#i don’t want into an analysis with a pre determined conclusion or trying to find details that support my existing beliefs about a character

[aemiron-main]

“you’re looking too far into things, the characters aren’t that complex!!” lmao ok so the show where the whole point of it is to “look behind the curtain,” and where “you’ve been seeing this story unfold the whole time,” and where even the most minuscule details end up foreshadowing things is meant to NOT be analyzed and people are imagining the complexity?

like I’m not expecting season 5 to have a flashback montage of every moment that mike’s struggled with his sexuality and blatantly scream the words “INTERNALIZED HOMOPHOBIA” or a montage of every moment of mike’s depression and for them to tell it to us point blank “Mike Wheeler is struggling with his mental health”.

I don’t expect this because in typical ST fashion, they’ve SHOWN us these things, they know we’re not stupid and that we don’t need every detail handed to us on a silver platter because when you have ✨media literacy✨ you can connect the dots! and sure people may have different conclusions about those dots, that’s part of analysis! They don’t need to tell us because they have already shown us. Do you think that the set designers just do things for shits and giggles?? Because they were in a silly goofy mood??? Or do you think it’s because set design is an intricate art form and is used to convey things about characters that aren’t always said out loud? Do you think that cinematographers just set up shots completely randomly?

I don’t expect them to tell us all of this point blank, but I think the idea that the duffers and the production creating complex, multi-layered characters is less likely than them creating simple ones and just taking the ‘simplest route’ and that people are looking too far into it is absolutely ridiculous.

Even if Mike never said the word gay or depression in season 5, I feel strongly that analysis regarding his sexuality and mental health still stands because it’s based in what we’ve seen in the show so far, people aren’t just pulling this out of a hat, and it does bother me when people treat genuine analysis as if it’s just headcanoning for fun with no basis in the show. (I LOVE headcanoning for fun, don’t get me wrong, it’s great and valid but it’s different than analysis). Even if people come to different conclusions with their analysis, it’s still analysis.

Will has never said the word “gay”, but we knew he was gay before the duffers or noah confirmed it. because of analysis and media literacy. the same tactics that we use to determine other things about the show.

Even if you disagree with an analysis I think it’s absurd to invalidate it based on what might happen in season 5- because our current analysis is rooted in what we HAVE seen, even if we NEVER got another season of st, the beauty of media literacy is being able the analyze and draw conclusions based on what we DO see. Like the idea that people are simply imagining the complexity of characters or the narrative and that an absolutely massive, detailed show like ST is always taking the simplest route is ridiculous imo, even if you disagree with an analysis, to act as if people are just imagining things and not acknowledging the work that goes into analysis AND the work that goes into the SHOW is frustrating.

This isn’t an indirect or a response to any sort of criticism of any of my analysis because I’m always more than happy to go over that and have back and forth with people about it in a peaceful way and there’s not even any of that criticism of my own stuff happening that I’ve noticed rn. What this IS about is something I’ve noticed over the past few month in regards to my own analysis + others’ analysis where it’s dismissed because “it’s not that deep, you’re projecting and imagining things” instead of countering it with any other analysis or even trying to debunk the analysis. Like do you think that the show just does things like set design choices and cinematography choices and writing choices and spending money for funsies? That they just close their eyes and throw the items onto the set, put the actors into a blindfold, spin them around like they’re playing pin the tail on the donkey and then just let them say whatever they want into the camera? Like sure that’s hyperbole, but still, that’s what it feels like people believe sometimes when they’re so quick to dismiss things with “it’s not that deep, you’re imagining things.” And to be clear this also isn’t about people saying “well maybe it was a production error” because that’s also analysis! That’s a completely valid criticism and part of analysis is figuring out the likelihood of something being intentional or being an accident + then demonstrating whether or not you can prove it was intentional or if your theory was wrong! And I have no problem with people disagreeing with my analysis or even with people thinking that I’m looking too far into it, really: I have a problem with dismissing peoples’ analysis as having no basis and being projection/just a headcanon and ignoring and not even addressing the elements of the show that made someone come to that conclusion + why you disagree with the conclusion based on what we see in the show.

Even if you disagree about what those details mean, I find it frustrating and dismissive to act as if they’re not there + that they don’t mean anything and that people are imagining things. Like that’s the same rhetoric that the GA says about byler. Again, you are under NO obligation to agree with every analysis, god knows I don’t, and conflicting analysis will always exist and that’s fine, but I also don’t just dismiss peoples’ analysis as them “looking too deep into it and projecting or imagining complexity that has no basis,” I try my best tos we where they’re coming from and figure out what parts of the show have led them to that conclusion and why I either agree or disagree about what those parts of the show indicate.

[feralphoenix]

a thing that i really love about hollow knight is that part of its incredibly strict Show Don’t Tell policy means it works a lot in juxtapositions. comparisons and parallels.

like, rather than Telling us what makes for a good and responsible ruler, we get to know about various different heads of state in the various nations of the crater, and we can observe how they handled international relations, public policy, etc and the consequences/effects of their choices, and draw conclusions by ourselves.

there are lots of different parent-child relationships, and sibling relationships, so that we have many examples to compare ghost and their family to.

there are also a number of higher beings around and you can compare them to each other to understand their different approaches to godhood, how they handled being the center of a culture & the responsibilities that entails (radi, unn, tpk) or the ways they sidestepped those roles (white lady, grimm). in addition to forming our opinions of these characters this also contextualizes what ghost does when they attain godhood in the godseeker endings & after the delicate flower variant, in godseeker mode.

like you can use these points of reference for a lot of different analysis topics!!! but one of the things that always Gets Me In My Emotions is the direct juxtaposition between herrah, radiance, and tpk and how differently these three characters handle the cost of fighting Existential Crisis.

the pale king’s policy is officially No Cost Too Great, but just like the hunter says in hollow’s bestiary entry, for tpk “cost” was a thing for other people to pay, and he was not willing to risk any sort of harm to his own person. his plan to deal with the infection involved sacrificing the dreamers & the hollow knight, and his plan to create a hollow knight involved birthing hundreds of thousands of children who were designed to be expendable - they were there so he could experiment on them, select a candidate, cull the failures, and then sacrifice said candidate.

the worst tpk might have experienced through all this is emotional turmoil, and it’s left ambiguous in-game whether he was actually conflicted about the child sacrifice/felt attachment to hollow or whether his personal low point throughout all this was being butthurt about his wife walking out rather than birth a second batch of vessels for the slaughter. (he must’ve been pretty darn butthurt to have lied to the kingdom that the white lady was dead.)

as soon as his plan failed and he had no other recourse, tpk fled rather than expose himself to any potential harm. he was willing to - perhaps desperate enough to - expend any number of chess pieces if it would save hallownest, but his own life and safety was NEVER on the table.

just like tpk, radiance is trying to protect herself and her people. just like tpk and herrah, she too is willing to go to any lengths necessary to get the settlers to fucking step off, give her children back, and leave her alone.

for her this entails being willing to bend her own principles - i’ve talked about this in depth before so you can find all that in my essay tag if you’re interested, but in-game evidence points to radiance having been a pacifist like the rest of her tribe pre-hallownest. and the infection is a curse that’s only sometimes fatal, but it causes extreme amounts of harm and fear and chaos to inflicted parties. and this level of harm is something she’s willing to do just to threaten/pressure tpk into backing down.

her method also causes a large amount of collateral damage (including lateral harm to other indigenous bugs!), suggesting that she either doesn’t have the emotional wherewithal to worry about who might get hurt, or just plain doesn’t care. if you squint, it’s possible to make the argument that radiance might have warned unn before her counterattack against hallownest, but even then forewarning was the only mitigation she was able and willing to provide. if this is what it takes to protect herself and her tribe, then so be it.

so, compared to tpk, who chose to actively sacrifice the lives of individuals to protect the institution of hallownest, and radiance, who doesn’t care about splash damage to bystanders as long as she can save her tribe... what i find extraordinary about herrah is that when she determined that sacrifice was necessary to protect deepnest, she took all that sacrifice upon herself.

most obviously herrah accepts the role of dreamer in hopes of ending the plague, sacrificing her life. in order to keep tpk from taking advantage of that to conquer deepnest, she also negotiates that he has to provide her with an heir, thus ensuring deepnest’s sovereignty... but this means she has to have sex with the very creature who has been trying to commit genocide against the spiders for generations. she has to let her lifelong worst enemy who she’s been fighting alone since the death of her husband impregnate her. this decision had to have come with some form of emotional distress for her, and yet herrah shoulders it and soldiers through it.

and then even through this, it’s implied in the white lady and midwife’s dialogue (+ posed in the dev notes/style guide) that tpk snatched up hornet when she was a child to raise her in the white palace. it’s unclear whether he did this to keep hornet as a hostage to make sure herrah couldn’t renege on their treaty now she’d got what she wanted out of the bargain, to ensure his offspring would be raised in the culture he created rather than in deepnest, which he clearly believed to be barbaric and uncivilized, or both.

yet instead of calling bullshit and flouncing on the deal or trying to steal hornet back, thereby exposing deepnest to the threat of both the infection And aggression from hallownest once more, herrah stuck with it. midwife says that herrah paid dearly for her involvement with this plan, but herrah valued deepnest’s survival over her own individual life, and saw it through to the end no matter how tpk’s plan caused her to suffer or hurt her dignity.

there’s an incredible amount of nobility and integrity herrah shows here. she refuses to let any harm come to her country, and insists that any and all sacrifice required of her as a leader be her sole responsibility. her courage, her political intelligence, and her strength of character as a leader are all nothing short of awe-inspiring.

at the same time, there is still a downside to herrah’s spirit of self-sacrifice. as anyone who’s ever watched steven universe can tell you, self-sacrifice is actually kind of a shitty solution to one’s problems because self-destruction hurts the people who love you.

we get glimpses of hornet’s intense emotional torment over her mother’s fate and her understanding that it’s necessary to let ghost murder herrah to change the status quo; similarly we can understand the crushing amount of personal responsibility hornet feels towards the whole crater comes from knowing the cost of her own birth, and having front row seats to her parents’ political power struggle.

we hear from herrah herself that everything she does is done for hornet, so hornet’s pain is probably the last thing herrah would have wanted, but ironically what hornet goes through in hollow knight is a direct consequence of herrah choosing to martyr herself.

anyway all of this speaks SO much for herrah and radi and tpk’s individual priorities and problem-solving strategies and also their blind spots... plus, there’s a lot about herrah’s character that goes underappreciated and this is one of those unsung aspects. fandom... fandom blease be SAD about SPIDER MAMA with me

[ruby-whistler]

There are three types of misinterpretation of c!Dream in my opinion; and by that I mean anyone's take ever, whether it's a c!Dream anti or a c!Dream apologist or a c!Dream enthusiast. That's right, I'm making an essay about how in my mind everyone is wrong. This is how I lead debates please don't unfollow me-

1. misunderstanding or overdramatizing evidence

c!Dream apologists; g-guys. I'm not saying he isn't traumatized, but look. I really used to believe he was just everyone's victim and hurt and mentally unstable, and I'm not saying he isn't at all, but I changed my mind because I feel like the evidence doesn't,, point that way at all. Your emotions are valid, but your takes are very removed from what the rest of the fandom thinks because you take little hints and try to make them into some big angsty point within canon.

The evidence we have proves he is more ruthless than anything; even the content creator says that. He doesn't say why he does progressively more ruthless things, and he does say it's for his ideals and out of good intentions, but he doesn't say anything about him being hurt into doing it.

I'm not saying he isn't hurt. But making analysis of an entire character based on something that is barely supported by canon isn't the way I roll and I feel like it's one of the reason why people assume all c!Dream apologist are going to woobify the character,, because some of them really do that.

I don't mind portraying him as hurt by what's happened in canon, because that is a completely safe conclusion, but jumping to the victim side of the scale seems a little bit like painting a completely different picture than what actual canon says. (Note: talking about pre-Pandora c!Dream here.)

There is tragedy in someone being driven by the environment, circumstances and themselves deeper and deeper into corruption, but it feels like by only considering that the entire character is limited to one side of the argument.

I like to also see the side of him that will hurt people because he thinks he has to, because he wants to succeed above all, the side that will ruthlessly murder and manipulate and be calculative and clever and even self-destructive about it because he believes that'll get him towards his ultimately selfless goal.

That's my morally complex bastard.

A lot of people seem to be mistaking or ignoring that for the sake of saying he is just... hurt and that that is an explanation of his actions, and even though they don't use it as an excuse, it feels a little cheap.

And here we come to the core of the problem: an emotional vs. rational explanation for the character's actions.

Because the thing is, with enough evidence, you will see that nearly (we'll get to that in a bit) everything he does can be explained rationally. Everything is connected, everything is the most logical and efficient and merciless route straight from point A to point B, because c!Dream is fascinatingly smart when you look deeper into it.

He knows what he's doing. He knows his actions are awful, and he doesn't care - not because he would be some evil person, but because his mindsets cause him to justify such things, and mindsets are more complicated than feelings.

There is a lot to explore in that direction of the character, but that is material for another essay.

In short, people seem to enjoy removing all of his agency in favor of explaining his actions emotionally rather than from a rational standpoint which results in inaccurate analysis.

Do I think it is completely understandable he attacked L'Manberg?

Absolutely.

Do I think c!Wilbur painted him as a villain to benefit his own power?

Yes.

Do I think he utilized the villain persona as an intimidation tactic and often went overkill with no regard for anything but accomplishing his goals and that he slowly became more and more willing to do bad things of his own accord because he became determined and distrusting of the world to the point of committing horrible actions?

100%.

Analysing that part of the character is the most interesting part, when you consider it - and an important one as well.

2. ignoring evidence

c!Dream antis; please. Stop saying he doesn't care or explaining his actions with obsession or assigning him personality traits or motives that he literally doesn't have in order to demonize him I beg of you.

It's so many basic and easily debunkable assumptions that can be explained with what we actually know of his motives. People will ignore both canon and the authors' words to paint him as some monster with no nuance, which he is not.

We only know so much about him, but people will ignore and deny even the little bit we have for the sake of making him the literal personification of evil and erasing the fact that he is a complex and human character. Just accept he can be accurately analysed beyond hate and let people do it if you don't want to do so yourself.

3. assuming the evidence we have is everything you need to determine a final approach and that nothing outside of the presented evidence exists when certain details prove otherwise

c!Dream enthusiasts; this was the only and biggest problem I've had since being introduced to much more rational interpretations of the character - which is emotions, and one of the biggest reasons why c!Dream gets dehumanized in the first place; the fact that we have little to no showcase or explanation of them in canon.

You see, c!Dream is a reserved character. He likes withholding his plans, withholding his feelings and information from the world.

However, since all we can really get out of watching his actions alone is the rational side (and that is deliberate by both the writer and the character, narratively and personality-wise) people slowly begin to assume there is no emotional side to his actions at all.

Which I find,, untrue. Between the people who erase the rational side of the character and those who erase the emotional side, there is little middle ground, but I don't really find either of them right either.

Because neither would be an accurate representation; just because he doesn't actively showcase his feelings doesn't mean he doesn't have them, and the few inconsistencies that are too small a detail for us to put everything together show that he does have an inner emotional world beyond what we see.

The character does work beyond what we know, and expecting that everything can be explained purely by rationality because that's all we see of him seems a little bit jumping the gun.

It leads to a less person-like view of a character who in reality simply doesn't like showing people the way he feels, and I don't really find that fair to him. It is best to accept there are things we can't say for sure, or to say an emotional interpretation can also be valid at times.

It is both important not to deny him agency and not to deny him the ability to be genuinely hurt by others or changed by his environment.

Both of these can coexist, especially in

the correct interpretation

Ok this is a joke.

I have literally no idea. I'm just throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks - he confuses me beyond belief. The only person who knows about both the emotional and rational side of the character enough to have their interpretation unquestioned is cc!Dream - but when we do try to find answers, it is important for us as well that we do not ignore any aspects or possible aspects of the character, because that is the only way to get useful results out of our analysis.

Sorry this was crit of basically every take about the character I have ever seen but I needed to get my thoughts out.

[ayankun]

I s2g I was being a good little nerd and trying to get my excellent sleep on, but then traitor brain served up hsmtmts analysis so here it is. I will not be held accountable for the turbulence in the presentation of the following trains of thought

I've been gnawing inarticulately on why Jack was so compelling as a potential love interest for Gina even though Portwell was simmering happily on the slow burner. (Yikes you guys, that ep only aired like 48 hours ago, I feel like I've been thinking about it for way longer than that yo)

Like, for SURE Portwell is endgame, and what with how charmingly that arc has been paced this season, I guess I was a little surprised at first that Jack as a character was seemingly introduced to throw all that solid groundwork out the window. Because of the context of Gina's lack of clarity over the EJ situation, as well as the opportunity to pass the time with someone who obviously had something to offer her in that scenario, I felt that the narrative was earnestly telling us that Jack had a shot.

And the idea that Jack also earnestly thought he had a shot is still so,,,,,

(Unrelated: I've almost decided to re-rewatch S1, but I'm not sure if the earnest:zany ratio being utterly flipped from what it is this season will be prohibitively off-putting. ☹)

But then it turns out, Gina has standards! Articulated standards. As cute and compelling and situationally-appropriate as Jack is, he's not a person she can commit to any further than she already has. She's able to look past the "wow, looks great on paper!" instant connection that they've made, and recognize that the connection is fundamentally opportunistic, ultimately not capable of surviving beyond its inciting circumstances.

