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goneseriesanalysis · 4 years ago

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Drake Merwin

I am soo sorry, this is super late but I got incredibly distracted with reading and forgot that literally anything else existed. Drake was a really hard character for me to analyse because his characterisation was just so disappointing to me - but luckily my intrinsic desire to have everyone hear my opinions prevailed, and so here it is. I hope you enjoy!!

Spoiler Warning: Major spoilers for Gone, Minor spoilers for the rest of the series and the monster trilogy

Old Opinion: I had a sort of morbid obsession with Drake and thought he was a top-tier villain

New Opinion: So far Drake is tied with Astrid for most-changed opinion. His character has almost no-depth and could be placed in almost any story without changing a single thing about him - and it would make sense. I found myself desperately trying to make him more interesting than he is in an attempt to justify younger me’s obsession - but alas I was unsuccessful. He had a lot of potential, but instead he ended up as a copy-paste villain with no realistic motivations and no real intrigue.

1.) DRAKE’S APPEARANCE:

Drake is, I think, the character who is best (as in most thoroughly) described in the first book. Not only do we get an idea of his actual appearance beyond the vaguest possible descriptions (sorry to Sam, Caine, Diana and every minor character) but we also get some idea as to the effect his appearance has on other people.

In Chapter 14, when we are first introduced to the Coates kids, Drake is described as, “a smiling, playful, mean-eyed kid with shaggy, sandy-coloured hair.” I actually really like this description. Contrasting “smiling” and “playful” with “mean” really brilliantly sets Drake up to be a complex villain – the kind of villain we all love to hate, who cracks a joke while slitting your throat. It has the implication of a layered personality but sadly, this is not the villain we get. In fact his character in the first chapter compared to the character we get as the book continues is so drastically different that it almost seems like mg did a complete 180 on his character. An original description is supposed to give us some indication as to what a character is like – their personality and role in the story, and we know that mg can do this really well. (Sam’s non-descript description setting him up to be the underdog, Quinn’s mismatched attire hinting at his inability to fit in, Astrid’s colour scheme reflecting her innocence and religiosity), and so it seems particularly odd, not to mention disappointing, that Drake’s description gives us…nothing. No real indication as to who he is or his purpose other than to hint to him being an antagonist (which we already guessed from his affiliation with Caine.) I could go on and on about what a waste Drake’s character was, but I’ll save it for a later paragraph.

We will then skip ahead to Chapter 37 where both Howard and Lana describe a similarity between Drake and Pack Leader:

“The one time she had seen Drake Merwin. He had made her think of Pack Leader: strong, hyper alert, dangerous. Now, the lean physique looked gaunt, the shark’s grin was a tight grimace, his eyes were red-rimmed. His stare, once languidly menacing, was now intense, burning hot. He looked like someone who had been tortured beyond endurance.”

“The two of them, two of a kind, it seemed to Howard, stared holes into each other.”

This is a much better example of mg using descriptions to establish the purpose of a character. By drawing a comparison between these two, mg sets up Drake’s later role in the books, where he replaces Pack Leader as the gaiphage’s right-hand man. This almost leads me to believe that mg had decided very early on that Drake was going to desert Caine and this is possibly why he seems so out of place and underdeveloped as Caine’s underling in the first two books. Mg had already moved on from this side of his character…and it shows. Lana’s description of Drake also works as a basis for showing the reader how he has changed since losing his arm (before gaining his whip) and acts as an insight into his current mental state – which is important as we don’t get much introspection during Drake’s POV’s. But, I still have a few issues with this. First of all, his “lean physique”. Now this isn’t really a problem all by itself, but unless I have forgotten what 14 year olds looks like (which is a possibility though I doubt it) I don’t think that they should be muscly with minimal body fat. And Drake is not the only character he does this with. Quinn gets extremely muscly later on in the books (I’ll admit that there is a plausible reason behind this so this example isn’t terrible but it’s mentioned like every 5 sentences) and in Fear Caine is described as having wash-board abs. Why are we sexualising children?? Children should be pudgy and awkward and still growing into their bodies, not lean and muscly!! The attractive, damaged man who hates women for no reason at all is also a really really really common trope and tbh I’m just so bored of it. It’s not relatable (at least it shouldn’t be) and it’s just really unimaginative – although it does help us to understand Drake’s character as we’ve seen him before so many times in all types of media. My second issue with this description is the way it really really highlights how much of a waste of character Drake was. The potential of a high-school bully with a skewed world-view due to the death of his father and the later abuse of his mother at the hands of his replacement father figure trying hard to impress the charming “leader” with unimaginable power (that he so desperately wants) only to be undermined at every turn by a girl who teases him by pointing out his flaws and insecurities taking his anger out on everyone around him (especially women) as a way to cope with his childhood traumas then turning into a heartless monster who not only enjoys others pain but lives for it after being “tortured beyond endurance”, was astronomical. But we don’t get that. Instead we get a cheesy, one-dimensional cartoon villain. The change that his body and mind go through after his maiming should have been pivotal to his character, but that just doesn’t come across in the writing. :/ But more on this later.

And last but not least, the whip-hand, which is very important to Drake’s character. It turns his actual body into a weapon and his excitement over this is indicative of his sadistic nature. Again, I think this is an example of a wasted opportunity. I would have liked mg to have gone in to depth about how Drake’s body undergoing this change affected his psyche (and I’m not counting his one-off line in the monster trilogy). I think it could be argued that Drake’s “change” is a metaphor for him going through puberty. Him gaining the whip that ultimately turned him into his very own weapon shows his transition from a child [a little messed up but still just a kid] into a monster, someone who is capable of committing atrocities without a second thought. It would have been particularly interesting for Drake and Orc’s final battle to put some focus on the fact that they both suffer through monstrous physical changes that can be used to represent their shift from children to young adults but whereas one relishes in this, one is completely disgusted. The whip-hand is described as being an “impossible blood-red snake” and then that “It was stretched. Like it had been turned into dark, blood-red taffy. It wrapped twice around his body.” – Both of these occurring in Chapter 39. I don’t have much to comment about this – other than that I think red is great colour choice for Drake, thematically at least.

I know this point was mostly about what Drake could have been as opposed to an actual analysis of his appearance, but I’m just so tired of the attractive misogynistic villain that seems to appear in every single piece of media. His characterisation really bummed me out and put me into a slump so instead of analysing his appearance I decided to roast him instead. But, onto actual analysis now (I am going to further expand on some of the points I made here I promise).

2.) DRAKE’S PERSONALITY AND CHARACTER

I mentioned in the previous point that a lot of Drake’s characterisation seems like an afterthought at best and one of the things that made me think this, is the inconsistencies with his character and the most obvious example of this is the discrepancies with his birthday. In chapter 20, Diana says that his birthday is “April twelfth, just one minute after midnight.” But, in Chapter 33 we get the line “Sooner would be better,’ Drake drawled, ‘what with me having a month.” This is a really small nit-pick, I know, but it just really bugs me that mg overlooked something as simple as a birthday – especially when birthdays are such an important plot point in this book. But anyway, moving on. I promise this whole review isn’t going to be negative.

Backtracking now to Chapter 14. Drake’s character here seems to differ quite drastically from his later characterisation. He seems here to be an example of the laughably evil trope, he has a kind of dry sarcastic humour that is quite fun and seems to lighten the tone of the story a little bit. Rather than showing us the boringly disgusting misogynistic villain that Drake turns out to be, we instead see a funny, charismatic character who seems to prefer picking on those who already have power – as is seen here:

“Drake paused halfway, turned back, and spoke for the first time. In an amused voice he said, ‘Oh, um, Captain Orc? Have your people – the ones who aren’t injured- line up outside. We’ll work out your… um, duties.’ With a grin that was almost a snarl, Drake added a cheerful, ‘Later’.” – Chapter 33

Now I understand that the reason we don’t see the real Drake here is because Sam is obviously not yet aware of his true personality – my issue lies in the fact that based on just this small excerpt here, I expected so much more from his character. We get hints of his sadistic nature here, with him joking about Cookie’s horrific injury and clearly taking joy in exerting power over Orc, but it is evenly balanced by the fact that he’s kind of amusing and we don’t really like Orc at this point anyway. Can we see that something isn’t quite right with him?? Yes. But do we kind of like him anyway?? Well I did. At this point. I would have really loved it if mg had carried on this idea of Drake abusing those who already have power – him enjoying to take down bully after bully so he can be King bully, instead of him picking on people who he perceives as weak and vulnerable. Mg relying on misogyny as a motivator is just really disappointing to me because there is no depth to it, and it’s pretty lazy. He hates Diana because she is a woman and he sees women as beneath him?? Weak. Over-used. Dull. He hates Diana because she has power over Caine in a way that he never can, which makes him feel insecure in himself and the fragile sense of stability and power that he has struggled to cultivate within his damaged psyche?? Yes pls. Not only would this have made Drake a much more engaging character, but it would also have made his desertion of Caine in hunger much more impactful. And while I think there are aspects of this within his character, which I will go into later, I wish there had been more of it. Again, I’m sorry that this has become more of a “what could have been” rather than an analysis but there really is just so little to analyse without just pointing out obvious facts and statements. There’s no spice here :/

Moving on now to Chapter 16, where we as an audience, as well as the characters within the book, begin to realise what Drake truly is – an unhinged madman. We are told by Sam that Drake has been abusing his power as Sheriff – which particularly stands out as, so far at least, Drake is the only member of Coates who has shown this kind of behaviour (Caine is actually a pretty sound leader until he loses his shit and attacks Sam). And this is the first major distinction that we get between Caine and Drake and their capacity as villains in the story. Caine is a bad person who will do bad things to achieve his goals, he is power-hungry and ambitious but he is not needlessly violent. Everything he does he (in his own mind) is able to justify as it helps him to achieve his vision. Drake, on the other hand, doesn’t really seem to have an end goal. He is violent for the sake of being violent – he is a sadist who enjoys the suffering of other people as we see here, “Drake was more than a little scary. Kids who defied Drake or any of his so-called sheriff’s had been slapped, punched, pushed, knocked down or, in one case, dragged into a bathroom and given a swirlie. Fear of Drake was replacing fear of the unknown.” Now, we still don’t get to see the full extent of Drake’s madness here. Most of the crimes listed are pretty mundane bully things – they’re still wrong, but they aren’t life-threatening. He hasn’t bashed anyone’s head in with a baseball bat. While Caine is playing with politics, Drake seems unable to move past his role of high school bully. If he had played it right, the role of Sheriff would have been perfect for him. I mean, how many actual police officers get away with literal murder in the name of “upholding the law”?? But he is unable of seeing the bigger picture, unable to grow and fit the new world order as Caine does so naturally, and so, instead of properly taking on the role of Sheriff and building up his own authority in this way, he turns back to his tried and tested method – hurt them and they’ll fall in line.

I particularly enjoy this as I think it explains, a little bit more, why he hates Diana and Astrid so much. Now I know the bottom line is simply that he is a violent misogynist – but that doesn’t explain why he hates Diana and Astrid specifically. Is it because they’re both attractive women and he is unable to distinguish sex and violence in his head?? Partly yes, but then Taylor is also described as attractive (and most people find her annoying) and yet he doesn’t seem to hate her to this extent. I think the real reason he hates these two specifically, more than anyone else, is because he simply cannot understand them – and that scares him (although he is unwilling to admit it). Drake only knows how to gain power through violence – he sees this work at home, he used it on Holden, he used it to gain his reputation at Coates and, although he has the ability to gain authority in other ways, he continues to use this method even now in the FAYZ. Diana and Astrid cannot do this, they are not fit to fight, they are not able to use violence to assert their status – and yet they both have more power in the FAYZ than he does. They make him question his whole world view and, as he cannot or will not adapt to the new hierarchy of the FAYZ, he resorts to trying to destroy them, in order to return the world to what it was before. His hatred of others gaining power through (what he sees as) unconventional means is then further established with his dislike of actual powers and the people who have them:

“I’m sick of all this powers crap. You saw what we did to freaks at Coates?? Who do you think it was that took care of that?? All these kids with their stupid so-called powers. Starting fires and moving stuff around and reading your mind and all?? Who do you think it was grabbed them one by one in their sleep and beat them down and when they woke up their hands were setting in a block of cement??

[…]

That’s right. And I didn’t even have a gun then. It’s not about who’s got powers, morons. It’s about who’s not afraid. And who’s going to do what has to be done.”

We get told by Diana that it was Drake’s idea to cement the kids in the first place (and a bad one at that) and I really think that is all the evidence you need to see that Drake’s hatred and fear all stem from his complete inability to adapt. He is trapped in a cycle of abuse that started with his father, a police officer who teaches him how to shoot people (however unwillingly) and is then continued by his step-father (an actual abuser) rendering him incapable of recognising any kind of authority if it is not gained from violent means. And so of course he hates the powers – none of the kids gained their powers through suffering or through causing suffering. They didn’t earn their authority in any valid way, according to him. (This is also another reason why I think Drake was so ecstatic at gaining his whip-hand. He suffered for it and therefore, in his twisted mind, he earned it. It is physical proof of his supposed power over these kids.) It’s tragic really – but mg then goes on to make him so disgustingly unsympathetic that his story loses its meaning. I love mg’s writing but Drake’s character truly was butchered for shock value and plot convenience and it makes me so sad.

Ok back to Chapter 16. Here, not only do we hear about some of the things that Drake is capable of, but we see them as well. His beat-down of Orc is the first indicator we get that Drake is someone we should really be afraid of. Heads up, this is a long quote:

“Nobody move,’ Drake said. Orc pushed Edilio off and jumped to his feet. He started kicking Edilio, landing size-eleven Nike blows into Edilio’s defensive arms. Sam jumped in to help his friend, but Drake was quicker. He stepped behind Orc, grabbed him by the hair, yanked his head back, and smashed his elbow into Orc’s face. Blood poured from Orc’s nose, and he howled in rage. Drake hit him again and released Orc to fall to the concrete. ‘Which part of “nobody move” did you not understand, Orc?’ Drake demanded. Orc rose to his knees and went for Drake like a linebacker, Drake stepped aside, nimble as a matador. He stuck his hand out and said to Chaz, ‘Give me that.’ Chaz handed him the bat. Drake hit Orc in the ribs with a short, sharp forwards thrust of the bat. Then again in the kidneys and again in the side of the head. Each blow was measured, accurate, effective. Orc rolled over on to his back, helpless, exposed. Drake pushed the thick end of the bat against Orc’s throat. ‘Dude. You really need to learn to listen when I talk.’ Then Drake laughed, stepped back, twirled the bat in the air, caught it and rested it on his shoulder. He grinned at Sam.”

“Sam had gone up against bullies before. But he’d never seen anything like Drake Merwin. Orc outweighed Drake by at least fifty pounds, but Drake had handled him like a little toy action figure.”

Orc has already been established as the top bully in Perdido beach – we’ve already seen that our main character is afraid of him – and for good reason. And so for Orc to be defeated so casually and so easily is shocking. It lets us know that the old world order has collapsed and old fears are fading away with it, with new, much more threatening adversaries taking their place. I actually think that this scene was exceptionally clever of mg. Drake is attacking someone who has already been set up as an antagonist, at the same time rescuing Edilio, who the reader has been conditioned to like. But, through context clues, we know that this is not a good thing. It sets up the villainous nature of the Coates kids, Orc’s redemption, Drake and Orc’s rivalry and Sam’s fear of Drake. And it feels natural, even after re-reading the book multiple times. It’s scenes like these that really remind me how great of a writer mg is.

Another thing I really wanted to talk about here IS Drake and Orc’s rivalry because, yet again, I think mg missed a huge opportunity with this. Drake and Orc are very similar before, and in the early days of the FAYZ. Both have abusive fathers (a step-father in Drake’s case but still), both enjoy asserting their power over people through violent means and both are put in positions of power that they are unable to fully take advantage of – Sheriff and Sheriff Deputy. And even as the books continue, similarities can still be found. They both suffer mutations that turn their bodies into grotesque weapons, dehumanising them and alienating them from their peers and That Scene in Plague tells us that Orc and Drake sometimes have similar “desires”. Their stories are constantly intertwined, with them being played off of each other from the start and Orc becoming Drake’s jailor later on (and in turn Drake sort of becoming his). Their differences come from their reactions to the horrific acts of violence they have committed – and of course why they do them. I’m going to make a whole separate post on this because it’s long enough to be a standalone, but my I just wish mg had played up both their similarities and differences more. It would have made Drake so much more interesting.

