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rentalboos · 7 months ago

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Watcher has lost almost 100 thousand subscribers

Hi babygirl, thank you for your 6 new messages, I love that you think my opinion is this important, though I genuinely don't quite get it. I'm not even a Watcher fanaccount, like, I have maybe two followers who even know the channel. What beef do you have with me lmao Since you're so interested in it though, I'm going to give it to you! FOR FREE! Since that's so important to you!

Here's the tldr: You're on anon sending hate, so you already know you're in the wrong and everyone else knows it too!

Great. Now that that's covered, here we GO! My precious opinion that you value so much! For free:

I'm sorry it offends you that I have the 5,99 to pay them and am doing it, but like. Do you do this with everyone? Do you go into people's DMs (no of course not, you only hate anonymously, wonder why that is!) to yell at them about subscribing to Twitch streams? Spotify? Youtube membership? Patreons?

What about this offends you so? That a bunch of youtubers had to make a tough choice between "we have to stop creating the art we want" and "we could try and keep creating the art we want, but we'll need to get paid for it" and chose to try and get paid for it? Is the offense, to you personally, that other people will still get to enjoy the content they like, opposed to absolutely no one getting to? It certainly can't be that you, personally, can't access their content anymore, because, quite frankly, I doubt you actually like it very much.

As for your five billion questions for why this makes you racist: You singling out Steven makes you racist. They founded this company together and they doubtlessly made this decision together and the narrative that is currently spun of "Shane (the white dude) would never, his evil non-white co-workers are forcing him to!" is .... extremely parasocial, and wildly random and coming out of nowhere.

Except for all the parts it's not, because of COURSE. Of course the evil guy and the guy who creates content "no one wants to fund" and who now everyone calls "boring" and who now has viral hate tweets saying he's "dragged Ryan and Shane down", is the asian guy who's pushed for diversity on the channel from the very start.

Like, he's well aware that his shows are the least popular. There's a reason for that, sweetie, and I promise you, it has to do with the fact that they've focused on diversity and quality rather than shittalking in front of a camera. And I'm not even a Steven girlie, I'm a Ghost Files ride or die, baby!

But this narrative that he's "homophobic and racist" because he said in a podcast once that he chooses to stay friends with people who sometimes sprout ignorant views, that's like- Get a fucking grip. I know y'all haven't reached adult life yet, it is painfully apparent, but there comes a time in life where you'll have to realize that sometimes the people around you aren't as socially aware or educated as you, but in their nature good eggs, and you can, of course, choose to drop their asses, if you don't happen to be otherwise connected to them in an adult environment, where jobs and friend groups often overlap or they're part of your family or family's circle, but the far, far better choice is to be their friend and educate them. Because that's the best way the ignorant views become less ignorant. That's literally what he's been saying in that podcast ep, by the way. I don't need to "google" that and I don't need your twitter links, I was there when that episode dropped. I listened to it as I did the dishes. I was applauding Steven for putting in the time and effort and energy to DO that with people, because I oftentimes find myself too scared to have the conversations he is having.

Watcher has donated to queer charities. They sell queer merch. They have queer employees. Their fanbase is mainly queer. He's not homophobic, y'all are insane. If any of that would go against his values, he'd a) not be in a company with Ryan and Shane, because they wouldn't be having it and b) wouldn't stand up for, employ and cater to queer people. He'd be out with the homophobes, telling us how Jesus died for our sins or whatever.

He's also not racist which- duh. Before I even knew Steven Lim, I already knew this is something he is incredibly(!) sensitive about, he literally hates racism (And I don't know if you noticed. But he's very often the target of it, you absolute bufoon) and specifically went into Watcher to be able to help marginalized voices have a platform. That was his goal for Watcher that he couldn't properly fulfil in Buzzfeed. I know that. Because I was there from the start and actually listened to them talk. And it was stated and proven many, many times.

Y'all so eager to jump on a hate train and take shit out of context, it's pathetic. And "homophobic" good God, he had a book on his bookshelf. Wow. I have Harry Potter in three different editions on my bookshelf, I've learned reading with them. They have tear stains on the pages where Dumbledore died. You're gonna say I'm a transphobe if you see them in a photo? Gonna go ahead and call me, a trans guy, a transphobe now? Knock yourself out. Because I'll care about that about as much as I care about how many angry little kids are unsubscribing from Watcher rn: Not even a little bit.

You're whining like little bitches in random fan's inboxes, are throwing insults, false accusations and racism around to stirr the pot, you're coming for Steven as if Ryan and Shane aren't literally HORRIFIED by y'all doing this in their name to someone who's their close friend. As if Watcher would even exist without him, when he saved it from going bankrupt in their first year, when Ryan and Shane couldn't be arsed to step up and figure out how to run a company.

You weren't paying them anyway. I'm subscribed to their Patreon at the highest tier, because I know good art doesn't come free and I knew they were gonna struggle on Youtube views alone and I enjoy their content and want to help them keep making it. I don't expect anyone to be able to do that - And they don't either. They also don't expect everyone to pay or be able to pay for their streaming services. They're currently working on responding to the feedback and make things more accessible. They certainly didn't handle this perfectly and they certainly didn't want to make this choice if they had another one. Neither of the three.

You won't pay for it. That's fine. That's literally all there is to it. There's no need to sling this shit around, but you're doing it anyway. Not because you care, but because you're having fun with it. Well, go ahead. The more hate you send, the more I know I'm standing up for the right people.

#watcher #watcher entertainment #discourse #sorry to my poor doctor who followers lmao #things are.... a lot

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shuinami · 1 year ago

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Part 3: How to write an MLE-based London accent authentically

Part 1: Who, What (London Accents) | Part 2: When, Where, Why (Black Londoner Culture since Windrush)

As I conclude this little guide, I'd like mention that my ask box and DMs are always open if anyone has further questions or anything 🤎

In this section, I'll go over some advice, the grammar and vocabulary and provide some suggestions for references.

Section A: Basic Tips

When to use slang

The concentration of slang is key to differentiating characters as well as writing an accent authentically. As an MLE-based speaker who is not actually a roadman (meaning a gangster, though many people misuse the term to refer to anyone who uses MLE, especially if they are working class), like most of us, Hobie does not utterly kill it with slang that would likely not be understandable to the people he’s with. There are a lot of phrases and idioms/metaphors that seem self-explanatory once you know what they mean or that seem similar to Americanisms (e.g. roadman = street/hood nigga), but of course, as someone who doesn’t use the terms, hearing it in passing, it probably wouldn’t be understandable, despite the speaker thinking it is.

Coming from a diverse place, often with immigrant parents who don’t even speak English as a first language, if fluently at all (not in the case of most black Caribbeans from former British colonies, but remember Asians and Africans are more plentiful here), trust me, we know what we sound like 😂! Most of us code-switch, as we learn standard English in school and, until more recently, where more people are 3rd gen+ immigrants as opposed to 2nd, we actually tend to pick up MLE slang from experiences outside the home as we grow up. At the same time, some people really don’t care at all and don’t change how they speak for anyone haha. I don’t recommend trying to write code-switching if you’re not extremely familiar with MLE because you’ll probably lose the flow and also, Hobie only eases up a little bit after his intro.

My point is though, that not every single sentence needs to have slang in it. Most should, but if you’re trying to be serious or sexy, for example, and you feel the need to tack on some slang just to convey Bri’ishness, even if it doesn’t really fit, don’t do it cause it’s no more authentic than just writing plain English in those scenarios.

When talking to people from his own dimension, however, slang it up if you’d like, because the expectation would be that a (working class or ethnic) Londoner would understand him.

For humour, mocking and teasing, we love to use slang because a lot of it is funny, even to us. Like I said, we know what we sound like. Those are the moments when more obscure slang (such as Cockney rhyming slang) might come out for comedic effect.

It’s good to have some balance, so not every word needs to be substituted. If you couldn’t read it without a fucking huge glossary, you’ve probably done a bit too much.

Writing the Accent

It’s good in moderation. ‘Luv’, ‘ain’t’, replacing the last g with an apostrophe in -ing words - you all have those things down, it works, good job.

HOWEVER, it is very clear that a lot of you have no clue what letters we do and don’t drop/change and in what words, as well as a lot of you going OT with removing the T’s from the middle of words. I know it kind of sounds like that to you but it reads like an over-exaggeration or mockery, particularly because most London accents, including Hobie’s, are much lighter in comparison to Brits from other areas, in which such omissions and alterations of letters would be somewhat appropriate but still, in moderation. I don’t recommend typing out the accent often, just sprinkle it around for a bit of flavour but don’t consistently write in that way because your writing loses legibility and it gets quite distracting.

