#and their work was very well-known and debated about in academic journals

[mvshortcut]

Ok so. Curtain definitely had Tai Li's parents killed right. like. do we agree on this

[ugisfeelings]

Perhaps it’s apt that a dying political ideology seeks redemption in a dead discipline. As the Israeli government and public become ever more vocal and defensive about their daily practice of abuse and murder, as another Nakba is initiated with impunity and in fact legally sanctioned, liberal Zionists continue to dwell in what Saree Makdisi has called a “culture of denial.”[1] Purportedly aghast at what their Israel has become, some intellectuals—rather than honestly reckoning with the past—resort to desperate exercises in obfuscation. A new book edited by Stefan Vogt, Derek Penslar, and Arieh Saposnik, Unacknowledged Kinships: Postcolonial Studies and the Historiography of Zionism(2023), seeks both to rescue Zionism from its history of violence in Palestine and delegitimize efforts for Palestinian liberation. 

"Complexity” is the order of the day. A history of colonialism that has become clearer by the hour, both because of its increasing desperation on the ground and the efforts of committed scholars to carefully expose its methods and rhetoric, is made opaque. Devoting all their energies to language, to the cherry-picked utterances of one or another Zionist, at the complete exclusion of the material reality of Zionism in Palestine or Israel’s insidious role in the Arab world or across the three continents, is the basis of this endeavor. The editors claim—as Penslar has done since his well-known and widely criticized 2001 article “Zionism, Colonialism and Postcolonialism”—that Zionism cannot be understood as “colonial” because it was both an anti-colonial nationalist movement (even “subaltern”) not a colonial enterprise projected from a metropole and a postcolonial, developmentalist, state like so many others.[2] And if one must reluctantly claim Zionism as colonialism and Israel as colonial, that can only be done in reference to the events of 1967 and after (and even then, with extensive hand-wringing, or in the case of Johannes Becke’s contribution to the volume, tendentious comparison). The colonial project in Palestine explicitly initiated at the end of the nineteenth century by European Zionist settlers, facilitated by the British Empire in the 1920s, accelerated in the 1930s, consecrated in 1948, and continuing to this very day, is rendered irrelevant.

For the editors and a number of the contributors, “postcolonialism” refers principally to the work of Homi Bhabha and his notion of “the in-between.” The binary of colonizer and colonized is deemed insufficient for understanding Zionism by the editors, and Bhabha’s writing on the “hybridity” and “instability” produced by colonialism is taken as a guiding gesture.[3] Recourse to Bhabha and the wielding of his work explicitly against that of the anti-colonial Edward Said—Unacknowledged Kinships foil from its first paragraph onwards—has its origins in the reception of Anglo-American postcolonial theory in Israel during the 1990s. The journal Teoria ve Bikoret, founded in 1991 in Jerusalem and edited until 1999 by the Israeli philosopher Adi Ophir, was the principal forum for post-colonial theory in Israel. “Academic and journalistic texts” Ella Shohat writes of this period, “have fashioned a kind of folk wisdom that posits Homi Bhabha as having surpassed Said.” “Without engaging in any depth Said’s oeuvre,” Shohat continues in an indispensable 2004 article for the Journal of Palestine Studies “or the varied debates around postcolonial studies, the facile recital of the Bhabha-beyond-Said mantra has come to be an entrance requirement for ‘doing the postcolonial’ in Israel.”[4]

Thirty years later, the editors of Unacknowledged Kinships seek novelty. The reasons for which are political, they argue. The collaboration of postcolonial studies and Zionist historiography, the editors hope, “could help overcome the destructive competition that often exists between the struggles against racism and the struggles against anti-semitism, in favor of a joint effort to confront past and present forms of exclusion, subordination, and persecution” (5). What the editors clearly mean is that they would prefer if anti-colonial and anti-racist organizers and intellectuals would desist from criticizing Zionism and Israel on anti-colonial and anti-racist grounds. The editors are explicit later in the introduction when they claim that postcolonial scholars’ support for Palestinians and BDS is partly due to their “sometimes insufficiently complex view of the conflict” (15). The editors take ambiguity—the other keyword that dominates the book—as “the very foundation of postcolonial studies” (15). Ambiguity, they argue, must be reaffirmed. [...]

[cambridgschol]

Top CBSE School Near Kullu

Introduction: Finding the right school for your child is a daunting task, especially when you want to ensure they receive a quality education that prepares them for future challenges. If you’re searching for the top CBSE school near Kullu, you’re in the right place. This blog explores what makes a school stand out and why our school is the best choice for your child. Academic Excellence The cornerstone of a top CBSE school is academic excellence. Our school near Kullu adheres to the CBSE curriculum, known for its rigorous standards and comprehensive approach to education. The curriculum is designed to foster critical thinking, creativity, and problem-solving skills.  Regular assessments and competitive exams prepare students for national-level competitions and entrance exams. Experienced Faculty Our faculty comprises highly qualified and experienced educators who are passionate about teaching. They bring innovative teaching methods to the classroom, ensuring that students are engaged and motivated. The teachers regularly attend professional development programs to stay updated with the latest educational trends and methodologies. State-of-the-Art Facilities A top CBSE school near Kullu must have state-of-the-art facilities to provide a conducive learning environment.  Our school is equipped with:  Modern Classrooms: Equipped with smart boards and audio-visual aids to enhance learning.  Science Labs: Fully equipped laboratories for physics, chemistry, and biology to encourage hands-on learning.  Computer Labs: Updated with the latest technology and software to teach coding, programming, and digital skills.  Library: A well-stocked library with a vast collection of books, journals, and digital resources. Holistic Development Education is not just about academics; it’s about the overall development of a child.  Our school focuses on holistic development, ensuring students excel in various fields:  Sports and Physical Education: We offer a variety of sports activities, including cricket, football, basketball, and athletics, with professional coaching.  Arts and Music: Our school encourages artistic expression through music, dance, drama, and visual arts.  Extracurricular Activities: Clubs and societies like debate, robotics, and environmental club help students develop diverse interests and skills. Strong Community and Values We believe in fostering a strong sense of community and instilling values like respect, integrity, and empathy in our students. Our school promotes a collaborative environment where students, teachers, and parents work together to create a positive learning experience. Admission Process The admission process at our school is transparent and straightforward. We welcome students from all backgrounds and ensure a fair evaluation process. Parents are encouraged to visit the school, meet the faculty, and understand our values and teaching philosophy. The process typically involves: Filling out the application form Submitting necessary documents An interview with the child and parents Testimonials Our school has received numerous accolades and positive feedback from parents and students alike.  Here are some testimonials: “We are extremely happy with the progress our child has made at this school. The teachers are dedicated, and the facilities are top-notch. Our child has developed a love for learning and is excelling in academics and extracurricular activities.” — Parent “The school environment is very supportive and encouraging. I have made great friends and enjoy participating in various activities.  The teachers are always ready to help and guide us.” — Student Conclusion Choosing the top CBSE school near Kullu for your child is a critical decision. Our school offers a perfect blend of academic excellence, holistic development, and a supportive community. With state-of-the-art facilities and a dedicated faculty, we are committed to nurturing young minds and preparing them for a successful future. Enroll your child today and witness the transformative power of quality education.

[ellie-bygrave]

Realism in an Otherworldly Setting

[Minor spoilers for Spider-Man 2 (2023)]

To begin, we should discus the definition of realism. Academically there are many discussions on this topic and many different views. Putnam (1975) argues that realism can be explanation of scientific fact, whereas Morris (2003) discusses that realism is based on what we perceive to be true is realism. Realism can mean something different to everyone, but for the purpose of this discussion when talking about video games, I will be talking about realism in terms of being accurate portrayal of real life as most people perceive it.

As technology has become more advanced and gained new capabilities, many video game studios have made attempts to bring more realistic-looking games to audiences. Many have been successful, with developers sometimes using motion capture and face scans alongside their more traditional skill to create highly detailed characters capable of a wide range of human expressions. Additionally, using photoscans of objects and textures can push environments closer and closer towards realism.

However, realism doesn't have to end with just the visuals of a game, although this is often the first thing we think of when discussing realism in regards to video games. Realism can also be applied to the story, dialogue, characters, and gameplay.

Often, the story and plot of a video game will be unlikely to be something most audiences will have experienced themselves; one of the points to playing a video game is to escape from reality and experience something different. For example, games such as Bioware's Dragon Age series are set in a fantasy world with magic, dragons, and an Archdemon set on destroying the world. This is not something most of us can expect to have experienced and, therefore, we can say it is not very realistic.

Having said this, there are different levels of what we can deem realistic within a different world setting based on the rules this world establishes. Within the world of Dragon Age, is is perfectly normal to encounter a rogue dwarf on their way to defeat a host of Darkspawn. It would not, however, be realistic to pull out a smartphone in order to check which way to go at a fork in the path. This is because the rules and established lore of this world can define what is realistic and what isn't within the game.

Often people can have a problem with realism - or lack thereof - in video games. A recent release which has sparked some debate is Insomniac's Spider-Man 2. Most are familiar with the story of how Peter Parker (and now Miles Morales) was bitten by a radioactive spider and gained superpowers. Not very realistic by our real-world standards, but when we look at the universe in which this takes place in the comic books and on our screens it doesn't seem that far fetched.

An article from the well-known media journalism platform Polygon discussed the unrealistic way in which Mary Jane (MJ), a journalist, was implemented into these games. The writer of the article said they felt it was unrealistic to have MJ sneaking around and fighting the bad guys instead of staying out of the action, as journalists usually do (Rivera, 2023). Whilst in our world they would be correct, in the world of Spider-Man (specifically the Insomniac games) MJ frequently becomes involved in the action to help Peter with his world-saving duties. Therefore we can say that it is not that unbelievable that she would have the abilities we see in this game. After all, Peter Parker has worked as a photographer and lab assistant in these games, neither of which typically involve dealing out masked vigilante justice on the streets of New York.

All in all, the element of realism in video games in terms of storytelling very much depends on the world in which these stories take place. Realism doesn't just have to be constrained by what we have experienced in our own lives. Game developers can destroy the boundaries of what we determine as realistic to create their own to create fantastical and bizarre tales that we could never hope - or sometimes want - to experience.

References

Morris, P. (2003). Realism. Routledge. London. https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ROSAAgAAQBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false

Putnam, H. (1975). What Is “Realism”? Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 76, 177–194. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4544887

Rivera, J. (2023). Please, Spider-Man games, stop making me play Mary Jane stealth missions. Polygon. https://www.polygon.com/gaming/23930425/spider-man-2-mary-jane-stealth-missions-why

[musclelover4826]

The School Paper Part 1

(Part 1 of 3, mostly set up but more to come soon!)

It made no sense to the rest of the college paper editorial board when one of their most active members, Maxwell, dropped off the radar over the summer. Especially when he insisted he was onto a huge scoop, the supposed dark explaination for the sudden expansion of the athletic department. It was true that just a few years ago this school was very academic focused. Yes with football, soccer, lacrosse, and whatnot offered to students but it was far more well known for its theater club and debate teams. That was until Coach Winters suddenly became employed there. A renowned high school coach moving up to the college level. Odd wasn't it for him to not go for a more academically oriented university. He surely would have had his pick from among those. After his employment suddenly there was a lot more student interest in athletics and the department grew and as they ranked in regionals the department got more funding. The school invested in a new Student Athletics Center, or the SAC as the jocks jokingly called it. And yes the increase in funding was at the detriment of other departments and clubs. Maxwell was sure there was something shadey about it and that the revelation would blow the lid on some illegal dealings Coach was involved in and restore the college to a respectable academic institution.

While the rest of the editorial board had doubts it was anything more than the publicity of a well known coach attracting more athletes to the college they had learned by now not to underestimate Maxwell's gut feelings. He was right about the school accepting money from wealthy families to guaruntee good grades for their children. He was right about the previous funding cut being about the president wanting a higher pay. He was right about the head of the art department advertising student works as her own. He was right about...well you get the point. So the odds he was right about there being something fishy about Coach Winters, was pretty high. While they wouldn't be involved in the investigation actively, opting to focus on more mundane stories, they let Maxwell do his thing. However it was rather unusual for him to give no updates for the whole summer. Even if it was a 'dang I got nothing maybe I was wrong' or something, anything. They tried his cell phone, nothing, texts and emails also went unanswered. It was all very odd.

The school year started and in the first week there was a club fair. The college paper had a table of course. But the fair was near the football fields and while the the team was practicing Paul, the president of the editorial board, noticed one of the guys on the field looked a lot like Maxwell. Granted that short jock cut looked nothing like how he would style his hair and he looked a lot more muscular. The look on his face was dull. Paul rushed over confused. "Maxwell! Maxwell what happened over summer? You dropped off the radar" he called getting closer while the now bigger Maxwell gave him a dumb look.

"The fuck bro? My names Max, what kinda nerdy name is Maxwell?" His voice was a lot deeper and the way he talked was so dumb.

"What happened to you?" Paul asked confused.

"I stopped being a little bitch" Max chuckled.

"We did you find anything out?"

"Bout what bro?"

"About the athletic department! Coach Winters! You don't remember your investigation?" Paul was confused and a little scared as Max just chuckled.

"Found out how to lift and eat right if thats what you mean bro. Coach is fucking awesome huhuh" he chuckled. Paul looked at Max's face, the dull grin, the empty look in his eyes. The meat head in front of Paul was a far cry from the beanpole journalism major that he had once known.