We also get more hints at his sadism in this scene. He is later unbothered that Betty has been hurt and it seems that the only reason he attacked Orc was because it gave him an opportunity to assert his dominance over him. All in all, this is one of my personal favourite scenes in the book as it establishes characters, themes and relationships very well. I just wish some of these had been developed further – but mg dropping certain aspects of the story does seem to be a common problem.

The final thing I wanted to talk about in regards to Drake’s personality and character is this line we get in Chapter 23, “It was small, just two bedrooms, very neat, very organised, the way Drake liked things.” This was another thing that irked me slightly. It’s such a small aspect of his characterisation but it reinforced the idea that drake is just another cookie-cutter villain with no real personality, nothing that makes him stand out in the sea of white male psychopaths with a hatred for women. His whole character could be replaced with any other misogynistic psychopath at no detriment to the story. My immediate though when reading this was that even the smallest aspects of his character can be seen in other, more developed villains – this line in particular is hugely reminiscent of Patrick Bateman. Nothing seems to be his own. No aspect of his character is even remotely unique. (I think this may also be why some young fans develop an obsession with him. His character is comfortable because we’ve seen it so many times before.) He is so entirely replaceable and replicable - only reason he isn’t completely forgettable is because you are constantly plagued by the horrific things he has done. Mg sacrificed depth and development for shock value and it’s so disappointing

3.) DRAKE’S PAST

Onto Drake’s life before the FAYZ. Not only does Drake receive some of the longest and most POV time in this book, he is also the character whose life before the FAYZ we learn the most about (with the possible exception of Sam). This is especially shocking to think about seen as Drake is arguably one of the most underdeveloped characters in the whole book, but anyway. There are two scenes I’m going to talk about here, both occurring in Chapter 23, with the first being his dad teaching him how to shoot. I apologise in advance for the long quote:

“His father had taught him how to shoot, using his service pistol. Drake still remembered the first time.

[…]

He remembered the way his father had taught him to grip the butt firmly but not too tight. To rest his right hand in the palm of his left and sight carefully, to turn his body sideways to present a smaller target if someone was shooting back. His father had had to yell because they were both wearing ear protection. ‘If you’re target shooting, you centre the front sight in the notch of the rear sights. Raise it till your sights are sitting right under your target. Let your breath out slowly and squeeze.’ That first bang, the recoil, the way the gun jumped six inches, the smell of the powder – it was all as clear in Drake’s mind as any memory he had. […]

‘What if I’m not shooting if I’m not shooting at a target?’ He’d asked his father. ‘What if I’m shooting at a person?’ ‘Don’t shoot a person,’ his father had said. But then he relented, relieved no doubt to find something he could share with his disturbing son. ‘Different people will tell you different techniques. But if it’s me, say I’m doing a traffic stop and I think I see he citizen reaching for a weapon, and I’m thinking I may have to take a quick shot? I just point. Point like the barrel is a sixth finger. You point and if you have to fire, you shoot half the clip, bang, bang, bang, bang.’ ‘Why do you shoot so many times?’ ‘Because if you have to shoot, you shoot to kill. Situation like that, you’re not aiming carefully for his head or his heart, you’re pointing at the centre of mass and you’re hoping you get a lucky shot., but if you don’t, if all you’re hitting is shoulder or belly, the sheer velocity of the rounds will knock him down.”

Ok so the first thing I want to analyse here, is how important this memory clearly is to Drake. He remembers it fondly, in immense detail and seems to call back on it when he needs to clear his head (notice how this memory is placed while Drake is trying to figure out what to do, not while he is doing it.) It seems that rather than just using this memory as a source of useful information, it is also a source of comfort to him. Now there are some things that I really wish mg had told us that would help to analyse this scene better, like: How old was Drake when this memory took place?? How old was Drake when his father died?? How did his father die?? But alas, we don’t know these things (at least not that I’m aware of, and not within this book) so I’m going to try and do the best I can with the information that we have. Now, in Light, Drake makes it seem like his step-fathers behaviour has been significant in forming his worldview – which makes sense, trauma does that. But he spends half of his time away at Coates, which says to me that for this behaviour to have had such a profound effect on him, his step-father must have been around for a while. Right?? I’m gonna take a guess at 3-4 years at the least. Give Drake’s mother about a year to meet and start dating this man after the passing of her husband – this means that Drake would have been around 9/10 at the latest when this scene took place. That’s pretty young. Like, this is a formative memory and from the way it’s written, it seems like this may be some of the only bonding that Drake and his father ever did together. No wonder Drake has such an unhealthy obsession with guns as is seen with these quotes:

“He started from Astrid’s house, which was already beginning to smoke. He worked his way methodically, a hunter, looking for any movement. Each time he spotted someone walking or running or biking, he would take a look at them through the rifle scope, line them up in the crosshairs. He felt like God. All he had to do was squeeze the trigger.” – Chapter 23

“Drake kept all three guns loaded all the time. They were set out on the dining room table, a display, something to be gazed at lovingly.” – Chapter 23

“Drake could not leave the gun alone. He kept thumbing the safety on and off. He rolled down the window and aimed it at stop signs as they passed, but did not fire.” – Chapter 31

Drake shooting Sam and his gleeful reaction – Chapter 34

For him, guns are the ultimate symbol of power and authority. He was introduced to these weapons of incredible power at such a young age – of course he loves them. That being said, it seems that Drake has always been “disturbed” so I suppose we can’t fully blame his father and step-father for his mind-set – and I have to say I don’t really like this. Drake’s issue as a character is that he is completely de-humanised by all the horrific things he does. By having it seem like Drake was irredeemable from the off-set, it just adds to this idea and again removes any possible depth or character development. Imo it would have been much better to present Drake as becoming the way he is AFTER his father’s death. It would bring a sense of tragedy to his character – the way he uses his father’s advice to hunt down Astrid would seem less like a by-product of his sadism and more like a misguided attempt to feel connected to his deceased father.

However, flawed though it is, this scene does give us some insight as to why Drake is the way he is – through the characterisation of his father. Admittedly we don’t get much, but one line really stood out to me, “Because if you have to shoot, you shoot to kill.” Ummm..sir?? I don’t think that’s how police officers work. Isn’t your goal to incapacitate – not to just kill on sight?? The fact that he not only stands by this rule himself, but also gives this advice to his CHILD is disconcerting. Drake is not only receiving this harmful rhetoric from his father figure but also a police officer. Someone who is meant to uphold the law. I think this links back to my earlier point on how Drake only recognises authority if it is gained by violent means. While we get no indication that his real father was ever violent to Drake or his mother, he openly tells Drake that when he is upholding the law (in this hypothetical situation) he does it by using force. That is a dangerous thing to tell a child, especially a child who you already think is disturbed. This twisted-take on a father-son relationship nicely sets the precedent for Drake’s warped perceptions, I just wish it had been developed further. And this leads us nicely into the next scene – the shooting of Holden:

“He remembered with vivid, slow-motion detail the time he had shot Holden, the neighbour’s kid who liked to come over and annoy him. That had been a bullet to the thigh, with a low-level calibre gun, and still the kid had nearly died. That ‘accident’ had landed Drake at Coates.”

Again, first and foremost I just wish we had a little bit more information. It is not clear whether this situation occurred before or after his father’s death – which seems like a pretty important detail to me. Although, we don’t actually find out that Drake’s father is dead within this book, and this omission again makes me feel like mg adding that detail was little more than an after-thought. It feels like in Light he wanted to quickly try and make Drake more of a sympathetic character and so he added in an abusive step-dad to try and tone down or at least explain Drake’s violence and misogyny. It seems like Drake is a plot-point first and a character second and the lack of detail here really highlights that for me. What purpose did these scenes really have in the story?? They did very little to flesh out his character, they introduced no new themes or relationships. It seems like mg just wanted to let us know – “Hey! Drake knows how to use a gun. That’s gonna be important later.” That being said, there are a couple of other things I would like to quickly mention. Firstly, I think the fact that Drake did not aim to kill Holden, even though he could have, is meant to be indicative of his change between then and now. It’s done to tell us that Drake wasn’t always this bad – there was at one point some hope. For this to have the desired effect though, I really think mg should have waited until after Drake lost his arm to straight up try and murder Astrid and Little Pete. Like, you can’t tell us that Drake was a little messed up but still redeemable before his maiming and then go and have him try to kill a random girl and her five year old brother. Because that’s more than a little messed up (and that’s not even mentioning the cementing). And it also contrasts the idea that Drake has always been disturbed. An idea that was introduced to us not even a page ago!! The other thing I wanted to pick up on, which I actually quite liked, is the ambiguous “who liked to come over and annoy him.” Because this is Drake’s point of view – so “annoy” could mean anything. Was Holden actually just an annoying kid?? Was he just trying to be Drake’s friend?? Or was he actually a bully and Drake doesn’t want to admit it?? I guess we’ll never know.

4.) DRAK’ES MOTIVATIONS

For this point, I wanted to focus on three particular motivators: Caine, Diana and Astrid. These are the three people, I believe, who provide, either consciously or unconsciously, the motivation for his actions within the FAYZ. I’ll start first with Astrid and Diana, the two people who Drake hates the most. Throughout this book it is clear that Drake has no real goals – he has no desire to be in control like Caine, no desire to re-invent the world like Albert. All he wants is to cause pain, with his preferred targets being these two. And, as I’ve said before, I think this is partly because he hates the authority that they have within the FAYZ – which stems from manipulation and intelligence rather than violence.

In Chapter 20, Drake explains his hatred for Diana, “Drake had made the time to check out Diana’s psych file the day after the FAYZ came. But her file had been missing by then. In its place she had left Drake’s file lying open on the doc’s desk and drawn a little smiley face beside the word ‘sadist’. Drake had already hated her. But after that, hating Diana had become a full-time occupation.” What I take from this scene, is that Drake’s loathing stems from Diana’s ability to get under his skin, to make him feel inferior – to annoy him. (Perhaps Holden had a similar talent). I’m going to assume that his prior hatred of her can be boiled down to his misogyny and his disgust at Caine’s weakness for her, both of which have been explicitly stated in the text. His hatred after this though, comes from a pretty mundane incident. I mean all she did was get there quicker, and do exactly what he was going to do to her. And so I think this loathing is less about what she did and more about his own personal reaction to it. Diana was able to weaponise Drake’s own anger against him – to make him feel inferior and powerless. She challenges Drake’s fragile perception of authority and takes a diagnosis that he seems to not only be ok with, but is actually proud of, and makes him feel embarrassed. His whole perception of power is rooted in the idea that his ability to inflict pain on others with no guilt or remorse is what makes him better, it is what gives him his power. But she takes this idea and belittles him for it and so his initial reaction is to attack. This is an idea that is again seen with Astrid. Astrid intentionally tries to make Drake feel inferior by bringing up his biggest insecurity, Diana’s treatment of him “Doesn’t it bother you that Diana treats you like some wild animal she keeps on a leash?” And she does escape him – twice. Her and her autistic brother (and we already know how Drake feels about autistic people). She also proves herself to be more intelligent than him, in their little argument over the r-slur. Drake only gets violent after he realises that, in an intellectual sense, she has more power than him. It seems to be his defence mechanism just as much as his pleasure – and therefore Astrid and Diana’s power over him motivates him to use it.

Now onto Caine. Caine and Drake’s relationship is, for me, one of the most interesting aspects of Drake’s character and while I’ll only be mentioning it in its capacity as a motivator here, I have a whole post planed out for it. Drake seems to simultaneously hate Caine and admire him. He is constantly looking to impress him and the only time we ever see Drake think about betraying him in this book is when Caine gives his attention to Diana rather than Drake. And, because of this, I can kind of understand why people ship them (although I personally dislike the idea of Drake being gay). A lot of the time this motivation is completely unprompted by Caine himself, like in these quotes:

“Drake cursed and, again, for just a moment, felt the almost desperate fear of failing Caine. He wasn’t worried about what Caine would do to him – after all, Caine needed him – but he knew if he failed to carry out Caine’s orders, Diana would laugh.” – Chapter 23

“I got him’ Drake announced. ‘I got them all.’ ‘Yes, you did,’ Caine said. ‘Good work, Drake.” – Chapter 34

In Chapter 23, it seems that both Drake’s need to impress Caine and his need to prove to himself that he is better than Diana are his main motivators for his extreme attack on Astrid. I think it’s important to note that he only planned on trying to catch her, until Caine told him to kill her. His sadistic nature is brought out in full because he needs to prove himself to Caine. But why does he?? If he is planning on taking over from Caine in the end, why does he have a “desperate fear of failing Caine”?? Sure, part of it is his desire to prove himself to be better than Diana. But even this has roots in his absolute need for Caine to take notice of him. Drake is drawn to Caine because of his power and authority over people. Caine seems to be the closest thing that Drake can get to an equal, someone who shares the same motivations, ambitions and worldview (of course Caine and Drake do not share these things, but Drake doesn’t realise this…yet.) He seeks validation from Caine because he wants to have these things in common with someone – yet another motivation for his hatred of Diana as she constantly gets in the way of this.

We also know that Caine is, at least, partly aware of his effect on Drake. He is paranoid that Drake will turn on him (because Caine sees being equal to someone as relinquishing power) and he is able to manipulate Drake’s misguided feelings when he wants to – most notably in Chapter 36:

“It’s not Diana or Chunk or even me,’ Caine said. ‘It’s none of us, Drake. It’s Sam. It’s Sam who did this to you, Drake. You want him to get away with it? Or do you want to live long enough to make him suffer?”

This is such a clever moments as it sets up Drake’s whole character in Hunger, and it’s false. Because yes, Sam is the one who burned Drake’s arm and Drake has every right and reason to hate him. But it was Caine who abandoned him to save himself. And it was Caine who refused to let Drake die, even though he was begging for it (and let’s face it, he didn’t refuse to kill him out of any affection – it was a selfish decision.) But Drake is so desperate for that equal, for that validation that his worldview is correct and is shared by another person, that he just idk forgets?? He never brings up this conversation again and just accepts Caine’s word as gospel. I have so much more to say about their relationship but, as I said, I’ll save it for a later post.

5.) DRAKE’S MENTAL STATE

And finally, we have Drake’s mental state. Now I’m not going to try and give him an official diagnosis or anything, but I wanted to make a small point specifically about his mental state after his maiming. I think we can all agree that what Drake went through was pretty horrific, and while I personally struggle to feel any amount of sympathy for him due his own list of horrific crimes, the change he goes through after this is extremely significant, or at least it’s supposed to be. I think mg wants us to believe that Drake’s descent into madness was directly cause by the loss of his arm, and that before that he did have the chance to be redeemed. I think whether you buy into this depends on how forgiving you are, but I want to focus more on the actual proof of change that we see.

I’ve already talked about the physical changes he goes through, and the implications of this so I’m going to focus solely on his mental state during and partly after the whole ordeal. I think the first and most important thing to talk about is the fact that Drake didn’t actually want to survive:

“Don’t cut off my arm,’ Drake cried. ‘Let me die. Just let me die. Shoot me.” – Chapter 36

He would rather die than lose his arm (his gun arm to be specific). Now, while I don’t doubt that the burning was indescribably painful, I’m still not sure that the majority of people would beg for death. Especially when an alternative (in this case losing his arm) is presented. Not to mention, he doesn’t actually talk about the pain when begging for his death – what he talks about is the loss of his arm. Of course it could be argued that the reason he didn’t want his arm to be cut off is because he knew it would mean more pain, but I don’t think that this is the case. Rather, I think that Drake is so scared of losing the power that he has, that he would genuinely rather die. This 14 year old boy is so messed up that his own death is preferable to the idea of no longer being able to hurt people. And so when he gets his power back, he doubles down. He has realised by this point what he truly wants, that he would rather die than be rendered powerless, so he begins committing more heinous acts (like attacking the prees). Pair this with the amount of pain that he went through, which most definitely will have had an effect on his already damaged brain, and you can see how a high-school bully became what he did. The groundwork for an interesting and though-provoking character was right here. I think yet again the problem with his character is the execution. Interesting aspects of his personality are dropped in favour of plot convenience and shock value and it cheapens his character as a whole until all the intended nuances are lost and over-shadowed.

