#did i do all this just to draw big corpus?

[kaiserouo]

(prev | next | first)

ability strength +0%

strength +???%

[impostoradult]

Okay, 2 big responses to this.

A) I don't agree with your characterization of how ChatGPT (and other large language models) work. I don't think it is automated plagiarism. Yes, taking someone else's fic, and just swapping out some synonyms is definitely automated plagiarism. But that ISN'T analogous to what ChatGPT does, in my opinion. Automated prediction isn't "stealing" it is...prediction based on previous data. And yes it needs the previous data to make a prediction, and therefore to make a story. But SO DO HUMAN BEINGS.

A human being could never tell what we would consider a coherent story without having stories already in their brain to build on and rework in various ways. We also need a corpus of data before WE can be creative.

When human beings create something, often the creative choices we make are amalgamations of things we've seen in other stories. Often we're 'predicting' what should come next based on all the narratives WE'VE consumed over the course of our lives. And frankly, if anything, debatably we're more guilty of plagiarism in that process than the AIs because we could never consume as much narrative data (or other data) as an AI. So the AIs are drawing far less on any one particular story or piece of content than a human is when they write.

The predictive nature of ChatGPT doesn't make the content STOLEN anymore than I am stealing when I read a bunch of similar stories and then write a story that sounds similar based on my observations of the patterns of the stories. I don't see how those processes are *fundamentally* different. I don't.

B) And here's where my argument tends to hit a wall with people, but, I am not someone who believes there is (necessarily) some key difference as to what MY organic matter brain is doing when it writes creatively and what the AI is doing through algorithms.

We actually have NO IDEA how our brains generate creative thoughts.

We can't reverse engineer that process. And frankly, for all we REALLY know, our brains are just remixing in ways that are fundamentally no different from the AI.

I have had experiences before where I've written things and I wasn't *consciously* riffing of something. But I realized later that I was. I've written romance fics not intending to crib anything directly. And then reread one of my favorite romance novels, and only then realized I'd clearly lifted things from it without intending to.

There's actually also a famous case of music 'plagiarism' that illustrates this really well. Sam Smith actually had to pay royalties to Tom Petty after Sam Smith unintentionally wrote a song ("Stay With Me") that instrumentally bares a very strong resemblance to Tom Petty's "Won't Back Down." (Stay with Me's instrumentals are basically Won't Back Down in minor key) And Sam Smith didn't do it on purpose. It was unintentional. But Won't Back Down was clearly a major creative force in writing Stay With Me, even though nobody did it consciously or on purpose.

Our creative works, even the ones we THINK are original enough to be new works, can be reproductions of pre-existing work without our conscious knowledge. WE don't even necessarily know when we are drawing on something creatively, even though we might be.

We don't know why or how exactly our brain generates the creative ideas it does. And it is quite possible WE never come up with anything original either - that it's all just 'remixes' of ideas we've encountered other places (other stories we've read, real experiences we've had, history we've learned, etc.)

Just on a metaphysical level, I am not sure what our brains do is *fundamentally* different from what the AIs do. Since no one can demonstrate to me exactly how their creative process works (and I can't even prove my OWN creative process is not just amalgamations of other things I've read/seen/encountered/etc.), I'm not just going to be anthropocentric and ASSUME brains have a magical special process that is any different from just 'prediction' based on an existing corpus of data in my brain.

It is quite possible our brains work EXACTLY the way these AIs work. And it's just happening via organic matter as opposed to machine algorithms. We don't really know.

And i refuse to assume human beings are special JUST BECAUSE.

That's not a good argument just because it flatters our egos to think we're special. We very well might not be.

Okay can someone actually give me an answer to this question....

Why, if 10,000 other fans 'steal' your idea for a coffee shop AU and use it in their almost identical coffee shop AU, that's totally okay and just how fanculture works.

But if the AI spits out a coffee shop romance that reads like a traditional coffee shop AU, that's crossing a line?

Why, if a bunch of other fans steal your idea, is that just the process of human creativity at work, but if a machine generates something similar, that's a bridge too far?

I literally don't get how the one is different from the other (and frankly if either was the outrage, I'd think it be the people who are consciously deciding to rip you off rather than the machine that is just reproducing large scale linguistic patterns and not singling your work out because it literally CANNOT single out pieces of work to rip off individually because that's not how AIs work)

[neverdoingmuch]

Wait cql lawyer/law school AU

i got you my pal dont worry!!

law school, im gonna be honest and say i know like nothing about law or law school so pls ignore any inconsistencies or inaccuracies

lwj goes to law school and he is definitely the top student in his class. they’ve been there for like a month and everyone already knows he’s gonna be the best

his one and only competition is this dude called wei wuxian but lwj isn’t particularly worried about him

so far they’re still in the stage of the course where they do the fun things to sucker people into doing the class for the semester so there’s been some practise debates and arguments and stuff in their tutorial classes

wei wuxian has that Charisma and like yeah all of his arguments are perfect but also he has an amazing smile and people are like yes i can trust him 

(he’s definitely the sort to be like hm, the easy way to argue this case would be to quote some laws and use precedence to justify this but that’s boring)

lwj is also good at that sort of stuff because his arguments are perfect and everything is so perfectly researched that there should be no ground at all for someone to lodge a counterargument

(wei wuxian manages somehow and it makes lwj so mad)

but that’s whatever lwj thinks,, a lot of people join law thinking it’s gonna be like the tv shows and books and then get completely blindsided when it comes to the rote learning part or like the actual laws 

and for all of wwx’s confidence, lwj hasn’t actually seen wwx so much as touch the textbook/s and he always studies in the law library so he knows that wwx has probably never even been there bc he hasn’t seen him even once (why’s he looking? bc he needs to see which books wwx uses to study,, bc there has to be something going on there,, obviously)

then they do their first like proper written assignment and lwj and wwx tie for the highest scores and now lwj has a Rival and he refuses to lose to someone who thinks that putting a ‘-us’ sound at the end of a word makes it latin (did wwx say habeas corpus and then point at a soft drink and go  sprite-us can-us,,, maybe,,,,)

anyway! lwj and wwx are kinda rivals for the top spot and it’s one of those situations where one test lwj wins by a point but then the next test wwx gets full marks and they just keep exchanging the top spot in class

and this whole time wwx is like The Worst to have in class. he’s always interrupting to ask questions or just straight up not listening and spends the class doodling pictures of rabbits (they’re cute but wwx is terrible and he’s not allowed to make cute drawings)

so after a few months the most horrible thing happens.... they get put together in a project and lwj is like ugh. internally of course but his face is also saying ugh

the first time wwx and lwj get together to work on the project, lwj is prepared with a proper list of tasks to do all nicely split up between the two of them and a schedule for when they should get certain parts done by. 

needless to say, lwj does not expect wwx to be ready, but wwx is definitely on top of things

he rocks up and is like yeah let’s do this, this and this and have them done by this time - basically proposing to do everything that lwj has already written down

and lwj is pleasantly surprised and is like hm maybe i misjudged wwx and decides to like re-evaluate his opinion on him

in doing so he realises that when he’d never seen wwx studying, it wasn’t an exaggeration at all. he’s never seen wwx so much as touch a textbook or spend more than a minute on a laptop doing something that wasn’t minesweeper or solitaire

but wwx is also making all of their deadlines and even adds extra information and resources to their document that could be useful elsewhere and sometimes he shows up to their study sessions and he looks absolutely exhausted

eventually lwj manages to get the truth out and wwx is just like yeah it’s easier to get worse grades than a genius but if you both study and you still get lower grades, it’s not easy,, for jc or for me

so wwx usually studies at night when his brother is asleep and lwj is like that’s bad, you can’t keep that up and just when wwx is about to go off at him lwj is like you can come study at my place

and thus begins the wonderful time where everything is alright and lwj falls in love with wwx

they work really well together and wwx is strangely considerate and nice? when he finds out lwj likes rabbits, he goes out and buys bunny post-it notes for lwj and starts to always bring him a doodle of bunnies every time he comes over. he always gets his work done on time, early even, and his work is always so brilliant and every time wwx smiles at him, lwj feels warm inside etc etc

for a long while lwj is like yes (: this is friendship (: bc he’s never had a crush before but then on the day they submit their project wwx is like hey,, the two of us make a great team,, we should always work together,, now and next year and even when we graduate,, i want to help the innocent people who need our help and i think i’d like it a lot if you joined me and lwj has his oh moment

they get a perfect score on the project of course and even after it finishes, wwx keeps coming over to lwj’s place to study or just hang out and lwj is just falling more and more for wwx each day

they’re best friends now and everyone gets used to seeing them work together on projects and then turn around to try and decimate each other when they’re working one on one and lwj thinks that he might just be the happiest he’s ever been

but then one day wwx doesn’t show up to class. it shouldn’t be strange but wwx has never missed class even once and he ends up hearing from lxc who heard from jgy that wwx was caught sabotaging some other student’s work (the other student was jzxun, who had a fondness for playing devil’s advocate and other than wwx once telling him that his argument was shit, wwx never spoke to him or seemed to know who he was but lwj is a bit too angry to remember that)

he manages to find wwx outside of his dorms as he’s moving out and he’s just like why did you do that? and wwx is like oh y’know,, bc he’s not really sure what’s happening himself,, one second he was at the top of his class and the next he was being brought before a board and being told that he was being expelled but he’s not going to tell lwj that bc lwj would definitely try and stand up for him and then they’d both get expelled

but lwj is furious and just spits out well if our dreams meant so little to you then maybe it’s a good thing you failed now,, bc his mother was a lawyer who took all these little jobs that helped people who actually needed the help and lwj was looking forward to doing that with wwx and he doesn’t even seem to care that now they can’t do that 

wwx flinches and then smiles at him and just cheerily says, that’s me and leaves. he doesn’t look back and lwj doesn’t chase after him.

lwj doesn’t see him again for years (you can do 13 or 5 or however long you feel like)

lwj is a fully licensed lawyer and he’s working for the family company and he spends half of his time working on cases and uses the rest of his time to do like outreach programs where he goes and visits schools and runs sessions on what it’s like to be a lawyer, how to apply, and to provide assistance to any students who decide to study law at uni

and then at one of these programs he meets this kid, wen yuan, who is ridiculously bright and enthusiastic and has a smile that seems oddly familiar

at the end of the second session he comes up to lwj and is like mr. lan, is your name lan wangji? and lwj just says yes, expecting the kid to be a fan of one of his cases or something but then wen yuan is like oh wow! i thought i recognised you from my dad’s photo!

and lwj isn’t expecting much but he asks what the photo looks like and wen yuan pulls out this photo from his pocket and lwj immediately recognises it,, it’s the only photo he has of him and wwx

your father is wei ying? lwj asks him and wen yuan is like yes, hesitates, and then asks, would you like to see him?

and that’s how lwj finds himself following wen yuan to some dinky little office that has a plaque outside that reads wen and wei

(wen ning is the nicest and sweetest person ever and lots of people underestimate him but then he’s an absolute monster on court. he gets up and completely decimates the opponent and then at the end is like (: it was so nice to meet you!! i am baby!! and all that,, you know our boy)

anyway they walk in and wwx turns to greet wen yuan but then he sees lwj and is like woah! you! and he’s not sure whether to hide or go and hug lwj so he just gives him a fist bump,, like a bro,, and immediately wants to shrivel up and die

anyway they get the reunion stuff out of the way, swelling music, tender wrist holding, lots of staring, lwj silently declaring his wholehearted love for wwx and refusing to believe rumours about him again even though he doesn’t actually know what happened, you know how it goes

from wwx’s side of things,, after he got kicked out he went to some small uni. good in its own right but not known for their law program and ended up specialising in family law

the first case he ever won was for the wens to have the right to keep custody of a-yuan and the first case wen ning ever won was to let wwx adopt a-yuan bc i’m soft like that

so wwx has just been kinda vibing,, being a single dad, living with the wens and helping to make that difference he always promised he would

now this isn’t gonna be some au where lwj goes oh my! i must give up my high salary job and work with wwx! bc lwj has been doing good stuff at his current job and for all of his family’s stuffiness, they run a fair and just company 

but! he does end up helping wwx when wwx gets a letter with a bunch of information about the jins and how they’re actually super corrupt and evil (big surprise,,) and how wwx was maybe definitely framed bc he was doing some casual work on the side and stumbled across some bad shit on the jins back in uni

lwj ends up being the one to take the case officially but wwx is definitely the guy leading it and so lwj ends up spending most of his time at the wen-wei office

lwj definitely bonds with wen yuan, who also wants to go into law, and writes him recommendation letters and helps him edit his applications and stuff

(and one day wen yuan is like leaving you was the hardest thing dad ever did and i dont think you appreciated how much he cared about you. he really did think that he annoyed you ‘til the end and lwj is like no! he didn’t! and wen yuan is like yeah i know but you gotta tell him and lwj really does mean to but the time is never right or something like that but also wen yuan is all but calling lwj dad at this point)

anyway they end up going to court, side by side, working as a team just as they promised to do and just as they finish their final day on the case, ended with the jury ruling jgy guilty and wwx’s reputation all but saved, wwx turns around and flings himself at lwj

is he crying? is he laughing? a bit of both tbh but wwx ends up confessing right then and there, still on record and everything (is that how that works??? idk! let’s say it does)

and what can lwj do but make out with him?

did a news crew come in to film the results of this massive court case just to end up with five minutes of wangxian kissing?? maybe! but when it played on tv it meant wwx and lwj didnt have to actually tell anyone they got together

(and does lwj eventually pop the question using wwx’s bad latinification? yes and wwx is too busy laughing to accept at first but he does and they end up being the worst possible tutors for wen yuan as he goes through law school bc they keep being all gross and lovey-dovey and acting like law school is the most romantic place in the world)

[derelicthorror]

agree to disagree, i'm still taking your credits

[wherein a red veil member signs on with a tenno who isn't what you call close and cuddly with the red veil]

Yanovan signs on to the Tenno's crew for want of adventure, and for lack of credits. He also agrees to pack his things and board her Railjack because he recognizes this particular Tenno as a nuisance in the Veil's eyes. This one keeps company with Arbiters and Cephalons. This one is viewed with distrust and waiting tension.

