#look this snippet of audio is impossibly comforting

[friendlyfaded]

i might have a problem considering i listen to this five minute sneak peek at the very least once a day

vega saying “i won’t leave you as others have” hits so hard

[worldsover]

Dal Segno ft. Chuu

length ✦ 3570

genres ✧ music making; oral fixation; facefuck; subby!Chuu

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Composition is only fifty percent of the process, you've heard, but it's closer to ten for you. For the importance of a solid melody and chord progression with the right instruments and singer, a song becomes less than the sum of its parts with bad mixing because all that effort goes to waste when you can’t hear something, or when something is too loud, or when a certain je ne sais quoi is wrong. But you do know. You don't have to be a chef to be a food critic but it certainly helps. Avoid muddling the lows as it waters down the soup. Carve space in the highs to prevent too much salt from killing the taste buds. Have at most five sounds at a time or else the flavors clash. Focus on these basic techniques to guide you as repetition wears down your mind. Funny. Repetition legitimizes especially in music yet here you are fatigued by repetition as though you weren't down four cups of black coffee. Repetition legitimizes. “From the sign,” the translation reads. Notation, simply instructing a musician to return to a certain point in a piece. You recognize it as an intro song you wrote years ago.

Glass and foam separate the undersized room. Cheap ramen and dampness in the hot air contribute to the odor. You would keep the fan on, if it were worth the extra time filtering out faint noise from recordings. The only scent that keeps you sane is a slight strawberry flavor lingering in the room. Jiwoo. Your muse. A large clock holds both of its hands near one with the lack of natural light muddling whether it’s AM or PM. Studios were always underground man-caves whether they were discount rooms or the signature workspace of the biggest producers. Here you are in the former. Look down at the Macbook and all the wires, sliders, and knobs. Deep breath. “Take 63,” you say into the cheap control room microphone.

“Not good enough.”

“Again.”

“One more.”

Look up. Jiwoo sucks on a grape lollipop. You stare. Watching her fixated on getting all flavor out of the purple sweet derails your flow state. See, work had a rhythm. Listen, volume up, hotkey to copy this clip, volume down. The obvious innuendo sends you offbeat. That perky butt bending over to get a notebook filled with lyrics entrenches the folds of your brain. She didn’t have to wear that skirt. You’ve seen that skirt already and you wish she weren’t wearing it. Oh, you really wish she weren’t wearing that skirt. Guilt sets in. You’re a trusted coworker, she, a naive girl. It takes a while to find your groove again. Your stare has yet to cease until she finally returns the eye contact with candy still in mouth. Her pink tongue laps to secure all the sugar and red pillows engulf the ever-shrinking circle. Pop. Anyone else and it would be calculated action.

“Oppa." Her voice resounds in your monitor headphones. "I don’t know if these harmonies really make sense. Why did you write the second voice to cross down below the main line? Plus it goes so low."

“To be fair, you wrote both of those melodies and you said you wanted them in the same song. Tell me anywhere else they’d work.”

“Ugh, let’s figure this out later. Next song.“

Dozens of takes later and Jiwoo’s frustration causes her to make mistakes. Sometimes she even tries to start singing with the sucker in her mouth. For the character she plays, you know she’s a professional and that she can be better. Yet hours later, she still could not get the vocal runs right. Incomplete songs bloat your project folder: "Jiwoo - Mania", "Jiwoo - Look Closer", "Jiwoo - Untitled Idea 21". Just a small side project that the company approved during another ample period of break time between comebacks. That’s why the director didn’t even let you use the company’s facilities, instead opting to rent out this cheap closet of a studio. At least no one would be mad about the amount of time you spent recording together.

You shift seats from the leather office chair to the white lovechair, the only two pieces of furniture that fit comfortably in the room. Jiwoo follows suit and leaves the recording booth, really more of a phone booth in square footage, while she huffs and puffs on her candy.

“I’m tired, oppa,” she says.

“Me too, Jiwoo. May I remind you that I’m not getting paid extra for this. Are you gonna focus or what?” your voice just a few cents down, just a bit harsher.

“I, I’m sorry.” A lick anyway. Her meek tone disappears, “Ya! You know how good your royalties are gonna be. Sole producer and all that. Plus, here you are still doing all this work for me." Why were you working so hard on this? "You know, if you just taught me how to use Ableton-”

“Then I’d be out of a job.”

Jiwoo frowns, “Wow, selfish much? You could’ve joined me as a trainee.”

“Nah, no way. Fish dance better.”

“Shut up, oppa. You would’ve easily made it with your, um, musical talent.” She clamps down on the lollipop with her mouth.

“You good? What was that?”

“Let’s," she stands promptly, "get back to recording.”

Crack. Jiwoo bites down on the lollipop and throws the stick in the trash. In ten minutes, she nails the verse she spent hours trying to get right. It'd be really nice to know what catalyzed that rally. You'd ask but driving Jiwoo back to her dorm is quiet as usual.

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Make a good impression on someone, anyone, on your first day as a mixing engineer. That’s why you returned to the Blockberry Creative building with an extra bar of Melona in hand. A simple bribery. Light beamed down between two skyscrapers on a short girl with long hair and strands of bangs adorning her forehead. She stood outside the lobby, introducing herself to every passerby. You had to pinch her cheeks, the intrusive thought screamed.

She scurried up to you. “Hi! I’m Kim Jiwoo and I’m going to become an idol!”

Ah, a trainee. You already knew she was destined to become one. Well, not literally, you weren’t in charge of that. But her overflowing charm was impossible to ignore. You had to tease her though, “Are you sure?”

“Hey! What would you know about that, mister?” she said.

You bit down on your mango. “Mister? First of all, I’m only a high school senior,” her lips rounded in surprise, “And second, I’m your new audio guy, and I know for a fact they’re debuting you girls in order of talent.”

“Woooow. Well, I’ll have you know, I have a great voice!” She certainly spoke lyrically.  “Wait a minute, I didn’t know they hired people that young.” You pointed at her. “Okay, I’m in high school too. But that’s different, idols start this age.”

“I guess. I’ve been making music ever since I was a kid, and they liked what I had,” you said and Jiwoo nodded in understanding.

She fluttered her eyebrows. “Sooo, is that mango ice cream for me? Oppa?” A little surprised she already called you that, but it sounded right.

“No, I have this unopened strawberry-” Jiwoo snatched the half-eaten cold treat from your hand, and started licking it. Trouble she would be.

You spent many recording sessions together, alone after all the other members left. She cozied up to you because her little musical snippets had to become full-fledged tracks and you helped her out every time.

Something changed over the years however. Your interactions became colder. It felt like you were the only one who she would respond to in a deeper voice. Jiwoo wouldn't pepper you with silly acts or mess around. Maybe she took you more seriously which is how you managed to make more songs together regardless. Then, you stood idly by and watched her debut. Who didn't love her? But when she was with you, you missed the playfulness, the ice cream and her riffing over your playful guitar strums. It turned less of a hobby and more of a job though you never regretted any second with Jiwoo regardless.

Under the Earth's largest natural satellite, you shared a simple meal in black bean noodles. She was still in her hippie outfit from the comeback, and you handed her your jacket since it was cold. You realized, there was something else there that you were too inexperienced to notice. Your bodies' radiation replace the chill in the air, a bubble with just the two of you eating on the grass in a park near your dorm. A cliche slurping on one noodle and Jiwoo pulled away. In embarrassment, like a damn anime character, she hiccuped. Good thing you didn't close your eyes when you leaned in.

“Wanna make an album together?” Jiwoo says.

“Sure.”

You threw away the noodles’ package and escorted her home. That was all you expected anyway. Fine.

✦✧✦✧✦✧

“That’s enough!”

Three goddamn weeks. It's been three goddamn weeks and you've barely made any progress.

Barge into the booth, slam the door shut and raise your tone, just below a shout, “I've had it up to here! You know how many of my songs have been mashed together in some unholy quest for your perfection? Just one unknown something is missing and either you start complaining or we move on to the next."

She backs up from the mic to the insulated wall but you continue, paying no heed to her, as you spout your piece to the artificially cold air, "You know how much time I’ve spent outside working on these songs? These are songs I’ve saved up over years. And you trash them like they’re nothing. How do you even manage to record LOONA tracks?”

Regret sinks in. This was your passion project as much as hers. Was it frustration from the recordings? Weeks of the same routine and it took until now for you to give in to your temper.

"It wouldn't even be that bad! If you could just one time, you could be cute or cheerful again with me, or,” Fuck. So stupid. You don’t have to take your friendships for granted like this. You’re lucky enough she treats you as much. “Hold on. Wait, I'm-"

Examine her face. It’s not sour and she hasn’t stormed out or even slapped you.

“No, no. You don’t have to say it. I’m. I’m sorry oppa.” She looks down. “I'm the one messing up after all." Her heartbeat a harsh snare drum. "And you. You're. Different. Looking at you always made me feel some, something funny. Not funny but? Ugh. I wish I could explain it.”

You hold in your confusion.