"Yo Max! Why you talkin to this loser?" One of the jocks shouted and Max shrugged and jogged off with them to continue practice. Paul returned to the paper's table at the club fair dejectedly. "Max was onto something. They did something to him" he said "and I'm gonna find out what" the others agreed. They had originally decided to stay out of Max's special project but this was too weird to ignore.

The next few days the investigation was on. It stared with interviewing the jocks on the various teams as well was the staff of the gym located in the SAC but kept getting the same answers.

"Coach is the best!"

"That new gear he ordered is the shit!"

"He made this school great!"

And so on. Very little implied there was anything dark or sinister going on. Coach Winters seemed like a man with connections to tech and sports gear companies who came in to save and revive a failing athletic department. In all honesty it seemed to be the conclusion Paul could gave reached without interviewing a bunch of jocks. If it weren't for Max. That was the only odd detail. Coach did something to him. And Paul was determined to find out what it was. Pauls next step was to ask about Max specifically.

"Oh yeah, he kinda was like you, askin a bunch of random shit about Coach"

"I remember him pissing off the assistant coaches with his questions"

"I think the quarterback got him a meeting with Coach, he started helping out after that" it was that last statement from some guy named Dale that caught Paul's attention. It was that statement that led to the poor decision to break into the Coach's office after hours. To find what? What was he really expecting? A file on his computer called 'brainwashing script'? Some contract between him and a brain chip company to just be sitting on his desk labeled in big red letters 'TOP SECRET'? If thats what Paul expected he was in for disappointment. All he found was some requests for funding, stats on the sports teams ans how they've improved. Some framed diplomas on the walls. Student records in a filing cabinet. A few trophys and a football helmet sitting on a stack of random books. Nothing damning. There was a student file on Max but it was just his health report prior to joining the team, a workout plan, and then order forms on the size gear he'd need. Proof Max acted out of character yes, but the papers themselves would only show he joined the team not that he was forced to against his will. There was one last odd thing though. A form on Paul. A application to the football second string, with his own forged signature on it. Some stats abour height and weight that were nowhere near accurate. What the hell?

"Coach said you'd be here" the deep rumble of Max's voice came from behind Paul and he turned around in time to see Max grab the helmet from the desk and shove it on his head. After that everything went dark.

[merelygifted]

Scientists discover Machu Picchu could be at least two decades older than thought | Peru | The Guardian

A team of investigators used enhanced carbon dating methods to examine human remains from the site in Peru

A scientific discovery about Machu Picchu has cast doubt on the reliability of colonial records for modern western historians trying to piece together an understanding of the Inca people who built the site.

For more than 75 years, many historians and scientists have worked on the assumption that the famous site in Peru was built some time after AD1438. This was based primarily on 16th-century Spanish accounts from their conquest of the region. However, enhanced radiocarbon dating techniques carried out on remains have now found it could be at least two decades older.

“The results suggest that the discussion of the development of the Inca empire based primarily on colonial records requires revision,” said the lead author of the research, Prof Richard Burger from Yale University.

“Modern radiocarbon methods provide a better foundation for understanding Inca chronology than the contradictory historical records.”

The historical site is one of the most well-known in the world, yet its past and the people who used it remain among the more mysterious to western historians.

The ancient citadel would typically attract more than a million visitors each year. Yet developing an understanding of its detailed history has been made more difficult by huge cultural differences, such as a lack of contemporary historical records inscribed in a way that would have been recognisable to Europeans.

To tackle this, Burger led a team of US investigators in carrying out accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) dating of human remains from Machu Picchu.

They examined the remains of 26 individuals and the results, published in the peer-reviewed journal Antiquity, strongly suggested continuous use of the site from 1420 at the latest – and probably earlier – until 1530. The latter date would roughly coincide with the start of the Spanish conquest of the Inca empire.

“This is the first study based on scientific evidence to provide an estimate for the founding of Machu Picchu and the length of its occupation,” said Burger, adding that earlier such attempts did not produce sufficiently reliable results.

There is some debate among academics about the relative values of historical and archeological records in developing historical narratives. “Inca chronology is a matter of debate among archaeologists and historians,” Dr Gabriela Ramos of Cambridge University said.

“Dating Inca sites is subject to speculation because written accounts and archaeological evidence do not always correspond. For decades, historians and anthropologists have relied mostly on written accounts and it is rather recent that archaeological findings, use of radiocarbon dating, and other techniques are contributing to, add to or change our understanding of pre-Columbian societies.

“The fact that very few Inca tombs have survived – because of looting – and, overall within Andean archaeological research, the fact that the Inca period is the least studied [mean that] we still don’t know as much about the Incas as we do about their predecessors.”

Dr Trish Biers, an osteologist at the same institution, said colonial records are important to our understanding of what was witnessed by the Spanish at the time. But that they were “heavily influenced by political propaganda, religious superiority, and the overall subversive voice of the Spanish Empire, which had its own glittering agenda”.

She said: “Scientific methods, particularly on human remains, can give us insight into what the people were experiencing – for example, diet, disease and labour – on both an individual level and population level. Which is pretty cool.” ...

[moonsubinpr]

[Lee Soo Hyuk — 35 — he/him] Introducing MOON SUBIN. Word on the street is they are a PRESS SECRETARY FOR THE DISTRICT ATTORNEY affiliated with the DEMOCRATIC PARTY. Though they are RESERVED and INTIMIDATING, they can also be DEPENDABLE and HARDWORKING. In the chaos of New York City, they’re sure to fit right in.

Biography. Ask. Wanted Connections. 

I. WRITER’S INTRODUCTION

First of all, I want to introduce myself. You all can call me Jackie, and I am a twenty-one year old graduate student residing within the Eastern Standard Timezone (EST). I have been roleplaying for about 10 years now, however, I took a hiatus from writing on Tumblr due to migrating to other platforms that are more mobile friendly in terms of writing. Now that I have a greater availability, as well as not fond of the newfound style of roleplay on platforms such as Twitter or MeWe, I have returned in hopes to better develop characters and build better connections with other writers. Aside from writing, I enjoy spending quality time with my cat, going out to explore newfound areas, thrifting, reading, and watching random reality television shows. I look forward to getting to know everyone! Feel free to message me for plotting, headcanoning, or for a casual conversation. 

II. BASICS

NAME: MOON SUBIN

AGE: THIRTY-FIVE 

DATE OF BIRTH: 1986 MAY 31

GENDER: CISMALE

PRONOUNS: HE / HIM

SEXUALITY: PANSEXUAL 

HOMETOWN: IOWA CITY, IOWA

AFFILIATION: THE GOVERNMENT

JOB POSITION: DISTRICT ATTORNEY’S PRESS SECRETARY 

EDUCATION: BA IN JOURNALISM FROM NYU

RELATIONSHIP STATUS: SINGLE

CHILDREN: NONE

POSITIVE TRAITS: ELOQUENT, INDEPENDENT, INTELLIGENT, RESPONSIBLE, MATURE, REASONABLE

NEGATIVE TRAITS: RESERVED, BLUNT, INTIMIDATING, DEMANDING, SARCASTIC

FACECLAIM: LEE SOO HYUK 

III. POINTS ABOUT THE MUSE

Moon Subin was born into a rather average household in Heukseok-dong, Seoul, South Korea. His mother, a down-to-earth woman with a contagious smile, worked alongside her mother as a food vendor in one of the city’s largest market. The two were acutely known for their blood sausages as well as jangeo-gui (grilled eel). In fact, this is how the young woman met the young businessman. Running from a class with only a few cash in hand, he stopped at mother’s spot, asking for anything he could get with the amount of money available. She laughed at his lack of time management, and he only stated that he’ll make time to see her better next time. The following day, he returned and sat to chat with the woman. 

Subin was unplanned. The two were not yet wedded when discovering that the woman fell pregnant. However, never did the young couple refer to the baby as a mistake. Rather, they saw Subin’s life as a blessing to better plan for their fast approaching future. During the time in which the woman was pregnant, the man was offered an opportunity to continue his university studies abroad. Sent to Iowa City, Iowa, the young couple packed their belongings and settled within the United States. It’s in this city where Subin would be born, granting him American citizenship despite his parents yet to become naturalized citizens. 

Falling in love with the environment, the mother and father went through various means in order to further extend their stay within the country. From a student visa to a work visa, the father was granted more time to better prepare for the examination of becoming U.S. citizens. While his father began to work in a local company specializing in medical prosthetics, his mother worked at a local Chinese restaurant where she befriended Chinese immigrants who helped her with assimilating into the culture. 

Subin grew up in an environment where he witnessed the benefits of hard work. His parents worked many hours in order to provide for him as well as to their community. He found this to be admirable, and this encouraged the young boy to succeed in his academics so that he could provide for his parents in the future. 

He became interested in the field of communications due to constantly acting as the translator for his parents when making doctor appointments or trying to pitch the best deal at a cars dealership. Words were fascinating, and he especially thought this was the case after reading a number of novels written by authors such as H.G. Wells and Amy Tan. His interest in communications got him involved with the morning news at his middle school and high school. During his four years at high school, he also participated in Model UN and the Debate team. These involvements were the result of his great achievements in social studies courses, and his teachers encouraged him to get involved with these extracurricular activities. 

Due to awards achieved in high school, he was granted a scholarship to attend New York University in New York City. Although his parents did not want him to leave their home, they eventually came to terms that this would be good for his future successes. Thus, he went to attend NYU for a Bachelors in Journalism with a minor in Politics. Thanks to amazing professors and establishing connections through networking events, the young man was able to maintain a number of internships---such as volunteering for the current Governor’s former campaign in the creative team for marketing. He later volunteered alongside CNN professionals, and he gained an internship experience with the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office as Press Office Intern. By the time he graduated from university, he’s already met a number of influential, powerful people of the big city. 

 Upon graduation, he was able to get a job at the Manhattan District Attorney Office as Press Officer due to his wonderful performance during his internship with the office. He held this position for two years before being promoted as Deputy Press Secretary for the office. However, in less than 2 years, he was able to maintain the Press Secretary position due to the former Press Secretary’s leave to another office. In another year, he was granted the position of Deputy Director of Communications for the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. Subin held this position up until he was given the opportunity to work as the city’s District Attorney’s main Press Secretary. 

During his years working for the city and learning about the mishaps behind the scenes, Subin has been able to learn a lot about the dirty truth. He is aware that some of the crimes dealt with in the office are a result to the existing gangs within the city. Although his DA remains slightly oblivious to the people surrounding them, Subin maintains awareness due to the connections he’s established during interviews as well as conferences. They threaten Subin to keep quiet. They ask Subin to twist the truth. He does what keeps him safe, but he holds the knowledge close to his heart. The quiet man knows a lot----perhaps more than what the gangs wish for him to know, and this can be dangerous. One never knows what he can do with all of this knowledge. He could expose them to the public whenever he dares to do so. If he really wanted to, of course.

But, for now, he keeps quiet. He does his job and remains cordial with those he establishes some sorts of connection with. If someone he cares about, though, ever gets hurt, he’s not sure what he’ll do. No one knows.  

IV. WANTED CONNECTIONS

Any and all possible connections within the Government. I would love to further develop and establish connections within the affiliation in order to better understand Subin’s position in the government as well as with Law Enforcement, for he works within the District Attorney Office; therefore, he has connections with lawyers as well as officers. This can be good or bad, I am open to all possibilities. 

For those in Media, Subin is responsible for addressing those in Media in order to report information given by the DA. Those in media could have interviewed Subin, have gone to a number of his press hearings, as well as questioned his intentions or morales within this position. Anyone who does not trust him is very much wanted. A person who trusts him a lot is also wanted. 

To those in any gang, people who has paid him or threatened him to withhold information from the public is very much wanted. Give me some angst in regard to perhaps threatening his family. Perhaps people question how Subin can offerd such a luxurious home or car, and this could be due to payments accepted from those within these organizations. I am open to anything.

I am also interested in a secret relationship that should not be a relationship, however, the two continue to pursue one another in sexual and romantic rendezvous. Subin is not entirely the most relationship-orientated person, however, due to a lot of stress within his career, some fun would be favorable. 

[olderthannetfic]

Hey, sorry to ask this, but a few days ago I saw a post/discussion about the history of original work on ao3 (i.e. how and when it was allowed). I thought it was in my likes, but it's not, and I thought you had reblogged it recently, but I didn't find it. I was wondering if you have seen this discussion around? Or where I can find more about it? This specific post talked abt how who defended original work on ao3 were not the BNFs, if that helps.

That was me running my mouth in the reblogs of something or other. It’s just the one comment.

But what’s that you say? Some tl;dr about a pet topic? Don’t mind if I do! ;) (To be honest, most of this debate happened years ago, and a lot of the long meta was by me back then too, so…)

Okay, so, the situation with Original Works is actually super interesting and a microcosm of early years OTW wank.

This is going to be even more tl;dr than my usual. To try to summarize very briefly:

There were two big cultural factions. One thought “original” was the opposite of “fan”. That one was in charge of OTW. It was hard to get voices from the other side into the debate because they already felt excluded from OTW.

This divide broke down more or less into Ye Olde Slash Fandom on the “it’s the opposite” side and anime fandom on the “WTF?” side. Americans on one side and a lot of non-US, non-English language fandom on the other.