She is also, according to what Fortuna's Ticker has told him, soft and jovial and unsuspecting on a personal level. He sharpens his blades lazily and watches her Warframe stride toward him - and dissipate, leaving behind the real Tenno, the will behind the blade.

She's a child.

Yanovan knows Tenno are children. And granted, this one isn't quite an infant - there are definitely teeth under there, maybe, and all the bones seem to be in order, and she seems to be only a year or two shy of just breaking into adulthood. But that is definitely not a hardened warrior. This is a kid.

He thinks it, but he's unsure why it matters. Tenno are walking destruction, a glorious rain of death upon whichever land they fall.

"I'm Shinoda," she says, extending her hand. She's tall for a baby, probably. Comes right up to his neck, and he's a fairly tall guy. Perfect height if she wants to try shooting forward and ripping his throat out with her teeth, but from the last few seconds, Yanovan is already certain that she won't. She's smiling, for Rell's sake. He can tell even with the scarf obscuring most of her face. He smiles sometimes, too, but his are a good deal more threatening than what's being leveled at him.

He grips her forearm; she clasps his. There is muscle there, but it's not something acquired gradually over years. Immediately afterwards, she follows up with one of those Tenno bows. He's not big on token greeting gestures, himself, but he does find it funny how she immediately began with the one that he usually sees among Veil and Meridian. If anything, it's weirdly nice that she's obviously brushed up on the little tics belonging to each syndicate she deals with. He'd probably have busted out laughing in her face if she tried to do some dainty Corpus handshake.

"Yo," he says, instead.

"It's good to meet you. Yanovan, right?" She smiles. "You wouldn't believe the extra creds I had to shell out to get you on board. Red Veil tax, see. But Ticker showed me your file and I wanted you with me."

"Oooh," says Yanovan, scoffing a mocking laugh. "I have a file. I have notable achievements."

It draws a laugh from her. "Right? She said there was paperwork, but Void. Notable achievements seems about right to me, though - like, you're an ace pilot. But you're also an engineer?" Shinoda shakes her head. "Honestly, pick a talent."

"I did. All of them." Never mind that his combat prowess could be described as 'average.' He crosses his arms and studies her, appraising. "So I know you know that you're on the Veil's list, Tenno. Desperate for someone to pull their weight on board?"

"Maybe so." Shinoda rests a fist on her hip and appraises him right back. It's a friendlier gaze than his, though. Nothing about her is particularly sharp - she's like a hammer, clear in its purpose and generally without harmful intentions. He feels like he's being sized up by a baby kubrow. Then she hums, considering, and lets out a breath.

"To be honest, I liked your energy. I'm calling it here - from what I've gathered, you're whip-smart and ruthless, and I could use that balance. For a couple reasons, too.

"Look, everyone on my crew right now has some kind of moral or another. Something holds them back. I'm not talking about killing innocents or ransacking towns. I mean that when it comes down to it, when a hard decision needs to be made, the rest of us are going to hesitate for at least a split second. And that split second can cost us a lot, maybe everything."

Something troubled rests in her eyes. They're strange in that eldritch way - golden and sun-orange and yellow and red, and constantly, constantly shifting. He can't see her pupils, sometimes. Weird.

She continues. "And on top of that, I have a lineup of people like me, who are going to brute force their way through a situation. Sometimes - a lot of the time - a battering ram works. But I'm not stupid, you dig? I like that I’m a hammer, but --"

"But you need a scalpel." Yanovan nods. And, because it has to be said: "You talk so much."

"Yeah! Yeah, you're going to have to get used to it, if you're sure about joining. I got your credits."

The thrill of hope under her tone is funny. He shakes his head - it's not fondness, he's not fond of her just yet, and maybe he won't ever be, but it's acknowledgement. She's a kid.

"I like credits. Come on. Ain't going to get used to much if we're standing here until the heat death of the universe."

Shinoda's eyes positively glow. She moves to follow him out of the little room he'd been staying in - good riddance, he thinks.

"Remember, if you want to walk at any time," Shinoda adds, "then walk. Keep the credits for your time, though - that's only fair. Cy tells me -"

Yanovan, listening idly to the stream of chatter, stops her before she gets too excited.

"Hey. One thing before you really get going. Don't think that you get any special treatment just because you're small. You're on the Veil's watchlist." He picks up his pack from where it sits against the wall. "I'm a nice guy. I can work and play with you just fine. But also I can and will stick a knife in your intestines if spilling your blood is to the benefit of the system."

When he glances over to watch her reaction, he can see a distinct lack of surprise. She still wears an easy smile that crinkles her eyes. But there's also a grimness there, an understanding.

"I hear you." She huffs. Laughter? "We have common enemies in this system, and I can understand the goal of wanting this place cleared of all the corruption. But I'm not the Veil's biggest fan myself. So you watch your back, too, okay?"

It has to be the most childish reduction of a proposed alliance that Yanovan has ever heard. Thinking on it, though, he wonders if she didn't just soften it deliberately. There's no malice to her words; it's a statement of fact, of coexistence.

She'll go down with dignity if (when) he does see fit to purge her. It's something that he can respect - as a captain, maybe she won't be so bad.

So, "whatever," Yanovan says. "I'm hungry for something that isn't Fortuna fare. You're paying, Tenno."

The smiling eyes are back. "Cool. Let's go."

[keepingupwithlinmanuel]

Lin on the season 2 finale of His Dark Materials

[These interviews will have major spoilers for the season 2 finale. I have not quoted any of the spoilery answers - please click through to read the rest.]

You shared videos of yourself and Andrew pretending to be Sam Neill from “Jurassic Park” and then a photo of the two of you napping in a caravan. You two seem to have formed quite the rapport.

We had a wonderful time working together. We’re both theater kids and the fun thing about those sequences was we were way up in the Welsh countryside. Normally, when you’re filming in a studio, you have a base camp, you each go to your separate trailers and you have your own little space. There was no luxury of that when we were filming those final scenes, we are in a rented Winnebago belonging to a local person up there because it’s just too treacherous a journey all the way back to base camp. It was this pink, very flowery Winnebago and we’re like all right, let’s dry off from the mud and have a nap. I also think being that far in on location, you also kind of shut out the outside world, and you really only focus on the work and that’s been one of the great gifts of playing this role and being in Philip Pullman’s world. As my life has gotten more hectic, working on the show is like a holiday for me. I just get to go fly a hot air balloon and learn how to fire a gun and do stunts. It was just the most fun thing to get to live inside this world I loved so much.

I know Philip Pullman’s books are really close to your heart. What has this role of Lee meant to you and being able to put your own spin on the character?

When Lee first appears in the books, it’s the first really big hint that Philip Pullman’s universe is bigger than anything than we’ve been picturing. A Texan aeronaut is not on anyone’s bingo card as they were reading that story, and suddenly you’re hinting at a much wider world than Oxford and the trip north that we’ve been accustomed to. It’s been a larger-than-life character and the DNA that he shares with our main character, Lyra, who’s the hero of the entire series, is this notion of doing the right thing. Jack Thorne talks about greatness versus goodness being a theme in this. There are many people trying to do “great things” in this story which required terrible and immoral acts, whereas Lyra is always motivated by doing the good thing, the right thing. It’s not the same thing as doing “great things” and I think Lee shares that.

Are there any big moments from filming this show that will stick with you?

The week in Alamo Gulch was an absolute highlight, and then the other one that comes to mind is the scene with Mrs. Coulter [season 2, episode 3] which is not in the books but I'm incredibly grateful for because we learn a lot about Mrs. Coulter, we learn a lot about Lee. It's a really unexpected twist of a scene and was just enormous fun to play from beginning to end, every layer of it. And I'm really grateful that fans of the books embraced that scene because it's a detour, but I think it's a detour that honors the characters in the book.

How does it affect your work to play a character who’s in so many people’s heads already? Can you think about that at all? Or do you just have to shove it out?

Honestly you have to shove it out, because there’s already been an iconic Lee Scoresby [in the movie The Golden Compass], you know what I mean? Sam Elliott’s who I pictured.

Fair.

So when the producers and Jack Thorne came to me and said, “We thought of you for Lee,” I went, “OK, this is just a different direction. They’re drawing more upon the young Lee of Once Upon a Time in the North.” And also, I’m a hardcore fan of the books. Like, one of the songs in In the Heights, “When the Sun Goes Down,” is based on a Will and Lyra moment in that third book. At the risk of spoilers. And so I’ve also been really pleased to see that the line that the writers have taken with the show is kind of … faithful-plus. Like, it’s faithful to the things that I think matter to me as a fan, but then there’s these detours. Like Lee getting to face off against Mrs. Coulter. That doesn’t ever happen in the books, but it’s enormously satisfying.

What did that scene with Mrs. Coulter teach you about Lee?

It links Lee and Lyra in a very specific way. And when Lee sees the damaged—I mean, incredibly powerful and brilliant, but damaged—parents Lyra’s coming from, he senses a kinship with her that is chemical. But also that childhood that he faced is also something he and Mrs. Coulter share. And, the fact that he’s able to find a common ground with her is really unexpected.  She’s kind of the big bad in the first book, but she grows into something so much more complicated because she really loves her daughter and would do anything for her.

And getting to play with Ruth Wilson was like a dream that I didn’t think would happen. It was sort of like, “Wow, I have this great cast and I … see some of them.” I never see James McAvoy, but I got to work with Ruth Wilson.

Lee’s character is cut from a very old-fashioned storytelling cloth. He’s a cowboy hero and a marksman and a sly fox. When you were playing him, how did you approach making him particular to you?

I thought a lot about my grandfather. My grandfather is of that generation who had a dime-store Western novel in his pocket at all times. He had hundreds of them. Spanish language Westerns by a guy named Estefanía, it was always Estefanía on the cover. One of the last memories I had with him is us watching the first season of Deadwood together. He just was crazy about Westerns. So I thought about the heroes that my grandfather loved so much from that genre. And then the other thing was, like, my accent was very much my Mexican cousins who live in Corpus Christi. I’m not trying to do the typical thing.

That’s so interesting, because I feel like Latino representation in the classic Westerns is not … uh … not great, overall.

Not great, and that all used to be Mexico, guys.

[icarus-suraki]

weird asks: 4, 9, 15, 21, 40, 49, 61

Sorry for the late reply. My depression decided to sneak up behind me and steal my corpus callosum.

4. how did your elementary school teachers describe you?

I don't actually know, so I'm making this up based on what I recall... Bright but somewhat inattentive. Can't write a lowercase R in cursive to save her life (I got bad grades in handwriting all through 2nd grade). Sometimes anxious. Not a troublemaker at all; if she is disruptive, it's by accident more than by intent. Very creative and imaginative.

9. favorite smell in the summer?

There's this smell I'll come across in the evenings sometimes, especially when I'm driving home from work on these little country roads around here. I always thought it was clover, but I think it's maybe elderflower? It's sweet and floral, but not a "bright" sweetness; it's more of a dark floral, if that makes sense. Kind of low and evening-colored (that makes sense, right?). But it's fantastic to just find myself in a cloud of it on a humid evening. I will literally drive with my car windows open some nights just to smell it, it's that good.

15. favorite book you read as a school assignment?

This is tricky because the things that I liked the most weren't books, per se. I absolutely loved Hamlet and King Lear (King Lear is always associated with the Led Zeppelin "Stairway to Heaven" poster--long story). And I absolutely loved T. S. Eliot's poems. Like, damn, this is so much better than the rhyme-rhyme-rhyme shit I'd seen before. Like, sir. Damn. That was all high school, though. College? Hmm... See, I was an English major so I read a lot (or claimed to have read a lot and just BS'd my way through the tests). Reading As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner was a Moment, in part because I realized that my mom had summarized the story for me when I was a kid. Same thing with Spencer's The Faerie Queene--I think I surprised my professor with that one. Once I hit post, I'll probably think of a bunch of others.

21. obsession from childhood?

Oof. That depends on what age we're talking about here. Because Sesame Street was a big one when I was very small, then Muppet Babies when I got a little older. Any Muppet thing mesmerized me, according to my mom (I still love them). I loved playing dress-up (let's be honest: I still do, only I call it cosplay now) and dancing and playing pretend (and I still do). I drew constantly--especially bleeding hearts flowers, but also anthropomorphic animals in elaborate outfits and these creatures I called alligator birds. My Little Pony toys were everywhere in my house growing up--the original MLP, the good MLP. That was definitely still going strong in elementary school. I was really into A Wrinkle in Time and most of the other Madeline L'Engle books in about 4th grade onward. 6th grade I was hung up on blue-and-gold celestial designs (it was the 1990s) and everything purple. I got ahold of a really basic AM/FM cassette Walkman about this time and I discovered that there was actually Good Music in the world, not just children's music and I got so obsessed with just what you could find on the radio. I used up so many batteries and just wore out headphones and it was wonderful. I know somewhere in this span I started reading the Elfquest comics (n.b.: I was probably too young but I only realize that now) and got really into wolves and the particular version of elves that Wendy and Richard Pini created (I would shank someone for a chance to meet them) and did a lot of drawing of Wendy Pini's style of elves. I think I discovered anime by way of Sailor Moon when I was about 12 or 13 (and that's still an obsession) and started drawing anime-style characters A Lot. Somewhere in middle school, some friends and I started doing text-based RP via email, which sounds bizarre but we sure did it and it was very Mary Sueful but we had fun. I started writing a lot in and around then--maybe 7th, 8th grade? Mostly fantasy and, of course, lots of Mary Sues (but I really think that the Sue Stage is an important developmental stage, truly). I got sent a quiz by a friend in about 7th or 8th grade that was supposed to determine if you were a "starseed" and that got me into UFOs and Atlantis and ESP and some New Age-y stuff, which was actually a lot of fun (bless my mom for tolerating that). And since I was getting bullied a bit at this point in my life, maybe it was good that I had this "I'm special, I'm actually from another planet and I am important there" thing to hang on to. I know I was super-obsessed with the computer games Myst and Riven about this time--to the point of writing self-insert fanfiction. The hyper-religiosity (mainstream religion, mostly variations of Protestant Christianity) period among myself and my friends was no fun, but there we were, and I guess that counts as an obsession. There are theories that this developmental period is some of the background to the Salem Witch Trials, but I digress. I guess that gets me up to about high school. So, how's that?