She blabbers on, “Like, are. Are you mad? I promise you, I,” A nervous breath, ”I like you. Okay?"

Your confusion grows like the length of your silence.

"I’m just acting how I really am with you. Do you want to maybe, I don't know, like," her voice decrescendos, "Um. Punish me?”

Your heart, your brain are deprived of blood as it all rushes down. Did you hear that right? Not an apology, not retribution, but a call to punishment? Misinterpreting her, the consequences would be dire but that damned demure tone for such an erotic request. Was Jiwoo the exact type of slut constructed in your mind? The one that made you feel sinful for even imagining. No, no, there's no way.

Too late. Jiwoo must have noticed the absurd bulge now. It had to be these Adidas pants today. Fuck it. Life can’t be lived fully without risk. Hopefully, the same switch turned in her mind. You remove all ire from your face and say in earnest, “Do you like games?"

She lights up a little. You sigh relieved.

"Let’s try…”, you say, ”Strip recording.” She lights up a little more, so you go on, ”If I mess up anything, the mix, the composition, the arrangement, I’ll take off a piece of clothing. Your choice. And every time you mess up-”

Jiwoo unbuttons her denim shorts and brings them down her tight legs.

“D- did I say now?”

However, with her resolve steeled, she continues pulling them. "So what? I did mess up, right?" she says coquettish. Deliberate the turn she makes when she bows down to remove the shorts from her legs, Jiwoo reveals a hint of her innie pussy on that same little ass that ran through your mind earlier. A small trace of her thighs glistens, the only thing reflecting the single lightbulb’s glow in the microphone’s abode. She turns back to face you. "Please. Punish me."

Step closer until Jiwoo backs up to the soundproofing. She’s an eighth note away from your face, flashing her beady eyes and a coy smile, ”Where's your underwear?" A little drop spills out onto the floor, "And why are you so wet, Jiwoo-ah?”

Red on her cheeks, like she only now realized her dishevelment in front of you. “You just… Something about you snapping at me. I don’t get it either. I knew you'd do it, some day, I wanted you to," she mumbles in her best efforts to answer you.

“Have you ever worn underwear to the recordings?”

Those efforts continue to fail.

"Oh, Kim Jiwoo. What do I do with you?" One of your hands grabs her cheek. The other crawls down her back to grab her cheek.

“Oppa… Do I have to say it?”

“I want to hear every." Smack. "Word." Smack. She slips a moan.

“Can you," she says, "can you use my mouth?”

You disguise your long pause as thought, teasing the bare skin of her ass with your exploratory fingers to bide time, but it's an expression of your shock. The interruption helps you come up with a more suitable punishment however.

“How about this then. Every time you mess up, you have to give me a blowjob. Call?”

“Call!” Once more, unprompted, she kneels down in front of you and claws away your track pants. You roll with the punches.

"Oppaa," with an pronounced pop and in a sing-songy rhythm, "I've always wanted to know, if your dick-" It certainly didn't need Jiwoo's dainty hands pulling on your boxers, as it would've sprang out on its own with how like diamond your cock is getting.

"Fuuuck," the first profanity you ever hear her utter, she lilts. "Please. Oppa. Fuck my face?"

After all she said, she could still surprise you. Bring your hips forward and just as you would've her pussy, tease Jiwoo’s lips with the head of your dick. She parts them open, starved, anxious.

Hold her by the chin. "Wait."

She freezes at the command. Again, like foreplay, rub her lips with that head making them turn redder and more plump. You sweep aside her bangs to see her begging eyes. More importantly, slide your dick up to her nude forehead to slap as a first act of retribution. “A-ah!” Jiwoo stutters as you slap her face with your manhood again and again. Bring your cock back down and she's already a mess without you even having entered her mouth. A little drool from her shut lips gently massages your balls while a bit of precum drools from your slit to meet those lips.

Jiwoo mumbles as best as she can with you holding her jaw shut and your dick on her lips, "Please. Please. Shove your dick in me. I need you in my mouth."

You squint your rough eyes to command her.

Muffled still, "Oppa. Please. I. I need to taste you. You just, you're so thick and you're so long and cock is perfect and please I just-"  Loosen the grip on her chin to let her envelop the entire tip with her warm lips. "Mmmmm..." the moan resonates a saw wave and your stern resolve fades away on your first entrance into her face but it returns as her teeth rub against you. She quickly readjusts her jaw but it takes multiple attempts of you pulling out and her sucking you back until only silken lips hold your cock's head. Finally. A focused glint in her eyes. She endeavours to keep your tip in her mouth as long as possible.

You were mad at her earlier, weren't you?

Recall this anger and press yourself into her with all your hips' strength, working against the force of her lip's airtight suction. Saliva leaks to betray the seal. Jiwoo's prying tongue explores the underside of your cock but you reach an impasse while she's not even halfway down the shaft. You shove your dick deeper but to no avail and tears roll down her eyes joining the fluids coating her lips. Thus you exit back out. And back in you go to repeat and repeat and slowly increase your rate, becoming rough sex with her diligent mouth. All the positions you’ve imagined fucking her little pussy, you picture using her throat instead. Even in this compact studio, the couch, chair and desk would provide ample support for you to use her in many ways. The dirty thoughts inspire your speed right now. She slurps and gulps at every quick plunge but you realize her moans and rumbles aren't just incoherent reactions. You decelerate.

“Ah, ahhh, ahhhhhh… Ah’ve ahways- Hmph.” She slurs as she tries her hardest to communicate while her airway is blocked.

She slides up your cock to catch some air, “Thought about it- Mmm.”

“Your dick in my mouth and it’s just so pew, fect- Ahhh.” Jiwoo's lips let go gently then her tongue sticks out to lick up your cock and she shows off a trail of spit leading to your tip. A less patient man would’ve jerked himself off right there to grant her eyes and open mouth's unison request to feed on your cum.

Instead you retort, “You think you’ve earned it? Not even halfway down. Going nowhere, just like our recording sessions, huh?”

“Shut up!”

“Oof.” You’re already weak in the knees so Jiwoo's one handed shove sends your tailbone to the floor. Since you’re still dazed by her confounding strength, she takes initiative and kowtows her head into your lap to crawl down your cock with her tiny lips. Fondling your balls, Jiwoo starts from the furthest point she could muster on your shaft up to your cock head. Her tongue follows back and she starts playing under your tip to swirl that tongue around the most sensitive parts until it explores your slit. You buckle and groan. Jiwoo sucks and spits and sucks while she circles only the most minimal twisting motion of her lips on your head. This is the Jiwoo you know. Relentless. Only now your load is her magnus opus.

Her right hand strays downwards and her face on your dick blocks a full view but you can tell that hand is working as intensely as her mouth. As she strokes herself with more vigor, she starts humming a satisfied melody on your tip. In kind, your subtle grunts turn into full-bodied moans. You're a single measure away from your coda so you reach down and pull her off your cock by grabbing her neck.

You glare into her. “Desperate little girl, aren't you?”

Her breath is stilted and she's nearly shaking. “Please…” she sobs, ”You, you want it as bad as I do right?” Of course. “Won't you just cum for me?” Not now. Not when you have putty in your hands.

“You're making a mess. You can't take me all the way down. And I see that it’s not just your saliva coating the floor.” Point to the spot where she kneels, her drool joins a stain growing ever larger with a strand of juice from her pussy flowing as you continue to berate her. Then you point to her hand. Ha. “Were you playing with yourself using my pencil?”

“No… Wait!”

You back off. “Your top’s a mess too. Anyone can tell I just fucked your face.” You take off your black hoodie and give it to her. “I’ll see you tomorrow for our next session.”

“Wait, we didn’t book tomorrow, did we? Also, you can’t just leave me like this! Oppa!”

"I said, I'll see you tomorrow. I have to go,“ you remind her, ”Ha Rin’s picking you up. And give me back that pencil.”

She hands it to you, unable to meet your eyes despite hers lusting over your cock. You'll definitely use the alluring musk on it for later to save you from your self-induced blue balls. Exit the booth. Of course she barely waits to use your hoodie the same way since she doesn’t notice you lingering in the room. Instead of hiding the grey long sleeve that soaks her neck, your used sweatshirt covers Jiwoo’s face as her fingers make the mess on the floor larger.

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AFF, AO3

Swear to god I’m not just writing the cutest idols to write for. I mean maybe I am but also this answer from @nsfwtwicecatcher​ and all the subsequent pictures that I found of Chuu pouting inspired me. Also, this was a longer piece but I kept spinning my tires on it and decided to split it up, so look out for more.

✦✧✦✧✦✧

Fermata, the aforementioned sequel

[the-story-of-five-lights]

Osaka dome fanaccount 180218

I’m writing this after getting some food in my stomach while sitting under the covers in my hotel room and looking out at the night lights in Osaka. I feel incredibly grateful I got to experience these concerts. I know what it’s like to be sitting at home streaming and wishing you could be there, because that’s usually where I am. And I know this time, even though there was a lot of apprehension, so many people wanted the chance to support SHINee in person. I’m thankful I got that opportunity, and I hope I was able to bring at least a portion of all of your well wishes for SHINee into the Dome along with me.