I’m really sorry if this is a bit all over the place and not quite as polished as my other posts. I found Drake so difficult to write about and so my thoughts kept going haywire. Thank you so much for reading (and being patient with my brain). I hope you enjoy!!

#the gone series #Drake Merwin #character analysis #gone

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arcticdementor · 3 years ago

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In the past I had often fervently wished that one day everyone would be passionate and excited about scientific research. I should have been more careful about what I had wished for. The crisis caused by the lethal COVID-19 pandemic and by the responses to the crisis have made billions of people worldwide acutely interested and overexcited about science. Decisions pronounced in the name of science have become arbitrators of life, death, and fundamental freedoms. Everything that mattered was affected by science, by scientists interpreting science, and by those who impose measures based on their interpretations of science in the context of political warfare.

One problem with this new mass engagement with science is that most people, including most people in the West, had never been seriously exposed to the fundamental norms of the scientific method. The Mertonian norms of communalism, universalism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism have unfortunately never been mainstream in education, media, or even in science museums and TV documentaries on scientific topics.

Before the pandemic, the sharing of data, protocols, and discoveries for free was limited, compromising the communalism on which the scientific method is based. It was already widely tolerated that science was not universal, but the realm of an ever-more hierarchical elite, a minority of experts. Gargantuan financial and other interests and conflicts thrived in the neighborhood of science—and the norm of disinterestedness was left forlorn.

As for organized skepticism, it did not sell very well within academic sanctuaries. Even the best peer-reviewed journals often presented results with bias and spin. Broader public and media dissemination of scientific discoveries was largely focused on what could be exaggerated about the research, rather than the rigor of its methods and the inherent uncertainty of the results.

Nevertheless, despite the cynical realization that the methodological norms of science had been neglected (or perhaps because of this realization), voices struggling for more communalism, universalism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism had been multiplying among scientific circles prior to the pandemic. Reformers were often seen as holding some sort of a moral higher ground, despite being outnumbered in occupancy of powerful positions. Reproducibility crises in many scientific fields, ranging from biomedicine to psychology, caused soul-searching and efforts to enhance transparency, including the sharing of raw data, protocols, and code. Inequalities within the academy were increasingly recognized with calls to remedy them. Many were receptive to pleas for reform.

Opinion-based experts (while still dominant in influential committees, professional societies, major conferences, funding bodies, and other power nodes of the system) were often challenged by evidence-based criticism. There were efforts to make conflicts of interest more transparent and to minimize their impact, even if most science leaders remained conflicted, especially in medicine. A thriving community of scientists focused on rigorous methods, understanding biases, and minimizing their impact. The field of metaresearch, i.e., research on research, had become widely respected. One might therefore have hoped that the pandemic crisis could have fostered change. Indeed, change did happen—but perhaps mostly for the worst.

…

Personally, I don’t want to consider the lab leak theory—a major blow to scientific investigation—as the dominant explanation yet. However, if full public data-sharing cannot happen even for a question relevant to the deaths of millions and the suffering of billions, what hope is there for scientific transparency and a sharing culture? Whatever the origins of the virus, the refusal to abide by formerly accepted norms has done its own enormous damage.

…

Many amazing scientists have worked on COVID-19. I admire their work. Their contributions have taught us so much. My gratitude extends to the many extremely talented and well-trained young investigators who rejuvenate our aging scientific workforce. However, alongside thousands of solid scientists came freshly minted experts with questionable, irrelevant, or nonexistent credentials and questionable, irrelevant, or nonexistent data.

Social and mainstream media have helped to manufacture this new breed of experts. Anyone who was not an epidemiologist or health policy specialist could suddenly be cited as an epidemiologist or health policy specialist by reporters who often knew little about those fields but knew immediately which opinions were true. Conversely, some of the best epidemiologists and health policy specialists in America were smeared as clueless and dangerous by people who believed themselves fit to summarily arbitrate differences of scientific opinion without understanding the methodology or data at issue.

Disinterestedness suffered gravely. In the past, conflicted entities mostly tried to hide their agendas. During the pandemic, these same conflicted entities were raised to the status of heroes. For example, Big Pharma companies clearly produced useful drugs, vaccines, and other interventions that saved lives, though it was also known that profit was and is their main motive. Big Tobacco was known to kill many millions of people every year and to continuously mislead when promoting its old and new, equally harmful, products. Yet during the pandemic, requesting better evidence on effectiveness and adverse events was often considered anathema. This dismissive, authoritarian approach “in defense of science” may sadly have enhanced vaccine hesitancy and the anti-vax movement, wasting a unique opportunity that was created by the fantastic rapid development of COVID-19 vaccines. Even the tobacco industry upgraded its reputation: Philip Morris donated ventilators to propel a profile of corporate responsibility and saving lives, a tiny fraction of which were put at risk of death from COVID-19 because of background diseases caused by tobacco products.

Other potentially conflicted entities became the new societal regulators, rather than the ones being regulated. Big Tech companies, which gained trillions of dollars in cumulative market value from the virtual transformation of human life during lockdown, developed powerful censorship machineries that skewed the information available to users on their platforms. Consultants who made millions of dollars from corporate and government consultation were given prestigious positions, power, and public praise, while unconflicted scientists who worked pro bono but dared to question dominant narratives were smeared as being conflicted. Organized skepticism was seen as a threat to public health. There was a clash between two schools of thought, authoritarian public health versus science—and science lost.

…

Honest, continuous questioning and exploration of alternative paths are indispensable for good science. In the authoritarian (as opposed to participatory) version of public health, these activities were seen as treason and desertion. The dominant narrative became that “we are at war.” When at war, everyone has to follow orders. If a platoon is ordered to go right and some soldiers explore maneuvering to the left, they are shot as deserters. Scientific skepticism had to be shot, no questions asked. The orders were clear.

…

Heated but healthy scientific debates are welcome. Serious critics are our greatest benefactors. John Tukey once said that the collective noun for a group of statisticians is a quarrel. This applies to other scientists, too. But “we are at war” led to a step beyond: This is a dirty war, one without dignity. Opponents were threatened, abused, and bullied by cancel culture campaigns in social media, hit stories in mainstream media, and bestsellers written by zealots. Statements were distorted, turned into straw men, and ridiculed. Wikipedia pages were vandalized. Reputations were systematically devastated and destroyed. Many brilliant scientists were abused and received threats during the pandemic, intended to make them and their families miserable.

Anonymous and pseudonymous abuse has a chilling effect; it is worse when the people doing the abusing are eponymous and respectable. The only viable responses to bigotry and hypocrisy are kindness, civility, empathy, and dignity. However, barring in-person communication, virtual living and social media in social isolation are poor conveyors of these virtues.

Politics had a deleterious influence on pandemic science. Anything any apolitical scientist said or wrote could be weaponized for political agendas. Tying public health interventions like masks and vaccines to a faction, political or otherwise, satisfies those devoted to that faction, but infuriates the opposing faction. This process undermines the wider adoption required for such interventions to be effective. Politics dressed up as public health not only injured science. It also shot down participatory public health where people are empowered, rather than obligated and humiliated.

A scientist cannot and should not try to change his or her data and inferences based on the current doctrine of political parties or the reading du jour of the social media thermometer. In an environment where traditional political divisions between left and right no longer seem to make much sense, data, sentences, and interpretations are taken out of context and weaponized. The same apolitical scientist could be attacked by left-wing commentators in one place and by alt-right commentators in another. Many excellent scientists have had to silence themselves in this chaos. Their self-censorship has been a major loss for scientific investigation and the public health effort. My heroes are the many well-intentioned scientists who were abused, smeared, and threatened during the pandemic. I respect all of them and suffer for what they went through, regardless of whether their scientific positions agreed or disagreed with mine. I suffer for and cherish even more those whose positions disagreed with mine.

There was absolutely no conspiracy or preplanning behind this hypercharged evolution. Simply, in times of crisis, the powerful thrive and the weak become more disadvantaged. Amid pandemic confusion, the powerful and the conflicted became more powerful and more conflicted, while millions of disadvantaged people have died and billions suffered.

I worry that science and its norms have shared the fate of the disadvantaged. It is a pity, because science can still help everyone. Science remains the best thing that can happen to humans, provided it can be both tolerant and tolerated.

#tablet magazine #john p a ioannidis #science #read the whole thing

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clonerightsagenda · 5 years ago

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First #recentlyread of the year! After all many of us may have some extra reading time soon

Sisters of the Vast Black by Lina Rather. Will there be missionaries in space? This book suggests yes, and looks at the ways religion can be a beneficial and harmful force in the lives of individuals and societies against a backdrop of a not entirely concluded war. Features Space Nuns ministering to needy colonies and traveling via a living spaceship that made me nostalgic for the Leviathan.

Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi. A junk dealer stitches together a body out of dismembered parts to draw attention to the victims of suicide bombings. Then the being comes alive and seeks vengeance for the victims it’s made of. Has ‘found footage’/oral history elements.

Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor by Steven Greenhouse. I’ve been reading up more on labor history recently. This is not a comprehensive review, and at times it gets a bit “don’t worry, they’re not *too* radical” to reassure the moderates, but it has some interesting case studies of recent organizing successes.

Come Tumbling Down by Seanan McGuire. The latest Wayward Children installment, featuring Jack, who’s always my favorite. Sadly this is probably the last book about her in the series, but it brings the tragic, tangled story of the Wolcott twins to a suitably heartbreaking but inevitable conclusion.

How to Survive a Plague by David France. By the maker of the film with the same name, this book discusses how New York activists responded to the AIDS crisis, particularly how they pressured and later collaborated with scientists and doctors to improve treatment and medicine. Does skew heavily toward white cis men’s experiences.

#recently read

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lucimorningstar812 · 5 years ago

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2019: An Honest Review

So I’ve done two of these in the past; 2017 and 2018 split into the good and the bad, so time to carry on that tradition

This is a really long post. I mean really long, so only read if you’re actually interested in my life XD Also this is part 1 of my finalising posts. There will be another later talking about the decade as a whole

First, I’d like to compare to last year. While not a great year, 2019 was significantly better than 2018, at least mentally.

Last year, from around June onward, my nan was going through chemo and then a bone marrow transplant late September/October, but this year, all of her check ups have been positive and rather than every week, she now goes back to the hospital every couple of months

Last year, I was struggling because I didn’t want to get another dog but my parents did anyway, but this year, I am thankful for my baby boy, even if he gets on my nerves sometimes

I mentioned in last years post about having no job, no education and no plans. Well, now I have a volunteer job at the RSPCA looking after the cats, and I have plans next year to at the very least start looking at and applying for jobs

And the final thing, here’s a direct quote from last years post "I made a series of posts on my vent blog essentially begging for death. I just didn’t want to be alive and even now, I’m so sick of the emotions I have" I haven’t felt that low since last year, so my mental health, while still nowhere near where it should be, is significantly better. I’m still sick of my emotions sometimes, but I honestly don’t think I’ve ever fallen back into those suicidal thoughts

Now for what happened:

I genuinely can’t remember what stuff happened this year. It seems like the year has both dragged on for the first half and then /zoomed past for the rest, so there’s probably way more I’m forgetting . Anyway, I’m gonna split this up into good and bad again

The Good

Gabi (archivefullofyoutubers) went to Twitchcon EU and got a video from Robin for me. I had forgotten that was even this year until I checked the date and realised it was April. I still have that saved for one I need something to make me smile

In July, I got to go to MCM comic con, which itself was lovely because I hadn’t been able to go in 2018, but the moment Bryan and Amelia announced they were going, I lost it. I still can’t believe I got to meet them, but also Tomska (who is lovely) and I got to spend the day with a dear friend of mine (Gabi again) after not seeing her for almost 9 months

Sean announced he was planning to go to VidCon London. I outright said I wasn't going to go to multiple friends, but after a lot of pestering and friendly bullying, I now have my ticket as well as accommodation and travel plans. First time I'll be doing anything like this without family, but I can't wait to see a bunch of the HDWGH squad as well as a few online friends I haven't had a chance to properly meet yet

The Bad

My relationship with the JSE community has been rocky. Stuff happened and it caused me to breakdown multiple times. I started to resent people, either those who had "wronged me", those who were luckier than others with their position in the community or sometimes, those who had a differing opinion to me because I'd gotten so used to one half of the community essentially invalidating anyone who had anything negative to say. I will admit that I'm still working on letting that go, but my aim is to move forward in 2020 and leave all those grudges and bad experiences behind me

I also relapsed. I’ve been a self harmer for a few years now. I have a lot of scars from it, most hidden thankfully, but I relapsed only a few days ago. I’ve taken that to say to myself that I fully intend on going 12 months clean, which shouldn’t be too hard since I’ve been really good with it this year. I just have to watch myself in those brief moments

The December

This month has been a journey in itself, so it requires it’s own section

I had my 21st which was so wonderful and I felt so lucky. All of the messages, gifts and drawings I received made it a truly memorable day

Sadly fate only gave me that, since the next few days would be a mixture of heaven and hell. Still as part of the celebration, we went to London and the Harry Potter Studios (3rd time 😜). The train journey was dreadful to the point I was close to throwing up, the first day was stressful as I was acting as navigator and mum kept doubting my directions, and my ankle started to be extremely painful when walking on the second day, but despite all that, I absolutely loved going back to the studios and got to see another friend (Huffle) after not seeing her for over a year!

Christmas Eve/Day and Boxing Day were emotional rollercoasters. My mood swings were all over the place, from being excited and happy to feeling extremely depressed to ecstatic over presents to disappointed and sad. It was just little things, but it was tough to deal with

I’ve felt so exhausted since Christmas, sleeping way too much and just wanting to lie down and do nothing

And another tradition to finish off on; follower count In 2017 I said I had 524, and in 2018 it was 958 Now, it’s 1214. I always saw big blogs as ones with 1000+ followers, and crossing that threshold was bizarre to me, but then two more milestones after that?! It's still incredible that people want to follow me, and a good chunk of them are amazing mutuals who got lost on the way to good content and ended up here

Review of the year? It’s been a rollercoaster. Nothing was bad enough to skew it to horrible, while the good was few and far between, so it was average. I didn’t have the same experiences as last year, but I feel like this year, I’ve finally started to look forward and take steps rather than cowering away in the shadows on my past. This was a stepping stone year between the leaps I took in 2018 and the journeys out of my comfort zone in 2020

End of a year. End of a decade. End of a passive approach to life, I’m hoping See my 2020 goals post tomorrow to know why I’m saying that, but for now, happy new year and thank you for being part of it

#I finished writing this a few days ago and haven't read through it again #I may have forgotten stuff but here it is

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gaming-rabbot · 6 years ago

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Salmon Run and Presentation

A (not so) brief dissertation on narrative framing in video games, featuring Splatoon 2

With the holidays in full swing, I took advantage of a deal one day when I went into town, and finally got my hands on Splatoon 2. Having loved the prior game as much as I did, waiting this long to get the sequel felt almost wrong. But like many another fellow meandering corpus of conscious flesh, I am made neither of time nor money.

Finally diving in, I figured I might take this excuse to remember that I write game reviews, sometimes. You know, when the tide is high, the moon blue, and the writer slightly less depressed. I ended up scrapping my first couple drafts, however. You see, a funny thing was happening; I kept veering back into talking about Salmon Run, the new optional game mode the sequel introduces.

Also I might look at the Octo Expansion later, on its own. After I get around to it…

Look, the base game already has a lot of content to explore, and as previously stated, I am sadly corporeal, and not strung together with the metaphysical concept of time itself.

My overall thoughts, however, proved brief, so I’ll try to keep this short.

(Mild spoilers coming along.)

Gameplay wise, I think the story mode is much improved upon by handing you different weapons for certain levels which were specifically built with them in mind. Whereas the prior game left you stuck with a variant of the starter splattershot all the way through. This keeps things interesting, pushes me outside of my comfort zone, and it’s a good way to make sure players will come from a well-informed place when deciding what weapon they want for multiplayer; which, let’s face it, is the real meat of these games and where most players are going to log the most time.

