#my working theory is that i just have an idiosyncratic weirdness

[kingofattolia]

last week was the third time I've been asked "what is your accent" by people who, in my opinion, speak the exact same as me. ("regular american") I'm telling you, the dialect quiz can't even pinpoint my general REGION correctly because my speech is so generic. I'm baffled. I'm looking at them thinking... we are the same. what are you talking about. what ARE they talking about? WHAT DO THEY KNOW that I don't??!

[gender-trash]

actually i wanna jump off this post and talk abt filtering for a hot second because tag and post text filtering is THE killer feature tumblr has over All Other Social Media for me and i want it to be maximally good. (like, on twitter the post filtering literally doesn't work on the chronological feed, and if people want to include CWs they have to be in the POST BODY so 1) you can't add additional warnings to stuff you retweet (unless you QRT, but i feel like it would be considered weird/argumentative to qrt a post just to add warnings) and 2) it counts AGAINST THE CHARACTER LIMIT. and also due to the structure of twitter as a website, the Issue Du Jour is MUCH more inescapable in fandom spaces. also, a pettier concern, but it's impossible to blacklist fandoms you don't care about or want to see; i will probably never watch new trigun at this point because after danmei twitter's relentless obsession with it i've quite simply seen Too Much. not to even MENTION my beloathed gensh*n *mpact.)

ANYWAY, the bird hellsite aside...

i think "semi-standardized" tumblr content warning tags tend to emerge spontaneously sometimes, out of the primordial froth -- like, if you warn for Presence Of Food your tag is probably "food cw" or "tw: food" or the like, and if i have an eating disorder triggered by images of food, i can just stick "food" in the tumblr tag blacklist and i'll be fine. or, actually, if anyone ELSE reblogging the post before you has tagged it "food cw" the filter will also catch it and i'll be fine.

however, the set of Emergent Standardish Tumblr Tags is kind of idiosyncratic; it includes "scopophobia" and "flashing lights" and the very vaguely defined "unreality" but not "ai generated images" or "fake post" or "reblog coercion" (you know, the "reblog or something bad will happen" ones). the latter three are all things i personally tag for (for the record i probably have about 95% reliability with CW tags; i will try to hit 99% if someone who follows me specifically requests a tag but i also can't guarantee tags will be fully propagated into my archives).

in this particular case, if people tag posts about The Submarine with *any* content warning they usually tag them "death" or "violence" from what i've seen (or "current events", which is good actually and i wish more people did that). and enough people tag instances of *fictional* death or violence with those content warnings that those tags are functionally useless for me to blacklist (i'm, uh, in the naruto fandom). the problem is that there's *no* canonical tag for Real Life Mass Death, which means that i have about ten terms related to mass shootings blacklisted and despite my best efforts i STILL find out about every mass shooting from poasts on tumblr dot com, and the mood whiplash from posts about cat pictures or isopods to "FIFTY PEOPLE ARE DEAD" fucks me up really bad.

the other problem is untagged goddamn screenshots from goddamn twitter.

@23rdhunter's tags:

#y'all reblogging untagged screenshots. please.

i know i have no real room to judge here because i screenshot things instead of copy/pasting them all the time (tumblr tags are not selectable in the ios mobile app which is where i mainly post from), but these are terrible for several reasons: first, the words-in-post-body filter won't catch them; second, screen reader users can't read them; third, they take WAY longer to load for people on slow internet. but also, everyone seems to use twitter dark mode and light-text-on-dark-background is eye-straining for me (and makes my eyesight actively worse if i read light-on-dark text for too long, for some fucking reason; i have theories, but this post isn't about my bizarre eye issues). OCR is pretty good now! i don't understand why we don't have a tumblr feature -- or, hell, some third-party tool -- where you can paste in a screenshot and get a copyable text version. or, like, a tumblr feature that OCRs screenshots and automatically adds alt text if none was provided.