Content

The stereotype of British people liking sarcasm is true for most and, in general, we like to have, what we call, ‘a bit of banter’. We’re a jokey people, even if those jokes can be a bit harsh or teasing. Confusingly, even if we are joking around, it doesn’t mean necessarily we’re being friendly, joking is just how we communicate (e.g. “Oh boy, humbling reality Spider-Man has arrived”, “What does that do?” “Apart from having a great name?”, “super humane and not creepy”, “this is a great look…”). I think most people have got this down really well, so keep it up guys 😎🤙

Another thing is cussing, swearing, profanity, whatever you wanna call it. We do it a lot for no reason, mainly spamming the word “fuck(ing)”. So have fun with that if you aren’t already.

We’ll get into it more in the terms of endearment section of Section B but, basically a lot of Londoners are typically not too mushy or affectionate, as is the stereotype for big city people and, additionally, British people in general aren’t the most direct in their words. Obviously, some people are but it’s not the culture if you’re trying to write proper ‘authentic’ haha. For a lot of us, saying sweet stuff can be quite laborious when sincere or cheesy or confrontational levels of direct really 😂 We ain’t the friendliest of types through our words so I'd recommend relying more on context for the sweet factor unless it's a stand-out moment.

Different parts of the UK, even within England itself, have different slang

Idk what else to say about this but yeah, there’s some phrases I’ve seen people use that have me scratching my head cause “nobody [from my area] says those words in that order” but I’m guessing it’s down to people incorporating slang which is more commonly heard up North because it’s all classed as British/U.K. slang when you look it up so, just be wary of that.

Section B: Grammar and Vocab (the thing you’ve been waiting for 😂)

I’ll link a document here so I don’t clog up your dash more than I already have. Feel free to bookmark it or anything, I’ll update it if needed. The contents are links to the relevant section so you can just click those if you’re not trying to read the whole thing.

I only included some highlights of the things that are easy enough to explain just by writing them out with their meanings but it’s by no means an extensive list. I’ve studied a few languages but I’m not a linguist so I just did my best.

If you want to go more heavy with the Cockney slang, I’ll leave it to someone who’s more familiar with it (or not… lol) to explain those terms and when to use them properly.

Section C: References

Of course, it’s all good and all that I’ve given you instructions but to make it sound natural, you’d need a point of reference. Here are some references of black North West Londoners from the early 80s, black East Londoners, black Londoners more generally and a Daniel Kaluuya interview so you can get a better feel of how we sound:

Clip from ‘No Problem’, the first Black British Sitcom

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The accents within this one group of siblings is very varied and none of them use MLE, as per the time period. The two younger sisters have accents most similar to Hobie’s. The show follows a group of siblings of Jamaican descent living in a council house in North West London, first released in 1983.

Clips from ‘Chewing Gum’ by Michaela Coel [CW: they're awkwardly talking about sex in a lot of the clips + don't listen to Candice's boyfriend, Aaron, he's not from London lol]

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The show takes place in Tower Hamlets, which is in East London and was first released in 2015. Tracy has a similar accent to Hobie and also uses a mix of more general/Cockney-influenced slang and MLE, so this one should both be a fun watch and be useful, you’ll also want to pay attention to Candice who has a more MLE lean to her speech.

Clips from the Foot Asylum crew most of them are MLE speakers, see some examples of our banter with friends lol

Clips from ‘Top Boy’

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Another show that takes place in East London, this time in Hackney, which is an area known for being kind of rough in terms of gang activity. Almost all the characters speak exclusively MLE in this show. If you want to watch it, TW for violence and gang activity, death, etc. (18+). You can tell based on the ones I’ve chosen that Sully’s my favourite character lmao.

Fun fact, as you might hear the character, Dushane, reference, Sully lives on a canal boat for a while as a form of refuge. I know a bit about boat dwellers in London from a lecture at uni but if anyone wants me to do more research and do a post and explain the waterways and stuff, again, feel free to drop an ask and I’ll do it :)

Clip from ‘Love Island’ just pay attention to the black islanders, Tyrique and Whitney

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I just finished watching this year's Love Island UK so I thought I’d throw the clip of Whitney, Lochan and Tyrique fighting in here lmao

& Daniel Kaluuya talking about Spiderpunk to bring us full circle✨

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#hobie brown #atsv fanfiction #spider punk #black british #writing advice #across the spiderverse #shui fic #shuinami

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imaginarianisms · 7 months ago

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okay so. this is kind of a vent ive& been meaning to talk about for a while & this isn't directed at any of my moots y'all are fine. ok @ the general majority a.soiaf rpc. take my hand. ok. good. walk w/ me for a sec. gotta have a chat w/ y'all as a native mun.

this is what most of the arctic hemisphere is for white fantasy authors & let's be honest many of the predominantly white asoiaf fandom & rpc: russia, scandinavia & iceland (& of course it's always white scandinavians or northern europeans bc ofc it is & conveniently ignoring the many, MANY indigenous peoples of russia & scandinavia, particularly the sami people who were, y'know, literally always there in norway, sweden, finland & the kola peninsula of russia & are literally Always left out).

this is what the ACTUAL entire arctic hemisphere looks like in reality. that includes not just white european scandinavia but also all of northern russia including siberia which btw russia has MANY indigenous peoples, the sami people of norway, sweden, finland & russia, iceland which has no indigenous population but there are theories supported by genealogy & anthropology studies that indigenous peoples accompanied norsemen vikings to iceland, greenland which has the indigenous population of the greenlandic inuit before danish settlers came, canada which itself has MANY indigenous peoples & alaska which Also has MANY indigenous peoples including the inuit, several first nations communities & alaska natives.

so why is it that Every Single Fucking Blog i& see that has a northern/free folk character - whether canon or an original character - theyre literally Always white european coded, always having blonde hair with blue eyes if it's an original character "skin and hair as white as the snow and eyes as blue as the ice", all that shit. that's a rhetorical question. i& know why. you know why. it's because whiteness is considered the default in our lives & even in our stories & nonwhite arctic peoples or anywhere near the northern hemisphere are considered lesser than, considered an afterthought if even at all. bc y'all would rather have your perfect white instagram model northern characters rather than having diverse characters & actually doing & putting in the fucking work to incorporate nonwhite northern cultures into your fantasy stories despite claiming to be inclusive of everyone. to clarify, there's nothing inherently wrong with having white characters who live in the north but i& need y'all to ask yourselves Why its so overwhelmingly prevalent. bc as an INDIGENOUS mun it makes me& fucking insane.

"b-but a.rcana its in medieval europe!!!!!! :'CCCCC so of course the northerners are european northerners!!!!!" man you wont believe who lives in the arctic europe irl, it ain't white scandinavians, they aren't even indigenous to those lands, it's the sami & the karelians who're the indigenous peoples of arctic scandinavia & the kola peninsula. lmfao. now that's not to say there Aren't ANY people with blonde hair & blue eyes, but it's. really uncommon, even moreso people with red hair and blue eyes, especially historically speaking. the point of this post isn't even saying "there are no pale skinned people in the arctic so dont do that in fantasy", the point is "why are there ONLY white skinned, blue eyed, blonde haired people in fantasy arctic groups when the real arctic consists of so many more ethnic groups than that and why are there so many people just okay with indigenous erasure". the arctic is an extremely diverse place with THOUSANDS of ethnic groups in it & to keep writing & rping your character as all white characters especially if they're blonde is. extremely racist & its throwing aside indigenous folx & asians bc the arctic indigenous peoples look VERY diverse.

above are several different nations ranging from the sámi, to northern asia to indigenous peoples of siberia like the sakha to the tuvan to the chukchi to the nenets to the mongolians to alaska natives to the métis (basically, mixed white, mostly french, english & scottish settlers & indigenous people who're their own distinct indigenous people who, while not from there originally as their homelands are very diverse, historically also travelled up to the northwest territories) & several first nations in the subarctic region like the anishinaabe & cree. hopefully y'all now see what i& mean when there's literally SO MUCH DIVERSITY in the arctic, subarctic & otherwise northern regions in our world with a variety of different skintones from different shades of brown to pale & physical features & hair colors from brown to black to blonde & eye colors to choose from from shades of brown to blue to green. there's SO MANY ideas to choose from & y'all will STILL erase nonwhite peoples.

& that's just the first men in the NORTH (which are the place with the most people who're first men & btw the north is MASSIVE & that's not even including the MANY peoples from beyond the wall so combined they're canonically the largest & oldest of the seven kingdoms), there's technically other families such as house blackwood, house bracken & the now extinct house strong in the riverlands, house dayne, house wyl & house yronwood in dorne, house redfort & house royce in the vale, house westerling in the westerlands, house gardener in the reach, the mountain clans, & the people of crackclaw point claiming descent from the first men groups that could be interpreted as OTHER indigenous groups living in westeros before the andals (aka white european people) invaded & intermarried with the first men & the rhoynar came to dorne & later the valyrians, notably the targaryens, velaryons (who, in house of the dragon, are black) & celtigars (who i personally interpret as east asian, mostly han chinese, due to the yellow god-emperors of yi ti which is ancient china in the paternal line & a valyrian noblewoman who married him but that's besides the point) came to westeros. obviously there's no 1v1 comparison & most people in southern westeros are mixed between the andals & the first men according to grrm but y'all get it.

