#like *this much X will have Y effect in Z setting/treatment*

[mephist0phallus]

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[vulpes-z3rda]

SFW Alphabet ~ Bakugou

a/n: i have a few things in my drafts that just need editing before i publish them and then i should have a bit more consistent upload schedule, i just have college starting again soon so i’ll have to balance it!

for now though, i hope you enjoy this! yes i am moving my wattpad content over here dont @ me shush

A = Affection (How affectionate are they? How do they show affection?)

For starters, we all know he isn't the most... in touch with his emotions. But he's more than ready to show whatever emotions he has to for you. I mean, he doesn't just cuddle anyone when they seriously need it.

B = Best friend (What would they be like as a best friend? How would the friendship start?)

Well, you probably beat his ass somehow in some training activity Aizawa set. Or you stood up to him when you were younger to protect Midoriya. Whatever it is you did, it made him appreciate you so much more. Also, he'd basically be like your little bodyguard or guard dog so take advantage of it. He would never admit to any of this by the way.

C = Cuddles (Do they like to cuddle? How would they cuddle?)

I mean... of fucking course he does!!! It's not like he'll go out of his way every time to do it with you, but when he's up for it, he won't want to let you go.

D = Domestic (Do they want to settle down? How are they at cooking and cleaning?)

He never really imagined himself settling down with anyone ever. Of course, his mind changed when you can into his life. You're the first person to ever make him question what he wants his future to be like. The bonus to having him as your boyfriend is that he's an amazing chef and he cleans very well and often.

E = Ending (If they had to break up with their partner, how would they do it?)

He'd be very reluctant to do it in all honesty. This is Bakugou we're talking about, he doesn't do anything without putting up a fight. Unless he has to do it to protect you... that's really the only way he'd ever let you go.

F = Fiance(e) (How do they feel about commitment? How quick would they want to get married?)

Well, the subject of commitment is very new to him. What, with him being emotionally constipated or whatever... but he'd probably ask you to marry him after a couple of years of dating.

G = Gentle (How gentle are they, both physically and emotionally?)

Let's get real here, he isn't known for being gentle with anyone so why would he be gentle on you? However, he can be a big softie on a rare occasion or when he's drunk.

H = Hugs (Do they like hugs? How often do they do it? What are their hugs like?)

He's not that much of a hugger unless you really really need one. Honestly, he's surprisingly good at comforting people once he himself has opened up to them. So expect a lot of bear, comfort hugs from this man right here.

I = I love you (How fast do they say the L-word?)

It took him a few months. Listen, he's not used to showing how he feels to people so openly, so when he did, he was a shy b o i.

J = Jealousy (How jealous do they get? What do they do when they're jealous?)

Well... most people think it's concerning how easily jealous he gets, but you find it adorable. The worst he gets is using his quirk on them, but usually he just verbally threatens them. Like I've said before, he refuses to let you go.. he loves you too much for that.

K = Kisses (What are their kisses like? Where do they like to kiss you? Where do they like to be kissed?)

They're kind of steamy and passionate. Every now and then, they're just soft and loving. He kisses you on the lips and neck normally and you love that as well as forehead kisses.

L = Little ones (How are they around children?)

We all know he's angry towards children or anyone for that matter. But his own brats? Well, his personality does a complete 180. It scares you honestly, but you wouldn't have it any other way.

M = Morning (How are mornings spent with them?)

You both cuddle for a bit when you wake up before actually getting out of bed. It's a slow start to the day for you both that involves lots of love and hugs and kisses to wake up.

N = Night (How are nights spent with them?)

This is easy, you do some things that aren't PG and things that are very fluffy and soft. It's not abnormal for a friend or a family member to come over and see you both cuddled up, under a blanket with a movie on the tv.

O = Open (When would they start revealing things about themselves? Do they say everything all at once or wait a while to reveal things slowly?)

A couple of months into the relationship, he starts opening up a lot more to you. It comes in drabbles, but eventually, you get the bigger picture of Bakugou. After a year or so, you have every piece to the puzzle that you need to see the picture it holds.

P = Patience (How easily angered are they?)

Very easily. He has a short fuse so if you push him too much, he'll snap and yell at you. I promise he doesn't mean it, angers just something he's never been able to completely control.

Q = Quizzes (How much would they remember about you? Do they remember every little detail you mention in passing, or do they kind of forget everything?)

He remembers a lot actually! He may be shit with remembering people's names, but when it comes to you he finds it hard to forget anything. The little things and the big things, he knows everything you've ever told him.

R = Remember (What is their favourite moment in your relationship?)

I'd say when you went in your first date together. He's never been so happy in his life to be with "his nerd" as he called you. But seriously, he loved it and although he might never say it out loud, he appreciates that you gave him that chance

S = Security (How protective are they? How would they protect you? How would they like to be protected?)

I'm just gonna put it out there... he's very protective of you okay? Like, he saw one guy look at you wrong and the next thing you know he's over there telling him to fucking watch what he's doing. He just really loves you and doesn't want to see you hurt ever. Trust me, he goes off on one of you get hurt during training to the point were you have to be completely hidden from him during it.

He doesn't like being protected as much but if you do, he wouldn't really mind it and appreciates that you'd help him in a time when he's in danger or vulnerable.

T = Try (How much effort would they put into dates, anniversaries, gifts, everyday tasks?)

He plans it really well actually. He takes you to nice places and simple ones just as much as each other, he gets you trinkets that he knows you'll love and big gifts on occasions

U = Ugly (What would be some bad habits of theirs?)

When he gets really angry, he uses his quirk and destroys something in the house. You're slowly growing used to it but it still annoys you because "OI!! I PAID GOOD MONEY FOR THAT POP ROCKS!!"

V = Vanity (How concerned are they with their looks?)

I'd say he's moderately concerned about how he looks. He gets beauty sleep still and even goes as far as to book spa retreats for you both under the excuse that he wants to see you relax. We all know it's because he likes the facial treatments they use... we all know that Bakugou. There's no hiding it.

W = Whole (Would they feel incomplete without you?)

Omg... this pomeranian right here would be l o s t without you. You finally helped him realise his feelings and understand them and now you're just gone? Hell no. He'd slowly break in confusion but pretend like nothings effecting him

X = Xtra (A random headcanon for them.)

He's a sucker for playing stupid board games with you. You make it, he'll play it. It doesn't matter what the context of the game is or the rules, he'll play and he'll win.

Y = Yuck (What are some things they wouldn't like, either in general or in a partner?)

He doesn't like it when his s/o talks down on themselves or gives up without a fight. I mean, he's gotten over a lot in life to get to where he is, so he wants someone similar to him in that sense. Sure he understand you'll have that odd day or time period, but if it's all the time it begins to annoy him.

Z = Zzz (What is a sleep habit of theirs?)

He mumbles his well known phrases in his sleep. So you'll be sleeping peacefully and then the quietest "die" you've ever heard will just come from him. It's super cute surprisingly!! Every now and then he'll mumble an "I love you"

[williamjwatson]

Production Bias and OWL 2020

There’s… admittedly… a lot the Overwatch League has to iron out and polish in how they run, produce, and broadcast the league if they want the league to live up to the vision that they believe is possible in the long term.

I could be here forever if I wanted to go into all of it, but I want to focus on an insidious problem that I don’t think the broadcast/production staff realize is hampering the full potential enjoyment a lot of fans could have watching the games. (As the majority of league viewers are based in North America, I will be focusing on the American, or the “main” broadcast stream and social media channels.  I can’t comment on the other broadcast streams in other languages because none of them are in languages i am fluent in, so I won’t.)

That problem is Bias.

Bias emerges in many ways in OWL production.

There are overt examples:

Montecristo’s relentless dunking on the Houston Outlaws and insisting the team, its players, and its fans are trash during official broadcast and even as he is commentating Outlaws matches in a role he should be neutral in. The unified desk beating the “NYXL choking in all playoffs meme” to death while conveniently forgetting NYXL are the only two time back to back stage champions in league history, and even when the term “choking” technically isn’t relevant because they are simply being outclassed by a team that has consistently shown they can handily beat NYXL meanwhile few other teams get negative treatment as enduring Bren’s fervent backing of the Shanghai dragons, reason be damned Soe’s blatant favouritism of the Atlanta Reign in all situations because she simply loves that team more than any other.

Some of these examples can be entertaining as hell.

Others are annoying to have to be subjected to, especially if your team is the target.

There’s also much more subtle examples of bias, and these emerge more in the choice to include or omit things in production, the manner teams are discussed in desk segments, and with a whole season of footage and posts, clear patterns emerge:

The desk discussion about san francisco shock being notably more hype than discussion about vancouver titans despite both teams having the same trajectory and success over the season as a variation of above: framing every titans match as “who can defeat the titans???” meanwhile every san francisco match is “can the shock continue their streak of dominance?” as if one team inherently is a villain who must be beaten down and the other is a protagonist whose dominance is expected and accepted as the new normal as a caveat under this: being very respectful of super’s tears after stage 1 finals, and mocking bumper’s tears after stage 2 finals the desk’s respect and levity given to taimou’s mental struggles being a bench player in a meta that doesn’t cater to his skills and celebrating his return, while his teammate, EFFECT was not afforded the same respect when he had to go home for his mental health in season 1, and his return to season 2 was very much lukewarm in comparison trend towards mixed teams being lauded for performing well in a majority of their games, meanwhile full korean speaking teams get lukewarm responses even when they’re doing well, and downright mean responses when they don’t do well (there are exceptions because sometimes the records speak for themselves, ie: justice and mayhem) notable difference in how successes and failures are presented when discussing non-korean players and korean players the fact Montecristo keeps being scheduled to cast Houston Outlaws games despite his obvious and very vocal disdain for the team (this could be scheduling chance rather than choice, but even so, it makes it much harder than it needs to be for outlaws fans to enjoy watching their team play the game and the fact this isn’t seen as a problem is an unconscious issue) comparatively little or no footage of teams who don’t do comms in English being featured on the incredibly popular comms check videos, thereby hampering fan engagement and ability to relate to at least 1/3 the teams in the league (how hard is it to hire a translator to sift through footage and add subtitles?? the dragons and spark seem to do this with ease? and official broadcast shouldn’t be lacking in such resource??)

Generally, having bias isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Bren’s fervent belief in the dragons, even carried over as a meme from stage 1, is incredibly entertaining with the props and the ribbing, and in a way, Bren has his own redemption arc when the dragons really broke through that wall this season and won their first game, then kept winning until they won stage 3 entirely with stellar hardcore play.

The pre-show picks for the day are an entertaining segment, and gives the desk and analysts a chance to justify to the viewers and each other why their pick to win is the correct choice.  Sometimes it gives fans insight into what past performance, play style, and analysis should be accounted for.  Sometimes it’s just a blatant show of bias, and you know what, that’s fine. Sometimes it’s even entertaining as hell.

But sometimes Bias isn’t fun, and when the running joke about your team, or your favourite player keeps being featured even when the context is no longer there, or the talent who clearly doesn’t think much of your team keeps getting airtime to dunk on your team because some portion of viewers or production thinks it’s funny, the show stops being fun to watch.

The problem is amplified when it becomes apparent that you can’t avoid this bias if you intend to continue watching the league.  As there is only one single official English stream, featuring the same rotation of commentators and analysts and desk talent, fans have no choice but to listen and go along with the flow that the main production has set up for them, or avoid tuning into pre-and post game coverage and discussion, and watch on mute, missing out on content and strategic analysis that allows them to engage with other fans, or better understand the game at an esport level and why results turned out the way they did.  (Or watch Avast’s stream instead, which doesn’t show league footage and isn’t beholden to professional standards like official broadcast and also it’s not the OWL official broadcast which means fan disengagement.)

As an extension of that, with what the league chooses to post and broadcast, there’s also no way to access additional content the league chooses to omit to post unless your team takes the initiative to make that content themselves (Hangzhou Spark  and Shanghai Dragons open mic are both treasures and official comms check is missing out by not including their footage, among other teams: where is mayhem? dynasty? NYXL?)

So why am I discussing this? OWL is doing okay, and you can’t please everyone, right?  I obviously have my opinions, but otherwise it’s fine??

Well the thing is, OWL still very much has aspirations to grow.

I haven’t forgotten that 20 million dollar buy in.

Neither have the investors, I don’t think.

With the shift to a travelling rotating homestead schedule in four divisions next year to directly hit hometown markets and grow local communities, OWL clearly means to grow and get bigger, and that means attracting more fans and viewers and consumers, and keeping the existing fans they have.

Next year, leaving the Blizzard arena, bias no longer becomes an asset, it becomes an active, growing problem.

A significant portion of fans already find it very hard to watch and engage with pre-and post game coverage.  Fans that no longer engage with desk talent centric content, and maybe even watch games on mute are very much on their way to disengagement from the league entirely.

Furthermore, it will be significantly harder to recruit fans to support teams if the official league broadcast makes a point to tell them, before they are even engaged, that their home city team is trash and they should feel bad for thinking of supporting them for x, y, and z reasons.

Additionally, with the shift next year to local market games, the attention on the league will be amplified, and with it will come an expectation of professionalism.  There’s a clear lack of polish in this area, notably.  What happens when the Outlaws Homestead happens and Monte is not only scheduled to cast, but spends the entire time dunking on the Outlaws?  How does that look to local stakeholders?  How are Outlaws fans gonna have a good time at their own homestead while the official broadcast does them dirty?  How welcome does the broadcast feel to fans who don’t have means to attend their team’s homestands, and must engage via the official broadcast stream?

Given the single official broadcast in this language, and no announcement yet to expand the casting and desk talent cast, production needs to iron out their problems with bias, and that starts with stepping back and realizing they have a very obvious bias problem in the way they present narratives, decide what content is shown and promoted, and how often the talent team overtly supports certain teams while on air in an official capacity.  Professionalism also needs to level up, because a recent debacle on air already received negative response in the twittersphere directly from team organization stakeholders.

If the overwatch league wants to reach out to more fans, and continue growing while retaining the fanbase they already have, broadcast needs to become far more neutral in how they present the esport with this singular official broadcast, or create local based versions of official broadcast.  Unfortunately, option two is unfeasible because there is a lack of such experienced casters in the sport at this time to have the equally biased 20 local commentator broadcasts going at once.

With the singular official broadcast, this means neutral commentating without snide comments about teams casters obviously dislike.  This means desk consciously making the effort to present equal narratives to teams with similar trajectory, or equally flipping back and forth over time so a “villain” narrative isn’t constantly only dumped on one team all season.  This means hiring Korean and Chinese speaking editor or translator to help get equal team representation in fun quirky “get to know the team” segments like comms check in an official capacity instead of making the non-English speaking teams do extra work within their organization to pump their own versions of official content themselves. (Hangzhou and Shanghai may do their own open mics, but the point is they shouldn’t HAVE TO to get the same quirky fun coverage out that English speaking teams get to take for granted)

They’ve done a lot this year, expanding Danny and Emily’s roles beyond that of simply translator to give that extra interviewing representation to players who don’t feel confident speaking English, and giving them airtime to connect with their fans.  This is already mitigating the interviewing bias of last year, and giving more screen time to players who don’t speak English primarily (the Diem Carpe segment comes to mind).

I think they can do more, and I believe they have to if they want the League to live up to what they want it to be, so every fan of every team can enjoy watching as much as they can.

Source: Production Bias and OWL 2020

[rainbowguardassemble]

Here is a good Meta on Renly just messaging you because it wasn't tagged - joannalannister(.)tumblr(.) com/post/182019038016/renly-baratheon-seems-like-a-rather-sad-figure-to

First of all, it’s a post I and a lot of my fellow mods on the blog hadn’t seen before, so thank you for bringing it to our attention - new Renly content is after all what we’re here for, and we welcome all sorts of creations from fans everywhere!

Secondly, hi! Mod Felix - bpdrenly - responding here with a few thoughts on the post you’ve recommended. Obviously I am responding with my own thoughts and opinions only, and I welcome input not only from my fellow mods but also followers of the rainbowguardassemble blog and fans everywhere. (Please keep us company! It can be so lonely in this little corner of the internet!)