(wait, i'm a programmer. i could BUILD the third-party tool. remind me to come back to that one)

but ALSO also i think we need a norm of being a little more careful or thorough with content tags on screenshots. even if people don't content warn their tumblr text posts at *all* i can usually knock out 95% of content i'd like blacklisted with text filters, but the untagged goddamn twitter screenshots make it through every time. and the twitter screenshots are always the WORST takes, because twitter is a cesspit. maybe we should start content warning for twitter.

anyway my final thought -- god DAMN it i think i saw someone post about this last night, maybe @kodicraft?, and now i can't find the post -- is that it is unreasonably difficult to blacklist names of Famous People You Are Tired Of Hearing About. the example in the post i saw was "elon" because elon is also in "melon" and "elongate" and a lot of other common english words; i've been having a similar struggle with "trump" since about 2017. and then there's the thing where everyone gives them a billion nicknames like "elongated muskrat" or "orange man". i don't know what the solution to this is. i hesitate to request everyone tag their elonpoasting "elon musk". thoughts??

(if you reblog this post with comment and i don't seem to ack your reply, DM me or send me an ask? by necessity it includes about fifteen different things i have blacklisted so i will probably miss a lot of reblogs)

can you fuckers please consistently content warn for maritime disasters or something? i've resigned myself to never again seeing a post about any submarine good or bad but my filters are only catching like a third of the posts and it's giving me really incredibly bad brainworms . thanks

[inkdemonapologist]

I like the idea of Sammy being a failed Boris (although he was already referring to people as sheep for a while as a human i think it says?) !!!!!! I also kinda figured maybe he was more human because the ink was inside the body rather than covering you from the outside, like i’d imagine the machine would maybe work? Nobody else seems to have been drinking ink which kind of makes it funnier like. You are The Dumbass. You Did This to Yourself. Fool.

LMAO YEAH,

The Failed Boris theory is one I keep going back to and squinting at because it would make sO MANY PIECES FIT, but I also tend to lean more towards Sammy being the only one ingesting ink as a big reason why he's the only one that turned out the way he did. (“Sammy did this to himself” is a big part of why Escape!AU Sammy is the way he is; unlike the others, there’s nobody else he can easily blame for what happened to him)

I JUST….. KINDA TEND TO HAVE 5 DIFFERENT CONFLICTING THEORIES COMPILING IN MY HEAD AT ALL TIMES JUST IN CASE ONE OF THEM YIELDS SOMETHING INTERESTING, AND THIS FRANCHISE ONLY ENABLES ME, IM SORRY EVERYONE, THIS IS WHAT IM LIKE,

re: sammy's speaking habits and calling ppl sheep,

YES, HE DOES!! It’s actually one of my favourite pieces of Sammy Lore, the newspaper quote in the Employee’s Handbook where he defends Joey as "running a tight ship" and says that if people are quitting it's obviously just because they couldn't handle it, and the company doesn't need "a bunch of useless sheep" who can't meet a deadline. The way I usually write Sammy, I took this as evidence that he talked like this when he was human, too; that he actually calls people "sheep" unironically when he doesn't think very highly of them and expects people to take this seriously. It’s still the only use of “sheep” from him as a human that we’ve gotten after two novels though, so if someone wanted to interpret the newspaper quote as being a coincidence or the influence of the ink, it wouldn’t be hard.

There's this weird discrepancy between Sammy’s voice in the novels and Sammy’s voice in the everything else, where in earlier media he often has this kind of, idiosyncratic way of speaking even as a human (calls people sheep, "the piano delicately calls," etc), whereas in the novels he usually speaks very very very to-the-point. I love how he's portrayed in TIOL, but it's also An Interesting Challenge to combine those two diction styles, because I enjoy the idea that both are true? That he's speaking very matter-of-factly, but also, that Sammy Lawrence is the kind of person who thought "sing my song and my sanctuary will open to you" seemed like the most straightforward way to say that.

[recentanimenews]

FEATURE: The 6 Best Books On The History Of Manga And Anime

  Say you’re a fan of anime and manga who’s looking to learn more about history or craft. Where do you begin? There’s whatever insight you can glean from the work itself, of course. There’s also a good amount of information available online, from animation blogs to translated manga interviews to personal pieces. But when all else fails, turn to the library. Here are some excellent nonfiction books on the manga and anime industry that I’d recommend to just about anybody. I’ve also read at least sections of every book on this list, so you have my guarantee of their quality!