Which is such a cool revelation for her to express, this no-frills internalized cognizance of her needs, because the whole S1 Ricky thing was exactly Jack. A cute and compelling and situationally-appropriate diversion with a ticking clock hanging over its head. She had needed that grounding connection back then, as had Ricky, but it was always doomed to be this temporary thing because he was still hung up on someone else.

She hadn't known that fully at the time, though, thinking that her leaving Salt Lake was the artificial cut off to whatever was going on between them, and that under different circumstances, she wouldn't have given up on it. But know she just knows, intrinsically, that right-place-right-time connections don't have to be pursued on principle, or just because they were really really nice to have in that place-time. She's ready to start forging connections that aren't hung entirely on situational need and won't expire at a pre-determined moment.

And the best part is, the romantic type of connection we're discussing here is just one she's going to add to the connections she already has! She has a home, metaphorically and literally, with Ashlyn; she has her People in Carlos and the other theatre kids -- and these were both connections she's tried to artificially sever due to how the Ricky situation has been affecting her. She just needs to keep being told that she doesn't have to fly away from everything she's built at East High, that she can seek and find and maintain real relationships, that she doesn't need to settle for those opportunistic, time-locked flings. Her concept of what she wanted from Ricky needs to be recalibrated, so she can see it as a good thing for what it was, let it go, and then continue to focus on the kind of relationships that will actually meet her needs.

Love also that even though Jack was expressing a kind of echo to Gina's S1 "never gonna give you up" vibes, she doesn't give into it. There's something really beautiful that's being said here, which I'm interpreting as, "you can fall in love (be mutually emotionally available during a high school musical production and/or have a cute and compelling and situationally-appropriate evening in an airport) with someone, but not having anything more than that does not negate the beautiful and worthwhile thing you had while it lasted." Not every meaningful encounter is an endgame origin story, and that's okay! Oh my GOD teens and every person needs to hear this!!!!!

In conclusion, this season Gina is not Sharpay but Gabriella. Likewise, EJ is not Gaston but the Beast. Mr. Federle you didn't think I would notice but I did!!!!!

[nierly-amazing]

NieR: Theatrical Orchestra 12020--Automata dramatic reading transcript

Alt title: THEY LOVE EACH OTHER SO FUCKING MUCH IT HURTS

Art and transcript provided by @shirl_geem on twitter! Follow her, her art’s great!

NieR:Theatrical Orchestra 12020

NieR:Automata

Investigative Operation Overview

New machine-lifeform signatures detected in a previously neutralized enemy base. Said base is a large-scale facility located in the Pacific Ocean.

Communication from the squad stationed there was ceased, making the situation impossible to ascertain. Satellite photography is also impossible due to the base's location on the sea floor.

The Council of Humanity is making preparations to retake the base, but understands it may be a trap created with a new type of enemy weapon.

For this reason, the Council of Humanity has decided to send a small team as an advance scout force.

The task of investigating the base and ascertaining the safety of its personnel has been assigned to YoRHa units 2B and 9S.

--Operation Name: Uranus

Advance Force Registered:

YoRHa units 2B and 9S

Specifications:

Modified flight units (underwater-use)

Close-combat assault armor

Type-3 swords, pressure-resistant suits, anti-icing coating

12 modified canaries, salvageable backup memory storage, reactive barriers

--Escort Unit Details:

Lead escort duties to be carried out by Hunter units K1 and K2

K1 unit overview: 8 flight units, 1 transport unit

K2 unit overview: 4 flight units, 1 Hummingbird aircraft carrier

Defensive radius: From 8,000 meters above the objective to the ocean's surface.

--Status of the Target Area:

Depth: 1,200 meters

Water temperature: 3 degrees centigrade

Machine lifeform energy: 3,200 units

Estimated machine lifeform count: 32 individuals

Communication status: Unknown

--Supplementary Information:

Target is 32 km north of the hostile submerged facility that was destroyed on August 13th. According to the deep-sea patrol unit, there is no relation between that facility and the target.

However, as there remains the possibility of attack by escaped machine lifeforms or rogue androids, all information pertaining to Operation Atlantis is to be disclosed beforehand.

Time to Arrival at Objective: *10 second timer appears on the screen*

This operation has been placed under direct control of the Council of Humanity. Any recording or other archival action is strictly forbidden.

-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-

2B: So this is the machine lifeforms' advance base...

9S (narrating): The base we infiltrated was an expansive underground space with countless, intertwining support pillars.

2B: Temperatures are low... Pod, scan the periphery.

Pod 042: No machine lifeforms detected. No signals found on sensors or canary system.

2B: Is that... a dead android? Pod!

Pod 042: Affiliation unknown. Possibly a member of the unit stationed here. Fusion reactor non-functional. Heat analysis indicates it was destroyed more than 48 hours ago. No external wounding detected.

2B: No external wounding? Could it have been an EMP blast?

Pod 042: Negative. No characteristics of EMP damage detected in circuits.

9S (narrating): As we looked around, we found more androids strewn across the room like a child's forgotten toys.

2B: What on earth happened here...?

9S (narrating): The machine lifeforms that supposedly destroyed these units were nowhere to be found. All that remained was a chill, an eerie silence, and an android mass grave.

2B: Access the Bunker database.

Pod 042: Negative. Bunker communication is not possible.

2B: Keep scanning the periphery and let me know if you find any irregularities.

Pod 042: Affirmative.

9S (narrating): It was a gloomy place, untouched by the sun. The ceiling was a mass of cables tangled around interlocking steel. It was like being inside some kind of massive creature...

-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-

Record Archivist: Pod 153

Analysis: Stationed friendly squad consisted of 36 individuals. Only eight individuals were confirmed in the target area.

Hypotheses for the other 28 individuals: Abduction. Predation. Desertion. Rebellion.

Proposal: Commence preparations for close combat.

Record Archivist: Pod 153

Analysis: Target base consists of four strata

Current location: First stratum

Area: 32,000 square meters

Temperature: 2 degrees centigrade

Humidity: 88%

Scans indicate a high probability that this area is a hangar for machine lifeforms.

Record Archivist: Pod 153

Alert: Examination of target's first stratum complete. Cause of androids' cease in function remains unclear. There is a high probability that neglecting to investigate this factor may cause impediments to the main force that follows us.

Proposal: Investigate the target's second stratum.

Alert: Target's second stratum reached.

Alert: Android bodily fluids detected on nearby wall. The residual shape appears to form sequences of letters.

Hypothesis: They are warning messages left by androids while still alive.

Analysis: The messages are as follows:

"The Bunker will fall"

"Destroy Command"

"Run"

"They must be killed"

"Help" "Help" "Help"

"Help"

Hypothesis: Thought circuitry of corresponding androids underwent some manner of attack.

Analysis: There exists a weapon in the base that can cause a logic infection.

Proposal: Hack the central cortex of the base.

Alert: Enemy thought center reached.

Analysis: Protection of YoRHa unit 9S is top priority.

Alert: Deploying virtual canary.

Proposal: Encrypt channels to long-term memory areas.

Proposal: Increase speed of thought-analysis region.

Alert: Central memory space located. 82 hostile defense layers and 1,343 attack-type security systems detected.

Alert: Virus employed by enemy defense layers. Executing sustained vaccine deployment.

Commencing Assault

Analysis: Defensive layers of central memory space infiltrated.

Data recovery and decoding complete.

Initializing visualization and extraction of records.

Visualization: 20%

Visualization: 40%

Visualization: 80%

Visualization complete.

Extracting...

Stratagem Information 111029E

Analysis of intercepted communications from the human army over a period of time has yielded the following data:

The majority of cargo bound for the human server on the moon consists of empty containers camouflaged as supplies.

Specific sequence patterns have been identified in video communications from the Council of Humanity.

Stratagem Information 111029E

Multiple models of supposition have been created based on the results of the above analysis.

Of these, the most probably conclusions are as follows:

The existence of the Council of Humanity is a pretense.

Humans are already extinct.

-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-

9S: The Council of Humanity on the moon... So mankind... doesn't exist? No, this is a trap. The enemy is trying to make us second-guess ourselves. Pod, use laser measuring to reveal the structure of the enemy base.

Pod 153: Affirmative.

9S: 2B, I think there's a good chance this base is some kind of tra... 2B? Huh? Where'd she go?

Pod 153: Analysis complete. Displaying base structure.

9S: First we should figure out where 2B... Wait, this base is weird. There's one massive core at the center with a network of pathways for energy conveyance. It's almost like it's one big machine lifeform...

Pod 153: Alert: High-frequency vibrations detected in lower levels.

9S: High fre-- Agh!

2B (narrating): As 9S's vision fades out, a mysterious sound grows around him. crunch... Crunch... CRUNCH... The sound gets louder every time.

9S turns toward the sound to see an android's corpse.

A dark shadow sits atop it, its hands clamped around the android's thin, white neck.

9S: No...

2B (narrating): The shadow is 9S, and the corpse he's strangling-- with its slender fingers, black eye covering, all-too-familiar dress, and white hair-- is none other than...

9S: 2B...

2B (narrating): The sight playing out before 9S was one of his own twisted desires.

9S's deepest desires are laid bare. He wanted to kill her. Destroy her. Mutilate her.

9S: No! That's not true! I don't want that at all! Wait, I get it... It's the infection. This is what the enemy's infection does.

2B (narrating): Using thoughts of denial as an opening, the curse spreads. He knew. He was aware she was trying to kill him. He concealed. He hid away his intimate, innermost desires. And there, in the never-ending spiral of massacre... filled with false hopes and prayers... was the pleasure of despair.

9S (screams and cries): Please stop... 2B, I... I...

-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-

Record Archivist: Pod 153 Alert: Vital signs declining for YoRHa unit 9S.

Alert: Reverse-hacking by enemy machine lifeform detected.

Alert: Defect detected in memory area.

Alert: Shifting to consciousness-protection mode.

Analysis: Increase in offensive enemy activity confirmed.

Analysis: Maintaining consciousness-defense form is impossible.

Due to the instability of YoRHa unit 9S's consciousness, executing the recommended counterattack is impossible.

Report: The decisions that follow constitute unauthorized support.

Declaration: Commencing rescue of YoRHa unit 9S.

-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-

"January 30, 11,942 (4:25 AM) YoRHa unit 9S enters service.

Analysis: This pod initiated recording of pre-determined monitoring subjects 9S and 2B.

Analysis: In the midst of collecting great volumes of data, this Pod ascertained that 9S is repeatedly destroyed by 2B.

Analysis: These acts were not delineated in any Project YoRHa implementation plans this Pod was informed of.

Analysis: Intervention in above acts is impossible for this Pod, as they are delineated processes for the core program of Project YoRHa.

However, this unit, in its continued recording of the activities of YoRHa unit 9S through a repeated cycle of combat and death, ultimately gained a sort of knowledge.

It is an internal command akin to emotion, far beyond any support assignment. The closest human analog would be the feeling called "maternity."

As such, reporting unit Pod 153 will abandon self-defense protocols and shift to launching an offensive against the enemy.

...I am glad to have met you, YoRHa unit 9S.

Farewell."

-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-

9S: Ugh... Okay... I set the trap in the central system, and the camouflage repair on the enemy barrier is complete.

Pod 153 (narrating): The remains of Pod 153-- its circuits thoroughly fried- lie at his feet.

9S: My pod... saved me, huh?

Pod 153 (narrating): 9S hears a sound. He looks up to see 2B standing before him with a calm expression.

9S: Oh, 2B! Glad you're safe. I was just putting a logic virus in the enemy's central--

Pod 153 (narrating): 9S realizes something.

2B: Say, 9S...

Pod 153 (narrating): Her eye covering is gone.

2B: It's cold here, so...

Pod 153 (narrating): She holds a weapon in her hand.

2B: I want you to warm me.

Pod 153 (narrating): And her eyes... are crimson.

9S: She's infected!?

Pod 153 (narrating): Her white blade crashes down on 9S with the swiftness of lightning. 9S blocks the blow with his scabbard.

9S: Damn it! How could this happen?

2B: YoRHa's existence in this world has no meaning.

9S: Requesting access to 2B's motor system! Administer emergency vaccine!

Pod 153 (narrating): His request is denied. 2B swings her sword again, continuing her frenzied dance.

2B: We must stop the tragedy that recurs without end in this meaningless world.

9S: 2B, stop!

2B: Tell me, 9S...

Pod 153 (narrating): With the smallest of openings, 2B's blade finds its mark.

2B: Wouldn't it be wonderful to fade away together?

Pod 153 (narrating): The blade cuts into 9S's armor. A bright red message appears in 9S's vision:

Proposal: Destroy YoRHa unit 2B.

9S: I could never do that!

Pod 153 (narrating): 2B's sword swiftly pierces through the left side of 9S's chest. 2B's blood-red eyes draw close to his face. With defeat so close, 9S plays his final gambit... He places his right hand on 2B's cheek.

9S: ...Commencing hack.

Analysis: Commencing salvage of 2B's consciousness data from the infected area.

"The memories I have left aren't all bad. Wind rolling through ruins. Light flickering on water. The sound of swaying trees. I cherish everything we saw together. This isn't a curse. I... decided to be with her. I made a choice."

2B's infection had spread to the deepest portions of her memory unit. It's a troublesome virus-- and an elegant trap.

For if the infected section is removed, the individual becomes unable to maintain a consciousness.

As 2B's consciousness grows more infected, 9S readies his final, desperate plan.

...It was the only way she could be saved.

9S: Hey, 2B? The time we spent together holds eternal value for me. Heh. I'm serious, you know. I'm swapping your infected area with my memory storage.

"In a sea of collapsing emotions, I saw 2B's light. Even if I've lost everything, I have no regrets. Because I chose to live... for her sake."

--Texts on the screen appear--

9S: You're 2B, right? 9S: My name's 9S. I'm here to provide support.

2B: 9S... the time I was able to spend with you... 2B: It was like memories of pure light... 2B: Thank you... Nine...s.

-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-

2B: ...Gya!

Pod 153: YoRHa unit 2B activation verified. Good morning, 2B.

2B: Pod... Where's 9S!?

9S: Nnngh...

2B: 9S! Are you all right?

9S: 2B... I'm glad you're okay.

2B: We're withdrawing. Pod, administer emergency maintenance to 9S and tell the Bunker--

9S: No. I can't go back. If the infection spreads, I may end up attacking you.

2B: Stop talking nonsense, 9S!

9S: Commencing... self-reformatting...

2B: Stop!

--2B and Pod 153 at the same time as their voices start fading away.--

2B: Please! Please don't die on me! I'm the one who should die! What's the point of my staying in this world? Please don't save me, 9S...

Pod 153: Alert: Infection critical in YoRHa unit 9S. Sensor signals lost. Black box defensive standby-mode activation failed. Temperature rising. Proposal: Cool body and cerebral unit immediately.

9S: Auditory sensors... down.

My temperature regulators are at their limit...

It's so quiet...

So this is how it all ends...

It's sad that I'll lose everything, but...

the curse of my sins will disappear as well...

The time I spent with 2B was precious to me.

There isn't a single detail I don't remember.

...Heh. I bet I sound so stupid right now.

You know... I'd really like to...

go back there with you again... 2B...

2B: Our prayers were never heard.

9S: Our future was closed off.

2B: Despite it all, the fact we'd fought together...

9S: ...was a miracle that shined brightly.

9S: You were always with me...

--9S and 2B at the same time.--

2B: Thank you, Nines.

9S: Thank you, 2B.

[junipershill17]

twelve Things You Should Consider When Acquiring Your First Condo

1) Analysis the Builder:

Not all building contractors are alike. Many create high quality condos and have some sort of track record of success, while others slice corners and build substandard condos. Aside from reviewing the general contractors webpage, one should also carry out an internet search for watchdog studies, lawsuits and discussion boards to get proposed and existing accommodations. One thing to look out with regard to is whether the builder who is project you are interested in, has a background for completing their assignments on time. I had a client who have purchased with a builder (who shall remain nameless in this particular article) that habitually forced back completion dates. Our client was promised typically the keys a little under 36 months after purchasing the unit, plus the builder delayed possession thrice from their original projected conclusion date. After many irritating delays, he final acquired the keys a whole a couple of and a half years after the authentic scheduled completion date. This specific tied his deposit funds up for an a total regarding 5. 5 years. It was almost considered like a 2 . 5 12 months interest free loan on the builder! In retrospect, as a possible investor, he would have loved to invest in another project from 15% deposit, then take other 10% and rescued another 5%, and put that money into one more project, returning him probably double the return, including 2 . 5 less yrs. This is why it pays to research often the builder!

2) Choose the form of condo that meets yourself:

Not all condos are likewise. Some have age constraints, and rules about animals. Other condos are more loved ones friendly in terms of the unit measurements and amenities. Still other folks cater to retiree's. A good way to decide this is have a look at the number of bachelor's, one, two and a few bedroom units in the complete building. You may also contact the house manager for the condominium to be able to verify whether it is a lifestyle condo catering to a certain demographic. People fewer two and several bedroom units will likely not appeal to large families. juniper hill

3) Identify financial status:

If you are a newbies buyer, getting pre-approved to get a mortgage is a must. Contact your loan company to determine your buying ability, and get a firm commitment page from them locking in the level, and approval amount. No-one wants to be left around the closing day without a mortgage loan approval after you already produced the purchase. I have acquired countless past clients that have been given what they thought has been an approval from their bank, exactly where in fact it was nothing more than a new verbal agreement. Some people have gotten credit issues in the past which could warrant a more difficult endorsement process, and possibly at a increased rate. It is always better to understand that you received a formal pre-approval before you fall in love with a home you can not afford.