"but a.rcana!!!! grrm said its loosely inspired by the wars of the roses!!" .... ok and? asoiaf, like our world, still has many different peoples & cultures. using that as an excuse to not include characters of color in your writing in btw a fantasy series? ew. istg y'all will use any excuse to erase or ignore any nonwhite people even in the rpc.

"but a.rcana!!!! there's not very many indigenous fcs!!!" unfortunately that's very true but like. although it's great to have 1 you don't Need a fc do you. use your imagination.

i& can't tell you how angering it is to find that the vast majority of the rpc just. doesn't even entertain the idea of their favorite (yt) stark faves POSSIBLY being indigenous. if there can be black, brown & east asian valyrians there can be indigenous first men. just like the valyrians, there's literally ZERO lore saying that the first men exclusively had pale skin & btw their skintone, just like the native valyrians was literally NEVER described. yall wanna be racist & gatekeep fantasy SOOOOOOOOO fucking bad. please unpack & discard that white supremacist ideology bc science, history & nor fantasy or literally any other genre of literature & television is compatible with it.

g-d forbid j.on s.now be brown skinned & look visibly indigenous like his mother & uncle & being an indigenous man struggling to do the right thing in a world stacked against his cultural values & trying to save his people & the world from literal ice undead (which, by the way, as an indigenous mun in some of my nations we already HAVE creatures like the others, the giants & the children of the forest in our folklore, we don't need to make it up) & having an indigenous man being one of the major heroes of the story. g-d forbid everyone's favorite l.yanna s.tark be a visibly indigenous woman who's as skilled in the art of swordplay & embroidery & be named the queen of love & beauty & being taken from her home & having to mourn the loss of her father & brother who died trying to find their missing daughter / sister & depending on the verse dying in childbirth or living to become a woods witch & warrior & fighting in her nephew r.obb s.tark's army. g-d forbid r.obb s.tark who's white presenting be the noble prince turned warrior king who slaughtered every lannister soldier he saw for the capture then murder of his father & him struggling to do the right thing & trying to be what the king of the north should be, the first movement for indigenous independence in centuries since the targaryen dynasty fell & being tragically murdered. g-d forbid s.ansa s.tark be lightskinned & have red hair & blue eyes & still be the epitome & pinnacle of femininity beauty standards in king's landing who's considered just as beautiful as any white woman, struggle with the genocide of her people & be forced to use her wits & smarts in a place that didn't value honor or kindness & being used as a hostage by the very family who slaughtered her people & being viciously physically abused & sexually harassed by a white blonde haired green eyed tyrant boy king & his mother & no one blinked an eye & then being forced to marry another member of said family to the point of being bodily dragged to the sept & being forced to assimilate in order to survive & being oversexualized & objectified by white men & she's not even treated like an actual person & finally escaping & eventually taking her homeland back as queen of the north in her own right.

g-d forbid a.rya s.tark being brown skinned & being told she looks like her aunt l.yanna be genuinely angry at what happened to her people & learning about other people along the way & becoming a ruthless assassin for it & trying so hard to remove her culture from herself the further away from westeros she is but knowing deep down she'll always be a.rya s.tark & knowing that one day she'll avenge her family & her people. g-d forbid b.ran s.tark be white presenting & be a MORALLY COMPLEX PHYSICALLY DISABLED character who's literally just trying to save the world while being so far beyond the wall that everyone thinks he's dead & he & his (also indigenous) friends m.eera & j.ojen r.eed & hodor have to fight ice creatures & the undead. g-d forbid r.ickon s.tark who looks so much like r.obb being so young when all this happened & doesn't even remember what most of his family & own home looks like & all he knows is the (also indigenous) woman osha from beyond the wall who's his mother figure & his black direwolf shaggydog who's never abandoned him & he has to learn to fight & survive & thrive on the island of skagos where most don't even dare to tread bc of the supposed cannibalism & unicorns & him coming back to avenge his family as a fierce warrior even as a boy & arguably acting more like someone from the free folk than someone in the north.

g-d forbid indigenous men (rickard stark, brandon stark then eddard stark & robb stark) being brutalized & then murdered in front of crowds of cheering (mostly white) people & no one blinks an eye but ofc that doesn't mean anything (/s). g-d forbid the starks & the northmen are literally compared to literal animals & called savages doesn't mean anything race related despite the fact that savage is literally an antinative slur. g-d forbid the b.oltons (for the most part, not all of them ofc, its basically only r.oose & r.amsay) be indigenous villains bc there really aren't any native villains because we're always seen as the noble savage or these always good elf beings bc we're people just like anybody else & people can *GASP* do shitty things to each other & oppress their own people & native people aren't excluded from that. g-d forbid indigenous women being like the mormonts, dacey mormont & lyanna mormont & spearwives being strong & powerful native women & girls. g-d forbid w.yman m.anderly being a fat indigenous man be constantly underestimated by his peers but is actually a vital player in the northern restoration & his brave granddaughter green haired indigenous w.ylla m.anderly boldly standing up for the s.tarks even in front of the frey colonizers.

g-d forbid there be intracommunity issues between the northerners & the free folk bc like irl we clearly all got along so well (/s) like we didn't have enemies in the past & we had conflicts & fights like everybody else. g-d forbid there be indigenous people who look different & are just as diverse as dorne is. g-d forbid the north & dorne don't look at each other & find solidarity. g-d forbid the starks & northmen as indigenous peoples fighting to get their traditional homelands back from usurpers, traitors & colonizers to restore the north, castles, cultures & land back into indigenous hands.

#i'm& Very Tired #personals & fandom blogs do not interact i'll slaughter you on the spot kthx #''um ACKSHUALLY'' ion wanna hear it.#/ antinative racism #moots can reblog btw #ooc.

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lostcauses-noregrets · 2 years ago

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Eruri is my favorite ship but for personal reasons, I have very strict limits when it comes to fictional content and find very few fics that I am comfortable reading. I feel really alienated within the fandom because everyone has tastes that are not mine and can enjoy the most extreme content without any problems... As an eruri veteran, what do you think of the tastes of the fandom and how Erwin and Levi are generally perceived within it? What is your opinion on the evolution of tastes in the fandom as it grew? Do you feel more in tune with how Erwin and Levi were perceived before or today? And finally, what kind of fics do you like to read and (if you don't mind answering) what kind of fics will you never read?

I’m glad you are clear about setting your own boundaries, but I’m sorry you’re struggling to find content you’re comfortable reading. I know it can be dispiriting if you feel you’re out of step with your fandom, but preserving your own comfort is always important.

In terms of your questions, I’m going to break this down if that’s okay.

As an eruri veteran, what do you think of the tastes of the fandom and how Erwin and Levi are generally perceived within it?

The first thing to say here is that obviously the Eruri fandom isn’t a unified whole. It’s a large and diverse fandom with many different communities spread across multiple platforms and continents so it’s almost impossible to make generalisations. I’m not on TikTok, but I know the Eruri fandom on TikTok is quite different to the fandom on Tumblr or Twitter. There’s a huge Asian and Japanese fandom too of course, and their perception of these characters, their motivations and actions, can be very different from Western fandoms. @tsuki-no-ura's excellent blog gives a fascinating glimpse into what gets lost in translation.

I also think fans’ perception of these characters depends on when and how they came to the series. Anime only fans will have a different perception from manga fans. I think that fans who followed the series in real time have a different attachment to the characters from those who came to the series after it ended and were able to consume the whole story from start to finish.

If I was to make a sweeping generalisation though, I’d say that the fandom’s perception of Erwin and Levis is pretty true to canon. Most Eruri fans perceive Erwin’s emotional depth, the burden of guilt he carries, and the toll that pursuing his father’s dream takes on him. Erwin is a visionary, he can be ruthless when the occasion demands, but he never sacrifices life needlessly, and every soldier lost under his command adds to his burden.

If you step outside the Eruri fandom, which I do very rarely, you will find a very different perception of Erwin. In some quarters he is still regarded as the ruthless, heartless, military commander who cares nothing for the lives he throws away. These are the fans who will swear blind that Erwin would have supported the Yeagerists and Eren’s genocide. I can only conclude they read the series with their eyes shut.

Levi is crude and awkward but also deeply kind and compassionate. He is loyal to a fault and devoted to those he loves. Many fans perceive Levi’s love language as being acts of service, which is not out of keeping with the way he is portrayed in canon. There is a beautiful quote from Kamiya Hiroshi, who described Levi as the last stronghold of Erwin’s humanity and I think that really sums up how he is seen by the fandom.

