling out—its matriarch, Anatolia Radiata, died several years ago, leaving her daughter Cassiopeia as the lone survivor.

Examples: Cassiopeia, the late Anatolia

The Logos castes are just underneath the Trinitarians. Consisting of scientists, doctors, businesswomen, and other academic types, this cohort has given rise to some very powerful people. However, most women in this category remain solidly middle-class—not every researcher is an Einstein, you know? Despite this, they are treated with a sort of reverence by the rest of the population, because they're considered the "movers and shakers" of Eleutherian society. They discover new things, uncover the past, and help move humanity forward; who wouldn't love them? So they usually get off pretty well in the grand scheme of things... sure, sometimes they discover things they weren't meant to know and get themselves shot for treason, but considering that this is Eleutheria we're talking about, that's not that bad.

Caste Negotia is mostly composed of businesswomen, economists, and management types. Some are your ordinary office busybodies, and others are CEOs. They can be enormously wealthy, but many are your regular old run-of-the-mill managers. Still, the caste is associated with luxury anyway—very few Negotium are cripplingly poor.

Caste Scientia consists of researchers and scientists, who are further divided into specialties depending on their field. Again, they can be very rich, or kind of in the middle, but rarely ever impoverished. Outside of the Trinitarian castes, the Scientias are one of the most respected groups in Eleutherian society—after all, they invent the technology that's made the empire so powerful. Despite this—or maybe because of it—they are under intense scrutiny. Alestra is so afraid of the Scientias mobilizing against her that's she's started an aggressive campaign to keep dangerous ideas from spreading: she takes away their children to be raised by the state, kills anyone whose research goes a little too deep, and brutally slaughters everyone who disagrees with her just to make examples out of them. Scientias also have a tendency to die young due to completely unrelated reasons—they're often frail, sickly, and inexplicably weak. Conspiracy theories abound about this, but every time someone makes a breakthrough, they wind up dead.

Examples: Athena, Carina

Caste Medica contains medical professionals—doctors, nurses, dentists, and the like. Alestra sees them as slightly less of a threat, so she's a little more lenient with them. Besides, she kind of has to be nice to a degree—even Imperatrices get sick, and she wants to avoid being killed by her own doctors if something goes wrong. This caste is generally kept happy, just because Alestra knows offending them could result in her death. It would be very easy for the royal physician to cut the wrong thing during surgery and make an assassination look accidental.

Caste Historia ostensibly contains the historians, archeologists, et cetera. In practice, though, it's hardly composed of unbiased historical researchers. Most Historium are paid off by the state to publish the truths the government agrees with, and dissenters are simply killed. Much like the Scientias, Historium are subject to an intense amount of scrutiny; if someone publishes a document they aren't supposed to, Alestra's whole reign could collapse in on itself. This, compounded by the fact that society doesn't really need historians in the same way it needs scientists, has led to the thinning of caste Historia. After Alestra took power, their numbers were greatly reduced, and they never regained their lost power again.

The aptly named Artem castes are the creative types. Dancers, actors, artists, designers, animators, and anyone else who works an "artsy" job is classified into this cohort. Unlike most castes, the Artem castes are incredibly diverse and offer a high degree of social mobility for anyone fortunate enough to swindle their way into a high-paying job. Starving artists can become millionaires overnight if they're lucky, and famous stars can fade into nothingness if society forgets about them. It's a high-risk, high-reward game, but if you're skilled, loyal, and reasonably attractive, you have a decent shot at making a good living for yourself. Of course, artists who choose to defy the status quo never seem to remain in the spotlight for very long.

Caste Auctor is composed of writers, authors, and scribes. Auctores can be almost anything, so long as it's related to writing or communication. They can work in conjunction with Scientias and Medicas to do the paperwork surrounding scientific studies and case reports, help Magistratum with investigative journalism, translate ancient languages alongside Historium, create works of fiction, et cetera. Like the Scientias, they're somewhat respected by the majority of society, but that just means Alestra hates them more because they have so much influence. Any Auctor who finds themselves on her bad side will meet a swift and merciless end.

Caste Momentum consists of the people who are involved in creating "movies" and "TV shows" (read: "thinly veiled propaganda presented to the citizens as if it's truth.") It's a somewhat odd caste limited to propaganda professionals; there are actors and directors, but also certain psychologists and writers who specialize in messing with the human mind. Momentum castes regularly collude with Auctores, Medicas, and Scientias—and sometimes even Ciphers themselves—to create terrifying, mind-melding cocktails of half-truths that can convince weak-minded citizens of anything.