I. Media Fandom, Anime Fandom, and Early OTW

I went to that first fundraising party that astolat threw in New York City back in… god… 2007? 2008? I wasn’t on the Board or any official position until the committees got started later, but I was around right from the very beginning.

Whether you’re looking at volunteers or at people who commented on astolat’s original post, there were always a variety of fans from a variety of fannish backgrounds. People aren’t absolutely in one camp or another, and fannish interests change over time. If you go dig through Dreamwidth posts to find who was actually participating in this debate at the time, half of them are probably in the other camp now.

If you think like that sounds like a preamble to me making a bunch of offensively sweeping generalizations and divvying fans up into little groups, you’d be right! Haha.

I.a. Ye Olde Media Fandom

There are a lot of camps of people who like fanfic. One of the biggest divisions has been Ye Olde Media Fandom vs. anime fandom. Astolat’s social circle–my LJ social circle–was filled with people with decades of fannish experience and a deep knowledge of the Media Fandom side of things.

Those fandom history treatises that start with K/S zines in Star Trek fandom in the 70s and move on through the mainstream buddy cops like Starsky & Hutch to the more niche, sff buddy cops like Fraser and Ray or Jim and Blair are talking about Media Fandom. I try to always capitalize it because the name is lulzy and bizarre to me unless it’s a proper noun for a specific historical thing. It was coined as a rude term for “mass media” fandom aka dumb people who like, ughhhh, Star Trek, ughhh, instead of books. This is a very ancient slapfight from the type of fandom you find at Worldcon, often called “SF fandom” or plain “fandom”.

(Yes, this leads to mega confusion on the part of some old dudes when they find Fanlore and fail to understand that “fandom” there refers to what these people would call “Media Fandom”. They think only they get the unmarked form. But I digress…)

Media Fandom is a specific flavor of fandom. It’s where the slash zines were. It’s where the fans of live action US TV shows were. It’s the history that acafans have laid out well and that tends to get used to defend the idea of a female subculture writing transgressive and transformative fanfic. On the video side, Media Fandom is where Kandy Fong invented vidding by making Star Trek slideshows.

(Kandy’s still around, BTW. She’s usually at Escapade in L.A. Ask her to tell you about the dancing penises sketch in person. She’s hilarious.)

Astolat and friends had been going to slash cons for years. They founded Vividcon. And Yuletide. That meant that when astolat said “Hey kids, let’s put on a show!” we all jumped to help. This is a lady who gets things done.

From a Worldcon perspective, or even from an older Media Fandom perspective, this group was comparatively young, hip, and welcoming. Their fandom interests were comparatively broad. Just look at Yuletide!

In fact, yes, let us look at Yuletide… [ominous music]

I.b. Yuletide sucks at anime

From the very first year (2003), Yuletide mods have asked for help with anime fandoms, been confused about anime fandoms, or made bad judgment calls about anime fandoms. They’ve fucked up on Superhero comics and plenty of other things over the years, but anime has been the most consistent (well, and JRPGs, but there’s so much overlap in those fic fandoms).

There was already bad feeling about this. There were years of bad feeling about this.

I.c. Where are the historians?

Academic study of fanficcy things pretty much got started with Textual Poachers and Enterprising Women. Other acafans who are well known to LJ and later Tumblr are people like Francesca Coppa who wrote a very nice summary of the history of Media Fandom. These are not the only academics who exist, these academics themselves have written about many other things, and by now, OTW’s own journal has covered a lot of other territory, but to this day I see complaints on Tumblr that “acafans” only care about K/S and oldschool slash fandom.

There were years of bad feeling about this as well.

I.d. What kind of fan was I?

Now, by the time OTW got started, I’d moseyed over to not only a lot of live action US TV but a lot of old-as-fuck US TV that is squarely in the Media Fandom camp. But once upon a time, I was a weeaboo hanging out with my weeaboo friends in college. I learned Japanese (sort of). I moved to Japan. Livin’ the weeaboo dream!

More importantly, I used to be a member of a lot of anime mailing lists back in the Yahoo Groups days. I didn’t realize what a cultural gap that would cause until the original works issue came up on AO3.

I.e. Anime Fandom, German-language Fandom, Original M/M

Once upon a time–namely in that Yahoo Groups era–there was an archive called Boys in Chains. It was where you found The Good Stuff™. Heavy kink and power exchange galore! It was extremely well known in the parts of fandom I was in, even if you weren’t on the associated mailing list. It contained lots of fic, but it also had lots of original work.

Around that same era, I was on a critique list called Crimson Ink, which was mixed fic and original. The “original slash” and “original yaoi” crowds mixed freely and were in fanfic spaces. Remember, this is like 2003. You’re never going to get your gay fantasy novel published in English in the US. A couple of fangirl presses started around then, but they died an ignominious death after their first print run.

Fanfiction.net used to allow original work before it spun that off into FictionPress. We forget this today, but if you were an early FFN person, the separation wasn’t so great either.

Meanwhile, German-language fandom was hanging out on sites like Animexx.de, a big-ass fic archive that prominently mentions also including original work. I have the impression that Spanish-language fandom was similar too.

Shousetsu Bang*Bang was founded in 2005. It was a webzine for original m/m, but it was entirely populated by fanfic fandom types.

In all of those kinds of spaces, there was a lot of “original” work that was kind of slash or BL-ish and seen as fannish if it was posted in the fannish space. These weren’t anime-only spaces. They were multifandom spaces where it was seen as obvious and normal that a couple of huge fandoms like Harry Potter would dominate but that everything else big would naturally be anime.

While fans from every background are everywhere, I found that the concentration of EFL fans living in Continental Europe, South America, and Asia was much higher in this kind of space, even the exclusively English language part of it, than in my US TV fandoms.

II. AO3 Early Adopters

AO3 went into closed beta in 2009. In 2010, it was open to the general public (albeit with the invitation queue it still has). But not everyone was interested yet. Just like fandom is loath to leave the dying, shambling mess of Tumblr, fandom was loath to leave dwindling LJ/DW circles or was happy enough on Fanfiction.net. I used to see a lot of posts like “Why are you guys trying to STEAL fanfic from the original! FFN is enough!”

I literally could not give away the invitations I had. No one wanted them.

So who was on AO3? Obviously enough, it was all of us who built it and our friends. So that means a bunch of oldschool Livejournal slashers coming from fandoms like Due South or Stargate Atlantis.

The queue was open. Anyone could make an account. Everyone was welcome. In theory…

But more and more, there started to be these posts about how “AO3 Hates Anime Fandom” and “FFN is for anime. AO3 is for Western fandoms.” and “If you guys actually wanted anime fandom on there, you’d invite us better and make us more welcome.”

At the time, I found these posts obnoxious. People aren’t purely in one sort of fandom or the other. No one was stopping anime fandom from making accounts. No one was banning anime fandom. If there wasn’t much from old fandoms, that was because old fandoms seldom move.

Things began to change. Trolls on FFN forced the Twilight porn writers out, creating enough fuss and brouhaha to mobilize people who would rather have stayed put. AO3 got big enough that randos found it by accident. Original work started to pop up, posted by people who’d never looked at the rules and had no idea it was not allowed.

III. History of AO3’s Policy

I had argued for allowing “original work” during the initial discussions about the ToS. On one side of this issue was me. On the other, everyone else on the committee.

I was overruled.

Open Door started importing old archives to save them. Boys in Chains was hugely important to fandom history from my point of view. It was slated to be imported… maybe. Except that Boys in Chains is half original. AO3 was happy to grandfather in those stories, but the final archive owner felt, quite rightly, that it would be unfair to tell half of the authors they were welcome in the new space while spitting on the other half.

I was pissed. I had been pissed since being overruled the first time. To me, the fact that it should be allowed was so blatantly obvious that it was hard to even explain why.

(To be honest, this difficulty in explaining why and the even greater difficulty in figuring out the source of that difficulty is what held the discussion back for so long. When every assumption on either side is completely opposite, it’s hard to communicate.)

I felt betrayed. It would be like if you helped build something, and everyone was suddenly like “Well, obviously, we can’t allow m/m. It’s not normal fanfic.”

So we discussed it again and, again, it was me vs. literally everyone else. And still the “AO3 is only for Western slash fandom” bitching rose in volume and more and more people complained of feeling excluded from the new fandom hub. Finally, the committee agreed to open the issue up for public comment and get some more input. I was a fool and neither wrote nor proofread the post. It went out phrasing the question as allowing “non fannish” work or something of that sort.

I was furious. The entire point of the whole debate was that I saw some original work, the original work that belongs on AO3, as inherently fannish. And now this had been presented to the AO3 audience as something completely different. Think pieces were popping up in the journals of everyone I knew about diluting AO3’s mission and how we needed to save AO3 from encroachment. Public opinion was very negative. That’s both because of how the post was phrased and because OTW die hards at the time were mostly from the same fannish background. This tidal wave of negativity meant that there was virtually no chance of changing this poisonous rule. And if the rule didn’t change, the people who wanted the rule change were never going to show up to explain why it mattered.

If you’ve been reading my tumblr, I think you can guess what happened next.

I posted a long post to my Dreamwidth. It was a masterwork of passive aggression. In it, I wrung my hands about how simply tragic it would be if AO3 had to delete all of the original work… like anthropomorfic.

Now, I think anthropomorfic counts as fanfic as much as anything else, but I also knew that it fails most rigorous “based on a canon” type definitions of fic and, more importantly, it’s a favorite Yuletide fandom of many of the people on the side that wanted to ban original work.

That’s a nice fandom of yours. It would be a pity if something happened to it. 

Yup. Passive aggressive blackmail. Go me. Suddenly, there was a lot of awkward backtracking and confused running in circles in various journals. The committee agreed to table the idea for a while but not rule out the idea of allowing original works in the future. We agreed to halt all deletions of original work. If a fan posted it, the Abuse Committee (which I was also head of at the time) would not delete that work even though it was technically against the rules.

Time passed. The people on the negative side got tired. I wanted off that committee and had wanted off for ages, but I was damned if I was going to leave before ramming through this piece of policy. Grudgematch till I die! (Look, I never said I wasn’t a wanker.)

After a while, some other fans came forward with more types of “original work” as evidence that it should be allowed. These were from parts of fandom none of us on the committee knew a damn thing about.

This new evidence combined with the gradual accretion of original stuff on AO3 without the sky falling eventually led us to quietly rule Original Work a valid fandom. There was never even a big announcement post. I slipped a word to the Boys in Chains mod myself.

IV. What Were They So Afraid Of Anyway?

So why were people so resistant? Seems like a dick move, right?

Not exactly.

I mean, I was enraged and waged a one-woman war to change the rules, but the other side wasn’t nuts. The objections were usually the following:

I just don’t get why it would be allowed. It never was in my fannish spaces.

Most of our members don’t want this.

Most of the examples of things that ought to be included are m/m. We are privileging m/m if we allow it, and AO3 already has a m/m-centric reputation that can feel exclusionary to some fans.

AO3 is a young, shaky platform that can barely handle the load and content we already have. If we open to original work, we’ll be opening the floodgates. The volume of posting will be so high, it will drown out the fic we’re actually here to protect.

Protecting stuff that doesn’t need protection because it’s not an IP issue would dilute OTW’s mission.

If we allow it, idiots will try to turn AO3 into advertising space, posting only the first chapter and a link to where you can pay to read the rest.

If we add another category of text before we add fan art, that’s a slap in the face of the fan artists we are already failing.

These arguments all make perfect sense in context.

Obvously, the issue with the first two is that different fannish communities have different norms. I knew that a very large community disagreed with the then current AO3 policy, but since so few of them were around to comment, it seemed like a tiny fringe minority.

The m/m thing is… complex. M/M content with zero IP issues is at risk. It is always at risk in a way that even f/f is not (though f/f is also always at risk). Asking for m/m to be exactly equivalent to f/f or m/f in numbers, tropes, whatever is ignoring the historical realities. In our current moment of queer activism in the West, we treat all types of queerness as part of one community with one set of goals, but once you get to culture and art or even more specific activism, this forced homogenization is neither useful nor healthy.

OTOH, AO3 really did have PR problems related to the perception that we gave m/m fandom the kid glove treatment. That objection wasn’t coming from nowhere.

AO3 was shaky. It was tiny when I first brought up this argument. Hell, it wasn’t even in closed beta the first time we discussed this. Part of what made the quiet rules change possible was AO3 organically getting much bigger and OTW having to buy many more servers for unrelated reasons.

The “floodgates” thing was put to rest by tacitly allowing original work before the rules change. We had a period to study how fans actually behaved, and as I predicted, only a small amount of original work got posted. It was indeed mostly things like original BL-ish stories or original work that had been part of a mixed original/fic fest, exchange, zine, etc. Currently, the “Original Work” fandom on AO3 only has 76,348 works. That’s pretty big compared to individual fandoms but tiny compared to AO3’s current size.

The commercial argument was spurious because commercial spam had been against the rules from the very beginning. OH THE IRONY that nowadays AO3 has all these idiots trying to post the first chapter of their fanfic and then direct you to where you can buy the rest.

AO3 has plenty of fanfic of public domain works. One of the problems with gatekeeping original work is that any way you try to distinguish it (not based on a specific canon, not an IP issue, etc.) will apply to some set of obviously allowable fandoms.