O: “However, in coming back to being a human, it was when he talked to Levi, probably” (K: *assents*) “Well, all this time, probably, Levi was the last fortress, I think, that he can be as human.”

Ono Daisuke and Kamiya Hiroshi’s Dear Girl: Stories translated by @tsuki-no-ura

What is your opinion on the evolution of tastes in the fandom as it grew?

Like I said in the ask about Marley Erwin that I answered yesterday, I think that after Erwin died in the manga it freed writers to explore a myriad of AUs and what-ifs. However it’s notable that there are still many new authors writing fics set in the canon universe. Fics set in the period between ACWNR and the SnK manga are enduringly popular. Obviously once Marley came into the picture that gave writers a whole new world to play in and many seized the opportunity enthusiastically. The various merchandise franchises and collaborations have also provided fertile grounds for writers. The Sukiya AU was a gift to the fandom. Ditto Mer Levi and King Erwin.

Again, I hesitate to generalise, but I have noticed a bit of a trend over the last year or so for some writers to focus on darker aspects of Erwin’s character and his relationship to Levi. Virgin Eruris also seem to be in vogue. Not sure where that’s coming from. Trans Eruri fics have also grown in popularity over the last few years.

One of the things that’s interesting about the Eruri fandom is that the ending of the canon series appears to be having no impact on the popularity of the ship. The manga ended two years ago but the fandom is still growing. There are now a million different ship weeks and challenges to cater to almost every aspect of the ship. Last year we had Eruri Valentine Week, Femruri Week, Eruri Fluff Month, Eruri August, Dark Eruri Week, Trans Eruri Week, Bottom Erwin Week to name but a few. There really is something for everyone.

Do you feel more in tune with how Erwin and Levi were perceived before or today?

Ooh that’s a tough one. Fandom communities tend to be transient by their nature, so if you stick around for longer than the norm, it’s inevitable that your interests may fall out of line with new influxes of fans. I’m not going to deny that I do sometimes feel out of step with large parts of the fandom, as though I’ve stayed in the same place but the fandom has moved on. I will always be nostalgic for the Midnight Sun era, it was such an intense time, and despite the pain of the Serum Bowl, I'm glad I experienced it. But again, the Eruri fandom is so large and diverse that there are still plenty of corners where I feel right at home, where I can hang out with other fandom dinosaurs 🦕 At the same time, it’s really exciting to see so many new fans discovering this amazing ship. The Eruri fandom has always been blessed with incredibly talented writers and artists and it’s great to see new generations of fans carrying on this tradition. I’ve been really blown away by some of the new creators that have come to the fandom over the last couple of years.

And finally, what kind of fics do you like to read and (if you don't mind answering) what kind of fics will you never read?

I don’t mind answering as long as we’re clear that these are just my personal preferences. No shade on anyone who loves things I dislike and vice versa.

My preference is for fics that stick closely to Erwin and Levi’s canon characterisation, but I love AUs as much as canonverse. I adore fics that explore Erwin and Levi’s growing relationship. I’m a real sucker for hurt-comfort and I don’t shy away from fics that explore the impact of grief. I love reading smut. Well written BDSM fics that understand trust, catharsis and consent own my whole heart, but at the same time I adore fics where Erwin and Levi teach each other that they are worthy of tenderness and love. I’ve really grown to enjoy creature fics and you might even catch my reading omegaverse from time to time, but only if it’s written by seabear or @flecksofpoppy Historical AUs are absolutely my jam and I love fics that really inhabit a sense of place.

In terms of dislikes, I won’t read fics where Erwin is gratuitously cruel or callous or where he mistreats or manipulates Levi. I also dislike fics where Levi is naive, incapable, clingy or weepy. I find jealousy a real turn off and avoid it like the plague. I don’t mind reading first times but I have no interest in fics that focus on virginity. I’m not keen on mpreg, breeding kink, nesting and some of the squickier aspects of omegaverse. I dislike fics about marriage and weddings, with a few notable exceptions. I’m not a huge fan of parental Eruri fics, and I actively avoid fics where Erwin or Levi parent any of the Shiganshina trio. Zevi is an absolute hard nope from me, even when (especially when?) he is the abusive ex. Having said all that, there are always exceptions to the rule. As a wise friend of mine once said “you’re only one fic away from shipping your notp” and a really talented writer can make you fall in love with tropes or scenarios that you previously hated.

Oof sorry, that was a long ass answer. Thanks for your ask, it was interesting to sit down and think about some of this stuff.

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wayfarer-week · 2 years ago

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Resources

General

Content Warnings: This event will reblog content with canon typical violence and intimate scenes. Still, it is best practice to add content warnings if your work involves the following: blood, death, alcohol/drug use, violence, or sexual situations. We suggest being clear and concise with your wording, and perhaps using a rating system for written works.

Adding a Readmore: To keep things looking neat and make stories easy to access, we encourage using tumblr's readmore feature. This creates a line that hides some of the body of the work until it's clicked to display the rest.

Mobile: Start a new paragraph, type :readmore: and start another paragraph.

Desktop: Start a new paragraph, select the right-most icon that looks like a zig-zag between two straight lines.

Creating with Sensitivity in Mind

Wayfarer's setting and large cast of characters are extremely diverse! We will not share work that we feel poorly reflects the appearance and identities of canon characters. We hope you will join us in making sure they are represented as Idrelle Games intended!

The official Wayfarer discord server has dedicated space for sensitivity questions, for both art and writing. Don't hesitate to ask about things you're unsure of!

Writing

Here are a few resources on describing characters of color and queer characters in appropriate ways.

Words to Describe Skin Tone - via @writingwithcolor

Words to Describe Hair Texture - via @writingwithcolor

Describing East Asian Eyes - via @writingwithcolor

@yourbookcouldbegayer - a blog dedicated to helping others write queer characters

Art

Here you'll find several tutorials that may help you better represent people of color in your art, or expand your skillset in general.

Whitewashing In Art & How Color Works

Coloring Dark Skin

Skin Tones and Undertones

Tips for Drawing Black Hair

Black Hair In Depth

Drawing East Asian Faces

Youtube Playlist: Anatomy Tips

Fun Stuff

The Pinterest boards featured here are strictly headcanon, but have been vibe checked by Anna as pretty fitting for the setting. Feel free to use them as inspiration for your work! If your vision doesn't mesh with these, that's okay!

Velantian Fashion Pinboard - via @coldshrugs

Wayfarer Origin Inspiration Boards - via @coldshrugs

Velantian Architecture Board - via @harumeau

Damascus Steel Facts - the alassar steel of wayfarer weapons is based on this type of steel.

Rhesainian Beauty Standards - via @idrellegames

Timeline of Recent Rhesainian History

Vibe Tip: Corsets/Stays don't exist in this setting. Flowy, draping fabrics cinched or belted at the waist better fit the energy.

Vibe Tip: Asymmetry is considered very fashionable!

#wayfarerweek #admin

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unpredictablestuff · 5 months ago

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Not taking sides in an argument that has nothing to do with me, but I note the deep historical significance of this news. The Makah were not the only nation that hunted whales but they were one of the few (and the only one outside of Alaska) to get the right to do so included in a treaty with the US government.

That treaty allows them to fight for their right to hunt whales even in the face of an international ban (the legal question here is basically about treaty obligations the sovereign Makah Tribe and the United States have to each other).

This has deep historical significance because recent archaeological finds seem to have made the Pacific Coast migration model the only one that could have brought people south of Alaska in time for people to leave those traces.

Ancient people would have skirted the north Pacific Coast from northeast Asia, where the ice age glaciers began, to the Pacific Northwest of the United States, where they ended. Presumably they hunted marine mammals to survive along the way. The Makah live just north of the area where the glaciers ended.

The official Makah website: "The Makah Tribe has called the spectacular Neah Bay, Washington area home since time immemorial."

There is no way of knowing how many generations it took them. Genetic evidence suggests people in the Americas split from their Asian relatives about 30,000 years ago. Recent archaeological data indicates they arrived on this continent before 23,000 years ago, but they could have arrived thousands of years before that because archaeological finds that period are extremely scarce. They could have taken 7,000 years to travel around the coast or they could have taken a few generations.

Either way, it is possible or even likely that the ancestors of the Makah have been living on the coast of what is now Washington State and hunting whales to survive since the first people arrived on the continent.

Now that migration was not the end of the story and other people would have moved in and through the area, but in other areas of the world new arrivals mix with the people who are already present (and even other species of Homo). So even with population movements and possible language changes, the first people to set foot in North America outside of Alaska are most likely among the ancestors of the Makah nation. And hunting whales could very possibly go back to those original ancestors.