Today was so much easier. Infinitely easier. I’m sure there are people who won’t feel the same, but I feel lighter and more hopeful tonight than I did yesterday. I’ll try and write about some things I didn’t before so I’m not too redundant.

SHINee had an easier time tonight. I won’t pretend it wasn’t difficult for them or they don’t feel a huge weight of grief, but they smiled and were more at ease and teased at each other and clearly felt better than they did yesterday. Even if some smiles were forced, I don’t believe for a second they all were. Yesterday, pulling that band-aid off, made it impossible for them to hold the pain in, and today was a lot less raw.

Because SHINee seemed to be doing better — and probably because many of us knew what to expect — the mood of the concert was dramatically different. We were able to feed off each other’s energy and be more comfortable. Because of that, I was able to pay much more attention during the high energy and joyful parts of the concert today.

So, on to the concert itself:

The opening VCR is really beautiful. Whoever worked on it did an excellent job.

Colors of the Season was more stable vocally today. SHINee starts out standing in a line on stage with spotlights on them, and I realized it was the only time other than the end that they stood on the flat stage like that. During the song, the stage lifts them up high toward the lights before lowering them back down.

I didn’t talk about this before, but I really liked the medley of songs with the clock ticking in the background they played during the first break. It was a look back, and the way they edited the audio was really haunting. It hurt, because I couldn’t help but think of happier times, but I also don’t want to ever forget those memories. I liked that they had little audio snippets of their history. A reminder.

When they came out and started Stranger, the mood was already better than the 17th. I was seated about 10 feet from the middle track that they traveled down a lot and close to the front stage, so I could see their expressions well. The stage moved out towards the center and Key was faced toward my section. He went up close to the edge of the stage (this always makes me so nervous!!) and hyped us all up a lot. Right before the lights went out, he smiled at us, and I felt something loosen in my shoulders. It was clear that today would be different.

I saw a lot of people say Taemin seemed angry-sad yesterday, and I’d have to agree. I don’t think he was pissed, but he seemed closed off and like he was trying to focus on hitting his marks well. He already seemed more, I guess, normal at this point in the concert. He also started shedding clothes, so. You know. Definitely more back to normal. I saw the other members do something to perk him up a few times in like the first half hour of the concert, but after that he was running well on his own steam.

They had their short first ment, which had the same content as the first night but was nowhere near the same. Yesterday they stood in a stiff line with their hands folded together, often looking down when it wasn’t their turn to speak. Today, Onew smiled softly when he spoke (again, I felt such relief), and Key also seemed to have an easier time.

This next part, the Jonghyun tribute, was of course still hard, but I still found it easier than yesterday. I think this was in large part because I knew what to expect, but SHINee held it together the whole time and I think that also contributed. Kimi ga Iru Sekai was the most heart-wrenching for me. Just the image of them standing around the empty center platform is a lot. I saw Key mouth “I love you” when they turned to face Jonghyun’s spot. I thought I must’ve misunderstood because it definitely looked like I love you in English, but since he said it later I think it really must’ve been. It seems like he was doing that throughout the concert, because other people spotted him doing the same at different times.

If I didn’t love Diamond Sky before, I do now. Making that diamond shape has become absurdly meaningful, and raising up my hand alongside SHINee and the music and all the other Shawols in the crowd was so powerful. It’s not a feeling I want to forget any time soon.

The fanlights all changing color to a medley was next and was so cool. I love these wi-fi controlled lights and hope someone got a video of it for you guys. They did all sorts of cool things throughout the concert, like shifting into the shape of multi-colored stars across the stands and flashing like cameras and turning into a shifting rainbow along to Colorful.

SHINee came back out and performed Sherlock. This is one of the songs I thought would be difficult for them to cover, but they did a really good job both nights.

Love Like Oxygen was next, and I completely forgot about this yesterday but it was one of my favorite parts. They sing up to the bridge and then the music pauses and the lights dim. Some deep blue ones go on and the stage they’re on rises. They stay frozen in place and this eerie, haunting music reminiscent of the earlier “journey through our past” medley plays. Then Jonghyun’s vocals played out so clear and pure and echoed through the whole stadium. Only after that do the lights come back up and they continue on with the rest of the song. It was a beautiful, subtle tribute and indicative of how they did their best to incorporate him throughout the concert.

Hello was a lot of fun, and they were smiley and joking through all of it. Lots and lots of cute fanservice. Same for To Your Heart, and the crowd got really into it.

I wrote yesterday that the Dazzling Girl - Lucky Star - Downtown Baby trifecta was fun and one of the only happy parts of the concert. And I still feel they did a great job with it yesterday, especially in the context of such an emotionally harrowing concert. But today was ENTIRELY different. The girl next to me had also attended the day before, and we kept making big eyes at each other because it felt like we’d stepped into another concert altogether. I can genuinely say I had fun during these songs. After yesterday, I’d kind of been dreading the second day, but suddenly I had this big smile I couldn’t get rid of. SHINee was just out there giving it everything. Taemin was grinning and messing around with fans. He also shouted something at the beginning of one song, and I have no idea what it was but the whole place laughed. Which was really nice <3 Onew was pulling silly faces and waving his arms like crazy at everyone while going around on the carts. At the end of Lucky Star, he moved around the blocks (they got it on Star!) so that they said “Stay” then he hopped up on them and did that one move from Danger with his arms flung behind his back. He stayed like that for a good five long seconds too like a total goof. Key was being so sweet and soft to people he passed by and kept the energy up. He was far away from me the whole time, so I saw less of him sadly. I watched Minho a lot up in his hot air balloon, and he kept pointing to people and telling them to smile and then giving them a thumbs up and a firm, approving nod when they did it. He reminded me of a dad lol. He was really, really emotional and almost serious, kept putting his hand to his heart, and I could feel how much he loves us. Seriously.

Next was the dancers’ solo (which was good!) and then Hitchhiking which is still so. cool. The part where they’re on opposing stages coming closer together and having a dance-off… SO COOL. I was sat right in the middle of it so I got the perfect viewpoint. It’s almost like they’re each daring the other pair to go harder, and they got really into it. I don’t have too much to say about the rest of the songs in this part other than they definitely kept the energy up.

They went away for a while again and we chanted “SHINee”, and then Shaband came out and led us in clapping and starting to sing Sing Your Song. Still love this one at concerts <3 Yesterday, we only sang it a capella once, but today they had us keeping going just “once more” like four times. (Key helped us keep going when we faltered.) It was beautiful. The whole place was full of singing, and they stopped for a while and let us do it alone. Minho took out his in ear to hear better, and Taemin smiled really genuinely. Onew had sparkly eyes. You could tell they all wanted to hear it.

I’m With You was a return to something a bit more solemn. The lyrics have taken on a real poignancy. It almost feels like a message to Shawols.

There was another short ment, and once again they were more at ease than before. There were some small smiles and little laughs from shawols. They introduced the new song, and I’m looking forward to everyone getting to hear it clearly. It’s great and catchy, and I think I liked it even more the second time.

Then came Replay with all the old footage on the screens. It wasn’t just old performances of Replay — they had all sorts of meaningful moments like the first Tokyo Dome concerts, all the way back to debut days. This was still hard for me, and they didn’t look at all happy during it.

SHINee went around and did their bows and once again were smiling and waving soooo much at everyone. Much different from yesterday. They stood and talked, saying mostly the same thing as yesterday with a few additions. But their attitude was very different. They weren’t standing so stiffly in a line (like they were nudging each other and silently communicating things as they normally would more) and they spoke more comfortably.

Key said “I love you” to Jonghyun in English and sent kisses up to the sky. At one point, the others must have thought he was done talking, because they bowed and Key looked at them like “huh? what?” and shawols laughed.

After each one of them was done speaking everyone shouted their names loudly and cheered for an extended amount of time. I think everyone wanted to get across our support as much as we could. The cheers were especially loud for Onew.

Before they went backstage, we started chanting SHINee as loud as we could. Minho took out BOTH of his in-ears to listen and Taemin clapped his hands high in the air in approval. They waved goodbye and the curtain/partition came down to block them.

We kept chanting for them until they came out to perform the last song. As soon as the lights lit up the mic stands, people all over started shouting “Jonghyun”, just like we’d shouted for the others when they finished speaking during the ending ment.

This song will always be a gut punch. I knew by this point that they were singing “I’m by your side” and Jonghyun’s last line was “I’m by your side always”. This song hurt the most and there’s no contest. They performed it beautifully. At the very end, Key began to cry and put his head down. Minho looked at Jonghyun’s empty place while the recording of his voice played. He really had a rough time too, but not until they’d already finished singing. Yesterday we were silent (well, crying) while they put their roses on their stands and left, but today people shouted for them. I heard plenty of people shout “Jonghyun” again.

It’s a hard way to end the concert, although it’s fitting. The lights come up and they start playing other music, and you’re left there in this other headspace. I didn’t talk to anyone for a few minutes while I gathered myself.