I also love the way bosses are introduced with the heavy drums and rhythmic chants and the dramatic light show. It endows the moment with a fantastic sense of gravitas, and manages to hype me up every time. Then the boss will have an aspect of their design which feels a bit silly or some how rather off, keeping the overall tone heavily grounded in the toony aesthetics the series already established for itself.

Narratively, I felt rather okay about the story aspect of Story Mode. The collectible pages in the levels still have a certain amount of world building, though this time it seems more skewed toward explaining what pop culture looks like in this world, such as, an allusion to this world’s equivalent to Instagram.

Cynical as it is…

That’s definitely still interesting in its own right, though perhaps it’s less of a revelatory gut-punch as slowly piecing it together that the game takes place in the post-apocalypse of Earth itself, and the inklings copied ancient human culture.

We still got some backstory for this game’s idol duo, though. And that, I appreciate. It means Pearl and Marina still feel like a part of this world, rather than seeming obligatory for the sake of familiarity, given the first game had an idol duo as well.

Meanwhile, perhaps it is a bit obvious that Marie’s cousin, Callie, has gone rogue, and that she is the mysterious entity cracking into the radio transmissions between her and Agent 4. If I recall correctly, that was a working theory that came about with the first trailer or two. That, or she had died.

As soon as Marie says aloud she wonders where Callie has gone, I knew right away. And that’s just in the introduction.

That said, on some level, after stomaching through certain other games and such that actively lie or withhold information to force an arbitrary plot twist for plot twist sake, it feels almost nice to go back to a narrative that actually bothers to foreshadow these things. Plus, having gotten already invested in Callie as a character from the first game, I still felt motivated to see the story through to find out why she went rogue. And, loving the Squid Sisters already, there was a hope in me that she could be redeemed, or at least understood. In terms of building off the prior game’s story, Splatoon 2 is moderately decent.

Also, I mean, c’mon. The big narrative drive might be a tad predictable, but hey, this game is for kids. It’s fine.

That, I think, is something I love the most about Splatoon. Despite feeling like you’re playing in a Saturday morning cartoon, and being aimed primarily at children, it doesn’t shy away from fairly heavy subjects. Such as the aforementioned fact that the humans are all long dead and you’re basically playing paintball in the ruins of their consumerist culture.

Which brings me to what fascinates me so much about Splatoon 2: the way in which Salmon Run is framed.

You see, on the surface, Salmon Run appears to be your typical horde mode; a cooperative team (typically comprised of randoms) fights off gaggles of foes as they take turns approaching their base in waves. Pretty standard for online shooters these days, as was modernly popularized by Gears of War 2, and Halo ODST.

I say “modernly,” as the notion of fighting enemies as they approach in waves is not exactly a new concept for mechanical goals within video games. Rather, the term itself, as applied to multiplayer shooters, “horde mode,” became a point of game discussion when Gears of War 2 introduced the new game mode by that same name back in… 2008?

No, no that can’t be right. I played Gears 2 back in high school (I had worse taste back then, okay?). Which, from my perspective, was basically yesterday. That game being ten years old would mean I myself am old now, and that just can’t be. I’m hip. I’m young.

I am, to stay on theme here, fresh.

But okay, existential crises and game talk terms aside, the writing team behind Splatoon 2 probably decided to absolutely flex when it came to the narrative surrounding Salmon Run. It is one of the most gleaming examples of the nontraditional things you can do with writing in video games, to really elevate the experience.

Let me explain.

You see, narrative in video games typically falls into one of two categories: either the story sits comfortably inside of the game, utilizing it like a vehicle to arrive at the destination that is its audience’s waiting eyes and ears. Or the narrative, on some level, exists rather nebulously, primarily to provide something resembling context for why the pixels look the way they do, and why the goals are what they are.

Not to say this is a binary state of existence for game writing; narrative will of course always provide context for characters, should there be any. It’s primarily older, or retro games that give you a pamphlet or brief intro with little in the way of worrying over character motivation, and the deeper philosophical implications of the plot, etc (though not for lack of trying). These would be your classic Mario Bros. and what have you, where the actual game part of the video game is nearly all there is to explore in the overall experience.

Then you have games like Hotline Miami that purposely sets up shop right in the middle to make a meta commentary about the state of game narrative, using the ideological endpoint of violent 80’s era action and revenge-fantasy genre film as inspiration and the starting point to draw comparison between the two. It’s bizarre, and I could drone on about this topic.

But I digress.

Despite falling into that latter category, that is to say having mainly just an introduction to the narrative context so you can get on with playing the game, Salmon Run is a stellar example of how you can make every bit of that context count (even if it does require the added context of the rest of the game, sort of, which I’ll explain, trust me).

First, a (very) brief explanation of how the game itself works, for the maybe three of you who haven’t played it yet.

A team of up to four inklings (and/or octolings) have a small island out in open waters. Salmonid enemies storm the beaches from various angles in waves. Each wave also comes with (at least) one of eight unique boss variants, who all drop three golden eggs upon defeat. Players are tasked with gathering a number of said golden eggs each round, for three rounds, after which their failure or success in doing so shows slow or fast progress towards in-game rewards.

And it’s all an allegory for the poor treatment of labor/workers, utilizing the fishing industry as both an example and a thematically appropriate analogue. Yes, I’m serious.

First, Salmon Run is not available through the main doors like the other multiplayer modes. Rather, it is off to the side, down a dingy looking alley. And when you’re shown its location, either because you finally entered the Inkopolis plaza for the first time, or because the mode has entered rotation again, Marina very expressly describes it as a job.

A job you should only do if you are absolutely, desperately hard strapped for cash. You know, the sort of job you turn to if, for one reason or another, you can’t find a better one.

An aside: technically, playing Salmon Run does not automatically net you in-game currency, with which to buy things, as regular multiplayer modes do. Rather, your “pay” is a gauge you fill by playing, which comes with reward drops at certain thresholds; some randomized gacha style capsules, and one specific piece of gear which gets advertised, to incentivize playing.

The capsules themselves drop actual paychecks in the form of aforementioned currency, or meal tickets to get temporary buffs that help you progress in the multiplayer faster via one way or another. Which, hey, you know, that helps you earn more money also. Working to get “paid,” so you can get things you want, though, still works perfectly for the metaphor it creates.

When I first saw it open up for rotation, I found out you had to be at least a level four to participate. Pretty par for the course, considering it’s the same deal with the gear shops. But, again, it’s all in the presentation; Mr. Grizz does not simply say something akin to the usual “you must be this tall to ride.” He says he cannot hire inexperienced inklings such as yourself, because it’s a legal liability.

After returning with three extra levels, I was handed off to basic, on-the-job training. Which is only offered after Mr. Grizz (not ever physically present, mind you, but communicating with you via radio), the head of Grizzco, uses fairly typical hard sell rhetoric when it comes to dangerous, or otherwise undesirable work: calls you kid, talks about shaping the future and making the world a better place, refers to new hires as “fresh young talent,” says you’ll be “a part of something bigger than yourself.” You know, the usual balancing act of flattery, with just the right amount of belittlement.

Whoa, hang on, sorry; just had a bad case of deja vu from when the recruiter that worked with the ROTC back in high school tried to get me to enlist… several times… Guess he saw the hippie glasses and long hair and figured I'd be a gratifying challenge.

The fisher imagery really kicks in when you play. Which, I figure a dev team working out of Japan might have a pretty decent frame of reference for that. A boat whisks you out to sea with your team, and everyone’s given a matching uniform involving a bright orange jumper, and rubber boots and gloves. If you've ever seen the viral video of the fisherman up to his waist in water telling you not to give up, you have a rough idea. Oh, and don't forget your official Grizzco trademark hats.

It’s on the job itself where a lot of what I'm talking about comes up the most; that is to say, despite buttering you up initially, Mr. Grizz shows his true colors pretty quickly. While playing, he seems to only be concerned with egg collecting, even when his employees are actively hurting. This is established and compounded by his dialogue prior to the intermediate training level, in which informs you about the various boss fish.

Before you can do anything remotely risky, even boss salmonid training, Mr. Grizz tells you he has to go over this 338 page workplace health and safety manual with you. But, oops, the new hire boat sounds the horn as you flip to page 1, so he sends you off unprepared. “Let’s just say you’ve read it,” he tells you, insisting that learning by doing is best.

This flagrant disregard employee safety, in the name of met quotas; the fact we never see Mr. Grizz face to face, making him this vague presence that presides over you, evaluating your stressed performance with condescension; that we are not simply given the rewards as we pass thresholds to earn them, having to instead speak with another, unknown npc for our pay… It all drives toward the point so well.

The icing on the cake for me is when a match ends. You, the player, are not asked if you’d like to go back into matchmaking for another fun round of playtime. Rather, you are asked if you would like to “work another shift.”

The pieces all fit so well together. I shouldn’t be surprised that, once a theme is chosen, Splatoon can stick to it like my hand to rubber cement that one time. It has already proven it can do that much for sure. But it’s just so… funny? It’s bitterly, cynically hilarious.

Bless the individual(s) who sat in front of their keyboard, staring at the early script drafts, and asked aloud if they were really about to turn Mr. Grizz into a projection of all the worst aspects of the awful bosses they’ve had to deal with in life. The answer to that question being “yes” has led to some of my favorite writing in a video game.

All of these thoughts, as they started forming in my skull, really began to bubble when I noticed Salmon Run shifts become available during my first Splatfest.

Splatfest is, to try and put it in realistic terms, basically a huge, celebratory sporting event. Participation nets you a free commemorative t-shirt and access to a pumping concert featuring some of the hottest artists currently gracing the Inkopolis charts.

The idea, the notion, that a hip young inkling (or octoling) might miss out on one of the biggest parties of the year because they need money more than they need fun? It’s downright depressing.

It got me thinking. I looked at my fellow egg collectors. In-universe, we were a bunch of teen-to-young-adult aged denizens missing out on all the fun because we desperately needed the cash. We became stressed together, overworked together, yelled at by our boss together. But in those sweetest victories, where we’d far surpassed our quota? We celebrated together.

Spam-crouching, and mashing the taunt, something changed. I felt a greater sense of comradery with these squids and octos than I did in nearly any other coop game. And it’s all thanks to the rhetorical framing of the game mode.

It accomplishes so many things. It’s world building which wholistically immerses you in the setting. But mainly, its dedication to highly specific word choice does exactly what I mentioned earlier: it elevates the experience to one I could really sit down and think about, rather than use to while away the hours, then move on to something else. So many games make horde modes that feel inconsequential like that; it’s just for fun.

There’s nothing wrong with fun being the only mission statement for a game, or an optional mode of play. But this is exactly what I mean when I say this is the nontraditional writing games can do so much more with. And Splatoon 2 saw that opportunity, and took it. And what a fantastic example of bittersweet, cold reality, in this, a bright, colorful game meant mainly for children…

Happy Holidays, everyone!

#Rabbot Reviews #video games #review #Splatoon 2 #Salmon Run #narrative #framing

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quasifractalatomicgeometry · 6 years ago

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Electric Currents in Space

A long while ago I was seduced by a cosmic theory called 'The Electric Universe'. The reason why was because I was studying physics and magnetism alongside studying neuroscience and psychology and the one unifying factor that prevailed in all my research was the fundamental importance of electrical currents. Not only for our own senses, conscious thinking and processing, but also for cosmic phenomena such as the Aurora and the generation of our own (and other planets) magnetic fields. I had a strange gut feeling that electrical currents were the lifeforce of the universe. My old blog on this subject is here if you want to explore more:

However, fast forward a year or so and after more research I became extremely skeptical of some of the claims made by Electric Universe proponents. They seemed to make loose assumptions that lacked critical evidence and I quickly fell out of favour with their extravagant claims. I also was discussing my views with a few physicist friends who wholly disagreed.

Nevertheless, falling out of favour with a slightly wayward theory does not mean falling out of favour with an idea and gut feeling. This remained with me and still does. I decided to take a different approach and rather than listen to some of the Electric Universe crackpots (some are but some are actually very credible scientists too), I delved more into the peer-reviewed science on the matter, looking at topics such as Quantum Electrodynamics, Magnetohydrodynamics, and other emerging research in the field of plasma physics, as well as our ever increasing knowledge of neuroscience and the function of electricity within us as humans.

Fast forward to today and I am seeing more and more credible research come forward to highlight a growing importance of our understanding of the role of electricity and magnetism in space. From galaxy formation to the cosmic webs that link galaxies together. From the sun, it's Heliosphere, Parker Spirals and the Heliospheric Current Sheet to Geometric storms on planets such as Saturn or Jupiter. From increasing knowledge of electrical charge and quantum phenomena to the strange behaviour of macro structures in space...it's evident that electrical currents and the subsequent magnetic fields that are created are playing an ever increasing role in our understanding of the universe. I still believe some of the 'Electric Universe' theorists fall short by making assumptions without hard evidence or by drawing farfetched conclusions from data and observation. There's also the issue of trying to integrate fantasy and myth into the theory which, unfortunately, makes it laughable and sadly discredits any credible research they present, not because it's not valid, but because of their sometimes skewed interpretations. Still, I do feel that my initial intrigue in this area was not misplaced in any way, now ever-reinforced with a plethora of new research and scientific data on the subject.

So that brings me to this article and the Wiley Book it is highlighting - 'Electric Currents in Geospace and Beyond'. I fully recommend anyone interested in electricity in space and plasma physics to give this book a read. Or to at least muster an interest in the importance of electricity and magnetism in space. There is also a new lecture from a physicist at Princeton, Steven Cowley, called the Magnetic Universe that I am itching to watch. I will post it here when I find a good link. It's a fascinating subject and I look forward to more research on the topic coming out.

#science #universe #physics #quantum physics #astrophysics #cosmology #astronomy #quantum mechanics #science news #electricity #electricity in space #magnetism #magnetism in space #magnetic universe

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brightbeautifulthings · 7 years ago

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Whisper of Death by Christopher Pike

"'That is the difference between you and me. You had only one story to tell.' She stops and grins once more. 'I have millions.'"

Year Read: before 2006, 2018

Rating: 4/5

Context: Like so many of Christopher Pike's books, Whisper of Death scared the daylights out of me when I was a kid. Even the cover with its gruesome hitchhiker still gives me chills. I can tell it's been a rough week or a totally lackluster reading list when I'm reaching for Hamilton and Pike in succession. I'm not sure what it says about me that my comfort books are some of the most demented I've ever read. Trigger warnings: death, rape, abortion, gore, suicide.

About: Roxanne hasn't been with her boyfriend, Pepper, for long, but she's already in love with him. When she discovers that she's pregnant, Pepper convinces her to have an abortion. They're only in high school, after all. Rox changes her mind before the procedure starts, and when the two arrive back in Salem, they find the town empty. It's as though the entire world has disappeared overnight except for them and three other students. They're all connected by a strange girl, Betty Sue, who killed herself a month ago. But Betty Sue was more than what she seemed. She wrote stories about all of them, and her stories had a way of coming true...

Thoughts: This book is one of the creepiest I've ever read. It's not just that there are some graphically violent deaths, although that is part of it. Pike never shirks on the gruesome imagery, and he has a knack for killing characters in extremely grisly and specific ways--usually without leaving the realm of the totally plausible. It's also that this book has atmosphere, which is something sadly missing from a lot of horror. The empty town is spooky enough--it's right out of an episode of The Twilight Zone--and the vengeful specter of Betty Sue haunts the entire novel. She's a terrifying villain, not least because we rarely see her on the page, but she's always there pulling the strings. Her stories are almost childlike in their stilted prose, which is even creepier in contrast to their grim content.

I like the characters, and I like Roxanne the best. She's a little more independent than the average teenager, but she's sassy and funny and, with maybe the exception of Betty Sue, she's always the strongest character on the page. I don't understand her attraction to Pepper, who's an extremely flawed love interest. For as much as he claims to love her, he rarely takes her side. But in a way, that's part of the appeal of their relationship. Rox doesn't always know why she loves him either. The others are a little more stereotypical--Stan, the brain; Lesley, the beauty; and Helter, the criminal--but their contrasting personalities make things interesting.