As for fan art… OTW has failed fan artists. They needed protection as much as or even more than fic writers. Just look at Tumblr! If we had succeeded at making DeviantArt but allowing boners, fan art fandom could have been safe all these years. Or when Tumblr inevitably shat the bed, we could have scooped up all those people instead of them scattering to twitter and god knows where.

OTW has failed vidders too, at least in terms of preservation. I know I’m not the only one who thinks this. Other major people from like the first Board and shit have discussed this with me offline. Doing some kind of vidding project, possibly outside of OTW is on a lot of our to-do lists. But at least one of OTW’s biggest victories has been that copyright exemption. OTW has demonstrably done really positive things for vidders that other organizations and sites have not. As a vidder, I never expected to see good hosting for the actual video files, and I’m quite content.

But fan artists… yeah. That argument makes sense at least from a place of frustration.

BTW, for the love of god, if you’re a n00b to OTW stuff, please do not reblog this post excitedly telling me that hosting fan art is on OTW’s road map, so yay, good news. Someone always does that, and it’s so irritating. I haven’t been involved in OTW in years, but I used to be, and I know what is on the roadmap. The couple of you who do heavy lifting on sysadmin and coding and policy things are welcome to weigh in as usual. I know none of us like that we can’t host fan art. It’s not what we intended.

Nonetheless, I found this argument to be the perfect being the enemy of the good. If we can save more text now without losing much of anything, we should do it. The fact that we’re fucking up on the fan art front is not a reason to spread the misery around.

V. Is “Original” the Opposite of “Fanfic”?

Okay, so that tl;dr above is why “BNFs” were on one side and “nobodies” were on the other. BNFs from one cultural background founded OTW. BNFs from the other cultural background weren’t even aware that the debate was going on.

But what was the underlying philosophical problem in even having the conversation?

It took me a long time, but I finally worked it out: We had two completely different ways of categorizing writing, and they were so baked into how we phrased questions that everything ended up being unanswerable to the other side. Here is what I came up with:

Schema 1

Fanfic - based on someone else’s IP

Original Work - the opposite

Schema 2

Non-Fannish Work - School essays, stories you are writing to try to sell to a mainstream publisher

Fannish Work Type 1 - based on other people’s characters directly (i.e. fanfic) Type 2 - based on tropes or whatever (“original slash” and the like)

Now, in the current moment when half of Tumblr just got into Chinese webnovels and the m/m ebook industry is thriving in English, original, tropey, BL-ish work is no longer different from “things I am trying to sell”. But this is how the divide was circa 2005 on fannish websites, and it’s the divide that was driving this internal OTW debate.

VI. Let’s Summarize the Camps One More Time

So, again, the debate makes perfect sense if you understand who was involved.

On the mainstream “But that’s not fanfic? I’m confused?” side:

Big US TV fandoms in English

Fandom historians of K/S–>buddy cop slash–>SGA, etc.

Americans

On the other side:

Anime fandom

“Original slash” fandom that had already been chased off of everywhere

People upset that AO3 wasn’t farther on translating the interface and supporting non-English language fandom.

People upset about US-centrism in fandom

Yes, I am very white, very American, and by now very into old buddy cop shows, but this was basically how the breakdown worked. It meant that something that looked like a minor quibble to one side was really, really not.

[alyy0808]

English-APP Record Reading sept. 27 - oct. 8

Unit 1: The Nature of Academic Texts

In the lesson 1 titled Structure of Academic Texts I learned that Structure of Academic Texts is all about Structuring Paragraphs, Structuring the Three-Part Essay and Structuring IMRaD. First, I learned about  Structuring Paragraphs which is one of the essential features of academic writing, and we all know that a paragraph is a group of sentences that deal mostly with one topic or idea at a time. There are also three parts of a paragraph which are, first, is the Topic  Sentence. The Topic  Sentence is the main point of the paragraph while Supporting Sentences supports the main idea of the paragraph, and Transitional Sentences is used to end a paragraph and prepare the next paragraph for the introduction of the next concept. Illustration, definition, classification, comparison and contrast, and process  is the different kinds of patterns of development found in a paragraph. Also, In Structuring the Three-part Essay there are the 3 parts of an essay which are the Introduction, body, and conclusion. Structuring IMRaD or also known as  Structuring Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion, with a Conclusion. The context of the study and what the study will entail are typically included in the Introduction, while the Methods are part of this particular structure  that explain how the research questions and objective were met and answered. The results section presents the results  and how they were collected in the methods, It is also recommended to use graphs and charts to present data for a better understanding. Captions are also essential in presenting data because the readers may not read the entire text. Furthermore, the data or figures should not be repeated in the text.

 In the lesson 2 I learned about Academic Texts across the Disciplines and it explains about The Academic Disciplines, Connections across Disciplines, and Articulating Different Positions in Academic Writing. In The Academic Disciplines I learned that the academic disciplines has various branches under them which are the accounting, economics, finance and management marketing for Business.  Art, creative writing, languages, literature, etc. for Humanities. Natural and applied sciences also have biology, chemistery,  computer science, engineering, etc. and anthropology. education, geograpy, history, and law for the Social sciences.  Each discipline and its branches have its own communities with their own languages, communication styles, and ways of communication. Connection across Disciplines is all about the disciplines that are not so different in development and purpose. Disciplines are developed and designed to help us make sense of our world and phenomena. We can also gain more knowledge about the world when a practitioner can build on a perviously established body of work from his or her discipline. research are often used on this cause discipline requires you to make use of sources in form of past papers, journal entries and experiments. This helps not only your own research but also the discipline itself, as you are helping expan and add to the previous studies in your choosen discipline. Furthermore, With more knowledge in different disciplines, you will become better at knowing how your own specialization can fit with the rest of the world.

 Lastly, on the lesson 3 titled Articulating Different Positions in Academic Writing talks about that any discipline you to choose to enter already has a number of debates, studies,  controversies, and expirements that have been going on for years, if not decades or centuries. There are long-standing binary oppositions in each discipline that can help you make more sense of the different issues, themes, and topics you might encounter when reading academic texts and conducting your own research in the future. Production-consumption and labor capital are the binary oppositions of Business, while Humanities have artist-culture and text-context, Natural and applied sciences also have empiricism-rationalism and observer-subject, and nature-nurture and free will-determinism for Social sciences. These are just a few examples of the many binaries found in each discipline. with time and effort you’ll be able to pinpoint these binaries in the academic texts you read as well as determine other binaries within the disciplines.

 Unit 2: Thesis Statement and Outlining

In this topic I learned that in a academic paper Thesis Statement is very important because it is the main idea that will dictate the purpose and flow of your arguments in the rest of your paper. There are some characteristics in thesis statement and one of them is that, it shows where you stand regarding the subject matter you are discussing. Your academic paper should be persuasive  because in writing academic paper or research our goal is is primarily convince our readers to consider our stand, and by that to convince them, the rest of our paper should contain evidence that will help back up you thesis statement in order to pursuade others to take your stand. Furthermore, the body of your paper should then support and defend your thesis.

In Outlining Academic Texts I learned that creating an outline is one of the last steps of the prewriting stage, it helps the writer to categorize the main point of the topic, organize the paragraphs and to make sure that the paragraphs are fully developed.  An outline acts ultimately helps the writer to not get stuck while he or she is writing an essay. When writing a topic outline only phrases or main ideas are needed. There is no need to write the full sentences it also utilizes wording that is parallel to one another which is means that the same format is used for headings and subheading for organization. Sentence outline makes use of sentences, that means all headings and subheadings must be in sentences form.

 Unit 3: Writing a Summary

I learned that a summary is a brief statement or the main points of a paragraph or in research. Summarizing should reproduce the key ideas and points of a text, identifying the general concepts that prevail throughout the entire piece, and to express these concepts and ideas with precise and specific language. There are two techniques in writing a summary which are the previewing, skimming and scanning. In writing a summary it is essential to add the title and the author’s name in the first sentence and the author’s thesis too, so that it is easy to recall what the key points are, it also makes it easier to navigate through your summary. We should also avoid opinions or personal responses in our summary and be more mindful to avoid plagiarism. Furthermore, a proper summary can be used to help you to relevant information you might need for your academic writing.

The aims of summarizing texts are to reproduce the overarching ideas in order to identify the general concepts and to express the overarching ideas using precise and specific language. There are steps in summarizing texts and one of them is, the author’s thesis statement should be indicated in the first two sentences. It also should be break down the text or research into the main ideas before summarizing the whole texts and leave out the ideas that are not relevant to the whole text.

 Unit 4: Writing from Sources

I learned that in paraphrasing it doesn’t require you to quote from the source text, paraphrasing is a restatement of a text, passage, or work to express the meaning in another form. A good paraphrase shows how the writer understand what he or she reading. There are different kinds of paraphrasing which are the change of parts of speech, change of structure, clause reduction,and synonym replacement and there are also kinds of plagiarism which are, first, the verbatim plagiarism, word order plagiarism, and the idea plagiarism.

In techniques in paraphrasing I learned that there are several techniques that can be used to paraphrase effectively, which are the change of words and the change of sentence structure. In change of words we can change the part of speech, use synonyms, and change numbers and percentages to different forms. While changing the sentence structure we can change the word order, use different definition structures, use different attribution signals, and change the sentence structure and use different conjunctions. In paraphrasing we should not change the proper nouns and technical terms and we should maintain the meaning of the text when we’re paraphrasing a texts.

Lastly, paraphrasing vs. quoting, I learned that Quoting includes taking what the writer stated and repeating it word-for-word. This method is commonly used for terms or quick sentences. As mentioned in preceding lessons, copying an author’s phrases verbatim is typically categorized as plagiarism. To keep away from this, it's far critical to enclose the copied textual content in citation marks (“ “) whilst quoting and characteristic the phrases to the authentic author. When we are going to use quotation in our writing we should first introduce, cite, and explain (ICE method) the quotation we will be using.

 Unit 5:  Citing Sources of Information

In citation styles I learned that a citation is manner to offer credit score to the authors, scientists, researchers, and so forth whose innovative and intellectual work you used to guide or supplement your very own research and A citation style dictates what data is important to include in a citation, how that data have to be organized, what punctuations are used, and different formatting concerns. There are three different citation styles which are the American Psychological Association (APA) which is often used in education, psychology, and the social sciences and Modern Language Association (MLA) is normally used in the humanities while Chicago/Turabian style is often used in business, history and fine arts.  In writing in-text citations, endnotes, and footnotes I learned the format for in-text citations in APA uses the author-date-page number(s) while the format for in-text citations in MLA uses the author-page number(s) and the format for AD for CMOS ises author-date-page number(s), however CMOS also allows writers to utilize NB, where all references are found in either the footnotes or endnotes. Furthermore,  Footnotes and endnotes for APA and MLA should be limited and are usually used for additional content for other references. Lastly,  In writing a bibliography I learned that a bibliography lists all of the sources you used for your research and additional background reading. This includes even works that you did not end up referencing in your paper and a reference list or a works cited page is similar to a bibliography, but it only contains the sources you explicitly cited in your paper. Furthermore, The three citation styles organize and format their bibliographies and their bibliographic entries differently.

[mythgirlimagines]

Well, now that Tuesday is here, it’s time for a brand new talentswap! Give a soft hello to Myth, the Former Ultimate Essayist!

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BACKSTORY AND TALENT

Because of a combination of a weak body and her already existing scoliosis, this Myth spent most of her childhood bedridden and isolated from the world. With her frail body, Myth turned to reading and studying as her only two modes of entertainment. Myth was practically homeschooled, and from there Myth found her talent in writing. Although she is an expert in writing short stories, her true expertise lies in her essays that span a bunch of topics, ranging from science to history to even pop culture. Once her family raised enough money to get her scoliosis surgery, Myth was ready to attend Hope’s Peak and won’t let back pain stop her. When she graduated, Myth then was given the option to chaperone the Ultimates and Jr. Ultimates, and that is how our story begins!

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RELATIONSHIPS

Wyre Anon, Former Ultimate Romantic

A high-school celebrity thanks to their boyish charm and their lovable rogue personality, Wyre is well-known for being able to charm anyone, male or female, and Myth is most definitely is no exception to this rule. In fact, Myth has been Wyre‘s favorite flirting and teasing target ever since they first met in Hope‘s Peak, and Wyre has been Myth’s first-ever friend since. This hopeless bisexual just couldn’t handle the rugged muscles or the bad boy attitude of her  tomboyish charmer of a BFF. Myth is currently working on an essay to confess her feelings for Wyre. 

Outfit: Neatly-combed pixie cut, black blazer over a messily buttoned white shirt, tan pants, black loafers, glasses, necklace, and bracelet from original design.

Anon Scar, Ultimate Voice Actress

Famous for her wide range of voices and her typecasting into villainous or demonic characters, Anon Scar chose to embrace the archetype of her usual characters and put on her classic “Demon of Tounges” act that roped her tons of fans in the seiyuu fan community. When Myth first met Scar, she was scared off by the voice actress‘s deep voice and hammy performances. From there, Scar knew to tone down her theatrics around Myth and soon Myth saw Scar for who she truly is: a kindhearted and almost maternal teenager. 

Outfit: Shoulder-length hair, a black ski cap with a skull on the front, black headphones with a microphone on the right ear, a black and white striped sweater, black fingerless gloves, scarf, skirt, stockings, and boots from original design. 