In other words, while further archaeological data could reveal other stories, it is currently reasonable to believe that this way of life in this specific region goes back to the first First Peoples of the Americas. Few people in the world can make a claim that ancient.

Time immemorial.

But what it means is that basically everyone with indigenous ancestry south of Canada and Alaska (and probably those areas as well) probably has distant ancient ancestors who lived near the Makah reservation and also hunted whales like the Makah still do.

Again, further discoveries could change the story, but this could well be how it all began, the ancient roots of people as diverse as the Cherokee, the Aztecs, the Incas and the Guaraní.

It's also notable that one of the other nations that still hunts whales is Japan, which except for the culturally European government of Russia is the most northern nation on the east Pacific coast, making it the independent nation that is closest to the beginning of the First People's journey.

And making Japan and the Makah tribe bookends to a way of life that could go back 30,000 years.

The reservation of the Quinault Indian Nation, on the coast south of the Makah Tribe, is closest to the place where glaciers ended during the ice age. They didn't get the right to hunt whales in their treaty with the US.

The Makah and Quinault languages are unrelated, by the way. The Makah language is related to languages of coastal people to the north, while the Quinault language is related to those of people to the south and further inland. So much time has passed that there is no way of knowing if they share some very distant origin, or which language has a longer history in the region if they don't.

Basically, we don't know if the two different language families they belong to are more related to each other or to other language families in the region than they are to any other language family in North America or northeast Asia.

The region is home to multiple unrelated language families. This degree of linguistic diversity is stereotypical of places with long-standing cultural continuity. So is the phonetic diversity and complexity of the languages in the area (they have a lot of consonants English speakers can't pronounce).

There is genetic evidence of multiple migrations from northeast Asia to North America as well as migrations in the other direction from North America to northeast Asia. Linguists have been aware of these cultural connections for many decades and there have always been some who enjoyed proposing superfamilies including languages in both regions. None of those proposals are widely accepted.

The lack of Native archaeologists gets in the way of culturally accurate narratives. Part of the problem is the low numbers of Native peoples in modern times. One imagines that another barrier is the conflicting standards of archaeologists and indigenous people for treating ancient sites and, especially, ancient human remains. But those differences have been litigated in US courts, conversations have been had and the two groups are more likely to cooperate now than at any time in the past.

A major legal battle involving northwest tribes, the US federal government and scientists over one ancient skeleton was eventually resolved in favor of the tribes. While the disagreements were not new, the battle seems to have been something of a turning point.

And cooperation between archaeologists and indigenous people means the rest of us have a clearer, more accurate picture of the distant past.

It might not be a coincidence that the conflict involved indigenous people in the Pacific Northwest, which may be a place where humanity's story is oldest as well as a place where Native isolation and independence is relatively recent. The coast mapped by European explorers in the late 18th century (after New Zealand and Hawaii). The Columbia River was not known to Europeans or white Americans until 1792 (the mouth of the river looks like a bay so explorers passed it for years before entering it).

Historical maps show Russian, Spanish, British and US claims to the region, but this is laughable when they most they had done was travel along the coast a few times. You might as well draw maps of the English Atlantic colonies stretching to the Pacific Ocean, since many did in theory.

Native tribes remained fully independent up to the mid-19th century after plague upon plague had swept through ancient but no longer isolated villages.

And that brings up a story that takes us back to where we began: the memory of the Makah tribe.

[I don't know if the words sovereign and independent are used the same way in other parts of the English-speaking world or if their equivalents in other European languages have any real difference, but in US usage the distinction is significant. Native nations are always referred to as sovereign states. The United States is referred to as either sovereign or independent.]

#peopling of the americas #makah

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 5 months ago

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By: Michael Hartney and Renu Mukherjee

Published: May 30th, 2024

Introduction

Last summer, in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (SFFA), the United States Supreme Court issued a blockbuster decision eliminating affirmative action in higher education. In ending the nation’s controversial 45-year experiment with race-conscious admissions, the SFFA majority emphasized how affirmative action had evolved to discriminate against certain “overrepresented” minorities (Asian students), who did not receive a boost on account of their race, in favor of other “underrepresented” minorities (black and Hispanic students) who did:

College admissions are zero-sum.… [A] benefit applied to some applicants but not to others necessarily advantages the former group at the expense of the latter … [such that] the guarantee of equal protection cannot mean one thing when applied to one individual and something else when applied to a person of another color.[1]

The Court’s ruling in SFFA may be applied to the consideration of race in other areas, including in admissions at the nation’s service academies and selective public high schools and in employment and federal contracting, all of which are being actively litigated in lower courts.[2] Amid this new legal and political upheaval over the future of affirmative action, many progressives have sought to delegitimatize SFFA on two grounds.

First, some have described the case as conservative judicial activism. The narrative goes something like this: three new justices joined the court and abandoned precedent so that they could impose their extreme and narrow conservative policy preferences on the public. Arthur Coleman, a cofounder and managing partner of EducationCounsel, put it this way: “You might say, ‘Gee, it was only seven years ago that the University of Texas prevailed on these very same [affirmative action] issues. What’s the difference?’ In large part, it’s the composition of the Court.”[3] Not to be outdone, President Biden indicted the decision as extreme, saying immediately after the ruling was handed down that “this is not a normal court.”[4]

Second, many affirmative action advocates, especially in the media, insist that most Americans (including most Asians) favor affirmative action. Therefore, they say that SFFA was “out of step” with the public’s support for diversity in higher education.[5] For example, in the very same news conference where he blasted SFFA, President Biden said: “Take a look at how [the court has] ruled on a number of issues that have been precedent for 50, 60 years. That’s what I meant by not normal. …Across the board, the vast majority of the American people don’t agree with the majority of decisions the court is making.”[6]

This report marshals new evidence to show that both criticisms miss the mark.

Drawing on two survey experiments from the 2022 Cooperative Election Study (CES),[7] we show that affirmative action was politically vulnerable before SFFA. Specifically, we argue that the SFFA ruling strongly aligns with growing consensus that merit should trump diversity in university admissions, particularly when race-conscious admissions policies harm Asian students.

Specifically, our survey data show that:

On average (across several versions of an affirmative action question), seven in 10 Americans said that they opposed race-based admissions in higher education.

It was important that SFFA focused on discrimination against Asian students. Respondents who were told that affirmative action harmed Asian (rather than white) students were more likely to oppose racial preferences in university admissions.

The discrimination against Asian students that was revealed in the SFFA litigation made Democrats, in particular, more skeptical of affirmative action: fewer than half of Democrats supported affirmative action once they learned that Asian students would be disadvantaged. In contrast, 68% of Democrats who were told that affirmative action would disadvantage white students said that they supported maintaining racial preferences.

In an experiment where survey respondents played the role of a medical school admissions officer, the vast majority made admissions decisions based on race-neutral, merit-based criteria. Specifically, when asked to choose between two competing applicants (one Asian, one black), most chose the applicant with better academic qualifications, even if it came at the expense of maximizing diversity in the medical school. While respondents do value racial diversity at the margins, we find that they do so only when applicants have relatively comparable academic qualifications. However, in practice, universities’ rarely implemented race-based admissions policies this way.[8]

In sum, despite what progressive critics have argued in their attempt to delegitimize the decision, SFFA was not an example of the Court simply placating a small slice of the electorate (conservative whites). Rather, we show that SFFA’s concern for discrimination against Asian students reflects a wide degree of consensus from across the political spectrum. That consensus is driven by a public, including most Democrats, that prioritizes merit-based, rather than diversity-maximizing, admissions criteria.[9]

How Affirmative Action Is Framed Matters

Issue framing matters in politics. Research has long shown that the way an issue is framed can lead to significant policy change.[10] As one of us has written previously, “every issue can be understood, or defined, in multiple ways. Issue definition draws attention to some dimensions of an issue rather than others, [helping determine] which values, goals, and ideas are understood to be germane to a policy choice … when contemplating an issue.”[11]

In recent years, the debate surrounding affirmative action in American higher education has changed considerably. In the past, legal and political challenges to the practice focused on the harms to white students (see, e.g., Bakke, 1978; Hopwood, 1996; Grutter and Gratz, 2003; Fisher, 2013 and 2016). More recently, the issue has been framed to focus on discrimination against Asian applicants (e.g., SFFA, 2023).

Did this reframing of the affirmative action debate weaken public support for racial preferences? More specifically, does public support for affirmative action tend to decline when Asians (rather than whites) are shown to be disadvantaged by race-based admissions policies? To find out, we conducted a framing experiment on the most recent CES, a large national survey of Americans carried out in November 2022 (before the SFFA ruling).[12] In our first experiment, survey respondents were assigned to one of four possible versions of the following question (the bold font indicates the conditions that were randomly varied):

Some people say that {because of past discrimination / because it is important to have diversity on college campuses}, Blacks should be given preference in university admissions. Others say that such preference is wrong because it discriminates against {whites/Asians}. What about your opinion—are you for or against preferential admissions policies for Blacks?