So while today may not have been exactly easy as we might’ve used to think of it, it was definitely easier. There was more genuine happiness. Yesterday I was nearly left feeling like I couldn’t see a way forward, but not today. I’m feeling a lot more optimistic.

I’m glad I got to go to both shows. I think we all needed yesterday, even though it sucked. It didn’t feel good at all. But I think maybe we needed to let it out, all together, and I’m including SHINee in that. Having done that, it was like we were allowed to try and be a little happier. Yesterday was straight-up raw, barren, cold pit in the stomach grief. Today still had a lot of sad, but it was at least a little bit more peaceful feeling. There were still moments where I felt pretty scraped up. But we’re always going to have those.

I hope if you were listening along you could feel the energy change. It was really palpable. Shawols were more ready, and SHINee seemed more ready too. They really managed to turn an experience I was dreading — after that first day, I wasn’t sure I could do it — into something beautiful and touching and honestly, genuinely fun for good parts of it.

Please don’t mind me getting a little personal here, but sometimes I have doubts. I trust SHINee a lot, and I find that they’re generally very open and honest with us. But occasionally I’ll have a little niggling doubt that they’re just saying something because they feel like they have to. I know it’s k-pop — I know that’s not uncommon.

But there are a few things I know for a fact after all of this:

They love each other. (Although I never doubted this)

They love us.

They love this group and treasure what it means to them.

I know that’s all true.

I can’t predict the future, and it’s all scary right now. But I can at least hold on to those things. They tried so hard to reassure us through these concerts, and I think they were also trying to reassure themselves. I hope we did enough for them. I don’t know if we can right now. Before they went off stage, Minho and Taemin put up their pinkies in a promise and we put ours up in return. I really want to keep that promise, no matter what.

They did Jjong proud. I didn’t have a lot of expectations one way or another going in to this. I just wanted to be there. But the concert was put together beautifully and thoughtfully. They did this unimaginably difficult thing with so much bravery, and my heart’s full because of it. I think I cried more writing all this up than I did all day today, just because I’m so incredibly touched by what I saw. I keep having images flash through my head of their earnest expressions, and their smiles, and their little moments of communicating with shawols. I’m in awe of what a special, unique thing we have.

I’ll join the streaming crowd next week for the Tokyo concerts. Until then and forever, let’s keep doing what Minho asked and remember Jonghyun, our wonderful, shining diamond in the sky and fifth member of SHINee.

[thegloober]

Thumbnails 9/28/18

by Matt Fagerholm

September 28, 2018   |  

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Thumbnails is a roundup of brief excerpts to introduce you to articles from other websites that we found interesting and exciting. We provide links to the original sources for you to read in their entirety.—Chaz Ebert

1. 

“How Orson Welles’ ‘The Other Side of the Wind’ Was Rescued From Oblivion“: According to The New Yorker‘s Alex Ross.

“When Welles fans discuss the fate of ‘Wind,’ the name Oja Kodar inevitably surfaces, often in an unflattering light. A Croatian sculptor and actress, she co-wrote the script, had a lead role in the film, and—as the Welles scholar Jonathan Rosenbaum has established—directed three scenes of the film-within-the-film. She has been accused of holding up efforts to complete it, whether because of excessive demands or on account of a psychological block against seeing it finished. Yet she has artistic as well as legal authority over the work. In 2015, she made a rare public appearance at a Welles festival in Woodstock, Illinois. (The town was formerly the site of the Todd School for Boys, where Welles’s theatrical career began.) In an interview with Rosenbaum, Kodar made clear her profound attachment to ‘Wind.’ Now in her late seventies, she is a charismatic woman who speaks in a mixture of poetic flights and pungent aphorisms. She was born Olga Palinkaš, of Hungarian and Croatian parentage. Welles met her in 1961, when he went to Croatia to shoot his version of Kafka’s ‘The Trial.’ He named her his ‘present from God,’ and persuaded her to change her name; ‘Ko dar’ is Croatian for ‘as a present.’ She, in turn, coined the title of Welles’s final major film. In Woodstock, she told the story: ‘We walked in Cinecittà, which is a big Roman movie studio, and there was a set from ‘Romeo and Juliet’ from Zeffirelli, and the day was very, very windy, and Orson had on him his big black cape, and the wind went under that cape and opened it, and he looked like a giant bat.’ She went on to say, ‘He was more than human. He was an element of nature, he was wind.’”

Advertisement

2. 

“Why Elaine May Is A National Treasure“: Forward‘s Carrie Rickey makes a convincing case.

“Even if you don’t recognize her name, your funny bone has been tickled by May, who has no equal as America’s most influential comedian. Her beneficiaries include everyone from Lily Tomlin to Tina Fey. ‘I don’t think it’s possible to overstate her influence on funny women,’ said Mark Harris, the film maven writing a biography of Mike Nichols. She has had an enormous impact on funny men, as well, most prominently Nichols and Woody Allen. Harris said, ‘The intelligence and precision and versatility she brought to Nichols & May influenced everyone who saw it, and I think that influence has been passed down the generations, to the point where there are comedians and comic writer/performers who probably don’t even know that she is in their DNA.’ ‘In her early sketch work with Mike Nichols, she ushered in a Jewish sensibility,’ said Jason Zinoman, a comedy columnist at The New York Times. ‘The phone bit where May calls her son – ‘Arthur, this is your mother. Do you remember me?’ — is the Rosetta Stone for the Jewish mother joke.’”

3.

“Underneath ‘Bull”s Style and Smarts, There’s Real Depth Too“: The Talkhouse‘s Jim Hemphill sings the praises of CBS’s enjoyable procedural, now in its third season.

“Roger Ebert once said that a movie isn’t about what it’s about, it’s about how it’s about what it’s about. I think that’s even more true of network television, where the difference between a passable show and a good one (and between a good one and a great one) is often down to the way in which the makers play with and subtly vary well-worn formulas. The immensely entertaining and ambitious CBS show ‘Bull,’ which begins its third season tonight, is a case in point. A smart, stylish and very funny drama that premiered in the fall of 2016 with a killer pedigree – ‘Donnie Brasco’ and ‘Quiz Show’ writer Paul Attanasio is one of the show’s creators, Steven Spielberg is an executive producer, and indie auteur Rodrigo Garcia directed the pilot – Bull reinvents and reinvigorates both the procedural and the courtroom drama with consistent verbal wit, visual elegance and one of the most compelling protagonists on television. Under Attanasio’s guidance, the series started strong, and when ‘Moonlighting’ creator Glenn Gordon Caron took over as the showrunner for season two, it got even better, developing into what it is now: a drama of intense moral seriousness with the breezy charm and fast badinage of a classic comedy by Howard Hawks or George Stevens.”

4. 

“A Decade of Lady Gaga: Ten Unforgettable Performances“: At Indie Outlook, I highlight ten memorable moments from the past decade of Gaga’s ever-surprising career.

“Next week’s release of ‘A Star is Born’ will cause even Gaga’s die-hard fan base to view her in a new light—one devoid of makeup or theatrics. Her performance as Ally, a gifted singer whose career takes off once she’s discovered by show business veteran Jackson Maine (Bradley Cooper), is one of the year’s best. She’s electrifying not only in the musical sequences—which were all performed live and feature many songs coauthored by her and Cooper—but in the rest of the picture as well. In many ways, it’s a natural continuation of what she began with Joanne, which was itself inspired by her work on ‘American Horror Story.’ By removing each layer of artifice, Gaga is bringing us closer to the vulnerable truth of her soul—Stefani’s soul. Gone is her poker face in the breathtaking final shot, and that is ultimately what makes Ally a star.”

Advertisement

5. 

“Why Saying ‘Me Too’ Isn’t Enough“: Impassioned commentary from Variety‘s Caroline Framke. 

“These falls from grace are an overdue redress for those who have come forward about experiencing or witnessing abuse. But not all of them are satisfied with the outcome of telling their stories — nor do they have faith that they will ever see true justice served. ‘My optimism that I had at the beginning is certainly not there anymore,’ says Sarah Tither-Kaplan, who alleged in January alongside several other women that she witnessed James Franco sexually harassing women on set. Since then, she says, she’s gotten waves of online backlash and lost friends, job opportunities and faith in the industry. Meanwhile, Franco has continued to work unabated. (HBO programming chief Casey Bloys insisted at the summer TCA press tour that the cast and producers of ‘The Deuce’ ‘all felt comfortable’ with Franco continuing to star in the series, now in its second season.) And he’s far from the only one. Despite the increasingly frequent pearl clutching from some about the #MeToo movement going too far, plenty of accused men are inching back into their careers after brief hiatuses away from the public eye.”

Image of the Day

Courtesy of Getty Images.