  Image via Penguin Random House

  Pure Invention: How Japan's Pop Culture Conquered the World reaches beyond manga and anime to encompass Japanese pop culture post World War II. But there are plenty of stories in here that fans of anime and manga might find fascinating: 

  The toy car that inspired top developers at Nintendo

How the karaoke machine led directly to idol culture, as music producers sought to produce music that ordinary people could sing

The manga-obsessed student radicals of the 1960s, many of whom came to work on later anime projects like Mobile Suit Gundam

  Author Matt Alt’s choice of interviewees and attention to detail marks Pure Invention as one of the best of its kind. If you’re a curious reader looking for an accessible (and recent!) popular history, I highly recommend this book.

  Image via Bloomsbury.com

  For fans abroad, the history of anime begins with the airing of Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy on Japanese television. But this wasn’t enough for Jonathan Clements, a long-time anime and manga scholar who continues to blog on Schoolgirl Milky Crisis. His academic text Anime: A History begins in the 1910s, 50 years before the airing of Astro Boy, in fact, Astro Boy only appears halfway through the book! Clements is concerned not just with the medium of anime itself, but the cultural traditions, historical events, and individual people that brought it into existence.

  One of the greatest obstacles standing in the way of English-speakers seeking to understand the history of Japanese animation — besides, as Clements notes, the haphazard nature of even those resources available in Japanese — is the language barrier. Online writers at sites such as Sakugablog have done fantastic work in making some of this information accessible, but those same writers would be the first to acknowledge there’s still plenty we don’t know. Anime: A History synthesizes countless Japanese-language source texts and interviews about the history of animation, yet Clements is careful to acknowledge that the testimony of individual actors within the industry must be weighed against both their own agenda and the words of others. While Anime: A History would be a valuable text if it was nothing more than a synthesis, Clements’ ambition to build a coherent history of Japanese animation from a production standpoint that thoroughly examines its subject matter and context from all angles is what makes it essential.

  Image via Stone Bridge Press

  Jonathan Clements collaborated with equally prestigious anime and manga scholar Helen McCarthy to produce The Anime Encyclopedia, whose third edition was published in 2015. It’s an enormous text (over a thousand pages long!) that covers everything from summaries and critical appraisals of popular titles to specific themes and tropes to nuggets of cultural history and influence. If I were to criticize this project, I would say that recent anime writing outside the United States exposes The Anime Encyclopedia’s biases; for instance, the magical girl series Ojamajo Doremi only merits a few paragraphs despite its status as a beloved children's series in Japan. Keeping that in mind, it’s an impressive resource that is great fun to browse (and to disagree with)!

  Image via j-novel club

  Mari Okada is one of the most prolific and influential anime writers of the past decade. She’s worked on adaptations, original projects like Anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day and KIZNAIVER, and even directed her own films. In her memoir, From Truant to Anime Screenwriter, Okada frankly discusses her personal struggles: her fraught relationship with her mother, her years as a young student when she couldn’t bring herself to attend class, and the process by which she gathered her courage to touch upon her personal experiences in her work. There are chapters of this book that wouldn’t be out of place in an Okada-written drama, which I suppose is the point.

  Okada’s memoir is in part a testament to her work ethic and her willingness to tackle any challenge no matter how difficult or annoying it is. But it’s also a rosetta stone for her work: not just in how it overlaps with her personal life, but in its emphasis on the importance of communication despite how difficult it can be to voice even simple feelings. Whether you’re a fan of Okada or not, I found this to be a great resource for writers nervous of the fraught boundary between fiction and personal experience or for readers who want to know what makes Okada’s work so distinct.

  Image via Stone Bridge Press

  Frederik Schodt is one of manga criticism’s greatest elder statesmen. His book Manga! Manga! put him on the map, not only for its editorial content but also for its translated excerpts of Japanese comics — including what would be, for years, the only available English chapter of Rose of Versailles! Yet that book was published in 1983 and sections can’t help but read as dated now. So I’m recommending the sequel here, 1996’s Dreamland Japan. 

