#and different parts of it i conceptualized with different readings in my program

[wetbananapeel]

𝘊𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦 𝘐 | (2023)

Cloth, paper, ink, yarn, string, beads, glass, metal, various crystals, and found objects

[bowditch]

Hi! Do you think there’s any room for Calkins-style story-based learning/encouraging a love for reading in the classroom, or should curriculums be purely focused on the evidence-based phonics instruction?

I'm gonna be honest, I really don't like Lucy Calkins. Her denial of the actual evidence supporting phonics-based reading programs has been incredibly detrimental to educational programs because her influence was so vast. It's only recently that she's recanted that stance or folded some phonics into her recommendations.

The truth is, with a few exceptions for precocious kids who have a natural bent for story-telling and reading, most kids aren't ready to be creative in this specific way when they're also learning to read. Many, many kids love to tell stories or make up stories or scenarios-- very few of them have any kind of recognizable story structure when they're in the 4-8 year old range. Putting that down on paper in a way that supports reading skills is ... way too much for most kids.

I'm on mobile and trying to collect/organize my thoughts, so I'll go through them with numbers to try to coherently cover the things I want to touch on. Keep in mind that I'm not a trained expert-- I'm just a life-long learner who has taught kids to read and worked with learning disabilities and neurodivergent kids, as well as NT kids.

1. Story is one of the first and earliest "academic" concepts it's beneficial to expose kids to. Kids benefit from being read to when they're very small and that benefit continues when they grow. Kids should be read to at their age level, above their age level, and for their interests. You foster a love for story by engaging with stories and the kid together. Even people who are never strong or comfortable readers can enjoy and love stories.

2. The mechanics of reading (phonics primarily, whole word for some kids depending on LDs) have very little to do with story when a kid is first reading. Pairing them often leads, in my experience, to frustration. Learning to read doesn't have to be BORING, but expecting story to "unlock" reading for a kid still working on sounds is...a bit out of order? Some kids "get" reading at some point, something CLICKS, and they find things they love to read. But for most kids, trying to retain "story" from one page to the next while they ALSO do the work of decoding sounds is a LOT.

3. Kids are SO creative, but being creative and having coherent creative output are two different things. Writing things down and reading and telling a story are all using different functions/pathways in the brain and it takes time to link those things. They need to be strong skills to work together. Asking a beginning reader to make up a new sentence about something and write it down is like telling an adult to sit and write the great american novel-- it's daunting. It's why so many kids who CAN verbally tell stories cry over homework that asks them to "describe" something. Kids in the 5-9 age set should almost always be given the option of dictating creative material to someone who can write it down for them, and even then, they need help. Their creativity at that age is a state of play, not usually a structured output. It's sort of like asking them to "demonstrate" creative playground play. A few kids will love to show off, many of them will act confused or self-conscious or freeze up.

4. I think love of story and love of reading are linked. I think they support each other. But driving reading education by using guess words and context and sight words to "unlock" story, or expecting a child's natural love of story to be part of some creative output that supports reading, are things that fail most kids. Early academic education is laying the foundation for all of these skills that should eventually work together. Reading is a skill. Writing, conceptually, is a skill. Physically writing with a pencil is a skill. Being able to tell back a story is a skill. They're all things that should be working alongside each other, but they use different parts of the brain and you can't help a kid make progress on one skill with an entirely different skill they aren't comfortable with yet.

Kids should be surrounded by story. They should get structured, specific sound education for reading. They should get to be creative. But you also have to know what their brains are doing and where they're growing to support that-- you can't ask them to work with tools they don't have yet. Teaching a kid to read and teaching them to love stories are two different things at that stage, and it leads to frustrated, struggling readers to treat them as the same thing.

[theohonohan]

Detailing

I don't really know as much about architectural detailing as I would like. I have a copy of The Architectural Detail by Edward R Ford, but I haven't read it.

For some architects, detailing is everything. The central European idea that "God is in the details", associated with Mies van der Rohe, prioritises precise design and control of details. It's possible to design with a broader brush. Zaha Hadid, for example, did. But the outcome is a set of details, all the same—just self-consciously crude ones. but The tendency among designers as a whole is to agree with Charles Eames when he said “The details are not the details. They make the design.” In concrete terms, the drawing-up of details is a central part of the design process and a crucial mode of communication between the architect and the builder.

Nicholas Grimshaw wrote in 1994 that "there are very few universally admired buildings where the detailing is not superb", implying that great detailing is necessary, if not sufficient, for great architecture.

That much is clear. This is where my knowledge gets a bit patchy. I'm aware of magazines such as AJ Specification and the German DETAIL. Aimed at professionals, these publications reproduce drawings of details from recently completed buildings. Now, I've never seen a group of architecture students gathered around a copy of one of these magazines. There's little or no intersection between the concerns of the DETAIL reader and a typical architecture student. The student is designing at a different scale—larger, vaguer and more conceptual. The reader of DETAIL wants to know about things like cold bridges, vapour barriers, breather paper, intumescent coatings, insulation, drips and fixings. Still, I'm a bit puzzled that architectural students don't seem to appreciate or to aspire to the rigorous and specific practice of detailing, as celebrated by these magazines. Maybe they just didn't disclose this enthusiasm to me.

One of Le Corbusier's books was called Precisions, which is the French word for "specifications". It's an architect's job to select building materials, more or less from a menu, so it would seem natural to consume detail drawings in the same way one might browse a recipe book. Another parallel might be between browsing AJ Specification and reading literary prose or poetry and appreciating what the author is doing "at the sentence level".

Far from being abstract, the details reproduced in AJ Specification and DETAIL are completely concrete and particular. The work of discerning principles that can be applied on another project is left up to the reader. This work of abstraction is complicated by the three-dimensionality and relative intricacy of construction. At least, it's a more complex problem than is encountered in garment design in fashion. There can be a lot going on in a detail, and (it seems to me) a certain amount of brinkmanship—never over-insulating, for example.

Detailing shares with some forms of engineering the goal of an economy of means. In computer science, Edsger Dijkstra claimed that "an efficient program is an exercise in logical brinkmanship."

His contemporary CAR Hoare wrote:

There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.

Not really having access to the world of the professionals who read AJ Specification or DETAIL, I wonder whether this observation about complexity applies there. The details that are chosen for publication ideally go beyond mere best practices: they are clever, presumably, but are they clever in a simple way or clever in a complex way?

Hoare also made the following pronouncement:

The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich find most hard to pay.

Does this apply to architecture, as a profession? Innovative, fancy and expensive details are presumably more likely to fail. I understand that construction, like computer science, has inexorably become more complex. With ecological concerns that by now could not be more urgent, we now consider a building which uses fewer resources as a better building. I suppose there is often an expensive path to low-energy buildings, and an affordable one. An architect can specify an exorbitantly expensive self-contained curtain-wall system made in some factory, or they can choose the path of "utmost simplicity" and try to be more conscious not just of u-values but of the cost of complex building technologies and programmes. It's not so easy to make this choice if the client wants a standard office block, with the prestigious finishes everyone else has got used to.

I don't know why professional architects who read AJ Specification or DETAIL choose to examine and appraise specific details rather than discuss the underlying principles that make detail design possible. It's understanding the latter that confers the ability to actually design a new detail, rather than just copying what everyone else is doing. I guess I may never find out why these magazines exist in their current form. Perhaps it is something to do with the difficulties of describing three-dimensional structures in words, the difficulties of abstracting and generalizing about concrete arrangements of building materials. Or maybe it's just about the connoisseur's pleasure in sampling a fine detail, in the same way that someone might sample wine, cheese, or poetry.

[thegiandiediaries]

On School & Homeschooling

Two posts in one day?! Wow!

Since my last post was extremely long I decided to do a separate post discussing where I'm at with schooling. If you're interested in learning about where I'm at with Ballet, I would recommend reading "Holiday Bootcamp".

Over the summer I took two classes, Physics I (Calculus based) and Calculus I. For context, I had already taken both of those classes previously at a different college through an online program. I got a D in Physics previously but was "passed" with a C by my teacher. And in calculus, I got a B but definitely with the help of Symbolab, Mathway, and the likes at times when I shouldn't have used them.

I knew that if I was as serious about studying Physics as I felt, I would need to revisit those topics because I didn't truly pass either of them. So, I decided to take them at my current college during the summer since it would go faster and I already was somewhat familiar with the topics. How did I do? I got a D in Calculus and a B in Physics. Yeah...

At first, I chalked it up to the fact that I was taking these two demanding classes while also working two part-time jobs and trying to juggle ballet and cello classes as well as a randomly (and unexpectedly) active social life.

I wrote it off and moved on. For the Fall, I registered for Physics II, College Algebra, Pre-Calculus, and Gateway to Physics (a Physics elective). I chose to take Algebra and Pre-calc because even though I mentally wrote off my grades, I still felt like something was missing in my knowledge and that if I could just figure out what it was, I could stop struggling so much.

By the midpoint of the semester, I was so far behind in the work and they assigned so much of it, I couldn't keep up! A deeper issue was exposed. I watched a youtube video by this YouTuber named Amy and she spoke about being seen as smart and good at math (took AP Calc BC in 10th grade, was Valedictorian, went to Caltech) and mentioned having had a tutor for a good part of K12. For some reason this was mind blowing and eye opening. I knew, conceptually, that tutors weren't just for little kids and those who struggled with a particular subject but this provided proof, I guess.

That same day, I went out and found some tutors to try. I ended up working with this woman named Sofia. She was a kind Brazilian who I zoomed with for 2 months and she opened my eyes to a few key things:

I'm not college ready in math

How to actually study math

She never said to me "You're at an x grade level" or anything of the sort, but she assessed my knowledge level after working with me on some of my algebra and pre-calculus assignments and based off the starting point, it was definitely pre-college level. Which is okay and made total sense when I stopped and actually thought about it. My struggles in math started long before I ever set foot on a college campus, so it makes sense that my level of understanding is back at that point.

After realizing this, I looked at the mountain of schoolwork piling up in those two classes and decided to withdraw. I asked her before hand if she thought it was a good idea and would be willing to teach me what I needed to know. She agreed and up until a few days ago we met 2-3 times a week consistently. She's on a break for the next month and while she's doing that, I am utilizing the 2nd key thing I learned from her: how to actually study math.

The secret? Do it, don't just read about it. Coming from someone who spent every spare minute as a kid nose deep in a book, I am used to reading something and gaining understanding from that. But math and science? That is not how it works and I think this core idea is something that has tripped me up for so long. That and the fact that while my mathematical skills stayed rather stagnant, the work I was receiving didn't and so anytime I tried to solve problems I was so out of my depth, I would turn to the textbook to read about how to solve them but still lack the foundational skills necessary to carry out problem solving independently. This cycle I was unknowingly in kept me busy and working hard, but I was like a hamster on a wheel. I wasn't making any real or tangible progress but I was burning a lot of energy.