On a moral level, Whisper of Death is very uncomfortable. It would be easy to look at it and call it an anti-abortion novel, since Rox is punished beyond all reason for trying to have one. Indeed, the scenes at the clinic are some of the most chilling, as Pike takes an already terrifying concept and, well, puts it in a horror novel the way only he can. I've seen some feminist rant reviews, and I get it. I don't think they're wrong. Women are frequently unfairly punished, particularly for their sexuality, in horror. For whatever reason though, Whisper of Death just doesn't read that way to me. Every character in the book is punished for his or her wrong-doing, not just the women, and it's easy to see that Betty Sue's sense of justice is skewed. They're not all good people, but that doesn't mean they deserve what happens to them, least of all Roxanne.

The other issue is that, off-page, another character rapes Betty Sue. It's complicated by the fact that Betty Sue can supernaturally make people do things, and it raises some uncomfortable questions. Did she make him do it? Is it still considered rape if she did? Does it even matter? Nobody wants to get into a position where they're defending a rapist. Ultimately, I think at that point in the story, Betty Sue was able to nudge him in a dark direction, and it got out of her control. It was rape; the character admits it, and it's morally wrong. But I still ended up feeling a little sorry for him, and then feeling conflicted about the fact that I had any sympathy. And I actually kind of love that. I love that this novel forces me into a place that I can't mentally or emotionally reconcile to my satisfaction, since that's one of the things horror is best at.

Pike's writing can be rather spare at times. Other than the occasional turn of phrase, there are no lengthy descriptions or vignettes into characters' thoughts, yet he still makes his characters feel real and distinct in only a few lines. I have to admire a book that inspires fear, compassion, philosophy, and tears, since those aren't emotions that usually team up. It's far from a perfect novel, and it's certainly not for everyone, but it's still among my top favorite Pike stories and probably tied with Scavenger Hunt for scariest.

#book review #whisper of death #christopher pike #4/5 #rating: 4/5 #before 2006 #2018 #horror #horror fiction #tw: death #tw: rape #tw: abortion #tw: gore #tw: suicide

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knifeonmars · 4 years ago

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Capsule Reviews - Secret Wars Edition

Comixology recently had a sale on items related to their Secret Wars event from a few years back, and I decided to revisit some of the miniseries. I have to admit to a general fondness for Secret Wars and its various tie-ins, because they gave us a lot of series and ideas which just wouldn't have a place in the perpetual here and now of Marvel's normal line-up. Here's what I thought of some of them.

Armor Wars

It's a latter day James Robinson book, so for me, there's kind of a cap on how good it could possibly be, but it manages to be at least that good. The premise of the mini sees an entire city dominated by brothers Tony and Arno Stark, who create the suits of armor keeping the city's plague-afflicted citizens alive. James Rhodes, here the local Thor, because in Battleworld Thors are basically the Green Lantern Corps, but working for a godlike Doctor Doom, is investigating a conspiracy which has resulted in the death of Spyder-Man, the local version of Spider-Man. The story's twists and turns play out pretty much exactly how you might guess, and the story's greatest sin is that it just never manages to get beyond a pretty potboiler "mystery" story. There's also a kind of inexplicable decision to focus on the two least interesting characters in the book, and of the characters in the series, they're the only two with more than a page's worth of characterization who don't die by the end. The art and designs by Marcio Takara are great, and he's a perfect choice for the series, but ultimately, Armor Wars is mostly an art showcase.

Ghost Racers

I love Robbie Reyes. Great design, neat gimmick differentiating him from previous Ghost Riders. Here's the thing about Robbie Reyes though; he's a thin character. Or at least, he was under the pen of creator Felipe Smith. Ghost Racers suffers from the same problems that Robbie Reyes debut series did, which is that art and designs are unparalleled (indeed seeing Felipe Smith and Juan Gedeon run wild with new looks for the classic Ghost Riders is the best part of the series) but the story is painfully stilted and chained to a hero with basically no personality. Robbie Reyes is nice and loves his brother Gabe, who is ambiguously disabled in a way that always feels like it’s just on the very of becoming outright ableist and who inevitably gets taken hostage. The writing is bad, unambiguously. It's weirdly dated, no one aside from the hero receives any real characterization (and what he receives is again, painfully thin), the potentially interesting mythology of the series isn't explored, and it ends with a meaningless call for rebellion or further adventure. A lot of the Battleworld books do this and I understand the impulse, but given that almost none of them had any bearing on the main Secret Wars series, it feels weirdly meaningless.

E is for Extinction

An odd duck, essentially a divergent take on Grant Morrison's X-Men circa just before his final couple of arcs. It, understandably, doesn't quite live up to the standard set by Grant Morrison's own writing but it is very fun. The ending is a tiny bit underwhelming but the art and the mood, while not for everyone, is quite charming, and the way it loops in the Battleworld conceit is great. I don't think it's one of the more provocative or interesting minis, but for anyone who enjoyed Morrison's X-Men or, say, X-Statix, they might find something to like here.

Runaways

Easily mini I was mostly looking forward to reading here. Here's a question: This is a 2015 miniseries written by Noelle Stevenson, now an acclaimed showrunner for her work on the Netflix She-Ra series, written right when she was exploding and becoming a breakout talent after years cultivating a style and audience on Tumblr and through her webcomic Nimona. How the hell did Marvel Comics not lock her down as a writer after this? It's insane that a talent like that slipped through their fingers. Anyway, the actual series is solid. Sanford Greene's art is great, Stevenson's writing is great and embraces the often implicit queerness that the mainstream Marvel Universe never really lets thrive. The story isn't exactly surprising as a standard YA dystopian yarn, but the character beats all work, and it's easy to get swept up in. It's kind of a shame that this, like many of the better Battleworld minis, is essentially forgotten, because this could easily have had a second life for non-traditional comic book readers in bookstores.

Siege

Kieron Gillen's farewell to Marvel Comics, with Filipe Andrade on art, it's most of what you could ask for from the project. The ideas for a mile a minute, the Battleworld conceit is taken full advantage of to create full skewed and not-so-skewed versions of classic characters, like a legion of cloned Cylcops or a version of Magik who is explicitly rather than implicitly queer. It's about a hopeless fight, so it's not exactly an uplifting story, but its sweet and cathartic, and by the final pages it becomes obvious that the whole thing is a metaphor for Gillen's work-for-hire career. It's also got a great Thing moment and ties into the central Secret Wars series more directly than most, so it makes my shortlist of recommendations.

Weird World

Set in a segment of Battleworld which would later be integrated, if only for a sadly short time, into the Marvel U proper, Weird World has Jason Aaron at his absolute most Jason Aaron, with tough warrior men monologuing about how sad they are and also how much ass they're going to kick, cartoonishly evil villains whose lackeys really need to unionize, and Mike Del Mundo absolutely crushing it with some all-time greatest Marvel artwork. Easily worth reading for the art alone, and the deranged, schoolwork doodles take on swords and sandals action delivers on every front. Unlike many of the other Battleworld minis, Weird World actiually ties directly into its post-Secret Wars sequel which means the ending is unfortunately truncated, but it's still a very fun book.

#capsule reviews #words

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truemedian · 4 years ago

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Samsung Galaxy A51 review: Wait for a price drop

Image credit: Chris Velazco/Engadget It's not a bad phone, just a bad deal. (In the US, anyway.)

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Samsung got me. On paper, the company's Galaxy A51 appears to have everything you could want out of a $400 smartphone. A big, pretty screen. A multitude of cameras. A 4,000mAh battery. A flagship-inspired design, and a headphone jack. As an avid -- some might say rabid -- fan of ambitious midrange smartphones, I was ready for the A51 to take its place alongside other modestly priced standouts like the Pixel 3a XL and the iPhone SE. It never did.That’s not to say the Galaxy A51 is a bad phone. Samsung got a lot right here, and over a week of testing, I found it perfectly pleasant at times. Sadly, all the things the company handled well couldn't fully offset some janky, inconsistent performance: This is a $400 device that sometimes runs like a $250 one. I don’t think that's enough to make the A51 a bad smartphone, but it does make it a bad deal. Excellent design Big and beautiful AMOLED screen Flexible multi-camera system Laggy performance Camera quality is largely unremarkable Mediocre battery life Samsung’s Galaxy A51 packs a great screen, a handful of cameras, and a big battery -- what more could you ask from a mid-range smartphone? Well, more consistent performance, for one. Despite using a reasonably powerful chipset, the A51 is often plagued by slow app launches and laggy animations, to the point when it sometimes feels like a device that costs much less. Battery life wasn’t as good as we had hoped for, either. While Samsung got a lot right with the Galaxy A51, it never feels as consistently nice to use as some of truly great devices available in its price range.

Be the first to review the Galaxy A51 LTE? Your ratings help us make the buyer’s guide better for everyone. Write a review Key specs ConfigurationsThe Galaxy A51 I've been testing is a Verizon Wireless model with 4GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. (Disclaimer: Verizon is Engadget's parent company, but it has no influence over what we say.) Sprint and AT&T also offer this version of the A51, and no matter which carrier you choose, they'll all sell you the phone outright for $399. That doesn't sound too steep, but it's worth noting that the phone can be had for less when purchased unlocked, especially if you live outside the United States. If you're serious about owning an A51, scouting out a good deal is a must: This isn't worth $400.

Chris Velazco/Engadget Image credit: Chris Velazco/Engadget Flagship styleIf there's one thing Samsung deserves credit for, it's that the A51 in no way looks like a $400 phone. With a surprisingly trim frame; an eye-catching, light-refracting finish; and some incredibly small bezels, this midrange model could easily pass for a phone that costs twice as much. As far as I'm concerned, this is the best-looking midrange smartphone out there. Just keep in mind that thanks to its display, the A51 might be a nonstarter for people with smaller hands -- it's thin but still plenty large.Of course, since this phone costs a fraction of what a flagship does, Samsung had to be judicious about balancing style and substance. Consider Samsung's choice of materials: Wrapping a phone in glass quickly makes its price tag jump, so the company used what it calls "Glasstic" for the A51's body. As the name suggests, that just means this phone has a plastic frame that sort of feels like glass if you don't scrutinize it too much. The Galaxy A51 also lacks an IP-rating for water and dust resistance, which is very common for phones in this price range. (Note: If you Google "A51 water resistance," you might see a search result from Verizon claiming the A51 is rated IP68 -- it absolutely is not.)

Chris Velazco/Engadget The rest of the phone's design is fairly standard. There's a USB-C port that supports 15W fast charging and a combination nanoSIM/microSD card tray on the phone's right side that you can use to augment the standard 128GB of storage. If you're a music fan, you'll also appreciate the proper headphone jack Samsung squeezed into the A51, since its single speaker is pretty awful. What helps elevate the A51's design is its spacious, 6.5-inch, Full HD+ Super AMOLED screen. It's one of Samsung's Infinity-O displays which, if you're allergic to marketing BS, means there's a tiny hole cut out of the panel to accommodate a 32-megapixel front camera. It’s remarkably small and would be easy enough to overlook were it not for the shiny metallic ring surrounding it -- it's almost like Samsung wants you to keep looking at it. Thankfully, the rest of the screen is typical Samsung: Deep blacks, punchy colors, and great viewing angles considering the price. Its max brightness feels a little anemic so outdoor use can be a little tricky at times, but the display is very well-suited to binging on YouTube videos while you're sheltering at home.The screen is very often the most expensive component in a smartphone, and I'm glad that Samsung went with the display it did here. It's not just easy on the eyes; it’s a great rebuttal to devices like the iPhone SE that rely on dated designs to keep costs down. Visually, the A51 is a stunner, but as my parents always used to tell me, looks aren't everything.

Chris Velazco/Engadget Image credit: Chris Velazco/Engadget In use The frustration here begins when you go to unlock the phone. There's an optical fingerprint sensor under the display, and it's... not great. When it does work, it usually takes a while to actually recognize my thumb. Too often, though, the sensor just didn't work. Normally, you'd see a bit of green whooshing around your finger to let you know the sensor was analyzing your print, but that didn't always appear. Repeated screen cleanings didn't fix the issue, and neither did re-enrolling my fingers. For your sanity, maybe just set up a PIN or an unlock pattern instead.Once I made it in, a bigger issue became obvious pretty quickly -- the A51 is noticeably laggy at times. Switching between apps frequently felt choppy, as did thumbing through pages of apps, and even just popping back out to the home screen. You know, the stuff you do every day.To be clear, this doesn’t happen constantly, and I didn’t have much to complain about when the phone was firing on all cylinders. If you're the kind of person who just wants to watch videos and maybe send a few emails to the family, you might not even notice this momentary lag. But if you're a fan of smooth, consistent performance, be prepared for some disappointment -- stuttering animations and delayed app launches are never too far away, and it gets old pretty quickly. Gallery: Samsung Galaxy A51 review photos | 13 Photos

Exactly why the A51 runs the way it does isn't wholly clear, but part of the issue probably lies with Samsung's choice of chipset. Rather than use a Qualcomm Snapdragon like most US-bound Android phones, the company ran with its in-house Exynos 9611. From what I can tell, there's not much difference between this sliver of silicon and the Exynos 9610 Samsung started using in late 2018 -- some of the CPU cores are marginally faster and it supports a wider variety of rear cameras, but that's really it. That Samsung would splurge on a great screen and use a minor refresh of a chip that was announced a little over two years ago tells you a lot about its priorities. The funny thing is, this chipset is no slouch. It falls somewhere between the $250 Moto G Power (with a Snapdragon 665 chipset) and the $470 Pixel 3 XL (with a Snapdragon 670), which is exactly what you'd expect considering how much these phones cost. The A51 benchmarks pretty well, too -- it’s nowhere near flagship level, but well in line with other US-bound devices we’ve seen in this price range. That being the case, it seems more likely that this inconsistent performance is due to a lack of software optimization that could theoretically be fixed in a future update. (For what it’s worth, Samsung wouldn’t confirm that any such updates were in the works.)In fairness to Samsung, people contemplating a $400 smartphone probably know not to expect best-in-class performance. The bigger issue here is that it’s still a considerable sum to drop on a smartphone, and the A51's balance of performance and price just doesn’t feel right.

Chris Velazco/Engadget The Moto G Power -- a phone that costs $150 less with an older chipset -- manages to run a little more consistently. And the Pixel 3a XL? Forget about it. The difference in smoothness and the overall quality of experience between these devices skews heavily in the Pixel's favor. It’s also worth noting that all three of these phones have 4GB of RAM, so it’s not like Motorola or Google had more resources to work with here. And if you’re not married to Android, there's always the iPhone SE. It's a $400 arrow aimed at Samsung's heart and runs just as well as Apple’s most expensive smartphones. Whether it's because of a heavy touch with software, poor memory management, or something else entirely, this questionable performance makes the A51 hard to recommend for the price. I had hoped that epic battery life would've sweetened the deal here, but it doesn’t. Despite packing a pretty sizable 4,000mAh (along with a mid-range chipset and a screen that only runs at 1080p), the Galaxy A51 is only good for about one full day of use. That's not awful by any stretch, but when other mid-range phones -- like the Moto G Power -- have battery lives measured in days instead of hours, the A51 can't help but feel a little disappointing.