  Like its predecessor, much of Dreamland Japan is devoted to detailing Schodt’s theories as to what manga is and how it works. But the sections of the book I personally find most valuable are the profiles where Schodt writes at length about specific manga artists he either personally enjoys or believes to embody a specific genre unique to manga. The freakish kitsch of Suehiro Maruo; Ryoko Yamagishi’s historical epic Hi Izuru Tokoro no Tenshi (Emperor of the Land of the Rising Sun); and alternative artists like Kazuichi Hanawa and Shungicu Uchida. These chapters stand as a stark reminder that despite the recent popularity of manga in the United States, many fantastic comics remain completely unknown to most English-speaking audiences.

  Image via ComiPress

  Finally, there’s Udagawa Takeo’s Manga Zombie! Translated into English by John Gallagher, it’s an eccentric and rewarding text that profiles several avant-garde manga artists from the ‘60s and ‘70s. Udagawa strongly dislikes the market-driven manga hits that would go on to rule the world from the pages of Shonen Jump and fights instead for the careers of authors whose work was published in the pages of pornographic magazines as often as they were in Jump or the alternative magazine Garo. Most of these authors have never been published in English, whether officially or through illicit means like scanlations. If not for the translation of Manga Zombie — or for Udagawa’s further works of manga scholarship — the artists he writes about might vanish into history without leaving a trace.

  The comics detailed in Manga Zombie can be grotesque, ranging from the “fleshbomb style” of artists like Masaru Sakaki to prescient weirdos like George Takiyama. Some might be repelled by the content here; personally, I’m disappointed by the lack of female comics artists featured, although Udagawa (who mentions the girls comic pioneers the 49ers in the foreword to his book) is certainly aware of them. But I love reading folks talking about their favorite work that I’ve never heard about, and Udagawa makes for an idiosyncratic tour guide to some truly unique material. For those willing to brave the world of Japanese exploitation comics, Manga Zombie is a hidden gem.

  What’s your favorite text about manga or anime? Is there an interview you consider especially interesting? Let us know in the comments!

      Adam W is a Features Writer at Crunchyroll. When he isn't reading weird fantasy novels and horror fiction, he sporadically contributes with a loose coalition of friends to a blog called Isn't it Electrifying? You can find him on Twitter at: @wendeego

  Do you love writing? Do you love anime? If you have an idea for a feature, pitch it to Crunchyroll Features!

By: Adam Wescott

[davidmann95]

I’m sure I’m not the first person to ask this, but what did you think of the “The Batman” trailer?

Actually, you were! And I was thrilled from jump by the panel; it being reiterated once again that this is a detective movie first and foremost, Bruce Wayne psychology, Batman working out the long-term logistics of his crime-fighting operation as a viable antidote to Gotham’s corruption, lots of the history of the city, ordinary citizens having understandably complicated feelings on this guy, filming in Liverpool for the Gotham-appropriate architecture with the skyscrapers CGed in, and citing Darwyn Cooke’s criminally overlooked Batman: Ego as an inspiration for this take on the character. Plus the leaked pic of Pattinson’s Bruce Wayne with the mask off but the eyeshadow still applied, which forced me to uncomfortably reckon with my newfound reality where I find my hero, Batman, searingly hot. I was very content and looking forward to the 5 seconds or so of footage we’d get.

AND THEN

I am utterly head-over-heels in a way I cannot remember the last time a movie trailer brought me to, my already unrealistic hopes and expectations left in the dust. This is, if you’ll pardon the inherent dismissiveness, a real movie as opposed to a standard superhero flick, isn’t it? I gotta break up my thoughts here:

* The Virgin, normal Batman: I quest for justice, yet, in my selfsame thirst for vengeance, am I not as mad as those I fight? Gaze ye not into the abyss lest-

The Chad, Battinson: *Punches goon 11 times, only pausing a second to break his arm, while unquestionably nursing an erection that could puncture titanium*

I know I said with the costume reveal clip that this was a Batman who’s finally putting the previously subtextual sexual charge of a traumatized man in a black form-fitting animal-themed uniform exorcising his demons through violence on full display, but good lord. I thought Tom King had the last word anybody really could on “hey, maybe Batman’s kind of messed up?” - and for the better, that seemed like a vein run entirely dry even if King mustered up interesting final thoughts - but it’s now clear that our ideas of what constitutes fucked-up were crushingly limited. Luckily, Robert Pattinson’s vision of a beautiful leather emo punch-loving freak has come through to show us a new way altogether, and I look forward to whatever kind of character journey to apparently something a little more traditional the creators have in mind.