40. weirdest thing to ever happen at your school?

I mean, I guess there were always the bomb threats that made us all evacuate the school and hang around outside for a while. I didn't witness it, but I heard that once the cops brought drug dogs through the school and this one kid jumped up, grabbed his backpack, and ran out of the school and into the woods nearby because he had a bong in his backpack. There were the kids who'd stage a fight in the courtyard of the school so everyone would come running over and then their friends would throw water balloons on the crowd. There was this one girl who told people she was from another planet, and that was weird (me. that was me.). I dunno, I don't know of anything really weird happening at my school, in any grade. It was pretty quiet.

49. what saying or quote do you live by?

"If you work for a living, why do you kill yourself working?" --Tuco, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

61. favorite line you heard from a book/movie/tv show/etc.?

That's a tough one... It might be "the heaventree of stars hung with humid, nightblue fruit" which comes from the "Ithaca" chapter of Ulysses.

[sciencespies]

What Neuroscientists Are Discovering About Stuttering

https://sciencespies.com/nature/what-neuroscientists-are-discovering-about-stuttering/

What Neuroscientists Are Discovering About Stuttering

Gerald Maguire has stuttered since childhood, but you might not guess it from talking to him. For the past 25 years, Maguire — a psychiatrist at the University of California, Riverside — has been treating his disorder with antipsychotic medications not officially approved for the condition. Only with careful attention might you discern his occasional stumble on multisyllabic words like “statistically” and “pharmaceutical.”

Maguire has plenty of company: More than 70 million people worldwide, including about 3 million Americans, stutter — that is, they have difficulty with the starting and timing of speech, resulting in halting and repetition. That number includes approximately 5 percent of children, many of whom outgrow the condition, and 1 percent of adults. Their numbers include presidential candidate Joe Biden, deep-voiced actor James Earl Jones and actress Emily Blunt. Though those people and many others, including Maguire, have achieved career success, stuttering can contribute to social anxiety and draw ridicule or discrimination by others.

Maguire has been treating people who stutter, and researching potential treatments, for decades. He receives daily emails from people who want to try medications, join his trials, or even donate their brains to his university when they die. He’s now embarking on a clinical trial of a new medication, called ecopipam, that streamlined speech and improved quality of life in a small pilot study in 2019.

Many famous people have a stutter or did so as a child, including (left to right) presidential candidate Joe Biden, actor James Earl Jones and actor Emily Blunt.

(Left to Right: Michael Stokes; U.S. Embassy photo by S.J. Mayhew; Gage Skidmore)

Others, meanwhile, are delving into the root causes of stuttering, which also may point to novel treatments. In past decades, therapists mistakenly attributed stuttering to defects of the tongue and voice box, to anxiety, trauma or even poor parenting — and some still do. Yet others have long suspected that neurological problems might underlie stuttering, says J. Scott Yaruss, a speech-language pathologist at Michigan State University in East Lansing. The first data to back up that hunch came in 1991, Yaruss says, when researchers reported altered blood flow in the brains of people who stuttered. Over the past two decades, continuing research has made it more apparent that stuttering is all in the brain.

“We are in the middle of an absolute explosion of knowledge being developed about stuttering,” Yaruss says.

There’s still a lot to figure out, though. Neuroscientists have observed subtle differences in the brains of people who stutter, but they can’t be certain if those differences are the cause or a result of the stutter. Geneticists are identifying variations in certain genes that predispose a person to stutter, but the genes themselves are puzzling: Only recently have their links to brain anatomy become apparent.

Maguire, meanwhile, is pursuing treatments based on dopamine, a chemical messenger in the brain that helps to regulate emotions and movement (precise muscle movements, of course, are needed for intelligible speech). Scientists are just beginning to braid these disparate threads together, even as they forge ahead with early testing for treatments based on their discoveries.

Slowed circuitry

Looking at a standard brain scan of someone who stutters, a radiologist won’t notice anything amiss. It’s only when experts look closely, with specialized technology that shows the brain’s in-depth structure and activity during speech, that subtle differences between groups who do and don’t stutter become apparent.

The problem isn’t confined to one part of the brain. Rather, it’s all about connections between different parts, says speech-language pathologist and neuroscientist Soo-Eun Chang of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. For example, in the brain’s left hemisphere, people who stutter often appear to have slightly weaker connections between the areas responsible for hearing and for the movements that generate speech. Chang has also observed structural differences in the corpus callosum, the big bundle of nerve fibers that links the left and right hemispheres of the brain.

These findings hint that stuttering might result from slight delays in communication between parts of the brain. Speech, Chang suggests, would be particularly susceptible to such delays because it must be coordinated at lightning speed.

Chang has been trying to understand why about 80 percent of kids who stutter grow up to have normal speech patterns, while the other 20 percent continue to stutter into adulthood. Stuttering typically begins when children first start stringing words together into simple sentences, around age 2. Chang studies children for up to four years, starting as early as possible, looking for changing patterns in brain scans.

It’s no easy feat to convince such young children to hold still in a giant, thumping, brain-imaging machine. The team has embellished the scanner with decorations that hide all the scary parts. (“It looks like an ocean adventure,” Chang says.) In kids who lose their stutter, Chang’s team has observed that the connections between areas involved in hearing and ones involved in speech movements get stronger over time. But that doesn’t happen in children who continue to stutter.

In another study, Chang’s group looked at how the different parts of the brain work simultaneously, or don’t, using blood flow as a proxy for activity. They found a link between stuttering and a brain circuit called the default mode network, which has roles in ruminating over one’s past or future activities, as well as daydreaming. In children who stutter, the default mode network seems to insert itself — like a third person butting in on a romantic date — into the conversation between networks responsible for focusing attention and creating movements. That could also slow speech production, she says.

These changes to brain development or structure might be rooted in a person’s genes, but an understanding of this part of the problem has also taken time to mature.

All in the family

In early 2001, geneticist Dennis Drayna received a surprising email: “I am from Cameroon, West Africa. My father was a chief. He had three wives and I have 21 full and half siblings. Almost all of us stutter,” Drayna recalls it saying. “Do you suppose there could be something genetic in my family?”

Drayna, who worked at the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, already had a longstanding interest in the inheritance of stuttering. His uncle and elder brother stuttered, and his twin sons did so as children. But he was reluctant to make a transatlantic journey based on an email, and wary that his clinical skills weren’t up to analyzing the family’s symptoms. He mentioned the email to current National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins (director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at that time), who encouraged him to check it out, so he booked a ticket to Africa. He has also traveled to Pakistan, where intermarriage of cousins can reveal gene variants linked to genetic disorders in their children.

Even with those families, finding the genes was slow going: Stuttering isn’t inherited in simple patterns like blood types or freckles are. But eventually, Drayna’s team identified mutations in four genes — GNPTAB, GNPTG and NAGPA from the Pakistan studies, and AP4E1 from the clan in Cameroon — that he estimates may underlie as many as one in five cases of stuttering.

Oddly, none of the genes that Drayna identified have an obvious connection to speech. Rather, they all are involved in sending cellular materials to the waste-recycling compartment called the lysosome. It took more work before Drayna’s team linked the genes to brain activity.

They started by engineering mice to have one of the mutations they’d observed in people, in the mouse version of GNPTAB, to see if it affected the mice’s vocalizations . Mice can be quite chatty, but much of their conversation takes place in an ultrasonic range that people can’t hear. Recording the ultrasonic calls of pups, the team observed patterns similar to human stuttering. “They have all these gaps and pauses in their train of vocalizations,” says Drayna, who cowrote an overview of genetics research on speech and language disorders for the Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics.

Still, the team struggled to spot any clear defect in the animals’ brains — until one determined researcher found that there were fewer of the cells called astrocytes in the corpus callosum. Astrocytes do big jobs that are essential for nerve activity: providing the nerves with fuel, for example, and collecting wastes. Perhaps, Drayna muses, the limited astrocyte population slows down communication between the brain hemispheres by a tiny bit, only noticeable in speech.

Researchers created mice with a mutation in a gene that, in people, is linked to stuttering. The mutant mice vocalized haltingly, with longer pauses between syllables, similar to what’s seen in human stuttering.

(Adapted from T.D. Barnes et al./Current Biology 2016; T.Han et al./PNAS 2019; Knowable Magazine)

​

Drayna’s research has received mixed reviews. “It’s really been the pioneering work in the field,” says Angela Morgan, a speech-language pathologist at the University of Melbourne and Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Australia. On the other hand, Maguire has long doubted that mutations in such important genes, used in nearly all cells, could cause defects only in the corpus callosum, and only in speech. He also finds it difficult to compare mouse squeaks to human speech. “That’s a bit of a stretch,” he says.

Scientists are sure there are more stuttering genes to find. Drayna has retired, but Morgan and collaborators are initiating a large-scale study in the hopes of identifying additional genetic contributors in more than 10,000 people.

The dopamine connection

Maguire has been tackling stuttering from a very different angle: investigating the role of dopamine, a key signaling molecule in the brain. Dopamine can ramp up or down the activity of neurons, depending on the brain location and the nerve receptors it sticks to. There are five different dopamine receptors (named D1, D2, and so on) that pick up the signal and respond.

During the 1990s, Maguire and colleagues were among the first to use a certain kind of brain scan, positron emission tomography, on people who stutter. They found too much dopamine activity in these people’s brains. That extra dopamine seems to stifle the activity of some of the brain regions that Chang and others have linked to stuttering.

Backing up the dopamine connection, other researchers reported in 2009 that people with a certain version of the D2 receptor gene, one that indirectly enhances dopamine activity, are more likely to stutter.

So Maguire wondered: Could blocking dopamine be the answer? Conveniently, antipsychotic drugs do just that. Over the years, Maguire has conducted small, successful clinical studies with these medications including risperidone, olanzapine and lurasidone. (Personally, he prefers the last because it doesn’t cause as much weight gain as the others.) The result: “Your stuttering won’t completely go away, but we can treat it,” he says.

None of those medications are approved for stuttering by the US Food and Drug Administration, and they can cause unpleasant side effects, not just weight gain but also muscle stiffness and impaired movement. In part, that’s because they act on the D2 version of the dopamine receptor. Maguire’s new medication, ecopipam, works on the D1 version, which he expects will diminish some side effects — though he’ll have to watch for others, such as weight loss and depression.

In a small study of 10 volunteers, Maguire, Yaruss and colleagues found that people who took ecopipam stuttered less than they did pre-treatment. Quality-of-life scores, related to feelings such as helplessness or acceptance of their stutter, also improved for some participants.

Ten adult volunteers who stuttered were given ecopipam, a drug that blocks one version of the dopamine receptor, for 8 weeks. They stuttered significantly less when they were on the drug than they had before the treatment.

(G.A. Maguire et al./Annals of Clinical Psychiatry 2019/Knowable Magazine)

Ecopipam isn’t the only treatment under consideration. Back in Michigan, Chang hopes that stimulation of specific parts of the brain during speech could improve fluency. The team uses electrodes on the scalp to gently stimulate a segment of the hearing area, aiming to strengthen connections between that spot and the one that manages speech movements. (This causes a brief tickle sensation before fading, Chang says.) The researchers stimulate the brain while the person undergoes traditional speech therapy, hoping to enhance the therapy’s effects. Because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the team had to stop the study with 24 subjects out of a planned 50. They’re analyzing the data now.

Connecting the dots

Dopamine, cellular waste disposal, neural connectivity — how do they fit together? Chang notes that one of the brain’s circuits involved in stuttering includes two areas that make and use dopamine, which might help explain why dopamine is important in the disorder.

She hopes that neuroimaging can unite the different ideas. As a first stab, she and collaborators compared the problem areas identified by her brain scans to maps of where various genes are active in the brain. Two of Drayna’s genes, GNPTG and NAGPA, were active at high levels in the speech and hearing network in the brains of non-stutterers, she saw. That suggests those genes are really needed in those areas, bolstering Drayna’s hypothesis that defects in the genes would interfere with speech.

The team also observed something novel: Genes involved in energy processing were active in the speech and hearing areas. There’s a big rise in brain activity during the preschool years, when stuttering tends to start, Chang says. Perhaps, she theorizes, those speech-processing regions don’t get all the energy they need at a time when they really need to be cranking at maximum power. With that in mind, she plans to look for mutations in those energy-control genes in children who stutter. “There are obviously a lot of dots that need to be connected,” she says.

Maguire is also connecting dots: He says he’s working on a theory to unite his work with Drayna’s genetic findings. Meanwhile, after struggling through med school interviews and choosing a career in talk therapy despite his difficulties with speech, he’s hopeful about ecopipam: With colleagues, he’s starting a new study that will compare 34 people on ecopipam with 34 on placebo. If that treatment ever becomes part of the standard stuttering tool kit, he will have realized a lifelong dream.