"Doing it" is as simple as watching a youtube video (such as Professor Leonard's) and listening as they explain how (and why) to do something, then following along and solving the problems given. Sofia always asked me to pause the video and solve it first, then play and watch them walk through how to solve it. Another thing is to check your answers immediately after solving a problem. She would assign a worksheet on a topic she explained during our session and then I would need to solve them, check my answer, if I was right do the next problem and if I was wrong, work out why, redo the problem and then move on making sure to integrate that understanding I just gained into how I approached future problems.

It's surprisingly that simple! The important bits are being consistent with doing it, understanding what you're doing and why (textbook and youtube can help if you don't have a tutor), and starting at your current knowledge level.

Another thing Sofia helped me realize is that I was missing a math pre-requisite in Physics II and should work on getting taken out of the class. I did and it was a long and stressful process, but ultimately the Registrar's office removed me from the class!

Now, I'm just taking my Physics elective, but I looked at my graduation plan and I'm still on track to graduate in 2026, so long as I do what I need to do with my self studying and am prepared to resume major classes in the Summer (2024).

Which means that I have a lot to learn. My skill level is currently in between beginner and intermediate algebra. I was super embarrassed about it at first, but now I'm just excited. I know what the problem is! I feel like I could shout it from the rooftops! I was getting very discouraged in my math/physics study but trying my best to smile and keep pushing. But discovering this has lifted a mental load off. I'm not the problem. It's not that I'm not capable, it's that I'm not ready. And that's okay. I can get ready!

So, how am I getting ready? By homeschooling myself! At first, I was definitely like "I can't homeschool myself! I'm not 15 anymore!" but then I thought about it and decided I could lol. I make the rules. And I've ruled that I will homeschool myself for the next ~8 months. My plan is to work through Chapters 1-3 of Swokowski and Cole's Algebra and Trigonometry with Analytic Geometry as well as Professor Leonard's Intermediate Algebra course in November & December. I bought a book called Schaum's Outline of Basic Mathematics with Applications to Science and Technology which I am going to use to do additional practice problems in (outside of the textbook and videos). In Physics, I bought a high school algebra-based physics textbook called Cutnell & Johnson Physics (5 ed). My goal is to work through the first few chapters (between 3 and 7 chapters) of this text. I also plan on going through Dan Fullerton's videos in conjunction!

I was homeschooled for some of middle and high school and I definitely miss it. I have busy days ahead, but I'm super excited!

Bye for now!

Gia

[mez-rperez]

New Project: SpaceX, STEM education, and Data Visualization

Data Visualization Fellowship Week 1

This week marked the beginning of working with the University of Michigan Library as part of their Data Visualization Fellowship. Our cohort is made up of students from all over the university, mostly working on different self-directed projects. I'm excited to get started!

My project is something that I started a while back and am now trying to take the time to work on as part of my dissertation research. For this project, my aim is to visualize the impact of SpaceX on STEM education in the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas, where their launch site is located. The motivation for this project is to see if (and how) the promises of economic development and technological innovation are holding true in any way.

I'm starting out with a dataset of job postings that I pulled from their website, and am now working on ways to visualize this data and tell a story with it. Week by week, I will be posting a blog post as an update on how this project is going and what I'm hoping to accomplish within the next week.

Next week's goal: Expanding the dataset and defining a heuristic for a "STEM job"

After talking with the mentors for this program, I've decided two things need to be done pretty immediately: 1) I need to operationalize (somehow) what a "STEM job" is so that I can use it to categorize the job postings, and then 2) apply that definition to an expanded dataset. Currently, I have a snapshot of job data from a random day in May of last year when I first conceptualized this project. What I need is to expand that by looking at multiple years, starting probably around 2014 (when they broke ground in Texas). I'm still working out what this will look like, but by next week I intend to have at least this and my working definition of a STEM job.

Anyway, let me know if you have any questions or suggestions on the project. Thanks for reading!

[ohnoitstbskyen]

I've recently seen some posts saying that arguing against AI art would lead to corporations cracking down on fanart and fanfiction. I've had this thought floating around in my brain ever since. Part of me wants to dismiss it, since I feel it isn't anywhere near the same. AI can't argue to have been inspired and to have added their own little heart into a piece, but you can't exactly define that in law. Most art is also conceptually not original. However, AI is assured to be using a combination of direct sample, just from too many sources. So... I don't know. I feel you are very well informed in these kind of matters and would like to hear your opinion.

There's a simple distinction there, which is that "AI art" algorithms are not people. They're not even AI, there is no artificial intelligence happening here. They are machine learning algorithms, not inherently different in nature to the ones serving you "ads relevant to your interests" on various websites right now.

"AI art" cannot be said to be creative because those machine learning algorithms are not people. People are creative. Sentient, sapient, thinking minds are creative. Machines are not. They simply execute whatever algorithm we've put in their black box.

The argument "AI" art enthusiasts very passionately try to make is that their prompts are creative, that the specific line of words they input into the machine which create the output, that is creative, that is transformative. And idk, maybe there's a court case to be fought over that, but to me that reads like saying if you manually input a Minecraft seed, you now deserve creative credit and copyright over the world that it generates, because your prompt is the generative element, not the underlying technology actually executing the output. Microsoft might have some expensive legal opinions about that idea.

The allegory I like to use is this: Imagine that you can't do a backflip. Then, someone sells you a robot which does backflips at the press of a button. Would you say that because you pressed the button that caused the backflip to happen, that means you have now done a backflip?

"I caused a backflip to exist, therefore I performed it!"?

I won't argue that it can be a tricky business to optimize an input for the art machine such that it produces a desired output, but the scope of what the machine can output is NOT defined by the person doing the input, but by the data-set that the machine has available to draw upon. You can tell an "AI art" program to produce "steampunk" artwork all you want, but if the machine doesn't have a big library of steampunk artwork in its database to draw upon, it will never produce steampunk outputs.

You can only prompt the machine to replicate that which has already been fed to it.

Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein and birthed the modern genre of science fiction because she had been disturbed by hearing stories about new experiments to stimulate dead tissue with electricity and seemingly restore it to life. To write it, she drew upon inspiration from everything from gothic horror to biblical themes to famous explorer's diaries. Mary Shelley created Frankenstein by synthesizing the accumulated experience of a lived life.

A machine learning algorithm could only ever create Frankenstein if you had already fed Frankenstein by Mary Shelley into its database.

[dragonwysper]

So I think I am gonna torture myself by creating an AMV for this song. I have been up for the past five and a half hours (as of 9 am) working on a rough conceptual outline for this.

I'm also gonna post this in its WIP state, because I'm eepy and I also want y'all's input. I'm a little unsure on where to go from what I have so far and how to structure my very loose ideas for the rest.

Page break because this is really fucking long.

So the song is divided into ten main parts: the intro¹, a dialogue line², verse 1 (4 lines)³, chorus 1 (4 repeated lines, 4 different alternating repeated lines)⁴, verse 2 (5 lines)⁵, chorus 2 (4 lines, 8 lines)⁶, a bridge (3 distinct segments)⁷, verse 3 (4 lines)⁸, chorus 3 (4 lines, 8 lines)⁹, and the outro¹⁰.

I'm gonna write out my notes here, but, warning, they will be very simple, very brief, and highly specific to the lore of one of my character projects. I have a few bonus details at the bottom that might provide some context, but I don't know how understandable any of them are. I still wanna share this though, so y'all get to see it. I'll draw up a rough storyboard soon.

1: INTRO

Title card stuff (song credits, programs used, maybe my socials, etc). Exterior (only during beginning of credits) and interior shots of the base, probably with shots of the main gang playing a board game. Gravel gets up to find an Uno deck. If I go this route, I must show it holding the deck of cards while walking out into the hallway. Cut here.

2: DIALOGUE LINE

" Liberty this is Freedom. Do you read me?"

Fed speaking into a radio (lipsync).

Note: I can't make out what's said here. None of the lyric transcriptions I found had it. I am. A little upset.

Note #2: A FRIEND FIGURED IT OUT !!!

2.5

Feds surrounding the base (a little far off, behind and a little above. Mostly shapes in the shadows).

3: VERSE 1

"Circling overhead as the shadow hits the ground."

Upwards shot of the building and some surveillance drones hovering above.

"Renegade insurgents surround the compound."

Feds closing in (shot right up at one's face. Pointing right). Cut and slight slow zoom to door.

"Murderous intentions, a mission of ill reprieve."

Fed steps through the doorway. Cut to staircase. Cut back to a close up of his face (expression hardens).

"Complex situation, undone by evil deeds."

Cut to fed stepping onto the bottom few steps. Looks up and sees Gravel.

3.5

Fed quickly raises his gun. Others behind him also ready themselves.

4: CHORUS 1

"Don't take him alive."

Lipsync of lyrics (by main fed to his lackeys) (3/4 side, facing right).

"Don't take him alive."

Gravel tenses up (3/4 front from slightly below, facing left).

"Don't take him alive."

Gun raised. Fed begins advancing (face/gun close-up, directly to the side, facing right). Cuts to Gravel slowly backing up (bottom of shot is just below torso, directly to the side, facing left).

"Don't take him alive."

Gravel hits the wall (pan as if cameraman was standing still from their point previously. Now shot is a more frontal view of Gravel. Tip of the fed's gun comes into view on the left side). Gravel looks down/to its left side anxiously, sees button. It sneers.

Cut to close up of Gravel's hand (left side). It forms a fist and slams the button hard.

"Paralyzed."

Gravel transforms into its VP form and spreads its wings.

"Kill zone red, shoot the eye."

Cut to the rest of the gang in a room. Vincenc is to the side tinkering with some small machinery; Seo-Joon is in a chair researching; Asilia, Xiomara, and Zashil are on the floor playing a board game. All shoot up as they feel their VP powers kick on.

"Paralyzed."

Xiomara and Asilia usher Zashil to a small room in the back. Meanwhile, Seo-Joon heads for a computer screen to the side to check the cameras. Xiomara and Asilia crowd around to look. Cuts to camera view. Gravel is beating the shit out of the feds, but is losing. It runs.

"Kill zone red, shoot the eye."

Vincenc enters a dim storage room (shot from just outside the doorway, Vincenc facing right). He picks up some protective gear from the right side and a bomb from just next to the view (shot is stationary, from a shelf facing just right of the doorway and up enough to see Vincenc's face).

4.5

Sneaking, scheming, etc. View of Asilia and Xiomara staring at the cameras with concern. Cut to Seo-Joon with a determined expression.

Asilia and Xiomara travel together, peeking around corners. Cut to shot from next to the abandoned Uno deck (pointing up and at the two). Cut to Vincenc placing and rigging bombs of various kinds around the base (far off shot, maybe a pan through a wall from previous shot. Slows briefly to show Vincenc and then continues. Blacks out at next wall).

Pan up onto Zashil (facing left) sitting behind some furniture. He's anxious and knows he should stay put, but really wants to help. He stands. Cut to him exiting the doorway. Pan to another hallway (right at a corner). Gravel turns the corner, shaken, somewhat frantic, speedwalking through (frontal shot, zoom slightly into face).