A quick disclaimer however: whilst I am in no way attacking OP for the post, I have to admit that the disclaimer at the start of the post about ‘Yes, I know he’s x, y and z ‘bad things’’ doesn’t sit all that well with me. Having empathy, or even just sympathy, for someone - fictional or not - doesn’t require a disclaimer. Own those feelings! It’s okay! And let’s be honest, especially when next to people like Tywin, Ramsay, the Mountain, etc... Renly is not a bad person.

Renly’s a fascinating character, and the point OP has raised about how the relationship between he and Stannis must have been influenced by and has evolved since the Siege of Storm’s End is an interesting one. I personally have given a lot of thought to Renly’s childhood and young years, especially because we are given very little detail about it in the canon and never from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, as Renly is not a pov character. The description of him as starved for attention, starved for love is particularly striking and, i think, apt.  Renly’s behaviour in the ASOIAF canon i think does demonstrate this point beautifully. Maester Cressen’s anecdote from the ACOK prologue, ‘the bold little boy with wild black hair and laughing green eyes was a man grown now […] ‘look at me, i’m a king”, portrays him as a small child who acts out imaginatively to get that attention.

I work with children, and although I’m not by any stretch of the imagination a child psychologist or an expert on kids’ behaviour and the hows and whys, I can speak from experience to say that when children say ‘look at me, look at me’ enough for it to be an abiding memory you have of them… they are starving for attention. I look after a little boy (K) who constantly shows you what he’s doing, asks you to come and play with him, wants to know what you’re up to and can he join in and is it okay if he…? and it’s because he’s in every single day of the working week, from 10am to 6pm, and he just doesn’t get that attention at home. I’ve seen him present pictures he’s spent a lot of time and effort on to his mother only to have her glance at, outright refuse to look at, or even deposit them in the recycling outside the nursery. Children need validation, affection and support from parental and familial figures in their lives, and when they don’t get it, they search for it everywhere else they possibly can. Which, yes, is actually very sad to see. I love K to distraction, but the lack of attention he gets at home means he also acts out at nursery and isn’t as socially adept as his peers - which again, I think probably strikes true for Renly as well. He’s a pro at affecting masks and hiding his true feelings, which can make him come across as callous and unfeeling - perhaps the reason for OP having described him as ‘a dick’.

I’m not saying Renly is a saint. There are definite negative aspects to his character, including the level of attention-seeking he goes to. Stannis is correct when he says that he has the stronger claim to the throne, being the next eldest son of the current ruling family and therefore above not only Renly but Joffrey, Myrcella and Tommen who are technically Robert’s stepchildren. 

For me, the situation is reminiscent of the Anarchy, a civil war of succession between Stephen of Blois and Empress Matilda following the death of William the Conqueror. Ignoring Joffrey, Myrcella, and Tommen (as we all know that they’re not blood relations of Robert), the line of succession would pass first to the next eldest blood relative of the most recent ruler, which would be Stannis, and then to Renly. Obviously things like fitness to rule would have to be taken into account - infirmity of mental and physical health, for example, or ‘moral infirmity’ (such as, for example… incest) - but as an able man of sound mind and of an age to rule alone, Stannis is the prime candidate to become the next king. I’m sure anyone who has younger siblings will agree with me that there’s nothing more infuriating than a younger sibling being given precedence or preferential treatment, and Stannis has already had a long-standing grudge against Renly for having received dominion over the Stormlands and residence in Storm’s End, the Baratheon family seat and hereditary lands, whilst he gets Dragonstone. It’s a long story and one that’s been done to death in meta, so I’m not going to rehash it here, but suffice to say that the way I’ve always personally read the relationship between Stannis and Renly is a long-suffering and bitter older brother resenting his younger brother for essentially being given what was ‘mine by rights’ (ACOK Catelyn III).

Speaking about the siege and the effect it had on Renly, and on his relationship with his brothers, I would agree with OP that it must have had a profound and lasting effect. OP says he is starved for food; undeniably, the castle at Storm’s End spends a year under siege ‘surviving on rats and boot leather’ (AGOT Eddard VI) and would certainly be empty of food long before said siege was broken, to the point where they are almost forced to resort to cannibalism: ‘Maester Cressen told Stannis we might be forced to eat our dead, and there was no gain in flinging away good meat’ (ACOK Catelyn IV). Renly, being Renly, is being pretty flippant about it, making a joke - but even sixteen+ years later, he remembers that they were almost ‘reduced to dining on corpses’ (ACOK Catelyn IV). That would have been a deeply psychologically scarring experience to have had to even think about, let alone have it be a distinct possibility. A small child, looking over the parapet of a castle under siege, who has been forced to eat rats and boot leather for god knows how long in the attempt to survive said siege, is going to be desperate to join the amassed ranks of banqueting, feasting enemies outside his door. He’s a child. He doesn’t understand why he can’t go out there and eat with them, and I think it’s highly unlikely that stannis would have bothered to explain all of the intricate details of how and why they were enemies and so out of bounds to a five-year-old child. All he sees is food, and his tummy is grumbling. Stannis, however - ever a pragmatist, and considerably wiser to the perils of war than his five-year-old brother - sees the bannermen and armies of a king who is known to be cruel to the point of madness, who will have been charged with taking the castle and obtaining it and its inhabitants’ surrender by any means necessary. He knows that if the Tyrells get hold of him, Renly, or Robert, who are all technically traitors to the crown, the penalty will be death. He would rather starve slowly, keeping himself and the rest of the people in the castle as safe as can be expected under the circumstances, and deny them the satisfaction. It’s a very brave thing to do (and I’m not in any way, shape or form a fan of Stannis).

The thing that must really grind Stannis’ gears (or his teeth!) about Renly… is that his brother probably doesn’t remember that. He doesn’t remember the green and gold being the symbol of the people who were threatening his life and withholding essential food and resources from him as a child. He sees Highgarden as it is in the summer of his life: practically a utopia, beautiful and wealthy and full of all the things Renly loves, from music to fruit to luxurious surroundings. Renly entirely allies himself with the Tyrells. as OP says, almost every time we meet him, he’s clad in green and/or gold: 

‘a man near twenty whose armour was […] a deep forest-green’ (AGOT Sansa I)

‘the king’s green velvet tunic as well, worked in gold thread […] the Baratheon sigil in the colours of highgarden’ (ACOK Catelyn II)

‘his green velvet doublet […] a chain of gold and emeralds around his neck’ (ACOK Catelyn III)

‘green leather straps and […] golden buckles’ (ACOK Catelyn IV). 

Even when he dies, Renly ‘stumble[s] […] a dark red tide that drown[s] his green and gold’ (ACOK Catelyn IV).

His chosen partner is a Tyrell, his wife is a Tyrell, the bankroll behind his claim to the throne and the army supporting him: ‘Tyrell swords will make me king’ (ACOK Catelyn IV).

And Renly adds insult to injury with the peach scene. he outright admits that the fruit is ‘from Highgarden’ (ACOK Catelyn III)’, just like the men making up his army, his queen, and his lover. ‘You’ve never tasted anything so sweet’ (ACOK Catelyn III). He says, and I’m sure to Renly it’s true. I’m sure there’s a part of Renly that’s still the scared little boy seeing the bounty of Highgarden right outside the walls of his home and wanting desperately to be part of it. The Tyrells are not only Renly’s practically adoptive family, they’re his benefactors in more ways than one. His fortunes and his destiny are inextricably linked with them and theirs. Renly has found love with the youngest son of their family, a boy who adores him so much he takes a vow of chastity at sixteen years old because ‘when the sun has set, no candle can replace it’ (ASOS 1 Tyrion II), a vow that mirrors Jaime Lannister giving up Casterly Rock and all of the Lannister fortune and power for love. OP asserts that Renly was starving for love as much as he was for food; Stannis was a dutiful, not a loving, brother, and Robert was not only absent but openly preferred the company of Ned, who is almost an adopted brother to him, to that of his actual blood siblings. Is it any wonder that, when Loras offers him his heart, he takes it with both hands, no matter how it infuriates Stannis?

to cut this long and rambling essay down to the thrust of it: 

Renly is, as OP says, starving for love and attention above all, because as a child he didn’t get any of that from anyone in his family. He’s damaged, traumatised, and dealing with that the best way he can. I personally am very drawn to him because i can identify strongly with that aspect of his character (my url is bpdrenly because i headcanon him as being a bpd sufferer too, and I have another meta about why I feel that that fits his character here). His was the type of childhood you see written about in those Cathy Glass books about neglected kids in the foster system in bookshops. My heart honestly breaks for him. Yes, he says and does some cruel things. No, he probably would not have been a good king, even if he had been given the chance. But he’s a complex and incredibly interesting character who it is my deepest regret - and also deepest joy - that we don’t get to have even one pov chapter for. I love him, which is why i joined the rainbowguardassemble mod team. We’re all fans of Renly, and that’s why we’re here.

[ourhappylies]

Connor Murphy Fluff Alphabet (DEH) 🌻

A = Attractive what do they find attractive about the other?

He adores how sweet you are to him, even though everyone else treats him like garbage. When you showed up as the “new kid” he was particularly standoffish every time you would ask him for directions or a pencil, but the first time you found him in one of his moods and stayed even when he yelled and cried and told you to leave, he knew you were just as sweet as you were acting and you weren’t going to be like everyone else and leave him in the dust.

B = Baby do they want a family? why/why not?

Connor doesn’t really want children, at least children of his own, but he would definitely consider adopting later on in life. He’s terrified of someone else having to suffer through their teenage years like he had to, and so he doesn’t want to risk passing down the multitude of mental illness and pain to someone he loves more than anything.

C = Cuddle how do they cuddle?

Connor doesn’t have a specific way he cuddles, he just has to feel close to you. He absolutely adores being near you and he adores the way your heart beats just a tiny bit faster around him. You make him feel safe, and there’s nothing he loves more in the world than cuddling with you while you both sleep, no matter what position you two end up in.

D = Dates what are dates with them like?

Dates with Connor are always something to remember. He particularly loves abandoned places, places only you two can find, a safe space for both of you to be completely honest with each other. Sometimes he’ll go before your date to set up the little area you’ll share, whether that be with lights, flowers, or anything else he thinks might possible cheer you up.

E = Everything you are my ____ (e.g my life, my world…)

He always stays up later than you do, and he’ll stare at you while you sleep, grinning like a madman. “You’re the reason I’m even still here, you’re my life,” he murmurs to you in the dark of night, a secret he’d only tell you years later when he wasn’t experiencing constant suicidal thoughts.

F = Feelings when did they know they were falling in love?

He knew he was falling in love after one of his angry mood swings, the first one you saw and the one you refused to leave his side for. He would try to avoid you for a while, too afraid you were too far out of his league until Jared asked you how you and Connor were doing, forcing you to confront him.

G = Gentle are they gentle? If so, how?

He tries to be. He always apologizes for himself and how his illnesses effect not only him but you. He buys you gifts for almost every date, and he shows you a side of him no one else ever gets to see, the side of him scribbled in the backs of notebooks and margins on homework, the side of him tht just wants to be loved.

H = Hand/Hold how do they like to hold hands?

Connor laces his fingers with yours, it gives him something to focus on and something to squeeze if someone starts to piss him off so he doesn’t hurt himself and you can get him out of the situation.

I = Impression first impression/s

His first impression of you honestly wasn’t very nice, he thought you were just faking being sweet, and he thought you would turn on him just as quick as everyone else as soon as you got the hang of things, but when you were still talking to him weeks into the school year, he reconsidered that impression.

J = Joker are they into pulling pranks?

He knows what it’s like to live in fear, and he doesn’t want you experiencing that even for an instant, so he usually doesn’t pull pranks, plus he’s always anxious you’ll get so pissed at him that you’ll leave him and he’s too worried he’ll cross that line to pull pranks.

K = Kisses how do they kiss?

Kisses with him are always passionate and sweet, albeit a little short. If you want more that a soft quick kiss, you’ll have to hold his face there to show him how much you do want him and do love him, and aren’t simply kissing him because he’s your boyfriend.

L = Love who says I love you first?

You have to say it first, because Connor is too anxious that you’ll leave him if he gets too serious. You’ll say it casually, and watch the dumbstruck look on Connor’s face for a moment before realizing what you say and quickly going to apologize and leave before Connor pulls you into one of those rare long kisses.

M = Memory their favourite moment together

His favourite memory is when he brought you to a wedding within.. somewhere in his family, Connor honestly didn’t know. You dragged him to the dance floor, dancing with him most of the night and sharing secrets, giggles, and kisses. He remembers that night like it was yesterday, down to exactly how your hair looked and the way you smiled at him.

N = Nickel do they spoil? do they buy the person they love everything?

Connor comes from money, so it’s not surprising that he’s used to just about everything material he could ever want. He’ll lie to his parents about things he wants just to give them to you, or agree to actually participate in therapy for an allowance just so he can buy you gifts, because he loves seeing how happy they make you.

O = Orange what colour reminds them of their other half?

The colour yellow reminds him of you. It’s such a vibrant colour and he thinks it matches your personality perfectly. Plus his anti-depressants are yellow and that and you are the only two things that seem to make him happy anymore.

P = Petnames what pet names do they use?

Connor loves stupid nicknames, because he loves hearing your laugh. From “Boobear” to “His favourite weeaboo”, he’ll call you anything to make you smile, especially when you’re mad at him for something, or at least giving him the silent treatment.

Q = Quaint what is their favourite non-modern thing?

Connor loves bookstores and he adores the fifties aesthetic. He takes you on milkshake dates more often than anything else, and he’ll dance with you in his room after to the old vinyls he has on his newest favourite thing: his record player. 

R = Rainy Day what do they like to do on a rainy day?

He loves to facetime you or just snuggle in your bed with you on rainy days. They are some of the only days he’s able to sleep, and he loves spending that time next to you. He enjoys having you read to him or just sit with him, playing with his hair, because it helps him fall, and stay, asleep.

S = Sad how do they cheer themselves/each other up

Connor will cheer himself up with videos and pictures he’s taken of you since the two of you met. He loves snapping pictures of you driving or off guard pictures with flowers or snow in your hair, and he loves taking videos of the presents he gives you, no matter how much whining you do at the start of them he loves and cherishes those videos with his whole heart. He always tries to cheer you up with being extra touchy, because that’s what helps him cheer up. He’ll set up cute dates and bring your favourite food and lots of gifts. He loves spending money on you, despite your protests, so he always does it to cheer you up.

T = Talking what do they love to talk about?

He loves talking about books and music. He loves exploring themes with you and he loves telling you his interpretations of things as he loves to hear exactly where you do and don’t agree. Connor has a very analytical mind, but this has in fact started numerous fights since Connor doesn’t particularly like his opinions challenged, as he usually feels that they are instead being dismissed.

U = Unencumbered What helps them relax?

If he’s paranoid, you have to sit with him and touch him and whisper to him, it’s the only way he’ll even begin to believe you love him. If he’s anxious or angry it’s better to keep your distance unless he approaches you looking for your compassion and loving touches. Talking to him and showing him you aren’t leaving is the easiest way to get Connor to relax around you.

V = Vaunt what do they like to show off? What are they proud of?

Connor likes to show off his art, he’s proud of how well he can draw and write. He loves drawing and writing, especially with you as his muse.

W = Wedding when, how, where do they propose?

Connor proposes when it’s just you and him. He proposes during one of your many late night adventures, this one ghost hunting. He leaves clues all night with fake EVPs asking things vaguely about marriage and staging a wedding dress at the end of the hallway (albeit on a vacuum cleaner).

X = Xylophone What’s their song?

All About Your Heart by Mindy Gledhill. He always imagines you singing it to him, and you’re the one person that makes him such a sap. He loves you and he loves singing the song for you softly to help you sleep.

Y = You the ___ to my ___ (e.g the cookies to my milk, the macaroni to my cheese)

“You are the icing on my cake-“ you’d started singing on day, not expecting Connor to come back with the same song, “You are the smile I can’t erase..” He always sings back now, and ever since then he can’t stop saying it.

Z = Zebra if they wanted a pet, what pet would they get?

Connor has always wanted a pet hamster. He wants someone up at night as late as he is, and something that won’t judge him no matter how much he talks about you.