Chris Velazco/Engadget Image credit: Chris Velazco/Engadget Plenty of camerasAt this point, the one thing that could redeem the A51 is truly excellent camera performance. Calling the phone's trio of rear cameras "excellent" would be a stretch, but in most cases, they're good enough.And that's right, I said "trio" although there are four lenses on the A51's rear. Most of the time you'll wind up using the 48-megapixel standard wide camera which, like most other phones with pixel-rich sensors, produces smaller 12-megapixel stills by default. As usual for a Samsung phone, the results feature lots of vivid colors, though pixel-peepers will notice a surprising lack of fine details upon zooming in. That’s despite Samsung’s typical -- and almost stylized -- image processing, too. Big surprise, right? Like nearly every Samsung camera before it, this one seems tuned to deliver images that look slightly nicer than reality. These are great photos to post on Instagram, but maybe not for printing and mounting on your wall. Unfortunately, even the decently wide f/2.0 aperture doesn't help the A51's main camera much in low light -- colors tend to look a little washed out, and details get smeared into oblivion. Gallery: Samsung Galaxy A51 camera samples | 24 Photos

Meanwhile, the 12-megapixel ultra-wide camera turned out to be a pleasant surprise. It captures a 123-degree field of view with minimal barrel distortion around the edges, and its colors are even poppier and more saturated than what you'd get out of the main camera. If you're walking around and shooting photos on a clear day, those pale blue skies will turn out a little more neon than you'd expect. Since this camera is mainly meant to capture lots of attractive, well-lit space, it's no surprise that it struggles more than the main camera does in low light.Rather than a telephoto camera (which was almost certainly too expensive for a phone like this), the A51's third sensor is a 5-megapixel affair for macro photos. I've wondered in the past who spends their time bopping around and looking for very small things to take photos of, but ever since testing the OnePlus 8 Pro, I've become one of those people. It's too bad, then, that this never produced the sort of crisp, super-tight images I was hoping for. That's partially because the camera's image processing seems to iron out some of those minute details, but also because the narrow depth of field means getting everything framed up just right can take some work.And that last lens? It's for a 5-megapixel depth sensor that Samsung uses to capture data for more bokeh-filled portraits. It does its job well. I've seen more than a few phones struggle with accurately separating the subject from its background, but the A51 handles the task without much fuss. Ultimately, no matter which camera you spend the most time with, be prepared for good -- not great -- results. If getting the best overall photo is your biggest concern, you'd still be much better off with one of Google's Pixel 3As or the iPhone SE. Samsung's real edge here doesn't lay in the quality of its images so much as the flexibility that multiple cameras provide.

Chris Velazco/Engadget Wrap-upWith the Galaxy A51, Samsung tried to bring some flagship style and features to an affordable smartphone. It wasn't completely successful, but the effort is appreciated. More than anything, what Samsung really got wrong here (in the US, at least) is the phone's price. If the Galaxy A51 cost closer to $300, as it does in certain overseas markets, Samsung's strange blend of style and stymied performance would be a lot easier to swallow. As it stands, though, the A51 never feels as consistently smooth as some of the truly great devices you can get for around $400 now. Sure, the Pixel 3a XL and the iPhone SE lack the A51’s panache, but they’re just nicer to use. And hey -- if you’re really itching for a Samsung phone and have some latitude in your budget, the slightly more powerful Galaxy A71 might be a better choice. If you can find a sweet deal -- or don't mind trading an older phone in -- the Galaxy A51 isn't a bad option. Anyone who doesn't need a phone now though should wait until Google releases its new mid-range Pixel and decide. All products recommended by Engadget are selected by our editorial team, independent of our parent company. Some of our stories include affiliate links. If you buy something through one of these links, we may earn an affiliate commission.

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red-pillgrimage · 8 years ago

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Debunking bullshit, partie un

A There’s this wall-of-text/links going around promoting some rather ignorant ideas on some skewed/misused data. Here’s my modest take.

Let’s take a look. [this segment brought to you by @feels-by-the-foot]

“The Wage Gap”

The Wage (1) Gap (2) is (3) a (4) myth. (5) 1 (6) 2 (7) Women tend to choose majors that pay a lower national median pay. (8) Women Now a Majority in American Workplaces (9) Labor force participation rate(10) for men has never been lower. (11) Women (12) in (13) some (14) cases (15) make more(16) than(17) men. (18) And their husbands (19) dont have (20) a problem with it either. (21) Women CHOOSE (22) to stay away from (23) STEM field (24) There is no STEM gender gap in the U.S (25) Women In Tech Make More Money And Land Better Jobs Than Men (26)

1. This is a broken link to a ticket distributor ? ? ?

2.This is a UK journalist's opinion about the 57 years predicted for women to make as much as men and their opinion on another prediction that manager salary will be equalized between men and women by 2067. Their “big conclusion” is “it's not the gender pay gap that is inequitable for women in their twenties and thirties. It's the maternity leave gap.” This is a huge red herring. Sure, on face-value we can address the fact that men in the UK are only offered two weeks off after the birth of a child by their employers. But we're talking about wage gap, not maternity leave. Maternity leave is but ONE reason people rationalize why women ought to make less. And no offence to this surely-esteemed journalist but she ought to read the own links she sourced when she complained that it's the discrepancy is a result of comparing part-time to full time, 'cause as the link of an article discussing a study of pay at 197 organizations, covering 43,312 employees, showed that in certain sectors, such as finance and law, women working full time can earn just over half the amount men get.

In the UK until late 2016, it was perfectly legal for companies to force their employees to sign gagging clauses to prevent colleagues from discussing salaries, bonuses, etc. Unlike what the journalist implied, legislating disclosure of gendered pay isn't “forcing society to pay”. A legally-enforced culture of secrecy only reinforces preexisting biases(women work less hard than men) with gendered exploitation(if we pay women less, they won't be able to tell anyone without legal reprimand!) But I mean this link was debunked as soon as their OWN source stated “in certain sectors ... women working full time can earn just over half the amount men get.”

3. What a surprise, another journalist chewing up some incomplete synopsis of studies from other news sources. In this one, the U.S. journalist who works for a conservative think-tank wants us to believe that

“The Paycheck Fairness bill would set women against men, empower trial lawyers and activists, perpetuate falsehoods about the status of women in the workplace and create havoc in a precarious job market. It is 1970s-style gender-war feminism for a society that should be celebrating its success in substantially, if not yet completely, overcoming sex-based workplace discrimination.”

There’s two main things that need to be addressed here. First, this U.S. journalist makes these claims about the impact of this bill that would allow for employees to file a suit for gender-based salary is the imminent gender-war & economic “havoc” of workers’ rights. How is this conclusion found? Who knows/cares, certainly not the author. But among their rationalizations they cite

“A recent survey found that young, childless, single urban women earn 8 percent more than their male counterparts, mostly because more of them earn college degrees.”

Yes. This study did point out that in cities where steel mills and other men-centered workplaces have suffered that women who are single and living in the city can make single-digit improvements over men. Yes, this study did point out that black & latina women enroll in post-secondary education at much higher rates than their respective counterparts. This study shows that in very specific economic and demographic situations, women can make more than men if they’re single, if they’re in the city, if they’re young. The american dream :’)

4. Oh wow, a seven year old blog post that primarily sources itself on a non peer-review book(including broken links to the book’s website) and then some straw-man arguments using arbitrary online news links. Oh wait, the blog post does claim one link as a “study” but in fact it’s just a research assistant’s summary of data published in 2000. Which in fact means it’s data collected from 1999. Kinda stale, dontchathink... So this US blogger makes it pretty easy and simply when they flat-out state

“In one sense, O'Neill is right about a wage gap -- on average, women earn about 80 cents to a man's dollar.”

So while the author asserts without blinking that men do in fact make more than women for the same job, they then provide a full list of rationalizations for why this is acceptable yet. still. denying. there. is. a. wage. gap. idontevencanyouhelpmeunderstand.

Blogger goes on to say

Due to the simple laws of supply and demand, these occupations pay more and contribute immensely to the pay gap.

Actually, “these occupations” which “contribute immensely to the pay gap” are pretty damn racialized. For some reason author believes that U.S. govt data doesn��t compartmentalize by profession/domain and it’s all just “men v women” for comparison. This isn’t so. This is why they argue that men work dangerous jobs and higher skill jobs than women and that’s why they make more money (cuz like they’re just better/deserving ok!11!) but then you see in the actual data that it’s latino men and black men who work in the dirty/dangerous/shitty jobs which were previously argued as “higher paying’. And this doesn’t explain why within the same fields, working the same hours, men make more. Hell, it doesn’t even explain why men who enter feminine gender-typed workfields are perceived as more “courageous”/”harder worker” and sooner promoted than women(See: glass - escalator).

5. Onto a pundit who is regularly invited to Republican party retreats and doesn’t even deny there is an income gap between men and women. Hell, they’ll even take it one step further with their conclusion

So we shouldn’t expect that 77 percent figure ever to rise to 100 -- or even want it to.

This doesn’t seem like a source to add onto a list trying to deny there is a wage gap. hbu

6. I’m going to guess this article added from The Wall Street Journal was done through an uneducated use of google searches for a given topic without having actually read the content of the article because like most of us, present author included, don’t have a subscription to The Wall Street Journal. However, I do know what the article is about and we’ve already covered the content in (3). How do I know?

A study of single, childless urban workers between the ages of 22 and 30 found that women earned 8% more than men.

Gee, if you’re young/single/nochild/Urban/crumbling masculine gender-typed industries, you might make 8% more than men?

7. Here comes another sensationalist news OPINION article, this time from CBS news that puts up this non peer-review book on a pedestal as some myth breaking weapon. Sadly, it’s the same dulled out logic from (4): the same boring old dangerous = higher pay that isn’t supported when you look at the salary of loggers or fishers.

8. This “career news” article tried to make some good points but overlooked a very, very serious issue. In comparing the majors between men and women, you’re kinda forgetting that ~70% of Americans don’t have post-secondary degrees.

So while it’s correct to point out that choice of majors may account for some disparity between gendered salaries, it doesn’t account for the other 70% of people from the US who don’t have majors but are above 25 and likely to need to find employment. It does however raise the issue of social biases that gender-type women and employment. ;))))

Addendum: They purposely mentioned women in aerospace so I’ll just leave this here

9. This NY times tried to play some fast-and-loose number games by employing sentences like “According to seasonally unadjusted data” and others like “they held 50.3 percent of the nation’s nonfarm payroll jobs in the raw numbers.” Notice anything yet? Well lets just quote the article to conclude the point

Male-dominated industries are actually especially cyclical in two different ways: They are not only influenced by the business cycle, but also by the seasonal cycle. Industries like construction, which tend to employ men, get more work in warmer months.

If you adjust for these regular seasonal factors that affect the job market, women would have held just less than half of the nation’s payroll jobs in January, at 49.9 percent.

Confused why this wasn’t about the wage gap? Me too. This was just an article about how “women are overtaking men in the workforce” @ 49.9% =o

10. I think the OP of this wall of text was trying to play a fast-and-loose one ‘cause this isn’t about the wage gap at all. This is a link that compares what percentage of men worked in 1948 to now and how many women worked in 1948 and now. ‘Lo and behold: ~70% of men work in 2012 and ~58% of women work in 2012, both seasonally adjusted.

11. So this is exactly the same as (10), even going so far as using the same charts and really not in any way talking about any differences in how men and women are paid any differently for doing the same job. This was just an article about men’s declining participation in the workforce.While a fascinating topic, pretty irrelevant to the wage gap.

12. Clickbait BusinessInsider article that claims that because one university president in Utah says that there’s a 2K salary difference between students’ according to gender, it must be so everywhere yet doesn’t ignore that only 5% of students are in the higher initial pay, nor does it say where they are in 5 years, or 10 years, or 25.

13. So this Reuters article has a brief summary of a study led by Paul Hodgson from the Corporate Institute. This study claims sampled Directors showed that the median income was just under 15% higher for women than men. They’re also out-numbered 8 to 1. Nevermind that a quick search through a more recent Reuters article also states that even tho median is higher, the average executive salary is still much higher for men than the median for the few women around. What’s of real interest in this article is the statement that

Director pay is typically far below what top corporate executives are awarded

Why is this interesting? Because Paul Hodgson writes more than a single thing and among his own writings:

Yet, despite the findings of the two surveys, according to an Institute for Women’s Policy Research survey cited by the WSJ – The Gender Wage Gap by Occupation 2013 – women CEOs still lag behind men. Using a much wider sample than the 300 or so CEOs used by the AP and WSJ, female CEOs only earned 80% of what their male counterparts earned.

Heck, even CFO who are women make less, 16% less on average

14. Oh boy. Well for some reason this article is in the print page format, but that’s cool. This ABCnews article likes to promote the idea that because a handful (literally 16 in 2010) of women have become CEOs and have demanded more salary in that one year (2009) that suddenly this makes any kind of difference that only 4.4% (now) of Fortune500 CEO constitute of women. The 2009 article points out that Meyer of Yahoo took home the biggest package of the year for 47 million. A quick scan of this list of the 100 highest paid CEOs of the US place Meyer at #18 on the list, with #1 having 147million. Why are we getting uppity again about a few women getting paid?? ? ? ?

15. If you’re a young woman between 21-30 and living in NYC, you’ll do gr8 says this NY times article which discussed an analysis prepared by Andrew A. Beveridge, a demographer at Queens College. Now what I appreciate about this article is they probably took the time to read more than just another newspaper’s summary of the content because they actually provided a very fascinating breakdown of salary by borough for NYC.

Young women from the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens make more than young men from those boroughs. Young women from Staten Island make the same as men. Among Manhattanites, the median wage for workers in their 20s was $46,859 for men and $45,840 for women. The gender wage advantage for women in their 20s was widest among whites with some college education, blacks and Asians with advanced degrees and Hispanic women who were high school or college graduates. Young men in the city still make more than young women in a number of jobs, including psychologist, registered nurse, high school teacher, bank teller and bartender. In high-paying Wall Street jobs, men heavily outnumber women, which is one reason that Martin Kohli, a regional economist with the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, described the women’s wage gains as “a surprising finding.”

Remember back in (4) how the racialization of gender might be is impacting the way in which certain regional factors come into play? How about NYC’ stop-and-frisk policies? Or Dallas’? What about the way in which nearly a quarter of Florida’s black men have criminal records? Might this impact the way in which we perceive statistics based on income?

16.

“Here's the slightly deflating caveat: this reverse gender gap, as it's known, applies only to unmarried, childless women under 30 who live in cities. The rest of working women — even those of the same age, but who are married or don't live in a major metropolitan area — are still on the less scenic side of the wage divide.”

“Chung also claims that, as far as women's pay is concerned, not all cities are created equal. Having pulled data on 2,000 communities and cross-referenced the demographic information with the wage-gap figures, he found that the cities where women earned more than men had at least one of three characteristics. Some, like New York City or Los Angeles, had primary local industries that were knowledge-based. Others were manufacturing towns whose industries had shrunk, especially smaller ones like Erie, Pa., or Terre Haute, Ind. Still others, like Miami or Monroe, La., had a majority minority population. (Hispanic and black women are twice as likely to graduate from college as their male peers.)“ “While the economic advantage of women sometimes evaporates as they age and have families, Chung believes that women now may have enough leverage that their financial gains may not be completely erased as they get older. “

Nothing more to add than their own words.

17. This is actually the same topic, using the same sources by The Wall Street Journal as from (6). Yes, SOME educated-single-childless-urban-women-21to30 do make a bit more than men of their own age for a time. This is still not a national trend for all women. So yeah, there’s a gap even if one small subset is doing ‘ok’...?

18. This Forbes article does raise some interesting tidbits but nothing that supports the idea that there’s anything myth about the gender gap. So let me excise the important stuff.

Women earned 81 cents for every dollar earned by men in 2010, up from 76 cents in 2000. Moreover, recent reports suggest that young urban women now earn 8% more than male peers, likely due to higher college graduation rates.

Ah, so education = 8% increase over someone with no education? What’s the disparity between educated men and uneducated women? How does education disprove wage gap? ? ? But there’s more.

The fact remains, however, that men still earn more in almost every U.S. occupation—except in a telling few. An analysis of 2009 median weekly earnings for full-time workers, collected by the BLS, reveals at least 15 jobs where women earn slightly more than male colleagues.

Oh gee. “Slightly more” salary in 15 out of “every U.S. occupation”.

Perhaps most surprising, women out-earn men in several male-dominated construction jobs. Female construction laborers, construction supervisors, maintenance painters, and aircraft and vehicle mechanics earn slightly above the median earnings for both sexes—despite holding just 3% of these jobs.

Connecticut College economics professor Candace Howes ... conjectures that the few women who enter construction and mechanical jobs are likely highly skilled and more concentrated in union jobs. “It was unionization that provided women access to these male-dominated jobs, and on average those wages are higher [than non-union jobs],” says Howes.

Ah, so union jobs pay more and that’s why “slightly more” salary can be extrapolated for 1 job out of “every”? Cool.

There is some evidence that men are discriminated against in female-dominated jobs. A 2010 study found that (SPOILER)men were less likely to be called for an interview in fields with 65% or more female workers, an attitude which may be reflected in wages. Employment researcher Laurence Shatkin, author of 2011 Career Plan, says that discrimination or feelings of not fitting in could cause higher turnover rates among (SPOILER) men in these jobs, which wouldn’t allow them to gain seniority and would negatively affect wages.