5: VERSE 2 ¹

"A killing ground for tyrants. Get down on your knees."

Cut to same shot but of the main fed, storming through the halls. He's bruised, disheveled, and pissed.

"A gun in your mouth will fill all your needs."

"Brainwashed solutions, torture and disease."

"Final retribution for everyone to see."

6: CHORUS 2 ²

"Don't take him alive."

"Don't take him alive."

"Don't take him alive."

"Don't take him alive."

"Paralyzed."

"Kill zone red, shoot the eye."

"Paralyzed."

"Kill zone red, shoot the eye."

"Paralyzed."

"Kill zone red, shoot the eye."

"Paralyzed."

"Kill zone red, shoot the eye."

7: BRIDGE ³

8: VERSE 3 ⁴

"Captivate, captivate."

"Captivate, captivate."

"Obliterate, obliterate."

"Incinerate, incinerate."

9: CHORUS 3 ⁵

"Don't take him alive."

"Don't take him alive."

"Don't take him alive."

"Don't take him alive."

"Paralyzed."

"Kill zone red, shoot the eye."

"Paralyzed."

"Kill zone red, shoot the eye."

"Paralyzed."

"Kill zone red, shoot the eye."

"Paralyzed."

"Kill zone red, shoot the eye."

10: OUTRO ⁶

Extra scattered notes for potential scenes:

¹ thinking somewhere around here, Zashil runs out in front of the feds, and they try to shoot him. Asilia sees this, runs over, flashbangs the feds, grabs Zashil, and books it.

² the feds in all their chaos step on a bomb of some kind (smoke or explosive, not sure yet). Xiomara should absolutely create a massive fireball and just beat the shit out of them. Seo-Joon probably helps fan the flames.

³ action shit and transitional scenes. Feds probably beat the shit out of the gang, and they have to fall back to the portal room (the thing they're trying to defend). Shenanigans ensue.

⁴ thinking this should be like the climax of the fight. Everybody's pissed and desperate and fighting with everything they've got. Lots and lots of action here. Anyway, the VP gang turns the tides around the last verse, and they know it.

⁵ this one I think would be cool if it was like a similar scene to Chorus 1. Gravel says, "Don't take him alive," and they advance on the last dude, who should probably be the OG main fed. They threaten him, probably try to kill him, he runs and escapes into the night.

⁶ probably the gang just kinda looking out into the streets.

Bonus context:

This is a super dystopian, cyberpunk type thing. There's like this group of people who have certain powers, which are 'activated' via a specific sound frequency that kinda wakes up the part of their brain that deals with that power. This is easiest to do in the Virtual Plane (name is still in the works), which is sort of an alternate reality, but in an empty world that kindof automatically emits this frequency. The people who found this place built a bunch of stuff for folks to exist and chill. It takes a fuckton of energy to run though, so it's not open too often. The government doesn't really know anything, but they've heard rumors of people developing powers and have like seen some shit to suggest that's true, so they're looking into it. They do not like it, because it gives power to anarchists (who make up most of the folks in this superpowered in-group, since it's all a very well-kept secret). It's a whole thing. The concept in this AMV is that the feds tracked down one of the portals and are doing a raid to figure out what's going on, and also probably destroy anything that enables folks' superpowers.

As for the gang itself, I've posted drawings of them before. They're very strongly based on my friends, especially my internet found family. They are also in some ways based on different aspects of myself, especially at different times in my life. They're all still in progress, but I love them a lot. Anyway, their powers and such are as follows:

Gravel (18, it/its) has physical enhancements, and essentially has an alternate form. Vincenc (19, he/him) has electricity powers. Asilia (22, she/her) has light powers. Seo-Joon (26, he/him) has wind/air powers. Xiomara (20, she/they) has fire powers. And Zashil (13, he/him) levitates.

I am going to test something. Hold on.

[grey-sorcery]

Suggested Reading

The Subtle Body

Energetic Senses

Visualization

Conceptualization Vs. Visualization

What is the Wellsource?

The Well-Source is the central energy point that maintains the stability of the subtle body. It is a place of seemingly infinite energy. This energy is unprogrammed and in its purest form. This is the place in the body that is potentially connected to one’s higher power, whatever that may be.

This place is the utmost sacred space for a witch. It is generally a good practice to keep it protected and secret, as keeping it open risks your energy being drained out by energetic vampires (Not necessarily other witches, a lot of non-witches do this as well.) While the Wellsource is seemingly infinite, it does have a glass ceiling in terms of the rate that energy can be drawn from it. When this ceiling is hit, your subtle body will react.

To see my post about the basics of energy work, click here

Energy work and Spoons

 A lot of practitioners are under the impression that energy work requires spoons. This is likely because they never draw energy directly from their Wellsource. Furthermore, using visualization can be very taxing on the mind. This being said, if a practitioner can astral project and draw from their Wellsource without visualization, then they do not even need to move their body. They do not need to imagine what they are doing. It will come as naturally as breathing. Performing energy work in such a manner will require zero spoons. Even our disabled and/or bedridden witches will be able to perform it with ease. 

How do I find my Wellsource?

To find your Wellsource, sit alone in a quiet place that isn’t too bright and isn’t too dark. Close your eyes and take to a comfortable breathing pattern, one that doesn’t take too much concentration. Sit up straight and place your hands comfortably in your lap. Allow your mind to wander in whichever direction it likes, but don’t give any of the thoughts your attention. Eventually the river that is your intelligent mind will become distant. A void of nothingness will slowly wrap its hollow embrace around you.

Once floating in the void, listen for your heartbeat.This will slowly bring you out of the void and back into your body. Once back into your body, use your energetic awareness, find the form of your subtle body. The Subtle body is the mitochondria of the subtle body. Pay attention to where energy is flooding into the subtle body from within. This point naturally wants to exist in the subtle body near the center of the chest cavity; however, it will move when trauma is experienced. It will move into the part of the body that you wished to protect during that trauma. However, as healing starts to happen, it will gradually start to drift into the chest again. Once you’ve found it, take some breaths and do whatever you need to do to ground yourself.

Whenever you’re feeling drained, alone, scared, move to this place and drink of its nectar slowly.

How do I use the Wellsource?

Become aware of your subtle body and the position of the Wellsource via energetic awareness.

Drawing from it without disrupting its flow into the subtle body can take some practice, but it is possible. It works a lot like siphoning a liquid. Create negative energetic pressure near it. It will create a separate stream into that negative space. 

Pull that stream into the conduits that connect your energetic points. Its typically easiest to start by letting flow into the dominant hand and out of the palm. However, once familiar with the process you can release it from any point in the subtle body.

Once it is released from the confines of the network within the physical body, it can be used to create any energetic construct or spell you can imagine. 

Energetic signatures

Drawing from your Wellsource puts a subtle energetic signature. Each Wellsource has slight differences in frequency. This being said, it is very accepting of programming. This can be done through running that energy through your mind, or by controlling which energy points it is run through directly. Further, you can also use gestures to program the energy. Regardless of how it's programmed it will still have that minute signature. A vast majority of the time this is inconsequential. However, when using this energy in order to curse a witch who is familiar with relatively advanced energy work, it is possible to use the signature as a taglock if it can be anchored. 

Uses in Gesture Magic

After years of research and discussions with many practitioners from a large variety of different practices and cultures, I have compiled a list of properties and correspondences for energetic points and movements of the physical and subtle bodies. This includes how energy is moved throughout the subtle body as well as how the physical body moves in tandem. I will be posting a complete guide to my findings in an article on gesture magic. But to cover some of the basics:

Making contact between two different parts of the body &/or physical body will combine the energetic properties associated with those points..

Index fingers represent knowledge, information, and understanding

Thumbs represent power, strength, and control

Middle fingers represent confidence, balance, and lust

Ring fingers represent life force, passion, and love

Little fingers represent Intent, focus, and spells/hexes/enchantment 

The palms represent release, control, creation, and absorption

The navel represents intuition, fate, and faith

Some direction correspondences/properties include:

Up represents spirit, connect, and luminosity

Down represents grounding, release, centering

Left represents take, receive, and transmutation

Right represents giving, gift, and creation

Forward represents pushing and progression 

Backwards represents Pulling, and regression

Inwards represents the shadow, divinity, and density

Outwards represents casting, the physical, and projection

Years ago, @my-dragoneyes asked in the comments on my old post: “How do you prevent malice from entering the Wellsource and what are the risks?”

My response was:

“The Wellsource is like an arroyo, a dried up river bed that fills with water when it rains and flows as it once did. Since that energy isn’t programmed, when you put a programmed energy into it, it will steadily pour back out when it rains. Like litter in an arroyo. Eventually it will be pure again but it takes time. And that malice, though diluted, will gradually affect your emotional state.

The only way to let malice or hatred into your Well-Source is when it is open. Which can only be done consciously, or when experiencing extreme emotion. It is very difficult to control your emotional self during these moments. Take a traumatic experience, for example. If someone just experienced trauma, it's near impossible to not pollute the Well-Source. However, if you’re tapping into it consciously, you can.”

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[copperbadge]

Heya Sam! Fandom and databases - I must preface, this may be dispiriting for writers struggling for visibility. Showing hits on AO3 does stress me out (they can be turned invisible, fyi). However! Spotted an outlier with a whopping 17% kudos / hit rate. At 'only' 144 hits. Whoa?! Yuletide exchanges typically 6 to 10%. If any nerds want to automate this? Easier to identify This Story Is Beloved, Actually; and on other end, This Hidden Gem Needs a Better Header, Series, Collection.

Yeah, it's nice AO3 is so flexible that you can really turn any given stat invisible if you can skin it right. I know people who get really unsettled by kudos, too.

I think this debate will probably go on forever (in part because while we have "data", what we do not have is "good verified data"): whether hits, kudos, hit-kudo ratio, comments, or some other form of stat are good indicators of a fic's quality, and what the "proper" sorting method is.

Not everyone who loves a fic leaves kudos or comments, and not every hit is a valid one, and I think the margins on those are significant enough to spoil the data. A lot of times hits are "returns" from people who've read the fic before. Fics that are older than Ao3 but now being archived there won't have many stats regardless of quality (I run into this a bunch with some of my fics -- "Why doesn't this have more kudos if it's ten years old?" Well, it's only been on the site for ten months) and may show up either very recently or far in the past depending on how the author chose to date it.

So I find kudos and comment counts kind of irrelevant in terms of finding good fic, and hit count is mainly good for indicating "Whether or not this fic is GOOD, it is likely to be popular." I think with the kudo-hit ratio you still run into significant data problems because you can only kudo once but you can hit a million times. And a lot of people don't kudo.

I rarely sort by any of the above, tbh. I'm very picky about what data I see (I want to see as much as possible and triage it myself) which makes me really good at my job and means I tend to see things other people don't, but also takes more effort and time. Like, I can't deal with the idea of asking for information from Alexa or Echo or whatever they're calling them now; you're just telling the program to google the question and pick an answer and then not give you the source of that answer. No thank you.