* Speaking of Pattinson, this isn’t the sort of thing I tend to notice in particular much less talk up, but his physical presence here is palpable and on-point - his stillness is uncomfortable, punctuated by bursts of horrific brutality. I absolutely believe that this is a man who traveled to the corners of the world to master every aspect of the martial disciplines, honing his mind and instincts to the peak of human perfection, just as much in order to find the self-control to not constantly slaughter people in his rage as anything else. He feels like the latter-day Frank Miller take on Batman as an absolute maniac, but honed to such a razor’s edge and tempered by a discipline that makes it work played straight. For that matter his ‘Batman voice’ feels like a cleaner, more powerful version of what Keaton was going for, the costume looks excellent in motion, and he manages some top-shelf brooding at the end there. He could easily end up my favorite live-action Batman, he’s immediately clicking with me in the same way Hoechlin did as Superman.

(Side note, it’s especially a hilarious contrast that now Keaton’s Batman, who Burton tried to play up as SUCH a WEIRDO, is now gonna be the Batman of the shared DCEU as a return to something more traditional, while in the corner there’s...this guy.)

* The comparisons to Nolan are overt and powerful, to the point people are saying on Twitter that this is the Batman vs. Riddler trilogy capper they’d expected of that series immediately post-The Dark Knight. But while I can’t imagine it’ll manage the lightning-in-a-bottle topicality and beautifully tight structure that managed, for the most part I feel like the comparisons come out very much in favor of The Batman? The cinematography is gorgeous, the fights actually look great, Gotham is Gotham, the costume’s so much better, and it not only seems to go farther in gritty realism but at the same time is much more open-seeming to weird Batman gimmickyness with its artfully choreographed riddle-murders literally addressed to the local crimefighter and roving gangs of Joker goons (which implies Pattinson has already thrown down with him); if nothing else, it deserves all the credit in the world for pulling off the latter contrast without looking totally ridiculous. But above all, there’s an atmosphere here, a vibe, that simply strikes me as far more potent.

* A dude on Twitter cracked Riddler’s code!

* And finally, I initially went “if this is gonna be a trilogy the way they’re saying, it should end on R.I.P.” on Twitter because I felt it was a mass-media version of the character that could finally nail that tone and setup, and what the hell does this dude when he’s full-on Zur-En-Arrh look like? But then I put together that apparently a lot of the mystery here is about Gotham’s history and how the Wayne family played into it, so absolutely it would be fair game for it to end on R.I.P. and while I know it’s a bad idea to set expectations against fan theories this is now ALL I WANT. And in an act of supreme coolness, @RES_comics on Twitter put this little beauty together in response:

So yeah, this is as they say clean and rad and powerful. Turns out that Batman fella, he keeps coming back in stuff for a reason, and the reason is that he rules! Already like it more on the strength of this than the whole collective DCEU - which has multiple very good movies at this point - and I cannot imagine it won’t end up at worst my fourth-favorite Batman movie (second if you’re sticking purely to live-action). Glad they’re immediately applying their “we’re gonna do stuff outside the shared universe with more radical, idiosyncratic visions” approach to their biggest name in such a big way and by all appearances having it so profoundly pay off.

[prairiewitchy]

What kind of magic do you actually do? I know your bio says folk magic, but I see you reblogging stuff about grimoires and demons and ceremonial stuff too. I'm sorry if it's not okay to ask this I'm just curious

I was gonna punt on answering this but changed my mind, so hopefully it’s useful to see how someone falls into a magical niche without, idk, picking a random “witch label” from some list with too many emojis. It also wasn’t something I’d thought about in a while, and it turned out to be kind of interesting to consider the various intersections between my interests, which are at once diverse and fairly singular, and how they’ve evolved over time. 