But here is something that gave me a pretty big larf. It was just so... ironic, that it was great. I wonder if the author put it in originally or their editor threw it in for the fragile masculinities who may be offended by an article discussing women being paid more in what I assume we’d call “almost none” of U.S. occupations. So a minority that is perceived as stereotypically different is less likely to receive a call-back, and even if they do, they’re subject to leave their workplace for feelings of not fitting in with the existing culture? That does sound like an awful time.

19. Wow, an Elle magazine partnership with MSCBC. This sure sounds like a legitimate source of sampling, amirite. If we sampled 70K people on the internet, would this be an accurate representation of people nationally? Would it account for racial differences? Are the kind of people who answer News-sites/Elle magazine online questionnaires about partner income/household responsibilities are really the average citizens? Very little scientific rigour. Having a massive sample size can actually be statistically harmful. Maybe Elle can cover that next month in “Money, Sex and Love”

20. So has a business partnership with CareerBuilder.com, which serves as the exclusive provider of job listings and services to CNN.com. And CareerBuilder.com is here today to bring us the news that thanks to a survey they gave on their own website, they’re here to give us facts. Real facts about all kinds of people.

Nearly one in four (24 percent) working dads feel work is negatively impacting their relationship with their children. Forty-eight percent have missed a significant event in their child's life due to work at least once in the last year and nearly one in five (18 percent) have missed four or more.

What does this have to do with wage gap? Nothing. It’s a sob story about how fathers choose their work over their families. Sounds like Goku/Vegeta to me. This isn’t as tagged “husbands are cool with wives making more/all the money” this is “dads want to be with their kids”. Not the same not even related topic.

21. To be honest, this is the least intellectually boring article to date. And why? Because it’s actually psychology and feminism. Two things right up my alley. While the average guy reader of the article will shout “Yeah! Women don’t support us enough to be full-time dads!” It’s actually a layer or two deeper than that.

The idea that Mother Knows Best for all things home and family is deeply ingrained and complicated by gender roles, socialization and culture, experts say.

This is probably a great time to mention that being a woman ≠ feminist. Being a woman doesn’t make you impervious to believing in sexism, racism, ableism or anything else. So if you hear anyone, be they man, woman, gender-nonconforming, whoever: never accept that a group can be better parents than another group. Individuals over other individuals, but there is nothing inherent to parenting. if you dare bring up that “but yung gurls like 2 play with dolls” shit I’m going to laugh, ‘cause that’s just proof that they needed practice very likely a sign of socialization and culture.

"There are a lot of pressures that keep reinforcing the division of responsibility in parenting that leaves moms in the control position — the 'expert parent' role," says demographer Catherine Kenney of Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio, who has studied how mothers' beliefs affect fathers' involvement.

What?! Spouses who are also women who uphold conservative/”traditional”/bullshit gender & parenting roles are likely to have an effect on how their spouses rear the children? This almost sounds like if the any parent is sexist, it can affect how their kids are raised =o

New research into the idea of "maternal gatekeeping" shows how attitudes and actions by the mother may promote or impede father involvement.

Wait, after shoving the idea that “motherhood” was their primary goal in life through music/movies/books/musicals/plays, after making them leave their jobs (without any maternity leave in the U.S.) you suddenly feel it novelty that women internalized the idea that the beliefs of women as “natural” caretakers will have an impact on the spouse’s involvement?

Unsurprisingly, the rest of this almost-delightful article just says “be a good father or be a good mother. Talk about sharing responsibilities with your spouse and avoiding falling back on social stereotypes that may prevent you from fulfilling your sincere family”.

23. Yikes, a more boring and less interesting rehash of blogger (4). Only talks about the non peer review book in which nothing more than speculation on numbers. Sure, the guy who wrote the book is a doctor, but that’s a PhD in education. Not exactly the pertinent field at hand.

24. Huh, so another article which says women are just as math-smart but a combination of social factors just fuck them over in life but as the scope of the article was about professors and we earlier covered that less 31% of people from the U.S. have bachelors. What else did we cover earlier? Uninviting workplace cultures focused on gender stereotypes are likely to have higher turnover rates or disinterest? Almost sounds like social factors are producing gender disparities.

25. I’m just going to leave this here ‘cause it’s maybe not a STEM problem at the bachelor’s level but it’s certainly an ET problem.

#antifa #wage gap #MRA #MRA bullshit #Debunking #Capitalism #Exploitation #PoC #intersectionality

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freshleadprovider · 5 years ago

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Why Nearly 20% of Young Consumers Didn’t Read Local Business Reviews in 2019

Every year, BrightLocal produces its flagship report on online reviews, the Local Consumer Review Survey, and in last year’s results we noticed some alarming trends that we felt worth further analysis and discussion. Of particular note are the stories the data tells us about the feelings and behaviors of those in the 18-34 age group (who, for the sake of simplicity, I’ll be referring to as ‘young people’ from here on in – especially as it makes a 37-year-old like me feel a little more youthful). Not only did young people’s responses to the survey often differ wildly from the average responses of other age groups, but at times they contradicted their own responses to earlier questions. Let’s take a deeper dive into the findings of the survey to see what insights we can glean, and what you can use to inspire your marketing strategies for young people. How Often Do Young People Search for Local Businesses Online? With web use steadily growing from year to year, and the prevalence of smartphones significantly contributing to it, one would expect that the frequency of searches for IRL businesses would trend higher as we become more reliant on it as a discovery tool in all parts of life. Not so with young people! In 2019, the percentage of young people who said they never used the internet to find local businesses rose to an astonishing 15% (from just 3% the previous year). As you can see above, decreases were seen across mid-range frequencies (e.g. at least once a week, once a month, 6-10 times per year) but these responses didn’t move over to the left side of the chart, as you’d expect with an increasing reliance on the web. Instead, there’s been a migration of responses from across the board to the far more apathetic response of ‘Never’. I should highlight that this question has been asked the same way, of the same representative group, year on year, and this is the first time we’ve seen a shift like this. (As a comparison, it’s worth noting that although the overall percentage of respondents (all age groups) who said they ‘never’ use the internet to find local businesses crept up from 8% in 2018 to 10% in 2019, the percentage that said they looked daily also leapt from 27% to 33%.) This statistic alone has left us with a lot of questions… Are young people finding other ways to seek out local businesses? Are recommendations from social media taking the place of original research and online reviews? Are young people even actively ‘seeking out’ local businesses? Have the prevalence of influencer marketing and targeted advertising simply turned social media into a brand recommendation delivery machine, to the point that young people don’t, for example, choose to go to a restaurant and look for one, and instead have one in mind from the offset? As they’re less likely to need infrequent services (like plumbing, lawyers, doctors), is the idea of a ‘local business’ reduced to shopping, entertainment and eating out? Having been raised on the internet, are they more likely to instinctively purchase from businesses online rather than shopping locally, as research from Invesp suggests? Or is it simply a question of semantics? Have the meanings of ‘use the internet’ and ‘local businesses’ slightly changed for young people? Do they now perceive ‘use the internet’ to mean using a web browser (rather than an app like Yelp or Google Maps) and ‘local businesses’ to mean ‘businesses in the town where I live’? Has this change in meaning led to this change in results? There’s a lot here to chew on, I’m sure you’ll agree. We’d be fascinated to hear your thoughts and theories in the comments below. Do Young People Read and Trust Online Reviews? Now that we’ve taken a look at young people’s use of the internet to discover local businesses (and come away somewhat shattered and disillusioned), let’s dive into the meat of the survey: their use of, and attitude towards, online reviews. This time around, many of those who had previously read online reviews ‘regularly’ or ‘occasionally’ are instead ‘never’ reading online reviews. In itself, this is a huge surprise (especially considering what you’ll learn a little later in this piece) but put in the context of the previous chart, it makes perfect sense: a big increase in young people not looking for local businesses online must naturally lead to a similar increase in those not reading reviews for local businesses. Still, that’s a bit of an increase in young people who ‘always’ read online reviews for local businesses (50% up to 52%), so the cause isn’t by any means lost. We’re perhaps merely seeing the emergence of two separate groups in this demographic of digital natives: those who have grown up to trust the online world and those who have learnt to be far more wary and distrusting of it. The emergence of discourse around the negative effects of social media and wider online practices on younger generations certainly bears this theory out. Taking this theory further, let’s see what happened when we asked those young people who did say they read online reviews to tell us how much they trusted them. And it’s the same story… a few more young people becoming entirely trusting of online reviews (from 39% to 41%), but a huge jump of 13% saying they ‘don’t trust online reviews at all’. Quite aside from making me scream, red-faced, into the void, “Then why are you reading them?!” this reaffirms my belief that we might be seeing the two diametric experiences that can come from a youth growing up with the web. It’s a broad thing to hypothesize considering the limited data in front of me, but I can’t help but think that, for young people at least, the movement of responses in the above charts from the middle ground to the left and right is indicative of a society in which the gray area is disappearing and online experiences and discourse are trending towards black/white extremes. Sadly, it looks like fake reviews aren’t helping the problem. Here we can see more young people than ever before being confident in spotting fake reviews online and seeing them regularly. One could certainly make the argument that the lack of trust expressed in the previous chart strongly suggests that this is just a very distrusting generation, perhaps battle-hardened by scrapes on social media, and that the number of fake reviews online hasn’t grown significantly, but by pretty much all accounts, fake reviews are indeed a growing problem. My hunch is, instead, that young people today are just more web-savvy and aware of the kinds of dodgy online tactics businesses are willing to employ to get your custom. How Much Are Young People Engaging with Online Reviews? As you’ve seen, there’s a consistent trend across many of our survey questions in which responses from young people are starting to skew towards the negative and distrusting. This might paint a picture of apathy, of a youth spent viewing the online world through an increasingly skeptical lens, but interestingly this hasn’t led to a disengagement with online reviews. Rather, the reverse is true. As our survey shows, young people who read online reviews for local businesses read 30% more reviews than the average consumer before trusting a local business, and spend 35% more time reading them than the average consumer. This fits in with the narrative of a digital native with a discerning eye, their bullcrap-detector permanently on. It seems that although some young people take their distrust of online reviews and choose never to engage with them, some go the opposite way and spend more time than any other age group combing through the reams of reviews left by other consumers. How Can Local Businesses React? Whichever way you look at the data above, you can’t deny we’re seeing some fascinating swings in the attitudes of young people. Whether 2019 was just a bad year for trust in, and use of, online reviews (or whether it’s a quirk in the data that will rectify itself next year) remains to be seen, but I for one will certainly be monitoring the perception of this key marketing tactic as the year goes on. But if your local business primarily deals with young people, what can you do to ensure you’re still attracting them in 2020? Try to get a presence on top lists in your local area, as these can dominate the organic results of local-intent searches. Get in the lists of top things to do, the top restaurants, etc. And if you can, make sure the lists are on websites where young people are a prime audience. Get more active on social media, and consider social media advertising on Instagram in particular. Facebook’s trending towards older age groups these days, and Twitter has never been a great place for local businesses to advertise, but Instagram is your holy grail if you can easily sell your service or products on a good image or short video. Use in-store tactics to get your audience to share their visit with you. Encourage the use of a hashtag, run a social media competition, or create an attractive and quirky ‘Instagram wall’ in your store or shop to make it a can’t-miss selfie opportunity. It looks like 2020 might be a bumpy year for young people and reviews, but I hope some of the ideas and theories above help you to weather the storm! The post Why Nearly 20% of Young Consumers Didn’t Read Local Business Reviews in 2019 appeared first on BrightLocal. https://probdm.com/site/NzUxMA

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tracyderry7729-blog · 6 years ago

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Ways to Give A Girl The Very Best Satisfaction.

Committed to the girls who have actually enhanced the webpages from background, from old to modern times. Rubin specifically was actually both a poster kid and advocate for females in scientific research She was actually the only female astronomy significant to graduate from Vassar College in 1948, and was actually the 1st girl to perform reviews at Caltech's Palomar Observatory. 10 In Jordan, nevertheless, ladies merely hold about 6 per-cent in the two legislative houses blended. I presume a girl specifically full figured girls appear incredibly attractive in them.Whenever my girlfriend and also me are getting close eventually at night she sees to it she wears all of them just for me. For example, if the last post you posted on Expertscolumn got on January 3, 2013 and also you begin publishing all brand new material on one more website ever since, up until today, April 5, 2013, your profile web page on EC drops ranking and your perspectives are going to start to fritter away. Indian ladies's group along with a total from 15.6 points gone on 40th postion out of 73 participating in the Oriental location, the Indian girls's staff 5th responsible for China, Korea, Japan and Chinese Taipei. An increasing amount of modern-day women straining to locate footwear dimensions that accommodate are glad that a quick on-line browse nowadays introduces a vast selection of excellent quality huge womens footwear in ingenious styles. Credit score: celticwoman.comFrankly, she uses me out watching her: competing the span from the runway splitting up the ensemble from the main phase at a full operate, her hair flighting, her slitted skirts surging, showing an upper leg slice from pure alabaster, its every muscle taut as an Olympic acrobat's. Snake has actually taken care of a considerable amount of attractive females in his days, however you would certainly be actually difficult pressed to discover one hotter than Eva. This is actually especially necessary for a woman to feel cherished-- that she is the absolute most important person in the whole planet to her man. Favorably to the stipulations from part 6, no expectant woman shall, on an ask for being brought in through her in this part, be actually called for by her employer to accomplish in the course of the duration pointed out in part listed below and job which is of an arduous attribute or even which entails lengthy hrs from status or even which whatsoever is very likely to obstruct her pregnancy or even the ordinary development of the fetus or is actually probably to cause her miscarriage or otherwise to detrimentally influence her wellness. While the ordinary female may locate her eating plan on aiming to slim down, if you complete in body building or shape competitors, your diet regimen focus are going to often get on putting on weight. That is actually cunnilingus as well as is actually the one sex-related act that will certainly offer her an orgasm 99 times out from ONE HUNDRED. 263; Krista L. Newkirk, "State-compelled Fetal Surgical Operation: The Stability Examination Is Unrealistic" (1998) 4 Wm. & Mary J. Female & L. 467; John A. Robertson, Youngster of Choice: Independence as well as the New Reproductive Technologies (Princeton: Princeton College Press, 1994) at 177-180 Robertson, Youngster from Choice, Deborah Mathieu, Stopping Antenatal Damage: Should the State Intervene?, 2d ed. (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1996) at 102-22; Ron Beal, "' Can I Take Legal Action Against Mommy?' A Study of a Female's Tort Obligation for Antenatal Personal Injuries to Her Youngster Birthed Alive" (1984) 21 San Diego L. Rev. Having said that, few additionally must remember that climax along with sex is actually certainly not essential for a girl to possess a healthy or enjoyable sexual activity life, Lloyd included. This is a rather skewed way of living, which Hobby4You-Sport.Info has however caused solitary Russian women which are unwavering in their methods and whose obligations in lifestyle are actually fully fixated their family members, spouses as well as children. Her final tally of 120 openings have made her the then-highest wicket-taker in the ladies's style, and she additionally had the honour of captaining the side three years after obliging her method right into that. The Grand Old Woman of Indian girls's cricket stored many settings after ending a 16-year career, and also has actually been actually really voice about what she regards to become second-class therapy coming from the BCCI. Sadly for the hardcore traditionalists, it carries out not appear to be. That ends up that the nations with the greatest regard for girls's legal rights, as well as the most egalitarian social constructs (consisting of Norway, Sweden and Finland) actually often tend to have the best volume of success, wellness, social reliability as well as happiness.

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b-sidemusic · 7 years ago

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LIVE REVIEW: BLACKBALLED, THE WILSONS & MESONICAL @ JOHN PEEL CENTRE, STOWMARKET

Saturday night meant a jaunt to the reasonably hallowed halls of the John Peel Centre for Creative Arts, in Stowmarket. The little venue* is always good for an intimate feel and they’d drawn in a good line up.