Generally when I'm looking for fanfic in a new fandom, I just sort by date and go through them for stuff that looks interesting. You can tell enough by tags and summaries to know what to skip, and while you hit a lot of duds the back-button isn't hard to find and sometimes you find a gem. When I find someone I like, I read through their back-catalogue and/or subscribe. If I'm looking for new fanfic in a fandom I'm already familiar with, I find the "updating bumps the story to the top" function somewhat irritating, so I just turn the tag I'm interested in into an RSS feed, which means every new fanfic gets fed to a reader I can access when I have time. If it's a WIP that looks interesting, I subscribe to keep up to date on it.

This is also a great indicator of when a ship or character tag is full of either garbage or stuff you don't personally want to read, because in a given day you can review 10-50 fanfics and see trends. There are ships I've followed in the past where I came to the eventual understanding that the writers for that ship just...weren't very good on the whole. And while I love me some Steve/Tony and thought we had some really great writers, eventually it became about 80% divorce fics after Civil War, and I don't follow a ship in order to see the people in it divorcing each other. Even before that the proportion of Steve/Tony-as-Peter's-dads, which is fine conceptually or whatever but which I personally dislike tremendously, was pushing me away from it. (It may be totally different now, I left the tag like....three, four years ago.)

So I mean, one could pretty easily create some kind of widget that would produce automated kudo-hit ratios for the fics in a given tag, but I wouldn't care to use it. I'd rather just throw everything in a bucket and go through it myself. But for people who don't have the time, energy, or desire for that, at least AO3 gives them a lot of options to suit their preferences!

[girl-in-the-library]

So I was just thinking about how I conceptualize media. I had read a post on here that had a sentence that basically boiled down to: most people, even those who are terminally online, haven’t read a fanfiction. And it made me realize that those of us in fandom consume media in a very unique way, and in a way that makes it difficult to conceptualize consuming media in a DIFFERENT way.

And I’m not inherently talking about shipping here, though yes, shipping is a big part of it. But the way fandom consumes a person and the mindspace it takes up. And I’m not talking about a hyperfixation either, even though various media properties can and often are hyperfixations by those of us with ADHD, autism, and other neuro-atypical comorbitities.

For example, here is a story about how I became friends with a girl in my Masters program:

We had been talking casually in classes. I was very clearly, unambiguously, a nerdy person - I wore Pokemon suspenders and had various nerdy keychains on my keys, among other things. My new friend had told me that she was, at the time, trying to hide her nerdiness and “be normal.” One day, after a night class, she offered me a ride home, because I lived out in the suburbs and would have had to take an hour long train ride to get back. In the car, we were talking about what we had done over spring break, and I mentioned that I started playing Persona 5. She told me that she was probably going to play that game, as she liked Persona 4 when she had played it.

My first question for her was, “Who do you ship?”

She likes to joke that I immediately clocked her as a “fujo weeb” who shipped SouYo, but at the time I asked the question, I asked it because there was no consideration in my mind that you can play that game and come out not shipping, regardless of what the ship was.

For all I knew, she didn’t care about shipping at all. For all I knew, she played the game for gameplay’s sake exclusively - loving the battles and soundtrack, etc. For all I knew, she played the game, enjoyed it, and that was it. It may not have taken up any more space in her mind besides being a game she played and enjoyed.

It was my assumption that she was involved in fandom. I mentioned the Bad Bad Bathhouse, and yes, she knew what I was talking about, but if I had actually thought about it, that was an unlikely scenario.

We are on the Fandom Website here on tumblr. There are subsections of Fandom Twitter and Fanom Reddit...but some of the things we do are considered strange to most people as they experience media.

My sister and I will watch an anime together, or we’ll both play a game - and we’ll both enjoy it. But then she’ll be done, or maybe she’ll watch a YouTube video about a show theory or something. Whereas I’ll dive into the discussion online, look up fanfiction and art of my favorite characters, and, even if I don’t /get involved/ with the community with my own contributions, it’ll be a part of my life for a lot longer than it is a part of my sister’s life.

One example: Undertale. I would not consider myself in the Undertale fandom. I adored the game, I am and will continue to play Deltarune as it comes out, and I enjoy memes, art, and even occasionally will purchase merch, if I really like it. I talk about it with friends, or strangers, even. I reblog meta on tumblr. But I don’t contribute to the fandom via my own meta, memes, or fanfic...therefore, I enjoy Undertale fandom, but I am not /in/ Undertale fandom. My sister played Undertale, told me she liked it, and that was it. She might play Deltarune when it is all finally released. But it was just a game she enjoyed, and that was that.

Even when my sister is obsessive about something, she never involves herself in a fandom way. She has played hundreds of hours of Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing. But she doesn’t even go online to find patterns, and I’m not even sure she talks to her villagers in either...she mostly just fishes for hours on end. The one game I would consider her to be really obsessed with is the original Luigi’s Mansion. She has played and beaten that game tens of times. She played until she got literally the highest possible score. She tried to speedrun the game (she is not a speedrunner, and I’m not sure she has even heard of speedrunning as a thing). She plays until she gets her favorite portraits of all the ghosts in one playthrough. She would play every year on Thanksgiving until we no longer had our Gamecube...then our Wii.

My sister is OBSESSED with Luigi’s Mansion. But that’s it. She doesn’t look up lore. She doesn’t talk with other fans (besides me and maybe one of her friends). She doesn’t talk meta, or game strats, or buy fanart or even look at fanart on the internet. She just plays the game.

And on some level, that’s mind-boggling to me. Of course there are things I enjoy that I DON’T get involved in the fandom for at all - one example is the Paper Mario games, or even one of my current favorite animes “My Next Life as a Villianess: All Routes Lead to Doom.” I’m not involved in the fandoms for those at all, but I also wouldn’t say I’m obsessed with them in the way that my sister is obsessed with Luigi’s Mansion. When I’m as interested in something like my sister is with Luigi’s Mansion, I dive DEEP. I get into fanfiction, fanart, merch, lore, meta, discussions, debates, shipping. And even though I don’t do any of that for, say, My Next Life as a Villianess...I STILL have my ships for that show, and I STILL look at merch sometimes. I will talk to people about it, I will read the occasional meta. I don’t really seek it out, but I am happy to enjoy what I find. And that’s me when I’m NOT involved.

I don’t really know where I’m going with this post. Just that, I suppose, some people can enjoy things without making any of it a facet of their personality.

TL;DR - fandom is a very unique way of interacting with media, and I don’t think a lot of us understand exactly how “weird” it is.

[piratesexmachine420]

#incredibly fucked up#however#maybe I *would* consider brainfuck low level#conceptually it's about as close as anyone can get to programming on a turing machine#and for a hardware implementation it seems relatively easy to make a one-to-one conversion#<- largely inexperienced on all fronts of what she's saying so yknow take all that with a big grain of salt

Okay first before I respond, I'd like to share a much better-written essay on basically the same topic:

Reading that (↑) is what got me on this path of thinking in the first place. Also, I'd like to say explicitly that I'm not trying to be snobby or dismissive wrt to what you said, in case I didn't control my tone properly. Just trying to have a conversation, and I have a lot of thoughts! :)

Anyways, back to what you said: it's subjective, right? "High-level" and "low-level" are not rigidly defined terms--nor for that matter is "abstract".

We both, I'm sure, agree that BF is minimal--the formal specification is short, the list of instructions is short, the architectural requirements are short and easily mapped onto most machine languages. This is, of course, the point. Brainfuck was designed to be as easy to compile as possible--on the machines of then and today.

But I'd still argue that it's "abstract" -- in the sense that while it's easy to translate between BF and assembly/machine code, there's nothing in BF that enforces how this should be done.

That, in my mind, is the difference between a "low-level" and a "high-level" language: high level languages leave the implementation stack (that is, the entire chain from compiler/assembler to linker to OS to firmware to CPU to individual logic gates) room to interpret the action(s) you request; low level languages leave little to no room for such interpretation.

For example, take the '>' (increment data pointer) command. How might we translate this to a machine instruction? If our compilation target is an 8086-based computer, it would make sense to use register DX as our data pointer, and to increment it with INC DX (0x42). We don't have to, though--and this is the important part--we could just as easily use a different register for the data pointer, or even store it in main memory; we could increment DX with ADD DX, 1 (0x8201); we could increment DX by any other nonzero integer (and leave empty padding between cells, or simply use a different addressing mode for memory access); we could use an 8087 FPU instead of the onboard ALU to increment the data pointer; we could use a table in memory to fetch the new data pointer value (C equivalent: data_ptr = inc_data_ptr[data_ptr]); we could decrement the data pointer instead of incrementing, and vice versa for '<'; we could do any number of things!

Things are made further complicated by... other architectures. BF is portable, after all! Maybe our target architecture doesn't have registers. Now it's even less obvious where we should put the data pointer! Or maybe we're targeting a transport-triggered architecture. Which execution unit(s) should we use to implement our data pointer? Do we have a hardware data pointer? Do we have registers? These questions don't have clear-cut answers!

Other questions we'll have to answer range from "how big is a cell, anyway?" (is it a byte? a halfword? a word? a doubleword? a float?) to "what kind of datatype are we even doing math on here?" (is it a binary 2s-complement integer? 1s-complement? tagged int? float? BCD? is our machine even binary-based? [maybe we're in the Soviet Union in the late 70s and trying to implement BF on a Setun computer with a balanced ternary number system!]) to "how should we handle overflows?" (ignore? crash? something else?) to "what does our runtime look like?" (e.g. how do we return control to the OS? do we have to relinquish it willingly? do we have to initialize memory ourselves? do we have to initialize registers ourselves?) and beyond.

In other words, while there may often be an idiomatic translation, there is never a "correct" translation. BF only specifies is that there is a data pointer, and that '>' will make it point to the "next" cell.

Compare that, then, to a language I would consider "actually low-level": z80 assembly. If I give a z80 assembler the instruction INC HL, it will only ever emit the machine instruction "0x23", and the z80 processor, upon fetching and decoding this instruction, will only ever take the value in the HL register, increment it in the ALU, and put it back in the HL register.

Furthermore, the HL register is real--you can put a z80 CPU under a microscope and look at it, unlike x64 registers (which are merely abstractions for the actual details of the processor's register file--any given physical register could at any time be 'the DX register', for example) or the BF data pointer, which as stated above could be any number of things.

If I write a program in z80 assembly, I will know exactly how many clock cycles each step will take. If I write a program in BF, or x64, I will have no idea. It depends. It depends on so many things.

This, in my mind, is what makes BF (and x64 assembly) "high-level"--there's no control over what the execution stack is actually doing, only suggestions for the general shape. They're crude suggestions, don't get me wrong, but they're suggestions.