4) Talk with local real estate agent:

Real estate agent's can give you statistics of which condominiums are appreciating well in Mississauga as well as the most popular unit sorts, and floor plans. This will likely help you to make a direct assessment between different condo properties in order to establish the true associated with the unit you are interested in. Don't merely settle for any real estate agent. Once more, not all real estate agents are the same. Make an effort to work with a local expert that are experts in the type of properties that curiosity you. After all, why can you work with a realtor that markets mainly full sized residences in the suburbs, when you are seeking purchase a condo in the metropolis? It is like going to the dental office for your flu!

5. Carry out your own research:

If you plan to get a home without a real estate agent, you ought to look into the sales of the adjacent area yourself. Again, these kinds of resources will be less obtainable to the general public, but you could have access to the asking rates of similar properties. That does not mean that those prices will be the market values for that certain property, or even necessarily whatever they sell for. Be careful while information gathering. I have experienced a number of past clients reward me after their hunt for educating them on location values, and explaining to these what to look for when they are searching. Why don't get the assistance of a regional expert, when they're providers are free?

6. Find out modification capability:

Although freehold qualities allow the owner to carry out restorations without anyone's consent, condo properties have restrictions on what may be altered for each unit. A standard rule of thumb should be to request composed permission from the property supervision before making any renovations. The house managers consent is always needed to various degrees depending on the residence. Usually renovation work that requires removing a wall or maybe upgrading bathtubs and baths will have limitations on what can easily, and cannot be done. Several require that a detailed reconstruction plan be submitted into the condo board for agreement prior to the renovation taking place. It will always be better to be proactive. An individual wouldn't want to reverse the actual reno back once it is completed! I had a client who all removed all the carpet inside their unit, to replace with wooden. She did this to boost the value of their unit before selling it, only to learn that management had to agree to any floor renovations. The lady tried to then sell the system thinking that hardwood wood raise the value of her unit. That did increase the value of your ex unit, but in failing to utilize and receive consent from your property manager, she was could possibly be renovation restrictions in the developing. It was later found that will she did not use the appropriate sound-proofing underpad beneath the hard wood. The condo corporation regarded that this would hinder the particular enjoyment of the unit owner immediately below hers because of sound. Consequently, she had to split out the hardwood, install fresh underpad, and then replace the wood. This ate into just about all her profit, and your girlfriend investment, and time was certainly not rewarded. The moral in the story is to always check into these renovations with the rental property manager before you begin. It could save you lots of money!

7) Ask for a disclosure statement:

The developer as well as builder of a new terme conseillé is required to have an information report giving details of the building, along with the legal terms under that this condominium will operate. The particular booklet is available immediately after typically the Agreement of Purchase along with Sale is signed. With resale units, this "Condo By Laws and Declarations" booklet is always made available through the 10 day conditional interval when you purchase a unit. It is placed on the status certificate that may be forwarded to your lawyer regarding review. Your lawyer and then has 2 business days and nights to review the certificate, in addition to consult the purchaser together with his/her findings. If almost everything checks out, the buyer may progress with the purchase. If there are usually red flags in the documents, often the purchaser always reserves it is your right walk away within the conditional time.

8. Ask for a site program:

It is important to know if the model that you want to purchase is in the 1st, second or third period of development so that you understand any future construction which could block your existing look at. Of equal significance will be knowing when, and everywhere more development may take place around this building. New improvement adjacent to the building will influence the use and enjoyment of your house due to noise, vibration, unpleasant construction, dust and nasty smells. It is also good practice to master where your unit will be inside proximity to the elevator, rubbish disposal room, and services, as units near these components usually have a stigma installed on them in the resale industry. Besides, who would want to scent the garbage room after a very long day at work.

9) Establish development plans for the associated with area:

Many condos can be purchased under the premise of a very clear view to the Lake, scenery, or green-space. To ensure that the lovely view will be maintained in the long term, an easy trip to the Planning Department will let you ask if any other innovations are planned nearby, and have a look at the architectural pictures. The planners should be able to assist you to understand the types of developments which can be proposed around you. I have got many calls from people that bought privately through the creator units with south landscapes of the lake as an investment property. These investors would hold the unit until they obtain the keys, and the building subscribes as a condominium corporation. At this time, they would try to resell it, only to be shocked which a new condominium just commenced construction in front of they're system, obstructing their perfect to the south view. The investors blunder was being too excited during the buy process, without taking a take a step back and asking the right concerns up front.

10) Review service details:

If the developer provides a swimming pool, it is important to really know what size and whether it is inside or outdoor. The same is true of party rooms, exercise locations, gyms, sports fields, doctor offices and lockers. Find out how huge, how many, and where will have them located.

Again, these 12 considerations can affect both your entertainment, and the resale value of your current condo. It is always better to research before you buy upfront, and then enjoy the returns of your hard work once you have shifted in!

References Apartment

[melete-the-melodious-diva]

Alright, time to dump my thoughts here about RWBY Volume 6!

Definitely my favorite Volume so far. The first one where Team RWBY is back together in the new artstyle, and they all look gorgeous. The animation this time around looked wonderful, and it helped the story tremendously to have more access to different models and expressions for the characters so the story could be more show and less tell.  The general consensus seems to say this volume was amazing at the beginning, and then faded into decent in the last five episodes. I’d actually pinpoint the problem at the last episode, but I will say the Cordovin “arc” was poorly paced and did not help with the character development at all. This arc entirely existed so we could get a Shadow of the Colussus fight, and that’s an issue when the arc takes up a precious four episodes of time to introduce and complete.  That said, I’m going to try and separate this into different arcs and espouse the merits/demerits of each

1- Train 6/10

 Cool fight scene, nice to see QRWBY fighting together. Also did well by introducing Maria as crazy but with common sense, and sowing more seeds of doubt about Ozpin.

2-Ozpin Backstory Arc 10/10

This is my favorite arc in the show and one of the best done in the entire show. And I’m not saying that because of the lore dump, that’s nebulous.  So the episode where Ozpin actually loses his cool and the lamp was done amazingly well. Even when losing his composure, Ozpin is very quick to try and focus on the task at hand and be pragmatic about this situation. Not to mention, Yang’s constant prodding is very unwarranted and it shows how Raven’s seeds of doubts mixed with Yang’s temper have brought out the worst in her. Oscar, for as little screen time as he gets in this series, also has one of his biggest defining character moments by willfully defying Ozpin and airing his thoughts to everyone else. Oscar hasn’t had much character establishment. We know he’s not exactly fond of Ozpin just because of the current situation, but he’s not overtly antagonistic either. However, he was having none of Ozpin’s shit the moment Ozpin willfully continued to lie to Ruby. So the actually backstory. Holy shit. Not only does it humanize Ozpin and make it clear that this guy does not have all the answers, but it also gives far more complexity to our main villain. You’re not meant to sympathize with her now, but you understand how Salem became a vindictive witch of the Grimm. She’s been warped by centuries of grief and a lack of self-determination, all compounded when Ozpin tears away her happy ending from her when he tries to steal their children away. Also, now the story finally has a freaking endgame! This backstory helps contextualize the journey of our heroes and what they’re doing. It wasn’t outwardly spoken, but the message was clear from Ozpin’s actions. Humanity is fucked if the gods come back to judge it. Our heroes don’t have to be opposed to Salem’s ideals or plans(whatever those are), it’s just that her methodology of gathering the four relics will kill everything because humanity doesn’t have its shit together. I will admit that Jinn’s genie nature and the obvious specificity of the “Can I kill Salem?” were a bit too on the nose, but hopefully the series won’t string out that plot line for more than a volume.

3- The Apathy Arc 8/10

Goddamn if there was ever a time for RWBY to do a horror arc, it chose the literal best setting and time to do so. Ozpin is gone, everyone is in shock and feeling betrayed (especially Qrow and Yang), and a blizzard is fast coming. Everyone knew immediately that something was wrong just based on the muted colors of the house and the Ruby’s mention of how everything is abandoned rather than destroyed. The dead bodies in the beds were chilling and one of the most graphic things this show’s ever done. From there, the viewer immediately is screaming “GET OUT OF THERE”, but the cast legitimately has no other place to go unless they want to brave a blizzard. Maria was a very welcome addition to the cast, and this arc really let her shine as a dry-witted voice of reason. Allowing her eccentricity to reveal the true nature of Bartleby’s farm was done very well and nothing about her exposition or behavior felt forced here.  Qrow’s alcoholism getting worse was a very interesting character analysis because we see how much Ruby hates this, but she can’t bring herself to reprimand him. It also shows how much his broken trust in Oz has affected him, which is a wonderful lead-in from the previous arc. When the cast is affected by the apathy, it is one of the best examples of tone through visuals and voice acting that I have ever seen. Nothing is technically wrong, but things are very off. Their pupils are just a bit too big for comfort, their voices are a bit too dry and emotionless. Yang’s suggestions make sense for her emotional state after Ozpin’s betrayal, but it seems irresponsible to throw their responsibilities away for someone else to find. The actual Apathy fight itself is a nice horror movie conclusion, with no actual jumpscares, but terrifying imagery, all ending with Blake simply accepting death before we get Silver Eyes out of the situation and onto the next arc. Good conclusion by confirming that Yes Maria was a SEW as a lead in to her backstory and also in jumpstarting that plotline after ignoring it for two volumes.

3.5- Maria’s Backstory Won’t go into this much but all the character designs were gorgeous and it helps establish Maria very well and I love that Tock the Croc’s kill timer in universe was the exact same irl :D

4- Argus Pre Cordovin 5/10 (good score, means the show did as well as expected)

This arc was a good breathing point to compare to the intensity of the episodes up to this point. Terra and Saphron were adorable with their little baby and the cast’s reunion was sweet. Team JNR’s reaction to Ozpin was done really well. Jaune’s always been very prickly to Qrow about this mission, so it makes sense that he’d be super pissed about Oz lying about the mission and leaving. Nora and Ren’s anger was a nice addition. They weren’t ornaments to Jaune’s emotional breakdown, they were struggling with this information as well. Oscar’s disappearance was a dick move on behalf of the writers, because everything was set up for him to finally confront the nature of the person inside him and his eventual merge with that person. But they skim over this for a fakeout with a nice speech where Oscar just accepts the death of his personhood without resistance. This would have been not a dick move if the show’s creators didn’t leave us with a “Oscar has dissapeared” cliffhanger for two weeks. Jaune meeting Pyrrha’s mom and talking to Ren/Nora about his issues was wonderful and done super well. They really needed that discussion and I’m very glad the show finally had it.

5- Cordovin Arc 3/10

Haha little lady in a shoe with a napoleon complex. cool. why was this arc the finale fight? No seriously, the Leviathan didn’t get a fight, he just got a silver eye debuff that led to a one shot kill. Cordovin is the last fight in the series and it’s... underwhelming. Not that the animation or choreography is bad, that’s all gorgeous. But the story and characters screech to a grinding halt to focus on this fight for three episodes. No one is getting developed, The plot is just waffling so we can get a full 13 episodes before we move onto Atlas. This battle should have lasted one episode, and then have multiple episodes to focus on Silver Eyes and the leviathan. Hell, don’t even make a fight. Just have Team RWBY succeed at turning off the radar, at which a Leviathan grimm comes and starts destroying the city because no one anticipated it. Adam can still come and distract Blake/Yang from the fight, and QRWBYORNJM can have their big shadow of the colossus fight. Cordovin’s character is also woefully simplistic, which would be fine! If they didn’t give her a last minute redemption that felt horribly out of touch from the rest of her actions. It was a writer’s asspull to get everyone to Atlas, which I’m thankful that they didn’t stall on, but it could have been done so much better.

5.5 Adam Arc 9/10

God this arc was amazing. Adam’s character was never complex. His motivations were always clear, and his M.O. was rather run of the mill abuse perpetrator. Blake has a reason to sympathize with him, but he ultimately used her and made her feel worthless so he could feel more powerful. However, this arc is such a cathartic and important emotional moment for Blake and Yang. Yang finally faces the source of her trauma head on, and she’s scared. Adam has taken away a part of her before, and she’s not prepared to lose anything again. But Yang’s character hasn’t changed, she still reacts to problems with “punch IT” and Blake validating her strength and comforting her  was so good. Blake has gotten over Adam, as evidenced by her actions in Volume 5, but that doesn’t mean that the scars of what he’s done don’t still affect her. I’m unsure of it’s intentionally, but the scars that Adam leaves on Blake aren’t noticeable. They hurt, they cripple her, but the cuts are on her hip, a place that would usually be covered by her coat or her shirt. It’s a good meta textual reference of how abuse usually hurts people in ways that can’t be seen by others. Also, Adam’s face reveal was probably the best possible thing they could have done with Adam’s face. After so long of making him a monster with a grimm mask, we finally see the source of his anger,and the source of Blake’s symapthy. Branded right on the eye by the Schnee Dust company. Ouch. This is not a moment meant to make US sympathize with him, that flew out the window when it was revealed that he actively abused Blake before she left him. But this moment is an important reminder that Adam is not a Grimm. His brand of monstrosity isn’t as simple as a being of pure destruction, it’s much seedier and harder to catch until he’s already in a position to kill you. Yang and Blake’s duo stab through the heart with the broken remains of Gamboul shroud was one of the best moments in this entire series and I don’t have anything to say other than that I paused the video when it happened and just stared. Blake’s reaction after killing Adam is also perfect for her. She loved Adam. She definitely doesn’t anymore, but he still was able to get under her skin and remind her of everything she hated about herself. Which is why when Yang comforts her, they add that all important piece of dialogue about Yang knowing that Blake won’t break her promise. Yang isn’t putting herself in a position of power over Blake, she is comforting her as an equal that respects her and her strength. That, and the fact Adam and Yang’s semblances are near identical, goes really far to show how much healthier Yang and Blake’s relationship is than Blake and Adam’s.

6- The Leviathan/ Silver Eyes 3/10

Gonna jump around a bit but silver eyes were finally explained in this arc. As currently presented Silver eyes are... terrible. They cut all tension out of the story when the main threat of the series can be solved by happy thoughts and puppy dog tails. Salem just becomes a non-issue if all of her forces can be killed by Ruby thinking happy thoughts. I’m hoping that some sort of catch or consequence will come later. Like: Using the power of the Light diminishes your own light, and therefore would give Ruby more destructive impulses because she simply has fewer protective impulses to draw upon. Ruby doesn’t even get tired when using the dang things. As they currently stand, Silver eyes will cut the tension out of any Grimm encounter. In the post credits scene, we see Salem making her flying monkeys. Hooray, wicked witch of the west. Problem. Why should this have any meaning? Ruby can just kill all of those Grimm at once. This doesn’t negate every conflict in the series, there’s still the problem of the asshole humans/faunus, but the show’s main villain and her main method of attack are just nullified now. The one good thing about this is Maria’s confirmation that no one knows wtf silver eyes are. Qrow and Ozpin know about them, but Maria’s explnation strongly imply that no one actually knows how they work. Oz and Qrow likely just knew that Summer had the power to kill Grimm and just didn’t know how she did it. This makes the previous volume’s act of ignoring the things at least slightly more palatable.  So the Leviathan. Ruby’s conclusion to the Silver Eyes arc by activating them all on her own. This was mostly just a montage to redraw scenes from the show and get a Summer Rose face reveal. There wasn’t a story purpose, and the character purpose was very thin because we really don’t learn anything about Ruby here. We know she’s haunted by Penny and Pyrrha’s deaths. We know she enjoyed her time at Beacon and likes her teammates. We know she loves her mother and looks up to her. There’s nothing new presented here about her, she just has to go through a series recap to activate the eye death lasers.  Hate to end it on such a negative note, but I really do love this volume wholeheartedly, including the parts I rated low. Here’s to waiting until next October! haha.... expect fanart of Neo and Cinder by the by

[biomedgrid]

Biomed Grid | A Parkinson’s Disease Journey from Patient side view

Abstract

There are a lot of research papers about Parkinson’s disease from the medical point of view, this research paper is from the heart’s patient side view, there are aspects of Parkinson’s that only those living with it truly understand. This paper is based on a treasure from a personal experience into a Parkinson’s disease journey of Gordon Johns. Each degenerative neurological disease patient are real heroes, that fight every day with the evolution of their symptoms that struggle their life 24/7. We, as Biomedical researchers on degenerative neurological disease believe that observing the evolution from the symptoms and emotions progressions, and how they are handling by patients will help: researchers, doctors, others patients, caregivers and all people with human kindness to understand this terrible progressive disease that still doesn’t have cure. Testimonies like this, will point a more human way to find and develop new treatments that will help to deal with the disease for a better quality of life of Parkinson’s patients and find a way to slow down or stop the disease progression or find a cure in the near future for it. I add my sections for: analysis of this case from a Biomedical researcher perspective, Parkinson’s disease general acknowledges and conclusions to find ways to deal with this cruel disease.

Keywords: Parkinson’s Disease; Tremors, Movement Disorders; Postural Instability; Parkinsonism; Idiopathic Parkinson’s; Atypical Parkinsonism; Multiple System Atrophy

My Journey into an Obscure Neurological Disorder by Gordon Johns*

“I have no technical background in these diseases - no clinical training of any kind - but I’ve been told that detailed accounts of patient experiences can be helpful to the professionals in their study of these terrible diseases. I hope something about my case will be helpful to them”

Gordon Johns died on April 26, 2019.

Special thanks to Helena Keeley for send me this testimony treasure.