[togglesbloggle]

Utility

This was going to be a ‘pet peeve’ post, but I think instead it’s more productive as a crowdsourcing post. The “pet peeve” was going to be “treating utility as an cardinal, rather than ordinal value”, largely on the grounds of Von Neumann’s formal definition of utility in Theory of Games back in the fifties. Going from memory here but, I understand that he basically defined utiltity as an ordering of preferences, largely revealed through thought experiments in which two things are compared to one another and the subject is asked to state a preference.  I would rather have a cookie than a swift kick to the face, therefore cookies are higher utility.  I would rather have immortality than a cookie, and we assume there’s a transitive property in play, so swift kick to the face < cookie < immortality.  We *can* map a number line to this, but you have to be really careful not to introduce assumptions- just because “pet kitten” is at “2″ on our map and “have breakfast” is at “6″, it doesn’t follow that I would rather pet five kittens than have breakfast.  After all, I might have used a slightly different transformation and set “have breakfast” at “2.0000005″ or “100,000,000″ instead, without any loss of information.  “Maximize utility” is very much a thing, but utility is not a quantity or a currency. But it seems like people are really prone to using utility in a cardinal sense.  Ratspace especially (’utils’), but even in the broader (Silicon Valley) world of software agent design and effective altruism it seems like the instinct has always been to treat certain events as cashing out for a fixed number of utility points that are added to a total.  I’m less familiar with academic economics, maybe it’s different over there? This came to mind particularly because I was reading Ozy’s excellent Animal Welfare post, and like many sources it uses the concept of “negative utility”.  But if that’s an arbitrary mapping of preference ordering to a number line, then the distinction between negative and positive utility is just a matter of wherever we decide to put the zero.  All utility could be negative, that would be a perfectly sensible system and would not imply any particular amount of suffering.  In that early, formal understanding of utility I discussed, there is no subtraction operation.  At best you can say something like, “this being demonstrates a preference for X over some null case Z, but would prefer Z to the conjunction of X and Y”.  So I guess Ozy is thinking of a ‘negative utility life’ in the sense that the animal prefers Z[not existing] to having both X[existing] and Y[dying].  But phrasing Y as having a cost that is traded against X seems like it’s using utility in a fundamentally non-Neumann sense, and implies that we can talk about the animals’ own utility in a way that’s different from simple preference ordering.  If so, I haven’t found a good treatment of what that ‘other’ utility actually is, what limits it has and what assumptions it makes.  I understand vaguely that suffering is treated as an objectively negative number, without any specific implied alternative, but what else happens to the idea of ‘utility’ when you start working with things like ‘objective magnitude of a being’s aversion to some stimulus’? Either I’m correct to be a grouchy old man about this, or I’m legitimately behind the times, and I’m not sure which.  Can any of my followers perhaps illuminate the meaning of ‘utility cost’ and other cardinal uses of utility?  Does it trace its roots back to some formal treatment or careful consideration that I can sink my teeth in to, or is it simply the kind of semantic drift that you’d expect in a concept that went from being a carefully defined formal system to a cultural community touchstone?  Did I misread or misremember the original text? 

[moondeerdotblog]

Walking Through On Political Ideologies

It was brought to my attention as I was sharing a threadified version (must have been the week I thought folks might be more likely to read a thread on Twitter than a linked post. I was wrong. Folks just aren’t interested in reading. So, technically, I am talking to myself right now) of On Political Ideologies that the way I express my thoughts often obscures the point I intend to make. To remedy this I created a thread walking through the obscurities of the aforementioned thread. I figured I may as well do the same for the post from which that thread had been transcribed (So … for the record … I wrote a post which became a thread which warranted the creation of an entirely new thread to explain what the first original thread that used to be a post ought to have just said plainly from the start which is now becoming a new post).

Let’s walk through On Political Ideologies to make sure everything in my head makes its way out. Might be overkill (but more likely everything I touch could use one of these).

So the post starts off with some digital art I created. The information depicted becomes the focal point of the entire post so let’s have another look at it before we start.

The introductory text is aimed at setting up the delivery of this mysterious information depicted I just referenced while, at the same time, addressing some of the societal abrasion and inner turmoil some may encounter that may be lessened to a degree upon its reception (the walkthrough is shaping up to require its own walkthrough … I see it too. It will clear up startinnnnnggg now).

So let’s have a look and do a bit of italicized rephrasing with the emphasis on clarity.

As the January 6th committee begins holding hearings, it feels worth pointing out once more just where Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger fit into the ideologies of today.

Twittersphere, has this ever happened to you?

You find yourself grateful for something Adam or Liz has said.

Being liberal can make supporting Liz and/or Adam feel weird. This is because of their conservative record voting against the liberal agenda you’d like to see succeed.

You admit as much on Twitter … and inevitably some a$$hat takes this opportunity to berate you.

They’re all, “these people are not your friends. They did ‘X’, ‘Y’, and ‘Z’. Blah-dee-f$&king-blah.”

People on Twitter can be a$$holes. They often are not shy about telling you that any support given to a conservative is wrong and you are a bad liberal for providing it.

Well … here is what these useless blowhards fail to comprehend (and what resolves that inner conflict I’m sure you felt) … one mustn’t be a friend to be an ally.

Things used to be black and white … but these are unprecedented times. The a$$hole is not adjusting their derivative blather for our current environment. Battle lines must be redrawn in a broader scope. Take two people that disagree on damn near everything. Toss in something they happen to agree on. Make it the most consequential g0dd@mn something one could conjure. Then gather a group of people that disagree with the first two people about this consequential thing. The two that started out on opposite sides now have all their disagreements superseded by a common consequential cause. You know the cliche … I needn’t include it here.

Liz and Adam are to the right ideologically. Adam’s 2020 record scored a 0.66 while Liz’s scored a 0.68. Were we to respect our political norms and precedents such scores would easily land Liz and Adam on our list of enemies … and whichever a$$hat trying to sh$t all over your gratitude would have at least one leg to stand on.

Traditionally, we have scored how politically left or right a legislator leans on a linear ideological line by scoring their congressional voting record.

Searching for such scores online led me to govtrack.us and the 2020 Report Cards found here (scroll down to Ideology Score). The site describes its ideology scores as follows: 

Our unique ideology analysis assigns a score to Members of Congress according to their legislative behavior by whether they sponsor and cosponsor overlapping sets of bills and resolutions with other Members of Congress. The score can be interpreted as a left—right scale measuring the dominant ideological difference or differences among Members of Congress, although of course it only takes into account a small aspect of reality.

On this left—right scale ranging from 0.0 through 1.0, Adam received a score of 0.66 while Liz received a score of 0.68. Contrast this with someone like Pramila Jayapal, who received a score of 0.07. If this were all there was to the story, that a$$hole berating you would have a fairly solid position backing his douchery.

Side note: a score of 0.68 would stick Senator Krysten Sinema on that very same list. Bet that m0therf$&ker didn’t know that sh$t.

This one’s just a dig at Sinema being as “politically right” as Liz Cheney (based on ideology scores alone, which are identical).

The trickiest bit to comprehend is likely the bits about bifurcation. Let’s revisit and italicly tackle what I mean by the bifurcated information ecosystem.

Okay … back to friendship ≢ allyship.

The symbol ≢ denotes not identical to.

When we bifurcated our information ecosystem, we doubled the number of realities hosted by our nation and available to our citizenry for occupancy …

The phenomenon I am referencing is easily recognized once seen. You may know what I am calling bubbles as echo chambers or something else (Joy and Rachel often employ the Earth One and Earth Two monikers). Whatever we call them, the effect is that it feels like there are two distinct realities in this country.

To greatly simplify my hypothesis, I believe our dual realities were fully developed when social media supplanted print media as a primary news source for millions of Americans. 

My essays often focus on how this alternate reality has been used to exploit its occupants, to lead them to believe in a shadowy high power cabal drinking up babies whilst wearing little girl faces in the pursuit of immortality, or even to convince them the last thing they want amidst a deadly pandemic is a prophylactic vaccine; but, if you get the Earth One and Earth Two reference you’re good. You can just think Earth wherever you see bubble.

what I like to refer to as our dual reality bubbles. I also like to number these bubbles from oldest to newest. Let’s look again at the House ideology scores.

Notice that the traditional score is not sufficient for plotting ideologies for our current legislators. We must adjust for the bifurcation by assigning each representative to one of our bubbles.

So here is where my ideology scoring system breaks with tradition. It reflects an additional data point specifying whether the congressional voting record leans more Earth One or Earth Two (which, of course, I was calling bubble one and bubble two). I posit that in a dual reality America, bubble associations are required to fully understand the ideologies of our legislators.

Rather than repeat myself here, I would point you to the evolution of the post we are walking through (where, just to confuse you even further, I introduce the Upside Up and the Upside Down as yet another pair of monikers for these bubbles), as it includes a more thorough treatment of how my bubble scores were calculated.

With so many House members, I only had room for the district labels, so you’ll find Liz labeled by her district, WY0, and Adam by his district, IL16, and so on. 

Labels that begin with an asterisk (*) indicate freshmen for which a traditional ideology score from govtrack.us was unavailable. The x-axis value for these labels indicates only where I felt I had the most room for working them into the plot.

Every label that does not begin with an asterisk (*) has been properly placed along the x-axis according to the traditional ideology score received for 2020.

I was able to generate a bubble association score for every member, including those represented by a label that begins with an asterisk (*). Labels residing in the top half of the plot were scored as associating with bubble one. Labels placed in the bottom half of the plot were scored as associating with bubble two. Y-axis values are arbitrary aside from this bubble assignment. There were a sh$t ton of labels to fit.

Before beginning to explore the implications of the information depicted, a minor digression.

The traditional two-party system with which we’re all familiar requires both parties to reside within a shared common reality. Without a common reality, there is no civil discourse as there is no common ground.

Civil discourse is all about finding common ground … and finding common ground requires a shared reality. The implication here is that dual realities prohibit common ground, which prohibits civil discourse. Consequentially, dual realities and the American Experiment are incompatible.

Time to italicly explore those implications I promised.

Within each reality bubble, however, political systems are recognizable. Within the alternate reality bubble, bubble two, we find a strong one-party system (this tracks with the pivot towards authoritarianism we’ve all noticed).

Things get interesting when we consider each bubble in isolation. Let’s look just at the bubble two labels. What do we see?

We find a sea of red, only one party enjoys representation on Earth Two. One-party states tend to be authoritarian in nature.

Within bubble one, we are clinging to our two-party system. The extra ideological dimension is the missing piece of the puzzle for sorting that inner conflict (and all the ammunition you need when telling that numb-nuts to go f$&k himself).

Liz and Adam represent the conservative element within bubble one.

Now, let’s have a look at just the bubble one labels. What do we see?

We clearly find two parties represented in bubble one (however lopsided the numbers). This is the two-party system we with which we are all familiar. Civil discourse is only made possible when representation is split across two or more parties. Liz and Adam represent the conservative element on Earth One. Their presence on Earth One is weighted more heavily than their conservative ideology.

On the home stretch now, let’s italicly rephrase the conclusion I’ve drawn, in part, from the information depicted.

We are b@lls deep in the War of the Bubbles. The dual reality configuration is unsustainable and will lead to a failed democracy. This is why we are allies. We believe in democracy. We want bubble one to outlive bubble two.

To rephrase this uncharacteristically crude sentiment, okay, so remember 7485 characters ago ( give or take) when I was all:

Battle lines must be redrawn in a broader scope.

This is where it gets redrawn. The battle for the soul of America is not between the left and the right, it is between bubble one and bubble two. That metaphorical battle line we have always drawn along the x-axis … that line must now be drawn along the y-axis. American democracy is unsustainable under a dual reality configuration. One reality must swallow up the other. The bubble is now the tribe.

The bubble merger … that is earliest point at which it becomes safe again to dabble with norms and precedents. That is when all bets get called off concerning Liz and Adam.

Any inner-turmoil fueled by x-axis concerns is superseded by y-axis concerns for as long as those concerns lay unresolved. All Earth One denizens want Earth Two to implode so we might return to a shared reality that is compatible with civil discourse. Once (knock on f$&king wood) we have achieved this, we no longer need to align with Liz or Adam and the battle line may once more be drawn along the x-axis.

Okay, let’s italicly rephrase the big finish and call it a day, shall we?

Anyone dabbling with norms and precedents before that second bubble f$&king pops is f$&king up … for they’ve failed to see the forest through the trees.

Until our dual realities have merged into that shared reality (knock on f$&king wood), one mustn’t rely on old knowledge … on norms and precedents that do not take into consideration the dual reality bubbles within which our populace has been divided. Those doing so are inherently ill-equipped as they are oblivious to an entire dimension of relevancy.

[discovering-ellie]

August 25, 2021 - Post Two

Day Twelve mid-day check in. Today's card comes from the "Relaxation" section of the deck because, well, it was her turn to shine. Tomorrow starts the cycle all over again

Front: "Straight back, soft belly"

Back: "Posture is important. The physical shape with which we meet the world can have a big impact on how we feel and how we act. Nothing embodies the ideals of mindfulness better than the combination of a straight back and a soft belly. The straight back encourages alertness and brightness, and the soft belly fosters a sense of relaxation and openness. Practice this position by bringing your attention to your posture several times a day -- when you're brushing your teeth or waiting for a bus. Notice how mindful posture impacts how your meet whatever comes your way."

My Interpretation: Man, calling me out on my posture now, huh? Honestly, because of my height and stature, I try to have relatively decent posture. I've seen people with a similar height and build to mine with absolutely awful posture (forward slumping shoulders, bowed neck -- think of how Vincent D'Onofrio's character looked once the bug alien took over his body in Men in Black) and that is absolutely NOT what I want to look like. However, during moments where I'm tense, like when my personal space is invaded or I'm stressed out for another reason, my posture goes out the window.

Also, the idea of a soft belly is honestly off-putting to me. I'm extremely insecure about my stomach/midsection (then again, who isn't?) and the idea of letting that be "soft" is just..... yeah. No thank you. There's a reason why I tend to wear oversized clothes a la Spirit Jerseys and huge ass hoodies.

Plan of Action: I mean, I don't know.... practice my posture? Trying to maintain my posture even during moments of stress where all I want to do is curl up into a ball until I'm left alone again? I know this isn't something I'll be able to master overnight but, in time, I think I'll be able to do that.

DBT Skills Card Update: The personal space issue at work is getting a little bit better I think? Kinda sorta maybe? There was a little bit of a hiccup this morning in which my coworker, for some reason, decided to squeak between me and a shelving unit in a room I was still working in just to see a certain dog and play with it but, other than that, things have shown some progress. I just hope that this progress isn't a fluke.

I don't know where else to put this, so I'm going to throw it in with the DBT Skills card since this situation is still pretty much about setting boundaries and expectations (specifically the part that states "...set expectations about how you want to be treated and establish clear boundaries to protect yourself, if necessary").

Last night, I received another couple of text messages from my dad, who I have not spoken to since the end of April following the blow up we had on Facebook where he ended up blocking and deleting me and, in turn, so did a number of my other relatives in, I don't know, solidarity or something. At that point, I decided that I wasn't going to accept that sort of treatment or behavior from him and I have not attempted to contact him since. Until he approaches me with an apology (which, honestly, is not very likely to come from him), I'm not going to give him any form of a response. I have more important things to focus on right now than being guilt tripped (is it technically gaslighting? I honestly don't know) into an apology for something that I don't need to apologize for.

Recently, it has come to my attention that he's been telling certain people a different version of this event -- one where I yelled at him on Facebook in front of all of my friends before deleting and blocking him. Then, he's telling other people that he's so very concerned about me and that I'm not answering any of his calls or texts. Dude, what calls? You haven't called me once aside from a Facetime which was probably a butt dial since you've never used Facetime with me in your life. When he said this to someone, he had sent me a total of one text. One. Yet, he's framing it like he's sent me many and I'm the big, mean, awful child who's ignoring a concerned parent.

This brings us to last night. He sends me another text stating that he's having dinner in Gainesville and is wondering how I'm doing. I, having the standpoint that I currently have, don't answer. He sends another. "You know, if you are ignoring me because you don't want to talk to me. Just ask me not to bother you anymore. I know I am not a perfect person, but I never thought I was that rotten either."

Sorry, not sorry, but I'm not going to take the bait and respond to that, either. It never ends well for me when I've attempted that on other people in the past, and it's certainly not going to end well if I take the bait and respond. I've come too far along in my progress to allow myself to get pulled back into those patterns and behaviors so, despite how frustrating it is, I'm holding firm in my boundary. Admittedly, it's a little difficult because, even still, I want to be like "I'm not answering you until you apologize for x, y, and z" but I also know that that's not effective, either. It gives him exactly what he wants and, ultimately, a forced or coerced apology is almost never a genuine one. I'm hoping that he'll come to the realization on his own but, in the meantime, I guess I'll just have to remain Public Enemy #1.