That's what drives me up the wall about x64. It used to be low-level, way back in the 80s, but over years and years of changes and refinements it just isn't anymore. Your PC's CPU isn't really an x64 processor--it's just pretending to be. It doesn't execute x64 machine code any more than it 'executes' JVM bytecode.

That's weird, right? I think it's weird. That's my real point.

Anyways, one final note on BF being easy to implement in hardware. This is true, but I don't think it's relevant. Any high level language could be run entirely in hardware given sufficient time, money, and mental illness* and likewise any low level language could be executed via an interpreter (or god forbid transpiler or decompiler).

What matters here is intent, though that's of course subjective. IMO, BF is intended to be portable, z80 assembly isn't. x64 assembly I would argue is also "portable", in a sense, between the many, many microarchitectures implementing it, all of whom are very different internally. (Look up the Via C3 and the Intel Itanium x86 emulation mode for a real trip)

In the end, none of this really matters. Like I said at the start, there's no objective list of "high-level" or "low-level" languages. Everything is nuanced, and mostly only worth discussing in relative terms. (e.g. "C is lower level than Java, Assembly is lower level than C, etc." instead of "Assembly is low level, Java is high level".)

At the end of the day, I'm just making an observation I thought was worth sharing. Hope I gave you something to think about! :)

*Look. Anyone willing to build a physical processor capable of natively running python is, like, definitionally abnormal. I say that with love. Don't build a python processor though.

x86_64 assembly is a kind of high-level language

[plantanarchy]

Hello! I'd love to learn more about growing plants, bcs growing up I've learned Nothing. I know that part of it is reading on your specific plants and observing how they're doing with what you give them.

But I'm the kind of person that needs to build a conceptual framework around which to build and into which to integrate knowledge and observations. I'm thinking generalities about plant physiology & some examples of logical deductions/problem solving to model off of. I need to build up a network of logical reference points. Otherwise things don't really stick, or take great effort to do so before they click into making sense. Being neurodivergent plays a part in this, i think. Do you have any course or book recommendations? For instance Sepp Holzer's Permaculture is something I've started reading a bunch of times and want to finally go through, but feels like it starts me a bit in the middle of things, so to speak.

Thank your for your patience in trading this! Take care, i wish you well.

(+I've followed in passing and figured it would be appropriate to ask. I AM asking for expertise and, ultimately, intellectual labor instead of going digging myself. If you have a ko fi or something, I'd love to make it up for your time and attention.)

Honestly not really tbh my brain likely works fairly differently than yours but I would look into something like your local master gardener's program or other classes hosted locally or just local facebook groups. Scope out your local garden centers and use their knowledge base, read signage, read tags, etc. Your local community is going to have the best advice for growing in your specific region. A lot of it is going to be your own trial and error.

[eintsein]

hi hi! could you please share your study techniques and advice for economics majors? I survived lower division just fine but upper division courses :( .

Hii! First of all, I want to apologize for answering this quite late - I wanted to give you an answer that's thorough enough and helpful. Read on below for tips!

Disclaimer: these tips are from my own experience and the experience of my peers, most of whom are in US institutions. However, I do think these tips should apply to many economics major programs.

Strengthen your mathematics foundations

Upper-division economics courses are math at their core. Here's an example of the objectives of an intermediate microeconomics course (source)

understanding the concepts of Pareto and sum-of-surplus efficiency, being able to determine whether a preference relation is complete, transitive, monotonic, and convex, and being able to determine whether a production function exhibits increasing, decreasing, or constant returns to scale.

Preference relations are concepts from discrete math. Increasing, decreasing, and constant returns are concepts from calculus.

Many upper-division courses also require knowledge of probability and statistics (game theory courses especially). Research-based classes often recommend having taken econometrics. Theoretical classes like decision theory are, as the name suggests, theoretically rigorous, so being comfortable with proofs is necessary, and knowing math theory is a great help.

A lot of people (myself included) struggle with higher division economics courses because they were not mathematically prepared. While you can definitely learn as you go, it will make your life a whole lot easier having the preparation or at least the comfort to work with the required mathematical concepts and use certain mathematical skills.

An example from personal experience: I had taken econometrics (a theoretical version) the spring of my sophomore year without much knowledge of multivariable calculus and having taken calculus II over a year before taking this class, and honestly I felt I had to work so much harder than my peers who were math majors or minors.

So yeah, you should definitely brush up on your math skills if you find yourself struggling. This could mean doing extra practice, looking for tutoring, or even taking a course.

Strengthen your economics foundations

Upper-division economics courses really build on lower-division courses. As far as I know, the purpose of upper-division courses is to teach us to synthesize what we learned from lower-division courses, i.e. to use the tools and techniques we've learned, and apply them to new economic settings.

For example, last fall I took a course on public finance (also known as welfare economics) and one of the topics we studied was regulating pollution. Two of the regulation methods we focused on were 1) cap & trade, i.e. giving pollution permits that can be traded, and 2) emission fees, i.e. setting a fee if emission is above a certain amount. The graphs below illustrate the two methods for two cases: inelastic marginal social benefit of pollution reduction, and elastic MSB of pollution reduction. Marginal cost and marginal social benefit curves are usually taught in lower-division courses, as are concepts of elasticity and demand-supply models.

Another example from the same class: evaluating Pareto efficiency of the allocation of public goods involves being comfortable with indifference curves, utility functions, and production possibility curves, as shown below. (Even if you don't understand what's going on, the general shapes should look familiar.)

Use the course's learning objectives to guide you

My probability and statistics professor taught me that the first step in studying any subject is to look at the learning objectives. These are the things you are expected to get out of the course and so they are the things you will be expected to know on an exam, do in a project/assignment, etc., not just information but also skills and techniques.

Study and practice drawing graphs

Graphs can hold a lot of information given that you know how to interpret them. In many cases, I found that if I understand the graph, then I understand the concept. Studying graphs saves a lot of study time, too, since the material's been summarized really neatly, and chances are you'll need to know the graph, too.

For many of my economics classes, I create a study guide comprising only graphs. These aren't just the graphs that are explicitly taught in class, though. I try to include as many cases, including special cases, because it teaches me to be able to think through the concepts being used in the graphs, instead of just being like, okay this is what it looks like.

For example, when studying Edgeworth-Bowley boxes, I drew them with different types of indifference curves, and then for each of them, I drew their utility possibility frontiers. Or when studying anything involving demand-supply curves (e.g. different types of taxation), I draw a graph for each combination of demand and supply elasticities (e.g. inelastic demand with inelastic supply; inelastic demand with elastic supply; etc.).

Of course, I don't always get it right. If there's something I'm unsure about or don't understand, I go to office hours for help.

Learn from assignments and practice a lot

Your assignments point out the types of questions you'll be expected to analyze and work through and thus can guide your studying, whether it's mathematical problem sets or a series of essays.

In classes with problem sets, doing them seriously helps SO much. They train your mental muscles to be able to solve or analyze the problems you're expected to be able to solve and analyze after taking the course. Your professor created these problem sets to achieve the learning objectives. If you're having trouble with any part of the problem set, you probably don't understand a key concept, skill, or technique the course expects you to, and that's totally fine; just don't forget to work on it and ask for help.

In addition, problem sets also serve as great revision tools to help you actively recall and synthesize the material you've studied.

Go to office hours for conceptual help

I've mentioned a couple times to reach out for help if you need it and I cannot stress this enough. In most cases, professors and TAs (teaching assistants) are more than willing to help you succeed. I would suggest going to each instructor/staff member if there are multiple and seeing which one is the most helpful, i.e. the person who can fill in your knowledge gaps the easiest, who understands your misunderstandings. Sometimes it's the professor, other times the TA is a better fit. Sometimes the TA gives better help for problem sets but the professor gives better help for conceptual problems. Use the resources available to you!

I hope this helps, and please don't hesitate to reach out if you have any other questions :)

[whitehotharlots]

The point is control

Whenever we think or talk about censorship, we usually conceptualize it as certain types of speech being somehow disallowed: maybe (rarely) it's made formally illegal by the government, maybe it's banned in certain venues, maybe the FCC will fine you if you broadcast it, maybe your boss will fire you if she learns of it, maybe your friends will stop talking to you if they see what you've written, etc. etc. 

This understanding engenders a lot of mostly worthless discussion precisely because it's so broad. Pedants--usually arguing in favor of banning a certain work or idea--will often argue that speech protections only apply to direct, government bans. These bans, when they exist, are fairly narrow and apply only to those rare speech acts in which other people are put in danger by speech (yelling the N-word in a crowded theater, for example). This pedantry isn't correct even within its own terms, however, because plenty of people get in trouble for making threats. The FBI has an entire entrapment program dedicated to getting mentally ill muslims and rednecks to post stuff like "Death 2 the Super bowl!!" on twitter, arresting them, and the doing a press conference about how they heroically saved the world from terrorism. 

Another, more recent pedant's trend is claiming that, actually, you do have freedom of speech; you just don't have freedom from the consequences of speech. This logic is eerily dictatorial and ignores the entire purpose of speech protections. Like, even in the history's most repressive regimes, people still technically had freedom of speech but not from consequences. Those leftist kids who the nazis beheaded for speaking out against the war were, by this logic, merely being held accountable. 

The two conceptualizations of censorship I described above are, 99% of the time, deployed by people who are arguing in favor of a certain act of censorship but trying to exempt themselves from the moral implications of doing so. Censorship is rad when they get to do it, but they realize such a solipsism seems kinda icky so they need to explain how, actually, they're not censoring anybody, what they're doing is an act of righteous silencing that's a totally different matter. Maybe they associate censorship with groups they don't like, such as nazis or religious zealots. Maybe they have a vague dedication toward Enlightenment principles and don't want to be regarded as incurious dullards. Most typically, they're just afraid of the axe slicing both ways, and they want to make sure that the precedent they're establishing for others will not be applied to themselves.

Anyone who engages with this honestly for more than a few minutes will realize that censorship is much more complicated, especially in regards to its informal and social dimensions. We can all agree that society simply would not function if everyone said whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted. You might think your boss is a moron or your wife's dress doesn't look flattering, but you realize that such tidbits are probably best kept to yourself. 

Again, this is a two-way proposition that everyone is seeking to balance. Do you really want people to verbalize every time they dislike or disagree with you? I sure as hell don't. And so, as part of a social compact, we learn to self-censor. Sometimes this is to the detriment of ourselves and our communities. Most often, however, it's just a price we have to pay in order to keep things from collapsing. 

But as systems, large and small, grow increasingly more insane and untenable, so do the comportment standards of speech. The disconnect between America's reality and the image Americans have of themselves has never been more plainly obvious, and so striving for situational equanimity is no longer good enough. We can't just pretend cops aren't racist and the economy isn't run by venal retards or that the government places any value on the life of its citizens. There's too much evidence that contradicts all that, and the evidence is too omnipresent. There's too many damn internet videos, and only so many of them can be cast as Russian disinformation. So, sadly, we must abandon our old ways of communicating and embrace instead systems that are even more unstable, repressive, and insane than the ones that were previously in place.