Fusion Anon, Ultimate Personal Assistant

In order to support both his parents and his little brother, Fusion had to take several odd jobs, ranging from a waiter to a cashier to even a court stenographer, resulting in him gathering an entire arsenal of skills and the title of Ultimate Personal Assistant. Despite his frightening height, Fusion’s kindhearted, reliable, and paternal nature made Myth warm up to him very easily. If Myth is ever in pain and needs her medication and comfort items, Fusion always has what she needs stashed somewhere on his body. Myth is still wondering to this day, where exactly does Fusion keep those things?

Outfit: Afro tied into a long and puffy ponytail with a red hair tie, blue and yellow vest over a red dress shirt and a yellow bow tie, white gloves, glasses, pants, and shoes from original design. 

Fusion Anon II, Ultimate Procrastinator

Getting picked on at school for her bookish, nerdy personality and her natural genius, Fusion II reinvented herself with a flippant, bad-girl personality, who couldn’t care less about her studies. Despite not caring about academics, Fusion II’s grades are still the top of her school. While originally scared of Fusion II, due to her punk fashion and delinquent personality, Myth’s fear of Fusion II diminished when Myth caught her reading one of her essays in the library, proving that she is still a massive bookworm and a nerd, much to the procrastinator’s dismay.

Outfit: Blue streaks in her ruffled up hair, black spiked headband, dark blue denim jacket with golden spikes on the shoulder, black fingerless gloves, dark blue skirt with a tattered edge, tall spiky metal boots that add 4 inches onto her height, sunglasses, t-shirt and choker from original design.

Just Anon, Ultimate Poet

Despite what his adorable pastel fashion sense, innocent talent, and his calming hypnotic poetry would suggest, in reality, Janon has a foul mouth and an equally foul attitude and wants nothing more than to lie in bed all day without people bothering him. Myth can relate to that big time, alongside having a talent relating to writing, which makes Myth one of the few people who Janon is able to open up to. Sometimes, Myth and Janon organise ”nap nests“ (aka. piles and piles of blankets and pillows) and exchange what they have written together. 

Outfit: An oversized pink turtleneck sweater with a bunny on the front that covers his mouth and hands, formal wear from original design.

Sparkle Anon, Former Ultimate Speedreader

Despite Sparkle’s loud and dramatic personality being more suited towards a performance themed talent, Sparkle’s true expertise lies in reading at extremely high speeds. Sparkle and Myth’s shared interest in reading made them very close friends, despite their contrasting personalities. At some time in their friendship, Myth has been christened ”THE SPECTACULAR AND SPEEDY SPARKLE’S SIMULTANEOUSLY SPECTACULAR STOPWATCHKEEPER!”, for Myth regularly times Sparkle and gives Sparkle brand new material to read. 

Outfit: A blue vest over a white dress shirt, a red and orange tarten skirt, glasses, paldrons, cape, stockings, and boots from original design.

Egg Anon, Former Ultimate Conspiracy Theorist, and Wet Sock Anon, Former Ultimate Ornithologist

Two great, but cursed, scientific minds, this freakish duo have took the world by storm with their “Future Avian Overlords” conspiracy theories. No matter how improbable the theory, Egg manages to point out real life aspects about the world around us, thanks to their twin, that supports the theory. But ever since Egg spread the theory that birds were just drones to Wet Sock, their relationship hasn’t been the same since. The twins scare the ever-living stuffing out of Myth, every time one of them decides to open their mouth, and Wyre regularly has to discipline them with violence for scaring her friend. 

Outfits: Dark brown sleeveless parkas over tan t-shirts, brown pants and brown boots, Egg has an alien pin and Wet Sock has a feather pin, glasses from original design. 

Curious Anon, Jr. Ultimate Surgeon

Hailed by the medical world as a child prodigy, Curious’s steady and disciplined attitude made him a natural at surgery, despite their age and height. Having interacted with surgeons ever since she was little, Myth always felt at ease when around Curious. As a matter of fact, Myth met Curious before just before they attended Hope’s Peak Junior High, at one of the hospitals they volunteered at. Curious’s polite and charitable nature makes them a perfect companion for the timid Myth. In their off time, Myth likes to give Curious some of her short stories to read. 

Outfit: Hair in a small ponytail, mint green surgery scrubs and facemask, black pants, blue and white loafers.

Anon Nerd, Former Ultimate Ice Skater

Myth actually saw Nerd’s performances on TV a couple of times and he was absolutely graceful and stunning on the ice. She may have a bit of a celebrity crush on him. But when she attended the Kibo-Con along with him, Myth caught wind of Nerd’s true personality: vulgar, surly, and loud-mouthed. But ever since Nerd met this tiny and timid essayist, his protective instincts have just flared up. Wyre knows about Myth’s little celebrity crush and Nerd’s little thing for Myth and is constantly coming up with schemes to choose her over the rude ice skater. 

Outfit: Hair combed over his right eye, a black, white, red and blue hoodie, black pants and red and white sneakers.

Eldritch Anon, Ultimate VS Debater

Myth thought that she was the timidest person in the Kibo-Con roster. But ever since she met Eldritch, Myth may have some competition in the timidity category. Despite his confidence and boldness on the debate podium, when put in any other situation, Eldritch starts shaking in his boots and thinking up the worst possible scenario for every occasion. Despite Myth’s kindhearted and honest nature, Eldritch seems to think that Myth’s timidity is just a facade and that she will pull out a weapon from underneath her hoodie and assassinate him. 

Outfit: Neatly combed shoulder-length hair, red suit with a maroon tie, orange pants and black boots.

Dream Anon, Ultimate Astronomer

Despite her athletic, energetic, and childish demeanor, Dream is regarded as a veritable scientific genius in the study of the vast vacuum of space, to the point of having a star cluster named after her volleyball team. Needless to say, someone like Dream wasn’t what Myth had in mind when she heard she was going to be chaperoning the Ultimate Astronomer. At first, Myth wasn’t able to keep up with Dream’s energetic and outgoing attitude. But as time went on, Myth now looks forward to her relaxing weekly stargazing with Dream. 

Outfit: Star barettes, a galaxy-printed version of her original shirt, skirt, shorts and shoes from original design.

Iris Anon, Jr. Ultimate Paleontologist

Despite Iris’s klutziness and almost stupidly optimistic outlook on life, Iris is a verified genius when it comes to paleontology, often being cited in academic journals and discovering a couple of new paleontologic species. Iris claims that she studies paleontology because she wants to show people that the world is just awesome, no matter the time period. Myth admires Iris’s optimistic outlook on life, and wishes to learn all about Iris’s philosophy and way of life, and Iris is happy to teach Myth the ways of the Iris. Maybe Iris’s philosophy could be just the confidence boost that she needs. 

Outfit: Cracked glasses, a green dinosaur hoodie over a brown dress with fossil designs all over, brown steel-toed boots, bandages all over her body from various freak accidents at digs. 

Purple Anon, Ultimate Puzzle Solver

Ever since Purple solved a highly-difficult puzzle as a toddler, Purple managed to dominate every single puzzle that the high-tech research lab threw at her. With an unparalleled aptitude for solving all sorts of puzzles, Purple specializes in ciphers and word puzzles. Because of their intellectual yet timid natures, Purple and Myth get along very well. Because of Myth’s talent, she has no problem at all, when it comes to understanding Purple’s cryptic speech patterns and vocabulary. They regularly exchange mental stimulation with each other in the forms of scientific essays and puzzles. 

Outfit: A white sweater with a cipher puzzle of her name on the front, a skirt colored like a Rubix cube, stockings and shoes from original design.

This series will be a bisexual harem series centering around five Anons fighting for the affections of the timid essayist who just wants them all to get along.

———————————————–

PERSONALITY

Because of her socially-isolated backstory, Essayist!Myth is supremely timid and often lets Wyre do the talking for her. Her time at Hope’s Peak raised her self-esteem and made her a bit more confident, but she is still painfully shy and socially-anxious. That being said, Essayist!Myth is really intelligent thanks to her hobby of reading and studying, and often finds solace with other intellectually minded Anons. Essayist!Myth isn’t at all skilled in the prospect of romance, which makes her a disaster bi, as opposed to the confident bi-ness of Romantic!Myth.

———————————————–

APPEARANCE

Essayist!Myth has long brown hair with two pink barettes that goes over her right eye and reading glasses. She wears a pink hoodie with a bisexual pride badge yellow zipper and flowers on each pocket. Myth wears the purple skirt, black stockings and pink Mary Janes from her original design. 

———————————————–

Let me know what you think of this series and this talentswap! If any of you have any headcanons for this AU, feel free to let me know!

-Fusion Anon

---

I have been known to write an essay or two, especially one on Strawberry Shortcake lol

[opheliacassiopea]

CHAPTER 6.

TW: Mature language, mentions of alcohol consumption.

Flopping down on your sofa the next morning, you find yourself grinning at the thought of last night as you look through the many pictures that had been taken to document the events of the evening. You insisted on using your Polaroid camera to capture most of the evening, the walls of your apartment were littered with small snapshots of your life; the team, your friends outside of work, nature, anything that made you feel at peace. Your apartment, much like your appearance was how you expressed yourself and it was your sanctuary. 

Looking through the photos, Hotch plays on your mind. He looked good last night, so much so that you had to fight with yourself to stop stealing glances at him. You knew it was wrong to think about him like that, but it was nearly impossible when the man looked that good. Especially his hands, the prominent veins and the polished silver Rolex that sat on his wrist making him look even more attractive. Pulling out a photo of the both of you laughing at Spence’s attempts to beat Derek at a game of snooker, you think back to the conversation at the table.

“You did good, you did good, Pais”. ‘Pais’. Not Selwyn, not Paisley, Pais. As you repeated it, it sounded strange at first, or at least it did until you imagined Hotch being the one saying it and then it felt right. Did he realise the significance of giving you a nickname? The very word is defined as ‘a substitute for the proper name of a familiar person and often used to express affection, it is a form of endearment and amusement’. Surely he must have done, he wasn’t the type of person to do that sort of thing, something that..intimate. Plus, he knew you weren’t one for your name being shortened by just anybody. Was he trying to say something, to tell you something? Of course he isn’t you tell yourself, he’s your superior for God’s sake. Pushing thoughts of your boss to one side, you carried on about your weekend. Despite your plans not being thrilling, you were looking forward to them nonetheless. You had dedicated the time to catch up on much needed sleep and general self care and you were incredibly glad of the opportunity. Always valuing time to yourself, you couldn’t help but feel slightly disappointed that the weekend vanished at a frightening pace. 

Flipping through the information brochure, you don't bother looking up at JJ who speaks to you “Spence tells me you’ve picked lecturing for the last module of your doctorate?”. The team, well you JJ, Prentiss, Morgan and Reid were currently sitting at the round table on your lunch hour, which was a rare occurrence with your schedules, you were nearly always working a case, or too swamped with paperwork. Garcia was hidden away in her lair doing who knows what, Rossi out for some fancy lunch and Hotch locked away in his office.

“Yeah, figured it couldn’t be too difficult and the genius himself has offered to help me prepare in the library so it seems like a win win if you ask me” you reply to her as you finally stop reading and look up at the faces around the table “what? It’s not like he’s writing my thesis, I’m just being resourceful and making the most of what's available, y’know?” you defend yourself, shrugging your shoulders.

“Oh so you’ll accept Reid's help, but not mine? You wound me pretty girl” Morgan teases, throwing an empty bottle at you, which you catch effortlessly and throw it into the bin, but not before you roll your eyes at him, sending him a cheeky smile as you do. 

Disconnecting herself from JJ’s embrace, Emily stands and crosses to you, picking up the brochure you were reading and scans over the information, before discarding it and spinning the chair you were sitting in toward her, clearly she could sense your apprehension. “You’ll do great Paisley, you’ll hit every inch of this criteria, I doubt you even need Reid’s help and besides, it’s not like you need another qualification to prove yourself, you’ve earned your place here” she tells you and you find that you have to force yourself to hold her gaze so you give nothing away.

One of the reasons you had multiple degrees was because on some level, you did feel the need to prove yourself, to prove you were doing something with your intellect and to prove that you did have a place on this team. Never did you want to be looked at as the baby FBI agent, who simply followed the others on the team like a shadow. On the other hand however, you genuinely loved learning and felt it was only natural to continue your studies to the highest level 

and you were proud of yourself for doing so, you’d come a long way since your childhood, but you didn’t want to dwell on that for long.  A few weeks pass and you soon find yourself sat in one of your favourite places; the older, dustier and lesser well known section of the bureau library, scanning over various notepads and books whilst feverishly typing at your laptop planning your first lecture. Looking across the table at Spencer, who kept true to his word and accompanied you to the library for assistance, you voice your initial plan for your first lecture in a few weeks. 

“I’m thinking of starting with nineteenth-century literature with the themes of crime and detection as a general focus and then work my way into psycho-linguistics with instances in literature, before moving on to case specific examples”. Whilst you held a close bond with Derek, you were good friends with Spencer too. The two of you would often hold mini academic debates between yourselves on the way home from a case, or on the phone in the early hours of the morning. From an outsider’s perspective it may look like something more, but that wasn’t the case, you genuinely just had a lot in common and it was nice to be able to watch Harry Potter over and over with somebody who gave no complaints. 