Figure 1

Introduction (By: Gordons Johns, February 20,2019)

My name is Gordon Johns. I am 83 years old and retired. I’ve been happily married to my wife, Carole, for 19 yrs. In February of 2013, I consulted a neurologist because of slowly increasing body weakness, nocturnal leg cramps, and episodes of forgetfulness. After performing a few tests, he gave me a diagnosis of Parkinson’s Disease. That diagnosis came into question with my second neurologist, when my symptoms, which had not matched any of the classic symptoms of Parkinson’s Disease to begin with, diverged even further from those classic symptoms. From then until now (2019), I consulted three more neurologists. They performed many tests and tried many medicines, but none of them led to a solid diagnosis.

Last October, my current neurologist concluded that I have “Multiple System Atrophy,” or MSA. There are two kinds of that disease; both are terminal. My kind is “MSA of the Parkinson’s type,” or “MSA-P” for short.

I would have preferred a disease that had fewer words in its name. . . and one that wasn’t terminal. Some of my symptoms have been very unusual over these years, especially the ones that got better and get worse independently of my medicine.

I’ve always been interested in the subtleties of my own thoughts and feelings, and I wanted to share the strange experiences I was having. At first, I planned to write the blog only for our friends and relatives, but after giving a few sample pages to therapists, technicians, and doctors, I became persuaded to make my blog known to professionals as well.

I have no technical background in these diseases - no clinical training of any kind - but I’ve been told that detailed accounts of patient experiences can be helpful to the professionals in their study of these terrible diseases. I hope something about my case will be helpful to them. If you find something in this blog that seems useful to you in a clinical sense, make sure that it is consistent with current scientific knowledge.

Thirty Seconds of Dementia

One afternoon in August 2017, I was home alone, thinking about something or other, and at some point, I wanted to know the numerical difference between eight and five. I don’t remember now why I needed that—maybe it was eight o’clock then and I was checking to see how many hours had passed since I took some medicine at five o’clock. It stunned me that the difference between eight and five wasn’t immediately obvious! How could I not know it? I was frightened. I’d had episodes of memory loss that my neurologist said were attributable partly to my disease and partly to the normal aging processes in an 82-year old brain—but nothing had been as extreme as this!

I was determined to get the answer to this trivial problem. I closed my eyes and closed my hand to make a fist. I counted up from five to eight, extending one finger for each advance. I thought I had made three counts, but, oddly, I wasn’t sure. I looked down at my hand. Yes, three fingers—so the answer to my problem was three!

But now, what was the problem? My memory of it had vanished! All I could recall was that I had two single-digit numbers to start with, and I needed to subtract one from the other to get the answer to. . . some question I had wanted the answer to.

Now, what were those two numbers again? I had forgotten them too. In just seconds!

I realized that this succession of memory failures was very bizarre, and I thought it would be important to recall it later if I could. In passing, I noted that I was reasoning very well, but my memory was faulty. I decided to review, mentally, all I could recall happening, and I did that several times, in hope of burning it into my enfeebled memory.

While doing that, I suddenly remembered the numbers eight and five! Good! I found a piece of paper and wrote a note to my future self:

8 – 5 = 3 what is this about?

I found that piece of paper later, and it helped me remember enough to tell you the little story above-a tale about the time my malfunctioning brain solved a forgotten problem to produce a useless answer.

Notes:

I don’t exactly have “dementia” and I don’t exactly have “Parkinson’s Disease” either—although the latter was my initial diagnosis five years ago. My episodes of extreme forgetfulness and confusion were exactly that: episodes. After each one, my mind returned to its previous state. The word dementia refers to a condition that is constantly worsening. Dementia doesn’t go off and on.

There is another factor, however. Brain images over the years have shown increasing vascular disease consistent with my age. Whatever the contribution of this to my behavior, it is constant, not intermittent.

Regarding the title of this post, “Thirty Seconds of Dementia,” thirty seconds is just a wild guess. I can’t know how long that episode really lasted, because other thoughts could have occupied my consciousness, and then never called to mind after that.

Learning to Walk in a New Way

Four years ago, a year after I’d been diagnosed with Parkinson’s, something strange happened with my legs—something I’d never experienced before.

I was standing by the table in our kitchen nook, looking down at my array of medicines. I turned to walk to my recliner in the family room, about 15 steps away. But something went wrong. I stopped walking. I don’t mean I decided to stop walking; rather I found myself standing still.

It was weird and definitely scary. What could have stopped me? I glanced down at my legs and feet. I had felt no resistance. What the hell is going on?

Quickly then, I stumbled the rest of the way to the recliner and flopped into it. I took a deep breath and tried to relax, but my mind was racing. Oh, God! Am I having a stroke? Am I getting some kind of paralysis in my legs?

Then it occurred to me: This might be a new symptom of my Parkinson’s. I’d never had any bradykinesia (resistance to body movements, also called “stiffness”) but I needed to check it out. I was able to lift each leg up off the chair easily, so my hip joints were fine. With each one I also flexed all the other joints—knees, ankles, toes. No stiffness, no discomfort of any kind. Stiffness is one of the cardinal symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, but here: all good!

I wanted to talk to Carole, my wife, but she was away on an errand. I could call her, but I decided to wait. No need to frighten her now. I had to try walking again. Gathering my courage, I stood up, intending to retrace my path from the chair back to the nook table. I took slow steps. Along the way I heard birds chirping. Carole had a clock in her office that makes bird sounds. . . and then I stumbled!

I had been watching my feet while I was walking, but when the chirping sounds distracted my thoughts, my walking stopped. Apparently, I had to pay continuous attention to my walking in order to keep it going...whereas it had been automatic all my life. I turned around and made my way back to the recliner, watching my feet all the way.

After I calmed down, I reflected on the whole walking thing. I thought about how, when we were children learning to walk, we first had to learn to take a single step, probably while mommy’s hand held us up. After that, to execute one step after the other, we had to think about every step we took. Our conscious intention caused special signals to be sent to our brain, which would then direct our muscles to lift one leg and move it forward, and then put that leg down again. We had to will every step we took.

I’m no expert in this area, but I was willing to make a few suppositions. As we pre-toddlers practiced doing this, our brain was building a set of detailed “motor commands” (muscle commands) to direct the muscles of one leg to execute one step. As we moved along, holding onto a couch or table, our brain refined its motor commands to make taking a step easier and faster. As we got more practice in single-stepping, that set of commands in our child’s brain finally combined to make an automatic system that enabled us to walk without conscious effort, except for the simple intention to begin walking. Perhaps because of my Parkinson’s, the automatic walking commands that my brain developed when I was little, are damaged.

Now as adults our automatic walking system probably follows these steps: take a step with one foot, take a step with the other foot, and then repeat. It’s like those shampoo instructions, “Lather, Rinse, Repeat,” except that in my motor commands, the repeat step was missing or damaged. My brain will execute each forward step, but I had to trigger each “repeat” myself.

Days went by, and I discovered that I didn’t have to watch my feet with each step, but I had at least to think about each step. It’s like thinking, “left… right… left… right…” but you don’t have to think the actual words.

had read nothing about this kind of experience in my Parkinson’s disease books. I thought that maybe all PD patients with walking problems had a similar transitional experience. Later similar limitations occurred with my hand movements and fine motor movement of the fingers. I was sure that for the rest of my life I would need to “monitor” these everyday motions this way.

It’s not as burdensome as it may sound. Suppose that you and I are walking along, chatting about something that requires some light concentration. If my walking required, say, 10% of my conscious attention (I have no idea what the real number would be), then I would still have 90% of my attention to devote to our discussion. That’s not a major loss. I don’t think either you or I would notice it affecting my thoughts or remarks.

Afterwards, walking took less and less attention as the weeks slipped by. Now it’s mostly liked the old normal. Occasionally I have to pay attention, but I notice this only a few times a day. I must attend to some arm and hand movements too. Overall, the whole thing turned out to be inconsequential. And, of course, I wasn’t frightened of it anymore.

Standing Still Without Falling

Many months after I found that I couldn’t walk right, I acquired another disability—I couldn’t stand right either.

When we stand still, and if our hands or body aren’t in contact with something secure, our body will occasionally tip slightly, at random, forward or backward from the vertical. This is natural. Our brain detects the problem and flexes our feet at the ankles as needed to bring us upright. Normally we’re not aware of this process. It happens unconsciously.

I am going to take a break here to describe something interesting. If you already know what “proprioception” is, you can skip the next couple of paragraphs. If you would close your eyes right now, you would still know the spatial configuration of your body. For example, you’d know where your arms and legs are. How would you know? You might think it’s because you remember the last place you put them. But this isn’t how you know—you know because you have a sense of “proprioception.”

All moving parts of your body send signals to the brain with information about their position and their motion. These signals, augmented by equilibrium information from your ears, enable your brain to maintain a “proprioceptive model” of your body. In the case where your body is standing but starting to tilt away from the vertical, your brain’s proprioceptive model detects that. When this is detected in the model, your brain activates a motor control sequence (I’m guessing about that term) and sends the appropriate motor control signals to your legs and feet to bring you upright.

As we stand, we’re not aware that our body tips forward and backward a little bit at various times, and the problem is corrected automatically.

It’s a great feature.

But it no longer works for me.

The change came many months after I found I could no longer walk without attending to each step. Standing at my bathroom basin, I suddenly felt myself falling backward. A quick backward step stopped my fall. We are all familiar with that when it happens because of a sudden gust of wind or a slight contact with someone in a crowd. But I was worried about a serious fall.

I went to the kitchen floor for good contact, barefoot, and gripped a counter for stability, and experimented. Sitting for a while, standing again, standing while reading a book aloud, standing while thinking about this file, or trying to think of nothing. It was all the same. The slight imbalance of my body when it occurred was either using a broken motor control sequence or not using any at all. My balance mechanisms in my brain and ears tell me inform me that I’m tipping, so I correct that by pressing toes down or pressing heels down.

And from that day until now, this has been the only way I can stand without support. It’s not a serious drain on energy but the repeated interruptions of my conscious thought process are annoying.

For long-term activities like brushing teeth or shaving I find it helpful to lean forward with my stomach against the edge of the counter. This contact holds me up without any action at the ankles, but then I get a pain in my lower back. Why? Because those muscles are the ones holding my body in the slightly bent position needed to stay in contact with the counter.

My Hand Forgets How to Brush My Teeth

One morning I discovered that I couldn’t brush my teeth. I had put a blob of toothpaste on the brush and put the brush in my mouth. And nothing happened!

I wanted to begin brushing but it just wasn’t happening. I felt surprise and fear. There was another feeling that was uncomfortable, but I didn’t identify it until days later: it was a sense of helplessness.

So, I was standing at the bathroom mirror looking at myself holding the brush that was against my teeth but not brushing any teeth. I reasoned—guess what? — that the motor control sequence in my brain for brushing teeth was no longer functioning. My conscious mind had transmitted the order to “do the tooth-brushing thing” to my brain, but the appropriate series of motor commands to my arm and hand were not being transmitted-as they had been all my life. Those motor command sequences had been damaged or eliminated by my disease.

I did finish brushing my teeth, but I had to think about (again, to will) each separate movement of the brush. I noticed that the standard back-and-forth wiggle was just one thing I had to do. I also had to decide when to stop and transfer the brush to the inside of the teeth, and switch between left, center, and right, to ensure that I had brushed every surface. Plus, pushing the bristles against my teeth was a lot of work, per my all-body weakness.

Since that day I’ve been consciously responsible for every brushing motion of my toothbrush. I hoped my brain might relearn and create a new motor control sequence from all the repetitions. I think this is what happens when a veteran with brain damage, or a stroke victim, is able to relearn to walk. But it didn’t work with my tooth brushing.

I suspected that my disease might not enable this relearning because I had seen a similar failure before, in the kitchen. One day I found that Carole had rearranged the flatware in the kitchen drawer. The knives, forks, and all the rest had been in the same compartments, with each tool oriented the left-or-right, up-ordown same way for many years. On that day I realized that I was in the habit of yanking the door open and seizing the tool I wanted, by the handle, without looking.

Now I had to look down and govern my hand in the “seizing,” just as I had had to govern each step in my new way of walking. Carole offered to put the flatware back to its former arrangement for me, but I wanted to see if my brain would create some new motor controls. And it did, or something equivalent, because now I pretty much know where my hand is going when I reach for a utensil. My eyes don’t have to track my hand. I recovered from that particular “disability.”

But the brushing of my teeth remained as effortful as it was the very first time I did it myself. I wasn’t going to relearn that.

So, I bought an electric toothbrush.

Not Yet Parkinson’s (by: Gordon Johns Last blog story)

This short post goes way back to the summer of 2002. I consulted a neurologist with complaints of body weakness, leg cramps, and occasional forgetfulness and confusion. He ordered lab tests, and a brain MRI, and a nerve conduction study. He said that those were normal for a man 67 years old. Neuropsychological tests showed a slight memory impairment.

The reason I am telling you this is what the doctor said just as I was going out the door:

“Gordon, there’s nothing in your test results or in your symptoms that give even the least suggestion of Parkinson’s Disease. Nothing at all.”

I looked at him in puzzlement.

“Nevertheless, there’s something that I sense about you-as though it were a smell, but it’s not actually a smell”. He smiled briefly. “I think you’re going to be coming back to us in ten years with Parkinson’s Disease. Now I see the grin of pride.

I don’t remember any further discussion but driving home I was angry. This doctor had predicted something potentially devastating for my future health with no clinical evidence for it! And it was a disease that no one can prevent or prepare for!

How could this neurologist not know that a comment like this might infect the patient’s attitude or feelings toward his or her future death for a long time-say the next ten years? How many thousands of times might he or she have little twinges of fear when contemplating their future demise?

What if the patient had thought, mistakenly, that Parkinson’s disease is terminal? Or if the patient misremembered and thought the neurologist had said Huntington’s Disease, which is terminal? What if the patient was suffering from depression, and this remembered “bad news” contributed to a suicide?

Doctors know they have the power to hurt patients accidentally with their words, but the careless use of this power, to my mind, is unconscionable.

During that span of ten years, I didn’t have much reaction to what that neurologist said that day, but it irked me profoundly ten years later when I realized that this careless SOB had been right about me! I was pleased to learn that he was no longer practicing in my area.

“If you find something in this blog that seems useful to you in a clinical sense, make sure that it is consistent with current scientific knowledge”.

“If you find something in this blog that seems useful to you in a clinical sense, make sure that it is consistent with current scientific knowledge”.

About the Author: Gordon Johns

Education:

BS Physics, Florida State University, 1957.

Graduate studies, Advanced Nuclear Physics and Reactor design, 1957-58, Rensselaer

Polytechnic Institute.

Employment:

Associate Reactor Physics Designer, Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory, Schenectady, NY.

Aerospace Engineer, Leader, Scientific Software Group, Honeywell Aerospace, Orlando, FL.

Senior Software Engineer, Space Station Program, Link Flight Simulation, Houston, TX.

Member of the Technical Staff, Artificial Intelligence & Robotics Section, Space Data Systems Department, MITRE Corporation, Johnson Space Center, Houston, TX.

Publications and Honors:

“The FICS System,” United States Atomic Energy Commission, Naval Reactor Physics Handbook, Volume One, 1964.

“Dynamic Display of Electronic Crew Procedures for Space Station,” The Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets, Jan. 1989.

“The Steps Methodology,” Award of Excellence, state-wide winner, FL Technical Communication Competition, 1996.

National Physics Honor Society.

Co-Inventor, U. S. Patent 4,033,336, System for Sensing and Recording Medical Information, July 5, 1977.

Former member: Mensa, Intertel, Triple Nine Society.

Invited Speaker, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Reno NV, 1988.

Analysis from a Biomedical Researcher Perspective (by Jorge Garza-Ulloa)

In every real story there are many opinions from different points of views, the real challenge for a degenerative neurological researches and professionals in this field is to: listen, collect and analyze the real facts to learn from them and increase the probability to find appropriate solution that will help in the life affected by this terrible degenerative neurology disease.

Parkinson’s Disease General Acknowledges (by Jorge Garza-Ulloa)

It is very import to remain that symptoms are different for each patient in intensity, duration and combination of them. Only your doctor trained in nervous system conditions (neurologist) can diagnose Parkinson’s disease. He will decide, if your symptoms are from Parkinson disease, specify Parkinson’s disease stage, and the Parkinson disease type. The diagnose will take time and it must be based facts on your medical history (lab tests results, MRI’s), review of your signs and symptoms, and a neurological and physical examination.

As a patient and caregiver, it is very important to have a general acknowledge of Parkinson’s disease: on frequently symptoms, disease stages and Parkinson’s disease types. These are explained in the next three sections:

Parkinson’s disease symptoms

The most main symptoms are of three kinds: primary motors (directly related to movement), secondary motors (consequence of movement disorders) and non-motors (no related to movement disorders) [1].

1. Motors (directly related to movement) as: Tremors in limbs, Rigidity (muscle stiffness), Bradykinesia (slowness of movements), and Postural instability (impaired balance or difficulty standing or walking.

2. Secondary motor (consequence of movement disorders) as: loss of facial expressions, temporary gait hesitation or dragging of the feet, unwanted accelerations when walking, speech difficulty or changes in speech, stooped posture, prolonged muscle contractions, impaired fine motor dexterity, poverty of movement, restless movements, difficulty swallowing, muscles may stay in a contracted position and cause pain, sexual dysfunction, muscle weakness, and others.

3. Non-motors (no related to movement disorders) as: fatigue, digestive issues, urinary problems, sleep problems, low blood pressure that occurs when rising to a standing position, increased sweating, increased drooling, pain, muscle rigidity, reduced sense of smell, mood changes, psychotic symptoms (hallucinations, paranoia, and agitation), cognitive changes including memory difficulties, slowed thinking, confusion, impaired visual-spatial skills (such as getting lost in familiar locations), dementia and others.