Until very, very recently, nuance and big-picture, balanced thinking were considered signs of seriousness, if not intelligence. Such considerations were always exploited by shitheads to obfuscate things that otherwise would have seemed much less ambiguous, yes, but this fact alone does not mitigate the potential value of such an approach to understanding the world--especially since the stuff that's been offered up to replace it is, by every worthwhile metric, even worse.

So let's not pretend I'm Malcolm Gladwell or some similarly slimy asshole seeking to "both sides" a clearcut moral issue. Let's pretend I am me. Flash back to about a year ago, when there was real, widespread, and sustained support for police reform. Remember that? Seems like forever ago, man, but it was just last year... anyhow, now, remember what happened? Direct, issues-focused attempts to reform policing were knocked down. Blotted out. Instead, we were told two things: 1) we had to repeat the slogan ABOLISH THE POLICE, and 2) we had to say it was actually very good and beautiful and nonviolent and valid when rioters burned down poor neighborhoods.

Now, in a relatively healthy discourse, it might have been possible for someone to say something like "while I agree that American policing is heavily violent and racist and requires substantial reforms, I worry that taking such an absolutist point of demanding abolition and cheering on the destruction of city blocks will be a political non-starter." This statement would have been, in retrospect, 100000000% correct. But could you have said it, in any worthwhile manner? If you had said something along those lines, what would the fallout had been? Would you have lost friends? Your job? Would you have suffered something more minor, like getting yelled at, told your opinion did not matter? Would your acquaintances still now--a year later, after their political project has failed beyond all dispute--would they still defame you in "whisper networks," never quite articulating your verbal sins but nonetheless informing others that you are a dangerous and bad person because one time you tried to tell them how utterly fucking self-destructive they were being? It is undeniably clear that last year's most-elevated voices were demanding not reform but catharsis. I hope they really had fun watching those immigrant-owned bodegas burn down, because that’s it, that will forever be remembered as the most palpable and consequential aspect of their shitty, selfish movement. We ain't reforming shit. Instead, we gave everyone who's already in power a blank check to fortify that power to a degree you and I cannot fully fathom.

But, oh, these people knew what they were doing. They were good little boys and girls. They have been rewarded with near-total control of the national discourse, and they are all either too guilt-ridden or too stupid to realize how badly they played into the hands of the structures they were supposedly trying to upend.

And so left-liberalism is now controlled by people whose worldview is equal parts superficial and incoherent. This was the only possible outcome that would have let the system continue to sustain itself in light of such immense evidence of its unsustainability without resulting in reform, so that's what has happened.

But... okay, let's take a step back. Let's focus on what I wanted to talk about when I started this.

I came across a post today from a young man who claimed that his high school English department head had been removed from his position and had his tenure revoked for refusing to remove three books from classrooms. This was, of course, fallout from the ongoing debate about Critical Race Theory. Two of those books were Marjane Satropi's Persepolis and, oh boy, The Diary of Anne Frank. Fuck. Jesus christ, fuck.

Now, here's the thing... When Persepolis was named, I assumed the bannors were anti-CRT. The graphic novel does not deal with racism all that much, at least not as its discussed contemporarily, but it centers an Iranian girl protagonist and maybe that upset Republican types. But Anne Frank? I'm sorry, but the most likely censors there are liberal identiarians who believe that teaching her diary amounts to centering the suffering of a white woman instead of talking about the One Real Racism, which must always be understood in an American context. The super woke cult group Black Hammer made waves recently with their #FuckAnneFrank campaign... you'd be hard pressed to find anyone associated with the GOP taking a firm stance against the diary since, oh, about 1975 or so.

So which side was it? That doesn't matter. What matters is, I cannot find out.

Now, pro-CRT people always accuse anti-CRT people of not knowing what CRT is, and then after making such accusations they always define CRT in a way that absolutely is not what CRT is. Pro-CRTers default to "they don't want  students to read about slavery or racism." This is absolutely not true, and absolutely not what actual CRT concerns itself with. Slavery and racism have been mainstays of American history curriucla since before I was born. Even people who barely paid attention in school would admit this, if there were any more desire for honesty in our discourse. 

My high school history teacher was a southern "lost causer" who took the south's side in the Civil War but nonetheless provided us with the most descriptive and unapologetic understandings of slavery's brutalities I had heard up until that point. He also unambiguously referred to the nuclear attacks on Hiroshmia and Nagasaki as "genocidal." Why? Because most people's politics are idiosyncratic, and because you cannot genuinely infer a person to believe one thing based on their opinion of another, tangentially related thing. The totality of human understanding used to be something open-minded people prided themselves on being aware of, believe it or not...

This is the problem with CRT. This is is the motivation behind the majority of people who wish to ban it. It’s not because they are necessarily racist themselves. It’s because they recognize, correctly, that the now-ascendant frames for understanding social issues boils everything down to a superficial patina that denies not only the realities of the systems they seek to upend but the very humanity of the people who exist within them. There is no humanity without depth and nuance and complexities and contradictions. When you argue otherwise, people will get mad and fight back. 

And this is the most bitter irony of this idiotic debate: it was never about not wanting to teach the sinful or embarrassing parts of our history. That was a different debate, one that was settled and won long ago. It is instead an immense, embarrassing overreach on behalf of people who have bullied their way to complete dominance of their spheres of influence within media and academe assuming they could do the same to everyone else. Some of its purveyors may have convinced themselves that getting students to admit complicity in privilege will prevent police shootings, sure. But I know these people. I’ve spoken to them at length. I’ve read their work. The vast, vast majority of them aren’t that stupid. The point is to exert control. The point is to make sure they stay in charge and that nothing changes. The point is failure. 

[rockalillygirl]

Hello! Sorry for not replying to this until now, I also want to convert that I'm really enjoying talking about this!! I'm just bad at Time.

So first, I agree that what "core programming" is depends on how we define machine intelligence. That being said, I personally have no idea how to quantify that. As you said, there are a lot of gaps in our and MB's understanding of that in the books. Based on some I interviews with Wells that I watched, I belive what are called in the book "lower bots" (idk? Hauler bots and bot pilots were the specific examples mentioned) are also meant to be sentient, but most humans don't see them that way.

But I think trying to draw a concrete line to define sentience is just a really hairy issue in general. It reminds me of the similar argument in our world about trying to quantify animal intelligence. Ofc, we learn new things about animal intelligence all the time, especially about types of intelligence that we didn't have ways to identify before. However, I think there will always be a bias towards judging organisms that are more similar to humans as more intelligent regardless of if that's really the case. (Thus the bias towards animals in general). I don't know if this bias can be completely eliminated, in our world or the MBD universe. It seems like even with their improved technology, humans in the books are still more likely to view constructs, human-form bots, or bots that can communicate like a human (like ART) as more intelligent. I don't think it's accurate- but that's probably the working definition I think is most likely to exist in the universe of the books.

Related to that, the way I've conceptualized "core programming" so far is closer to what you said about pre-installed directives that inform how a construct experiences and reacts to the world. But I also think it'd be impossible for those directives to encompass everything a construct might experience, and that the programming could potentially adapt (or even perhaps be altered by the construct itself) to account for this.

Regarding ur comments on empathy, I think the way you integrated behavior that humans might read as empathetic with Skulks self-interest is really cool! I think it raises questions about what empathy actually is: the feeling or the actions. I feel most people think empathetic actions are motivated by empathy the emotion. But this isn't usually the case for me, either. I usually feel pretty disassociate from my emotions, but I've learned over time what outcomes result from different courses of action- and most people have said that these actions are the result of empathy. So I completely agree that it's possible to back ones way into empathy, or into actions that most people would view as consistent with empathy even if the internal motivation is different.

Also, I don't think empathy is always a universally innocent or positive thing either. From my own experience, the few times where I HAVE felt the instinctive feeling of imagining another person's feelings, it's been an very unpleasant and overwhelming experience. Maybe because we most often empathize with people who are in pain or suffering.

And while I do think that in general empathy, or the actions which generally follow from it, is good- your example about the horses brings up an important point I've heard about some of the power dynamics that can be shades of that emotion. I read an article interrogating the relationship between empathy and things people regard as "cute". It connected it to how humans and other animals feel about their young. But it made the claim that part of this empathy response is a recognition of the cute thing's helplessness/powerlessness relative to our own. And that sometimes an instinctive desire to protect (motivated by empathy) can include the desire to control/dominate. Not suggesting that's what was going on in the example lol. I just thought it was an intriguing possible facet of empathy that I haven't heard discussed a lot.

Circling back to MB, I've felt that this dynamic comes up in how (in my opinion) MB sometimes infantilizes humans that it designates as it's own. It seems to happen more with some humans than others, but I've noticed as a need to control the humans under its protection to keep them safe. In life threatening situations of course this is often necessary- but in a couple cases I think it lead to MB putting itself in more danger because it assumes its humans don't want to or can't help it (thinking of the fight on TranRollinHyfa). And most of the tune it specifically doesn't want them to help and would rather be in control anyway. NOT saying this is necessarily a bad thing or that MB is wrong for doing that. And mostly I think it's just flavor text of MB distinguishing "good" humans that it wants to protect from "bad" humans that want to hurt/control it. I just thought it was interesting!

And it makes me wonder how different types of constructs (like CSUs) working relationships with humans would be. Like, because a CombatUnit wouldn't be as hyper-focused on keeping humans alive as a SecUnit would be (and the need for control that comes with that) would the dynamic maybe be more mutual in some ways? I'm not sure if that's something you intended writing Skulk- I just noticed shades of that but maybe I'm reading into it lol.

And finally, I also don't think that CSUs could be programmed so following orders was their highest morality. As you said, then the gov modules wouldn't be needed. Also humans already have combat bots for that. I think there's something necessary about the organic tissue that allows constructs to improvise in the case of incomplete orders or changes circumstances. The benefit is that it makes them much more effective in real situations- the drawback being they'll always have the potential to rebel.

Anyways these are the thoughts I have for now!! Looking forward to continuing chatting about this!!

Mamma mia here we go again…

So I have more thoughts because apparently there’s no bottom to the murderbot mindhole I’ve fallen down.

(Spoiler warning- minor stuff from several of the books, pls check tags etc.)

I’ve been reading a lot of things recently exploring Murderbot as an unreliable narrator, which I think is a cool result of System Collapse (because we all know our beloved MB is going through it in this one). There’s also been some interesting related discussion of MB’s distrust of and sometimes biased assessment/treatment of other constructs and bots.

And I’ve been reading a lot about CombatUnits! And I want to talk about them!!

Main thoughts can be summarized as follows:

We don’t see a lot about CombatUnits in the books, and I think what we do see from MB’s pov encourages the reader to view them as less sympathetic than other constructs.

I’m very skeptical of this portrayal for reasons.

The existence of CombatUnits makes me fucking sad and I have a lot of feelings about them!