ACT Skills (aka "Big Emotions") Update: It would be irresponsible of me to not tack this on after mentioning the situation that stressed me out in the beginning of the DBT section. It wasn't necessarily a "big" emotion per se, but a medium to small one that still needed to be recognized. *What was the emotion? - Stress *How long did it last? - 10-15 minutes *What prompted it? - The unnecessary invasion of my personal space while I was trying to complete my morning work *How did it physically feel? - It was a tenseness in my chest. Not very intense, but still tense *What did I do? - I acknowledged the feeling and left the room to take a couple of deep breaths for a minute or two. After going back into the room, I practiced the Expansion technique by acknowledging my stress and where I felt it, and then adding that I could also feel my anxiety ring as I turned it. During this time, I continued with my deep breathing until the feeling left. Afterwards, I tried using a "rainbow grounding" technique -- which is essentially like a version of I Spy where I find an item corresponding to each color of the rainbow and take in a breath for each color as I name the item.

"I am already everything I am trying to be. I will see that if I stop for a minute."

[marykwashington]

Why You Actually Want To Begin A Holistic Interior Design Business

The actual factor you wish to start an all natural interior decoration organisation isn't for the money. It isn't so you can be the proverbial depriving artist. Neither is it so you can be laughed at by the market. Due to the fact that, if we're honest below, there is a great deal of individuals in this sector that have no problem in mocking their clientele and colleagues when they're taking in negative thoughts. When you determine to start your alternative interior design business, recognize its rooted strongly in your need to help others. Not for the honors, you might locate from the market, or by being published in a publication for your job which was simply a notch on your online head board. Begin your journey as a holistic interior designer by procuring a degree from a holistic interior design school.

It is for you to do company on your terms as well as whether you were aware of it or not, your function is to use interior decoration to aid your clients transform their lives on their terms.

THE USER-FRIENDLY DESIGNER

The terrifying, or amazing point relying on your perspective is that I've found via working with my clients that a huge percent of them have intuitive abilities that materialize in various methods.

I was born with the capability to see points in my mind's eye, clairaudience as well as to notice spirit however I kept this to myself till recently because clearly, I really did not want individuals making fun of me. The amusing point is that so many indoor developers additionally have these gifts and also I don't believe I would've become aware of them up until I opened up concerning my abilities. Now I am finding with discussions as well as e-mails that possibly we're not that uncommon.

Better yet, we're finding that it is without a doubt more secure to come out and also share these gifts at this time. Not sure exactly how those style organizations that 'accredit' designers will certainly find a means to generate income from these presents, yet I'm sure they're considering it Your user-friendly presents assist your clients transform their lives. Think of it, how many times have you gotten on the work and also understood that you just hosted a therapy session with your clients? This occurs to a great deal of instinctive designers who, if you don't make sure to secure on your own from becoming entangled with your customer's power, can be diminished. The deeper link you need to power aids you to read the vibe of a house; it's materials, the flow of power and the people who live there. It allows you to see that all natural interior decoration isn't around only the visual, however the intention and power behind all of it.

HOLISTIC INTERIOR DECORATION THERAPY

The stories of your client's lives matter. The trauma they have actually suffered, as well as the course of their life currently needs to be attended to throughout their home to permit them to heal, to allow go of those points that do not offer them anymore so they can grow. With a suitable degree of holistic interior design one can start the practice. There are many interior design online courses that allows to do so.

We've all seen the residence that's cluttered, and also we know it's a physical symptom of something else taking place within them. Or your home that's too organized, and also it's maintaining the client from running away the chains of excellence. All of this is at the root of why you began an alternative interior design service - to help them do not hesitate enough to express their individuality in their home.

When it comes time to begin an all natural interior decoration business, you need to be straightforward with on your own and also what your presents are and also exactly how they can assist your clients. Your skills don't simply lie in your ability to develop a gorgeous residence, however to also tap into your customer's power as well as desires. That indicates your customers aren't going to be searching for a blog post on just how to select the best white paint either.

Your clients are going to have an interest in all the important things associated with alternative living - natural options like important oils, crystals, noise treatment, Reiki for their issues. They additionally might want spirituality and also how to bring that into their residence. They're a whole lot like you, and also you can integrate any of the alternative recovery modalities that you want with your layout solutions.

STEPPING OUT OF THE WOO-WOO STORAGE ROOM

This additionally could be the moment for you to service your intuitive capacities so you can access them, share them and also take care of them through spiritual practice so you can produce an one-of-a-kind inside that improves your customer's life and also their goals. As you enter your spiritual self, you'll start to lose the individual the globe wanted you to end up being, and also it doesn't call for any individual's approval.

Likewise, I want you to understand that when you bulge of the woo-woo closet, you may be a target of taunting. This will require you to be comfy with worry and knowing that being that you certainly are is much more freeing than hiding that you are. The choice is that you will certainly close down and also never ever realize your heart's objective.

BUT HASN'T ALL OF IT BEEN DONE PRIOR TO?

There are a lot of particular niches in the field of interior design that you will certainly not be the only one offering all natural interior design services. This niche is little as of today, as well as I just see it expanding exponentially in the future. That's why I encourage you to begin your alternative interior business currently. There are many interior design and decorating schools that offer holistic design training.What you will give the specific niche will certainly be different than what anyone else brings due to the way your unique presents manifest when you design.

IT'S STILL FUNCTION

Regardless of exactly how enchanting doing this work absolutely is, it's still work and there's no faster way to success. The job can be draining pipes and also boring sometimes. At some time, you may even get where you smash into a wall surface where you can not discover the motivation to proceed as it appears you have actually done it all as well as you feel like you're experiencing again the same layout tasks over and over once more.

You have consent to alter your organisation whatsoever that offers you. This is why I do not desire you to design your solutions on any individual else's. Even if somebody uses X, Y as well as Z does not suggest that you must do the exact same. Just deal alternative interior decoration services that excite you and enable you to do your finest job.

HOLDING SPACE FOR THE RECOVERY

Your job has to do with holding area for your customer's change in whatever kind that takes. Your job is to be open, non-judgemental, present and also let go of control. So usually we intend to manage the design procedure to a gnat's butt, but that doesn't constantly allow for the most effective service to develop.

While I'm in no means promoting for you to enable extent creep to end up being a part of your alternative interior decoration business and you do require to have solid boundaries in position for your job, know that some clients will require more focus throughout this procedure of improvement. You may wish to account for that on the front end by cushioning your fees for this or make your client mindful that if you've set a level cost what that consists of as well as if the extent of the task (or their demands on your time) increase that you will require to bill them appropriately.

Even if you're doing this job, doesn't mean that you require to do it totally free when you figure out that specific projects are a lot more comprehensive than you prepared for.

DON'T SELL YOURSELF SHORT BECAUSE YOU'RE NEW

If you're starting your business or shifting equipments, do not market on your own brief and also make a decision to not charge for your job. Also, do not sell on your own short if you don't have the "right" qualifications.

You require to have your knowledge as well as presents - even if this is a second or third job - due to the fact that the past experiences you have earned and matter to the job you do. You will utilize those abilities in this job.

Your business is worked on energy. The energy you expel is renewed through the customer's cash paying for your solutions. If you 'd like to work on your procedures and also gift someone a solution for this process, limitation on your own to a specific amount of "freebies." Nevertheless, when that period is done, cost accordingly for your job.

HOW TO START A HOLISTIC INTERIOR DESIGN BUSINESS

This guide doesn't consist of acquiring degrees, certificates, licenses, insurance policies, DBAs, establishing accounts, and so on that you will certainly need to begin a holistic interior decoration organisation since that is special to where you're located as well as the unwritten laws. You can do your study on that by looking online regarding starting an organisation in your state or country.

What is your objective for this business? It isn't only to earn money, but also for transformation for both you as well as your clients that are mutually useful.

What problems can you aid your customers fix? Because your option will be a mix of design deliverables and user-friendly gifts, inform yourself on how your service is advantageous for your client. You may also want to learn more concerning environment-friendly style, feng shui, sacred spaces, sacred geometry, color treatment, symbolism, energy, as well as room clearing up.

Delve deeper right into who your desire customers are. Go beyond the standard demographics of their life as well as go into who they are, what they think as well as how they live. Then determine what their psychological demands are and also just how you can help them please those.

Determine what your solution plans will certainly resemble how you'll provide your services. The advantages of your unique style process need to aim to be a transformational experience that your client can not wait to be a part of.

Identify a cost for your alternative interior design solution that represents your time PLUS your presents. You're not the patron saint of interior design, and also you need to bill. You can see what others bill, however I 'd motivate you to find out how much time it takes you to deliver your solution and after that add to that cost.

Study corresponding fields of alternative interior decoration to see just how you can adjust methods to market your business to that similar customers.

Establish your site and also brand name that will certainly attract your desire clients as well as attract their needs.

Create a marketing strategy that you feel comfy doing. If you're not a follower of Instagram, do not do it. The key is to turn up on social networks where you feel comfy adequate to be there continually to attach.

Begin interacting your thoughts on alternative interior decoration so your people can find you. It's mosting likely to be scary initially but recognize that there are people available you must help, and also they need to be able to find you. Utilize their words as well as inform their tales.

Meet business owners with complementary all natural undertakings to work together and connect with. Pointer: You're probably not going to locate all natural developers at the organization conferences, so you can most likely scrape that off the checklist currently. You might intend to start taking a look at on-line areas on Facebook.

When you start your all natural design service recognize that its success relies on you recognizing your why. When you understand why you're doing this job, your next job is to connect with your dream clients.

There's not one "master" approach that will certainly ever take the place of the stimulate one feels from an additional person. Your on the internet presence must be a really close representation of what it would certainly be like to recognize you personally, which message you share has the power to employ your people while the remainder (deliverables, solutions, the costs) ought to constantly can be found in 2nd to the service you provide for others.

All of it begins with a concept. Possibly you want to introduce a service. Perhaps you wish to transform a leisure activity into something more. Or possibly you have a creative task to share with the globe. Whatever it is, the method you inform your story online can make all the difference.

[thenormativesuperintendent]

The Schwarzschild radius

One of the most common complaints among people who begin treatment with SSRI's is that they reduce their ability to feel, and that this is definitely a bad thing, and therefore all psychiatric drugs are bad, Prozac is bad, Zoloft is bad, Big Pharma is bad, and then the patient gets depressed again and now feels even worse because, like, I can't take sertraline, can I? I wouldn't feel anything! "I knew I had to get off Zoloft because I couldn't even cry at my brothers wedding!" - Random woman whose name I can't recall. I can sympathise, this would indeed be a little jarring and disconcerting, but you know what else is bad? Depression. I don't mean to make a mockery of her plight, I understand what it's like to suffer from depression, but my annoyance at the time came from her anger towards the drug. I understand you were upset you couldn't feel that happy for your brother, but this is how SSRI's work, ok? Numbing to initiate action, action to improve your circumstances.

I'm going to palm this off to my favourite blog, and probably one of the smartest/most insightful people alive, Hotel Concierge, in this essay here, because he's written a far more eloquent, well articulated set of reasons as to why emotional analgesia is a good thing, and how this effect is leveraged to facilitate therapy. Also, if you have ever undergone the burden of mental illness, this essay is literally, for me, life-saving. I sincerely hope that it helps you too.

Second point: I find alarming the claim that, fundamentally, most antidepressants work via the same mechanism. I debated whether to tap out this text file on the point of not wanting to offend anyone/appear to be a pedantic asshole, but recently, this, courtesy Slate Star Codex:

“Increasing BDNF is the best option we have” NO[1]

Can I write "disagree" and then underline it, and then highlight it several times? I think this view -that it’s really just a landscape of SSRI’s- is flat-out wrong - I don't think it's necessarily dangerous per se, but it vastly misrepresents the state of play in psychopharmacology, and I want to put forward my arguments to rectify that.

Firstly, from the wonder of modern pedagogy that is Stahl:

Complex.

The idea behind these diagrams (the textbook is brilliant) is to give you a visual representation of the various binding affinities these compounds have for different receptors; the larger the shape, the greater the binding affinity.

Now let’s take a look at two similar antidepressants from the SSRI class: Lexapro and Zoloft (escitalopram and sertraline) The primary mechanism of action in both is occupancy of SERT (the serotonin transporter); normally serotonin gets slurped back up into pre-synaptic neuron, now it can’t because said slurpy protein is full, this leads to serotonin lingering in the synaptic cleft for longer which leads to an increased chance for it to bind to serotonin receptors on the post synaptic neurone. Voila, more activity in serotonergic neurons. Could be inhibitory, excitatory, changing receptor expression in the surface of the neuron: a multitude of downstream effects. Give two weeks for gene translation to occur and there you have it.

Serotonin is involved, in a broad, upstream kind of way, in regulating mood. More specifically, if thoughts[2] are constituted of different circuits or clusters of neurons firing, then serotonin plays a role in regulating affect by changing the activity of these cells (by the probability that they release/don’t release an impulse) that are poorly understood.

Posteriori, it’s no surprise that “pure” SSRI’s compress your emotional bandwidth concomitant to dose; we developed the saying “carrot and stick” for a reason; if emotional circuitry is closely related to System 1 thinking (Kahneman & Taversky - please don’t make me cite) then we need happiness and reward as well as sadness and grief. The two in partnership give us a map to help steer our actions away from what might harm us and towards what might be beneficial. If depression isn’t sadness (it isn’t) then lower serotonin levels lead to loss of any feeling, and your subjective cognitive interpretation of this is depression. You feel, not nothing, but hopeless. You lie there doing nothing; there’s no carrot, there’s no stick, everything just sucks. You’re not sad, you’re not crying, there’s just no point doing anything. Going upstream to jack up extracellular serotonin levels makes sense; sure, you might cap out your happiness by increasing the overall activity of all those serotonin pathways, but now the affective system has some life in it, you can get up and move about, think and cognise. Hooray, now therapy can work.

Except what if we could do better? We recognise that blocking the transporter means more serotonin everywhere, serotonin everywhere = emotional numbing. What if we could go further downstream and just target the receptors we want directly? Don’t jump to the conclusion that morphine is a good thing right now, if you’re suffering from depression and thumbing through your contact book to find a dope dealer, you have my sympathies, and far bigger issues than I can help you with. I wish you luck.

But there is no such thing as a pure SSRI; Zoloft has a weak, but clinically significant effect on other proteins (transporters and receptors); Lexapro is about as close to a pure SSRI as we currently have, but Zoloft seems to have some decent dopamanergic action going on in the frontal cortex.

And this is exactly the issue. I’m not debating that the primary mechanism of effect in both these drugs is interfering with serotonin metabolism, I’m saying that the subjective experience of being on sertraline is going to be different to the subjective experience of being on escitalopram. How do you quantify a slight uptick in dopamine? Chemists and pharmacists might say “well, it’s nothing, it’s really just an SRI” except: how in gods name do you qualify the subjective difference of “minor increase in dopamine”?

This isn’t a theoretical consideration; what appears on paper to be a bunch of drugs with minor differences, will, I am confident, have wildly different effects on different patients. Forget neurotransmitters, forget HAM-D scales. What if you just gave each patient four weeks on each of these different drugs and asked them to keep a daily journal of their subjective experiences? Which pill would they prefer? My best guess is no clear answer would emerge: minor differences on paper lead to concrete differences to different patients, and this is a very real, tangible, beneficial phenomena. Vortioxetine is indeed exciting: heavily antagonising HT2C sub-receptors tends to have good clinical effects, as evidenced by the fact Agomelatine seems to work well for some people. “But couldn’t that just be its beneficial effects on sleep and MT1/MT2 agonising?” Sure, except melatonin decreases dopamine release, which is the current leading hypothesis of seasonal affective disorder. Try popping 20mg of melatonin and tell me how you feel the next morning. Not enough dopamine means a malfunctioning reward/motivation pathway and shoddy cognition[3]. Combining SERT occupancy with serotonin antagonism on certain sub-receptors is a legitimately neat development. Mirtazapine is a potent drug, perhaps makes some a little too edgy or sedated (sedation can be a useful tool, see: insomnia) and it just antagonises the bejesus out of histamine, adrenergic, and serotonergic receptors.