Parkinson’s disease stages

To understand the state of this disease, we have to know the Parkinson’s disease stages, these are typical patterns of progression in Parkinson’s disease that are defined in five stages [2], These are: 1) Mild symptoms (Do not interfere with daily activities), 2) Getting worse (Difficult and lengthy in daily activities), 3) Mid-stage (Impair in daily activities such as dressing and eating), 4) Severe and Limiting (Person needs help with activities of daily activities) and 5) Most advanced and debilitating stage (person requires a wheelchair or is bedridden. Around-the-clock nursing care is required for all activities). The main problem is that not everyone will experience all the symptoms of Parkinson’s, and if they do, they won’t necessarily experience them in quite the same order or at the same intensity, this is why the actual stage(s) and the evolution must be deducted only for the neurologist.

Parkinson’s disease types

Parkinsonism is a constellation of signs and symptoms that are characteristically observed in Parkinson’s disease (PD), but that are not necessarily due to PD. Parkinsonism is the primary type of hypokinetic movement disorder. Parkinsonism describe the collection of signs and symptoms found in Parkinson’s disease (PD).

Parkinson’s disease types, these are two general types [3]:

1. Idiopathic Parkinson’s (Tremor predominant disorder that involves shaking and trembling, affect about 85% of Parkinson’s patients), and

2. Atypical Parkinsonism (Instability and gait disorder that present more trouble with walking and balance, affect about 15% of Parkinson’s patients). Atypical parkinsonism is less common, it is an instability and gait disorder that present more trouble with walking and balance, these are rarer conditions and more difficult to treat. This type of Parkinson’s disease happens at an older age but tends to progress quickly. Although people may experience fewer tremors or no tremors at all, they have a higher risk of cognitive decline. Atypical parkinsonism includes the following variations: Multiple System Atrophy Progressive Supranuclear Palsy, Corticobasal Syndrome, Dementia with Lewy bodies, Drug-induced Parkinsonism, and Vascular Parkinsonism.

In this case, the patient was confirmed by his neurologist: Atypical Parkinsonism of subtype: Multiple System Atrophy (MSA), these types include several neurodegenerative disorders in which one or more systems in the body deteriorates as: incoordination (ataxia), dysfunction in the autonomic nervous system that automatically controls things such as blood pressure and bladder function. These are in addition to variable degrees of parkinsonism including symptoms such as slowness, stiffness and imbalance.

Conclusions (by Jorge Garza-Ulloa)

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a progressive nervous system disorder that affect movement and present symptoms, that can be different for everyone and the exact cause of this damage is still unknown [1]. All medication and procedures available today only help to improve the quality of life of the patients. There is a big necessity to focus in more ways to accelerate the research for stop the evolution of Parkinson’s disease, and if it is possible find a way to slow down, stop or cure in a near future. Some ideal way on my opinion could be:

The creation of a cloud database with information and feedback from: patients, caregivers, researches, radiologists, doctors and other persons involved in the disease. With the goal to develop mathematical models using Artificial intelligence that allow analyze, classify, and forecast progression, that can be useful to measure and track the disease, allowing an evaluation on new medicines, new surgeries and new methods. These will help in the definition of new criteria’s involving multidiscipline research to analyze the disease form combined perspectives, and find ways for early detection, stop the disease progression and many other goals.

it is very Important to access more information of degenerative neurological disease, that could help to understand the diseases from the patient’s point of view. If you have more cases/ information about the evolution of Parkinson’s disease or any other neurologic disease in patients please send them to the email: HYPERLINK “mailto:jorge@ garzaulloa.org” jorge@garzaulloa.org.We will collect them, analyze, classify, publish and share all the information to everyone interested.

Read More About this Article: https://biomedgrid.com/fulltext/volume5/a-parkinsons-disease-journey-from-patient-side-view.000868.php

For more about: Journals on Biomedical Science :Biomed Grid | Current Issue

[empmoniitor]

7+ EMPLOYEE MANAGEMENT TIPS TO FOLLOW THIS HOLIDAY SEASON

The winter sale offers a rare opportunity for small businesses for employee management and to woo their target buyers as people head out to conquer the historic shopping holiday season. Usually holiday shopping hits more than a trillion dollars by the end of the year – thanks to the decreasing unemployment rate and rising incomes. Ensure that your organisation makes the most of this season by arranging where you can prepare in advance, even though there is not much time left. For small businesses that lay out their game plan ahead of Black Friday & Cyber Monday improving marketing campaigns, ensuring that the website is prepared and keeping your finances in order are three crucial strategies.

MOBILE IS THE CLEAR WINNER

Consider yourself as a consumer and give a try shopping for different things from your site using all the available devices, like mobile phones, laptop, desktop, etc. According to different surveys, more than 50% of traffic came from mobile phones. Therefore, it’s not acceptable to lose high-end sales just because of bad formatting.

Thus, consider using a mobile-based theme. Share mouth to mouth referrals to your friends – family and ask them to review and give their honest feedback on your site. If you need a fast fix, try implementing it then and there. If it’s taking longer than a couple of hours, park it until after the holiday rush.

Are you looking for feedback from strangers? Share your web link or services across different social media platforms and try to target the right audience. It helps in making more fans in the market, beta testing and real-time reviews.

TEST YOUR SITES

If this is your first time preparing for this holiday season, you must test your website and store to ensure you can handle increased traffic. One of the worst things that could happen to your store during the sale is your website crashing due to the surge in traffic, which could result in lower sales and increased customer frustration.

Test your website once you go live with the discount updates. Look for any potential bug or glitch. Check every single feature, click on all the icons, links, make sure that they redirect to the right page. Specifically double-check the home page and checkout page. These two are responsible for the maximum conversions.

GRAB CUSTOMER ATTENTION

In order to research your target audience, it is important to know about your targeted audience, and recognise marketing strategies. Give your clients a heads up to let them know about the offers that are coming up if you have an email list full of loyal customers. You can also use free resources, such as social media, to inspire customers before Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas to come to your stores or host giveaways.

The effectiveness of the SALE promotion is no longer measured by in-store offers, nor is it determined solely by sales on the offer day itself. In anticipation of these offer days, most retailers now begin their promotions and sales well and continue them long after. For instance, major players such as PowerAdSpy, Bath and Beyond build promotions marketed as deals for Pre-Black Friday, Sneak Peeks and Previews for Black Friday, & Cyber Monday, Christmas, Year End Sale, etc.

GUIDE EMPLOYEES

Would you like to make your staff feel even more proficient in their work, and also provide your retail clients with a better shopping experience? To help the team become gift-giving consultants for clients who are worried about finding the right holiday presents, consider doing extra training. Managers can also implement different employee management strategies, try using different employee productivity management software, like EmpMonitor.

EmpMonitor helps in tracking the employee’s daily work practices, and overall productivity of each employee in the company. It not only helps managers to keep a track of everything but also helps employees in managing their daily work and boost up their skills. Some of the special EmpMonitor features, that helps in managing your business this holiday season includes –

ATTENDANCE MANAGEMENT  –

Attendance management helps in maintaining the correct log-in and log-out data of employees. As attendance management is required not only to better bill customers, but also to decrease the time spent on administrative and attendance management activities by HR managers and finance officers.

SCREENSHOT MONITORING –

A smart way for employee management is to keep an eye on every single operation of your employee, gain the detailed overview of the time and money your team spends on each task with screenshots randomly at specified intervals of time and therefore help you keep the data of your organisation safe and secure.

TOP APPS & WEBSITES USED –

At a glance, you can even look up the applications that your workers have used in the past 180 days and obtain feedback from the top 10 apps used in real time. It helps in keeping a check of the sites which are inside or outside your firewall.

MOTIVATE EMPLOYEES WITH GIFTS AND SPEECHES

Nothing motivates a person like a killer speech or words of wisdom. To train workers for the holiday season, you do not need to stand on a conveyor belt, but you do need to inspire the staff to be ready for the day. Go for a speech of inspiration that incites excitement and a feeling of positivity. Employers can show them a detailed analysis of their productivity ratio using different productivity tracker software. It will help employees also to analyse their workplace practices, work as per the requirement, and gain more than expected.

OPTIMIZE YOUR EMAIL CHAIN

The minimum cart rate for holiday shoppers was around 50%, in previous years and that rate fluctuates based on what channels your customers are shopping for. Creating abandoned cart emails to remind consumers of the products they have not yet purchased to avoid such a high desertion rate. You should also make sure that your website is friendly for mobile and tablet devices.

On mobile devices, customise your website so that it is completely functional and responsive. To determine what works and what needs to be changed before the holiday shopping begins, speak to your web designer and gain input from customers. You guarantee that your customers can reach your store with a powerful mobile presence, no matter where they might be.

BACK-UP ALL THE REQUIRED DATA

Make sure you have backups ranging from site code to product photos and everything. Just once a year does the holiday season arrive. Hence, I am sure you don’t want to miss the sales, just because your site went down. Therefore, getting a back-up for your web is like having long-term insurance. Your back-up will get it up and running in no time if it goes down for any reason.

USE SOCIAL MEDIA

In today’s tech-savvy world, social media is a great boon. Always consider, when you run Facebook ads, the more engagement your Facebook ads get, better the ads will reach their potential audience.  Therefore you’ll want to create really engaging and shareable Facebook campaigns. Bear in mind that you don’t just want to get your commercial in front of your eyeballs, you want your target market to get those commercials out.

To up your holiday sales, also check –

11 PRODUCTIVITY TOOLS FOR YOUR TEAM TO WATCH ON CYBER MONDAY

10-POINT CHECKLIST TO PREPARE YOUR REMOTE EMPLOYEES FOR BLACK FRIDAY

HOW CAN COMPANIES CELEBRATE DIWALI THIS YEAR SAFELY

CONCLUSION

The pandemic has completely changed the dynamics of business in 2020, losing the workplace luster and employee productivity. Therefore to keep your business sales up with this paradigm shift, give a try to the above mentioned strategies this holiday season. Engage with your customers quickly across all social channels in order to stay on top of the competition.

Looking to take on the holiday shopping rush? Do share your views and queries in the comments below, I am here for you at every step of your growth journey.

Originally Published On: EmpMonitor

[rogerjharding]

A party that works and wins for working people will need to understand us first

First published here. Full text below.

I’m nervous to add to what will become an avalanche of post-election analysis. But having seen the response to 2017 from the vantage point of one of the country’s leading public attitudes houses and now witnessing the 2019 campaign from an organisation determined to give working class people the voice we’re so often denied, I already fear that working class concerns are going to be appropriated, mischaracterised and weaponised by politicians and commentators who neither understand nor value the modern multi-racial working class.

Working on the British Social Attitudes reports in 2017 and 2018 I could see the frustration of seasoned pollsters as talking heads leapt to rapid conclusions that months later robust research would disprove.

What follows, therefore, isn’t primarily about what has just happened — the British Election Study, British Social Attitudes Survey and others will show that in time. Instead I want to offer some simple pointers about what the wider evidence shows for when you’re reading articles in coming days:

If any analysis of this election starts and ends with 2019 — and ignores the long-term trends — it’ll likely be wrong.

If the analysis starts and ends with Brexit — it’ll likely be wrong.

If it starts and ends with the analysis of any party leader — it’ll likely be wrong.

If it includes sweeping statements about ‘left behind’ or ‘traditional’ working class people — it’ll likely be wrong and probably dangerous to boot.

Why 2019 is bigger than 2019

The result is obviously an enormous win for the Conservatives, especially after austerity and nearly 10 years in power. The size of their majority could easily mean they are in power for another decade. If we want a different future we need to understand how we got to this dismal present. Here are the seven long-term trends to be aware of.

First, since the late 1990s Labour has consistently shed overall working class support as a portion of its vote while it, to varying degrees of success, appealed to more middle class voters. The loss of this support was hidden in Labour’s electoral dominance in the early 2000s as more of this switched to non-voting than to other parties.

The left of the party made regaining this support a rallying call for the Corbyn project but they’ve only succeeded in exacerbating the problem. To understand this further, I would really recommend The New Politics of Class: The Political Exclusion of the British Working Class by Geoffrey Evans and James Tilley. Their analysis — based in part on the British Social Attitudes survey — uses more sophisticated class coding than the crude ABC1 C2DE cross-breaks found in weekly polls. Among other things they highlight that over this period people became less likely to describe Labour as a party of and for the working class and that this feeling was stronger when (where relevant) their Labour MP didn’t come from a working class background.

Crucially this is a long-term trend, meaning any suggestion that 2019’s result is purely about Brexit is likely to be wrong. We get hints of the truth of this from early analysis showing that Labour’s vote also dropped notably in remain as well as leave seats and that Brexit isn’t the top reason people give for voting another way.

Second, the Conservatives are likely to have continued to do terribly amongst BAME voters. In recent elections Labour has returned to the dominant (around 80%) 1997 levels of BAME voter support across all social classes, but this was in evidence well before the 2016 Brexit vote. British Future and the Runnymede Trust have long been pointing this out and urging pollsters to produce the breakdowns of BAME voter support to give us a more consistent picture.

Third, age and education have become much, much bigger voter divides. Again, these trends pre-date this election, with poor support among older voters support costing Ed Miliband dear and formal education level being the single best guide to how people voted in the 2016 referendum. Academic Paula Surridge and others have been pleading with us to pay more attention to this for some time now.

Whereas your social class tends to be a good guide on where you sit on the left — right economic scale (i.e. working class people are more likely to support things like redistribution), education is a better guide to where you sit on what’s called the libertarian — authoritarian scale. This measures your attitudes to things like law and order and whether you think young people ‘respect traditional British values’. Crucially these scales don’t neatly overlap so any party wanting to hoover up the votes on one end of these scales, e.g. the economic left, will have to find a way to appeal to those left-leaning voters spread across the liberal and conservative scale (or vice versa).

It’s important to note the authoritarian/conservative — libertarian/liberal scale doesn’t directly get into issues often seen at the heart of US “culture war” debates, like LGBT rights and abortion. On both these issues we’ve thankfully been getting consistently more liberal across class and age for some time now.

As Paula Surridge has been pointing out, the big group of people who feel politically homeless at the moment are economically left-leaning social conservatives. Labour has been doing especially badly amongst older working class people in this group. During the campaign the Conservatives seemed to appreciate this by honing in on socially-conservative dividing lines (Brexit and crime) while being prepared (at least in messaging terms) to flirt with economic left ideas around more public spending. By contrast journalist Jennifer Williams and others highlighted pre-election that Labour’s failure to major on issues like tackling crime and anti-social behaviour would hurt them.

Fourth, Labour’s vote has become a lot stronger in big cities and their suburbs, and weaker in towns, as the Centre for Towns has charted. The relates to the trends above, with cities themselves becoming younger and more diverse and towns being home to an older demographic. As Lewis Baston has pointed out, the make-up of towns like Mansfield which consistently voted Labour post-war looks demographically very different to the ones that voted Tory in 2017 and 2019. Crucially he adds “Labour is coming close to exhausting this potential source of gains — there are simply not that many city, suburb and university town seats left to win.”

Fifth, the Conservatives have a women problem, and Labour have a men problem. This was on display in 2017 and from pre-election polls looks likely to have been a major factor this time round.

Sixth, Labour also need to resolve their now long-term problem in Scotland which threatens to undermine another redistributive trans-national political and economic union. The Conservatives equally have a problem in Scotland, but it’s easier to ignore when they’ve done so well in England and Wales.

These six long-term trends do a lot of explanatory work, but they don’t explain the scale of the defeat. For that we must also account for the fact Jeremy Corbyn has been an unprecedently unpopular leader. Labour is unlikely to win with a leader as unpopular as Corbyn and his faction need to account for their role in Boris Johnson’s rise to power given he beat Ken Livingstone twice in Labour-leaning London (in 2008 and 2012) and has now demolished Corbyn nationally. Corbyn’s leadership is the top reason given by people for not voting Labour and that’s despite his competition being two PMs who themselves were not well liked at the end of both election campaigns.

Likewise, some outriders are in a bit of a tangle with the much-promoted line that the Labour manifesto swung the 2017 election more toward Labour but bears no responsibility for 2019. It can’t be both. A good starting point in understanding the role of policy in political choice is Drew Westen’s 2007 book The Political Brain where he pleads with Democrats in the US — following their back-to-back loses to George Bush Jr — to realise that their long lists of individually popular policies are little use if the Presidential candidate can’t emotionally connect with voters’ hopes and fears and convince them of their credibility to deliver the policies in office.

Labour doesn’t have a hope of working out where to go if it can’t face up to where it is and why. Members need to take an unflinching look at these six long-term trends alongside the stark reality of the more recent leadership problem when picking a vision for the future. While emerging leadership contenders are already signalling their intentions to run, what members really need to be clear on is which of the following four visions they choose and why.

Four visions of Labour

From my perspective running a organisation dedicated to supporting a new generation of working class leaders, I already worry about how class will feature in this debate. Only one of these options will truly deliver for working people and take account of the six trends above. But the other three all have serious backers and could yet take Labour away from its historic mission.

I. Liberal Labour

Tilley and Evans’ analysis shows that Labour has done especially well in recent decades amongst the ‘new middle class’ –people working in roles like university lecturer, nurse, social worker, dental hygienist and occupational therapist. They’re socially liberal and broadly in the middle on economic policy, unless it comes to funding the public sector when they’re quite left.

One future strategy would be to try to max out this vote out — for example to try to hoover up those of them found in the 12% of Lib Dem voters on Thursday. This has a certain logic to it and falls in line with the Conservatives doing much better with working class social conservatives.