Starting the evening were this established two-piece from Bury St Edmunds. Mesonical, who – and I do mean this as a compliment – took me back 15 years or so to when I was just discovering rock. I felt woefully deficient in eyeliner. Despite being just a two-piece – J. Hutchins (from BSE) on guitar/vocals and N. Skinner (from “the arse end of nowhere”) on drums/vocals – Mesonical made enough entertaining noise for a full rock band. Mesonical’s set was loud, deep and catchy – the kinds of songs you can hear once and sing along to forever. It took me a minute to work out what was missing: a group of teenagers headbanging in front of the stage. The crowd was perhaps a little old to fully appreciate Mesonical’s style, and I look forward to seeing them at a venue that skews younger. I might sit out the mosh pit, though.

Disclaimer: I’m a bit biased in The Wilsons’ favour. I’ve loved this band since I was 17 and they played at the then-fairly-musical Masons Arms (former Bury St Edmunds venue-turned-gastropub). Classics such as Turn the Cowgirl Round and Put the Knife Down Brenda still pop up fairly frequently on my playlist. The Wilsons have kept evolving, though, and their new material is just as weird, dark and enjoyable as their old. Unusually, over half of tonight’s set was songs that didn’t involve murder and sexual diseases – but they assure me that this doesn’t mean the band is moving in a new direction. One thing to watch out for is (singer/visual artist) Kate Jackson’s appearance on their new album, Crow, although sadly she didn’t make an appearance for this gig. Frontman Iain Watson manages to be simultaneously plaintive, angry and constantly upbeat in his performance. He’s in the story he’s telling. The rest of the band – Reuben Kemp (who is everywhere on the BSE music scene) and Tom Stebbing on guitars, Ronnie Hatt on bass, David Bacon on drums – play with obvious enthusiasm, grinning their way through cheery songs about murderous cowboys and broken hearts. Every one of them brings something irreplaceable to the band and tonight The Wilsons were superb as always.

I’d only listened to Blackballed - a North Manchester band made up of very experienced rockers - for the first time on Saturday afternoon, belatedly realising that a familiarity with one support band probably wasn’t going to cut it. The music was good. I wasn’t massively hyped, but I looked forward to seeing it live. I walked out with ears ringing and a massive grin on my face. Blackballed live is totally incomparable with Blackballed recorded. It was one of the most entertaining things I’ve ever seen.

Heading up the band is Marshall Gill - possibly better known for his role as guitarist in New Model Army. He sings backing vocals there, but his voice is clearly suited for a lead role, with a decent range and a rich, modulated tone. Tom Wibberly joins in on bass, easily keeping up with Gill’s finger work and adding his own depth to the sound. Each man had a line of Guinnesses (Guinni?) in front of him, which was soon depleted. Despite the showmanship at the front of the stage, the eyes were irresistibly drawn to Marshall’s brother, Leon – a mad-eyed ginger drummer who was clearly off his tits on rock and roll before the Guinness had time to hit. His face was stuck in an ecstatic rictus as he played, often catching the eye of his bandmates and seemingly energizing them further. He also brought some wild backing vocals to the mix.

The evening featured a lot of what Marshall called “twatting about”: easy rapport between the band members; false starts, drawn-out outros and improvised bridges; some really quite impressive downing of pints. The thing is, to get away with all of that - to make it entertaining – you need to be good. You need to be an expert before you can break the rules and, happily, Blackballed are expert musicians. Above all, the band had fun. They clearly absolutely love performing and, despite the small crowd, they threw huge amounts of effort into their set. You got the idea that they’d perform just as well if locked in a padded room. The joy was contagious, too – the audience nodded along with dopey smiles rather than po-faced appreciation.

It was a good night. The support bands were well chosen to compliment the hyper weirdness of the main event, and Blackballed stunned all of us first-timers with the energy of their performance. Although the gig deserved a bigger audience, the scarcity of numbers meant that it was possible to have a chat with all the musicians at the end of the evening – always a bonus. I’m pleased to report that Blackballed are quite as groovy, and mad, as they seem on stage.

*A shout out to whoever sorted out the beverages at the Centre – I’m always pathetically grateful to a bar serving decent non-alcoholic drinks at a sensible price. So rock and roll, I know.

THE LOWDOWN:

Mesonical Genre: Pure rock Find it: On bandcamp (mesonical.bandcamp.com/album/honey-trap) Best listened to: In your childhood bedroom with your best mate.

The Wilsons Genre: British Americana/Desert Rock Find it: On bandcamp (thewilsonsuk.bandcamp.com) Best listened to: Driving across the Mojave desert with a dead body in the boot.

Blackballed Genre: Rock/groove/blues – band members, when questioned, weren’t really sure Find it: www.blackballedband.org Best listened to: Live.

Words & Photo: Francine Carrel

#review #reviews #livereviews #the john peel centre #blackballed #the wilsons #mesonical #kate jackson #francine carrel #stowmarket #live music #john peel centre

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jaytbee · 8 years ago

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Bookworm Speaks!- Hero of My Dreams

Bookworm Speaks!

Hero of My Dreams

By J.R. Pitts

**** Acquired: From Word Slinger Publicity in exchange for an honest review Series: N/A Publisher: Outskirts Press (January 18, 2016) Paperback: 338 pages Language: English

****

The Story: The peaceful planet of Arklardin is under attack by Dragoon from the planet Zahrbruk. King Dinaar dispatches four lieutenants to find a commander, somewhere in the universe, to train his troops and lead them into battle. Alex Freeman, a veteran of Vietnam is the man they convince to help.

****

WARNING: This Review May Contain Spoilers!!!

The Review: On the surface, this seems like it would be a pretty nice book. It hits all the proper marks of a wish-fulfillment fantasy: A chose one, a war against an evil tyrant, save and romance the princess, aliens that inexplicably, look and work human.

Nothing particularly groundbreaking but still a good, happy, science-fantasy romp.

Alas, for Bookworm, this was one dream with that did not come true.

The truly unfortunate thing about this book is that there is a genuinely compelling story that is sadly buried amidst the poor writing. While reading this story, Bookworm was actually interested in these characters and what their ultimate fates would be come the stories conclusion. The romance that Alex Freeman goes through can be rather touching at times. You can tell the author put some genuine effort into it, even if it does stray into soap opera levels quite frequently.

One scene that is actually rather heartwarming is when Alex returns home to visit his family and brings his new family with him. Those moments are few and far between though. Because in spite of the fact of genuine heart, this book’s writing is so slipshod and overdone that reading this book became a task that Bookworm dreaded.

There is a line near the ending where the princess literally says something along the lines of: “With the lead of this pencil, I shall at least have enough for my final strike…”

What?

Come on!

If everything wrong with this book could be stripped down to one, singular, adjective, it would be this one:

Melodramatic.

This book is almost one long violation of the writing rule: Show, don’t tell. Being a science fiction piece (ostensibly) sometimes telling, or exposition, is sometimes a requirement but in the text we have here, the author seems to make it their mission to spell every though that come’s into their character’s heads and worse still, make them say it out loud.

This happens from beginning to end. When Alex gets first abducted by the Arklardin, he goes through a range of events capped of with the spoken statement:

“Damnit!” he shouts, “I can’t move! I’m like a mouse caught in a trap. My handgun is useless and I am completely at the mercy of this thing!”

We don’t need to know that! We do not need every little thing that goes through his head. explained to us! Bookworm does not believe that this was meant to be a book for preschoolers. This almost panders to the readers in a level that some may actually find insulting. No one may have gone broke assuming the lowest common denominator but this thing doesn’t even do that well. The writing is just plain lazy!

The world-building is next to nonexistent. This society is obviously meant to mirror the traditional medieval fantasy archetype, but there is no feeling to it. The reader really get a good mental image of what this world is like. If there was any point where this book could have actually used some exposition it would be when the reader sees the castle or the uniforms of the soldiers or the aftermath. We do not get that though. By then, the reader is so discouraged by the amateur-level writing choking it all to death, that it is overlooked.

The pacing of the story is skewed as well. It describes Alex Freeman getting married to Princess Kumari, her pregnancy, and then the birth of their daughter. All of that happens over the span of three or four chapters and there is nothing to indicate that over a year at least has happened. For that matter, in the chapters following that, the daughter has transformed into a toddler. One could make the argument that this is in fact another planet and pregnancy, birth, and maturation are faster here. If that is the case however, it is never mentioned.

It is like a sitcom on television, where one episode is dedicated to the birth of said baby but in the very next season or episode, the child in question is now three-years old.

As stated above, the story actually has some heart to it, but Bookworm barely remembers anything about it. The villain: nothing. Side characters: There were side characters? Only the two main characters: Alex Freeman and Princess Kumari have anything resembling substance about them and even then, they are in the shallow end of characterization. The romance is right up there with the romance scenes from soap opera and bad romantic comedies, pointlessly cheesy and sappy.

From what Bookworm can tell, this was also supposed be war story as well, but honestly is so glossed over that Bookworm forgot about it a few times.

Final Verdict: Professionalism is critical to be a successful critic and writer of criticism. One must keep an open mind and even the work being review is not very good. It’s okay to use strong language but don’t get too personal.

This had to be said though…reading this book was not a dream, it was a nightmare.

Two Dream Bubbles out of Five

thecultureworm.blogspot.com

#hero of my dreams #hero of my dreams review #outskirts press #jr pitts #j.r. pitts #hero of my dreams jr pitts #princess #Military Science Fiction #word slinger publicity #tampa florida #vietnam war

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freshleadprovider · 5 years ago

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Why Nearly 20% of Young People Didn’t Read Local Business Reviews in 2019

Every year, BrightLocal produces its flagship report on online reviews, the Local Consumer Review Survey, and in last year’s results we noticed some alarming trends that we felt worth further analysis and discussion. Of particular note are the stories the data tells us about the feelings and behaviors of those in the 18-34 age group (who, for the sake of simplicity, I’ll be referring to as ‘young people’ from here on in – especially as it makes a 37-year-old like me feel a little more youthful). Not only did young people’s responses to the survey often differ wildly from the average responses of other age groups, but at times they contradicted their own responses to earlier questions. Let’s take a deeper dive into the findings of the survey to see what insights we can glean, and what you can use to inspire your marketing strategies for young people. How Often Do Young People Search for Local Businesses Online? With web use steadily growing from year to year, and the prevalence of smartphones significantly contributing to it, one would expect that the frequency of searches for IRL businesses would trend higher as we become more reliant on it as a discovery tool in all parts of life. Not so with young people! In 2019, the percentage of young people who said they never used the internet to find local businesses rose to an astonishing 15% (from just 3% the previous year). As you can see above, decreases were seen across mid-range frequencies (e.g. at least once a week, once a month, 6-10 times per year) but these responses didn’t move over to the left side of the chart, as you’d expect with an increasing reliance on the web. Instead, there’s been a migration of responses from across the board to the far more apathetic response of ‘Never’. I should highlight that this question has been asked the same way, of the same representative group, year on year, and this is the first time we’ve seen a shift like this. (As a comparison, it’s worth noting that although the overall percentage of respondents (all age groups) who said they ‘never’ use the internet to find local businesses crept up from 8% in 2018 to 10% in 2019, the percentage that said they looked daily also leapt from 27% to 33%.) This statistic alone has left us with a lot of questions… Are young people finding other ways to seek out local businesses? Are recommendations from social media taking the place of original research and online reviews? Are young people even actively ‘seeking out’ local businesses? Have the prevalence of influencer marketing and targeted advertising simply turned social media into a brand recommendation delivery machine, to the point that young people don’t, for example, choose to go to a restaurant and look for one, and instead have one in mind from the offset? As they’re less likely to need infrequent services (like plumbing, lawyers, doctors), is the idea of a ‘local business’ reduced to shopping, entertainment and eating out? Having been raised on the internet, are they more likely to instinctively purchase from businesses online rather than shopping locally, as research from Invesp suggests? Or is it simply a question of semantics? Have the meanings of ‘use the internet’ and ‘local businesses’ slightly changed for young people? Do they now perceive ‘use the internet’ to mean using a web browser (rather than an app like Yelp or Google Maps) and ‘local businesses’ to mean ‘businesses in the town where I live’? Has this change in meaning led to this change in results? There’s a lot here to chew on, I’m sure you’ll agree. We’d be fascinated to hear your thoughts and theories in the comments below. Do Young People Read and Trust Online Reviews? Now that we’ve taken a look at young people’s use of the internet to discover local businesses (and come away somewhat shattered and disillusioned), let’s dive into the meat of the survey: their use of, and attitude towards, online reviews. This time around, many of those who had previously read online reviews ‘regularly’ or ‘occasionally’ are instead ‘never’ reading online reviews. In itself, this is a huge surprise (especially considering what you’ll learn a little later in this piece) but put in the context of the previous chart, it makes perfect sense: a big increase in young people not looking for local businesses online must naturally lead to a similar increase in those not reading reviews for local businesses. Still, that’s a bit of an increase in young people who ‘always’ read online reviews for local businesses (50% up to 52%), so the cause isn’t by any means lost. We’re perhaps merely seeing the emergence of two separate groups in this demographic of digital natives: those who have grown up to trust the online world and those who have learnt to be far more wary and distrusting of it. The emergence of discourse around the negative effects of social media and wider online practices on younger generations certainly bears this theory out. Taking this theory further, let’s see what happened when we asked those young people who did say they read online reviews to tell us how much they trusted them. And it’s the same story… a few more young people becoming entirely trusting of online reviews (from 39% to 41%), but a huge jump of 13% saying they ‘don’t trust online reviews at all’. Quite aside from making me scream, red-faced, into the void, “Then why are you reading them?!” this reaffirms my belief that we might be seeing the two diametric experiences that can come from a youth growing up with the web. It’s a broad thing to hypothesize considering the limited data in front of me, but I can’t help but think that, for young people at least, the movement of responses in the above charts from the middle ground to the left and right is indicative of a society in which the gray area is disappearing and online experiences and discourse are trending towards black/white extremes. Sadly, it looks like fake reviews aren’t helping the problem. Here we can see more young people than ever before being confident in spotting fake reviews online and seeing them regularly. One could certainly make the argument that the lack of trust expressed in the previous chart strongly suggests that this is just a very distrusting generation, perhaps battle-hardened by scrapes on social media, and that the number of fake reviews online hasn’t grown significantly, but by pretty much all accounts, fake reviews are indeed growing problem. My hunch is, instead, that young people today are just more web-savvy and aware of the kinds of dodgy online tactics businesses are willing to employ to get your customer. How Much Are Young People Engaging with Online Reviews? As you’ve seen, there’s a consistent trend across many of our survey questions in which responses from young people are starting to skew towards the negative and distrusting. This might paint a picture of apathy, of a youth spent viewing the online world through an increasingly skeptical lens, but interestingly this hasn’t led to a disengagement with online reviews. Rather, the reverse is true. As our survey shows, young people who read online reviews for local businesses read 30% more reviews than the average consumer before trusting a local business, and spend 35% more time reading them than the average consumer. This fits in with the narrative of a digital native with a discerning eye, their bullcrap-detector permanently on. It seems that although some young people take their distrust of online reviews and choose never to engage with them, some go the opposite way and spend more time than any other age group combing through the reams of reviews left by other consumers. How Can Local Businesses React? Whichever way you look at the data above, you can’t deny we’re seeing some fascinating swings in the attitudes of young people. Whether 2019 was just a bad year for trust in, and use of, online reviews (or whether it’s a quirk in the data that will rectify itself next year) remains to be seen, but I for one will certainly be monitoring the perception of this key marketing tactic as the year goes on. But if your local business primarily deals with young people, what can you do to ensure you’re still attracting them in 2020? Try to get a presence on top lists in your local area, as these can dominate the organic results of local-intent searches. Get in the lists of top things to do, the top restaurants, etc. And if you can, make sure the lists are on websites where young people are a prime audience. Get more active on social media, and consider social media advertising on Instagram in particular. Facebook’s trending towards older age groups these days, and Twitter has never been a great place for local businesses to advertise, but Instagram is your holy grail if you can easily sell your service or products on a good image or short video. Use in-store tactics to get your audience to share their visit with you. Encourage the use of a hashtag, run a social media competition, or create an attractive and quirky ‘Instagram wall’ in your store or shop to make it a can’t-miss selfie opportunity. It looks like 2020 might be a bumpy year for young people and reviews, but I hope some of the ideas and theories above help you to weather the storm! The post Why Nearly 20% of Young People Didn’t Read Local Business Reviews in 2019 appeared first on BrightLocal. https://probdm.com/site/NzQ5MA

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