Knowable Magazine is an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews.

#Nature

[theuniversitychallengereview]

UC 50.7 - Bristol vs Corpus Christi, Ox

Corpus Christi means Body of Christ in Ecclesiastical Latin, and most commonly refers to the Feast of Corpus Christi, also known as the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ, which celebrates the Real Presence of the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Jesus Christ in the elements of the Eucharist, while Bristol comes from an old English word meaning assembly place by a bridge. 

One might think you could draw some deeper meaning about the relative prestige of the two institutions, and of the inherent value of the students who attend them from the relative grandiosity of the derivations of their names, but you can’t. Its purely coincidental. 

However, were the Oxford College to be called Corvus Christi, which would relate to the Crow Messiah, it would render them victors of this tournament by default due to the fear they would instil in opposition teams. Anyway, nonsense aside, and to directly contradict said nonsense, Corpus Christi do have an historic pedigree in University Challenge that their Avonside opponents do not share.

This is a story that gets told every time Corpus appear on the show, but its a surefire way to use up a few paragraphs so I’m going to tell it anyway. Four years after lifting the 2005 trophy, they once again returned to the Grand Final and defeated an excellent Manchester side 275-190, but on this occasion they did not raise the plaque (well, technically they will have done, given that they were post-humously disqualified, which would have rendered the celebrations null and void).

One week after the final was broadcast, Corpus, who had won it in large part thanks to the legendary performances of Gail Trimble, were stripped of the title thanks to role player Sam Kay having left University mid-way through the filming of the series. It left a sour taste in the mouth, even for the Manchester side who inherited the victory, and Corpus have only made one appearance since then, making the quarter-finals in 2017. 

The quarter-finals are a stage Bristol know all about (the king of segues strikes again), having been knocked out at it no fewer than seven times in fifteen appearances during the Paxman era, including four times in the past six years. This being one of the few occasions where a statistic has enough data points on this show to be significant. No side has gone out at the same stage more often apart from University College London, who match them with seven exits in the second round, and Warwick, with a magnificent nine losses in the same round. 

Of course, I’m not really sure how much stock you can put in the previous performances of teams, given that its an entirely different set of contestants (although in recent years there does seem to be a trend of performance being related to training - thanks to Quiz Socs - at Universities outside Oxbridge in a way it didn’t before. See Edinburgh reaching three semis in a row, and winning a title, and Durham’s two semis and counting for proof that practice makes perfect), but I wouldn’t mind if Bristol got to the Quarters again, just so I could make a big point of it, whether they won or lost. 

But, we’ll just have to wait and see. You all know the rules by now, so here’s your first starter for ten...

Bristol are mascotted by a wooden plaque from their Student Union Awards, which is strange, but in a way you have to respect. Corpus Christi have a duck (edit: they don’t have a duck, they have a pelican, as was pointed out to me on Twitter, and which I would have known had I read the Corpus Christi wikipedia, which mentions teh Pelican Sundial, as well as the Pelican Bar and The Pelican Magazine, all of which are related to the College), which is less weird, and if it was a crow then it would have tied in nicely with my joke from earlier, but I still respect.

Webb takes the first three questions for Corpus, but its not that surprising, given that he studies Ancient and Modern History, which presumably means he knows about everything thats ever happened. His team, however, miss out on a bonus about The Princess Bride, which is frankly a disgrace. 

Bristol are delighted to get off the mark with the picture round, on travel to work areas. I wonder if they would have changed the questions had Bristol been one of the answers, but they probably wouldn’t have, given that any of the other questions could also be perceived as a gimme for one of the contestants, so you could never fully cover yourself.

Another for Webb kept the momentum up for Corpus, but a guess from Pye and a couple of bonuses on Holly got Bristol back in the game. You can’t keep a good Webb down though and he takes his fifth of the night without breaking a sweat. But he doesn’t know much about female fronted rap, and Bristol are starting to feel at ease and enjoy themselves a bit more. He might need some help from his teammates soon.

Zaayland does decide to chip in, but Webb simply takes that as a cue to up his own game, and snaffles up a couple more Starters to put Corpus ninety five clear with only a few minutes to go. Game over.

Or...

Game not over?

Salmon hooks another ten for Bristol with Johanna Konta, and the Avonsiders charge. A hattrick on the bonuses, and two more on the picked up picture bonuses. Owens grabs his first Starter of the night and they get two more on famous Huberts. They can barely miss if they want to, and Salmon comes in like a peregrine falcon with Finnish. Australian deserts bring them within ten. How has this happened? There are surely seconds left.

But unfortunately for them, Cherry pulls up clutch with her first Starter of the night, rhinestone, and seals the match. Webb takes yet another to ensure they won’t make the high-scoring loser play-offs (though Paxman says they might, they won’t)

Final Score: Bristol 135 - 175 Corpus Christi

So, Bristol will not have the chance to add to their historic seven quarter final losses, but what a comeback that would have been. For Corpus, Webb looks a proper quizzer, strong on the bonuses as well as the buzzer.

Thanks for reading, and if you enjoyed this, then you can sign up to my Patreon to get exclusive Retro Reviews of old series from before I started this blog. I will write one this week, definitely! 

https://www.patreon.com/user?u=16447756&fan_landing=true

[shannonparis29]

Miss USofA Diva Nationals 2017

             March 5-7 2017, Miss USofA Diva Nationals

Nationals is a big deal, and the fact that I qualified was amazing. There were 24 that qualified and 23 showed up to compete for the National title. I left on March 2nd and we arrived there early March 4th (the day before the pageant and the day of the “sash” party). Our plan was to be on time and we were early. Arriving in Dayton, Ohio, it was snowing. It wasn’t heavily snowing, but it was the only the fourth time I’d seen snow. Twice in Corpus, once in San Marcos, and once in Ohio. Jackie, Levi and I all went to eat at Bob Evans, since it was literally in front of the hotel and we had to wait a little bit for our room to be “ready.”

After “breakfast” and checking in, I rested all day, I found myself rested after an eventful trip. After resting, I dressed for the Sash Party. The sash party is an event (usually before the pageant) where everyone meets and mingles. Most of the time, this is where meet our fellow competitors for the first time-unless you’ve met them previously. (i.e. at a prelim or the year before). That day we had pizza and drinks and it was our treat. It was great and even my friend Sara from Kentucky came by. She used to live in Corpus, but she moved to Kentucky with her boyfriend. She drove to Dayton and hung out with us afterwards in the hotel room. At the dinner, I received my 2nd alternate sash for Iowa there, and I was happy, a memento of my USofA Journey for the 2016-2017 season.

Then, it was time to rest for Nationals. Nationals is three days. The first two nights are what they call “prelim” nights and the last night is the “final” night, where they announce the top 12, the top 12 compete in evening wear and talent one more time, to determine the winner. But if you choose to, you may swap your evening wear/talent for a different or better one. Most top competitors have a “prelim” evening wear/talent and a final night one, just in case they make finals. However, if you feel like your talent is strong enough to win, you are not “required” to change it. But most do. Pageants are not cheap (trust me I know) and I’ve seen people change their evening wear/talent for final night and win and some do not. However, most people’s strategy these days is to be “clean” prelim night (to make top 12) then go big for final night. However, sometimes it is better to go “all out” both nights, because truthfully you only get once chance to impress at Nationals. For, what if you do not make finals? It truthfully depends on the person.  Nothing is guaranteed or truthfully you never know who is going to bring on that day. Some people use the same talents from prelims, some do not. It is really on the person and what the judges see.

Registration was noon on the 5th of March. We would check in, draw our numbers and the promoters of Nationals-Devin and Gage would give a speech about being at Nationals. (Levi told me that part) But sure enough, he was right about that. The “best in the country” and “honored that so many were able to make the journey” The journey was 22 hours by driving but it also took me three prelims, thousands of miles across the country to be there.

The way preliminary nights work is that divide us into groups. This year, there are four groups. Day 1 group 1 and 3 do interview and evening wear, and groups 2 and 4, compete in prelim talent. On Day 2, it is the reverse, group 2 and 4 compete in interview and evening wear, and group 1 and 3 compete for talent. I drew contestant number 13, group 3. So, on day one, I would knock out two of my categories.

Once I knew my position, it was time for me to head back to the hotel, and Sara De La Hoya, my makeup artist, did my natural makeup and my hair in a bun. I wore my black and red suit, tights, and heels. It looked very professional, and some of the other girls were dressed similarly. I went into interview, and I still had nerves. I remember talking about my journey (doing three prelims, trying to feature myself, and so on). I also was asked questions about the USofA system-how the scoring works, etc. I felt like that was one question that I knew well. After my interview, I had to rest a bit and then prepare for evening wear that night. My evening wear was purple iridescent gown, that my drag sister Jackie and I stoned fully. I mean, it was a lot of work to stone that gown. And as expected, it looked stunning on stage. In fact, I even had the matching jewelry and shoes. I stoned the shoes and Jackie and I did the gown. It was stoned with ab crystal stones and I was so glad that I decided to do that. I ended up wearing that gown and even though it was not “creative” it was so gorgeous, and it fit me well, minus a few things that could have been altered, but we ran out of time to do so. My evening gown music was “Halo” by Beyoncé. I ended up being cinched to the Gods. I modeled the gown, walked the runway and did one last model before finishing my gown category.

After gown, I changed in my walkaround dress and I could enjoy the rest of the pageant, the remaining entertainment as well as group 2 and 4’s talents.

After the pageant, we were finished by midnight, and ended up going to Steak and Shake for a late-night dinner. It was delicious and after that we were exhausted and ready to head back to the hotel, for tomorrow would be yet another busy day.

Day 2

Day 2 started off with talent soundcheck, as I had talent on Day 2.  I witnessed so many wonderful talents during the rehearsal. I marked my talent, to save my energy for that night’s show. I will say that Nationals is exhausting. A few tips: If you’re a

Diva/Mi or any pageant contest, please make sure you eat a good meal, get a good night’s sleep and DRINK LOTS OF WATER. You will sweat a lot, especially backstage. I hardly ate on Day 2 and but I was able to eat a couple sandwiches after going back to the hotel room. Then, it was time to be painted for prelim night two for talent. Sara did my makeup for talent, and I had plenty of time to “enjoy the show” while I waited for my turn. After evening wear and several talents, it was my turn.  My talent was the same, as before, the SNL skit, and it went well, at least in my opinion. A few of my press-on nails flew off during my number. I mean, even with super glue, it can happen. Nothing is truly fool-proof. After everything was finished, night two was over. And it was time for another night of rest, before final night.

Final Night

Final night day, they had a luncheon and announced prelim night awards. I unfortunately did not receive any awards in my group. But having group or category awards prelim night does not guarantee you a place in the top 12. So, for all of you are wondering how scoring works as far as final night and prelim nights go. Prelim nights are cumulative Each judge can give 1-12 points in evening wear/talent and the most one can receive total is sixty points (a perfect score) . In talent each judge can give 2 to 24 points. The max you can receive total is 120 pts (which is a perfect score). It’s based on everything the judges look for in each category. The highest and lowest scores are dropped as well.On final night, however, you are judged against your competitors. Final night is comparative. So, for example, if a judge has you 1st in talent, you will receive 24 pts from that judge. Sometimes they agree, sometimes they do not. It truthfully depends on the judges.  

Comparative  Scores

Talent  (2-24 from each judge)

Evening  Wear (1-12)

 1st  24 pts

1ST  12 pts

 2nd  22 pts

2nd  11 pts

 3rd  20pts

3rd  10pts

 4th  18 pts

4th  9 pts

 5th  16 pts

5th  8 pts

 6th  14pts

6th  7 pts

 7th  12 pts

7th  6 pts

 8th  10 pts

8th  5 pts

 9th  8 pts

9th  4 pts

 10th  6 pts

10th  3pts

 11th  4 pts

11th  2pts

 12th  2 pts

12th  1pt

Of course, your final score is based overall, from all judges. It doesn’t mean you’re “bad” because you get 12th at Nationals. It just means on that day, someone was better but you made the top 12. However, there are some exceptions, in classic, where pageants are “one night only” they end up using the comparative-as they are competing one night. If there are 14 contestants then it’d be 1-14, 2-28, I think.  And for Diva 2020 Nationals, there would be only one night, but we shall get to that later.

On Final night, during the day, we have a quick presentation rehearsal, then we get two minutes to mark the stage in case, we make finals. We were instructed to come in our presentations and leave our “final night” package in the car, if we make finals.

Turns out, I did not make top 12 at Nationals. Was I upset? Disappointed? Could I have done better? Yes, yes, and yes. However, this year, truly was a trying year, as I reached my goal-I went to Nationals and represented well. I would watch the top 12 battle it out and in the end Seduction Dickerson won, with Ruby Scott (from Texas, yay) 1st alternate and 2nd alternate went to Jamison St. James.

I knew I would take any critiques and apply to my next season. It was back to the drawing board and back to competing again for next season. One critique that I received from Tommie Ross was that I wasn’t “being myself” in my interview. I should’ve worn a dress, similar to what I wore in my talent. I wore a suit because that is what most people wear to interviews. But maybe that was a wrong approach. I’d soon learn that I need to be myself. Easier said than done. I looked professional, yes, and truthfully, none of my critiques in interview have been about wardrobe. That ended up being something I worked for next season-but again that ended my 2016-2017 season.