“What texts are you thinking of using? I personally think that Arthur Conan Doyle’s, Sherlock Holmes stories would be a fine choice. It’s more of an obvious one as the element of crime is incredibly apparent and the style of writing is fascinating on it’s own, so it would break the students in nicely I think.” Spencer reveals and you nod in agreement, returning to your typing.

The weekly sessions in the library seem nothing more than distant memories as you find yourself standing at the front of the lecture hall listening to Professor Moore’s introductions. You begin to wish you’d chosen a different final module. Why were you so nervous? You chased serial killers down on a day to day basis, surely you could give a lecture to a bunch of hopeful students for an hour?

“Much to your enjoyment, I will not be lecturing you for these next three months” Professor Moore informs her students in a lighthearted tone. You knew firsthand she was a good teacher and hoped her students didn’t expect too much from you. “This fine young woman will be taking over as part of the last module for her doctorate in criminology and psychology, so please be kind to her and don’t even think about any kind of tomfoolery in my absence, I will be dropping in and keeping in direct contact with Paisley so don’t think it will go unnoticed.” she looks at you and winks as she tells them “plus, she’s one hell of an FBI agent so she won’t tolerate it anyway”.

“Right well, thanks for that Professor. Uh, I’m Paisley and as you know I’ll be taking over for these next three months, hopefully you’ll find it as quick and painless as possible” you tell them, hoping it will break some of the tension and it does, you find the students take to you well as you dive in to the job you’re there to do. “We’re going to start with looking at nineteenth-century literature through the themes of crime and detection. I know this isn’t the big stuff right away and I apologise for that, but I find it’s better to develop a general understanding of the topic first, before delving deeper.” you tell them as you begin to pace the lecture hall out of nervousness.

“This is the century which saw the creation of the Metropolitan Police Force in London, the birth of private and police detectives, and the rise of investigations into the psychology and social causes of crime. The genres of detective fiction and the dramatic monologue which both emerged during this period will be largely focused on, but we’ll also take a look into less frequently studied genres like journalism to give you a full flavour of the period’s insatiable taste for crime”. Switching to the next powerpoint slide, you take a breath and steady yourself, maybe this wasn’t so bad after all. 

“Fictional texts are studied in the context of contemporary debates about crime, policing, criminal responsibility and madness, including legal texts and those related to the emerging science of psychology. We will be studying the texts through genre theory and cultural and historical perspectives”. As you look out to the back of the lecture hall, you’re able to make out the familiar figure of Dr Spencer Reid. He’d taken one look at you that morning in the bullpen and knew how nervous you were; you’d paced back and forth to the break room countless times, drinking far more tea than usual and barely uttering a word to anybody as you fiddled with the two necklaces that always hung round your neck.

You bite back a smile and continue speaking to the students “indicative primary texts for the semester will consist of a selection of popular crime ballads and the dramatic monologues about murder and madness by Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, along with a selection of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. It’s absolutely essential that you all keep up with the reading. And with that, I’ll leave it there for now. Don’t hesitate to contact me with any questions and I’ll see you all next time”. 

Watching the students disperse from the room, you breath out a long sigh of relief and throw yourself into a nearby chair and by the time you get back to the bullpen, Spencer is practically screaming at the top of his voice as he tells anybody that would listen about how well you’d done in the lecture, speaking in just the right tone to be authoritative, but relatable and approachable. In short, he was incredibly proud of you and pride radiated off every inch of him. 

Two months had now passed and much to your surprise, it had now become part of your daily routine that Hotch would sit on the chair beside your desk during your twenty minute break at eleven o’clock each morning. At the start of your break you’d always find a cup of tea, perfectly made on your desk and each day you’d find yourself smiling as you knew who it was from. If Hotch was in a particularly good mood, he’d surprise you with a vanilla milkshake and raspberry muffin like he had done that very first time. If the team hadn’t picked up on it at first, they definitely had now, but they chose not to say anything. 

Some days you’d talk in depth about all manner of things, whereas other days you would find yourselves both working away in a comforting silence. Today was one of his chattier days and he greeted you with a smile as he placed a mug of tea down for you, and a mug of coffee for himself. “You’ve never told me the story behind all these little cartoon frogs pinned to your noticeboard” he begins, tracing his fingers over them as he looks to you for an explanation.

“You never asked, I’m surprised you didn’t use those profiling skills of yours to figure it out” you reply in a joking manner as you set your mug down. “To answer your question though, Spence asked me what my favourite animal was when I first started and when I told him it was a frog, he started to draw me one for each month of the year to help me settle in. I’ve got one of them tattooed on my ankle, I’m surprised you’ve not noticed it” you finish telling him.

“Can I see it? The tattoo?” he asks and you notice the nervousness in his voice and it makes you smile, seeing him almost shy is so unnatural you’re not quite sure how to act. You comply, kicking off your doc martens and pulling your left trouser leg up to reveal the image of a frog wearing a hat, sat on the edge of a teacup. It’s not the most conventional tattoo in the world, but you love it nonetheless. “It’s very you, I’ll give you that” he tells you as he helps you back into your shoe. 

You share a small laugh and you begin to pick up a file, ready to get back to work as the break comes to an end and the team filter back into the room and head to their desks. It’s Prentiss who asks you first “how’re feeling about your final lecture next week, Miss almost Dr Selwyn?” as she maneuvers a huge stack of case files from one side of her desk to the other. 

“Pretty good I think, just want to find out who the assessor is and get it over and done with to be honest” you tell her as you begin looking for a case consult you’d lost in a stack of folders.

“Doesn’t Hotch normally assess some of the final modules? He used to guest lecture with Rossi and Gideon quite a lot” JJ asks as she collects a pile of completed files from the table. 

“Actually no, he stopped guest lecturing once Gideon..uh...left” Reid fills you in “he thought it took up too much of his time and it was more productive to focus on leading the unit”.

“Huh, well at least you know it won’t be Hotch” Emily tells you and you smile in response as you dial the internal number for a copy of the police report for the consult you were working on. The rest of the day passes easily as you work through your files, thankfully not being interrupted by a new case and the rest of the week sailed by smoothly.

This was it, the final week of your doctorate. You’d been allocated reduced duties to allow time for the final hand in of your thesis, along with the multitude of exams you had to complete and you now you just had your final assessed lecture to complete. Arriving slightly earlier than anticipated due to your nerves, you decide to busy yourself replying to emails at your desk in the relatively empty bullpen, mulling over the happenings over the past week in the process.

Hotch had been keeping his distance and you didn't have it in you to figure out why, you’d just presumed it was just work and left it at that. Realistically you had far too much to worry about; the past week had left you feeling the most stressed you’d felt in years. 

Shifting your gaze to Hotch’s office, you’re able to see him talking on the phone, eyebrows furrowed together and jaw clenched. Clearly he’s not in a good mood and you’re thankful you’ll be out of the office all day. Checking through your notes one last time before you make your way to the lecture hall to set up, Hotch’s voice alerts you to his presence, you’d been so caught up in going over your notes that you didn't notice him leave his office. “Don’t you have a lecture to teach, Selwyn?”.

Before you can even look at him, he’s turned his back and retreated to his office. Pushing through the glass doors, you furrow your brows in confusion; what was his problem? It was only on your arrival to the lecture hall that your nerves began to kick in, this was it, once you’d finished teaching this class, your doctorate would be complete. Beginning to set up the powerpoint slides and distributing the resources for the lecture you find yourself slipping into a state of calmness as you worked, you could do this and you could do it well. Treat it like a case briefing you told yourself. Ten minutes later students begin to file into their seats and you’re pleased to greet Professor Moore who’s acting as the assessment supervisor. Toward the end of the lecture, you noticed an extra body had slipped into one of the seats on the back row and you knew who it was instantly. Aaron Hotchner. You’ve got to be fucking joking. He’d spent the better part of a week avoiding you and when he did speak to you, it was mostly dismissive and now he had the gall to show up to your final assignment. Swallowing the urge to throw one of the bulky textbooks at him for his sheer nerve, you continue explaining your current point to the students. 

“We’ve already been over the idea that psycholinguistics is the study of how the psyche responds to words and languages and this is how it’s distinguished from sociolinguistics. One focuses on the social dimension of language, and it’s stylistic patterns, whereas the other focuses on the expressive functions of language”. 

You begin to bring the lecture to a close, but not before thanking the students for their patience and hard work throughout the semester and you’re quick to express your gratitude to the professor for all her help and support. And just like that it was over, you were done. Hastily, you start to pack away the resources from the lecture in order to avoid a conversation with Hotch, his dismissive attitude had annoyed you all week and you weren’t thrilled at the sight of him in your lecture after the way he’d spoken to you this morning. 

“Can I help you with something?” you ask him in a cold tone, your eyes focused on shoving your laptop in your bag as you wait for his response, but you don’t receive one. Scanning the room one last time for any of your belongings, you promptly turn on your heel and exit the room, ignoring his calls as you melt away into the sea of scurrying students.

Things between the two of you eventually returned to normal, you weren’t even sure what ‘it’ was at this point and you didn’t care to ask, you weren’t even sure that it was normal. Hotch didn’t do these kinds of things or so you thought, but you knew better than to question it. Recently the team had been pushed in all directions, working case after case with little to no breaks, so it came as no surprise to you that the month of your graduation arrived in no time at all, acting as the perfect distraction for you all.

Pulling the garment onto your body, you admired the satin fabric of the deep purple dress you’d chosen to wear that day, it’s strappy sleeves allowing the many tattoos that graced the upper

half of your left arm to be shown off, along with the low neckline displaying the delicate tattoos on your collarbones. Before slipping on your graduation cap and gown, you add the finishing touches to your makeup, deciding to go for more of a dramatic look, if there was a day to go all out, it was definitely today. Giving yourself the once over, you feel a bubble of nerves form in the pit of your stomach, today was the day you were graduating and whilst you were excited, you felt apprehensive. Now that you were about to graduate, the pressure to live up to your new title was immeasurable and you were keen not to disappoint.

“Miss Paisley Anora Selwyn”.

You stand as your name is called, focusing on not falling over in your heels as you walk across the stage to receive your doctorate. There were no words to sum up how you felt, the moment was indescribable and as you walked back to your seat, you could hear a chorus of cheers and shouts from the team who insisted on buying tickets to watch the ceremony and later celebrate at one of the slightly fancier bars in the area. Luckily you’d managed to talk Penelope down from doing anything over the top and she very reluctantly agreed, making you settle instead for a compromise that allowed her to buy you a extravagant gift instead. 

“Tonight we’re here to celebrate Dr Paisley Anora Selwyn, many many congratulations” Dave begins the toast and you inwardly cringe at the use of your middle name.

Midway through the pleasantries, you feel Hotch’s hand resting on your lower back and you resist the urge to turn and smile up at him, instead opting for shuffling closer, a slight blush creeping onto your cheeks as you do so.

“Dr Paisley Anora Selwyn” the team echo as they raise their glasses to you, all grinning from ear to ear.

As the night progresses, you lean back against the bar, taking stock of the day. It was hard to believe that only three months ago that you were sat up till the early hours of the morning studying, the end seeming to be miles away, and now you’d finally done it. That wasn’t the only thing on your mind though, much like usual, Hotch occupied your thoughts. All throughout the night there had been subtle touches, stolen glances, and silent conversations between the two of you, and you loved it. Appearing next to you at the bar, Hotch’s arm slips round your waist, pulling you closer into his side as he congratulates you.

“I’m proud of you, well done, Pais”. 

[arcticdementor]

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

…

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

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

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

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

…

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

[mariacallous]

For the wider world, however, why not simply ignore articles that are not factually supported? As Morris-Suzuki noted, there are “all sorts of strange articles out there, by all sorts of strange people.” But, in Ramseyer’s case, she said, “the fact that it’s by a Harvard professor gives it a degree of prominence and respectability, which makes it important to look at carefully.” Indeed, in the past weeks, I have heard from colleagues who said that they hadn’t known, until they read Ramseyer’s article, that the “conventional” story about comfort women was in question. Morris-Suzuki thinks this is a “really good test case” for the contemporary problem of people “being overwhelmed by things that present themselves as fact but are not properly based in fact”—not just in academia but in the media and on the Internet. Ramseyer has framed his work on comfort women as that of a debunker coming to refute what he called a “pure fiction” adopted by an academic consensus obsessed with the “trifecta” of “sexism, racism, and imperialism.”

Morris-Suzuki has produced a “study aid,” with Ramseyer’s comfort-women article as the case study, to teach students how to maintain principles of research integrity while also supporting free speech. It explains, “If there are no ground rules, then academic journals would have no basis for rejecting any paper submitted to them, and any statement of opinion—however lacking in logic or factual evidence—would have to be treated as equal to any other. We could then very easily end up spending much of the rest of our lives debating conspiracy theories or fake news which have no intellectual foundation whatever. To put it at its simplest and crudest, if there are no research standards, then we may as well all pack up and go home, because anything goes and any truth claim is just as good as any other.”

[a-world-in-grey]

More Sunshine au please? Maybe everyone's reactions when Sola first gets published? I can definitely see Ardyn being a proud, bragging Uncle about it all. But just more of that verse in general would be amazing!

Alright, now that I’m not half-dead from work (three eight hour shifts in a row guys, eight hour morning shifts), I can properly answer this!

.