I got into folk herbalism initially, which is something I still do a lot of. This by itself is kind of a quasi-magical practice, particularly where it engages things like the doctrine of signatures or the syncretization of spirits and plants (e.g. angelica and angels, a variety of plants with Mary, High John the Conqueror with the plant that now shares his name, and so on). There’s a fair amount of science to it too, but I found I was really interested in the origins of particular stories, rhymes, and folktales that attested these herbs’ utility. 

Eventually, I became particularly interested in baneful plants. This was in part due to a series of weird interactions I had with a giant thistle over a few months one summer that made it clear to me that not only did plants have active, communicative spirits, but that their desires, needs, and interests can be just as complex as ours. That folklore began to intersect much more directly with american folk magic as well as sabbatic witchcraft, which deals more specifically with banefuls than a lot of the folklore I was finding. I started tracking the similarities and discordances between the two as they understood specific plants and plant spirits and trying to make sense of them through a variety of experiments using both folkloric and “traditional” methods. 

Through this, I started investigating other forms of spirit work that would enable me to better understand the plants I was growing and using. I got in over my head here quick, unsurprisingly, and made some bad calls that I won’t go into. Through this circuit I became involved with the witch father, who wears many masks (though, as the theory nerd in me reminds, the simulacrum is always true). I’d half-jokingly called my shit “witchy” before that, but I consider that the transition where what I was doing actually became witchcraft. 

It took a few years to get my shit straight after that--beyond the purple prose of crooked path stuff, there really isn’t a linear way to get good with the man at the crossroads (plus, I’m just not that smart in a lot of ways, I’m sure I shot myself in the foot over and over here). To cut to the end, these days I work mostly with Cain as a face of the witch father for the fairly obvious reason of: good at plants. This isn’t to suggest I only do plants, but the actual magic and mysteries have never strayed much further than improving my own and others’ material conditions via the use of roots and leaves (and sometimes flowers). I don’t keep a large spirit court or dabble in too many forms of occultism that don’t directly deal with that.

 I’ve experimented with calling my magic bioregional (kind of, by ease and necessity, but not imperatively); sabbatic (yes, but not only that and also not entirely that); regionally folkloric (I’ve spent almost all of my life in the midwest and most of my folklore and history come from there, but it’s not the only place I’ll ever be); none have them have quite suited. Like most folks who’ve been doing this a while, it’s pretty idiosyncratic. I’ve also had the excellent luck to make some interesting friends here and elsewhere online, so if you see grimoiric shit or ceremonial whatever here it’s almost certainly just reblogging their work, which is always fascinating. 

[artofdigression]

I’m 23 years old.  The 2 years leading up to now have been a complete whirlwind, but somehow, in this time, an actual music career has begun.   I’m a composer, a producer, a singer, a songwriter, a visual artist - among many labels.

I sit in front of my piano.  I know how to play all of 2 pieces - Gnossiennes 1 & 2 by Erik Satie.  I learned them by ear 4 years ago while working the reception desk of an art gallery that had two baby grand pianos hidden underneath the stairs.  I would get bored when no one else was in the gallery and venture down.

In my studio, I have piles of introductory music books, minuets and ballads laying around - some given to me at a young age, some passed down by dead relatives who knew I had a ‘good ear’  - or were maybe too dead to give a shit about where their old sheet music went by the time I got my hands on it.

I decide, for what feels like the 100th time, that I will learn how to read music.  

I had my first piano lesson when I was 10 years old.  My piano teacher was nice - a young, lanky, 20-something music student who wore beanie hats and played electric guitar in a rock band.  I thought he was pretty much the coolest and wanted to be him.  Unfortunately, I don’t think he was particularly ‘stoked’ in the same capacity to work with me.  I had very little enthusiasm for any of the mind-numbingly boring rudimentary theory curriculum, the limited repertoire I had to choose from (away in a manger or… the other version of away in a manger) made me want to rip my hair out, and reading sheet music would send my mind into kaleidoscope-vision.

I would also have kaleidoscope-vision in school. I struggled with school.   I was a rambunctious little human.  My attention span was uncontrollable (unless we were reading or drawing, then I absolutely paid attention). Looking over old report cards, there was a lot of ‘needs to stay on task’  and ‘could use help with organization’  - anecdotal pieces of advice I heard so much, I think the meanings eventually became hollow to me (or maybe the meanings were just hollow to begin with).  