According to Nick Allen: “Chicago’s own Third Coast International Audio Festival, also known as the ‘Sundance of Radio,’ will be hosting the special world premiere of the latest episode in ESPN’s ’30 for 30′ podcast on Sunday, October 7 at 6:00pm at the Logan Auditorium. The episode will focus on baseball player Jose Canseco’s doping scandal and a never-before-heard story about how he worked with a ghost writer to write a best-selling book. A Q&A will follow with the producers, which will offer more insight into how the famous podcast gets made.” Click here for tickets.

Video of the Day

[embedded content]

VIDEO ESSAY: #InformedImages: “Heat,” “The Dark Knight,” “Cliffhanger” and “Mission: Impossible – Fallout” from Nelson Carvajal on Vimeo.

Master editor Nelson Carvajal’s latest essential installment of #InformedImages at Free Cinema Now illustrates how “Heat,” “Cliffhanger” and “The Dark Knight” are all embedded in the DNA of “Mission: Impossible—Fallout.”

Bonus: Podcast of the Day

Snap Judgment Podcast #926 from WNYC Studios, as recommended by Nick Allen: “Kartemquin filmmaker John Fecile takes a deep dive into the history of the infamous ‘Faces of Death,’ and interviews the enigmatic creator who originally wanted to make a nature documentary. Included in the podcast episode are snippets of Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel discussing the impact that ‘Faces of Death’ had on them, along with reactions from other viewers who learn through John’s interviews what was real and what was not.”

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[mrmichaelchadler]

Thumbnails 9/28/18

Thumbnails is a roundup of brief excerpts to introduce you to articles from other websites that we found interesting and exciting. We provide links to the original sources for you to read in their entirety.—Chaz Ebert

1. 

"How Orson Welles' 'The Other Side of the Wind' Was Rescued From Oblivion": According to The New Yorker's Alex Ross.

“When Welles fans discuss the fate of ‘Wind,’ the name Oja Kodar inevitably surfaces, often in an unflattering light. A Croatian sculptor and actress, she co-wrote the script, had a lead role in the film, and—as the Welles scholar Jonathan Rosenbaum has established—directed three scenes of the film-within-the-film. She has been accused of holding up efforts to complete it, whether because of excessive demands or on account of a psychological block against seeing it finished. Yet she has artistic as well as legal authority over the work. In 2015, she made a rare public appearance at a Welles festival in Woodstock, Illinois. (The town was formerly the site of the Todd School for Boys, where Welles’s theatrical career began.) In an interview with Rosenbaum, Kodar made clear her profound attachment to ‘Wind.’ Now in her late seventies, she is a charismatic woman who speaks in a mixture of poetic flights and pungent aphorisms. She was born Olga Palinkaš, of Hungarian and Croatian parentage. Welles met her in 1961, when he went to Croatia to shoot his version of Kafka’s ‘The Trial.’ He named her his ‘present from God,’ and persuaded her to change her name; ‘Ko dar’ is Croatian for ‘as a present.’ She, in turn, coined the title of Welles’s final major film. In Woodstock, she told the story: ‘We walked in Cinecittà, which is a big Roman movie studio, and there was a set from ‘Romeo and Juliet’ from Zeffirelli, and the day was very, very windy, and Orson had on him his big black cape, and the wind went under that cape and opened it, and he looked like a giant bat.’ She went on to say, ‘He was more than human. He was an element of nature, he was wind.’”

2. 

"Why Elaine May Is A National Treasure": Forward's Carrie Rickey makes a convincing case.

“Even if you don’t recognize her name, your funny bone has been tickled by May, who has no equal as America’s most influential comedian. Her beneficiaries include everyone from Lily Tomlin to Tina Fey. ‘I don’t think it’s possible to overstate her influence on funny women,’ said Mark Harris, the film maven writing a biography of Mike Nichols. She has had an enormous impact on funny men, as well, most prominently Nichols and Woody Allen. Harris said, ‘The intelligence and precision and versatility she brought to Nichols & May influenced everyone who saw it, and I think that influence has been passed down the generations, to the point where there are comedians and comic writer/performers who probably don’t even know that she is in their DNA.’ ‘In her early sketch work with Mike Nichols, she ushered in a Jewish sensibility,’ said Jason Zinoman, a comedy columnist at The New York Times. ‘The phone bit where May calls her son – ‘Arthur, this is your mother. Do you remember me?’ — is the Rosetta Stone for the Jewish mother joke.’”

3.

"Underneath 'Bull''s Style and Smarts, There's Real Depth Too": The Talkhouse's Jim Hemphill sings the praises of CBS's enjoyable procedural, now in its third season.

“Roger Ebert once said that a movie isn’t about what it’s about, it’s about how it’s about what it’s about. I think that’s even more true of network television, where the difference between a passable show and a good one (and between a good one and a great one) is often down to the way in which the makers play with and subtly vary well-worn formulas. The immensely entertaining and ambitious CBS show ‘Bull,’ which begins its third season tonight, is a case in point. A smart, stylish and very funny drama that premiered in the fall of 2016 with a killer pedigree – ‘Donnie Brasco’ and ‘Quiz Show’ writer Paul Attanasio is one of the show’s creators, Steven Spielberg is an executive producer, and indie auteur Rodrigo Garcia directed the pilot – Bull reinvents and reinvigorates both the procedural and the courtroom drama with consistent verbal wit, visual elegance and one of the most compelling protagonists on television. Under Attanasio’s guidance, the series started strong, and when ‘Moonlighting’ creator Glenn Gordon Caron took over as the showrunner for season two, it got even better, developing into what it is now: a drama of intense moral seriousness with the breezy charm and fast badinage of a classic comedy by Howard Hawks or George Stevens.”

4. 

"A Decade of Lady Gaga: Ten Unforgettable Performances": At Indie Outlook, I highlight ten memorable moments from the past decade of Gaga's ever-surprising career.

“Next week’s release of ‘A Star is Born’ will cause even Gaga’s die-hard fan base to view her in a new light—one devoid of makeup or theatrics. Her performance as Ally, a gifted singer whose career takes off once she’s discovered by show business veteran Jackson Maine (Bradley Cooper), is one of the year’s best. She’s electrifying not only in the musical sequences—which were all performed live and feature many songs coauthored by her and Cooper—but in the rest of the picture as well. In many ways, it’s a natural continuation of what she began with Joanne, which was itself inspired by her work on ‘American Horror Story.’ By removing each layer of artifice, Gaga is bringing us closer to the vulnerable truth of her soul—Stefani’s soul. Gone is her poker face in the breathtaking final shot, and that is ultimately what makes Ally a star.”

5. 

"Why Saying 'Me Too' Isn't Enough": Impassioned commentary from Variety's Caroline Framke. 

“These falls from grace are an overdue redress for those who have come forward about experiencing or witnessing abuse. But not all of them are satisfied with the outcome of telling their stories — nor do they have faith that they will ever see true justice served. ‘My optimism that I had at the beginning is certainly not there anymore,’ says Sarah Tither-Kaplan, who alleged in January alongside several other women that she witnessed James Franco sexually harassing women on set. Since then, she says, she’s gotten waves of online backlash and lost friends, job opportunities and faith in the industry. Meanwhile, Franco has continued to work unabated. (HBO programming chief Casey Bloys insisted at the summer TCA press tour that the cast and producers of ‘The Deuce’ ‘all felt comfortable’ with Franco continuing to star in the series, now in its second season.) And he’s far from the only one. Despite the increasingly frequent pearl clutching from some about the #MeToo movement going too far, plenty of accused men are inching back into their careers after brief hiatuses away from the public eye.”

Image of the Day

Courtesy of Getty Images.

According to Nick Allen: "Chicago's own Third Coast International Audio Festival, also known as the 'Sundance of Radio,' will be hosting the special world premiere of the latest episode in ESPN's '30 for 30' podcast on Sunday, October 7 at 6:00pm at the Logan Auditorium. The episode will focus on baseball player Jose Canseco's doping scandal and a never-before-heard story about how he worked with a ghost writer to write a best-selling book. A Q&A will follow with the producers, which will offer more insight into how the famous podcast gets made." Click here for tickets.

Video of the Day

VIDEO ESSAY: #InformedImages: "Heat," "The Dark Knight," "Cliffhanger" and "Mission: Impossible - Fallout" from Nelson Carvajal on Vimeo.

Master editor Nelson Carvajal's latest essential installment of #InformedImages at Free Cinema Now illustrates how "Heat," "Cliffhanger" and "The Dark Knight" are all embedded in the DNA of "Mission: Impossible—Fallout."

Bonus: Podcast of the Day

Snap Judgment Podcast #926 from WNYC Studios, as recommended by Nick Allen: "Kartemquin filmmaker John Fecile takes a deep dive into the history of the infamous 'Faces of Death,' and interviews the enigmatic creator who originally wanted to make a nature documentary. Included in the podcast episode are snippets of Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel discussing the impact that 'Faces of Death' had on them, along with reactions from other viewers who learn through John's interviews what was real and what was not."

from All Content https://ift.tt/2OXyGAX

[benfchristie2]

AI and Big Data Are Changing Our Attention Spans

What catches your attention?

The business of answering that question attracts hundreds of billions of dollars every year. As long as there have been things to buy, there's been a market for human attention.