About half the respondents were told that critics of affirmative action worry that these policies discriminate against Asian students, while the other half were told that such policies would hurt white students. We found no evidence that the first part of the question (which provided different rationales for affirmative action) had any impact on the results; so to keep things as straightforward as possible, we focus on the results of the latter experiment here. Although all the results (broken out by racial subgroup) are shown in the Appendix, we highlight only the headline findings here in the body of the report.

Three main findings stand out.

First, on average (across the different experimental conditions), most respondents (71%) indicated that they oppose racial preferences (just 29% support them).[13] Unfortunately, we do not have large enough samples of racial-minority respondents to make reliable comparisons between minority subgroups. Therefore, we pool, or combine, responses from non-Hispanic whites (N=501), Asians (N=19), and Latinos (N=83), in order to compare them with responses from non-Hispanic blacks (N=79), since research shows that blacks hold decidedly more positive views of affirmative action than do other racial/ethnic subgroups.

We find little difference in support for affirmative action between whites alone and the pooled group of whites, Asians, and Latinos. When considered alone, 77% of non-Hispanic whites oppose the use of racial preferences in college admissions, compared with 75% of the white, Asian, and Latino grouping (across all the experimental conditions). We have fewer than 100 black respondents in our sample, but they were far more likely to favor preferences (70% in favor versus just 30% against).

Our second major finding comes from our other framing experiment, which found that respondents who learn that affirmative action policies may harm Asian (rather than white) students are far more likely to oppose racial preferences. That is, we find compelling (and statistically significant) evidence that when Asian disadvantage is emphasized, support for affirmative action craters. In total, support for preferences dropped by 10 percentage points, from 35.4% to 25.6%. Among whites alone, support dropped by 8 points, and among the pooled white, Asian, and Latino grouping, support dipped 10 points (all statistically significant differences).[14]

Third, in order to test the extent to which SFFA was, as critics allege, a “right-wing” ruling that catered to conservative whites, we break out the results by party identification in order to examine how the framing experiment worked on different political coalitions. We were especially interested in whether key elements of the Obama electoral coalition (progressive whites, Asians, and Hispanics) felt cross-pressured by affirmative action policies that hurt Asians (an important and growing member of that coalition).

Unsurprisingly, we found strong opposition to affirmative action among Republicans (95%), irrespective of whether Asians or whites were mentioned as the victims. But among Democrats, we witnessed a remarkable crack in the Obama coalition. Specifically, seven out of 10 Democrats who were told that affirmative action disadvantaged whites favored giving racial preferences to black students. But when Democratic respondents were informed about the disadvantages to Asian students, a minority (46%) said that they supported such preferences. Among the nonblack elements of the diverse Obama coalition (progressive whites, Asians, Hispanics), support dried up even more. As Figure 1 shows, 63% of these voters favored preferences that came solely at the expense of white students, but only 38% backed affirmative action when they learned that Asian applicants would lose out.

Suffice it to say that ending affirmative action wasn’t a right-wing affair. Rather, the Court’s evolving affirmative action jurisprudence tracked a shift among nonblack Democratic voters who, once cross-pressured by Asian plaintiffs’ interests, ultimately abandoned support for race-based university admissions (a position in line with most of the nonblack Obama electoral coalition). In sum, our findings show that when affirmative action programs threaten opportunities for Asians (as opposed to whites), most Americans—especially most Democrats—become far less comfortable with using race in admissions decisions.

Americans Want Universities to Use Merit-Based Admissions Criteria, Considering Diversity Only as a Tiebreaker Among Relatively Equal Applicants

When interpreting public opinion surveys, it is important to focus on specific questions that pollsters ask. Question wording is especially important for polling about affirmative action.[15] For example, proponents of the practice often point to polls that show strong support for programs that “help [minorities] get better access” to higher education.[16] Opponents, however, can just as easily find polls that show that most Americans oppose using race as a factor in admissions or hiring decisions.[17]

These findings reveal something important about Americans’ values. Large majorities broadly favor equality of opportunity but not equality of outcomes. Since equality of opportunity seems congruent with universities taking affirmative steps to diversify (another popular value), it’s not surprising that the public responds favorably to abstract questions about “affirmative action.” By contrast, most Americans oppose preferences, because that emphasizes how race-conscious policies intentionally benefit some groups (and harm others) to obtain equal outcomes.

Values, however, are only one part of the affirmative action polling puzzle. Most people do not pay close attention to politics, and thus do not know very much about how complex policy issues—including affirmative action programs—work in practice.[18] To be clear, we are not saying that Americans don’t hold sincere beliefs about what constitutes fairness in admissions policies. But one’s answer to a question about affirmative action depends not only on those beliefs about fairness but also on beliefs about how affirmative action programs actually work. Poll questions themselves, however, can have a strong impact on how respondents understand an issue. As political scientist Terry Moe explains:

Because [Americans] come to any survey with little information, they will be quite sensitive to information contained within the survey itself. …This information determines how the issue is “framed.” And the framing, in turn, influences which (of many possible) values and beliefs get activated in people’s minds, and thus how people respond. …If public opinion is to be well measured on an issue, the issue must be framed with great care. The framing should provide respondents with enough information to give them a good sense of what the issue is about. The information also needs to be balanced, so that respondents are not pushed to see the issue in a positive or a negative light.[19]

We agree with Moe so far as it goes, but we think that measuring public support for affirmative action presents additional challenges, ones that limit the value of conventional survey questions. Affirmative action puts so many competing values—diversity, inclusion, merit, opportunity, and nondiscrimination—directly in tension with one another, that even the most unbiased pollsters will struggle to write balanced questions that clearly convey these trade-offs for an unsophisticated public.

As an alternative, we propose experimental vignettes as a helpful solution.

Our vignettes are modeled after a technique used by political scientists to study voters’ preferences in elections known as “candidate choice survey experiments.”[20] In our vignettes, respondents are asked not to evaluate two competing political candidates but to play the role of an admissions officer and decide between two competing medical school applicants.

Specifically, in our experiment, we told each survey respondent that “a medical school must choose between two candidates who are competing for the final spot in next year’s class of future doctors.” Then we ask the respondents to “carefully review each applicant’s profile before selecting the applicant they would admit.” Importantly, although the applicants’ accomplishments were randomly varied, the specific pair of applicants that each respondent saw always consisted of an Asian applicant and a black applicant (Table 1).[21]

Table 1

Illustration of Applicant Pairings in Medical School Admissions Vignette Experiment

he experiment was designed to test whether, and when, Americans believe that diversity should trump merit in medical-school admissions. In other words, we wanted to know whether respondents would ever reject the more “qualified” applicant so that they could admit one who would increase racial diversity at the medical school.

First, we tested the effects of making the two competing applicants closer or further apart on the conventional merit-based criteria that medical schools consider: college grades (GPA) and performance on the Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT). We created two applicant pairings. In the first pairing arrangement, which we call the real-world merit gap, the Asian applicant boasts a 3.8 undergraduate GPA and a 90th-percentile MCAT score, while the black applicant has a much lower 3.5 GPA and 65th-percentile MCAT score. We call this the real-world merit gap because these numbers approximate the actual differences (on average) between black and Asian applicants who were accepted to an accredited U.S. medical school at the time of our survey (Table 2).[22]

Table 2

Average MCAT Scores and GPAs for Matriculants to U.S. MD-Granting Medical Schools, by Race/Ethnicity, 2023–24

In the second applicant pairing, which we call the affirmative action edge case, the Asian applicant boasts the same high grades and test scores as before, but we increase the black applicant’s GPA to 3.7 and MCAT score to the 85th percentile to create an “edge case”—i.e., one in which the underrepresented minority (the black applicant) is only slightly academically less impressive than the overrepresented minority (the Asian applicant).

We also randomized background information on the hypothetical medical school in the question prompt. One group of respondents were told that the medical school’s student body already matched “the racial/ethnic composition of the United States.” The other group were shown enrollment figures that matched the real-world racial composition of America’s medical schools (i.e., where Asians are overrepresented, and blacks and Hispanics underrepresented).[23] Respondents were randomly assigned to these different contextual cues, so we can be sure that any difference in their willingness to admit the underrepresented minority applicant is directly attributable to what they learned from the question about the lack of diversity or the magnitude of merit-based differences between the applicants.

The intuition of the experiment is straightforward. We first vary whether the medical school lacks representation (racial diversity); then we vary how close the underrepresented minority applicant is on merit-based criteria to the higher-performing overrepresented minority applicant. This allows us to examine whether and when Americans are willing to support affirmative action in practice—as opposed to supporting it in the abstract (as a non-zero-sum program that ensures equal opportunities for underrepresented minorities).