Reactions to Alata’s first papers getting published! (Two of her papers are published at the same time. Her personal research determining that miasma is destroyed by the UV radiation in sunlight, and the research by the medical task force in creating a treatment for early Vanishing Sickness using UV radiation.)

-Adryn is absolutely proud of his Dear Niece. And yes, he does brag to everyone about it. Because for years, Ardyn has very much been an Outsider among Niflheim high society. No one knows anything about this man who suddenly showed up and got the position of High Chancellor. No known lineage, much less a respected lineage, no history, no family, nothing. The nobility respect the fact that Ardyn is clearly a dangerous man, but they have only disdain for the man himself, for the filthy commoner who somehow has so much influence with the Emperor.

-So Ardyn takes great glee in bragging about Alata’s accomplishment. Getting published in any academic journal of notable repute is no easy task, and Alata’s work is in four journals in Niflheim alone, with reputable journals from Tenebrae, Accordo, and Lucis looking to publish the article as well. He brags partly as a way to thumb his nose at the nobles - my family is better than yours - but also as a way to advertise his niece’s research. The nobles are all but starving for any information about Ardyn, and Ardyn has just presented the bait of a previously unknown relative.

-And the nobles fall for it, hook, line, and sinker. They read Alata’s research. They contact the others involved in the research, asking about Alata. And if none of the scientists and doctors mention Alata’s age, well, she’s a sweet kid, and none of them want to toss her into the shark pit that is Niflheim politics. So an image of Ardyn’s niece is painted - a brilliant and kind-hearted humanitarian, with the ambition and determination to tackle the mysteries of the Vanishing Sickness.

-A possible chink in the High Chancellor’s armor, some think. A way to gain the Chancellor’s - and therefore the Emperor’s - favor, others believe. So they clamor for Ardyn to bring his niece to court. Such a bright and talented individual deserves opportunities to forge connections.

-Ardyn waits until the nobles almost think he won’t, then introduces Alata to court. Using the celebration of Prince Icarus’ betrothal to introduce her to the biggest possible crowd all at once.

-Alata shatters the nobility’s expectations. Yes, she’s bright and kind and ambitious and determined. She’s also fiercely passionate, sharp tongued and bluntly honest, with her uncle’s political acumen but no desire to pander to the song and dance of Court and stubborn enough to plant her feet and let any opposition break against her, like a wave breaking against a mountain.

-She’s also all of twelve years old.

-Ardyn is Smug.

-Besithia is an Outrage. He’s never liked the brat Ardyn picked up in Insomnia, not since she insulted his life’s work. But now, now this child has been acknowledged twice over by some of the highest academic journals worldwide. For the same research he’d scoffed at and dismissed as the idealistic ambitions of a six-year old.

-Besithia increases his efforts in his own research. He Refuses to lose to a child who isn’t as smart as he is!

-Queen Sylva is curious about this Alata Mederi. She didn’t personally attend Prince Icarus’ betrothal celebration, so she only has what her delegation and gossip can tell her. And Alata’s research, and does that spark Sylva’s curiosity. Because the research details how the Vanishing Sickness - referred to as miasma in her research - is destroyed by the UV radiation in sunlight, leading to the later medical research project in treating early Vanishing Sickness with UV treatments.

-Sylva can see how Oracle magic - Bahamut’s Blessing of Light - is able to cure the Starscourge where medicine and Lucis Caelum magic fails. But Sylva is curious how Alata discovered the Scourge’s weakness to sunlight at all. Prior research not published? 

-In Lucis, Regis is not expecting to get a call from Weskham. He’s been too busy the past few months worrying about his son - who the Astrals have declared will die to cure the Starscourge, and Regis refuses to lose another child - and researching everything he can about the Starscourge. Going as far as asking Queen Sylva for any knowledge the Oracles have.

-So when Weskham calls and tells him of the article about the Starscourge in a Niflheim academic journal, Regis and Aulea leap on the opportunity. They secure copies of Alata’s research. It’s no miracle solution, but it’s the beginning of one, and Regis almost cries when he finishes reading it because- because this is proof that something can destroy the Scourge. Something that doesn’t require magic, doesn’t require his little boy sacrificing his life.

-If Regis decides to discreetly invest in Alata Mederi’s research, even as Lucis begins planning research of their own... well, niece of the High Chancellor or not, this research could save Noctis’ life. 

And some other stuff!

-When Ifrit Blesses Sola, his Blessing replaces Bahamut’s. Because a) Ifrit is that petty, and b) his Blessing is Fire and Purity. The Holy Fire heals by destroying everything and anything that does not belong.

-(‘Reborn anew from fiery death.’ Sola burns in a pyre of white fire, and steps from the ashes with sun-gold eyes and white marks spiraling up her arms like fire from where Ifrit held her hands to bestow his Blessing. And when Sola later heals Titus of the scourge? Titus and Sola disappear in a firestorm of pure white, and well, as I said earlier, it’s rather hard on the glaives’ nerves. And oh does Sola healing Titus have unintended consequences.)

-Sola loses the Lucis Caelum magic. So do Loqi and Ravus, gifted with Sola’s magic as they are. No healing, no Elemancy save the Holy Fire unless Sola finds an Elemancy node, no warping, no shields, no armiger.

-Sure, Ifrit had Sola empty her armiger before he Blessed her, but he didn’t tell her why and now she can’t carry all of her weapons.

-Sola is still miffed about that.

-Half the people who meet Sola and learn of Ifrit’s Blessing are... shocked to say the least. Because, look. Sola is not reverent in any sense. Not to Ifrit or any of the other Astrals. Half the people in earshot choke on their own spit the first time they hear Sola call Ifrit a petty jerk.

-In this AU, Sola doesn’t pick up much Galahdian culture. She unnerves more than a few Galahdians wearing white and black. Combined with her red hair - that she keeps cropped short at jaw length, Sola hates dealing with her hair - and the white almost tattoo-like marks on her arms and the veritable armory she somehow stashes on her person (because I love the trope where a character pulls out weapon after weapon and everyone else is like, where are you keeping that?) Sola makes for an ominous picture to any Galahdian.

-And then they spend about five minutes in her presence and realize that she’s a massive nerd. Whose passion is linguistics, cultural development, and the reflection of such in literature and folk tales. That Loqi and Sola continue a previous debate on the accuracy of a translated historical work as they travel to Costlemark Tower, Ravus groaning in exasperation and Selena snickering, goes a long way towards easing Tredd, Luche, and Axis’ nerves.

-Noctis and Sola regularly write each other about once or twice a month. Sola doesn’t tell Noctis where she is or about her research. Not that she doesn’t want to, but she doesn’t know if Papa or Mama also read Noctis’ letters and she doesn’t want them trying to take her away from Uncle. Now that she’s older she understands why they would, but good intentions or no, Sola won’t let them stop her from reaching her goal.

-Noctis... kind of doesn’t tell anyone that he’s regularly writing to Sola. At first because it’s a secret, and managing to keep something secret from everyone makes eight year old Noctis giddy. Then it becomes something he’s possessive about. His letters with Sola are his. No one else’s, and Noctis is possessive of his new older sister and doesn’t want to share.

-Eventually Noctis does feel guilty about keeping his letters with Sola secret, once he’s a bit older and realizes how much Regis and Aulea and Cor desperately miss Sola. But he still doesn’t tell them, because how he doesn’t even know what he’d say. Oh, he’s been writing to his missing older sister for years now and never told anyone? Noctis is only eleven, but he’s not stupid. His parents would not be happy. Worse, they’d probably be disappointed.

-Then Noctis has the idea that if he convinces Sola to come home, his parents will be too happy about that to be mad or disappointed that Noctis didn’t tell them about the letters!

-Unfortunately, Sola tells him that she can’t come home yet. She has a very important promise to keep. And one should always keep their promises. But Sola promises Noctis that she’ll be home for his coming-of-age. Even if she can only visit. Noctis pouts and tells her that he’s twelve. That’s forever! 

[generalcreatortiger]

Scientists said claims about China creating the coronavirus were misleading. They went viral anyway.

Craig Timberg

Feb. 13, 2021 at 7:48 a.m. GMT+8

Scientists from Johns Hopkins, Columbia and other leading American universities moved with rare speed when a Chinese virologist, Li-Meng Yan, published an explosive paper in September claiming that China had created the deadly coronavirus in a research lab.

The paper, the American scientists concluded, was deeply flawed. And a new online journal from MIT Press — created specifically to vet claims related to SARS-CoV-2 — reported Yan’s claims were “at times baseless and are not supported by the data” 10 days after she posted them.

But in an age when anyone can publish anything online with a few clicks, this response was not fast enough to keep Yan’s disputed allegations from going viral, reaching an audience in the millions on social media and Fox News. It was a development, according to experts on misinformation, that underscored how systems built to advance scientific understanding can be used to spread politically charged claims dramatically at odds with scientific consensus.

Yan’s work, which was posted to the scientific research repository Zenodo without any review on Sept. 14, exploded on Twitter, YouTube and far-right websites with the help of such conservative influencers as Republican strategist Stephen K. Bannon, who repeatedly pushed it on his online show “War Room: Pandemic,” according to a report published Friday by Harvard researchers studying media manipulation. Yan expanded her claims, on Oct. 8, to blame the Chinese government explicitly for developing the coronavirus as a “bioweapon.”

Online research repositories have become key forums for revelation and debate about the pandemic. Built to advance science more nimbly, they have been at the forefront of reporting discoveries about masks, vaccines, new coronavirus variants and more. But the sites lack protections inherent to the traditional — and much slower — world of peer-reviewed scientific journals, where articles are published only after they have been critiqued by other scientists. Research shows papers posted to online sites also can be hijacked to fuel conspiracy theories.

Yan’s paper on Zenodo — despite several blistering scientific critiques and widespread news coverage of its alleged flaws — now has been viewed more than 1 million times, probably making it the most widely read research on the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, according to the Harvard misinformation researchers. They concluded that online scientific sites are vulnerable to what they called “cloaked science,” efforts to give dubious work “the veneer of scientific legitimacy.”

“They’re many years behind in realizing the capacity of this platform to be abused,” said Joan Donovan, research director at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, which produced the report. “At this point, everything open will be exploited.”

Yan, who previously was a postdoctoral fellow at Hong Kong University but fled to the United States in April, agreed in an interview with The Washington Post that online scientific sites are vulnerable to abuse, but she rejected the argument that her story is a case study in this problem.

Rather, Yan said, she is a dissident trying to warn the world about what she says is China’s role in creating the coronavirus. She used Zenodo, with its ability to instantly publish information without restrictions, because she feared the Chinese government would obstruct publication of her work. Her academic critics, she argued, will be proven wrong.

“None of them can rebut from real, solid, scientific evidence,” Yan said. “They can only attack me.”

Zenodo acknowledged that the furor has prompted reforms, including the posting of a label Thursday above Yan’s paper saying, “Caution: Potentially Misleading Contents” after The Washington Post asked whether Zenodo would remove it. The site also prominently features links to critiques from a Georgetown University virologist and the MIT Press.

“We take misinformation really seriously, so it is something that we want to address,” said Anais Rassat, a spokeswoman for the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which operates Zenodo as a general purpose scientific site. “We don’t think taking down the report is the best solution. We want it to stay and indicate why experts think it’s wrong.”

But mainstream researchers who watched Yan’s claims race across the Internet far more quickly than they could counter them have been left troubled by the experience — newly convinced that the capacity for spreading misinformation goes far beyond the big-name social media sites. Any online platform without robust and potentially expensive safeguards is equally vulnerable.

“This is similar to the debate we’re having with Facebook and Twitter. To what degree are we creating an instrument that speeds disinformation, and to what extent are you contributing to that?” said Stefano M. Bertozzi, editor in chief of the MIT Press online journal “Rapid Reviews: COVID-19,” which challenged Yan’s claims.

Bertozzi added, “Most scientists have no interest in getting in a pissing match in cyberspace.”

Catch up on the most important developments in the pandemic with our coronavirus newsletter. All stories in it are free to access.

Coronavirus fuels prominence of online science sites

Online scientific sites have been growing for more than a decade, becoming a vital part of the ecosystem for making and vetting claims across numerous academic fields, but their growth has been supercharged by the urgency of disseminating new discoveries about a deadly pandemic.

Some of the best-known of these sites, such as medRxiv and bioRxiv, have systems for rapid evaluation intended to avoid publishing work that doesn’t pass an initial sniff test of scientific credibility. They also reject papers that only review the work of others or that make such major claims that they shouldn’t be publicized before peer review can be conducted, said Richard Sever, co-founder of medRxiv and bioRxiv.

“We want to create a hurdle that’s high enough that people have to do some research,” Sever said. “What we don’t want to be is a place where there’s a whole bunch of conspiracy theories.”

Online publishing sites generally are called “preprint servers” because many researchers use them as a first step toward traditional peer review, giving the authors a way to make their work public — and available for possible news coverage — before more thorough analysis begins. Advocates of preprint servers tout their ability to create early visibility for important discoveries and also spark useful debate. They note that traditional peer-reviewed journals have their own history of occasionally publishing hoaxes and bad science.

“It’s very funny that everyone is worrying about preprints given that, collectively, journals are not doing a great job of keeping misinformation out,” Sever said.

After Wuhan mission on pandemic origins, WHO team dismisses lab leak theory

He and other proponents, however, acknowledge risks.

While scientists debate — and sometimes refute — flawed claims by one another, nonscientists also scan preprint servers for data that might appear to bolster their pet conspiracy theories.