Long ago, capitalizing on human attention consisted of little more than the call of a street vendor over the din of a crowded village market.

Much later, the first one cent copies of The Sun hit the streets of New York, inspired by the realization of its editor that it was much more valuable to sell each reader's attention to advertisers than to make money off newspaper sales directly.

Today, that concept has been taken to an extreme. Thousands of algorithms on millions of servers auction off your every click and tap, anticipating which emails you'll open, which search results you'll read, even how your eye might dart around the page.

Google and Facebook rely almost exclusively on directly reselling human attention. Machines are starting to help optimize email subject lines and article titles based on what might catch your eye. The playbook is simple: attract human attention with cheap or free stuff -- cheap newspapers, Google search, interesting reading material -- and optionally resell that attention to the highest bidder.

Where are we headed? In the face of this transformation, what can we expect? Answering these questions is hard. To go any further, it's important to understand how attention works.

How Attention Works

Your attention is like a spotlight cast on a stage. You're the spotlight operator. You can point the spotlight at specific things on stage, but you can't control what actually appears on the stage.

The stage is your awareness, and it contains the sum total of information accessible to your mind at this moment. That includes the words on your screen, the sensation of pressure from your chair, and background noises in your environment, as well as the never-ending stream of random thoughts that pop up in your head.

As you read this, you are volitionally casting your spotlight on the words you're reading. You'll keep this up for a little while, but inevitably, the spotlight will move without your permission, attracted by an unexpected noise behind you, or someone walking into your field of view, or a stray thought about what you want for lunch.

This is the nature of attention. It darts around, scanning continuously for what's interesting. This was an invaluable benefit in our ancestral environment. It was rare we might need to focus on one thing for more than a few moments at a time, but essential not to miss that snarling predator lurking in the bush.

As a result, if you try really hard to pay attention to only one thing, you'll quickly find your attention elsewhere. In fact, usually, your brain decides to change the subject of your attention without your conscious input, much less your permission. You might have already drifted off into a different thought a few times as you read this. Your brain expects a little hit of feel-good neurotransmitter every time your attention jumps to something interesting. Novelty feels good.

This is precisely what makes it hard to reliably capture people's attention. Generally, people themselves don't understand what catches their attention or why. Most shifts in attention are unconscious, so it's impossible for people to articulate why their attention does what it does. They only notice what it does after it has happened. Certain colors of call-to-action buttons work better on a landing page than others not due to any conscious decision by anyone, but due to the unconscious preferences of billions of brains.

Certainly, there are some things that work very well on all of us: bright colors, flashing objects, and attractive scantily clad people are all widely used to great effect. For a new parent, there's nothing better than an iPad to quell a tantrum from a cranky toddler, and that's because looking at colorful moving images feels good.

But beyond the obvious, the target of your attention is largely determined by neural mechanisms cultivated over decades of interacting with the world and anticipating the reward from different stimuli. Your brain is constantly moving about the spotlight of attention on the lookout for potential sources of pleasure and pain.

Attention in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

The best approach we've developed for understanding what captures people's attention is empirical. We record as much as we can about what's in their awareness -- or what's on stage. We then try to record where the spotlight is cast -- by recording a clicked link or opened email. Then, we look for patterns.

Each of those components is going to evolve dramatically over the next few years. The environments where we spend our time increasingly facilitate data collection. Algorithms for working with language, audio, and video are rapidly becoming more sophisticated. Hardware and cloud service improvements are accelerating research and discovery in artificial intelligence. There are several implications:

1) We'll have more data on both attention and awareness.

Eye-tracking has long been used in psychology, marketing, and consumer research, in both academia and business. It works great for studying cognitive development in infants and can even be used to A/B test their preferences.

Shops already use realtime facial expression APIs to track ad viewers' age, gender, mood, and interest level. Google's Project Soliis a miniature solid state radar that can detect the movement of your hand and other objects near your phone. We appear comfortable with inviting Amazon Echo's Orwellian always-on microphone into our homes.

How long before we see Amazon announce Prime Plus, requesting permission to occasionally activate your front-facing camera, Echo microphone, and motion tracker in exchange for free 30-minute drone delivery?

2) The arms race for attention will expand.

Attention is zero-sum, because every click your competitor gains, you lose. This accelerates competition. That's why your email inbox is a battleground of people vying for your attention. So is the results page for every Google search. This will be increasingly true of everywhere you spend your attention.

3) Screens will remain the primary conduit of human attention.

Screens are everywhere. Not only did our glossy paranormal hand rectangles become globally ubiquitous in just 10 years, they've fundamentally transformed how humans interact with the world. While technology often advances unpredictably, screens are probably likely to persist for a while. That's because out of the five senses you have -- the five ways of putting information into awareness -- vision has the highest throughput to the brain. We are multiple breakthroughs away from anything faster.

4) Humans will spend huge amounts of time in virtual worlds.

The $100 billion video game industry continues to boom. Games will become dramatically more immersive as virtual and augmented reality go mainstream. People will routinely spend time in deep and engaging virtual environments with limitless content to explore and hundreds of millions of other real and simulated people to interact with. That could transform how we spend our leisure time, how we learn, and how we meet other people.

Content in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Think of content as all things that attract human attention that can be represented as data. That includes almost anything online that humans make, from blog posts and dance music to short stories, video game livestreams, entertaining social media posts, and more. The more quality content you can produce, the more attention you can scoop up, continuing to sate our limitless thirst for customization and novelty.

1) Generative algorithms for text, images, sound, and video will improve dramatically.

Machine vision, automatic speech recognition, and natural language processing have made tremendous advancements in the past five years. Algorithms can already generate extremely convincing content from scratch.

The next generation of photo and video editing tools will make it trivial to rewrite any record of reality, replacing pixels using algorithms that are aware of what they're looking at.

Adobe claims to be working on a Photoshop for audio, making it easy to generate an audio clip of anybody's voice saying anything at all.

Today, you can ask a neural network to hallucinate arbitrarily many images of bedrooms or cats or sailboats, most of which look real enough to fool people. Or you could use a neural network to create a language snippet to insert into an email by reading a company's website.

Eventually, you might ask a machine to produce a fantasy novel. Say you theme it similar toHarry Potter ... but with a Game of Thrones flair. And let's maybe have the bad guy win this time.

This is a very a long way off, past multiple breakthroughs in semantics and discourse, but current techniques can already generalize well enough to spit out a cohesive and useful paragraph of text.

2) Machines will help us produce content.

Machines will play a much bigger role in helping us produce the content that captures human attention. We'll see a proliferation of collaborative agents in products that assist us in our workflows. Machines will suggest assets to include in the content you're making, or subsets of content to include. Executive control will remain with creators, but the ideation and production process will become increasingly automated. Think Clippy the Microsoft Office Assistant, but with a much bigger brain.

3) To cut through greater noise, humans will keep innovating.

Demonstrating that content was created by a human will become much harder. There's no way you can imagine this article having been written by a machine, but one day, that won't seem so ridiculous.

Machines are cheap, so as machines contribute more to creating content, the places where we consume content will be flooded. Early adopters of those techniques will benefits, but the late adopters will find that to stand out, they'll have to produce content that is demonstrably beyond machines' capabilities in an effort to keep attracting interest.

4) Machines will help us allocate our attention.

Work will become increasingly symbiotic. You'll spend more of your time deciding among things and less collecting and preparing things. Machines will find relevant documents and emails, do Google searches in the background, and perform other functions that can be defined as a semi-structured set of tasks. As the deluge of content on our screens grows, tools will emerge to stem the flood.

Broader Implications

Attention is an essential currency in the global transaction ecosystem. Understanding it is critical for anybody in sales and marketing. Despite the fact that attention is zero-sum in any given transaction, it's important to remember that the pie is growing dramatically.

Leisure time has grown by seven hours per week since the 1960s, and we will unlock much more free time as we shift toward self-driving vehicles.Economists from theNational Bureau of Economic Researchpublished a paper suggesting that high-quality video games are contributing to an increase in unemployment among young men.

Uber, Upwork, and Crowdflower support the emergence of a global market for part-time, on-demand work at a variety of price points. Y Combinator and Elon Musk are calling for a universal basic income plan.

To connect these dots, it's not hard to imagine a future in which wealthy corporations and governments support a basic minimum wage, and in return, people spend their time and attention generating training data and validating models. It would generally be simple tasks, easily performed on a phone, and would involve only skills or data that machines don't have yet.

Data on human attention exposes the unconscious information locked away in our minds. That information is valuable and important, because in the aggregate, it is an encoding of everything humans want -- not just of our buying preferences and creature comforts, but also of our ethics and values as a species. We want machines to understand us, and monitoring human attention may be a good way to collect the necessary data.

With the curtain pulled back on how powerless we are to control our attention and how valuable it is to everyone, perhaps we'll all find ourselves being a bit more careful with how we spend our attention.

[jasonmkemp4]

AI and Big Data Are Changing Our Attention Spans

What catches your attention?