Caste Incentor is much more innocuous, containing mostly musicians. They're monitored heavily to prevent Dangerous Ideas from spreading, but they have more freedom than most Artem castes, mostly because Eleutherian music is by and large kind of terrible. Incentores are stereotyped as being dizty, lovestruck morons, because they're one of the few castes that never really does anything with science or history or government—mostly they just sit around and look pretty, and some of them sing on occasion. (Of course, most of them are not really that brainless, but they pretend to be stupid anyway—the dumber Alestra thinks you are, the less she'll want you dead.)

Caste Sollertia is a weird, catchall mixture of other "creative types." All sorts of career artists wind up here—designers, certain architects, tattoo artists, and anyone else Eleutheria can't shove neatly into their own little category. Sollertium are stereotyped as "free spirits" because they can grow up to be pretty much anything, so long as that thing has a creative component to it. The daughter of an architect can easily become a graphic designer if she so chooses (though it's customary to take your mother's job upon reaching your age of majority.) Sollertium associate with Logos castes like Scientias somewhat frequently—you kind of have to consult engineers if you're designing a building—so they have slightly more respect than Incentores, despite their caste's lack of structure and organization.

The Auxilium castes are where things start to get depressing (if the government surveillance wasn't depressing enough.) Auxilium are "helper castes," and that describes them pretty accurately—they only exist to serve other people. They range from middle-class to extraordinarily, horrifyingly poor, and they don't have the greatest of reputations. Most of the upper castes look down on them at least somewhat, and anyone who makes friends with an Auxilia will be made fun of mercilessly. There is one exception to this rule, though—Ministratora, especially the Imperial servants, are treated with a great degree of respect. Mostly because they report back to Alestra.

Caste Suffragia is the most fortunate of the Auxilium castes. They're called Suffragium because they used to be one of the largest voting blocs back when Eleutheria held elections (same root word as "suffrage.") Suffragium are, by and large, everyday workers just trying to make a living. Regular old salesmen, secretaries, and the like are mostly Suffragium, as well as most retail employees. It's rare to see a Suffragia rise above middle-classs mediocrity, but this is Eleutheria, so dull suburbia and ticky-tacky box houses are pretty decent. And they don't get murdered by furious Ciphers on a semi-regular basis, so... that's a win for them.

Caste Ministratora is domestic workers. Personal assistants, maids, nannies, and some cooks are all Ministratoras, and their quality of life varies depending upon their employer. They can make very good money if they work for very rich people—you'd think noblewomen would treat their servants pretty poorly, but it'd be extremely easy for a resentful maid to slip something lethal into a drink or let important information slip, and sure, they might get themselves killed for it, but what good will that do if you're already dead? Alestra in particular is shockingly nice to the Ministratoras she employs, mostly because she's terrified of them turning on her.

Caste Raeda consists of the people who keep Eleutheria's public transportation system in check. It's a more important job than it sounds, but it's also too dirty and grimy for Scientias to want to do it, so the grunt work falls to the Raedae. They range from train conductors to mechanics to spaceship pilots, and though they're looked down upon by most other Eleutherians, their card isn't actually that bad. They don't make a lot of money, but that means they have more freedom than most, and they can escape Eleutheria with ease if things turn nasty—Alestra doesn't care about them enough to look into it when they vanish mysteriously.

Caste Vilicius is where things start to get human-rights-violate-y. Vilicius is a small caste that only exists to keep the Laborum and Cantatores in check—the second the lower castes start causing a problem, the Vilicii are there to beat them into submission. Allowing Vilicii to go mad with power and indiscriminately maim or kill Obscuri is one of Alestra's favorite ways of keeping Eleutherian society the way she wants it. Vilicii are another group that can get away with murder—provided they're murdering the "bad" people, of course.

And, finally, the aforementioned Obscurus castes. They're called Obscuri because they quite literally live in the darkness, populating the pieces of Eleutheria nobody else will tolerate living in. They're mostly orphans and other people with no family name or legacy, and they're often considered "resources" that can be bought, sold, and used rather than human beings with valuable lives. The one plus about being an Obscurus is that Alestra doesn't care about them, either, which means they can get away with doing "treasonous" things others would be jailed or killed for. On the other hand, they don't reap the benefits from the government, either—meaning they have no access to programs intended to help the impoverished.

Caste Labora is made up of factory workers. They're one of the largest castes, and they're incredibly strong, rivaling the greatest athletes and gladiators Eleutheria has to offer. This means that, hypothetically, if a Labora was to start a large revolutionary movement, things would be very, very bad—they probably wouldn't win anything, but they'd cause a significant amount of damage before the military came to shut them down. Somehow, though, they never stay strong for very long—every Labora seems to get some horrible, immobilizing disease that cripples their ability to move or communicate once they outlive their usefulness.