[skinfeeler]

tonight i decided to be a public nuisance and head out to do hiit with a jumping rope at the pavement in front of my house and everybody else’s houses, despite it being well past midnight. i don’t have a lot of time to get back to the level of physical performance i used to be at before i go to my trip to london, and i thought that with the heatwave gone but with business to do tomorrow, i should just go ahead and do it already. ten cycles of thirty seconds of going as hard as possible and thirty seconds rest, as before.

my plan was stalled briefly when i looked up into the sky. i am often up at night for a few hours, but that time is almost always spent inside with the curtains closed. every single time i go outside my house and look up at the sky i have this weird realisation that it’s the same sky as always, and if the moon is there, the realisation that now or at some point in the near future, all the people i know on this earth can see it, that same moon. that there is a physical reality all of us inhabit, all of us together, that people aren’t actually confined to a small device in my hand. this is naturally, all obvious, but it’s still a realisation that catches me off guard every now and then.

i wanted to dwell on it, but i decided to focus and go do my hiit. it had actually been a while since i last did this, but i decided to go for my old limit because even if i would strain to do it, doing this would mean i would be back at prior performance, which matters a great deal to me. i didn’t expect to be as impacted as i was, however, during the last few cycles i had trouble exhaling during the rest steps because my larynx tensed up in this weird way, closing my throat almost shut. for some reason, i didn’t really care. that’s how these things go. i got back to my old limit, in the end, and then collapsed sideways onto the grass: the nature of these things is that sometimes you have to collapse, and you simply pick the safest direction you can do it quickly in.

it wasn’t a very pleasant time, lying there while absolutely being unable to get up, only slightly able to reposition my body. i couldn’t breathe while on my side. i couldn’t breathe well while on my back. my ribcage simply didn’t expand that much, meaning i definitely overdid it. for a moment there i thought i would die, but i was already at perfect peace with it— i already felt so faint, and i knew that i had forgotten about everything else, and that this would be the best possible way to go, for anyone to go, but for me in particular.

but it didn’t go that way.

i almost vomited up the light food i had before i went exercise, but i managed to keep it in. i lost a lot of fluids and figured i’d probably worked out my calves about as much as if i had done resistance training, so i went get some chocolate milk and orange juice cartons and simply gazed at the sky as i did before i started.

usually the fact that this world is big is daunting. i don’t always take it very well. but in that moment, i could take it. the body isn’t just an entity, and in these moments of strain, you really feel this— the heart beats, the blood flows, everything in progress, like clockwork. so much empty space next to me horizontally, but also above me, but when you feel the body as a set of processes rather than just a vessel, it’s bearable, like the strong force of an atom keeping it together in an unimaginably macroscopic space around it, actively working every single smallest unit of time, x := y. my skin felt hot, but i was suffused in gentle summer air, the heavens around me, an edge within which my body works, but also part of the corpus in itself.

i deeply value these experiences and wish i could somehow share them with my friends who are less inclined to strenuous physical exercise. these are my mystic experiences, they are what make me feel like i can maintain shape when faced with an extremely daunting and cold universe, what i draw back on when everything feels incoherent and in disjointed.

[gaming-rabbot]

Salmon Run and Presentation

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Mild spoilers coming along.)

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

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

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

Cynical as it is…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am, to stay on theme here, fresh.

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

Let me explain.

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

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

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

But I digress.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Holidays, everyone!

[allthereclists]

stucky corpus research (10/042014 - 20/11/2015)

hold me tight by hollimichele 11,116

In the old days, before the war, Steve got cold at night. That was all it was, at first.

miles to go before i sleep by Avelera 11,910

Steve finds Bucky outside of the Smithsonian and invites him home.

The Steven G. Rogers Guide to What You Missed the Last Few Years by what_alchemy 5,195

Steve's got the hang of this 21st century thing.

a captain, a killing machine, and the homosexual agenda by cosetties 2,087

“So,” Bucky says, “the HRC wants us to get married."

build the walls (tear them down) by santanico 2,077

He wishes Steve’s fingers would leave hard bruises and his teeth would leave scars.

One and the Other by fmo 1,890

Bucky comes back, but the Winter Soldier stays too. In other words: disassociative identity disorder.

i revive, see it when i come alive by biggrstaffbunch 2,123

He falls. You follow after.

When you drag him from the water, he is water-logged and heavy. He lies on the ground, broken and bloody. Even that feels more like a memory than it should.

So you leave him by the water, and you run.

Stars and Stripes by afalsebravado 799

Steve's pleasant dream is interrupted when he is awakened by the Winter Soldier.

Like Short Lived Punctuation Marks by AdamantSteve 3,938

Steve takes Bucky camping in a bid to jog his memories.

Crawling in the Colosseum Dust by callmejude 1,807

The Winter Soldier doesn't remember Bucky Barnes but he does remember Steve Rogers.

Bed and Breakfast by pizzacakes1234 1,626

Bucky's healing and Steve's trying to help.

the cold calculus of war by orphan_account 1,662

The mathematics of it don't make sense. You do not continue to sink costs into retrieving and repairing an irreparably broken asset. Not when more viable options are open to you.

Awake My Soul by luckyfilbert 1,140 [Part 1 of Not With Haste]

A year after the events of Captain America: the Winter Soldier, Bucky finally feels ready to meet an old friend.

no heart to recall by KiaraSayre 15,350

He's been in Steve Rogers's company for less than twenty-four hours and he's already losing sight of his mission.

Fate by grumpyowls 2,100

Bucky finds a drawing and it turns out to mean something more than he thought.

Parallel Constructions by freshbakedlady 13,660

In the absence of orders, the man wearing the face of Bucky Barnes must figure out who he will be. The answer, mostly, is "somebody Steve Rogers can love." Nothing so easy should ever take this much work.

Your Mind Rings by Amberly 1,200

You aren’t Bucky. You’re not the Winter Soldier anymore, either, but you’re not Bucky

And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence, are more to me by ifeelbetter 4,495

The Captain woke quickly and tested the chain before he saw the Soldier. All the tension in his body evaporated once he met the Soldier’s eyes and he slumped downward, back up against the wall.

"Oh, thank god," he said. He repeated it twice, quiet. Like a secret.

i will be your ground by Misprinting (misprinting) 4,739

A character study. The subject: Bucky’s hair.

Five times Steve kissed Bucky by paragon 16,587

(+ once, finally, it was the other way around)

Time for you and time for me by paragon 7,627

He can't claw the feeling from the pit of his stomach, the ache like a blueing bruise where something is absent. The ache is something from his past, from the vulnerable core, that will not leave him alone. It is the only part of him that he might concede is James Buchanan "Bucky" Barnes.

your favorite ghost by augustbird 21,013

It's harder than Steve ever expected to bring Bucky home.

Permission by derekstilinski 2,585

After Bucky’s captured by SHIELD, they put him in a holding cell, and strip him of everything but his clothes. He’s dirty, damaged, and Steve can’t just watch him like that, protocol or not.

Up All Night To Get Bucky by 74days 1,425

Steve finds out his photos are auto-uploaded to Twitter. Nothing bad, only good, fluffy stuff

like an avalanche by ataxophilia 2,694

Bucky shrugs, clears his throat, and says, "Saw Fantasia with Steve when it came out, and that one with the puppet — Pinocchio, or whatever. Took a girl to Snow White for a date. Never really— never got a chance to see the others."

volgograd by black_nata 7,673

He is nineteen. He is a hundred. The little boy he cherished has now become a big, strong man, who looks at him as though he is not part machine, and has brought him to his home for cake.

Through the notches in your spine by caughtinanocean 4,460

Bucky Barnes has been broken down to nothing, and he has been pulled back together again, and this—this is the part where he lives.

“Are you sure you're ready for this?” Steve asks, stroking the point of Bucky's hipbone with the pad of his thumb. He is naked and he is perfect and sometimes Bucky isn't sure that he knows how to want things anymore, but Bucky wants him.

the body adrift by Febricant 4,221

Steve has no drawings of Bucky from before. Those are all gone, destroyed in the war or by his own hand; it wouldn’t do for anyone to see how easily the details came from memory, how often Bucky was in his thoughts.

Close Enough by Penthos 3,100

When Steve thinks about it, his life has pretty much been a collection of almosts. Almost joining the army, almost getting his dance with Peggy, almost losing Bucky (although that had felt pretty certain at the time). And there have been a lot of almosts with Bucky.

You got that medicine I need by SkyisGray 10,094

Bucky was trying to enter his room.

Bucky is a wildcard right now.

Bucky could have been seeking Steve’s help, but there is as much of a chance, Steve admits, that he was trying to kill or capture him.

Brooklyn by togina 8,749

"Captain America, what's your stance on gay marriage?"

Everyone knows that, by now. Everyone but Bucky.

the future's so bright (I gotta wear shades) by KiaraSayre 3,482

Things Bucky loves about the future.

Memories are Made of This by eleveninches 13,216

Nearly a year after turning himself into SHIELD and the Avengers, Bucky struggles to find himself in the 21st century. Unfortunately, no one told him about the aliens.

Five Times Steve Scared the Ever-living Shit Out of Bucky, And the One Time Bucky Finally Did Something About It by WhatTheBodyGraspsNot 7,669

'Steve smiles against him, still getting his kicks with the whole thing. Because he might be a truly wonderful person, but he can also be a little shit if he wants to be.

“Never fucking do that to me again,” Bucky says, but it lacks venom.

“I won’t.” Steve says.

But Bucky knows he will because he’s Steve.'

The Bucky Barnes Guide to Household Management byCryptoHomoRocker 5,506

"Steve doesn't even notice at first, is the thing."

Or: Steve is unobservant, Bucky learns to be good at things that aren't killing people, and knitting happens.

my soul to keep by hitlikehammers 4,646

They've had more second chances than anyone has a right to. They've survived the unthinkable, and emerged not only breathing, but together.

So they don't risk it; they don't play games with fate. Every night, they lay everything out: the good, and the bad. The life-altering and the mundane. The bad haircuts and the shitty cologne.

Every night before they go to bed, they make damn sure nothing's left unsaid between them.

Just in case.

But We Can Try by hetrez 10,567

Bucky said, "These are love letters, Rogers. You've been drawing me love letters."

lonely houses off the road by Etharei 17,454

Barnes is now glaring at him for some reason. It's somewhat terrifying but also, oddly, a little reassuring— because that's emotion right there, which means there's still somebody behind those eyes. Somebody who seems to think Sam is being a bit slow on the uptake. "Time parameters exceeded. Mission failed."

"Wait." Sam narrows his eyes. "Is this some kind of... report? Debriefing?"

"Mission report," confirms Barnes, looking pleased. Well, looking slightly less murderous than before.

In which various people deal with things they never signed up for, but at the end of the day no one's particularly surprised.

New Words For Old Desires by CryptoHomoRocker 7,462

"After the dust settles, after Bucky is found and taken in and his brain is as fixed as it’s going to get, according to everyone who is paid to know about that kind of thing, there’s really no question of where he’s going to live."

Or: Bucky uses unusual coping mechanisms, Steve pines in what he thinks is a very subtle way, and literally everyone else in the world is like GOD just KISS ALREADY.

Progress (The One With The Post-It Notes) byParaxdisepink 5,760

Bucky is alone for a day and Steve leaves post-it notes on his metal arm.

I'll Be Your Safety by Paraxdisepink 3,627

Bucky's getting headaches from what HYDRA did to him. And there's feelings. And some fluff.

You've Got A Friend In Me by twerkinshield 5,682

In which Steve is fed up with the antics of the Avengers, epic prank wars are waged, scarves are knitted, and Bucky throws his metal arm at people.

A Certain Kind of Magnetism by chaoticallyclev 1,676

Four times Steve and Bucky exchanged notes using magnets (and one time that still happened)

A Not-So-Covert Affair by Kryptaria 6,845

Everyone always underestimates Steve Rogers, including the Winter Soldier.

Really, you'd think they know better by now.

How am I Gonna be an Optimist About This? by sidium

Steve answers the door, and stares. Neither of them move, eyes locked on the others’. He sees wonder, hesitation and careful, cautious hope in Steve's. He wonders if Steve can see anything in his. Probably not. He probably looks as empty as he feels.

the guilty hide, the guilty run (You're a marked man brother) by agirlnamedchuck 6,256

(Two times Bucky shared clothes with Steve, one time Steve tried to, and the one time Bucky accepted)

“You're such a jerk.” he said turning back to sleep but Bucky caught the end of a smile on his face.

“Yeah well, you're a punk so I guess we're a match."

where you go to rest your bones by booksandteaandallthingslovely 3,966

It’s been three weeks since Washington, three weeks since pieces of helicarrier rained down on the city below and Steve fell, fell, fell into the Potomac, the name Bucky on his lips like a prayer.

It’s been three weeks since someone hauled him up out of the cold water, and he woke coughing and spluttering, bleeding and bruised on the shore, alone.

Three weeks of digging up information, following leads, searching for the man he had once called his best friend, no, still called his best friend.

And here he is in front of him.

New Definitions by midnighttypewriter 16,588

Steve chuckled. "Handsome and charming," he said. "Very popular with the dames." He brought his hand to the crown of Bucky's head, ran his fingers through his hair. It was still long and Bucky had never shown any interest to cut it down to his original style; Steve assumed it was here to stay just like the metal arm. He had Bucky back but the Winter Soldier was a part of the package. "Do you remember?"

Bucky shrugged. He rolled his face into Steve's touch. "Some things. There're still blank spaces. I know enough to tell when the book's lying."

Upside Down by roane 1,217

It all started with a building. Maybe Steve and Bucky broke it a little. Steve has protective friends, so naturally, they come to investigate.

Reconstruction Site by EmilianaDarling 7,671

He is the Winter Soldier.

He is James Buchanan Barnes.

He’s not one and he’s not the other, and he’s not sure if that makes him anything worth saving.

[In which the Winter Soldier leads Steve Rogers and Sam Wilson on a wild goose chase through Eastern Europe so that he can learn more about the man who actually thinks he can be saved. This fic takes place chronologically second in the series but was written first.]