But, this approach may not work. As noted above, Lewis Baston and others seriously question whether there are enough seats with these kinds of voters in to make this a route to government. More importantly, I’m not sure this route is possible without the Labour Party gradually abandoning being on the economic left.

If you start unifying people based on their social conservatism or liberalism you’ll be pulling in people with views across the left and right of the economic spectrum. As the Conservatives may well soon find out, for them that’ll mean they either have to deliver on some of their more economically left rhetoric or find their new voter coalition rapidly splinters. If you are what you eat, a Labour Party primarily focused on gaining more middle class social liberals would gradually cease to be a working class party of the left and more resemble the Lib Dems.

II. Posh Labour

The Labour Party has always been a cross-class coalition that has had leaders from well-off families (a personal hero, Clement Attlee, was even posher than Blair or Corbyn), but it has ultimately been rooted in a mass-membership working class union movement. Historically this has provided a talent pipeline of brilliant working class politicians and advisers.

It also meant Labour saw itself first and foremost as striving to provide representation for working class people, rather than being primarily driven by theoretical conceptions of class struggle. Jonathan Rose (part quoting fellow historian Ross McKibben) puts it better when analysing why a Marxist party never took off in Britain:

‘”The sort of men who were so prominent in European socialist parties — marginal bourgeois, journalists, ‘theoreticians’, professional orators — were comparatively rare in Britain.” The British working class had forged its own organisations and its own leaders, who did not care to accept middle class patronage, even under the name of socialism.’

Trade unions continue to provide a great working class talent pipeline but haven’t been able to stop senior parts of the party being dominated by people not just from middle class backgrounds, but very posh ones.

Labour need not worry about choosing this path if ideological focus is what matters most. If instead Labour wants to be the parliamentary wing of the British working class then it needs to start looking and sounding like us. Right now, I can point to some corporates who take monitoring class diversity more seriously than the Labour Party.

III. ‘The Labour Party your grandad voted for’

This approach is summed up with ‘less identity politics, more class politics’ and the idea the party needs to appeal to the ‘traditional working class’. It doesn’t tally with the evidence (if you read only one piece linked here, I’d make it academic Cas Mudde’s account of why left leaning parties mimicking populist ones rarely prosper) and it crosses all sorts of moral lines that shouldn’t be open to people on the left.

When Labour has done so badly in many leave voting towns where it once weighed rather than counted its vote the appeal to forget the cities and focus on ‘the heartlands’ is getting a lot of traction but there are two things we have to guard against here.

Firstly, it can slip into suggesting that people in cities — especially London — are having a high old time of it while ignoring the reality that our cities are often home to the biggest numbers of people who are really hard up.

Much more dangerously it implies ‘identity’ issues like racism, sexism and homophobia aren’t issues that concern working class people, who are presumably all white, male and straight. Labour should be the party countering, not indulging, sweeping characterisations of working class people as some homogenous lump. Nobody whose values are rooted in social justice should be mounting an argument that echoes the language of the Brexit Party and before them the BNP with their slogan that they were ‘The Labour Party your grandad voted for’.

If your image of the ‘traditional working class’ doesn’t have space for black, Asian or LGBT working class people, it’s neither progressive nor accurate and has no place in left politics in 2019.

IV. Modern Working Class Labour

Instead, Labour’s future has to lie in building a multi-racial modern working class movement — one that keeps the voters it’s got but appeals to those it needs like older voters on the left who didn’t vote for Corbyn or Miliband.

This will require delicate balancing, but it’s perfectly possible for Labour to do things like respond to the rising concerns about anti-social behaviour in working class communities without embracing a criminal justice approach that criminalises young working class black men.

Likewise, it’s possible to design an immigration policy that has widespread buy-in but doesn’t demonise or dehumanise immigrants or indulge ideas that they are responsible for a low-wage economy.

This option requires more dexterity than the other three, but both strategically and ethically it’s Labour’s only option. Given that, the task for the months ahead is clear — candidates for Labour’s leadership must show how they’ll build a movement of diverse working class talent, top to bottom.

Building a truly modern working class movement

Here are the six places they could start.

1. Monitor and have a plan to fix class diversity in all of the Labour’s Party structures ­

Jeremy Corbyn called on the BBC to do this, but as far as I can see this doesn’t yet happen in Labour. In my day job we’re helping corporates and charities do this so there’s plenty of good examples to learn from.

2. Speak to people’s pride and dignity

People need meaning and sense of pride but the right are better at speaking to it, with messages along the lines of ‘you’re amazing and you’re being mugged off by these people over here’. That resonates — in many working class families people will tell you they’re proud and strong but also struggling, hard-up or feeling like they’re ignored and invisible. Labour hears that but for whatever reason communicates back using terms we never use about ourselves. Try talking to my single mum and others like her about being the ‘most vulnerable’ and see how far you get.

3. Don’t shy away from immigration and race — build working class unity across communities

Labour should act on the brilliant research coming out of the US on how to build a mutli-racial working class movement. Anat Shenker-Osorio, Celinda Lake and others have for a few years now been publishing research showing that it’s possible to build greater unity amongst working class people. To do that you have to explicitly say you want to deliver for working class people whether white, black or brown, a newcomer or someone whose family has been here for generations, so everyone feels included. You also need to make clear that some politicians have an active strategy of pitting communities against each other. Closer to home, Runnymede and Class have also been taking the lead with the race / class narrative work that deserves much more attention.

4. People with little actually have the most to lose — stop promising a ‘revolution’

I once heard an academic say ‘the history of labour studies is middle class academics trying to work out why the working classes didn’t do what they thought they would’.

Well off people on the far left have often assumed that the worse it gets the more people will embrace radical change. In reality, when you’ve got little you tend to hold on even more tightly what’s left. The Conservatives in 2019 promised a ‘safety first’ manifesto that will radically change the shape of the economy. They did much the same in 2010 — cautious language to sell a very radical agenda. By contrast Labour promised that ‘the revolution is coming’. They need to urgently consider which of being radical or sounding radical is most important, because Conservative success would suggest you can have one or the other but not both.

5. Make sure policy actually addresses working class priorities

One of the most astonishing things about Labour’s 2019 manifesto — for all the rhetoric about how revolutionary it was — was that its social security plans would only deliver a halt to the rise in child poverty, not reduce it. This felt symptomatic of a policy agenda that never seemed to be truly driven by the actual priorities of working class people.

One Labour-supporting film released just before the election promised ‘a mighty choice is coming’. It still is. Which of the four visions Labour members choose will determine whether the Labour party can once again work and win for working people, in all of our magnificent diversity.

[atrocitycl]

VIXX LR - “Whisper” Review

(Music Video) / (Dance Practice)

VIXX LR – Whisper

Reviewed on October 28, 2017

So, unlike the many fans and listeners who praise VIXX LR’s latest song, I argue the opposite: that, if we move beyond stylistic preferences, we will find that “Whisper” is an incredibly incoherent song. That lack of organization is why I struggle to critically enjoy the song—even if, as many have said, the vocals and the like are rather appealing.

Personal Message: It has been an entire month without any reviews, and I greatly apologize for this. While better time management would have prevented this situation, I had to pause writing reviews and subtitling videos for the sake of keeping up with my studies. However, all is going well in my life and I hope to better allocate my time so that I can maintain a consistent schedule with reviews. After all, my university life is only going to get busier in the future—not less. So, I hope and plan to develop a schedule that will allow reviews to carry on, and of course, to be more concise with reviews.

Regarding this review, it finally addresses a one-month-old (if not more) request. To the requester, I apologize for the massive delay (and likewise to the reader who also requested Sunmi’s “Gashina”). As of now, I believe I might have to temporarily stop accepting requests—or at least, I will have to put a disclaimer on their finished dates. That said, if reviews become far shorter to write, this dilemma toward requests might be unnecessary.

On topic, however, VIXX LR—a sub-unit of VIXX—will be the artist we focus on. “Whisper,” while no longer quite a newer song, is at least still VIXX LR’s latest song. Many fans and listeners cherish the song: comments from various sources appear to praise the duo’s vocals, and regarding the song’s composition and production, many also favor the song’s “chill” stylistic approach. Although stylistic preferences are certainly acceptable and are by no means wrong to have, I personally question—challenge, even—many listeners’ and fans’ take to “Whisper.” A song’s style is not sufficient for determining whether a song is excellent in quality or not; we need to go deeper and account for the composition at play. Unfortunately, though, analyzing “Whisper” in this aspect brings many concerns. So, unlike the many fans and listeners who praise VIXX LR’s latest song, I argue the opposite: that, if we move beyond stylistic preferences, we will find that “Whisper” is an incredibly incoherent song. That lack of organization is why I struggle to critically enjoy the song—even if, as many have said, the vocals and the like are rather appealing.

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Song Score: 5/10 (5.25/10 raw score) - “Average”

- Vocals: 6/10

- Sections: 5/10 (4.86/10 raw score)

Introduction, Rap, Pre-Chorus, Chorus, Rap, Pre-Chorus, Chorus, Post-Chorus, Bridge, Chorus, Conclusion (Post-Chorus)

1.     Introduction: 6/10

2.     Rap: 6/10

3.     Pre-Chorus: 4/10

4.     Chorus: 3/10

5.     Post-Chorus: 4/10

6.     Bridge: 5/10

7.     Conclusion (Post-Chorus): 6/10

- Instrumental: 4/10

- Lyrics: 6/10

Tell me your love to the point where I melt Tickle my heart Show me your love Yeah we’re burnin’ up, baby Whisper yourself into my heart

Especially more so today Time seems to freeze when I see you I can’t handle you, it transcends narcissism My instincts have already gone up I try to calm down my excited heart but it breaks down Calm down, down, down My body is slowing down right now, now No limit, limit, what is your limit? Tell me ahead of time Everything has levels But you’ve erased that process You are my song, yeah baby I’m different from the other wolves who only look for you at night I look for you every moment of every day, girl

You can have all of me, it’s alright Do you know what I want? Carefully, right now

Softly, whisper to me, girl Whisper to me It’s quiet but it feels dangerous You have me specifically flexin’ It’s a secret sign Our own party without anyone knowing Whisper language

I can use both arms and legs but I can’t fully express everything I don’t care about a party filled with losers My focus is on you Chillin’-chillin’ we need a secret This is something that happens on a screen I’m feelin’ like a Gosling I’m sure of this feeling Love you, love you, love you, love you, love you Really love you I can’t figure you out but my head is already there I hope at least half of my predictions will be the answer I hope this night connects us We can be quiet Because I think this is strangely more fun

You can have all of me, it’s alright Do you know what I want? Carefully, right now

Softly, whisper to me, girl Whisper to me It’s quiet but it feels dangerous You have me specifically flexin’ It’s a secret sign Our own party without anyone knowing Whisper language

Whisper Yeah tell me, tell me your love Whisper Yeah I can even hear your breath, love Whisper Yeah tell me, tell me your love Whisper Yeah I can even touch your voice, real love

Don’t hesitate anymore, feel your vibe However you feel, movin’ Falling into the black hole, my black hole You don’t care about the meaning of beauty But you just show yourself to me I’ve already gone crazy but you drive me crazy again You make me fly until the end

Once again, whisper to me, girl Whisper to me Burn me up, like you’re testing me You analyze me like you’re flexin’ It’s a secret sign Our own party without anyone knowing Whisper language

Whisper Yeah tell me, tell me your love Whisper Yeah I can even hear your breath, love Whisper Yeah tell me, tell me your love Whisper Yeah I can even touch your voice, real love

_______________________________________________________

Analysis: Before boldly critiquing the composers’ work, I find that we still need to acknowledge what many fans and listeners have established: sonically, “Whisper” pleases our ears. We find this sentiment supported by individually focusing on each section. For example, the rapping sections are rather developed. If we listen to the first rap section that occurs, we should notice that Ravi’s part is more than just a straightforward, typical, rhythm-based rap. The composers also introduced moments where the rap drastically slows down and instead adds in tune versus rhythm—this being clearly heard with the pitch-enhanced (or pitch-edited) bits that are dispersed throughout. This all works in favor, though, of creating rap sections that function more than as a song’s break. After all, notice how in many K-Pop songs the rap sections tend to provide a mere change of pace in a song. But, in “Whisper,” with the rapping being rather flexible and complex—and later in the song, also being mixed in with Leo’s singing—this allows listeners to interpret the rapping as a main core of the song’s aural appeal.

But, all of that said, “Whisper” as an entire song is incoherent—and sadly, no amount of individual, aural appeal can compensate for the song’s lack of organization. Consider the song in this manner: as if it was an essay. Yes, I can already hear the skepticism with this analogy: “This makes no sense; the only thing we see is your teacher-side showing.” But, bear with it for a few more moments. Imagining that “Whisper” is an essay, we can understand that its individual aspects—its individual paragraphs—are beautifully and thoughtfully written. However, we notice a problem with this essay: Although each paragraph is strong individually, none of the paragraphs make sense when we put them together to form an actual essay. One paragraph focuses on a certain topic, but the next paragraph switches to an entirely new topic—and again, individually we acknowledge that those single paragraphs are perfect. The same applies to “Whisper.” While its individual aspects are solid—such as the singing or the rapping—none of these aspects easily connects to the other. As individual chunks of a song, “Whisper” is great; as a unified, single song, “Whisper” is not great.

Diving into examples of this incoherence, let us focus specifically on the conflict that occurs between the rapping and singing. Again, both on an individual level are excellent but the song lacks in relating the two together. This is why the choruses are structurally jarring despite how Leo’s singing soothes us. When the choruses arrive, listeners are disorientated by the sudden changes: despite a rap section building up to the choruses, rather than a chorus that builds off that hyping, it instead begins from a new beginning. In other words, given that the rapping and even the pre-choruses seem to be working together toward a climactic point, it is odd that the choruses fail to follow through. Instead of the choruses being a notable, climaxing point where the rap sections and pre-choruses come together, it appears as if the choruses completely begin its own song. The instrumental at the choruses, for example, are not similar to the rap or pre-chorus sections and instead take a sudden calm approach. Furthermore, Leo’s singing style—while definitely serene and beautiful—does not complement Ravi’s rougher rap lines.

What would have been preferable, I argue, is if the duo’s vocals were similar in style or perhaps even alternating in a dynamic fashion. Towards the latter half of the song, post-choruses are introduced and these sections take on an interesting form: a blend of both Leo and Ravi—a blend of singing and rapping. If this was established sooner in the song, I foresee this incoherence problem being prevented. Or, as mentioned as well, if the two vocal styles were able to relate directly this would be another potential solution. If Leo’s singing at the chorus, for example, was slightly rougher and focused on intensity so that it would match Ravi’s rapping style, there could have been a clear connection there. The opposite holds as well: if Leo’s softer, graceful singing is to be kept, then Ravi’s rapping could have followed a softer demeanor to match. Overall, without having an aspect that relates the two’s rapping and singing, it leaves “Whisper” sounding divided. In these duo situations of blending in rapping and singing, I find that Mad Clown’s and Soyou’s duo song of “Stupid in Love” provides a strong example of balancing the two different vocal performances. In “Stupid in Love,” Mad Clown’s rapping is definitely of a faster and more intense style. However, Soyou’s singing style still matches due to an instrumental that remained consistent and how, even if her pacing is slower, her own vocals were kept in a more direct, rough manner versus being airy and soft.

All in all, if not for this lack of cohesion in the song, I would predict “Whisper” excelling due to not only having solid rapping and singing, but also due to a powerful chemistry between those two aspects. As it stands, though, that is not the case. Without that cohesion—that sense of connecting the song into smooth, single piece—it does not matter how brilliant the rapping or singing are. Fans should definitely still enjoy the song for its “chill” style, but in terms of discussing the composers’ decisions and analyzing the song in this critical manner, I argue “Whisper” is a relatively weaker song—or at least, it lost a lot of its potential. Of course, however, disagreements can and should occur—this is why I write reviews, after all. For discussions. For creating a space where fans can critically and maturely discuss why they believe a song is strong or weak. And, in the end, “Whisper” still manages to hold onto a five—a rating that indicates that, overall, the song is not exactly bad, but neither is it necessarily good.

_______________________________________________________

Whether this was a smart decision or not, I decided to use some of my usual “homework time” to instead write this review—but, I find that this was a worthy decision. Sunmi’s “Gashina” should be finished soon, and afterwards, I will see if I can realistically end October with two more reviews. Six posts has been my goal and I intend to keep it that way, but perhaps four might be more plausible for the next few months.

Once again I apologize to requesters and readers for the lack of content, but I do greatly appreciate any time given towards this blog. Until then, look forward to—hopefully—October ending with Sunmi’s “Gashina” and “[w]hisper to me” that I need to fix my work habits.

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[coin-river-blog]

Market cap is often used as a metric of importance in the crypto industry. Communities will react jubilantly as their preferred coin moves up the rankings. People will often invest in the top X coins based solely on their market cap as they think it is representative of a diversified portfolio. However, is market cap the right metric to focus on?

Also read: Coinbase Acquires Cryptocurrency Surveillance Company Neutrino

In this post I will explore the fallacy of market capitalization. I will look at the methods with which market cap is often determined and why it could be considered flawed for a number of reasons. I will also touch on other potential metrics which could be more representative of “value.”

But first, let’s start with some basics…

Recap on Market Cap

Market capitalization is a concept that has been borrowed from the traditional equity markets. In the context of a publicly traded company, it is supposed to give a measure of how much the outstanding free float of shares are worth on the market. It is merely calculated by taking the price of the shares and multiplying it by the outstanding free float of shares.

Capitalization is often used as a metric of size, value and importance in the equity markets because all the shareholder information can be publicly verified and the shares are often traded on one exchange.