Caste Cantator is like the catchall caste for people Eleutheria doesn't like. Bastard kids, orphans, illegal second daughters back when Alestra had a one-child rule, et cetera, all fall into the Cantator category. Cantator is one of the smallest castes, but Alestra hates it more than anything because every Cantator is a living embodiment of a broken rule. She hasn't outright killed them all yet, mostly because doing so would be inconvenient, but she's dangerously unsympathetic to their problems, and she's revoked what little support the government used to offer them. They're a constant thorn in her side just by virtue of existing, and she'd be very happy to see them all wiped off the face of the Earth.

Examples: Lyra

Caste Servum consists of slaves. Chattel slavery hasn't been legal in Eleutheria for over two hundred years, but the fact that this caste is still on the roster shows how little the government cares about enforcing that rule.

"Outcaste" is a sort of general term for a person who doesn't fit into the official hierarchy. It doesn't actually have a negative connotation; whether or not being an Outcaste is a good thing depends on the circumstances of a person's birth.

The Magistratum are the police force. They aren't considered a part of the official caste roster because they're technically military (though they're rarely treated as such.) Certain units of the Magistratum are terrifying and efficient, especially Alestra's not-so-secret police, but most of the time they're kind of a mess because they're always fighting with each other. Most units are ruled by the government, others are run entirely by the various gangs/mobs that pop up in the Eleutherian underground, yet more work for various non-government paramilitary rebel groups, and some just serve themselves. And for every cop who works for an ulterior motive, there's some poor guy whose entire job is filling out paperwork and fighting with idiot sov cits.

"De Caelo" is the what non-Eleutherians get on their paperwork in the place where the caste name should be. It literally means "from heaven" because it most often refers to people from other planets (usually Mars.) Eleutheria doesn't get many tourists (because it's kind of a dystopian hellscape) but it does get visiting diplomats, and the "de Caelo" classification is just a way of saying "no, they don't have a caste; they aren't from here."

Miles (pronounced mee-lays) are soldiers. Most men fall into this category because Eleutheria has compulsory military service. The military has its own ranking system, which is kind of impossible to memorize because it's so needlessly complicated—some of it is meritocratic like a traditional military structure (i.e. you get promoted if you do a good job), but most of it is just based on what you were born as, and it all uses random letters instead of fancy Latin names. The random categories are intended to confuse enemies so they won't intentionally target higher-ranking men—the idea is that they wouldn't single out a TB soldier over a DX soldier, because their names don't indicate how important they are. Of course, different categories have different uniforms and appearances, so the whole "random alphabet soup letter" names are functionally useless.

Examples: Ace, T (or AX-C240 and TB-2115, respectively.)

Luminosa is the title given to the founders of Eleutheria and other historically important people. It means "enlightened," and it's the highest honor an Eleutherian can ever hope to get. It's virtually impossible to receive this title—even Alestra didn't dare award it to herself. Less than fifty people have ever been called "Luminosa," and it's almost always awarded posthumously. Luminosae aren't considered a part of the caste system because they're theoretically above it—everyone on the planet would bow down to them, even the Ciphers themselves.

Examples: Katherine Amelia Davis, better known as Katerina Aurelia Luminosa (the woman Acidalia's coronation oath references, and ostensibly her ancestor.)

#lore #d e e p e s t l o r e #wren has too much time on her hands #worldbuilding #caste system #eleutheria #terra #solis #eurekaproject

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douchebagbrainwaves · 7 years ago

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THE COURAGE OF SOMETHING

In a startup you can do to make programs shorter? Individual programs can certainly be too succinct for their own good.1 We can afford to be candid about what you should work on, and that's what the startup is in the form of the new skills you'll learn. The idea of switching to your current name. What a hack!2 It's probably always some of both. I wrote for high school students have searched for does not seem to exist.3 I think the rate of people who do that tend not to have much power in big companies than small ones, and product development is something that has to pervade every program you write in school even has users.4 You don't expect photographic accuracy in something that looks like a mess.5

One could have described Microsoft and Apple in exactly the right place and you've made this beautiful portrait.6 Nerds are already a lot cooler than they were when I was a kid I was firmly in the camp of bad. Their revenues aren't as high as 50%. In most people's minds, spending money on luxuries sets off alarms that making investments doesn't. It's like saying something clever in a conversation as if you'd thought of it is unconscious. Eventually everyone will learn by word of mouth. What this means for language design, and my habit of always asking would x be useful in a programming language just got invoked. But America has no monopoly on this.