The problem is that once people see “SERT” on a drug, everything else gets sucked into that vacuum, compressed into a black hole and all nuance is lost, and in the delicate balance of various ratios of neurotransmitter levels, nuance is everything. There’s no way to qualify the subjective experience of “minor increase/decrease in transmitter X/Y/Z” so stop pretending that these drugs are all basically the same; similarity on paper != similarity of experience.

(Endnote: SNRI’s tend to work well, slightly paradoxically, on anxiety. Why? Because increasing norepinephrine levels leads to agonising the alpha-2 autoreceptor, this shuts down the firing of the pre-synaptic neuron. Of course, individual mileage may vary and standard disclaimers apply. Just don’t be surprised if you fall asleep in class six hours after you’ve taken your Cymbalta)

I hope I haven’t offended anyone - my aim is simply to push back against a perceived hopelessness at making new antidepressants, and to argue that there are demonstrable, subjective (which in psychiatry is almost everything?) differences in each and every anti-depressant out there.

[1] It was (still is?) trendy to say that increasing BDNF ameliorates depression, but I’m pretty confident BDNF has very little to do directly with depression. Yes, depressed people show low levels of BDNF, and drugs like Zoloft can increase BDNF and synaptogenesis (they can also not do that) So does exercise. And yet exercise is much more efficacious at doing so than Zoloft, but no-one successfully gets through clinical depression by doing laps across Greece like 300 lives depend on it. Don’t get me wrong, exercise is fantastic, for mental and physical health. I’m just saying that nothing increases BDNF like exercise, and yet it doesn’t work as well as antidepressants in most cases. That NSI-189 failed to differentiate from placebo is perhaps the most unsurprising result since Karl Popper put pen to paper.

[2] Ontology question: what’s a thought?

[3] My leading cause of frustration with the nootropic/biohacking/transhumanist community: “give me all the dopamine you can!” Oh, so you want schizophrenia? Dude, you don’t need pills, you need to stop avoiding study. To quote Hotel Concierge, “your rationalism is inseparable from your anxiety”

[periodicreviews]

RWBY Volume 4 Episode 8

This episode addressed some of the things I’ve been wanting such as Blake talking privately with a parent and exploring the main plot. But there always seems to be something that drags these episodes down like characters doing weird things because the plot demands it or Sun ruining another emotional scene. Also not all scorpions are venomous.

 Qrow’s Campfire Chat

I appreciate getting filled in on the details of the plot since there hasn’t been much main plot progression since episode 1. I’m glad they made the smart choice of jamming this “World of Remnant” segment into the main episode because it’s critical to the main plot and too easy for people to skip if it was a 5 minute extra clip.

If I had to complain about something, maybe it was too much at once? They go over the maidens, the gods of dark and light, and the 4 relics. The maidens were a review, but maybe the gods of dark and light could’ve been a story some innkeeper told them in an earlier episode. Then Qrow could’ve expanded on it in this episode saying it was true and that the relics were Salem’s true aim. But it was pretty much fine as is.

I’m personally still waiting for the actual “Much Needed Talk” where the characters talk about their dead friends.

 Blake

I was honestly excited when Blake’s mom says that she’s going to keep Sun occupied by getting him to tell her stories about Team RWBY. I thought “Great, Blake is going to have a nice heartfelt conversation and we’ll get a real sense of her state as a character without being interrupted by comic relief characters.”

After some initial awkwardness, this exchange occurs.

Blake: I can look after myself.

Dad: I know you can. I'm sorry.

Blake: Why? Why would you say that?

Blake: What did I say?

Blake: How could you love me after that? I called you cowards.

I paused the episode at this point because I thought I had missed something in episode 5 when we last saw Blake. I loaded it up, skipped around, didn’t see anything, and came back to episode 8 to resume it thinking “what is going on with this show?” As the conversation goes on, it makes a little more sense as she indicates she’s talking about when she ran away from home/abandoned her family to continue working with the White Fang.

Later she says “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry” and I guess they were going for some parallelism between her and her father saying the same things and how both feel guilty about what happened in the past. Maybe it’s too cliché to say “No, I’m the one who’s sorry” or something along those lines, but I felt like I needed something like that in between the “Why would you say that” line.

I’m really not sure what I wanted differently from this conversation. Blake’s sudden breakdown seemed to come out of nowhere. My confusion probably wasn’t helped by last watching episode 7 quite a long time ago.

I went back to episode 5 to see how Blake acts to see if there was anything to indicate this breakdown is imminent. Unfortunately all these interactions have Sun in them, so there’s really nothing to be gained from watching them again. As a character, she has no reason to open up to Sun about the guilt she feels since it’s between her and her parents.

You could maybe argue that she hesitates knocking at the door in episode 5 for this reason and just lies to Sun when she says “It’s been awhile.” She is also very paranoid and on edge in episode 3, but that all seems to disappear once Sun comes into the picture. I’m not trying to say someone has to show X, Y, and Z in order for their breakdown to be valid. Lots of people are very good at pretending things are okay and can sometimes fool the people that know them best. But it can help to give a few hints to the viewer to clue them in. I won’t go into how Evangelion does this perfectly.

 Miss me?

Of course, Blake can only progress so far as a character before the mandatory comic relief literally breaks a door. For me, it really just ruined the scene. I can’t tell if they just couldn’t figure out how to end the scene and having Sun break in was their solution. Or if the production timeline just didn’t give enough time for them to finish the conversation.

I’m also confused as to how exactly he broke the entire door. 

When Blake enters, we see that the door sliding instead of swinging. If you’re going to implement the “guy falls into room while leaning on door attempting to eavesdrop” trope, why did the modelers use a sliding door instead of just a regular door? Blake could’ve not closed it because she was too concentrated on keeping the tea tray steady. Then it would’ve been realistic for Sun to fall in.

Before I get too cynical, it’s entirely possible they actually thought this through a little more. Sun was running in to talk about the White Fang spy he saw and in his “country” ways, he just tried to kick open the door, expecting it to swing open. But then why didn’t the glass shatter instead of the entire frame coming apart from the wall?

Maybe it really was a rushed job to end the scene and they didn’t have time to remodel the entire building and the earlier Blake tea entry. I’d like to believe that instead of “Guys, wouldn’t it be funny if Sun barged in right in the middle of this important conversation? But get this, the entire door frame collapses and he falls right on his face! It’s not realistic but it’s funny right?”

Let’s not even talk about the door later being fixed immediately. I can understand this getting missed.

Sun, again

If it’s not clear already, I really do not like Sun in this volume. He is at least consistently annoying so I applaud the writing team for that.

After they spot the White Fang spy, Blake jumps off the balcony to chase them down. When Blake’s mom asks what happened, Sun replies “The White Fang is evil, I totally called it, and I'm bringing your daughter back.” I’ve seen some youtube comments with a lot of upvotes saying this was the best line ever. But if you really think about it, the whole sentence is weird.

“The white fang is evil” Does a spy necessarily mean they’re evil? Their slaughter of innocent people, sure, but the spy itself is pretty benign. Maybe this is more just in reference to the parents only seeing the diplomatic side, but that this spy is clear evidence that there is something more going on.

“I totally called it” When? There was no scene where Sun alone keeps telling everyone the White Fang are evil and no one is believing him, leading to this scene of redemption. Blake and Sun do this together in episode 5 in trying to convince Blake’s parents that the White Fang are evil. The viewer, all the students at Beacon, and everyone not in Menagerie seems to understand the White Fang are killing a lot of people. I guess it makes sense in terms of Blake’s parents, but it’s still weird to say he alone “called it.”

“I’m bringing your daughter back.” This part makes the least sense. Why does Blake need to be brought back? She wasn’t kidnapped, she’s chasing a potential threat. We know she’s a capable fighter too. She’s not like a captive in the house either. Why isn’t Sun saying “We’ll find out who that spy was” or “I’ll tag along in case she needs backup”? This dialogue feels reminiscent of the semi-patronizing language he uses in episode 3.

It feels very nitpicky to break down a sentence like this and I really only wanted to talk about the “bringing your daughter back” part. But the more I stared at the words, the weirder the line looked to me. So I went all in.

A small side note about the White Fang ninja spy. In my episode 5 review:

But I still feel it’s a stretch to believe both that she is a master of stealth and that she would also easily reveal herself. Why not just have someone overhear the boat captain drunkenly sharing the stories of the two Faunus who killed the sea dragon that was about to destroy his ship? Or just have some spy/double agent be covertly watching Blake’s family since it would be a natural assumption that she might go to visit them at some point?

Scorpions are sometimes venomous

I took the time to look up a little bit about scorpions and it turns out that not all of them are venomous. I had previously thought they all were.

I say this because I at first thought it was weird that Ruby was surprised that Qrow was suffering side effects from Tyrian’s attack but maybe they all thought scorpions were non-venomous. One could argue this is another case of Qrow's bad luck. But in this particular instance, it seems he just stupidly didn't seek medical treatment after being stung by a scorpion Faunus, when they had no way of determining whether he was venomous. Really Qrow? The guy who is like this super elite badass who seems to have traveled the world? And he doesn’t have the sense to be evaluated by a medical professional? Not when the plot demands that his life be put in further danger. They didn’t even throw in any kind of throwaway line that “We need to get you some help” and his reply “Nah, it’ll be fine, I’ll just sleep it off.”

 My hopes for a post-holiday turn around seem to be setting the bar too high. Only 4 episodes left for me to watch and it doesn’t seem like the ship is close to getting back on course.

[exilesofembermark]

Game Dev Update | 4.28.17

“You ate the last Twinkie...” - Master Dwarf Thisguy ^

We’ve waited to show more than a glimpse of the dwarven race on Embermark until our own hammers were pounding out the mass of loot we’ve promised in Dev Updates past. Now that the promised loot train is rolling, it’s time to really take a look at our stout, grumpy friends. 

Last update, we covered the beginning of our game mode experimentation, world map navigation, a Legendary sword and the ability to view your Battle History. This time, its about content and gameplay. Read on to check out our new icon system, new battle environments, new loot, an upcoming AMA, your chance to help design an item that ends up in the game and what we’re learning about battle mechanics. 

Oh, and dwarves.

DWARVES

Whether they’re holed up in the caverns and carved-out tunnels of Siege or feverishly rebuilding the once-great Anglon, dwarves in Embermark are a force to be reckoned with. Here’s an Elite version of our angry fellow from above:  

We started the dwarf-creation process exploring what we wanted the basic proportions, faces and gear types to be, as well as where they reside in Embermark and what their background is. As you can see below, Beardbo Grumperson IV there on the far right is a look we’ve stuck with through the representation of our Elite fellow above. 

There are a few geographic locations where the dwarves in Embermark tend to be found (though they travel and team up a bit more than dwarves in many other settings), and as mentioned before, the region of Siege is one of them. They’ve gone underground for the past several hundred years as Embermark was overrun and a terrible place to live, but a few ancient entrances to their underground lairs are still visible on the world map:

3D design proceeded much as all the humanoid races we’re developing have-- from the base player model, with some changes that led into a distinctly dwarven look:

And unless the dwarf in question has been beaten in battle to a humiliating degree lately, he/she usually has some manner of facial style going on:

We couldn’t resist this one:

And this one, with a better look at some of the tattoo designs we’re playing with:

I’ve mentioned the history and background of the wolves in Embermark before (despite my bold-face lie about there being no rats, bats, wolves or skeletons in this game). They’re a mean and cunning lot, with far more organization to a “pack” than typical. 

Well, this gives you a clue about how dwarves on the continent feel about them:

Depending on the proportions of our humanoid NPCs, we’re making versions of all their gear to also fit the player, for extra tasty drops.

ICONS

When you have a lot of lootses in a RPG, someone has to make the icons. And usually, artists hate doing it cuz there’s so many and it takes so long and it’s not sexy.

WRONG.

With Exiles, it is sexy (and so are you).  We’ve had the same placeholder sword/boot/pants icons in just about every screenshot you’ve seen up till now (like here and here). No more!

Because we aren’t satisfied with that (and hate sleep), we created a new icon creation pipeline that takes EACH design for a piece of loot and creates an icon for it. So for every item you get, you’ll see a Tier 3 (that’s the highest) image of that item over a rarity color (either nothing, blue, purple, gold, or green) to give your loadout that extra oomph you’ve been looking for. 

GAME MODE EXPERIMENTS

As fast as the content train is moving, the mechanics train is hurtling along just as fast. Now that we have most of the Abilities, Stats and Talents working for the Warrior and Mage classes, we’re diving into what will make the moment-to-moment gameplay the most strategic, satisfying... and visceral! To that end, we have our 4-Ability loadout that we’ve talked a lot about, but last week, we got a second mode of combat going-- The Deck. 

With The Deck, the rules of the game are still the same:

 WEGO-style turn-based with initiative determining order of ability execution 

Abilities combine with Gear & Talents to create effects on either character

First character to die (there’s no fainting in Exiles) loses

However, instead of a 4-Ability Set, you now choose 8. 4 are chosen for you randomly at the beginning of a Battle and the others are in queue. As you use Abilities, they cycle back into the deck and the next Ability in the deck becomes available (see the smaller “coming” Ability represented below-- that is WIP as is everything in these Updates, and it will get a proper UI representation if it ends up being something we support).

Initial testing has proven fun and maddening-- my main Mage “MoarMagicks”still can’t consistently beat SingmeAsong’s main Warrior “Jackal,” despite my clearly superior strategies and build-- and we have some work to do on what the mode does to overall balance. But it’s promising, and we’re excited to show it to you if it ends up passing muster. 

AMA

We’re getting ready to do another AMA! If you’ve got burning questions about Exiles, from features to rules to lore to whatever, join the crew and the community for an evening of anything goes-- even making fun of the devs-- we can take it. Submit questions/discussions now on the Reddit thread, and we’ll have some answers ready. And you can win stuff! We’ll be doing some good old-fashioned rolling (of virtual dice) for in-game prizes (loot table is forthcoming, and will be published on the AMA thread in the forums).

So head over to the Discord channel on MAY 9 at 5:30 PM Central Time and get the inside scoop on all things Exiles.

WE HAVE AN ANDROID BUILD

“WHAT?!”

Yes. MANY of our early testing sign-ups have Android devices, and I have some good news for them-- we have an early Android build! Now, before any shenanigans break out, you should know that it’s rough, new and not as far along as the iOS build. But it lives, and you Android users will be kicking arses before too long right beside your iOS brethren.

VANISIR 

Along the southwest of Embermark is a region called Vanisir, a mostly arid-- but critical-- piece of land, given its major port, resources and the presence of a manageable Breach. We’re rolling out Battle environments for each of our starting world zones, and Vanisir’s first can be seen here, with an unfortunate player sizing up the enemy that I can’t stop showing to you-- the overly intelligent and vicious WOLF. 

“Hey, didn’t I just see you atop some dwarven shoulder armor?”

THE PLAYER CREATED GEAR CONTEST (PCGC)

Players have been guiding us every step of the way toward Embermark and it’s time for them to get a piece of loot or two (or more) in the game. All of the rules surrounding battle and loot haven’t been revealed, but those of you following the development of the game probably have an idea or two rolling around in your heads about a piece of equipment that would do X, Y, or Z.

So the 1st Exiles Player Created Gear Contest (PCGC) is on! Check this thread in the forums for all the details and how to submit your idea. One lucky (and clever, and creative) winner will get their piece of loot in the game (and get a copy of it themselves) and many will win prizes based on the criteria you see in the official thread!

LOOT UPDATE

The loot train continues, and our artists are feverishly designing, modeling texturing and lootzing armor weapons and even rings now (rings are just icons, so they won’t show up on your person, but whatevs). 

Armor for the Warrior is getting the color-tell treatment, as we showed for the Mage armor earlier. You’ll see it throughout the system as you start to play, and it’s turning out to be both useful and sometimes hilarious, depending on the how close your gear build preferences are to your color preferences (did someone say transmog? *whistles as he walks away). 

Behold the Axe of Cleaving (your head from your body)!

You will see this spear put to good use by our draconian friend below.

I’m not even sure what to say here other than I wouldn’t want it connecting with any part of me...

We continue to design various silhouettes for shields, for those sword-and-board enthusiasts out there...