I got introduced to the idea of MB as an unreliable narrator in a post by onironic It analyzes how in SC, MB seems to distrust Three to a somewhat unreasonable degree, and how it sometimes infantilizes Three or treats it the way human clients have treated it in the past. The post is Amazing and goes into way more detail, so pls go read it (link below):

https://www.tumblr.com/onironic/736245031246135296?source=share

So these ideas were floating around in my brain when I read an article Martha Wells recently published in f(r)iction magazine titled “Bodily Autonomy in the Murderbot Diaries”. I’ll link the article here:

(Rn the only way to access the article is to subscribe to the magazine or buy an e-copy of the specific issue which is $12)

In the article, Wells states that MB displaced its fear of being forced to have sex with humans onto the ComfortUnit in Artificial Condition. I think it’s reasonable to assume that MB also does this with other constructs. With Three, I think it’s more that MB is afraid if what it knows Three is capable of, or (as onironic suggests in their post and I agree with) some jealousy that Three seems more like what humans want/expect a rogue SecUnit to be.

But I want to explore how this can be applied to CombatUnits, specifically.

We don’t learn a lot about them in the books. One appears for a single scene in Exit Strategy, and that’s it. What little else we know comes from MB’s thoughts on them sprinkled throughout the series. To my knowledge, no other character even mentions them (which raises interesting questions about how widely-known their existence is outside of high-level corporate military circles).

When MB does talk about CombatUnits in the early books, it’s as a kind of boogeyman figure (the real “murderbots” that even Murderbot is afraid of). And then when one does show up in ES, it’s fucking terrifying! There’s a collective “oh shit” moment as both MB and the reader realize what it’s up against. Very quickly what we expect to be a normal battle turns into MB running for its life, desperately throwing up hacks as the CombatUnit slices through them just as fast. We and MB know that it wouldn’t have survived the encounter if its humans hadn’t helped it escape. So the CombatUnit really feels like a cut above the other enemies in the series.

And what struck me reading that scene was how the CombatUnit acts like the caricature of an “evil robot” that MB has taught us to question. It seems single-mindedly focused on violence and achieving its objective, and it speaks in what I’d call a “Terminator-esque” manner: telling MB to “Surrender” (like that’s ever worked) and responds to MB’s offer to hack its governor module with “I want to kill you” (ES, pp 99-100).

(Big tangent: Am I the only one who sees parallels between this and how Tlacey forces the ComfortUnit to speak to MB in AC? She makes it suggest they “kill all the humans” because that’s how she thinks constructs talk to each other (AC, pp 132-4). And MB picks up on it immediately. So why is that kind of talk inherently less suspicious coming from a CombatUnit than a ComfortUnit? My headcanon is that I’m not convinced the CombatUnit was speaking for itself. What if a human controller was making it say things they thought would be intimidating? Idk maybe I’ve been reading too many fics where CombatUnits are usually deployed with a human handler. There could be plenty of reasons why the CombatUnit would’ve talked like that. I’m just suspicious.)

(Also, disclaimer: I want to clarify before I go on that I firmly believe that even though MB seems to be afraid of CombatUnits and thinks they’re assholes, it would still advocate for them to have autonomy. I’m not trying to say that either MB or Wells sees CombatUnits as less worthy of personhood or freedom- because I feel the concept that “everything deserves autonomy” is very much at the heart of the series.)

So it’s clear from all of this that MB is scared of CombatUnits and distrusts them for a lot of reasons. I read another breathtaking post by @grammarpedant that gives a ton of examples of this throughout the books and has some great theories on why MB might feel this way. I’ll summarize the ones here that inspired me the most, but pls go read the original post for the full context:

https://www.tumblr.com/grammarpedant/703920247856562177?source=share

OP explains that SecUnits and CombatUnits are pretty much diametrically opposed because of their conflicting functions: Security safeguards humans, while Combat kills them. Of course these functions aren’t rigid- MB has implied that it’s been forced to be violent towards humans before, and I’m sure that extracting/guarding important assets could be a part of a CombatUnit's function. But it makes sense that MB would try to distance itself from being considered a CombatUnit, using its ideas about them to validate the parts of its own function that it likes (protecting people). OP gives what I think is the clearest example of this, which is the moment in Fugitive Telemetry when MB contrasts its plan to sneak aboard a hostile ship and rescue some refugees with what it calls a “CombatUnit” plan, which would presumably involve a lot more murder (FT, p 92).

This reminds me again of what Wells said in the f(r)iction article, that on some level MB is frightened by the idea that it could have been made a ComfortUnit (friction, p 44). I think the idea that it could’ve been a CombatUnit scares it too, and that’s why it keeps distinguishing itself and its function from them. But I think it’s important to point out, that in the above example from FT, even MB admits that the murder-y plan it contrasts with its own would be one made by humans for CombatUnits. So again we see that we just can’t know much about the authentic nature of CombatUnits, or any constructs with intact governor modules, because they don’t have freedom of expression. MB does suggest that CombatUnits may have some more autonomy when it comes to things like hacking and combat which are a part of their normal function. But how free can those choices be when the threat of the governor module still hangs over them?

I think it could be easy to fall into the trap of seeing CombatUnits as somehow more complicit in the systems of violence in the mbd universe. But I think that’s because we often make a false association between violence and empowerment, when even in our world that’s not always the case. But, critically, this can’t be the case for CombatUnits because they’re enslaved in the same way SecUnits and ComfortUnits are (though the intricacies are different).

There was another moment in the f(r)iction article that I found really chilling. Wells states that there’s a correlation between SecUnits that are forced to kill humans and ones that go rogue (friction, p 45). It’s a disturbing thought on its own, but I couldn’t help wondering then how many CombatUnits try to hack their governor modules? And what horrible lengths would humans go to to stop them? I refuse to believe that a CombatUnit’s core programming would make it less effected by the harm its forced to perpetrate. That might be because I’m very anti-deterministic on all fronts, but I just don’t buy it.

I’m not entirely sure why I feel so strongly about this. Of course, I find the situation of all constructs in mbd deeply upsetting. But the more I think about CombatUnits, the more heartbreaking their existence seems to me. There’s a very poignant moment in AC when MB compares ART’s function to its own to explain why there are things it doesn’t like about being a SecUnit (AC, p 33). In that scene, MB is able to identify some parts of its function that it does like, but I have a hard time believing a CombatUnit would be able to do the same. I’m not trying to say that SecUnits have it better (they don’t) (the situation of each type of construct is horrible in it’s own unique way). It’s just that I find the idea of construct made only for violence and killing really fucking depressing. I can’t even begin to imagine the horror of their day-to-day existence.

@grammarpedant made another point in their post that I think raises a TON of important questions not only about CombatUnits, but about how to approach the idea of “function” when it comes to machine intelligence in general. They explain that, in a perfect version of the mbd universe, there wouldn’t be an obvious place for CombatUnits the way there could be for SecUnits and ComfortUnits who wanted to retain their original functions. A better world would inherently be a less violent one, so where does that leave CombatUnits? Would they abandon their function entirely, or would they find a way to change it into something new?

I’ve been having a lot of fun imagining what a free CombatUnit would be like. But in some ways it’s been more difficult than I expected. I’ve heard Wells say in multiple interviews that one of her goals in writing Murderbot was to challenge people to empathize with someone they normally wouldn’t, and I find CombatUnits challenging in exactly that way. Sometimes I wonder if I would’ve felt differently about these books if MB had been a CombatUnit instead of a SecUnit. Would I have felt such an immediate connection to MB if its primary function before hacking its governor module had been killing humans, or if it didn’t have relatable hobbies like watching media? Or if it didn’t have a human face for the explicit purpose of making people like me more comfortable? I’m not sure that I would have.

Reading SC has got me interested in exploring the types of people that humans (or even MB itself) would struggle to accept. So CombatUnits are one of these and possible alien-intelligences are another. All this is merely a small sampling of the thoughts that have been swirling around in my brain-soup! So if anyone is interested in watching me fumble my way through these concepts in more detail, I may be posting “something” in the very near future!

Would really appreciate anyone else’s thoughts about all of THIS^^^^ It’s been my obsession over the holidays and helping me cope with family stress and flying anxiety.

[sanstropfremir]

by request, the first post-kingdom stage roundup! this one is a best to worst by group!

some introductory notes:

i’m not going to be ranking the 100sec stages in here because they are too different of a scale. but i will be talking about them as a part of the process. i’m not going to be including the team stages here either, since i talked about them in my episode seven and eight reviews and i do think they stand separately from the individual group stages, because we don’t know who the creative teams were behind them. this is not meant to be an overall best of all the performances, i’m intending this more to be a look each of the groups’ stages overall; seeing how they adapted and improved and how effective the trajectory of their journey as a whole was. also, a very important definition to make right at the start so i don't have to explain it every time: by ‘worst’ i do not mean the stage was actually bad. by ‘worst’ i literally mean ‘not the best.’ if i break it down, i’m ranking these by ‘most amount of successful components’ to ‘least amount of successful components.’ there were no stages that were actually bad or unwatchable; they were all successful in one way or another, but some of them more so. i’m ordering these in my own personal ranking of reverse who did the best overall, which obviously is not how the actual show rankings went down, but we all know my thoughts on the official rankings.

in case you want to catch up and read my more in depth thoughts, here’s all of my episode reviews: one, two (with added tbz costume breakdown), three, four, five, seven, eight, nine, ten! oh and also here’s my very first review of the dance solo performance film, since i’m also going to be referencing this a bit.

tbz

monster - the least involved with their overarching story concept and it’s stylistically the most interesting because it’s a departure from the glittery royalty concept we have primarily seen them in. it also helps that it’s a great song that they did a relatively good cover of.

kingdom come - the solidity of the choreo is the thing that puts this stage up here, because it’s some of their best. and it’s not as explicitly reliant on the game of thrones theme as their other stages.

o sole mio - this has real potential as a good small concept vaudeville themed stage; it starts off really strong and then they blow it by shoehorning in the unnecessary lore.

no air - they tried to start off with a big conceptual bang in the first round with a semi-explicit narrative, but it relies entirely too much on the viewers knowing the references for it to make any sense.

to be honest, i’m not that surprised about how tbz constructed their stages and how they turned out. i know a lot of people have been disappointed with how lackluster their stages have felt in comparison to their rtk ones, and i think that’s fair because i agree, i don’t think they ever captured the same energy they did for danger or for shangri-la. if you’ve been following along (or have just read all my reviews now) than you know most of my complaints about how tbz have been working with their lore and concepts, so i won’t rehash them here. but i do think it’s warranted to point out that theoretically, being first in rtk would logistically put you at the bottom of the initial ranking for kingdom. i know they’re not technically the youngest group, but in the execution of their stages in comparison, it does make sense to me that they come out looking as the most inexperienced group. even though they were intending to have a similar overarching story like they did on rtk, it was not at all very fleshed out and there wasn’t a strong enough connection between that story, the themes of their stages, and the narrative shapes of those stages. which is a shame because they are not unskilled performers, and they have the most members of all of the groups on the show, so they had a lot of opportunity to be doing interesting choreo and blocking work that never seemed to materialize. i also think they never truly got used to the size of the stage in comparison to the rtk stage, and they were always struggling to fill it in an intentional way. they tried valiantly to recoup their ground and bring everything together in a full circle for their last stage, and even though they somehow came in second, i think by the finale they had been worn down and lost a lot of their steam. it also doesn’t help that they lost a member to injury right near the end, which can be very demotivating, especially for a young group.