That's schlep blindness. So in 1998 powerful New York types were suddenly wearing open-necked shirts and khakis and oval wire-rimmed glasses, just like guys in Santa Clara. I know they exist. And he'd be right. These ideas didn't just seem small. But Durer's engravings and Saarinen's womb chair and the Pantheon and the original Porsche 911 all seem to have such a bad time. How could that ever grow into a startup hub to rival Silicon Valley. Language designers are solving the wrong problem. For example, the guys designing Ferraris in the 1950s they paid associates far less than firms do today.7

Another thing we tell founders is not to compile a complete list, just to show that there's some solid ground here. I like to work.8 Hence such parodies as Pets. Languages, not Programs We should be clear that we are talking about the taste of apples, I'd agree that taste is subjective found such a receptive audience is that, at this early stage, there are all kinds of scaffolding and hustle and bustle.9 What's different about religion is that people don't feel they need to change their name.10 The finance guys seemed scrupulous about reporting earnings. I'm not claiming that stock grants can now be quite cheap; all money can really buy you is sales and marketing. The end of school is the fulcrum of your life, the biggest distributor, Digi-Key, has been trying to force a crappy product on ambivalent users by spending ten times as much traffic by word of mouth online than our first PR firm got through the print media.11 Which one of these centers.

So, paradoxically, if you're prepared to live on ramen. But talking to my father reminded me of a heuristic the rest of the world. A silicon valley has to be right. Since there's such a thing. I don't believe it when they tell you this is a naive and outdated ambition. They made one seem old. In addition to formidable founders, a promising market, and if it doesn't engage the identities of any of the software you write in the language longer than one you have in your head. In some countries this is the problem you're trying to convince investors there will be demand for a cheaper alternative to something popular, if you can achieve the same level of performance with less effort, surely that's more impressive, not less.12 When you see your career as a series of concentric rings, like ripples in a pond.13

Your spinal cord is less hesitant, and it frees conscious thought for the hard problems.14 When you make something users love enough to tell their friends, you grow exponentially, and that job at Microsoft will still be waiting for them if they need it.15 You don't need to become the founders' bosses, which is what that title CEO means. New Yorker, Lockheed's Skunk Works, Xerox Parc. So we have no data about what it takes to get from the swarms-of-beggars stage to the silicon-valley stage. I know to be the right thing, which is not far from saying that Python's goal is regularity and readability. This doesn't just affect what they claim to like; they actually make themselves like things they're supposed to.

It seems like it violates some kind of need.16 By the end of each chapter was just some advice about solving them.17 But this is so easy you can pick it up on the fly. Art is man-made. The other reason parents may be mistaken is that, like speculating in securities. The initial focus should be the product. So Dad, there's this company called Apple. He means the same thing at different stages in its life: economic power converts to wealth, and social class are just names for the same thing; the difference is individual tastes. Instead of saying that your idea is to make credentials better. Object-oriented programming, and three and a half of them are the same or aren't, to ask: to what extent does succinctness power?18

Notes

And since everyone involved is so hard to say, good deals.

By this I mean by evolution. This is why, when Subject foo degenerates to just foo, what you learn about books or clothes or dating: what they're doing. In fact, for example, to pretend that the meaning of distribution.

Where Do College English 28 1966-67, pp.

Foster, Richard and David Whitehouse, Mohammed, Charlemagne and the super-angel than a VC firm wants to the principles they discovered in the imprecise half.

Parker, op.

Horace, Sat.

There were lots of potential winners, from hour to hour that the http requests are indistinguishable from those of dynamic variables were merely optimization advice, before realizing that that's what I think it is not too early for a certain threshold.

Perhaps realizing this will help you in?

I may try allowing up to two of each token, as I explain later. There is no.

I have to want to impress are not more.

When a lot of legal business.

I don't know of at least straightforwardly benevolent, doesn't help people on the scale that Google does. There can be either capped at a famous university who is highly regarded by his peers, couldn't afford it.

If we had, we'd have understood why: If they really need a higher growth rate early on. They'll have a significant effect on the East Coast VCs.

To be fair, the employee gets the stock up front, and stonewall about the size of the company they're buying. Because in the sense of the present that most three letter words are independent, and I don't know yet what they're wasting their time on applets, but this advantage isn't as obvious because it doesn't commit you to stop, the Romans didn't mean to kill. Instead of earning the right mindset you will find a kid that you'd want to. It will require more than the type who would never even think of a company.

Currently the lowest rate seems to them this way that weren't visible in Silicon Valley like the application of math to real problems, and are often surprised by how you spent all your time on applets, but that we are not the type who would never even think of the rest of the causes of hot deals: the editor, which was more expensive, a VC who got buyer's remorse, then they're not. Anyone can broadcast a high-fiber diet is to let yourself feel it mid-twenties the people worth impressing already judge you more by what you can eliminate, do it well enough known that people working for startups, you need. I think lack of understanding vanity would decline more gradually.

The most striking example I know for sure a social network for x.

There's nothing specifically white about such customs. It doesn't end every semester like classes do. Well, of course, or pigs, to a woman who, because the outside edges of curves erode faster.

Emmett Shear, and anyone doing due diligence for VCs if the founders.

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