Sequel:  Amidst the Rubble (We Can Build a Better Us) or "Five Times During Bucky’s Recovery and One Time Everything Was Pretty Okay" byEmilianaDarling 21,019

Learn How To Bend by nerdwegian 6,405

"Okay, let's say you see someone, a stranger, but you decide that you maybe want to get to know them better, how would you--how would you go about doing that?"

In which there's terrible dating advice, terrible Starbucks drinks, and a whole lot of denial.

Can We Pretend To Leave? And Then We'll Meet Again bymisspunkrock 23,252

The thing is Bucky hadn’t the slightest clue when it first began.

Maybe it was when he was old enough to understand what the meaning of the word desire was. Maybe it was when he saw that crooked smile for the first time and really noticed the brightness that was barely contained behind blue eyes. Maybe it was when they had to start sharing a bed together in the winter because their too small apartment got far too drafty.

Or in which Bucky writes Steve notes and Steve finds them years later.

On The Shore I Stand Alone by prosepoet 4,416

or the five times someone tried to talk Steve out of looking for Bucky and the one time someone encouraged him.

All the First Times by Vera (Vera_DragonMuse) 9,694

Bucky starts over and finds new ways to survive.

testament by paxlux 10,638

His memory runs backwards in crooked bright flashes, hard as the noise flare of an assault rifle.

in my dreams by leap4joyak 10,045

Of course it's him. Who else could it be?

words that became hard to say by defcontwo 3,326

Here's the thing about growing up like they have, though.

You get pretty used to the line between wanting and having; you get pretty used to how wide and vast and unsurmountable it is.

How can a loser ever win by sirona 12,448

The Soldier should not be standing here, in the middle of a crowded room with obstructed exits, risking discovery with every second he remains rooted to the spot -- but.

But. He'd had to know.

broken pieces (the rough edges remix) by legete 2,185

It's wrong, he knows it's wrong, but sometimes Bucky prefers the nightmares that actually happened.

Photo Booth by nothingwrongwiththerain 1,858

Steve grabbed Bucky’s hand and yanked him into the booth before he could protest

In which Steve and Bucky make out in a photo booth and Steve keeps the pictures safe as long as he can.

Scratched Ragged and Rubbed Raw by cheesethesecond 3,788

“How are you gonna sleep tonight,” Bucky asked, letting his head fall back against the wall and closing his eyes, “knowing that a guy who tried to kill you is sleeping in the next room?”

“Like a baby,” Steve said.

Sequel:  This Lonely Hour Before Daybreak 2,912

Revision history by viverella 4,223

“Anyway,” Sam says to Bucky, and his voice is light and joking. “If you’re so concerned about the state of the internet, you could always spend your days correcting Wikipedia articles.”

“Don’t give him any ideas,” Steve says to Sam. “He knows way too many embarrassing things about me.”

The Quickest Way by Wynn 6,219

The last place that Steve expects to find Bucky Barnes, former Hydra assassin and now current assassin of Hydra members, is standing in the cereal aisle of his neighborhood grocery store. But he does.

A pas de deux eighty years in the making set in a grocery.

have you ever thought just maybe by Desdemon 4,472

“JARVIS,” Tony called thoughtfully.

“Yes, sir?”

“Those young people are in love,” he said.

Debridement by KathrynShadow 3,563

He fires between breaths. He misses, and one of Rogers's assailants goes down in a flush of red. Fights back the confusion (he doesn't miss, he doesn't miss harder shots than that), readjusts, doesn't breathe at all this time, watches— He misses again. He misses ten times, until the Captain is alone, surrounded by the corpses of his attackers.

Five Times Bucky Missed Steve’s Birthday by MsBluesunflower 2,170

...and one time he didn't. 5+1 things.

Living On the Edge by shockvaluecola 1,754

He's not really Bucky right now. But he's not the Winter Soldier, either. Shaving might take him a step closer to Bucky, though, which he's pretty sure is where he wants to be.

yourself (or someone like you) by biggrstaffbunch 2,629

"Here is the root of the truth, the crawling dark thing that lives under the earth, hidden from eye: Bucky does remember. He just wishes he didn't."

It's not the Winter Soldier's memories that Bucky fears the most.

I've Been Funny, I've Been Cool With The Lines by nerdwegian 6,080

Steve's not jealous.

Here Comes the Sun by cylobaby27 11,216

When being Steve's best friend again isn't enough to heal Bucky after decades as the Winter Soldier, Steve decides to bring in man's best friend to do the job.

In which Steve gets Bucky a therapy dog, and Bucky is less than cooperative.

The Way Up by dirtybinary 7,991

It's a long road to recovery, but Bucky's got this. Breaking into Steve's apartment sounds like a good start.

The S. Rogers Memorial (it’s NOT a shrine) to J. B. Barnes by SkyisGray 18,332

When the Avengers realize that Steve doesn’t have anything to remind him of Bucky Barnes, they embark on a project to track down Bucky memorabilia. But it seems that Steve isn’t the only visitor to the (unofficial) J. B. Barnes memorial (which is totally NOT a shrine, Tony).

and we are finally home by springsoldier (ladydaredevil) 7,340

The Winter Soldier shows up in Sam's kitchen, one morning. He deals with it. (Natasha helps. Steve would, if they let him.)

the nightmare from which I am trying to awake by Speranza 15,971

"You gotta bring him in, Cap." Tony Stark, distant: on speakerphone. "You can come in to me, or you can go to—well, I don't know who else is left. But you gotta bring him in."

History Painting by M_Leigh 6,834

“We’ll go there one day,” Bucky adds a moment later, back to his bright self again, grinning, cocky. “All those fucking places with all that fucking art. You can tell me all about it. Paintings and sculptures and all that crap.”

A chronicle of looking at art across the decades, and two birthdays.

It's an Adequate Life, Bucky Barnes by what_alchemy 10,260

This is a world without Bucky Barnes.

your homecoming will be my homecoming by lupinely 18,972 

This is what Bucky thinks he remembers. Writing a letter to Steve in the trenches, muddy footprints, impressions of army boots on the ground. So cold his fingers ache. He’s writing the letter but it doesn’t make sense. He’s writing the letter but he wants to go home. It’ll make sense then, he thinks—it’ll make sense when they both come home.

Past Tense by Ark 3,778

Steve Rogers is falling from the sky.

His brief life flashes before his eyes.

clean up that blood all over your paws by beardsley 5,674

His dog tags identify him as Barnes, James B. It takes a frankly embarrassing amount of time for him to remember that name without stumbling over it inside his own head.

‘But you go by Bucky,’ says the man who calls himself Steve.

it's a love story (baby just say yes) by biggrstaffbunch 4,264

Steve's not jealous precisely.

(When Everything Breaks) You Are The Anchor That Holds Me byCryptoHomoRocker 5,133

"Steve is the one thing Bucky hasn’t had to make up his mind about."

Or: Bucky has feelings, Steve has feelings, and then they have sex.

so familiar a gleam by sariane 5,631

Steve develops temporary psychic abilities and accidentally wanders his way into Bucky's dreams. All he wants is to convince Bucky to come home.

Reflex Memories by sariane 34,174

Bucky Barnes never remembers who he is.

That doesn’t stop him from falling in love with Steve Rogers.

And walk through the Manhattan valleys of the dead by lanyon 3,599

Bucky has amnesia and Steve struggles to come to terms with the fact he may never be the same again.

The gold-hearted boy I used to be by lanyon 1,901

There is so much Bucky Barnes does not remember.

A Four-Letter Word by lanyon 1,452

Every time Steve and Bucky want to spend some alone time together, they get cock-blocked by world crises, minor and major.

the sky is blue because it misses the stars by zarabithia 1,134

All of his memories are still a bit hazy, which is why Bucky doesn’t initially realize what a big deal July 4th is.

break loose of loss and longing by victoria_p (musesfool) 3,509

"What do you think of the speculation that you and Steve Rogers were lovers?"

"What? Who thinks that? I don't think about that. Why would I think about that?"

I'll give you my heart to make a place by victoria_p (musesfool) 5,808

The one thing Bucky knows is that he never wants to hurt Steve.

un seul lit by pollitt 319

Steve smells like fresh clothes and soap.

Bucky remembers.

so here we are by pollitt 451

He's getting there.

check me out by pollitt 437

The lines at the grocery store aren’t long, but once Bucky and Steve take their place in one of them, it’s clear that no one is going anywhere anytime soon.

Bucky grabs a magazine off of the rack and raises an eyebrow at Steve. “Captain America groupies -- how much of a ‘Cappie’ are you? Should I take the quiz and find out?”

Captain Rogers and Sergeant Barnes by Speranza 14,372

His eyes were dark and unreadable: there was only a faint ring of blue around the pupils. He stared at Steve down the gun barrel and muttered: "Are you really my friend?"

Steve's Got Moves by reena_jenkins, sirona 1,648

Steve's hips don't lie... but he's got an excellent poker face.

You've got the love I need to see me through by sirona 1,473

Bucky (and Steve, because, well, he's never been good at saying 'no' to Bucky) steal Lola to go joy-riding. (That's Bucky's story and he's sticking to it.)

Let's Be Exposed and Unprotected by torakowalski 4,893

Bucky’s pretty sure he should be into getting fucked through the floor while walls explode around him like in that Mr and Mrs Smith movie that Clint loves. But he likes it like this. He likes being on his back with Steve looming above him, big and naked, blocking out the rest of the world.

The Pretense of Being by radialarch 3,068

Captain America believed that the soldier was Bucky Barnes. This did not make it a fact.

the stirring of you in my arms by radialarch 2,142

Bucky comes to Steve, and then he comes home.

Cause You Were Born on the Fourth of July (Freedom Ring) by sidium 1,126

“I remember when we were little,” Steve starts out, feeling a grin spread over his face, “I think we were about six or seven; you used to tell me the fireworks that went off every Fourth of July were just for me. The whole city celebrating my birthday.”

these days are not done by lupinely 2,455

A long time ago, Bucky taught Steve how to dance. Later, Steve teaches him.

The Words that Were by OddityBoddity 3,999

Bucky is starting to remember the things he'd really rather keep forgetting.

Reaching For What We Can't See by WhatTheBodyGraspsNot 10,713

'In retrospect, it takes a lot longer for Bucky to realize it than he thinks is probably normal. He should probably be even slightly aware of it before he finds himself drinking a little too much after a particularly rough day, and before he knows what’s happening, he’s half naked and there’s this lovely girl on top of him but…but he doesn't care. She’s gorgeous and spunky and just the right amount of everything but Bucky can’t get it up to save his life. And what’s worse is he’s not interested. At all. And he should be.

His S.H.I.E.L.D-appointed therapist tells him that a diminished sex-drive is normal for someone with depression. But Bucky tells her that it isn’t diminished, it’s fucking gone.'

OR: The depression that has resulted from being The Winter Soldier has left Bucky with little to no interest in sex. Seeing as he was more than interested in it before the war, Bucky is rightfully perturbed, even setting out to try to get that spark back . And Steve, well Steve is his rock through it all--always is, really.

old rhythm (or five times bucky broke down walls) by cosipotente 1,364

Of course they had presumptions and ideas about him. But Bucky makes it his mission to break them all down.

give me your answer do by lazulisong 2,053

Bucky knows it's going to be a bad one when Steve wakes up again, lifts his head up from the side of Bucky's fancy electric hospital bed, and says, "Now don't get mad until I explain."

His voice has the tone that had meant he'd got into another fight and had two black eyes, or found a HYDRA nest and accidentally forgotten to tell Bucky or the other Howlies that he was going in to clear it out, or that he'd met a stray dog on the way home from the store and given it his share of meat for supper and was planning to eat boiled potatoes and stale bread, while expecting Bucky to eat his own share of the meat as if it didn't choke him.

Valentine's Day by Anonymous 2,661

Bucky leaves Steve at the bar to go fiddle around with the jukebox in the corner, and even that looks authentic, like it really is 70 years from the past, and suddenly all of it is too much. Bucky’s hung his jacket on the back of a stool, and when he turns around and Steve’s able to look at him, really look at him for the first time in a long time, he gets a little misty-eyed. Because by God, Bucky really hasn’t changed much from what he looked like in the 40’s. A little older, some more lines on his face maybe, but the smile is still the same, turned up at the corners, with a twinkle in his eye.

The one where Bucky plans out Valentine's Day for Steve.

Kingdom Come by hitlikehammers 8,216

“It’s too late, Steve,” Bucky’s voice across the comm is flat, layered with static. “The deadlock’s irreversible. S’the only way.”

Steve knows what nearly dying feels like; knows it better than most, and this—those words, that voice, this impossible burning that courses through him like the serum in reverse, this.

This is so much worse than nearly.

pro patria mori by hitlikehammers 4,109

The words are sandpaper, all grit and metal: poison in his mouth, in his veins.

"I’m not who I used to be, Stevie."

Bucky thinks it's only him who's changed.

He's wrong.

https://www.diigo.com/user/ohmypreciousgirl?page=9&query="%23steve+x+bucky"

[plurdledgabbleblotchits]

“An impression has been left behind that Wodehouse’s talks (not that anyone remembers what he said in them) showed him up not merely as a traitor but as an ideological sympathizer with Fascism. Even at the time several letters to the press claimed that ‘Fascist tendencies’ could be detected in his books, and the charge has been repeated since. I shall try to analyse the mental atmosphere of those books in a moment, but it is important to realise that the events of 1941 do not convict Wodehouse of anything worse than stupidity. The really interesting question is how and why he could be so stupid. When Flannery met Wodehouse (released, but still under guard) at the Adlon Hotel in June 1941, he saw at once that he was dealing with a political innocent, and when preparing him for their broadcast interview he had to warn him against making some exceedingly unfortunate remarks, one of which was by implication slightly anti-Russian. As it was, the phrase ‘whether England wins or not’ did get through. Soon after the interview Wodehouse told him that he was also going to broadcast on the Nazi radio, apparently not realising that this action had any special significance.”