What do we find?

First, regardless of the vignette received, most respondents make their admissions decisions on merit-based criteria (college grades and MCAT scores). Consider the “strongest” case for giving the nod to the black applicant: one in which blacks are severely underrepresented at the medical school and the black applicant in question is an “edge case,” i.e., only a little below the Asian applicant on academic qualifications. Even in this most favorable (and, as we have noted, unrealistic) scenario, only about one in three respondents would admit the less qualified black applicant. About 70% still choose the Asian applicant.

Figure 2 shows the rates at which nonblack Democrats and nonblack Republicans would admit the black applicant over the Asian applicant, depending on the experimental condition. As we expected, political affiliation makes some difference, but respondents in both parties make their admissions decisions overwhelmingly using merit-based criteria. Even when the black and Asian applicants are close on these criteria and the school lacks diversity, only 35% of nonblack Democrats say that they would admit the black applicant to diversify the medical school.

Diversity, however, is still important for these respondents—and especially for Democrats. When Democratic respondents are told that the black applicant has much lower grades and test scores than the Asian applicant, and that the medical school is already racially representative of the country, just 14% admit the black candidate. However, regardless of the black applicant’s qualifications (relative to the Asian), about one in three Democrats will admit the black student when told that blacks are underrepresented, and Asians overrepresented, at the medical school. In other words, diversity looms larger for Democrats, and they feel cross-pressured, despite their clear concern for merit, to consider racial representation in medical school admissions.

The results of our vignette experiment are telling. Remember, when Americans are asked abstract questions about affirmative action, they tend to respond favorably, saying that they support programs that ensure equal opportunities for minorities in education. However, this experiment reveals what happens when we dispense with abstraction. Instead of asking citizens to understand what “affirmative action” means, our vignette experiment asks them to perform a straightforward task that mirrors what admissions officers actually have to do: evaluate actual applicants relative to a pool and choose. In the case of medical school admissions, Americans are a merit-first bunch. They tend to choose the applicant with better academic qualifications. They do appear to value diversity at the margins, but they allow it to become a deciding factor only when applicants are close on the merits, rather than far apart.

Americans Favor Merit-Based Admissions Criteria and Reject Anti-Testing Narratives

Some readers might object that our vignette experiment emphasizes standardized test scores as the linchpin of merit-based admissions criteria. After all, many affirmative action proponents claim that such tests are racially biased and are poor proxies of students’ academic qualifications. To address this criticism, we asked all our survey respondents two additional sets of questions that probe their beliefs about testing and the various criteria that should be used in higher-education admissions.

First, we asked respondents which of the following two statements about the role of standardized tests—such high school exit exams, the SAT/ACT, and Advanced Placement (AP) exams—was closer to their own views:

Since their inception almost a century ago, standardized tests have been instruments of racism that perpetuate racial bias in our society. Although they are imperfect instruments, standardized tests are one objective indicator of a student’s academic progress and ability.[24]

Over 75% chose the second option. What’s more, most nonwhite respondents firmly rejected the first option (that standardized tests are instruments of racism that perpetuate bias). Over 65% of nonwhites said that, in fact, such tests are an imperfect objective indicator of academic ability. Just over 55% of non-Hispanic black respondents agreed. In other words, only a minority of blacks (44%) said that standardized tests were instruments of bias rather than objective indicators of learning.

We then asked a series of questions (modeled after a similar survey conducted by Pew Research) about the factors that should and should not be used in college and (separately) medical school admissions. Specifically, for undergraduate college admissions, we asked whether the following criteria should be a major factor, minor factor, or not a factor:

Race or ethnicity Character or personality factors (e.g., likeability, courage, kindness) Scores on standardized tests, such as the SAT or ACT High school grades

For medical school admissions, we asked about:

Race or ethnicity Character or personality factors (e.g., likeability, courage, kindness) Scores on the Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT) College grades

The full set of results for all demographic subgroups are displayed in Table A3 in the Appendix. Here we wish only to note that Americans of all racial backgrounds are far more supportive of using high school grades and SAT/ACT (in the context of college admissions) and undergraduate GPAs and MCAT scores (in the context of medical school admissions) than any other factor we examined. In other words, most respondents would likely object not only to Harvard’s use of race/ ethnicity but also to its use of the now-infamous “personality scores” (which were biased against Asian students) to ensure that it recruited a racially diverse class. Americans of all stripes rejected both consideration of race and of subjective factors, and instead supported using test scores and grades as the major factor in admissions decisions.

Conclusion

Since the Supreme Court eliminated affirmative action in higher education, university administrators have been hard at work devising various ways to weaken the impact of the decision. One popular workaround has been to encourage students to write about their race or ethnicity in application essays. Consider one of the 2023–24 supplemental essay prompts for admission to Harvard College: “Harvard has long recognized the importance of enrolling a diverse student body. How will the life experiences that shape who you are today enable you to contribute to Harvard?”[25]

This prompt is not only in tension with the Court’s opinion in Students for Fair Admissions—the majority noted that “universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today”—but it also goes against public consensus that race should play, at most, a minimal factor in admissions. Our findings from the 2022 CES show that for large swaths of the American public—including, we would note, most nonwhite Democrats—merit trumps race when it comes to university admissions; and this is especially true when Asians are framed as the victims of affirmative action.

[ See Appendix for data. ]

#Michael Hartney #Renu Mukherjee #merit #make merit matter #meritocracy #affirmative action #supreme court #medical school #racial discrimination #Harvard #Harvard University #Students for Fair Admissions #religion is a mental illness

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sydneyinreallife · 1 year ago

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time

9/17/23 || 11:42pm

i'll blame it on time.

i think it freaks me out that i tend to find ways to be sad in every situation i'm in. like i am never truly content. however, i think that as bizzare as it sounds, i find a sort of comfort in being sad. this sounds more depressing than i mean to be, i just think that sadness is a reliable feeling and it gives me something to chase. this isn't to say that i am never happy, i just tend to always find something to be upset about. i absolutely hate the way my brain does this.

while in arizona i felt this sort of disconnect. i never truly felt like i belonged there, however i don't actually know how many people feel like they truly belong in their chosen college towns- there is no way social media tells the truth. being there made me dislike myself very much. no matter how hard i tried to be the version of me i wanted to be, i always felt like i was acting a part. i felt distant from my culture, family, friends, and literally myself. the feeling of slowly loosing yourself but not knowing how to fix it, is terrifying. i hate that i had everything (friends, a relationship, a job, and so many opportunities) yet it felt like i was completely alone with nothing. it's like i was fulfilled but with emptiness, so nothing really mattered. i stopped caring about school, but still did good. i stopped caring for my mental health, but still presented myself on the internet and in real life very well. i stopped enjoying the things i cared about the most, and became severely unmotivated and tired all the time.

i feel like this makes little sense without specifics so here is my list of things i disliked about arizona:

the weather was too hot which made me miserable, which made me stay inside all the time, which made me change my style, which made me never comfortable in my own clothes, which made me uncomfortable in my own body.

my classes were massive and my major was poorly run, which made me feel unspecial, which made me feel unmotivated in school, which made me care less, which made me feel dumb, which made me feel so lazy and unproductive, which led to me losing my purpose in life (academically).

there was a lack of diversity, which made me question why i had no asian friends, which made me sad about being asian, which made me feel like i was losing my culture, which is basically everything that makes me, ME, which is just not a good feeling.

in califonia the weather is nice. it's always nice. i feel at home, we always joke around and say the weather is bi-polar, however that just means it's like 60s-80s varying throughout the day and week. i can wear the clothes i want to wear, i never feel judged or out of place, and the status quo is actually being different, rather than all the same. in california (my school), the classes are smaller. no more than 30 people i would say. it's nice that the teachers know my name. it's nice that they grade my papers themselves, and don't have some ta doing it. it's nice that i feel supported by my school in my academic career. in califonia it's diverse. significantly more than most places, i mean it's basically known for it. it actually seems like there are more asian people than white people (this cannot be true) but it seems like it. i feel closer to my culture, and i am also closer to my family. the majority of my friends are asian. this is the first time in my life that this is true.

now the weird thing about time is that it changes the way you think about the past. many months later, i have quite literally fixed every major issue i had with arizona, by moving back to california.

when i think about my time in arizona i always end up putting myself in this endless cycle of regret for leaving. it almost always emotionally pains me to think about- which i do find odd since i know i've expressed my extreme dislike for the place. it starts like this:

why did i leave? wasn't it a hassle to transfer?

i do miss my friends. would i still be in a relationship had i stayed?

i did have good memories with those friends, i miss it.

i really took that time for granted, diversity doesn't matter that much, friends are friends and i genuinenly enjoyed my time spent with them

did i just give up on my major? maybe i would enjoy school more if i had just tried to get throught it? it was what i wanted for so long, am i a failure for giving up?

the classes were huge but the teachers paid less attention so i guess it was easier

culture is never truly gone. maybe you just didn't make an effort to keep up with it.

you could have done more

transferring out is basically like giving up.

and suddenly i feel myself rationalizing every single thing that i had once expressed as a reason to move away. sometimes looking back on this feels like the most dramatic and important thing in the world- however sometimes it feels the complete opposite. time changes feelings and it also changes perception. i know my decision was right, but that doesn't change the fact that i will always ask myself, "what if i had stayed? what if?"

and that truly pains me in ways i can only attempt to explain.