Getting me to sit still for 30 minutes was an excruciating feat for any adult in my life, so 2 hours? 3 hours? 6 hours? Good god, I wanted to climb the walls.  When the teacher would start talking, I would look past their gaze - into Lala Land as adults disdainfully called it.  (I still deeply hate calling it Lala Land, but, for continuity purposes, we’re going to reclaim the name in neon lights.)

Lala Land was great.  Real life?  Not so much.  In real life, from third grade until high school graduation, my teachers (with the exception of 3 gems) were blatantly judgemental of me.  They’d think nothing of admonishing me in front of my peers if I fidgeted or looked out a window.  

Because the amount of physical energy I had was not conducive to a classroom environment, I learned to dissociate from my body.  Because looking out a window meant I was not looking at a chalkboard, I learned to look past the chalkboard to find Lala Land, its neon letters burning behind my absent gaze. Past the letters, there would be a window. I could look out the window and its glass panes could evaporate and autumn’s leafy gusts of wind could sweep me away and I’d never have to worry about a messy desk or a missed assignment or classroom of judgemental eyes looking at me again.  The next day’s fantasy would be the same, but different.

Children’s imaginations are often playful and fantastical.  Take a kid with a traumatized brain, however - and imagination can give them a seemingly supernatural ability to create, in their mind, what they need for emotional survival.  That was me.

There were parts of my childhood that were truly blissful, gorgeous, hilarious and nurturing.  But I’d be denying you, dear reader, important context if I didn’t tell you that a significant part of my young formative years was steeped in grief, chaos and abandonment.  I assure you need not build castles in the air in understanding that I was a child with a traumatized brain.  And though I was surviving, trauma had created a faceless, nameless internal chaos for me that I didn’t truly even recognize until adulthood.  Trauma changes the way brains function. That’s a lot for a kid to be dealing with.

In piano lessons, my teacher would sit with me and we would go over the theory of a piece of sheet music - that was my brain’s cue to look past the kaleidoscope paper, nodding “yes, mhm, got it.” But then, when he’d clap the rhythm of the piece, my brain would engage and I’d clap the same rhythm back, no problem.  After that, he would play the piece for me as an example - this was where my brain would hyper-focus.  I would retain, retain, retain, and I would play the piece back, not reading a note, but looking past the page all the same. This wasn’t a ploy to dupe him. This was a system of which neither of us were consciously aware. I was just 10, and playing piano.

Outside of school, I was different.  I was encouraged to sing, I would go to my parents’ choir practices every week and sit in the pews of Saint Mary’s Church and listen to 30 voices reverberate through it.  I would shoot the shit with adults and carry around books about Roman mythology and Egyptian hieroglyphs and I would talk about how I wanted to travel the whole world and I would make 1-page comics and I would dress up my dog and I loved the ballet costumes from Stravinsky’s Firebird and… I digress.  

Outside of school, I was different. Music calmed my internal landscape enough for me to be myself.  No - actually, music calmed my immediate surroundings enough for me to make sense of my internal landscape… Actually, both.

On a borrowed piano, I would sit and endlessly ear out songs (Carmen, movie soundtracks I liked, songs my mom sang, etc).  I would walk into my Saturday lesson and proudly showcase the self-taught triumphs of Sunday through Friday for my teacher, only to be met with a brief pat on the back and the god-damn sheet music to 'away in a manger’ - which I still hated and still couldn’t read, but played anyway.  After 5 months, I eventually made it clear to all parties involved that I was done with piano, and my parents finally gave into my weekly protests.

When I was 7th grade, I started playing french horn in the school band and, for whatever reason, continued for 6 and a half years.  I still saw through a kaleidoscope when I got a piece of music, but there was one other french horn player in my class so I usually copied what she did - Unless we had different parts in which case I fumbled constantly through band practice until I finally figured out what I was playing.  Band, generally, had a negative impact on my relationship with music.  I think the only reason I stuck with it was because the feeling of playing music with such a large group of people triggered some kind of dopamine rush that my brain loved.  I would get ASMR - auto sensory meridian response - also known as “that fuzzy, warm, calm feeling in the centre of your brain” - some folks experience it and some folks don’t.