skz

god’s ddu du ddu du - the most stylistically different and interesting of the bunch, with a lot of interesting elements and well designed movement, even if the overall arc was half baked and lackluster

i’ll be your man - this was an actual attempt at a departure from their normal bluster and even though it never makes it all the way there and they don’t do that great of a cover, it’s different enough.

wolfgang - although watchable for hilarity and/or cringe value, nothing about this stage demonstrates a significant amount of growth from the first one. it fact it just feels like they injected a load more money and time into the premise of their 100sec stage, without any of the reflection that this kind of circular final stage concept should have. it’s exactly the stage of a group that’s been propelled to first in every round through an artificially inflated system.

god’s menu/side effects - the most scattered of all their stages. there’s not quite enough material to tie everything together and it feels underformed.

we all knew what the outcome of the show was going to be the moment that very first round of fan voting came in. now i don’t actually care about final outcome of the show, because the most valuable experience of a show like this is learning from what your competitors around you are doing and how to improve your work for further rounds. if the ranking system had been solely expert + judges based, all of the weekly rankings would have looked a lot different and skz would have actually had a chance to grow from this experience. but because they have the biggest and most aggressive fandom, their stages constantly ended up in first place and they never actually had the opportunity to sit back and reflect on their performances to figure out how they can do better. because the truth of the matter is that they did not have the best performances on the show. they consistently made stylistically stagnant stages and never managed to correct any of the issues that have been plaguing them since the 100sec round. the closest they got was god’s ddu du ddu du, which was aesthetically the most different and had the most interesting subversions of the stage format, even if it ultimately fell flat because they still missed the mark on managing the shape of the narrative. if you watch all their stages back to back you’ll see that there’s an overreliance on the same types of stylistic decisions and thematic elements, including in the sound and feel of the work. this is a bit hard to explain, but even though the stages all look different, they don’t convey any nuanced emotion or intention other than ‘stray kids world domination.’ now nuanced intention is not necessary for a kpop song performance, but skz took it upon themselves to try and tackle some fairly complex thematic ideas, which is commendable, but they fall flat because the members themselves don’t know how to act. and acting is supremely important when you are doing themed stages. i talked about this same principle in this response about orange caramel and wjsn chocome, but most newer idols don’t approach performing as a character, they approach performing as themselves, and skz are big victims of this. that’s why even i’ll be your man, where they do actually attempt to be a bit more nuanced in their delivery, still comes off like all their other stages. they don’t ever push themselves beyond their performance boundaries (physically yes, obviously. i mean mentally) and so every stage has a little checklist of skz-specific personality traits that round out in the bigger picture to the same general feel. this kind of strategy works great for music shows and for general promotion because it’s super marketable, but in this particular setting, where we spend an extended amount of time with all the groups, it doesn’t facilitate the same amount of growth that letting those of personas go would.

ikon

at ease - really clear cumulation of their performance, group colour, and design elements over the entire show.

classy savage - well designed and decorated with an interesting concept, but has a few flaws that keep it from being their best work.

inception - again, very well designed; the set is so inventive and features a lot of carefully blocked movement, plus the colour palette is tight and used effectively, it just doesn’t reach the same scale as the latter two stages.

love scenario/killing me - it’s the first stage and it clearly suffers from a bit of underd evelopment as they were getting used to the format of the show. it’s still an interesting and well performed stage with the start of elements that we can see them develop further in the next rounds.

ikon had the most lackadaisical attitude toward the whole show, which i think was the best way to approach it, but also they didn’t really push much beyond their boundaries as performers. i’m not faulting them for not wanting to, they’re a very well established group and honestly don’t really need improve on anything. they did however, do a really great job of improving on their design quality and intergration after the first round, which is the one thing that this program definitely facilitates for. they’re also the only group where their finale stage was demonstrably their best stage, so they really did nail that slow improvement progression. they got what they wanted out of the show, which was new friends and a chance to make some fun stages that they wouldn’t have otherwise been able to. like i think i’ve said in every other review, there’s not that much to say about them as a whole because they just put their noses to the grindstone and did the work while maintaining a chill and fun demeanour, and those efforts paid off even if they didn’t end up ranking very high.

sf9

the stealer - great integration of theme into narrative and design, small scale concept with big impact.

believer - smart use of camera work and choreography in conjunction with the design elements. although not very narrative focused, it’s a clear and thoughtful elaboration on their intro stage that’s very well executed.

move - a risky choice that pays off fairly well for them, even if it doesn’t capture all the depth that it could have.

jealous - it’s their first stage of the competition and the first time they had worked on something of this scale before, so it only makes sense that it’s the weakest of their run. despite that, it shows a strong understanding of an unusual concept and it still holds up.

sf9 were the clear underdogs of everyone and the rankings pretty clearly reflected that. but as a group they really put in the work to improve their skills and i think they showed the most dramatic improvement of everyone, especially between the first and second rounds. they repeatedly made comments about how they were focused on creating good stages and it paid off. their stages were all conceptually and visually interesting without relying on much external lore or overly dense themes, even if some of them were more effective than others. they had a lot of strong emphasis on costume in particular and they were very well styled. their finale stage was a very clear synthesis of all of the experience and knowledge they gained over the course of the show and it wraps a neat aesthetic and thematic bow on their journey. they absolutely did not deserve last place; they were the ones hardest hit by the fan voting system and i hope that the group doesn’t internalize the official outcome too much, because they did a lot of good work that they should be proud of and deserves a higher due than it was given.

ateez

rhythm ta - simple concept with a clear narrative that uses a lot of visual referencing as exposition without being cluttered and too reliant on the source material. impeccable use of limited design elements to create atmosphere and it’s a strong reinvention of the song.

wonderland - an absolute banger of a first stage that does all the same things as rhythm ta just to a slightly less polished scale.

ode to joy - both stylistically and tonally a departure, this stage relies a lot on group lore but also has a very clear message that was surprising for its maturity and temerity.

the real - purposefully pulled back in scale and ambition as a pointed critique of the competition as a whole. looser in design aesthetic synthesis but has more freedom for the members to show more dynamism in the group’s abilities and colour.

the youngest of the six groups, i don’t think anyone was expecting ateez to come out swinging in the way that they did. oh, we were all expecting them to put up a fight, but i know that i wasn’t expecting much beyond the capabilities of what we’d seen from skz and tbz, since they all share the dubious honour of being similar aesthetic performance based fourth gen groups. but oh baby did they prove us all wrong. the fact that they have incredible performance abilities and stage presence is what carried them half of the way, but they also proved to have a top notch creative team working behind them that knew how to visually craft a great performance. wonderland and rhythm ta are two of the smartest designed stages, and i’d put rhythm ta as the best designed stage, because it does so much in such a small amount of time. this ranking was tough because all of their stages intentionally prove a point and i dont think there are any that are demonstrably weaker. wonderland and rhythm ta served to prove that they had the capacity to keep up with their seniors, and that they were ambitious and hungry and had a solid team foundation. both stages ranked them first in non-fan judging and once they saw how the fan judging skews the final results, they smartly and ambitiously made a choice in the round BEFORE the finale to make a stage that rebuffs the laurels of the competition show they were at the pinnacle of, specifically for their fans. there is so much care and thought put into the ode to joy stage that it feels wrong to rank it as their third best, especially when it also contains one of the greatest 40 seconds of acting i’ve ever seen on a kpop stage. just the dichotomy of the stage’s melancholy feel with the choice of song is so compelling, and in its context as a part of the whole now the show is over.... i’m out of words. the brain on the person who came up with this, i would LOVE to talk to them. and having the real as a followup stage? where they have the freedom to have fun and be stylistically themselves while thumbing their noses at the show? a perfect follow up and rounding out of the expression of their abilities.

btob

back door - perfect. simple concept and simple narrative extremely well executed. excellent attention to detail and atmosphere.

show and prove - perfect reflection of their journey on the show as a whole.

blue moon - same as back door, just with a slightly larger scale.

missing you - only last because it doesn’t have the same strength of narrative and design concept as the other three stages. it’s still a better stage than 80% of the stages on the show.

we all know this, but btob are the real kings. all of their stages were phenomenal and they all hit my personal top ten, so this ranking is more of a ‘which stage was the best of the best.’ they did an incredible job of playing to their strengths and they knew exactly what they needed to do in order to craft the best performance. this was actually very difficult for me to decide because they never fucking missed. watching missing you for the first time in like two months smacked me right upside the head because that stage is beautiful. the intro in the forest with changsub and eunkwang is fucking gorgeous; the lighting and atmospherics are so effective and the trees do an incredible job of obscuring the stage architecture. and their costumes. this stage screams elegance in a way that no other stage managed to capture and this was the first round. and i’m putting last on this list, which should be telling about the quality of their work. and honestly it only goes up from here. they took that one maybe valid expert critique that they got of utilizing more narrative and they RAN with it. i put back door as first because it juuuuust inches out blue moon and show and prove for smart camera work, but honestly all three of these stages could take top spot, they’re of equal rank.

btob came into this show at a pretty distinct disadvantage: they’re old, and there’s only four of them. and as we know, thanks to rtk and the fourth gen groups, this show has a reputation for big acrobatic blowout spectacles, which is just not something they can do. but they also had a distinct advantage: they’re old and there’s only four of them. they very smartly foresaw that they wouldn’t be able to compete with the fourth gen groups in athletic ability, so they specifically chose to highlight the areas they were the strongest in, which you can see right from the start. their intro stage specifically highlights their vocals, and even in minhyuk’s dance solo the design is music show themed, as a gentle reminder that they know how to work a stage. and as the show progressed they started to solidify that assumption. they used narrative extremely well to give their stages an element of emotional investment that kept the audience engaged without banking on individual idols’ popularity to keep them afloat, and spent their time on the show being gracious and generous competitors, intent on being as watchable offstage as they were on. and it worked. by the time the finale rolled around, we knew who these men were and we had seen them be individuals, so they were able to cast off the need to play to narrative and to character and instead they were able to loop back around to that very first stage; simple, clean, emphasis on vocals, with a very important addition of uniformity. the current trend in kpop costuming is to have group members dressed similarly, but not exactly the same, partially in order to be able to everyone apart, but also because the ‘sameness’ of the boy band model has fallen by the wayside. btob took all their previous stages where they had clearly been individuals and as the culmination of their journey they chose to look exactly the same, to clearly send a message that they are a singular unit and they are proud of that. and they absolutely stuck the landing. this was a perfect run for btob, they should be really fucking proud of the work they did.