The business of answering that question attracts hundreds of billions of dollars every year. As long as there have been things to buy, there's been a market for human attention.

Long ago, capitalizing on human attention consisted of little more than the call of a street vendor over the din of a crowded village market.

Much later, the first one cent copies of The Sun hit the streets of New York, inspired by the realization of its editor that it was much more valuable to sell each reader's attention to advertisers than to make money off newspaper sales directly.

Today, that concept has been taken to an extreme. Thousands of algorithms on millions of servers auction off your every click and tap, anticipating which emails you'll open, which search results you'll read, even how your eye might dart around the page.

Google and Facebook rely almost exclusively on directly reselling human attention. Machines are starting to help optimize email subject lines and article titles based on what might catch your eye. The playbook is simple: attract human attention with cheap or free stuff -- cheap newspapers, Google search, interesting reading material -- and optionally resell that attention to the highest bidder.

Where are we headed? In the face of this transformation, what can we expect? Answering these questions is hard. To go any further, it's important to understand how attention works.

How Attention Works

Your attention is like a spotlight cast on a stage. You're the spotlight operator. You can point the spotlight at specific things on stage, but you can't control what actually appears on the stage.

The stage is your awareness, and it contains the sum total of information accessible to your mind at this moment. That includes the words on your screen, the sensation of pressure from your chair, and background noises in your environment, as well as the never-ending stream of random thoughts that pop up in your head.

As you read this, you are volitionally casting your spotlight on the words you're reading. You'll keep this up for a little while, but inevitably, the spotlight will move without your permission, attracted by an unexpected noise behind you, or someone walking into your field of view, or a stray thought about what you want for lunch.

This is the nature of attention. It darts around, scanning continuously for what's interesting. This was an invaluable benefit in our ancestral environment. It was rare we might need to focus on one thing for more than a few moments at a time, but essential not to miss that snarling predator lurking in the bush.

As a result, if you try really hard to pay attention to only one thing, you'll quickly find your attention elsewhere. In fact, usually, your brain decides to change the subject of your attention without your conscious input, much less your permission. You might have already drifted off into a different thought a few times as you read this. Your brain expects a little hit of feel-good neurotransmitter every time your attention jumps to something interesting. Novelty feels good.

This is precisely what makes it hard to reliably capture people's attention. Generally, people themselves don't understand what catches their attention or why. Most shifts in attention are unconscious, so it's impossible for people to articulate why their attention does what it does. They only notice what it does after it has happened. Certain colors of call-to-action buttons work better on a landing page than others not due to any conscious decision by anyone, but due to the unconscious preferences of billions of brains.

Certainly, there are some things that work very well on all of us: bright colors, flashing objects, and attractive scantily clad people are all widely used to great effect. For a new parent, there's nothing better than an iPad to quell a tantrum from a cranky toddler, and that's because looking at colorful moving images feels good.

But beyond the obvious, the target of your attention is largely determined by neural mechanisms cultivated over decades of interacting with the world and anticipating the reward from different stimuli. Your brain is constantly moving about the spotlight of attention on the lookout for potential sources of pleasure and pain.

Attention in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

The best approach we've developed for understanding what captures people's attention is empirical. We record as much as we can about what's in their awareness -- or what's on stage. We then try to record where the spotlight is cast -- by recording a clicked link or opened email. Then, we look for patterns.

Each of those components is going to evolve dramatically over the next few years. The environments where we spend our time increasingly facilitate data collection. Algorithms for working with language, audio, and video are rapidly becoming more sophisticated. Hardware and cloud service improvements are accelerating research and discovery in artificial intelligence. There are several implications:

1) We'll have more data on both attention and awareness.

Eye-tracking has long been used in psychology, marketing, and consumer research, in both academia and business. It works great for studying cognitive development in infants and can even be used to A/B test their preferences.

Shops already use realtime facial expression APIs to track ad viewers' age, gender, mood, and interest level. Google's Project Soliis a miniature solid state radar that can detect the movement of your hand and other objects near your phone. We appear comfortable with inviting Amazon Echo's Orwellian always-on microphone into our homes.

How long before we see Amazon announce Prime Plus, requesting permission to occasionally activate your front-facing camera, Echo microphone, and motion tracker in exchange for free 30-minute drone delivery?

2) The arms race for attention will expand.

Attention is zero-sum, because every click your competitor gains, you lose. This accelerates competition. That's why your email inbox is a battleground of people vying for your attention. So is the results page for every Google search. This will be increasingly true of everywhere you spend your attention.

3) Screens will remain the primary conduit of human attention.

Screens are everywhere. Not only did our glossy paranormal hand rectangles become globally ubiquitous in just 10 years, they've fundamentally transformed how humans interact with the world. While technology often advances unpredictably, screens are probably likely to persist for a while. That's because out of the five senses you have -- the five ways of putting information into awareness -- vision has the highest throughput to the brain. We are multiple breakthroughs away from anything faster.

4) Humans will spend huge amounts of time in virtual worlds.

The $100 billion video game industry continues to boom. Games will become dramatically more immersive as virtual and augmented reality go mainstream. People will routinely spend time in deep and engaging virtual environments with limitless content to explore and hundreds of millions of other real and simulated people to interact with. That could transform how we spend our leisure time, how we learn, and how we meet other people.

Content in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Think of content as all things that attract human attention that can be represented as data. That includes almost anything online that humans make, from blog posts and dance music to short stories, video game livestreams, entertaining social media posts, and more. The more quality content you can produce, the more attention you can scoop up, continuing to sate our limitless thirst for customization and novelty.

1) Generative algorithms for text, images, sound, and video will improve dramatically.

Machine vision, automatic speech recognition, and natural language processing have made tremendous advancements in the past five years. Algorithms can already generate extremely convincing content from scratch.

The next generation of photo and video editing tools will make it trivial to rewrite any record of reality, replacing pixels using algorithms that are aware of what they're looking at.

Adobe claims to be working on a Photoshop for audio, making it easy to generate an audio clip of anybody's voice saying anything at all.

Today, you can ask a neural network to hallucinate arbitrarily many images of bedrooms or cats or sailboats, most of which look real enough to fool people. Or you could use a neural network to create a language snippet to insert into an email by reading a company's website.

Eventually, you might ask a machine to produce a fantasy novel. Say you theme it similar toHarry Potter ... but with a Game of Thrones flair. And let's maybe have the bad guy win this time.

This is a very a long way off, past multiple breakthroughs in semantics and discourse, but current techniques can already generalize well enough to spit out a cohesive and useful paragraph of text.

2) Machines will help us produce content.

Machines will play a much bigger role in helping us produce the content that captures human attention. We'll see a proliferation of collaborative agents in products that assist us in our workflows. Machines will suggest assets to include in the content you're making, or subsets of content to include. Executive control will remain with creators, but the ideation and production process will become increasingly automated. Think Clippy the Microsoft Office Assistant, but with a much bigger brain.

3) To cut through greater noise, humans will keep innovating.

Demonstrating that content was created by a human will become much harder. There's no way you can imagine this article having been written by a machine, but one day, that won't seem so ridiculous.

Machines are cheap, so as machines contribute more to creating content, the places where we consume content will be flooded. Early adopters of those techniques will benefits, but the late adopters will find that to stand out, they'll have to produce content that is demonstrably beyond machines' capabilities in an effort to keep attracting interest.

4) Machines will help us allocate our attention.

Work will become increasingly symbiotic. You'll spend more of your time deciding among things and less collecting and preparing things. Machines will find relevant documents and emails, do Google searches in the background, and perform other functions that can be defined as a semi-structured set of tasks. As the deluge of content on our screens grows, tools will emerge to stem the flood.

Broader Implications

Attention is an essential currency in the global transaction ecosystem. Understanding it is critical for anybody in sales and marketing. Despite the fact that attention is zero-sum in any given transaction, it's important to remember that the pie is growing dramatically.

Leisure time has grown by seven hours per week since the 1960s, and we will unlock much more free time as we shift toward self-driving vehicles.Economists from theNational Bureau of Economic Researchpublished a paper suggesting that high-quality video games are contributing to an increase in unemployment among young men.

Uber, Upwork, and Crowdflower support the emergence of a global market for part-time, on-demand work at a variety of price points. Y Combinator and Elon Musk are calling for a universal basic income plan.

To connect these dots, it's not hard to imagine a future in which wealthy corporations and governments support a basic minimum wage, and in return, people spend their time and attention generating training data and validating models. It would generally be simple tasks, easily performed on a phone, and would involve only skills or data that machines don't have yet.

Data on human attention exposes the unconscious information locked away in our minds. That information is valuable and important, because in the aggregate, it is an encoding of everything humans want -- not just of our buying preferences and creature comforts, but also of our ethics and values as a species. We want machines to understand us, and monitoring human attention may be a good way to collect the necessary data.

With the curtain pulled back on how powerless we are to control our attention and how valuable it is to everyone, perhaps we'll all find ourselves being a bit more careful with how we spend our attention.

[benfchristie2]

AI and Big Data Are Changing Our Attention Spans

What catches your attention?