“As I have tried to show, his moral outlook has remained that of a public-school boy, and according to the public-school code.... But how could he fail to grasp that what he did would be a big propaganda score for the Germans and would bring down a torrent of disapproval on his own head? To answer this one must take two things into consideration. First, Wodehouse’s complete lack – so far as one can judge from his printed works – of political awareness. It is nonsense to talk of ‘Fascist tendencies’ in his books. There are no post-1918 tendencies at all.”

“The other thing one must remember is that Wodehouse happened to be taken prisoner at just the moment when the war reached its desperate phase. We forget these things now, but until that time feelings about the war had been noticeably tepid. There was hardly any fighting, the Chamberlain Government was unpopular, eminent publicists were hinting that we should make a compromise peace as quickly as possible, trade union and Labour-Party branches all over the country were passing anti-war resolutions. Afterwards, of course, things changed. The army was with difficulty extricated from Dunkirk, France collapsed, Britain was alone, the bombs rained on London, Goebbels announced that Britain was to be ‘reduced to degradation and poverty’. By the middle of 1941 the British people knew what they were up against and feelings against the enemy were far fiercer than before. But Wodehouse had spent the intervening year in internment, and his captors seem to have treated him reasonably well. He had missed the turning-point of the war, and in 1941 he was still reacting in terms of 1939. He was not alone in this. On several occasions about this time the Germans brought captured British soldiers to the microphone, and some of them made remarks at least as tactless as Wodehouse’s. They attracted no attention, however.”

“ ...one of the most noticeable things about Wodehouse is his lack of development. Books like The Gold Bat and Tales of St. Austin’s, written in the opening years of this century, already have the familiar atmosphere. How much of a formula the writing of his later books had become one can see from the fact that he continued to write stories of English life although throughout the sixteen years before his internment he was living at Hollywood and Le Touquet.”

“In his radio interview, Wodehouse wondered whether ‘the kind of people and the kind of England I write about will live after the war’, not realizing that they were ghosts already. ‘He was still living in the period about which he wrote,’ says Flannery, meaning, probably, the nineteen-twenties. But the period was really the Edwardian age, and Bertie Wooster, if he ever existed, was killed round about 1915.”

“Wodehouse made an ideal whipping-boy. For it was generally felt that the rich were treacherous, and Wodehouse – as ‘Cassandra’ vigorously pointed out in his broadcast – was a rich man. But he was the kind of rich man who could be attacked with impunity and without risking any damage to the structure of society.... Wodehouse’s indiscretion gave a good propaganda opening. It was a chance to ‘expose’ a wealthy parasite without drawing attention to any of the parasites who really mattered.”

“I have striven to show how the wretched Wodehouse – just because success and expatriation had allowed him to remain mentally in the Edwardian age – became the corpus vile in a propaganda experiment, and I suggest that it is now time to regard the incident as closed.”

George Orwell

[newfrontierseries]

#CROPT Post 1: Hands-On (September 12, 2020)

A confession: Neopets is the only reason I have a job. I feel like I’m exactly the right age to have grown up spending countless hours blinking at the Neopets interface, willing myself to understand just what was meant by a long block of HTML. If you’re like me, you remember graduating to Xanga, then MySpace layouts, then the big show: building your own website. I wonder often whatever happened to the pages I designed on Microsoft FrontPage fifteen years ago or the Blogger or Tumblr sites I was so excited to “launch.” I have to believe that they’re all still out there somewhere, locked away to me by chains of broken passwords I swore I’d never forget. In so many ways, that’s where CROPT begins, too. 

CROPT asks us to think about what’s inside and behind the infrastructures we take for granted, the systems we use to make ourselves into something else. This post is about part of that infrastructure: the internet. We couldn’t be making CROPT right now, of course, without the internet -- without the thousands of blinking data centers around the world that draw energy and resources and labor to support our Zoom connections, our Tumblr blog, our Google Docs and iMessages and FaceTimes and the countless other tools we use to make creative work.

But what happens when we see the things we’re not supposed to see? What happens when we want to see what data centers and cloud computing demand of land?

In April 2015, Google released a short video introducing a new platform for cloud computing. Set against soaring instrumental pop music, the advertisement showcases several Google employees — nearly all white men — extolling the technical excellence of Google Actual Cloud, “the world’s first cloud offering running on servers in the troposphere, inside actual clouds.” Google Actual Cloud appears as just that: actual white clouds of data floating above crowds of rapturous onlookers. As a throng of awed Googlers assembles under the shadow of Google Actual Cloud, one of the only two speaking women in the video adds that, “I just love that I can see it.”

Of course, Google Actual Cloud is an exceptionally well-branded April Fool’s Day joke, but I’m interested to think about why and how it is so effective. Even as multinational tech corporations like Google engage in concerted public efforts to visibilize the cloud through art projects and splashy employment advertisements, there is still a need for interventions that address the felt effects of  our hyper-reliance on the internet,. I think the woman in the video has a point when she says that she loves that she can see “it.”

GOOGLE BOOKS CRPOT invites us to think about the risks we take when we want to see the violence visited on human bodies in service of the technical infrastructure we take for granted. One site for that kind of seeing is Google Books. Announced in 2004, Google Books is the massive digitization project that made 20 million of books available online. That digitization was done by humans contract workers, bodies that Google attempted to render invisible.

Andrew Norman Wilson, a 2007 Google employee, was shocked when he first realized the cohort of mostly Black and Latinx workers clad in yellow badges he would see each afternoon were actually Google Books digitizers along the fringes of the complex. He writes that his interest began to consume him:

I mined all the information about the yellow badges that I could from Google’s intranet, which led me to the internal name for the team—ScanOps. This class of workers, who left the building much like the industrial proletariat of a bygone era, actually performed the Fordist labor of digitization for Google Books—“scanning” printed matter from the area’s university libraries page by page […] I found some vague meeting notes […] about how they would be excluded from all standard privileges like cafes, bikes, shuttles, and even access to other buildings. […] Why did it seem so secretive?

Norman Wilson’s later project, “Workers Leaving the GooglePlex” attempts to capture the striation and unevenness of Google workers’ status using surveillance camera footage and narration.

Google Books digitization workers’ bodies do appear materially in the content of many Google Books online scans. The Art of Google Books collects images of the many Google Books scans that include errors, including scans that feature the hands of Google Books workers. These images are captivating, in large part because they represent an intimacy with the ScanOps workers that by Google’s own design was impossible. Vulnerable to the occupational hazard of repetitive assembly-line style labor, bodies refuse erasure in the Google Books corpus, and the unpredictability of those traces renders Google’s lack of commitment to workers legible.

From The Art of Google Books, a scan of Red Feather: A Comic Opera in Two Acts that features the ScanOps team member’s hands.

GOOGLE ARTS A recent effort on Google’s part to make internet infrastructure both visible and beautiful has been the 2016 Data Center Mural Project. A promotional video depicts several artists creating large-scale murals on the exterior of data centers, with one artist defining his mission as “[making] something joyful and colorful and try to make people happy.” According to the video’s prefatory material, the murals are meant to make data centers, and in turn internet infrastructures and involved labor visible to a broader public. The narration explains that in Google’s large global data center campuses, “the people and  machinery work 24/7 to make things run faster, safer and more efficiently. So much goes in to running the internet inside these buildings, we decided it was time to reflect that on the outside.” It is unclear whether such a project’s focus on aesthetics of technological infrastructure does indeed transfer the same positive affect to citizens, observers, or other laborers; but it does call to mind Norman Wilson’s surveillance videos of ScanOps exiting a Google complex. Are workers like the ScanOps team meant to feel joy at the beauty superimposed on infrastructure meant to occlude their very presence? What does that mean for us as users?

[frankkjonestx]

What the 1960s civil rights protests can teach us about fighting racism today

Day after day, protests have arisen in cities across America. The outrage was sparked by video of a white police officer kneeling on the neck of George Floyd, even as the 46-year-old black man begged for breath. Floyd was arrested May 25 for allegedly trying to buy cigarettes with a counterfeit $20 bill and died after being pinned to the ground for eight minutes and 46 seconds by the Minneapolis officer’s knee.

That spark easily found both fresh and long-simmering fuel. Among recent events, white men killed a black jogger, a white woman called the police on a black birder in New York’s Central Park (SN: 6/4/20) and the pandemic has taken a disproportionate toll on black people (SN: 4/10/20). Those events underscore centuries of racism that has limited black people’s access to housing, health services, education and jobs.

The anger, anguish and calls for racial justice that first boiled over in Minneapolis quickly spread coast to coast. While many protests have been peaceful, some have turned violent — instigated sometimes by looters, sometimes by individuals among the protesters and sometimes by law enforcement using force to disperse crowds.

Whether these protests will help dismantle systemic racial inequities in the United States remains to be seen. But some lessons and parallels can be drawn from the civil rights protests in the 1960s, says Princeton University political scientist Omar Wasow. His research shows that the media covered civil rights protests in the ’60s in different ways depending on whether protestors were peaceful or violent. And that coverage shaped public opinion and behavior at the ballot box.

When protestors remained peaceful, particularly in the face of aggression and violence, the resulting images shocked a complacent nation into action. But when the protestors themselves turned violent, even in self-defense, the media message shifted from a framing around civil rights to one around the need for control, Wasow finds. For example, Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination on April 4, 1968, triggered a week of violent protests around the country. Those protests helped Republican candidate Richard Nixon, campaigning on law and order, prevail over Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey, lead author of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, in the November presidential election, Wasow reports May 21 in the American Political Science Review.

Princeton University political scientist Omar Wasow’s recent research on civil rights protests in the 1960s suggests that nonviolent protest, especially in the face of aggression, is the best tactic for advancing protesters’ cause.Willi Wong

“An ‘eye for an eye’ in response to violent repression may be moral, but this research suggests it may not be strategic,” he writes.  

Science News talked with Wasow about his findings and how they apply to the current protests. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

SN: What was your big question about the protests of the 1960s?

Wasow: A large body of political science finds marginal groups have no influence. I wanted to see if protesters actually influence politics. I found that protests could be very influential through their effect on media. If you think about it, almost nobody directly observes a protest. The way a protest reaches us is through the news. That coverage varied if the protest was violent or nonviolent. A nonviolent protest [that made the news] predicted a front-page headline the next day that mentioned civil rights. When protests escalated to violence, that predicted a front-page headline with a word like “riot.”

So a protest influenced media coverage and that coverage influenced public opinion, or how people responded to survey questions such as: What is the most important problem in America today?

As protest activity mobilizes, the percentage of Americans who say civil rights is the most important problem in America increases. When protests turn violent, public opinion shifts to concerns about crime and riots.

SN: How did you evaluate the link between violent versus nonviolent protest and later voting?

Wasow: In the early part of the 1960s, most civil rights protests used nonviolent tactics even when met with police violence. Those events were followed [later in the decade] by a wave of protests that often escalated to protester-initiated violence, peaking when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in April 1968.[That coincides with] a big shift in public opinion. In the early part of the 1960s, survey respondents say the most important problem in America is civil rights. But in the late 1960s, we see a spike in concern for crime and riots. That’s a puzzle. Are those shifts at all associated with protest activities on the ground?

In political science, voting is a really important outcome, so that’s what I looked at. The basic framework is we have a county and it is “treated” or “not treated” by a protest. A county is [considered] treated if there is a protest within 100 miles and within two years of an election. I looked at two conditions. Under one, I compared counties treated with nonviolent protests to counties that experienced no nonviolent protests. In the other, I compared counties treated to violent protests to those with no violent protests. I wanted to know: Do the treated counties vote differently than the not treated counties?

In the primary models, I estimate the effect of protests on voting across the 1964, 1968 and 1972 presidential elections. These models compare each county to itself over time. In addition, to try and make better “apples to apples” comparisons, I also used a method called matching that only compares counties with and without protests that are very similar on variables such as percent black or percent foreign born. Another thing I looked at are counties that are 90 percent white. I find that counties close to nonviolent protest between 1960 and 1972 see increased Democratic vote share. Conversely, counties close to violent protest vote more for the Republican Party. That’s likely because, following the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Democrats tend to be seen as the party of civil rights and Republicans as the party of law and order.

On March 7, 1965, protestors marched from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., to draw attention to black voting rights. Historical records show that the activists knew police might retaliate, but hoped that images juxtaposing peaceful protestors against violent police might shock the nation. Soon after this photo was taken, police teargassed and beat the protestors. That event and others helped precipitate passage of the Voting Rights Act.Spider Martin/National Archives photo/Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0)

SN: Could something besides protests have influenced those election results? 

Wasow: If we had godlike powers, we could randomly assign which counties to treat with violent or nonviolent protests and then see what happens in the November vote. Obviously we can’t do that, but we can look for possible natural experiments. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in April 1968 sparked many violent protests across the country, so I could compare what happens when counties did or did not experience violent protests.

What I do here, which builds on work by some economists, is use rainfall as something that might predict protest activity. There’s a lot of work that shows protest activity is sensitive to weather. More rainfall equals less likelihood of protest activity. Less rainfall equals more likelihood of protest activity.

Counties that experienced less rainfall were much more likely than those with more rainfall to experience protests following Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. So there’s two steps in the process: rainfall’s effect on protest and protests’ effect on voting. If rainfall can predict voting, the only plausible path is through protest activity. There’s not another plausible explanation.