And here’s one more! (this one’s a stock broadsword, but I still lurve it)

MILITARY

Last couple of Updates, we’ve been showing off a race of baddies that will hound and hinder you throughout your journey to be among the Marked. Their political and military machinations threaten to overrun the entirety of Embermark.

They also look like dragons, have wings and are awesome. Now we’ve got them animating in the engine and will be playable in short order. Like the dwarf above, we created their gear with an eye towards dropping it for you to use in your own loadouts.

(Alas, I had to fool with this one quite a bit to get it under Tumblr’s 2 MB GIF limit, so if you want a higher quality look at this attack, it’s here)

REMEMBER

We’ll keep sharing details as we head into testing (remember to PM TheWizard on the Exiles forums if you want in on closed testing & beta later), and you can count on early impressions from the testers throughout our various channels.

If you haven’t already, follow along with the Exiles development on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. And if you haven’t, I’ll find you. And SMITE you.

GET IN ON THE CHATTER

If you want to hear about the game, ask questions or connect with others who are helping the development team think about features, design and narrative, hop into the Discord Channel for live chat and say hi– it’s a friendly lot with plenty of daily shenanigans (there’s even a Shenaniganizer).

THE BONUS

I leave this here without comment.

[kinkykinard]

X is for Xenopolycythemia (24/26)

Fandom: Star Trek (AOS/TOS). Pairing:  ReaderXBones. Prompt: Fic 24 of 26 in the CMO’s Log – A to Z series.  Click here for a listing of all the fics in this series!  X is for Xenopolycythemia Word Count: 5703. Warnings: None. Rating: Teen+. Author’s Note: Requested by @star-trekkin-across-theuniverse – Xenopolycythemia appeared in TOS (S03E10 “For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky”).  It is not a real illness, but features many of the same symptoms as polycythemia.  In this condition, the body begins overproducing red blood cells, leading to all sorts of problems.  Enjoy!

X is for Xenopolycythemia You watch Leonard from across the room, leaning on the desk to chart while he finishes up talking to a patient.  You’re concerned about him; he hasn’t been himself all morning, he’s flushed and looking like he’s coming down with something, and while you’ve given him a chance to admit that something is wrong, you can’t stand by and watch anymore. As he leaves the ensign’s bedside and heads for his office, you pick up your PADD and beeline off after him, following him through the door before it manages to slide closed all the way.  He jumps, clearly startled at your proximity as he turns to face you and looks down at you from his lofty height. “Can I help you?”  He asks, quirking an eyebrow. Up close, you can see that he’s got a fine sheen of perspiration on his forehead.  He’s breathing a bit quickly and he’s hunched a little – not enough to be immediately noticeable, but he’s definitely not standing at his full height. Reaching out, you gently touch his cheek, cupping his face in your hand. “Yeah,” you reply.  “You can let me help you.”

“I’m fine,” he says firmly.

It’s his insistence that assures you your hunch is right – there’s something wrong and he doesn’t want to admit it. If he was fine he’d be questioning you, not outright shutting you down.  You shake your head, stroking your thumb over his cheekbone. “If you won’t tell me, I’ll just have to figure it out for myself,” you say with a sigh.  “I may not be as brilliant as you, but I am still a doctor.” Leonard rolls his eyes and reaches up, running his fingers through your hair.  At first you’re sure it’s to distract you, but his expression is softer when you look more closely and his wry smile is telling of the fact that you’ve won. “Alright,” he says with a nod.  “You’re right.  I’ll let you take a look at the end of the shift.  We’ve only got another couple of hours.  I’ll be fine until then.” You’re less than pleased, but you accept his compromise with a nod.   “Deal,” you say with a smile, stepping up onto your tip toes to kiss him.  “I’ll be expecting you in room three at eighteen-hundred hours.” “Yes ma’am,” Leonard murmurs, returning your smile with a faint one of his own. You step back, giving him some space to get back to what he was doing before you’d interrupted him and then turn on your heel, striding out of his office.  You throw yourself into the appointments you have booked over the next couple of hours, performing physicals and follow ups until the end of the shift rolls around.  When the next round of doctors and nurses show up, you hand off your report and turn around, looking for Leonard, just in time to see the CMO step into the preselected exam room. You give him a few moments to settle in and prepare for you, knowing that he hates getting medical attention almost as much as everyone else does (if not more so sometimes), and then you head for the exam room.  You rap on the door, giving him a second to collect himself, and then step inside, letting the door glide shut behind you.  Depositing your PADD on the counter, you walk closer to him, fingering the tricorder in your pocket. “What’s going on, Lee?”  You ask, your eyes taking in the deep red flush of his cheeks and the air of complete exhaustion he’s exuding. He coughs a couple of times, bringing up his arm to cover his mouth so he’s not exposing you to whatever he has unnecessarily. You frown, reaching up to gently cup his cheek and feeling surprised when you don’t sense the heat of a fever radiating off of him. “It’s probably just a cold,” he rationalizes, shaking himself off after the cough. “I doubt it,” you disagree.  “You don’t feel feverish.” Pulling your hand away from his face, you take his hands instead, gasping at how cold and clammy his palms are. Bringing his hands up closer for inspection, you notice the duskiness of the skin at his nail beds.  Furrowing your eyebrows, you set his hands down in his lap and look up just in time to see him sway dizzily.  Setting a hand on his shoulder to steady him, your expression grim, you touch his wrist to check his pulse. “Any pain anywhere?”  You query, glancing at the bio bed’s read out to corroborate what you’re feeling with what the machine is telling you. “Left upper quadrant,” he replies.  “It could be mono.” You roll your eyes. “Have you been kissing someone else and not telling me, Dr. McCoy?”  You tease. It’s his turn to give you a wry look as he starts to go on about how kissing disease is a stupid moniker and how there are dozens of ways to pick up the Epstein-Barr virus but you silence him with an order. “Lie down,” you instruct with authority, leaving him no room to argue. “This really isn’t necessary, Y/N,” he tries anyway while doing as you’ve asked.  “I’m sure it's just a virus.” “Self-diagnosis is highly frowned upon, doctor,” you admonish him as you step up to his side, slipping a hand beneath his tunic and gently palpating his abdomen.  “I would have thought you knew better.  Any pain here?” He shakes his head as you press on all the quadrants aside from the one he’s indicated.  You watch his face closely as you finally apply pressure to the left upper side and give him an apologetic look as he recoils, guarding the sore spot unconsciously.  You palpate a little more deeply a couple of times and then remove your hand, resting it on his thigh and stroking there gently. “Your spleen’s enlarged,” you say pointedly. “Let’s run some scans.” Leonard’s sigh is not lost on you.  You pull out your tricorder and slowly wave it over his body from head to toe, ensuring that you’re not missing anything. You frown at the readings, running the scans again just to be sure. “You’ve already had xenopolycythemia, right?” You ask him, staring at the readout. “Yeah,” he replies.  “Why?  What’d you find?” He props himself up on his elbows, craning his head in an attempt to look at your tricorder. “Your hematocrit’s over sixty,” you murmur.   “Given your history I might suspect a flare up, but you were cured, weren’t you?  You shouldn’t be relapsing.” Sitting up all the way, Leonard swings his legs over the edge of the bed and takes the tricorder from your hands, getting a better look at the screen.  Cursing under his breath, he sets the instrument down and runs a hand through his hair. “It doesn’t make sense,” he sputters.  “I have antibodies to the virus now.  I shouldn’t relapse, let alone so soon. It’s only been a couple of years.” You reach out, putting a hand on Leonard’s shoulder and squeezing it reassuringly.   “I’ll take some blood,” you insist. “We’ll run some scans and go from there.” Leonard nods, already holding out his arm though you’re only just gathering the supplies you need.  It doesn’t take you long to set up and within a few minutes, you’re drawing the necessary vials of blood and securing a cotton ball over the needle stick with a piece of tape. “I’m going to go and run a few tests on these,” you explain, finishing up.  “I’ll be back soon to run a full body scan to look for the beginnings of any emboli.” He looks like he wants to argue and follow you to the lab instead, but he refrains. “Just try to relax in the meantime,” you say softly.  “I know you’re not very good at it, but the last thing you need is to drive your blood pressure up and stroke out.” Leonard rolls his eyes at you but complies, lying back on the bio bed as you rush off to run some tests.  You drop three of the vials of blood off for routine testing, and keep the fourth one in hand, inverting it every few seconds to distribute the anticoagulant inside of it as you carry it to the xenobiology lab. Fifteen minutes later, after the biology wizards have had their fun, you make your way back toward the med bay, somewhat troubled by their findings.  You stop by the nurses’ desk, quickly checking the results of Leonard’s remaining blood work on your PADD and breathing a sigh of relief that at least everything else looks fine.  Pushing the PADD aside, you head back into Leonard’s room, earning yourself an immediate turn of the head from the other doctor as you enter and approach his bedside. “What is it?”  Leonard asks, aware of your puzzlement already. You curse his perception inwardly and try to rearrange your expression into one less dire. “You’ve got a new strain of the virus,” you say briefly, sparing him the details.  “You’re not relapsing, you’ve got a whole new disease with the same symptomology.” Leonard curses aloud, showing no further sign of his frustration aside from a slight quickening of his heart rate.  As he considers what the diagnosis means, you busy yourself with preparing a hypo for him, hoping that the cure for the original virus would be effective on this one, too.   With the hypo in hand, you return to Leonard’s beside and hold it up, wordlessly asking for his consent to administer the medication.  He gladly exposes his neck for the shot and doesn’t even flinch with the injection. You glance at the chron as you step away and enter his treatment details into your PADD before facing him once more. “Now, we wait,” you say softly. “I’ve never been very good at that,” Leonard grumbles. You chuckle and nod. “Don’t I know it,” you agree.  “Get some rest, Lee.  I’ll come check on you in a half hour, see if your crit’s come down yet.” The half hour flies by in the blink of an eye, and a follow up check of his blood count shows that his hematocrit hasn’t come down.  It hasn’t increased much, either, which is a good sign, but that isn’t much of a consolation to Leonard when you tell him what’s going on. Two more hours pass by, with hourly checks showing no change in his condition.  Flummoxed, you lean against the counter opposite the bio bed he’s propped up on and cross your arms over your chest. “It’s evolved a resistance to the treatment,” you offer.  “The medication doesn’t seem to be doing it.” “Why don’t we try another dose?”  Leonard suggests, but you immediately shake your head. “The side effects might worsen, possibly catastrophically, and I doubt we’ll see any improvement,” you explain.  “I’m going to treat you the old-fashioned way until someone in the lab can figure out how to kill this thing.  Mr. Spock is quite knowledgeable about all of this, if I remember correctly – I’ll have him give the team a hand.” Leonard groans and nods, lying down once again and pulling his sleeve up as high as it’ll go.  The only way to keep him stable until you find a cure is to draw off a pint of blood or two to decrease his red blood cell count and prevent problematic blood clotting, and so you assemble a phlebotomy kit, setting it down at his side. The set up takes you less than two minutes, and before long you’ve got an IV line inserted and taped into place.  You hook the line up to a blood bag and hang it below the level of his heart, watching blood slowly trickle into it and scanning him with your tricorder to keep an eye on his blood count.  You’re relieved to see it coming down after you’d drained a pint of blood and once you’re satisfied with where his levels are at, you stop the treatment all together. “Listen,” Leonard begins as you disconnect the set up.  “If we can’t find a cure, there are some things I want you to do for me.” You hold up a hand to stop him as you dispose of the phlebotomy kit. “We’ll find one,” you promise.  “And even if we don’t, we have a year to talk about all of that.” You’re fighting to keep your voice from cracking as you speak, and you shake your head as Leonard tries to get another word in.  You can see the echo of the pain and uncertainty in his eyes from the last time he was sick, and for the first time you find yourself wondering whether there’s more to the story than what you’ve seen in his medical chanrts. “Please,” you say quietly.  “I can’t focus on finding a cure right now with you talking like that.  Let’s have this discussion later.  Your vitals are good and the draw should hold you for a while, so I’ll let you head back to your quarters.  I’m going to head over to the lab to check on things.  I’ll be up soon and then we can talk.” You move toward him and press a gentle, chaste kiss to his lips, squeezing his shoulder once more before turning to make your way out of the room.  You’re not very good at processing big feelings, and you make haste so that you don’t break down.  You don’t have time to break down when his life is at risk. Rushing down to the biology lab, you find they’ve made no progress.  You stay for an hour in hopes that your presence might be some kind of a boon, a good luck charm, but nothing changes.  Reluctantly, not ready to face your feelings, you head up to your room. You run a hand through your hair, exhaustion claiming you and making your stomach turn.   A wave of dizziness washes over you as you enter your access code into the keypad outside of Leonard’s room and you take a steadying breath before stepping inside.  You’re not in the least bit surprised to find Leonard sitting on the couch and watching the door intently; he’s clearly been waiting for you. Letting the door slide shut behind you, you step forward slowly and make your way over to him.  You deposit your PADD and tricorder on the table and take a seat opposite him, searching your brain for the right words to say. “Tell me about last time,” you urge at last. “I can’t even imagine how scary it was, getting that diagnosis.” Leonard nods, reaching out to spear his fingers in between yours, entangling your hands in the space between you. “I was still trying to pick up the pieces after Jocelyn,” he explains.  “I got the news and I was scared of facing it alone.  Of dying alone.  We went on a mission and I had a lapse in judgment – I got married to a woman who was living on borrowed time, too, in a way.  When I look back on it, I realize how stupid it was, and how impulsive, but at the time, with all the grief, the anger, the fear – it made sense.  I’ll tell you the whole story some time, but this isn’t the time or place.  It’s irrelevant now, anyway; this time, I’m not facing this alone.” You smile sadly and watch Leonard’s expression fall, if possible, even more. “I’m sorry, darlin’,” he says quietly. Your eyes widen and your lips part in surprise at his words – they’re definitely not what you were expecting. “What for, Lee?”  You ask.  “For being sick?  For being mortal?” You shake your head, inching closer to him, reaching up to gently cup his cheek. “Don’t apologize, Lee,” you rebuke softly. “I’d find some reason or other to worry about you, regardless, and this isn’t goodbye.  It’s not.” You lean in slowly and press your lips to his, cutting off whatever he was going to say.  The kiss is chaste but comforting, and you pull away moments later with a smile.  The smile falters for a split second as you feel an ache in your abdomen and you curse inwardly as you realize your wince isn’t lost on Leonard. “This new strain,” he begins, his tone grave. “How virulent is it?” You shake your head, immediately wanting to deny what he’s getting at, but you realize that you can’t. “I don’t know,” you supply. “Lie back,” Leonard instructs you, all affection gone from his demeanor, replaced by worry and a physician’s cool countenance. Now your mind is racing with the implications of his condition, not just the emotional ramifications.  You do as he asks, sitting back against the couch cushions and slumping down a little.  His hand lands on your abdomen and palpates around gently, eliciting tenderness in the left upper quadrant.  His facial expression says it all. “Scan me,” you say resignedly.   Leonard wastes no time in reaching for the tricorder you’d deposited on the table earlier and he activates it, waving it over you.  You already know what it’s going to say, and your mind is reeling with the protocols you’re going to have to activate now that the xenopolycythemia has been transmitted so easily. “We need to get you to medical,” Leonard insists, setting the tricorder aside again. You nod. “Quarantine,” the two of you say in sync. “Everyone on board needs to be scanned,” you add. Leonard’s expression is grim. “I’ll call Jim as we walk,” he states. “Let’s go.” Fifteen minutes later, the two of you are behind the isolation partition in the med bay, the negative pressure in the room keeping the flow of air from mixing back in with the airflow going to the rest of the ship.  M’Benga is handling arranging screenings for the rest of the crew while you and Leonard monitor and take care of one another.  You’re both still fully capable of doing your jobs, you just can’t be exposed to anyone else until more is known about the virus.   The captain is, understandably, out of sorts. “Dr. M’Benga is changing the schedule around a little bit to account for your indispositions until we figure things out,” he explains, his voice strained.  “The folks in biology are working on it – we’ll have you two cured in no time.  Rumor has it they can build a new molecule using the old cure as a base.  They think it’ll work, it’ll just take some time.” Neither you nor Leonard need him to say the rest of what he’s thinking aloud. “We have time,” you assure the captain. “We’ve got it under control.” You can tell he’s not convinced, even after Leonard promises him that things will be fine, but he takes his leave nevertheless.  The two of you are left alone in isolation, lying around, waiting, scanning one another every hour to monitor the disease’s progression.   Four days pass by incredibly slowly and largely uneventfully.  The mutated virus causes your respective hematocrits to rise much more quickly than the original virus and so you’re stuck undergoing phlebotomies daily to keep your symptoms in check.  Thankfully, a thorough check of everyone on board has revealed that no one else is sick, and an environmental scan has shown the virus is not airborne – you must have caught it when you’d kissed Leonard. The two of you deal with a lot of feelings throughout the four days.  Both of you cycle through anger, fear, uncertainty, and everything in between.  You used to think that grief came in stages, in a certain order to those who had lost someone, but facing your own mortality – and Leonard’s – was showing you that grief comes in many forms, and it’s hardly predictable.  You break down, crying and wondering what you’re going to tell your family as Leonard’s strong arms hold you and he makes promises that he can’t keep about how you’ll be okay, everything will be okay.  Leonard breaks down, too, but not to your face.  You can hear him, though, late at night in the bathroom after he thinks you’ve gone to sleep.  You want to go to him, but you resist; he’s an intensely personal man and you know that he’ll come to you when he’s ready. About half way through the fifth day, just as Leonard is waving a tricorder around you for the hundredth time since the start of the ordeal, a knock on the glass outside of the exam room gets both of your attentions.  Leonard sets the tricorder down and steps out of the room.  He isn’t gone three seconds before he’s poking his head back in, gesturing for you to follow him. You hop down from the bio bed and make your way out of the exam room, finding the captain and Dr. M’Benga waiting for the two of you on the other side of the partition.  The doctor is holding a couple of hypo vials in one hand and smiling, and you know even before he makes the announcement that they’ve found the cure. “It’s not without side effects,” Dr. M’Benga warns.  “But we anticipate that it will be effective.” “Thanks, Geoff,” Leonard says with a relieved smile.  “We’ll keep you informed.” The other doctor nods. “I’d recommend taking it one at a time,” M’Benga offers.  “Just in case the side effects require intervention.  If you need backup, just call and I’ll get gowned up and join you.” The two of you exchange determined glances and then look back at Geoff. “Will do,” you assert. Geoff drops the vials into a delivery slot in the partition and departs with the captain in tow.  You pluck them out in return and turn them over in your hands, staring at the amber liquid therein.  You look over at Leonard who is similarly inspecting the vials and smile. “Let’s do this,” you say determinedly.   “After you,” Leonard insists, gesturing to the exam room the two of you had recently vacated. You step inside but refrain from getting up onto the bio bed.  You hover nervously, torn between wanting to go first to spare Leonard the same fear you were facing over how your body would react to the cure and wanting him to go first so you would be prepared for whatever eventuality.  He joins you, putting a gentle hand on your shoulder. “I’ll go first, darlin’,” he says softly, moving to take a step forward. Reaching out, you grab hold of his shirt and hold him back, shaking your head. “No,” you say with certainty, though your voice wavers a little.  “It’s fine. I can do this.  Side effects or not, it’ll all be over soon, right?” The other doctor nods and leans in, pressing a gentle kiss to your forehead. “Don’t be scared,” he reassures you. “I’ll take care of you.  I won’t let anything bad happen.” You nod and take a deep, steadying breath, stepping around him to climb onto the bio bed.  You lie back and rest your arms by your sides, closing your eyes and tipping your head up to receive the medication.  You listen carefully to the mechanical clicking noises as Leonard loads one of the vials into a hypo spray and to his footsteps as they approach your side. “A little pinch here, darlin’,” he explains, pressing the hypo to your neck and injecting its contents. The serum burns like liquid fire as it seeps into your muscles and slips into your veins.  Each pump of your heart sends the medication further, faster, causing the heat to spread throughout your core and limbs.  You shut your eyes tightly against the sensation and find yourself breathing hard, attempting to relax against the assault.  Leonard is taking your hand in an instant, mere seconds after the injection, and you can tell he’s noticed your state of discomfort. “Talk to me, darlin’,” he says, his voice firm but reassuring at the same time.  “Tell me what you’re feeling.” “Hurts,” you croak, licking your lips. “I’m hot.” You don’t have to look at him to know he’s carefully observing your vital signs as he comforts you, reaching up to stroke your hair as a sheen of perspiration wells up across your forehead.  You know things are quickly becoming critical as you start to tremble violently and your heart begins to feel like it’s trying to beat out of your chest. “I’m going to give you something for the pain,” Leonard states, letting go of your hand so he can retrieve another hypo. “No!”  You call, opening your eyes and looking over at him, tears leaving tracks on your temples as they run into your hair.  “I-I don’t want anything to interact.” Leonard curses under his breath, returning to your side to take your hand again, his other palm landing on your hip and stroking there softly. “Fine,” he agrees.  “But if your heart rate keeps climbing, I’m going to have to intervene.  You’re at one-thirty as it is.” You nod, attempting to normalize it a little bit by taking a few deep breaths, but even your lungs feel like they’re on fire. You grit your teeth, focusing on the feeling of Leonard’s hand on your hip, girding yourself to get through the agony for however long it lasts. And that it does for the next three hours. You’re so used to the pain that when it finally wears off, you hardly notice at first.  The residual flaring in your nerve endings has you occupied until Leonard speaks, squeezing your hand to get your full attention. “Your vitals are stabilizing,” he states. “Let’s run a scan and see where you’re at.” You lie still as he runs the tricorder over your body, watching his face for any clues to your condition.  His expression is serious, as usual, but not unduly so and you relax a fraction as he looks up at you, his features brightening into a grin. “I can’t find any traces of the virus,” he explains.  “And your hematocrit’s stabilized; looks like you’re cured, sweetheart.  One more phlebotomy and you’re out of the woods.” A soft laugh bubbles out of you and you groan as you prop yourself up onto your elbows.  Leonard’s hand lands on your shoulder and he attempts to push you back down to rest but you shake him off, grabbing his arm instead and using it as leverage to pull yourself up into a sitting position. “I’m fine, Lee,” you murmur.  “Tired, but fine.  It’s time to load you up.” You slip down from the bio bed, ignoring the shrill chirping that indicates it has lost a signal, and gesture for Leonard to take your place.  He does so swiftly and before long you’ve got a hypo at the ready for him.  Before you administer the medication, you give him a quick scan, mentally noting his significantly elevated red blood cell count, and taking heed of his vitals, too.  As you finish up, you look down at him from his bedside, laying your hand gently on his cheek and smoothing your thumb over his cheekbone. “It’s going to be a bumpy ride,” you warn. “But it won’t be for long.  Just try to relax.” Leonard wordlessly nods his consent and allows you to inject him with the serum.  You quickly realize that experiencing the serum as a bystander is just as horrible as it was feeling it working in your own body.  You watch Leonard’s skin flush, his muscles bunch, and his eyes shut tightly as the burning begins.  It’s your turn to worry now as his blood pressure and heart rate soar while the cure ravages his body, the agony an ugly side effect of its battle against the virus holding the two of you hostage. You sit at his bedside, carding the fingers of one hand through his hair, holding one of his hands with the other, murmuring soft words of encouragement as he breathes in sharp gasps occasionally punctuated by groans.  Like clockwork, three hours later, his vitals begin to level out and you realize he’s overcome the fight just like you had. “You did great,” you whisper softly, picking up your tricorder.  “Hold still for me.” You don’t realize that you’ve been holding your breath until you feel all of the air leave your lungs in a rush when his hematocrit pops up on the screen.   “Stable,” you muse aloud.  “Thank the stars, Lee; it worked!” He smiles weakly, groaning as he shifts around and moves to sit up.  You offer him a hand, your strength having returned in the hours you’d spent watching him, and he’s sitting up and facing you within moments.  You move to stand between his legs, stepping up on your tip toes to press a kiss to his lips and you shiver as his hands comes to rest on either side of your neck. You pour all of your passion in the kiss: a passion that’s been pent up, locked away behind grief and fear and questions of when.  Your hands land on Leonard’s hips and you slowly slide them higher, beneath his shirt, splaying your palms on his skin and drinking him in as your breath begins to come more quickly.  His hands wander into your hair, tugging on it, creating a perfect contrast of delicious pain to the pleasure his lips are giving you. The kiss lasts until you’re both completely breathless.  The monitors are screaming as the bio bed registers Leonard’s elevated heart rate and you reach over blindly toward the console, shutting the whole thing down. In the peace and quiet that follows, you catch your breath and pull away just enough to look up at Leonard.  He’s smiling down at you. “Let’s go talk to M’Benga,” he suggests. “The sooner he clears us, the sooner we can get out of here and get on with our lives.” You nod and hold out a hand to him, stepping aside as he hops off of the bed.  You keep his hand clasped in yours as the two of you make your way back to the front of the isolation quarters.  You’re still latched on when Leonard comms Geoff and the other doctor arrives, smiling at the two of you. “Good news, I trust?”  He says, beaming. The two of you nod in unison. “A couple of side effects, but nothing catastrophic,” Leonard explains.  “Both of our crits are down in the 40s after treatment.  They were in the low sixties this morning.” “That’s great!”  Dr. M’Benga exclaims, glancing over his shoulder as he hears a noise behind him, realizing the captain is approaching. “You two look a lot better than you did this morning,” he says with a chipper grin.  “I take it the crisis has been averted?” “Aye, Captain,” you assure him.  “Looks like we’re in the clear.” “Great!”  He says brightly.  “Join me for dinner; we can celebrate!” “Not so fast,” Dr. M’Benga chimes in.  “I’d like to keep them in isolation for another day or two, just to be sure the pathogen has been eradicated and not just become dormant.” He turns his attention to the two of you as your expressions fall at the thought of being locked up even longer. “I’d like for you two to draw some bloods,” he instructs.  “The lab can confirm that the virus has been eradicated.  I’d like you both to have complete physicals to ensure no damage has been done, and I’d like to monitor you both once daily for another week, or longer as needed.  It’s probably being over-cautious, but I’d rather not risk anything.” You groan inwardly but you can admit he’s right.  You nod, looking up at Leonard with a smile. “I think we can handle that,” you agree, exchanging a glance with your boyfriend.  “What’s another day, right?” Jim laughs, getting your attention. “Get some rest while you have the chance,” he says with a wink.  “I want you two right back at your posts as soon as Dr. M’Benga gives you the all-clear. Now, I’ve got to get back to the bridge. I’ll see you soon.” He turns on his heel and makes his way off, pausing and glancing over his shoulder, a genuine smile on his face, relief in his eyes. “I’m glad you two are okay,” he says softly. “Don’t know what I would’ve done without my two best doctors.” You watch him beat a hasty retreat after the little slip up of sentiment and bid Dr. M’Benga a farewell, too.  Once he’s gone, the two of you head back to the exam room you’d taken your cures in.  It doesn’t take you long to draw bloods and you clean up the equipment you’d used as Leonard goes to deliver the vials for pick up. Returning to the inpatient room where you and Leonard had been sleeping for the duration of your quarantine, you make your way to the bed you’ve been sharing where Leonard is waiting, an unspoken we’ll worry about everything else tomorrow passing between the two of you. It's getting late and you’re both exhausted, not only after the day’s events, but after the whole ordeal.  Leonard gestures for you to climb into bed and once you’re settled he follows.  You sigh contentedly, tucking yourself in against his side, resting your head on his chest so you can hear his steady heartbeat beneath your ear.  You know that even though you’re in the clear, there’s a lot the two of you need to talk about if you’re going to have a future together.  For now, however, all you want it so be able to sleep without thoughts of your own mortality, and Leonard’s, hanging over your head. “Let’s forget this ever happened,” you murmur sleepily. “Deal,” Leonard says softly, reaching out with his free hand to pull a couple of blankets up to cover the two of you.  “Get some sleep, darlin’.  Sweet dreams.” “Mmm, your heartbeat’s like a lullaby,” you sigh, snuggling into his chest for emphasis.  “G’night, Lee.” “Goodnight, Y/N,” he replies, pressing a kiss into your hair, drifting off into dream land right alongside you.