The business of answering that question attracts hundreds of billions of dollars every year. As long as there have been things to buy, there's been a market for human attention.

Long ago, capitalizing on human attention consisted of little more than the call of a street vendor over the din of a crowded village market.

Much later, the first one cent copies of The Sun hit the streets of New York, inspired by the realization of its editor that it was much more valuable to sell each reader's attention to advertisers than to make money off newspaper sales directly.

Today, that concept has been taken to an extreme. Thousands of algorithms on millions of servers auction off your every click and tap, anticipating which emails you'll open, which search results you'll read, even how your eye might dart around the page.

Google and Facebook rely almost exclusively on directly reselling human attention. Machines are starting to help optimize email subject lines and article titles based on what might catch your eye. The playbook is simple: attract human attention with cheap or free stuff -- cheap newspapers, Google search, interesting reading material -- and optionally resell that attention to the highest bidder.

Where are we headed? In the face of this transformation, what can we expect? Answering these questions is hard. To go any further, it's important to understand how attention works.

How Attention Works

Your attention is like a spotlight cast on a stage. You're the spotlight operator. You can point the spotlight at specific things on stage, but you can't control what actually appears on the stage.

The stage is your awareness, and it contains the sum total of information accessible to your mind at this moment. That includes the words on your screen, the sensation of pressure from your chair, and background noises in your environment, as well as the never-ending stream of random thoughts that pop up in your head.

As you read this, you are volitionally casting your spotlight on the words you're reading. You'll keep this up for a little while, but inevitably, the spotlight will move without your permission, attracted by an unexpected noise behind you, or someone walking into your field of view, or a stray thought about what you want for lunch.

This is the nature of attention. It darts around, scanning continuously for what's interesting. This was an invaluable benefit in our ancestral environment. It was rare we might need to focus on one thing for more than a few moments at a time, but essential not to miss that snarling predator lurking in the bush.

As a result, if you try really hard to pay attention to only one thing, you'll quickly find your attention elsewhere. In fact, usually, your brain decides to change the subject of your attention without your conscious input, much less your permission. You might have already drifted off into a different thought a few times as you read this. Your brain expects a little hit of feel-good neurotransmitter every time your attention jumps to something interesting. Novelty feels good.

This is precisely what makes it hard to reliably capture people's attention. Generally, people themselves don't understand what catches their attention or why. Most shifts in attention are unconscious, so it's impossible for people to articulate why their attention does what it does. They only notice what it does after it has happened. Certain colors of call-to-action buttons work better on a landing page than others not due to any conscious decision by anyone, but due to the unconscious preferences of billions of brains.

Certainly, there are some things that work very well on all of us: bright colors, flashing objects, and attractive scantily clad people are all widely used to great effect. For a new parent, there's nothing better than an iPad to quell a tantrum from a cranky toddler, and that's because looking at colorful moving images feels good.

But beyond the obvious, the target of your attention is largely determined by neural mechanisms cultivated over decades of interacting with the world and anticipating the reward from different stimuli. Your brain is constantly moving about the spotlight of attention on the lookout for potential sources of pleasure and pain.

Attention in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

The best approach we've developed for understanding what captures people's attention is empirical. We record as much as we can about what's in their awareness -- or what's on stage. We then try to record where the spotlight is cast -- by recording a clicked link or opened email. Then, we look for patterns.

Each of those components is going to evolve dramatically over the next few years. The environments where we spend our time increasingly facilitate data collection. Algorithms for working with language, audio, and video are rapidly becoming more sophisticated. Hardware and cloud service improvements are accelerating research and discovery in artificial intelligence. There are several implications:

1) We'll have more data on both attention and awareness.

Eye-tracking has long been used in psychology, marketing, and consumer research, in both academia and business. It works great for studying cognitive development in infants and can even be used to A/B test their preferences.

Shops already use realtime facial expression APIs to track ad viewers' age, gender, mood, and interest level. Google's Project Soliis a miniature solid state radar that can detect the movement of your hand and other objects near your phone. We appear comfortable with inviting Amazon Echo's Orwellian always-on microphone into our homes.

How long before we see Amazon announce Prime Plus, requesting permission to occasionally activate your front-facing camera, Echo microphone, and motion tracker in exchange for free 30-minute drone delivery?

2) The arms race for attention will expand.

Attention is zero-sum, because every click your competitor gains, you lose. This accelerates competition. That's why your email inbox is a battleground of people vying for your attention. So is the results page for every Google search. This will be increasingly true of everywhere you spend your attention.

3) Screens will remain the primary conduit of human attention.

Screens are everywhere. Not only did our glossy paranormal hand rectangles become globally ubiquitous in just 10 years, they've fundamentally transformed how humans interact with the world. While technology often advances unpredictably, screens are probably likely to persist for a while. That's because out of the five senses you have -- the five ways of putting information into awareness -- vision has the highest throughput to the brain. We are multiple breakthroughs away from anything faster.

4) Humans will spend huge amounts of time in virtual worlds.

The $100 billion video game industry continues to boom. Games will become dramatically more immersive as virtual and augmented reality go mainstream. People will routinely spend time in deep and engaging virtual environments with limitless content to explore and hundreds of millions of other real and simulated people to interact with. That could transform how we spend our leisure time, how we learn, and how we meet other people.

Content in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Think of content as all things that attract human attention that can be represented as data. That includes almost anything online that humans make, from blog posts and dance music to short stories, video game livestreams, entertaining social media posts, and more. The more quality content you can produce, the more attention you can scoop up, continuing to sate our limitless thirst for customization and novelty.

1) Generative algorithms for text, images, sound, and video will improve dramatically.

Machine vision, automatic speech recognition, and natural language processing have made tremendous advancements in the past five years. Algorithms can already generate extremely convincing content from scratch.

The next generation of photo and video editing tools will make it trivial to rewrite any record of reality, replacing pixels using algorithms that are aware of what they're looking at.

Adobe claims to be working on a Photoshop for audio, making it easy to generate an audio clip of anybody's voice saying anything at all.

Today, you can ask a neural network to hallucinate arbitrarily many images of bedrooms or cats or sailboats, most of which look real enough to fool people. Or you could use a neural network to create a language snippet to insert into an email by reading a company's website.

Eventually, you might ask a machine to produce a fantasy novel. Say you theme it similar toHarry Potter ... but with a Game of Thrones flair. And let's maybe have the bad guy win this time.

This is a very a long way off, past multiple breakthroughs in semantics and discourse, but current techniques can already generalize well enough to spit out a cohesive and useful paragraph of text.

2) Machines will help us produce content.

Machines will play a much bigger role in helping us produce the content that captures human attention. We'll see a proliferation of collaborative agents in products that assist us in our workflows. Machines will suggest assets to include in the content you're making, or subsets of content to include. Executive control will remain with creators, but the ideation and production process will become increasingly automated. Think Clippy the Microsoft Office Assistant, but with a much bigger brain.

3) To cut through greater noise, humans will keep innovating.

Demonstrating that content was created by a human will become much harder. There's no way you can imagine this article having been written by a machine, but one day, that won't seem so ridiculous.

Machines are cheap, so as machines contribute more to creating content, the places where we consume content will be flooded. Early adopters of those techniques will benefits, but the late adopters will find that to stand out, they'll have to produce content that is demonstrably beyond machines' capabilities in an effort to keep attracting interest.

4) Machines will help us allocate our attention.

Work will become increasingly symbiotic. You'll spend more of your time deciding among things and less collecting and preparing things. Machines will find relevant documents and emails, do Google searches in the background, and perform other functions that can be defined as a semi-structured set of tasks. As the deluge of content on our screens grows, tools will emerge to stem the flood.

Broader Implications

Attention is an essential currency in the global transaction ecosystem. Understanding it is critical for anybody in sales and marketing. Despite the fact that attention is zero-sum in any given transaction, it's important to remember that the pie is growing dramatically.

Leisure time has grown by seven hours per week since the 1960s, and we will unlock much more free time as we shift toward self-driving vehicles.Economists from theNational Bureau of Economic Researchpublished a paper suggesting that high-quality video games are contributing to an increase in unemployment among young men.

Uber, Upwork, and Crowdflower support the emergence of a global market for part-time, on-demand work at a variety of price points. Y Combinator and Elon Musk are calling for a universal basic income plan.

To connect these dots, it's not hard to imagine a future in which wealthy corporations and governments support a basic minimum wage, and in return, people spend their time and attention generating training data and validating models. It would generally be simple tasks, easily performed on a phone, and would involve only skills or data that machines don't have yet.

Data on human attention exposes the unconscious information locked away in our minds. That information is valuable and important, because in the aggregate, it is an encoding of everything humans want -- not just of our buying preferences and creature comforts, but also of our ethics and values as a species. We want machines to understand us, and monitoring human attention may be a good way to collect the necessary data.

With the curtain pulled back on how powerless we are to control our attention and how valuable it is to everyone, perhaps we'll all find ourselves being a bit more careful with how we spend our attention.