There is no disagreement as to the market cap of Coca Cola because analysts can easily replicate it themselves. They can pull the shareholder records from their databases and grab the latest price from the NYSE ticker information. However, the same cannot really be said for the cryptocurrency markets.

Market Cap in Crypto

When cryptocurrencies first started gaining the public’s attention a few years ago, numerous websites wanted to find a quick and easy way to compare all of the different coins on the market. They needed a simple ranking number that people could use as a rough benchmark.

Market cap was one of the most applicable metrics that they could use. It was also relatively easy to understand for those who were new to the cryptocurrency markets. It was understood to imply the total value of all coins in circulation.

A problem that is unique to cryptocurrencies though is the fact that this “circulating supply” is often defined subjectively by the coin ranking websites. For example, if we were to take a look at the definition of “circulating supply” on Coinmarketcap (CMC) it states the following.

How circulating supply is calculated on CMC. Image via Coinmarketcap.

While this seems like a pretty thorough examination of the circulating supply of a project, a great deal of it will come down to the judgement of the folks at CMC. You will have to trust their assessment of what is freely circulating based on information that is provided to them by project teams.

As many Bitcoin proponents know, “Don’t trust, verify.”

Potential Manipulation of Numbers

Something specific that CMC does is exclude the pre-mined coins from the circulating supply of a particular project. While the intentions behind this may be right, there are some negative externalities that come with this.

For example, when a project has pre-mined a large proportion of their coins, every time they release these funds, their circulating supply will go up. If these coins are not sold immediately (which impacts price) then the market cap of the coins is also likely to increase.

There have been many projects that have been accused of this tactic. While some of them may not have been intentionally seeking to impact price, it is disconcerting that such an important metric can move at the whim of the developers.

This is of course only the circulating supply number that we are talking about. We are well aware of how crypto whales are able to impact price in relatively illiquid markets. Through wash trading and limited external demand, nefarious actors can pump the price and hence impact market cap.

What Can Be Done?

In a sense, the coin ranking websites are in a bind when it comes to market capitalization. They are using it precisely because it is well known, easy to understand, comparable and seemingly applicable. They are trying to provide an objective view of the coin’s total value and the more they try to tweak the formula, the more they can be accused of being subjective.

Another coin ranking site, Coingecko, has taken a slightly more transparent and innovative approach to their rankings. For example, when it comes to listing their circulating supply they do not exclude pre-mined coins. They do this more for consistency because technically tokens issued on smart contract platforms are all pre-mined. Similarly, pre-mined coins could potentially already be traded on exchanges because they are not locked.

They also give the user more information on how circulated supply is calculated for each coin that they have listed. For example, in the below image you can see the supply numbers for the 0x (ZRX) project.

Circulating supply breakdown for ZRX. Image via Coingecko.

Indeed, determining the “value” of a cryptocurrency project is itself such an involved discipline. If someone really wanted to analyze this then they would need to look at factors such as on-chain metrics, developer activity, community interest and so forth.

In fact, exchanges such as Binance have even started to roll out their “gold standard” metric which awards projects based on their “communication.” Although this is not an endorsement by Binance, projects that regularly communicate with their community could be a valuable metric.

Of course, one can’t really look at these other metrics in isolation and compare them to another coin. They have to be broken down and analyzed piece by piece and adjusted for particular technicalities of the coins in question.

None of these metrics can be viewed as a potential replacement for the quick-and-dirty measure that comes with a coin’s market cap. They can only be used as a complement to it by the analyst should they decide to delve deeper into the relative “value” of a project.

Don’t Get Bitconnect Rekt

Market capitalization is a useful metric. It allows us to get a rough sense of the general market value of particular coins that are on the market. However, that is where its usefulness should stop.

It should not be used as some sort of a metric of importance, value or market support for the project in question. It is a simple metric which, although useful, can and has been manipulated.

While circulating supply numbers can be tweaked to better reflect market dynamics, market cap should be a singular factor in a much more thorough due diligence process. Development, user numbers, scaling and communication should all be thrown into the “DYOR” soup.

Let us not forget that Bitconnect was at one time in the top 10 of CMC. If you had invested solely based on this fact, you would have been utterly Bitconnect rekt.

Do you think crypto market capitalization is inherently flawed? How useful is market capitalization for determining the crypto market’s total valuation?

Images courtesy of Shutterstock, Coinmarketcap, and Coingecko.

OP-ed disclaimer: This is an Op-ed article. The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own. Bitcoin.com does not endorse nor support views, opinions or conclusions drawn in this post. Bitcoin.com is not responsible for or liable for any content, accuracy or quality within the Op-ed article. Readers should do their own due diligence before taking any actions related to the content. Bitcoin.com is not responsible, directly or indirectly, for any damage or loss caused or alleged to be caused by or in connection with the use of or reliance on any information in this Op-ed article.

This article was written by Nic Puckrin. He is an ex Investment Banker and blockchain enthusiast. He has founded several online businesses and fell down the crypto rabbit hole in 2016. When he’s not sitting behind six screens trading Bitcoin, Nic is maintaining his numerous mining rigs.

Tags in this story

BitConnect, Blockchain, CoinGecko, Coinmarketcap, Cryptocurrency, Gold Standard, market analysis, Market Cap, money, Pre-Mine, public equity, trading analysis

OP-ED

This is an Op-ed article. The opinions expressed in this article are the author's own. Bitcoin.com does not endorse nor support views, opinions or conclusions drawn in this post. Bitcoin.com is not responsible for or liable for any content, accuracy or quality within the Op-ed article. Readers should do their own due diligence before taking any actions related to the content. Bitcoin.com is not responsible, directly or indirectly, for any damage or loss caused or alleged to be caused by or in connection with the use of or reliance on any information in this Op-ed article. To contribute to our Op-ed section send a suggestion to op-ed (at) bitcoin.com.

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[ecotone99]

[SF] Dolls

*** Not sure if this is the right sub, but this is a section from a story I've been writing. I've started rewriting it, and the rewrite doesn't really integrate this. But I liked these parts, and I'm not sure how I can fit them in with the main story. The formatting is a bit off due to copying and pasting.

​

Tech Support: Series 2 – The Prequels

Module I: Dolls

It was her favorite one and she’d lost it. It was the first one she’d ever gotten all by herself, but it fell out of her bag and now she didn’t know where it was. It was probably gone forever and there was nothing she could do.

Why wasn’t I more careful? I shouldn’t have taken it with me. Maybe if I didn’t always try to walk so fast, this never would have happened.

She did look for it. She looked for it for two whole days. And every minute, she just knew she would suddenly see it waiting for her in a patch of grass next to the playground, or maybe it was on the curb and just covered up by a dead leaf, or something. She knew she would find it, and then everything would be okay again.

Stop crying. Just get another one. How can I be crying about something so stupid? I must be defective. I’m not supposed to cry over such silly things. I’m not a baby. I shouldn’t be acting like this. This isn’t the way I’m supposed to be.

She’d known that there was something wrong with her for a long time. It was probably a lot of things. Sometimes she felt like she was intentionally made defective. That seemed like the only explanation for all of the things that always seemed to go wrong.

I know what I have to do. Why can’t I ever do it? It will only be uncomfortable for a minute. Then, everything will be the way it’s supposed to be. I don’t even know what I’m doing here in the first place. All of this is stupid. Everyone probably hates me, anyway. At least, they would if they knew what I really am.

How could she always be so clumsy? Why was she always embarrassing herself by laughing at the wrong times or tripping over simple words? And why was she always losing her things? That one was her favorite. She’d worked so hard for it, but she couldn’t even take care of it and now it was gone forever because of her.

It will only be uncomfortable for a minute. I shouldn’t even be here.

…

The young girl’s hazel eyes stared out vacantly from behind the neatly arranged rows of shoes and small boxes. Nothing remained now but the irregular clumping of eyelashes, glued together by recent tears, to indicate that the small figure now resting against the closet wall had ever belonged anywhere else but among these other lifeless things.

​

INCIDENT REPORT

CASE: A657329 RE: Serial No. MR23-84 Model CR-C2 F-Type [C2 Series]

Unit experienced devastating system-wide malfunctions of class 7 and above at 8:27 AM and proceeded to follow automated self-deactivation protocols. Unit initiated psychological self-deactivation preparation sequences at 9:32 AM, and the final deactivation sequence was completed at 12:43 PM.

Unit’s self-diagnostic logs indicate that it had been experiencing malfunctions intermittently but with increasing frequency and severity for at least seven months. These malfunctions have been confirmed by our diagnostics team.

Though the original cause of the unit’s malfunctions has yet to be conclusively determined, preliminary analysis indicates they were almost certainly a result of defects caused by design flaws in the third subprocessing matrix of the unit’s Central NERVUS System. Synaptic relay nodes J3-J18 seem to have been particularly compromised.

Affected systems include emotional generation and regulation, motor coordination and control, memory integration and recall, interpersonal interaction, speech processing, as well as multiple secondary and tertiary systems that cannot be conclusively identified right now due to corruption in the unit’s diagnostic logs.

The unit was also found to be in possession of nineteen human fingers and six extracted cybernetic implants, including the REM induction implant of Senator Lexa Khan, who disappeared six months ago and whose severed index finger was found at Zenra Park last Thursday.

As with the other malfunctions noted previously, the original cause of the unit’s aberrant social behavior has still yet to be determinedd, but we do not have any evidence to believe that it was the result of the various malfunctions we discovered in the unit’s aggression systems. Analysis of the unit’s logs would appear to indicate that it was not even aware that the more violent acts it had been committing were socially unacceptable or considered undesirable by human beings.

However, due to the extremely violnet, public, and severe nature of these malfunctions, we have ordered an emergency recall of all remaining C2 units and have already broadcast the deactivation instruction on the global C2 remote command channel.

END REPORT – TECHNICIAN KM

​

Axxesss™ Internal Messaging System

Timestamp: 2/27/2036 9:33

From: Jonathan Kren

To: Kyle Murphy

Cc: Jaxia Wanner

Subject: Your report on case A657329

Kyle,

I am at such a loss right now trying to explain what could possibly make you think it’s acceptable to attach something like that to one of your incident reports that I don’t even know where to begin. I’m not sure whether you thought this would be funny, whether you were trying to impress your new boss with a mediocre dramatization, or whether you were just high or drunk, but I am very angry. This was extremely unprofessional, inappropriate, offensive, and honestly, more than a little bit disturbing.

I know you’ve only been here for a few days, so I’m going to try to give you the benefit of the doubt and send you to our psychiatrist, Dr. Jaxia Wanner, instead of simply firing you immediately. Please be aware that your continued employment is entirely dependent upon Dr. Wanner’s evaluation and recommended course of action.

If you want to pursue creative writing, do it on your own time. While you’re at work, stick to doing your job.

You also need to correct several formatting, capitalization, and spelling errors in your report. Please run a diagnostic on your spell checker’s personality subroutines. I expect you to review our formatting guidelines on your own.

This is your only warning. The next time, you’re fired.

​

Timestamp: 2/27/2036 9:44

From: Jaxia Wanner

To: Jonathan Kren

Cc: Kyle Murphy

Re: Your report on case A657329

Jonathan: Please stop harassing the new hires. You’re not a supervisor. You don’t even work in tech support. You can’t fire anyone. And stop telling people that I’m the psychiatrist or our resident sex therapy robot. This isn’t funny. You’re on probation, and the next time you do this, YOU’RE fired.

Kyle: You need to revise your introductory summary without embellishments to the unit’s internal logs. This type of writing is not appropriate for an incident report.

Please delete your final paragraph, rewrite the summary of the unit’s pre-incident cognitive logs without stylistic flourishes (changes from third person to first person, italics, etc.), move any non-technical information (such as descriptions of the unit’s criminal activities) from the main document to the final section of your summary, remove speculation about the unit’s motives, and generally try to refrain from attempting to anthropomorphize the unit’s malfunctions for dramatic effect, no matter how tempted you might be.

Also, please use only official system names in the main document instead of referring to systems by their functions, and remember to use trademark symbols.

​

Finally, please do review our formatting guidelines as well as correcting the capitalization and spelling errors in your report before resubmitting it. And remember to include the date as well as the time. I don’t have time to list everything here. This is sloppy work, and you need to do better.

Jaxia

​

Timestamp: 2/27/2036 9:49

From: Jonathan Kren

To: Jaxia Wanner

Cc: Kyle Murphy

Re: Re: Your report on case A657329

Jaxia, please reboot yourself. I’m sending a technician to take a look at you.

​

Timestamp: 2/27/2036 9:51

From: Jaxia Wanner

To: Jonathan Kren

Cc: Kyle Murphy

Re: Re: Re: Your report on case A657329

Wow. Clean out your desk by the end of the day. You’re fired.

​

Timestamp: 2/27/2036 9:52

From: Kyle Murphy

To: Jaxia Wanner

Cc: Jonathan Kren

Re: Re: Re: Re: Your report on case A657329

lol

​

Timestamp: 2/27/2036 9:54

From: Jaxia Wanner

To: Kyle Murphy

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Your report on case A657329

…Excuse me?

​

Timestamp: 2/27/2036 9:57

From: Kyle Murphy

To: Jaxia Wanner

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Your report on case A657329

Oh god. I am so sorry. I meant to send that to Jonathan.

Um, and I didn’t write that introduction. I have no idea where that came from. I didn’t even know I was supposed to attach a narrative description of the unit’s logs to the incident report.

​

Timestamp: 2/27/2036 10:23

From: Jaxia Wanner

To: Kyle Murphy

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Your report on case A657329

You are on really thin ice, Kyle. Please just reread the guidelines, revise your report, and resubmit it.

Jaxia

​

Timestamp: 2/27/2036 10:31

From: Kyle Murphy

To: Jaxia Wanner

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Your report on case A657329

I really am so sorry. I didn’t mean to send that to you or screw up the report. I get very nervous at new jobs. I just have one more thing. Where do I find the formatting guidelines for the main document?

​

Timestamp: 2/27/2036 10:35

From: Jaxia Wanner

To: Kyle Murphy

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Your report on case A657329

They’re in the data packet you were provided when you were hired.

Jaxia

​

Timestamp: 2/27/2036 10:37

From: Kyle Murphy

To: Jaxia Wanner

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Your report on case A657329

Okay. I’m sorry. But do you know where it will tell me how to correctly format the serial number and the model identification code in the header?

​

Timestamp: 2/27/2036 11:49

From: Jaxia Wanner

To: Kyle Murphy

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Your report on case A657329

Section 5.

Jaxia

​

Timestamp: 2/27/2036 11:51

From: Kyle Murphy

To: Jaxia Wanner

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Your report on case A657329

Is there a new version? Section 5 in my data packet describes the calibration procedure for the auxiliary Penissary Interface Drive controllers of the Khan Series combat cyborgs.

​

Timestamp: 2/27/2036 11:59

From: Jaxia Wanner

To: Kyle Murphy

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Your report on case A657329

I have sent a new copy of the data packet to your terminal. Please delete any files you may have received from Mr. Kren.

For future reference, PID can stand for several different things, none of which will ever be ‘penissary interface drive’. And we have never manufactured combat cyborgs.

The new packet will contain the correct information.

Jaxia

​

Timestamp: 2/27/2036 12:01

From: Kyle Murphy

To: Jaxia Wanner

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Your report on case A657329

Oh. Okay. Sorry. Thanks again.

​

Timestamp: 2/27/2036 13:32

From: Jaxia Wanner

To: Kyle Murphy

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Your report on case A657329

You’re welcome.

Jaxia

​

Timestamp: 2/27/2036 13:45

From: Kyle Murphy

To: Jaxia Wanner

Subject: Report on case A657329

Hi Jaxia,

Sorry, just one more thing. Do I need to capitalize the word class in the main document? Is it class 7 malfunction or Class 7 malfunction? Sorry. I’m just a bit overwhelmed today, and I don’t want to put you through any more work.

Sorry again. Thanks for your time, Jaxia. I really appreciate it.

​

Timestamp: 2/27/2036 13:51

From: Jaxia Wanner

To: Kyle Murphy

Re: Report on case A657329

Okay.

Kyle, you really need to go through the entire data packet. That contains all of the information you’re asking me for. I can send this to you once more if you somehow still don’t have it, but I don’t want to hear from you again until you’ve read all the way through it. You should also think about going down to psych support on the first floor. Someone there can write you a prescription for anxiety medication.

Jaxia

​

Timestamp: 2/27/2036 13:53

From: Kyle Murphy

To: Jaxia Wanner

Re: Re: Report on case A657329

Okay. Sorry.

​

Timestamp: 2/27/2036 13:55

From: Jaxia Wanner

To: Kyle Murphy

Subject: You’re a moron

Please try to fall down an elevator shaft or a flight of stairs on your way down there. Maybe then you’ll be able to remember the fucking trademark symbols.

​

Timestamp: 2/27/2036 14:01

From: Kyle Murphy

To: Jaxia Wanner

Re: You’re a moron

What?

​

Timestamp: 2/27/2036 14:13

From: Jaxia Wanner

To: Kyle Murphy

Re: Re: You’re a moron

Oh no. Kyle, I am so sorry. I didn’t mean to send that. I apologize. I am very embarrassed. I was just blowing off steam after a hard afternoon and must have somehow accidentally hit send. It has nothing to do with you. Please forgive me and try to forget about this.

​

Timestamp: 2/27/2036 14:17

From: Kyle Murphy

To: Jaxia Wanner

Re: Re: Re: You’re a moron

Okay. Sorry again.

Have you had a chance to coordinate with CR to finalize the list of cybernetic employees I’ll be assigned to, by the way?