A research team led by computer scientist Jeremy Blackburn has tracked the appearance of links to preprints from social media sites, such as 4chan, popular with conspiracy theorists. Blackburn and a graduate student, Satrio Yudhoatmojo, found more than 4,000 references on 4chan to papers on major preprint servers between 2016 and 2020, with the leading subjects being biology, infectious diseases and epidemiology. He said the uneven review process has “lent an air of credibility” to preprints that experts might quickly spot as flawed but ordinary people wouldn’t.

“That’s where the risk is,” said Blackburn, an assistant professor at Binghamton University. “Papers from the preprint servers show up in a variety of conspiracy theories … and are misinterpreted wildly because these people aren’t scientists.”

Jessica Polka, executive director of ASAPbio, a nonprofit group that pushes for more transparency and wider use of preprint servers, said they rely on something akin to crowdsourcing, in which comments from outside researchers quickly can identify flaws in work, but she acknowledged vulnerabilities based on the extent of review by server staff and advisers. A recent survey by ASAPbio found more than 50 preprint servers operating — and nearly as many review policies.

And the survey didn’t include Zenodo, which, Polka said, should not be considered a preprint server given its broader mission. Rather, she said, it’s an online repository that happens to host some preprints, as well as conference slides, raw data and other “scientific objects” that anyone with an email address can simply upload. Zenodo has none of the vetting common to major preprint servers and isn’t organized to easily surface critiques or conflicting research, she said.

“Without that kind of context, a preprint server is even more vulnerable to the spread of disinformation,” Polka said. But she added, in general, “Preprint servers do not have the resources to be arbiters of whether something is true or not.”

Yan defends her work

Yan said in her interview with The Post that Zenodo’s openness is what drove her decision to use the site. She had initially submitted her paper to bioRxiv because as a researcher whose work has appeared in Nature, the Lancet Infectious Diseases and other traditional publications, she knew that this preprint server would appear more legitimate to other scientists.

Trump pardons Steve Bannon after ugly falling out early in his presidency

Yan has a medical degree from Xiangya Medical College of Central South University and a PhD in ophthalmology from Southern Medical University — both in China — and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Hong Kong, she said. That university announced she was no longer affiliated with it in July, following an initial appearance on Fox News, saying in a statement that her claim about the origin of the coronavirus “has no scientific basis but resembles hearsay.”

After she fled Hong Kong, she harbored deep suspicions about that government’s potential to block publication of her work, she said. When she checked bioRxiv 48 hours after making her submission, the site appeared to have gone offline, Yan said. Fearing the worst, she withdrew the paper and uploaded it to Zenodo.

Sever, the bioRxiv co-founder, said he could not comment on an individual submission but said that, despite occasional glitches, he was aware of no “prolonged outage” on the site during mid-September and no sign that the Chinese, or anyone else, had hacked it.

For Yan’s paper on Zenodo, she did not list an academic affiliation, as is customary for research. Instead, she listed the Rule of Law Society and Rule of Law Foundation, which are New York-based nonprofit groups founded by exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui, a close associate of Bannon, who in 2018 was announced as chairman of the Rule of Law Society. When Bannon was arrested on fraud charges in August, he was aboard Guo’s 150-foot yacht, off the coast of Connecticut. (President Donald Trump last month pardoned Bannon, his former campaign chairman and White House chief strategist).

Chinese dissidents say they’re being harassed by a businessman with links to Steve Bannon

Yan said she listed the Rule of Law entities out of respect for what she said was their work helping dissidents in China, and that they paid for her flight from Hong Kong and provided a resettlement stipend while she largely lives off her savings. She said her work is independent, and she rejected notions that Bannon was helping her spread political claims.

“I didn’t know he was so controversial when I was in Hong Kong,” Yan told The Post.

On Sept. 15, the day after Yan’s paper appeared on Zenodo, she was a guest on Fox’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” an appearance watched by 4.8 million broadcast viewers and 2.8 million on YouTube, and that also generated extensive engagement on Facebook and Twitter, according to the Harvard researchers. Bannon appeared on Carlson’s show that same week and discussed Yan’s claims. He also interviewed her on “War Room: Pandemic” 22 times last year, both before and after the Zenodo publication.

The political context was obvious in the midst of a hotly contested election in which Trump was attacking Democratic rival Joe Biden for supposedly being overly sympathetic to the Chinese government, dubbing him “Beijing Joe.” Republicans, including White House trade adviser Peter Navarro, pushed Yan’s paper along with the hashtag #CCPLiedPeopleDied, a reference to the Chinese Communist Party.

Archives showed the paper had more than 150,000 views on its first day on Zenodo — spectacular reach for a scientific paper, especially one that had not yet been reviewed by any independent experts.

But this surge of attention also generated backlash, including critical news reports by National Geographic and others, raising serious questions about Yan’s claims.

In the academic world, the Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins issued a point-by-point response one week after Yan’s paper appeared on Zenodo, raising 39 individual issues in what it said was “objective analysis of details included in the report, as would be customary in a peer-review process.”

A few days later, the MIT Press online journal “Rapid Reviews: COVID-19” featured four scathing reviews, including one from Robert Gallo, a renowned AIDS researcher and a titan within the field of virology.

He labeled Yan’s work “misleading” and cited “questionable, spurious, and fraudulent claims.” Most points were highly technical, but Gallo also questioned her logic regarding the alleged role in creating the coronavirus for the Chinese military, which Gallo noted would be vulnerable to covid-19.

“And how would the Chinese protect themselves?” Gallo asked in his review. “Well, according to the paper, the military knew it could be stopped by remdesivir,” a drug later shown to have some benefit in treating covid-19 while not necessarily reducing the risk of death. “I would surely not want to be in the Chinese military if they were that naive.”

The idea to recruit Gallo came from Bertozzi, the journal’s editor and dean emeritus of the School of Public Health at University of California at Berkeley. Like Gallo, Bertozzi had worked extensively in AIDS research. After seeing Yan’s appearance on Fox, he was eager to use the online journal founded only months earlier to correct the scientific record.

“I felt it needed to be quickly debunked by people with scientific credibility,” Bertozzi said.

He soon thought of Gallo.

“We need somebody of your stature to say this is garbage science,” Bertozzi recalled telling him.

The reviews by Gallo and three other scientists also came with an editor’s note raising questions about the preprint process itself, saying, “While pre-print servers offer a mechanism to disseminate world-changing scientific research at unprecedented speed, they are also a forum through which misleading information can instantaneously undermine the international scientific community’s credibility, destabilize diplomatic relationships, and compromise global safety.”

But these public rebukes from some of the biggest names in virology did not deter Yan. Nor did a detailed report on Oct. 21 by CNN quoting her critics and documenting flaws.

Yan declined to be interviewed for that story, she said, because CNN did not allow her to address the issues they unearthed, point by point, on live television.

Instead, she published her own response on Nov. 21, on Zenodo, titled, “CNN Used Lies and Misinformation to Muddle the Water on the Origin of SARS-CoV-2.”

In her Post interview, Yan acknowledged — as CNN had reported — that her three co-authors on the original Sept. 14 paper were pseudonyms, used to protect what she said were other Chinese researchers whose families remain in peril back in China. Authors are typically discouraged from using false names in academic work.

Her claims suffered another blow this week, when a World Health Organization team sent to China to investigate the origins of the pandemic issued a statement saying it was “extremely unlikely” that the coronavirus came from a lab.

One of Yan’s earliest vocal critics, virologist Angela Rasmussen, who was at Columbia when Yan’s paper first spread, agreed with WHO’s assessment but did not rule out the possibility — however unlikely — of laboratory origin for the coronavirus. But she said the argument lacks concrete evidence.

“There needs to be a lot less speculation and a lot more investigation,” said Rasmussen, now an affiliate at Georgetown’s Center for Global Health Science and Security. “It takes a really long time to figure this stuff out... This is going to take years or even decades to solve it, if we ever do.”

Yet Yan continues to double down on her claims and to attack her critics as spreading “lies.” She still argues that the Chinese government intentionally created the coronavirus and continues to do everything it can to silence her.

Yan also offers no apologies for making common cause with Bannon and other Trump allies. As a dissident, she said, she doesn’t necessarily get her choice of supporters.

“If China is going to do this crime, who can hold them accountable?… Trump was the one who was tough” against China, Yan said, adding that her claim “is about real fact. I don’t want to mislead people.”

Even now, she is preparing another paper, nearing 30 pages, that she hopes will refute her critics and bring fresh attention to her claims about China, covid-19 and what she says is an international coverup campaign.

Yan plans to publish it in a few weeks, she said — on Zenodo.

[i-ran-away-without-a-map]

@jenlog I ain't having an argument in the notes cause it's a pain in the ass. I don't know why you didn't just tag me in a normal reblog or post if you wanted to discuss things.

Anyway, this is the link to the article you provided: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/article-abstract/2749479

I took the time to read that and I can only say one thing: read the damn comments on that, from fellow academics. They back up what I was also gonna say: it's a very flawed analysis. It has the strength of numbers of participants, but it lacks proper data analysis, it fails entirely to account for already existing mental health issues in the participants, and it is extremely vague with the details of what exactly the patients reported (aka the so called "gender identity conversion therapy" could very well be anything, from an actual form of gay conversion therapy to their therapist advising them against taking hormones, and neither of those options suggest the actual practice of such a thing as "gender identity conversion therapy"). Also, the people who participated in writing this study already assume that "gender identity" is an actual thing, which is a whole other debate that they fail to even take into account, not even as a statement like "for the purposes of this study, we are working off the assumption that gender identity is a real psychological trait" or something along those lines; that in itself is extremely dishonest, and doesn't help the credibility of this source much.

Here is comment one in its entirety, for reference:

"September 27, 2019

Not all therapy is conversion therapy

Julia Mason, M.S. M.D. | Calcagno Pediatrics

As a pediatrician, I am very concerned with the probability that we are prematurely and permanently medicalizing many young patients who suffer from transient gender dysphoria (GD). 

Multiple studies confirm that only a small minority (15%) of childhood-onset GD persist; GD persistence may be even lower in the novel segment of adolescent-onset GD--a poorly understood group of primarily female patients, which has become the predominant presentation in the last 10 years. 

Many of these patients’ distress has resolved with the help of ethical forms of non-affirmative therapy, which allowed them to ascertain the reasons underlying their GD. Conversely, a great many have been harmed by quick affirmation, which often led to hormonal and surgical interventions they later regretted. (https://www.piqueresproject.com; https://www.reddit.com/r/detrans/)

Turban et al allowed a number of study limitations-- including convenience sampling and failure to control for mental illness, a key predictor of suicidality--which should make any savvy reader wary of accepting the study conclusions about the harms of therapy aimed at alleviating GD. 

In addition, the authors failed to mention a key methodological flaw. The researchers limited their survey to a sample of persons identifying as transgender (a term that lacks clinical specificity), rather than including all persons who have suffered from gender dysphoria (a DSM 5 diagnosis). As a result, the study is not generalizable to the larger population of persons with gender dysphoria (GD). The number of persons who at one point suffered from GD but no longer do far outnumbers those who have persistent and consistent GD and thus identify as transgender. 

Without access to ethical exploratory psychotherapy (which the authors appear to incorrectly conflate with unethical conversion therapy), patients suffering from GD have only one option: permanent treatment with hormones and surgical interventions. Given the many known, and as yet-to-be discovered risks of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, the irreversibility of sex change surgeries, and the increasing numbers of young people expressing regret about choices made during what turned out to be a transient phase of their identity formation, it’s critical to ensure free access to all ethical forms of therapy.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST: None Reported"

I found this one to be very well worded, but the other two are equally informative and all three can be found by scrolling to the bottom of the link you've provided, and pressing the read more options.

To put it bluntly, this is a shaky study at best. Academic studies all follow certain guidelines, and while there are of course differences between types of studies and the subject the study is made for, I'm familiar with reading psychology type studies since I'm a psych student myself, and immediately I can point out that this would not have gotten very good grades. It states its point repeatedly, often without any clear link between its reaffirmed hypothesis and the actual data gathered. Here's a thing about studies: they're real hard to make for several reasons, but one of them is that data gathering is hard, and data interpretation is harder. You also don't always wind up being right in your hypothesis: sometimes you're right, sometimes the results are inconclusive, and sometimes your hypothesis was wrong. You need to write that down, that's the conclusion part, and it's absolutely mandatory. You're not supposed to twist data to fit your hypothesis, or to purposefully keep your data analysis vague. This article has overall poorly analysed and interpreted data, quite an aggressive writing style (it drives its conclusion on repetitive statements more often than not), and the three comments (which by the way! function as peer reviews, since they are written by fellow academics) do a very good job of explaining its weak points further, so I suggest anyone who has some time to kill, give both the article and the comments a read, since it was actually pretty interesting, especially if you're currently a psych, med or sociology student, since it gives a very good practice on both how to spot the weak points in an article, and it can also be an exercise of what questions you should ask yourself as you read an article.

Overall, thanks for the evening read my dude, but if you're genuine about your interest in such studies, I suggest you check out those comments (the reason why articles are peer reviewed is so that dishonesty, purposeful or accidental flawed data interpretation, or personal biases can be spotted), and try to learn how to spot poorly made articles, since those aren't gonna be very helpful for any actual research.