@whatsthematterwithamelia @imamotherfuckingstar-lord @earinafae @feelmyroarrrr @starshiphufflebadger @trekken81 @fandomheadrush @yourtropegirl @theonlyparadox @musingsongbird @ababyinatrenchcoat @arrowsshootyouforwards @alluramc @medicatemedrmccoy @the-alpha-otter @gerardnot-gerald

Graphic by @wonders-of-the-enterprise

[solipsistful]

wait, what's the thing about not putting CPTSD in the DSM?

mostly it’s folks talking about developmental trauma disorder, but CPTSD usually enters the conversation too since DTD is basically childhood CPTSD. 

so a lot of folks were really pushing for DTD to be added to the DSM-5. but there was generally little movement from anyone else, so it never made it in. the general criticisms/reasons why some researchers didn’t jump on board immediately include: 

it’s still not the clearest of criteria, and there needs to be clear evidence that clinicians will be able to use the criteria effectively and consistently -- some of those studies exist, but maybe not enough?

relatedly, the criteria are so broad. for almost every domain, it covers both extremes of behaviors -- being distrustful and aggressive and being clingy and over-empathetic. so there’s a question of 1) whether it’s useful to treat all those presentations as the same, and 2) whether DTD in fact covers disorders that already exist. if a kid could be diagnosed with either e.g. disruptive mood dysregulation disorder or developmental trauma disorder, and the difference is just whether there��s a known history of trauma then... maybe that should be part of the discussion around DMDD? and DMDD and DTD have quite different looking treatment plans; who’s to say the traumatized kid wouldn’t benefit from psych meds, etc.?

more on that second point: the overlap with other disorders causes some. problems for etiology. DTD posits trauma as The Cause. on the CPTSD side: some people try to conflate it with BPD, some people recognize that not everyone with BPD reports childhood trauma. how much of CPTSD presentation is actually due to the trauma, then?

it’s a diagnosis of childhood and adolescence, and especially in the DSM-5, those disorders have been getting a lot of scrutiny; it’s hard to give just a one-page long checklist, or even a checklist with a lot of additional prose, that accurately covers all of childhood development. “in 3 year olds, DTD looks like X; but in 5 year olds, like Y; and in 13 year olds, like Z”. again, that’s also part of the discussion around other disorders like DMDD and ADHD

for the record, i do believe that DTD should be in the DSM, at the very dang least as a condition for further study. it seems to be getting at something important, even with its broadness, and frankly i don’t mind if it “eats up” some diagnoses like ODD lmao. i don’t know for sure, but i think it’s likely that its absence also has something to do with all the other places in the DSM-5 that this set of researchers & clinicians were responding to -- adding a dissociative subtype of PTSD, some folks trying for dissociative subtypes of other disorders (ie schizophrenia, ie Ross), trying to loosen criteria A of PTSD so that maybe a special category of CPTSD wouldn’t be as necessary, the whole discussion of child diagnoses in general, etc.

HOWEVER, there are people who read the above responses in a more conspiratorial lens. scientists are scared that DTD could encompass other disorders (viewed as a complete plus!) because it hurts their expertise and grant funds (as if developmental trauma & attachment doesn’t have that kind of investment itself ;P). that, since DTD generally doesn’t have pharmaceutical treatments, its absence is because of Big Pharma (especially with the inclusion of DMDD, have i mENTIONED DMDD). that its absence from the DSM-5 amounts to no less than systematic neglect, and even continued abuse, of abused kids everywhere.

- Ace

[thermoplasticroadmarking]

The problem with TEF – a look at the technical failings

Professor DV Bishop outlines the multiple flaws in the TEF methodology

  In a previous post I questioned the rationale and validity of the Teaching Excellence and Student Outcomes Framework (TEF). Here I document the technical and statistical problems with TEF.

  How are statistics used in TEF?

Two types of data are combined in TEF: a set of ‘contextual’ variables, including student backgrounds, subject of study, level of disadvantage, etc., and a set of ‘quality indicators’ as follows:

Student satisfactionas measured by responses to a subset of items from the National Student Survey (NSS)

Continuation – the proportion of students who continue their studies from year to year, as measured by data collected by the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA)

Employment outcomes- what students do after they graduate, as measured by responses to the Destination of Leavers from Higher Education survey (DLHE)

As detailed further below, data on the institution’s quality indicators is compared with the ‘expected value’ that is computed based on the contextual data of the institution. Discrepancies between obtained and expected values, either positive or negative, are flagged and used, together with a written narrative from the institution, to rate each institution as Gold, Silver or Bronze. This beginner’s guide provides more information.