I also conducted a placebo test. That’s because rainfall is associated with geography, and geography is also associated with voting behavior. So I asked: Does rainfall before Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated influence voting in November? That’s a placebo, like a sugar pill, because we shouldn’t expect it to have any effect. I find that rainfall before King’s assassination does not predict voting in November. I also look in the last two weeks of that April after most violent protests ended. And again, the rainfall in that period doesn’t predict voting in November. It’s not just rainfall in April. It’s rainfall in one week of April that predicts voting in November. That allows me to say it’s not just geography, it’s not just the South is rainier. I make the case that experiencing a violent protest caused people to vote for order in November.  

SN: What role do journalists play in shaping the narrative around protests?

Wasow: I scanned thousands of newspaper pages and created a corpus of articles about protests and then asked: If a protest had been categorized as nonviolent, what sorts of words are commonly used? And similarly, if a protest had been categorized as violent, what are some of the most common words?

Nonviolent protests seem to be covered as if they were traditional attempts to redress grievances, seek rights. So the words we see are “civil rights,” “demonstration,” “march,” words that suggest this is a legitimate claim for rights. When there were violent protests, the words that were commonly used were things like “riot” and police.”

The key idea here is people are protesting because they’re angry about some injustice, but the kinds of tactics employed will focus the media’s attention on that injustice or, in some cases, shift the focus away from that injustice. That’s why tactics matter so much. The approach tells the media what to pay attention to and by telling the media what to pay attention to, protestors are telling the country what to pay attention to. This finding was revelatory for me. I didn’t start out thinking this was a study of media.

SN: Do those findings apply to today, given the media has changed a lot since the ’60s? 

Wasow: Media are much more fragmented than they were in the 1960s. Everybody has their own unique media feed. That’s going to mean that following the news may be a more siloed experience, where some people are very focused on activist violence while other people will be much more focused on police violence. Depending on which channel you watch, depending on who your friends are on social media, you may be getting very different narratives.

To be clear, that’s not entirely different from the ’60s. Most of the Southern media was pro-segregation, and media outside of the South tolerated Jim Crow and was not interested in the concerns of black people. The idea that there might be two different visions of what’s happening was not so unlike a black press that covered the concerns of black people and a white press that was indifferent or even hostile to those concerns.

SN: What kind of impact could violent protests have on the 2020 election?  

Wasow: It’s hard for people to appreciate that there’s a set of voters who are open to concerns about racial equality, but it’s not their top priority. They also are very concerned about order. Think of somebody who might be an Obama-turned-Trump voter. In the ’60s, there were people who supported the Democratic candidate after the passage of the Civil Rights Act [in July 1964]. But they joined the law and order coalition after the period between 1964 and 1968 when there was a lot more violent protest. These voters are influential because they move between parties and because they are in swing states.

On the one hand, some whites today have become much more concerned about racial equality and center their conversation on the underlying injustice against George Floyd. But it might also be possible that more whites move toward the law and order coalition and support Trump. I think it’s too early to tell.

SN: Recently, newspapers have run images of the police taking a knee in solidarity with protestors. How do you think such imagery affects media attention?

Wasow: My model suggests that peaceful events don’t usually get as much press because they are less dramatic. But I had to simplify the model [for this study]. A slightly more complicated version of the model is that violence is just one way of creating drama. Seeing police behave in a counter-stereotypic way is dramatic. And consistent with my theory, nonviolent protest can be effective if it’s able to do something that captures the attention of the media. Violence is one way of creating spectacle, but it’s not the only way.

SN: Critics have said your study puts too much responsibility on protestors. What do you think?

Wasow: What’s important is the causal story I’m trying to tell. A story that says “this is all about white moderates” deprives the protesters of their agency. I want to begin the story with, despite overwhelming odds, this subordinate group at the margins of society has power. And the question is: How can they use that power to advance their interests most effectively?

SN: What is your advice to today’s protesters?

Wasow: There are two kinds of deep narratives in which we talk about protests: a rights-, or justice-, framed story or a crime story. That was true in the ’60s and that’s true now.

In the 1960s, leaders of the civil rights movement were incredibly focused on how to get their message out to the whole country and used protest as a means to gain influence. What they found was that large, peaceful demonstrations without conflict didn’t interest the press. A New York Times reporter covering a march in Mississippi said something along the lines of “no blood, no guts, no glory.” The key idea is that nonviolence was often not enough to generate the kind of attention that was necessary to create a national crisis.

To create a sense of crisis, it became necessary to engage in this very strategic kind of nonviolent protest, which was for protestors to become the object of state violence. Activists picked places like Birmingham and Selma because there were these police chiefs with a hair trigger for violence who would engage in brutal repression in front of cameras. That would shock the conscience of these otherwise indifferent or even hostile actors outside the South. It changed public opinion.

If you’re an activist on the ground thinking about and angry about this injustice against George Floyd and a long history of police violence in this country against African Americans, if you want to put that at the center of the national conversation, it’s important to be thinking about this: Is what we are doing on the ground elevating the justice frame or elevating the riots frame?

from Tips By Frank https://www.sciencenews.org/article/what-1960s-civil-rights-protests-teach-fighting-racism-today

[galacticbugman]

My Nature Vest

A few years back my late grandmother got me a nature vest for Christmas one year. I wanted one to hold all of my nature gear when I went out on hikes and to show off the places I have gone. It has turned out to be one of my most cherished items that I wear on my outings. I wear it not only as a reminder of my grandmother but as a conversation starter. I must say it has turned many heads. Now these photos I have to show are older but all my patches have been added that I got back on the winter trek to the coast and all around Texas. I started to collect patches for it back when I got it. I wanted to have it like a billboard for all the cool places I have been. Every time I go out to a new place that has a gift shop I am always looking for patches. I have a lot so far but I am going back out to Colorado soon so I am going to be looking for some great keepsakes and patches on this next exciting adventure here in a couple of weeks. 

Here is the front left side of the vest. The top very top patch is one that I got my first time out to the Fort Worth Nature Center and Refuge a place I didn’t know I would be volunteering for at the time. This is one of the coolest patches for it is a place that I volunteer at and often visit to do some nature hikes. It is also the place where I did the Texas Master Naturalist training class. People often get this thing mixed up for a boy scout thing but I am quick to correct them. I was never in the scouts even though it is popular belief that I was among my friends. I do lead scout hikes and things when I am volunteering but I am not a boy scout. No I am just an wildlife fanatic and a naturalist. The next patch I want to point out is the Caldwell Zoo Patch. That is by far one of my favorite Zoos here in Texas. I had this patch for years and finally put it on something so it wouldn’t be collecting dust. I love this one because of the many fond memories of that Zoo when I was a child up to adulthood. That place is so amazing; I love going out there from time to time even though I don’t visit many zoos anymore. I spend a lot of time out in nature. The Star one is for an historical area known as Washington on the Brazos; I went out there during my horrific time in junior high. I say horrific because I was not very appreciated and was constantly bullied and made fun of by a lot of people who didn’t understand me at all. I got this patch when I was doing a project with places that had historical markers. I took a bunch of weekend trips to get pictures of me in front of historical markers. This place is kind of cool for it was where the Declaration of Texas was signed. They have a lot there on site even a small living farm with people who tell how life back in the 1800s was. I don’t just have nature areas on this vest but some areas of Texas cultural importance. The last one on this section was an old Cave badge I got from who knows where. I was really young so I don’t remember where I got this one but it is on my vest because I love caves and caving. I don’t go to a lot of caves but there are some really neat ones I like to go to. I am going to see if there are any good caves in Colorado to visit that will be very fun. 

The next side will be the right side of my vest: 

I have a ton of patches on the back; if you are familiar with my blog posts you may remember my trip to the coast. The top middle then the middle row’s first and third patches are my most recent ones from my whirlwind trip across Texas last winter. Here in Texas we have a bunch of cool areas to visit. the ones shown here are all from Texas. The first one is from a beautiful place called Ink’s Lake which is really close to a favorite place of called Enchanted Rock. Hill Country Texas is full of granite and a lot of it. Ink’s Lake and more importantly the formation known as Devil’s Waterhole is right in a valley of Granite. I saw my first Earless Lizard right in that valley and also saw some cool plants and things. I even saw my first Black-throated Sparrow and my first Ladder-backed Woodpecker at this park. The one after the Waco Mammoth Site is from Texas’ only National Seashore in Padre Island. It is one of my favorite place to go birding in the early morning. I also went to one of their famous Sea Turtle Releases there for their Kemp Ridley Sea Turtles. That place is so cool there are birds of plenty and I went there over the course of my winter trek to the coast last winter right before Christmas. The next patch I want to draw your attention is the middle patch. This one is from the USS Lexington Museum by the Bay in Corpus Christi. I have a deep respect for history and WWII History has always interested us. We had a few veterans in our family line and we really respect the sacrifices the military men and women make each day to keep our country safe. I for one may be a naturalist but the way I see it you can’t be a naturalist without knowing a little history. It all goes hand in hand. I have said it many times; learn nature and you history because some times your natural areas have a rich history behind them. It is not boring it is really good to know what went on in history to edify you and to not make the same mistakes again. I love boats and ships and ship wrecks have always been of interest to me. This cool museum is a must for a trip to the Texas Coast. It maybe a little cramped in places but this place has it all. You can explore most decks of the ship and learn about the design and the history of the USS Lexington which was originally supposed to be called the USS Cabot but when the first Lexington went down in the battle of the Coral Sea this ship became it successor and was given the nickname of the “Blue Ghost”. This is just one of my favorite places and it is a big part of the coast life near the JFK Cause way for it is a facet in the bay’s architecture and landscape now. 

Now for three bottom ones; I didn’t go over the three from Waco Mammoth, Aransas National Monument, or the Inner Space Caverns for I already have a blog post about how I obtained those. The next one I wanted to talk about is the one with the Pelicans. That one is from the John Bunker Sands wetland Center. I went there for the first time back in 2016. It was during the time I was just starting to get really serious about birding. There was a birding festival and fun walk which was part of the 5th Anniversary celebration. It is not open all the time and they say a lot of the best birding spots are now closed off from the public so I have not been out there since but it was a really cool area. They have a nesting pair of Bald Eagles out there who have an amazing story to their nest. The place is so cool and many birds gather there year after year to feed and stop over on their migration routes during the winter and spring. The next patch is the green one across from the previous one. That was obtained when I went to Colorado Bend State Park. One of the most beautiful areas to visit in Texas in my book. This place has a really nice trail called Gorman Falls. It is a fairly easy trail until you get to the end of it. There are a bunch of slippery rocks and things and is kind of hard to navigate but they have support ropes to help ease you up and down. I still have yet to get back and go on the other trails but it is so neat to explore there. I got a bunch of neat cactus and some really nice bird photos there. The last one on my vest’s back as of now is the Dogwood Canyon Audubon Center patch. It has turned into one of my favorite parks; I have volunteered out there a couple of time and I am going again in a few weeks for an Orchid Walk on June 22nd. It is a nice place with a huge hill and in some areas you can get a nice view of Joe Pool Lake. Ahhh... this place is such a pretty place. I saw my first Brown Recluse Spider here and many other Arachnids and insects on my last Moth night out there. Such fun memories do these patches conjure up with good friends and good family moments. Each one is more than just a piece of fabric stitched on a vest; it is a reminder to me of some of the best wild lands of Texas and the world. Some are even reminders of hard work and achievement as you will see now. 

The first one I want to share with you is the patch that stands for what I am in the naturalist community. I got this Texas Master Naturalist patch when I graduated from the State Class of 2016 for the Cross Timbers Eco Region. This was the most proudest moment of my life to date. Being a Texas Master Naturalist may sound daunting but we are known as Masters not for us personally but for we uphold the lessons of the naturalists who came before us and continue their practices. It is very meaningful to be part of this group for in it I have found my voice to speak about nature and I help kids and the rest of community learn about animals and the environment and to make that connection and inspire future generations to care about our planet and to give back to their communities. This is something that I will always remember till the day I die. This is how I became the naturalist I am today. We are hard working volunteers who help make communities have a strong connection with nature. It is an honor to be working with some of the top minds and people in the naturalist field. It is nice to be among them and be one of them. The patch above this one is the one I got out in Arkansas at Pinnacle Mountain State Park. This place is not only a great place to look for wildlife but the river system that runs through it was the water way of the Trail of Tears. This place was also the place where I went on my very first night hike to look for owls and creatures of the night. I found my very first Eastern Hercules Beetle there which was really neat. But there is another patch here that is of both a memorable place and an achievement.

 Here is the last patch on my vest that I have so far. This one was when I became a Junior Park Ranger for the Garden of the Gods area. This place is one of the coolest places to go in Colorado. It was also a popular meeting place for when we would meet my aunt after she got out of class when we were there. We are all from Texas but my aunt teaches and takes classes out of state sometimes so on the week of my thirteenth year of live we went up there and did a lot there. It was a nice trip and I remember it like it was yesterday. I had to add this one for it is a nice patch and reminds me of one of my favorite achievements in life to better understand an area. Becoming a Junior Park Ranger is nothing to sneeze at. It is a great way for your kids to learn and explore nature and history. It is a nice way to learn and you receive really neat patches and swag sometimes. It is a really neat program that the National Parks and State Parks Service have to get kids fired up about their favorite parks. I for one think that the Garden of the Gods area is one of the most beautiful places I have ever been to. The big sandstone monuments are so beautiful and if you go look up and you might actually see two kissing camels sitting on top of one of the huge columns. They are not real camels but the way that nature made the rock it looks like two camels kissing. Naturalist get creative with some of their formations. So there you have it all the patches I have from my travels across Texas, Arkansas, and Colorado. I will be going to Colorado very soon and I have a feeling I will be buying some more cool patches from some new areas. I will be making a blog post all about the adventure to Colorado in a few weeks time. We won’t leave until the end of June or so but there is much to plan for there is a lot to see in that wonderful state. So until we meet again; I am Zachary Chapman AKA Galactic_Bug_Man and I will see you on the trail!