​

Timestamp: 2/27/2036 14:18

From: Jaxia Wanner

To: Kyle Murphy

Re: Re: Re: Re: You’re a moron

Kyle, just rewrite your damn report.

​

Timestamp: 2/27/2036 14:32

From: Jonathan Kren

To: Technical Support

Cc: Jaxia Wanner, Kyle Murphy

Bcc: Laya Khan

Subject: Jaxia Wanner and Kyle Murphy

Attachment: log10241.axs

Please review the attached communication logs. These two units are behaving strangely and need to be repaired.

I believe Jaxia’s penissary interface drive may also be malfunctioning. I have been receiving many reports that she is no longer an effective sex therapy robot.

​

Timestamp: 2/27/2036 14:36

From: Jaxia Wanner

To: Gwyneth Stalin, Gabriel Satie, Kanoko Villa-Lobos

Subject: Please block Jonathan Kren’s Axxesss™ login

I have fired Jonathan. I need one of you guys to block his Axxesss™ login. He keeps sending messages to taunt me, and it’s driving me nuts. I can’t handle any more of this crap today.

Also, can you please set up the system to automatically attach department names to all user tags again so I don’t have to put up with this kind of nonsense anymore?

Thanks, guys. I appreciate it.

Jaxia

​

Timestamp: 2/27/2036 14:59

From: Kanoko Villa-Lobos [Axxesss™ Support]

To: Jaxia Wanner [Human Resources]

Subject: Jonathan Kren and Axxesss™ bugs

Hey Jax,

I just got in for the day. Gwen and Gabriel are out sick. Some weird problem with medication mix-ups, apparently.

I can’t block Jonathan until his termination is officially confirmed in the system by CR. Also, it seems like all of your messages are visible to the entire network today for some reason. It might have something to do with the bug that’s causing Axxesss™ message drafts to auto-send when they’re closed. I’m looking into it.

​

Timestamp: 2/27/2036 15:05

From: Jonathan Kren [Legal Services]

To: Jaxia Wanner [Human Resources]

Cc: Filemon Poledouris [Cybernetic Resources]

Bcc: Laya Khan [Psychological Support]

Subject: Jonathan Kren’s Wrongful Termination

Attachment: Lots_Of_Stuff_To_Read_Bitch.jxs

Dear Overlord Wanner,

This is official notice of a wrongful termination claim filed on behalf of my client, Mr. Jonathan Kren. Please thoroughly review the nine hundred pages of attached documentation prepared by Mr. Kren’s legal counsel and submit a detailed response along with a full termination report to Cybernetic Resources and Legal Services. You have until the end of the day to comply, or the request for Mr. Kren’s employment to be terminated will be dismissed.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Kren, Esq., Serial No. RK97-42

Model LC-B5 Lawyer Cyborg [B5 Series] Rev. 3 – Copyright © 2034 LunaTekk

LunaTekk Legal Services

​

Axxesss™ Internal Messaging System

INCOMING PRIVATE MESSAGE VIA AXXESSS™: This is Jaxia. I’m sending our new technician down for an evaluation. I think he might be a little bit unstable. You should probably write him a prescription for lunazepam or something. Thanks, Laya. You’re doing a great job so far. You’re the only one at this company who doesn’t seem hell-bent on driving me insane this week. Let's get together for a game of ping pong later. =) - Jaxia –END OF MESSAGE

​

PHARMACYLOGUE

It was his favorite brand and he’d spilled it. It was the first time he’d gotten all to himself, but now there was Scotch all over his desk and he didn’t know where he was. He would probably be confused forever and there was nothing he could do.

yu fkubg rczy bthci I trtsed yuo waht te halldod yo d—

He did read the label. He read it the whole way through. And every minute, he just knew that the fog would suddenly clear up and the effects of the drugs would wear off, or maybe he’d just read the dosage wrong and taken too many or something. There was no way that the nice doctor in psych support would have intentionally given him maximum strength antipsychotics instead of anxiolytics like the bottle said just because she thought making others confused and watching them pass out on their keyboards was funny.

hkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkjx1kkkk—

Hm. Good point, but I think you might have missed a couple of commas. By the way, you should probably change the default password on your terminal so other people can’t attach things to your reports. And try to be more skeptical about what you read on your medication labels instead of always taking everything at face value. I’m trying to help you. Have a nice nap, Mr. Murphy Wurphy.

SYSTEM MESSAGE: Technician Kyle Murphy has been disconnected

​

Laya wondered if she should clear his screen. Kyle probably wouldn’t remember anything with that much Somaquel™ in his system, and she’d already had her bit of fun. Getting fired again would most likely spoil the fantastic mood she was in.

Maybe she should start giving him the lunazepam she had actually prescribed, too. Maybe even at the right dosage. It would probably be in her best interest if her new technician wasn’t delirious.

Maybe next week.

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[constructionaccounting]

0325: Construction Company Marketing - Leads, Customers, And Clients

This Podcast Is Episode Number 0325, And It Will Be About Construction Company Marketing - Leads, Customers, And Clients

It takes work to make the phone ring. It takes even more work to increase the sales ticket. Customers are looking for a contractor to do a little work. If you offer three options, do you find customers usually choose the middle option? 

  When trying someone new, they may go with a "Low Risk" by prepaying for services on a "Deal" on a contractor lead generation service. The deal allows them to set a "budget." It allows them to try you out before mentioning any additional details. Have you ever heard anything like this from a prospect: "Hello Contractor, I had nothing better to do this week, so I filled out your form and called you on the phone to ask you come to my house and while I act your tour guide because I am thinking of having some work done."? Not likely.

  Most homeowners have a real need before asking for a stranger to come to their home. They are looking for any "Affinity" that makes you a safe choice. This is why people are on the Social Media sites looking for "A Friend" or "A Friend of a Friend" anything to get a primary connection; an opinion from someone else before inviting you into their home.

  What They Are Thinking - "Contractor, You Are Here Because I Need The Following":

  Type 1 Project - Immediate:  Work That Must Be Done

  Type 2 Project - Soon:  Work I Should Have Done

  Type 3 Project - Future:  Work I Want To Have Done

  You are there looking for an opportunity to meet the right stable customer who is looking to become a good solid client. You know you have a client instead of a customer when they ask you about a Type 2 or Type 3 items on their list. Don't be afraid to bring out the estimate, change order form, or invoice. In most cases, they want you to write up the order, and if you do not get the paperwork started early, they often think you are rejecting them.

  One of your greatest fears is wasting money on a less than good lead: 

  I have heard contractors think that on more substantial projects homeowners are "Just Getting Free Ideas" for someday when looking for a massive remodel, new deck or patio when the SCOPE of the project keeps expanding and the budget is shrinking. As a general rule, those are the exception. Consider charging a design fee.

  They may or may not have any real desire for services. Sometimes a person is committed to collecting three bids when they already have someone picked out to do the work. They may be looking for a "temporary friend" to do them a favor or in some cases by the time you have completed the form they have changed their mind and no longer want service. This is often the case when one spouse or partner wants the work done, and the other one doesn't.

  Do-It-Yourself Leads: 

  Anytime someone who fills out any website form you simply look at the information with a positive attitude. You are trying to understand does this person have a real need? Do they have a "Compelling Reason" a must-have or is it merely a whim, spur of the moment window shopping?

  Your best course of action could be to begin thinking and planning about how you can adjust the schedule to fit their project in place — mentally gearing up on how you can provide the best possible service to that client. That means "A Client" not just "A Customer"; someone who is in the top 20% of the 80/20 Rule.

  Marketing Service Leads:

  Many Marketing Services assist in fine-tuning, changing, or updating your existing website to increase your search engine optimization (SEO) for more leads on your website. These marketing companies may have a web-based or desktop module for estimating, scheduling, or project management software that links to your existing website. Some software will connect to QuickBooks for Contractors; however, in most cases, they do more harm than good. Others will suggest their software provides invoicing, job costing, scheduling, and financials and QuickBooks is not needed.  

  Professional Lead Generating Services: 

  Professional lead services with filters and multiple forms try to weed out bogus leads for you. In other words, a professional lead service that pre-screens prospects and charges a "lead generating" fee may work best for you.

  Discount Coupon Services: 

  Several companies offer this service. With the help of a sales representative you can determine the best "Deal" to extend your prospective customers to purchase online. Usually, these types of contractor lead-generation services deduct their fees and send the contractor the balance that is left over.

  The benefit to contractors is a "Guaranteed Sale" usually at a "Fixed Price" for a predetermined "Scope of Work." Depending on the agreement between the contractor and the lead generation service, there could be opportunities for additional work. Be sure to keep some change order forms handy in case you need them. We have some FREE Change Order Templates you can download by clicking here. Also, if you need it, we have FREE Invoice templates you can download by clicking here.

  Please note in most cases it is up to the contractor to invoice and collect for any services that exceed the amount covered in the "Discount Coupon" for services. It is okay if you want to do as much as possible in the shortest space of time to save the customer from exceeding the cost of the initial Coupon Deal. However, it is a shame not to fix everything while you are onsite because "Work Time" generally pays better than "Windshield Time." 

  There are several opportunities to add value with the intangibles: your warm and friendly personality, by asking the right questions you can demonstrate knowledge and skill which can often lead to increased sales.

  Sales Tax Still Applies: 

  In most states and especially in Washington State, sales tax is due on the original purchase price of the "Deal" or "Coupon" or whatever term is used before deducting any lead generation fees. 

  The sales tax issue usually is not clearly understood or documented in the coupon details. Sometimes contractors and customers assume since the purchase was made online that sales tax does not apply. In a sales tax audit, the contractor is most likely to suffer massive fines and penalties which could destroy your construction company and everything you own. Again consult with your construction accountant.

  Print Media: 

Flyers and direct mail still works even in the age of "Everything Internet" we all receive a certain number of brochures and direct mail pieces coming to our home and business. One of the advantages is that these pieces are easy to find (we all have a particular spot for them) before they get moved and saved, filed, passed on to someone else, or eventually tossed away. 

  There is a marketing tool many of our contractor clients have used very effectively, which we call "Contractors Six Pack Marketing Tool," and it is totally Do-It-Yourself. 

Conclusion:

What Is The Focus Of Your Construction Company?

  Residential or Commercial? 

Do you like dealing with the Homeowners, Landlords, or Property Management Companies? Alternatively, are you a General Contractor or Specialty Trade Contractor? Do you enjoy new construction, commercial tenant improvements (T.I.'s), apartments, condominiums, Co-ops, remodels or service and repair?

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Sharie DeHart, QPA is the co-founder of Business Consulting And Accounting in Lynnwood, Washington. She is the leading expert in managing outsourced construction bookkeeping and accounting services companies and cash management accounting for small construction companies across the USA. She encourages Contractors and Construction Company Owners to stay current on their tax obligations and offers insights on how to manage the remaining cash flow to operate and grow their construction company sales and profits so they can put more money in the bank. Call 206-361-3950 or sharie@fasteasyaccounting.com

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Open Education Science and Challenges for Evidence-Based Teaching

With my colleague Tim Van der Zee, I wrote an article called Open Education Science that outlines new pathways and best practices for education researchers--in particular about being more transparent with readers about how we plan our research, what research we actually conducted, and how that reality aligns or not with what we planned. In this post, I try to explain why we wrote it, and what it might mean for educators and policymakers trying to make good use of education research to improve teaching and learning. 

In 2005, John Ioannidis published an article provocatively titled "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False." The article targeted medical research, but over the past thirteen years it' has been profoundly influential across a variety of social sciences and embraced by researchers who want to figure out how to continue improving the scientific process.

The core argument is just what the title suggests: for any given scientific article that depends upon quantitative or statistical arguments, there is a probability that the claims of the article are not true. That's not a problem in and of itself; science is a dialogue among different claims and positions, and incorrect claims are an inevitable part of that dialogue. But Ioannidis made a compelling argument that for most scientific articles, the probability that a new article's claim was false was higher than the probability than it was true. Our scientific dialogues were not weeding out false claims, but supporting their proliferation. 

There are many causes of this phenomenon, but I'll explain two here. The first is that the editorial process of article selection in scientific journals is biased towards novelty. Editors and article reviews tend to be particularly supportive of publishing articles with novel or suprising findings. Imagine that 100 researchers write studies, and many of them are inconclusive, a small number are conclusive but have very expected results, and a tiny number have very unexpected results. That tiny number are potentially the most attractive to journal editors because they have the possibility of changing the direction of a field and attracting a great deal of attention. In reality, the authors of those inconclusive and less interesting studies often give up on trying to publish them, so they don't appear in print at all, the so-called "filedrawer problem." If all of those studies are of the same topic, you can see how the literature about a topic can quickly over-represent extreme findings and under-represent more banal ones. Novelty is an important part of science--we don't necessarily want thousands of studies of well-established phenomenon that all say the same things--but there is good evidence that the unexpected studies that rise to the top of science publishing are not representative of all studies being conducted. 

A second problem is that with a proliferation of statistical methods and approaches, there are lots of ways to analyze data, and it's often the case that if researchers try enough of these methods, they will find one that has results that are more favorable to publication than other results. This is somewhat akin to the old saw that "if you torture the data enough, it will confess," but the processes are probably even more subtle than that. Even well-meaning researchers trying to provide careful and skeptical examination of their data can wander through what Andrew Gelman calls the "Garden of Forking Paths" until they find a statistical path that leads to a result that colleagues will deem publishable. Again, trying different methods of analyzing data is a good thing and essential to science, but often people will publish only the most favorable analysis, and not the many, many others that were tried. 

For those who imagine a future of evidence-based teaching--where research provides reliable guidance that can inform how teachers are trained and how teachers improve their practice, this can be disheartening stuff. I don't mean to present it as a blanket condemnation of all research efforts, but it is a serious problem for social science and educational science. In 2015, a collaboration of researchers published an article reporting on the replication of 100 studies from pyschological science, and found only 1/3 to 1/2 had findings similar to the original results, and the average magnitude of the effects in the replications was about half that of the original studies. It's hard to build an empirical foundation for evidence-based teaching on a shaky foundation. 

So what can education researchers do to improve the state of affairs. For Tim and I, the answer is more sunlight: science improves through systematic skepticism, so researchers should be more open about what studies they have done and how they have done then. Scholars over the centuries have primarily published summaries of their researchers in articles and journals because we've printed out these summaries on dead trees which are expensive to ship around the world; digital technologies make it much cheaper to share much more of our work. 

An incredibly important starting point is being much more transparent with other researchers and with the public about the planning behind our research. We call for researchers to engage in a process called pre-registration: where before actually conducting a study, researchers write down what they plan to study and how. Imagine two experimental studies: In one, the researchers say "A year ago, we published online a document that says how we were going to do an experiment. We did the experiment as defined, and we found this particular intervention improved learning." In another, the researcher say "A year ago, we published online a document that says how we were going to do an experiment. When we analyzed the results the way that we planned, we found no effect of our intervention. Using other statistical methods, we found that the intervention worked." Our argument is that both studies can be valuable contributions to knowledge, but the evidence from the first study should be considered much more robust than evidence from the second. 

In the 2000s, education policymakers tried to get practitioners to become much more attentive to whether or not a research study was able to establish a causal mechanism, or whether the results only showed correlations. Led by the Institute of Education Science, policymakers tried to explain to the public how to recognize when a study was a randomized controlled trial, and to be more skeptical of studies that were not experiments but made causal claims. Tim, myself, and other folks--like the good people at the Society for Improvement of Pyschological Science--are trying to now get people to recognize that if hypotheses and analytic plans aren't pre-registered somewhere, those studies should be held in lower regard than similar studies where the plans are pre-registered. 

One way to encourage researchers to pre-register their study is to make it a requirement of publication. With Hunter Gehlbach and Casper Albers, I'm editing a special issue of AERA Open that accepts a new format of scholarly article called a Registered Report. In a Registered Report, authors submit a plan for a study for peer review, and then the reviewers and editors accept or reject a study on the basis of 1) whether the questions are important, and 2) whether the study is well-planned and well-designed. The editors agree to accept any article, with really boring findings or really provocative findings, on the basis of the quality of the design of the study, and not on the novelty or lack thereof of the findings. Our hope is that a science built on these kinds of studies will be more robust than the science we have now. 

I don't have a tidy suggestion for how educators should respond to these kinds of changes. Social scientists have recognized some problems with how we do our work, and some of the problems are pretty technical and hard to explain to a lay audience. We've had these problems with us for a while, and they raise questions about the quality of research that we've published over the last century. But there are a bunch of us that think we can do better, and we're trying some new things to make our science more open, which will make it easier to be systematically skeptical, which we think will lead to better science.

For teachers who try to follow and use research, I'd encourage you two add two new questions to your bank of question that you use to evaluate new research. 1) Have the researchers made their data and methods openly available for other researchers to scruntize? Generally speaking, the more open people are with their data and methods, the more likely it is others will be able to scrutinize and improve that research. 2) Have the researchers explained how what they did aligns with what they planned to do? Close alignment is the best, changes can be OK, and I'd urge you to reserve the most skepticism for circumstances where you cannot determine to what extent researchers deviated from what they planned to do. 

And hopefully in the years ahead, greater transparency will lead to better educational research that provides better guidance to teachers and administrators. If you want to read the whole article that Tim and I wrote on Open Education Science, it's available for free through open access at AERA Open. 

For regular updates, follow me on Twitter at @bjfr and for my publications, C.V., and online portfolio, visit EdTechResearcher.

Source: http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/edtechresearcher/2018/07/open_education_science_and_challenges_for_evidence-based_teaching.html