  Problem 1: Lack of transparency and reproducibility

When you visit the DfE’s website, the first impression is that it is a model of transparency. On this site, you can download tables of data and even consult interactive workbooks that allow you to see the relevant statistics for a given provider. Track through the maze of links and you can also find an 87-page technical document of astounding complexity that specifies the algorithms used to derive the indicators from the underlying student data, DLHE survey and NSS data.

The problem, however, is that nowhere can you find a script that documents the process of deriving the final set of indicators from the raw data: if you try to work this out from first principles by following the HESA guidance on benchmarking, you run into the sand, because the institutional data is not provided in the right format.  When I asked the TEF metrics team about this, I was told: “The full process from the raw data in HESA/ILR returns, NSS etc. cannot be made fully open due to data protection issues, as there is sensitive student information involved in the process.” But this seems disingenuous. I can see that student data files are confidential, but once this information has been extracted and aggregated at institutional level, it should be possible to share it. If that isn’t feasible, then the metrics team should be able to at least generate some dummy data sets, with scripts that would do the computations that convert the raw metrics into the flags that are used in TEF rankings.

As someone interested in reproducibility in science, I’m all too well aware of the problems that can ensue if the pipeline from raw data to results is not clearly documented – this short piece by Florian Markowetz makes the case nicely.  In science and beyond, there are some classic scare stories of what can happen when the analysis relies on spreadsheets: there’s even a European Spreadsheet Risks Interest Group. There will always be errors in data – and sometimes also in the analysis scripts: the best way to find and eradicate them is to make everything open.

  Problem 2: The logic of benchmarking

The idea of benchmarking is to avoid penalising institutions that take on students from disadvantaged backgrounds:

“Through benchmarking, the TEF metrics take into account the entry qualifications and characteristics of students, and the subjects studied, at each university or college. These can be very different and TEF assessment is based on what each college or university achieves for its particular students within this context. The metrics are also considered alongside further contextual data, about student characteristics at the provider as well as the provider’s location and provision.”

One danger of benchmarking is that it risks entrenching disadvantage. Suppose we have institutions X and Y, which are polar opposites in terms of how well they treat students. X is only interested in getting student fees, does not teach properly, and does not care about drop-outs – we hope such cases are rare, but, as this Panorama exposé showed, they do exist, and we’d hope that TEF would expose them. Y, by contrast, fosters its students and does everything possible to ensure they complete their course.  Let us further suppose that X offers a limited range of vocational courses, whereas Y offers a wider range of academic subjects, and that X has a higher proportion of disadvantaged students. Benchmarking ensures that X will be evaluated relative to other institutions offering similar courses to a similar population. This can lead to a situation where, because poor outcomes at X are correlated with its subject and student profile, expectations are low, and poor scores for student satisfaction and completion rates are not penalised.

Benchmarking is well-intentioned – its aim is to give institutions a chance to shine even if they are working with students who may struggle to learn. However, it runs the risk of making low expectations acceptable. It could be argued that, while there are characteristics of students and courses that affect student outcomes, in general, higher education institutions should not be offering courses where there is a high probability of student drop-out. And students would find it more helpful to see raw data on drop-out rates and student satisfaction, than to merely be told that an institution is Bronze, Silver or Gold – a rating that can only be understood in relative terms.

  Problem 3: The statistics of benchmarking

The method used to do benchmarking comes from Draper and Gittoes (2005), and is explained here. A more comprehensive statistical treatment and critique can be found here.  Essentially, you identify background variables that predict outcomes, assess typical outcomes associated with each combination of these in the whole population under consideration, and then calculate an ‘expected’ score, as a mean of these combinations, weighted by the frequency of each combination at the institution.

The obtained score may be higher or lower than the ‘expected’ value. The question is how you interpret such differences, bearing in mind that some variation is expected just due to random fluctuations. The precision of the estimate of both observed and expected values will increase as the sample size increases: you can compute a standard error around the difference score, and then use statistical criteria to identify cases with difference scores that are likely to be meaningful and not just down to random noise. However, where there is a small number of students, it is hard to distinguish a genuine effect from noise, but where there is a very large number, even tiny differences will be significant. The process used in benchmarking uses statistical criteria to assign ‘flags’ to indicate scores that are extremely good (++), or good (+), or extremely bad (–) or bad (-) in relation to expectation. To ameliorate the problem of tiny effects being flagged in large samples, departures from expectation are flagged only if they exceed a specific number of percentage points.

This is illustrated for the case of one of the NSS measurements in Figure 1, which shows that the problem of sample size has not been solved: a large institution is far more likely to get a flagged score (either positive or negative) than a small one. Indeed, a small institution is a pretty safe bet for a silver award.

Figure 1. The Indicator (x-axis) is the percentage of students with positive NSS ratings, and the z-score (y-axis) shows how far this value is from expectation based on benchmarks. The plot illustrates several things: (a) the range of indicators becomes narrower as sample size increases; (b) most scores are bunched around 85%; (c) for large institutions, even small changes in indicators can make a big difference to flags, whereas for small institutions, most are unflagged, regardless of the level of indicator; (d) the number of extreme flags (filled circles or asterisks) is far greater for large than small institutions.

  Problem 4: Benchmarking won’t work at subject level

From a student perspective, it is crucial to have information about specific courses; institution-wide evaluation is not much use to anyone other than vice-chancellors who wish to brag about their rating. However, the problems I have outlined with small samples are amplified if we move to subject-level evaluation.  I raised this issue with the TEF metrics team, and was told:

‘The issue of smaller student numbers ‘defaulting’ to silver is something we are aware of. Paragraph 94 on page 29 of the report on findings from the first subject pilot mentions some OfS analysis on this. The Government consultation response also has a section on this. On page 40, the government response to question 10 refers to assessability, and potential methods that could be used to deal with this in future runs of the TEF.’

So the OfS knows they have a problem, but seems determined to press on, rather than rethinking the exercise.

  Problem 5: You’ll never be good enough

The benchmarks used in TEF are based on identifying statistical outliers. Forget for a moment the sample size issue, and suppose we have a set of institutions with broadly the same large number of students, and a spread of scores on a metric, such that the mean percentage meeting criterion is 80%, with a standard deviation of 2% (see Figure 2). We flag the bottom 10% (those with scores below 77.5%) as problematic. In the next iteration of the exercise, those with low scores have either gone out of business, improved their performance, or learned how to game the metric, and so we no longer have anyone scoring below 77.5%. The mean score thus increases and the standard error decreases. So now, on statistical grounds, a score below 78.1% gets flagged as problematic. In short, with a statistical criterion for poor performance, even if everyone improves dramatically, or poor-performers drop out, there will still be those at the bottom of the distribution – unless we get to a point where there is no meaningful variation in scores.

  Figure 2: Simulated data showing how improvements in scores can lead to increasing cutoff in the next round if statistical criterion is adopted.

  The bottom line

TEF may be summarised thus:

Take a heterogenous mix of variables, all of them proxy indicators for ‘teaching excellence’, which vary hugely in their reliability, sensitivity and availability

Transform them into difference scores by comparing them with ‘expected’ scores derived from a questionable benchmarking process

Convert difference scores to ‘flags’, whose reliability varies with the size of the institution

Interpret these in the light of qualitative information provided by institutions

All to end up with a three-point ordinal scale, which does not provide students with the information that they need to select a course.

Time, maybe, to ditch the TEF and encourage students to consult the raw data instead to find out about courses?

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8239600 http://cdbu.org.uk/the-problem-with-tef-a-look-at-the-technical-failings/ via IFTTT

[advertisingproductioncompany]

The problem with TEF – a look at the technical failings

Professor DV Bishop outlines the multiple flaws in the TEF methodology

  In a previous post I questioned the rationale and validity of the Teaching Excellence and Student Outcomes Framework (TEF). Here I document the technical and statistical problems with TEF.

  How are statistics used in TEF?

Two types of data are combined in TEF: a set of ‘contextual’ variables, including student backgrounds, subject of study, level of disadvantage, etc., and a set of ‘quality indicators’ as follows:

Student satisfactionas measured by responses to a subset of items from the National Student Survey (NSS)

Continuation – the proportion of students who continue their studies from year to year, as measured by data collected by the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA)

Employment outcomes- what students do after they graduate, as measured by responses to the Destination of Leavers from Higher Education survey (DLHE)

As detailed further below, data on the institution’s quality indicators is compared with the ‘expected value’ that is computed based on the contextual data of the institution. Discrepancies between obtained and expected values, either positive or negative, are flagged and used, together with a written narrative from the institution, to rate each institution as Gold, Silver or Bronze. This beginner’s guide provides more information.

  Problem 1: Lack of transparency and reproducibility

When you visit the DfE’s website, the first impression is that it is a model of transparency. On this site, you can download tables of data and even consult interactive workbooks that allow you to see the relevant statistics for a given provider. Track through the maze of links and you can also find an 87-page technical document of astounding complexity that specifies the algorithms used to derive the indicators from the underlying student data, DLHE survey and NSS data.

The problem, however, is that nowhere can you find a script that documents the process of deriving the final set of indicators from the raw data: if you try to work this out from first principles by following the HESA guidance on benchmarking, you run into the sand, because the institutional data is not provided in the right format.  When I asked the TEF metrics team about this, I was told: “The full process from the raw data in HESA/ILR returns, NSS etc. cannot be made fully open due to data protection issues, as there is sensitive student information involved in the process.” But this seems disingenuous. I can see that student data files are confidential, but once this information has been extracted and aggregated at institutional level, it should be possible to share it. If that isn’t feasible, then the metrics team should be able to at least generate some dummy data sets, with scripts that would do the computations that convert the raw metrics into the flags that are used in TEF rankings.

As someone interested in reproducibility in science, I’m all too well aware of the problems that can ensue if the pipeline from raw data to results is not clearly documented – this short piece by Florian Markowetz makes the case nicely.  In science and beyond, there are some classic scare stories of what can happen when the analysis relies on spreadsheets: there’s even a European Spreadsheet Risks Interest Group. There will always be errors in data – and sometimes also in the analysis scripts: the best way to find and eradicate them is to make everything open.

  Problem 2: The logic of benchmarking

The idea of benchmarking is to avoid penalising institutions that take on students from disadvantaged backgrounds:

“Through benchmarking, the TEF metrics take into account the entry qualifications and characteristics of students, and the subjects studied, at each university or college. These can be very different and TEF assessment is based on what each college or university achieves for its particular students within this context. The metrics are also considered alongside further contextual data, about student characteristics at the provider as well as the provider’s location and provision.”

One danger of benchmarking is that it risks entrenching disadvantage. Suppose we have institutions X and Y, which are polar opposites in terms of how well they treat students. X is only interested in getting student fees, does not teach properly, and does not care about drop-outs – we hope such cases are rare, but, as this Panorama exposé showed, they do exist, and we’d hope that TEF would expose them. Y, by contrast, fosters its students and does everything possible to ensure they complete their course.  Let us further suppose that X offers a limited range of vocational courses, whereas Y offers a wider range of academic subjects, and that X has a higher proportion of disadvantaged students. Benchmarking ensures that X will be evaluated relative to other institutions offering similar courses to a similar population. This can lead to a situation where, because poor outcomes at X are correlated with its subject and student profile, expectations are low, and poor scores for student satisfaction and completion rates are not penalised.

Benchmarking is well-intentioned – its aim is to give institutions a chance to shine even if they are working with students who may struggle to learn. However, it runs the risk of making low expectations acceptable. It could be argued that, while there are characteristics of students and courses that affect student outcomes, in general, higher education institutions should not be offering courses where there is a high probability of student drop-out. And students would find it more helpful to see raw data on drop-out rates and student satisfaction, than to merely be told that an institution is Bronze, Silver or Gold – a rating that can only be understood in relative terms.

  Problem 3: The statistics of benchmarking

The method used to do benchmarking comes from Draper and Gittoes (2005), and is explained here. A more comprehensive statistical treatment and critique can be found here.  Essentially, you identify background variables that predict outcomes, assess typical outcomes associated with each combination of these in the whole population under consideration, and then calculate an ‘expected’ score, as a mean of these combinations, weighted by the frequency of each combination at the institution.

The obtained score may be higher or lower than the ‘expected’ value. The question is how you interpret such differences, bearing in mind that some variation is expected just due to random fluctuations. The precision of the estimate of both observed and expected values will increase as the sample size increases: you can compute a standard error around the difference score, and then use statistical criteria to identify cases with difference scores that are likely to be meaningful and not just down to random noise. However, where there is a small number of students, it is hard to distinguish a genuine effect from noise, but where there is a very large number, even tiny differences will be significant. The process used in benchmarking uses statistical criteria to assign ‘flags’ to indicate scores that are extremely good (++), or good (+), or extremely bad (–) or bad (-) in relation to expectation. To ameliorate the problem of tiny effects being flagged in large samples, departures from expectation are flagged only if they exceed a specific number of percentage points.

This is illustrated for the case of one of the NSS measurements in Figure 1, which shows that the problem of sample size has not been solved: a large institution is far more likely to get a flagged score (either positive or negative) than a small one. Indeed, a small institution is a pretty safe bet for a silver award.

Figure 1. The Indicator (x-axis) is the percentage of students with positive NSS ratings, and the z-score (y-axis) shows how far this value is from expectation based on benchmarks. The plot illustrates several things: (a) the range of indicators becomes narrower as sample size increases; (b) most scores are bunched around 85%; (c) for large institutions, even small changes in indicators can make a big difference to flags, whereas for small institutions, most are unflagged, regardless of the level of indicator; (d) the number of extreme flags (filled circles or asterisks) is far greater for large than small institutions.

  Problem 4: Benchmarking won’t work at subject level

From a student perspective, it is crucial to have information about specific courses; institution-wide evaluation is not much use to anyone other than vice-chancellors who wish to brag about their rating. However, the problems I have outlined with small samples are amplified if we move to subject-level evaluation.  I raised this issue with the TEF metrics team, and was told:

‘The issue of smaller student numbers ‘defaulting’ to silver is something we are aware of. Paragraph 94 on page 29 of the report on findings from the first subject pilot mentions some OfS analysis on this. The Government consultation response also has a section on this. On page 40, the government response to question 10 refers to assessability, and potential methods that could be used to deal with this in future runs of the TEF.’

So the OfS knows they have a problem, but seems determined to press on, rather than rethinking the exercise.

  Problem 5: You’ll never be good enough

The benchmarks used in TEF are based on identifying statistical outliers. Forget for a moment the sample size issue, and suppose we have a set of institutions with broadly the same large number of students, and a spread of scores on a metric, such that the mean percentage meeting criterion is 80%, with a standard deviation of 2% (see Figure 2). We flag the bottom 10% (those with scores below 77.5%) as problematic. In the next iteration of the exercise, those with low scores have either gone out of business, improved their performance, or learned how to game the metric, and so we no longer have anyone scoring below 77.5%. The mean score thus increases and the standard error decreases. So now, on statistical grounds, a score below 78.1% gets flagged as problematic. In short, with a statistical criterion for poor performance, even if everyone improves dramatically, or poor-performers drop out, there will still be those at the bottom of the distribution – unless we get to a point where there is no meaningful variation in scores.

  Figure 2: Simulated data showing how improvements in scores can lead to increasing cutoff in the next round if statistical criterion is adopted.

  The bottom line

TEF may be summarised thus:

Take a heterogenous mix of variables, all of them proxy indicators for ‘teaching excellence’, which vary hugely in their reliability, sensitivity and availability

Transform them into difference scores by comparing them with ‘expected’ scores derived from a questionable benchmarking process

Convert difference scores to ‘flags’, whose reliability varies with the size of the institution

Interpret these in the light of qualitative information provided by institutions

All to end up with a three-point ordinal scale, which does not provide students with the information that they need to select a course.

Time, maybe, to ditch the TEF and encourage students to consult the raw data instead to find out about courses?

from CDBU http://cdbu.org.uk/the-problem-with-tef-a-look-at-the-technical-failings/ via IFTTT