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chris-mga2022mi5019 · 1 year ago

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⚫️Toxic to plants | cautious hat | used to predict negative outcomes

Some fungi immediately kill the plant cells to feed on their nutrients, whereas other types of fungi take up nutrients from living cells through a specialized structure produced from the hyphae.

Fungal phytotoxic secondary metabolites are poisonous substances to plants produced by fungi through naturally occurring biochemical reactions. These metabolites exhibit a high level of diversity in their properties, such as structures, phytotoxic activities, and modes of toxicity.

However, there are also fungi that can attack plants, causing plant diseases. Disease-causing organisms, including fungi, are called pathogensAn agent (e.g., virus, bacteria, or fungi) that can cause a disease to a living organism.. Pathogens of plants use their plant hosts for food, or for a place to reproduce themselves, causing damage to the plant. Fungal pathogens are extremely dangerous and may cause the loss of crop harvests or, in the most serious cases, the death of the plants. Fungi can also negatively affect the quality of crops, causing an accumulation of toxins within the plants. The toxins produced by some fungi are dangerous for humans and animals.

Not all fungi produce mushrooms and the fungi kingdom includes yeasts, molds, mildews, rusts and smuts.

But, researchers estimate that over 140,000 species of wild mushrooms thrive worldwide, and around 3,000 of these are edible.

One of the ways scientists classify these mushrooms is based on how they get their nutrition and what they eat. You can also use this information for mushroom identification.

Mushrooms classified this way fall into four groups:

Saprotrophs

Saprotrophic mushrooms and toadstools thrive on decaying organic matter like wood, plants and even sometimes dead animals.

They’re decomposers who play a crucial role in the ecosystem by breaking down dead organic matter. They recycle the organic matter into compost that benefits the soil, trees and plants.

Many of the most popular culinary and medicinal mushrooms and are saprotrophs, including:

Morels – Morel mushrooms are delicious with a unique meaty texture and sought after by chefs.

Reishi – Reishi mushrooms are one of the most potent medicinal mushrooms ever discovered.

Shiitake – Shiitake mushrooms, known for their great taste and medicinal properties, are a staple ingredient in many types of Asian cuisine.

Cremini – Cremini mushrooms are a species of Agaricus bisporus and fit between a button mushroom and portobello mushroom.

Oyster – Oyster mushrooms are one of the most cultivated and consumed mushrooms worldwide and one of our favorite mushrooms.

Maitake – People value Maitake mushrooms for both their medicinal effects and their culinary uses.

Turkey tail – People have used Turkey tail mushrooms for centuries in medicinal tea to treat numerous conditions.

Giant puffball – Puffball mushrooms are unlike other mushrooms as they don’t have gills and stems. Besides tasting great, they also have medicinal benefits.

Button – Button mushrooms are very versatile and the most widely consumed mushrooms worldwide.

Chestnut – Chestnut mushrooms are both saprotrophs and parasites, but grow better on decaying wood than living trees.

Mycorrhizae

Parasites

Endophytes

More on this can be found in the above article.

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notaschoolblog · 2 years ago

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Gaming Communities (Week 9)

For what’s generally seen as a solo, isolating hobby, video games have pretty much always involved community, spectatorship (Taylor 2018, p. 1) and interpersonal involvement. Games don’t exist solely on the platforms they run on though: with the internet, content like live-streaming on websites like Twitch, YouTube, or Facebook have created online communities centred around specific games or gaming in general. Furthermore, these communities aren’t only focused on the entertainment side of gaming; the existence of wikis, forums, subreddits and discord servers allows for largely community-sourced knowledge about games to be shared. Gaming culture is that it is very masculine dominated: the assumed ‘gamer’ is young, white or East Asian, and middle-class. Despite the ‘nerdier’ (and thus ‘unmasculine’) connotations of unathletic, indoor activities like gaming, patriarchy is upheld via a ‘geek masculinity’ which ensures that ‘women are actively subordinated in, and excluded from, presumed male spaces through acts of vitriolic misogyny’ (Maloney, Roberts & Graham 2019, p. 28). An extreme example of this was the harassment campaign #GamerGate, which sought to ‘fight back’ against rising political correctness in video games by doxxing and threatening prominent women in the gaming industry. This campaign is emblematic of the ‘seemingly leaderless…toxic technoculture’ (Massanari 2017, p. 333) that has perpetuated and encouraged misogyny in the gaming sphere.

The domination of hegemonic masculinity in gaming is perhaps most obvious when looking at the state of esports. Only 35% of esports players are women (Interpret cited in Rogstad 2022, p. 196) and only 5% of those are professional players who compete at the ‘top level’ (Hilbert cited in Rogstad 2022, p. 196). This disparity is largely attributed as a result of hegemonic masculinity, not the ‘alleged physiological superiority of men over women…[as it] is not as central to the virtual nature of eSports as it is in other [traditional] sports’ (Rogstad 2022, p. 209). Instead, ‘eSports appear to possess a hyper-masculine culture like traditional sports, including the objectification and exclusion of women’ (Rogstad 2022, p. 209), making it especially difficult for women to establish themselves as professionals in the field, let alone get their male counterparts to see them as ‘equals’. Moreover, this hegemony isn’t limited to who has power within the industry, it is also important to note that sports are a ‘media event’ for a ‘global audience’ (Taylor 2019, p.2), who would have certain presumptive expectations for who they will be watching play. Made in Melbourne, a globally acclaimed indie game called ‘Untitled Goose Game’ was developed by House House using Unity and was released in 2020. Despite being a short and simple game, it features a diverse cast of characters. The Melbourne indie game scene as a whole tends to push to be more ‘ethically considerate and inclusive’ (Keogh 2021, p. 219) than mainstream studios, who instead may focus their attention on their games as financially successful products. While many have been taking steps to appear more inclusive in the past few years, the depth and genuinity of this can be questionable.

The lack of diversity shows that adherence to social hegemonies goes way up the line, it is cyclical in that over time gaming culture has established a broad ideal of compliance to the status quo which it feeds its audience, and in turn, the audience expects it remains that way and gets aggressive when it even slightly deviates.

>REFERENCES ARE UNDER THE CUT<

Chia, A, Keogh, B, Leorke, D, & Nicoll, B 2020, ‘Platformisation in game development’, Internet policy review, vol. 9, no. 4. DOI: 10.14763/2020.4.1515. Keogh, B 2021, 'The Melbourne indie game scenes: value regimes in localized game development', in P Ruffino (ed), Independent videogames: cultures, networks, techniques and politics, Routledge, pp. 209-222. League of Legends 2009 [Video Game], Riot Games. Macgregor, J 2022, Overwatch creators explain they didn't use King's 'creepy' diversity charts, PC Gamer, viewed 30 April 2023, https://www.pcgamer.com/overwatch-creators-explain-they-didnt-use-kings-creepy-diversity-charts/. Maloney, M, Roberts, S & Graham, T 2019, Gender, masculinity and video gaming: analysing Reddit’s r/gaming community, 1st edn, Springer International Publishing, Cham. Massanari, A 2017, ‘Gamergate and The Fappening: How Reddit’s algorithm, governance, and culture support toxic technocultures’, New media & society, vol. 19, no. 3, SAGE Publications, London, England, pp. 329–346. Rogstad, ET 2022, ‘Gender in eSports research: a literature review’, European journal for sport and society, vol. 19, no. 3, pp. 195-213, DOI: 10.1080/16138171.2021.1930941 Stardew Valley Wiki 2023, Stardew Valley Wiki, viewed 30 April 2023, https://stardewvalleywiki.com/Stardew_Valley_Wiki. Steam 2023, Untitled Goose Game on Steam, Steam, viewed 30 April 2023, https://store.steampowered.com/app/837470/Untitled_Goose_Game/. Taylor, TL 2018, ‘Broadcasting ourselves’, in Watch me play: Twitch and the rise of game live streaming, Princeton University Press, pp.1-23 Wu, B 2014, GamerGate response, 14 October, viewed 30 April 2023, https://twitter.com/BriannaWu/status/522038018392477696?s=20.

#gaming #esports #mda20009 #essay #analysis

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