A lot of changes in my home life happened in that 6-and-a-half-year period.  After years of week-on, week-off pivots between my mother and father’s separate homes, my father permanently moved to Sweden when I was 13.  My mother became my primary parent while dealing with the loaded blows of bankruptcy and multiple reckonings around her own life challenges.  We moved into a home that had completely gutted walls and plywood floors (left unfinished by previous tenants with renovation goals too ambitious to finish).  The situation was chaotic.  So, so chaotic.  But, from that time up to now, my mother was (and continues to be) an incredible support to me.  She could see that I was struggling, and did everything in her power to advocate for me when I couldn’t advocate for myself.  I can only imagine the feeling of knowing something is not right with your child and being told by everyone around you that your child is fine.  Her support was integral.

When I was in 9th grade, she and my homeroom teacher (also a phenomenal support to me at the time) pulled some strings to have an initial psychological assessment performed on me - not technically “official” - as it was conducted by a student of psychology, I recall - nevertheless, it provided enough insight to validate that there was an underlying dissonance between what most of my teachers were saying about me (lazy, bad attitude, etc) and what was actually going on in my head, and that a formal assessment would be necessary to help me. My name was put on the waiting list for a psychologist that year.  But, the entire island had only 1 or 2 psychologists available (Totally appalling).  And so I waited... And waited... And waited...   And while I waited, I continued to find refuge in my visual art practice, as well as learning other instruments on my own terms.  

I refuse to say something cliche like “art  and music saved my life” because creativity isn’t a sustainable singular lifeline for anyone, and believing so feeds into the highly problematic mental health stigma as it pertains to those who create for a living...  But art and music did play key roles in tempering my inner storms.  Now, as a musician, I allow my craft to be a teacher, not a therapist.

When I was 16, I went to my first voice lesson.  I kept at it for a year, and… excelled? I totally excelled - personally and musically. This did wonders for my confidence (I attribute a lot of that to my voice teacher at the time, who had a really supportive and receptive approach to my weird energy levels and the idiosyncratic ways I learned). I did festivals, took a Royal Conservatory exam - and I was still excelling, which honestly shocked me at the time because I was so used to failing everything.  

Oh, also, I could still barely read the music.  Kaleidoscopic forever.  

Many classically trained musicians describe the experience of being overwhelmed when they get a new piece of music (especially if it has theory components they may not be familiar with or something) - totally normal. But then, they concentrate, deconstruct it from the page section-by-section and eventually learn to play it with neurotypical grace. Deconstructing written music on the page to understand what was happening became a little bit less nauseating as I was exposed to it more.  I WORKED at theory and understood parts of it, but only… theoretically.   Being able to transcribe that (limited) understanding into playing?  That never happened for me.  The page would remain kaleidoscopic until it felt like my brain was just going to short-circuit and cave in on itself.  It was weird, and trying to describe to anyone in band class (teachers and students alike) made me feel like I was on a different planet.  So, when the heat was on (whether that was in performance or in private lessons or “sight singing”) I kept relying on my ears and refined my ability to hold my own in band concerts, private voice lessons, choirs, musical theatre productions.  

Meanwhile, in high school, my academic life was still basically the worst.  I had adversarial relationships with nearly all of my teachers. I barely passed each year.  Emotionally, I also had a lot of anger seething below the surface of my consciousness.  I had internalized so much of what so many teachers had told me - that I was smart but lazy, that I had a bad attitude, that I was disruptive, distracted, manipulative etc.  - and having gone through some pretty drastic events that effectively destabilized my home life, this all had a profoundly negative impact on my self-worth.

One year later, I was 17, in 12th grade and school issues had not gotten any better (still muddling through - grades between 40% and 60%).   I had just given up at this point… Except now, instead of having the teachers before, who were mostly unhelpful, but at least straight-up about being judgemental of me based on my “laziness” diagnosis, I had a haul of teachers that were giving me these new weekly out-in-the-hall John Keating-wannabe-motivational speeches, telling me how much “potential I have” and how “I’m wasting it away” by “not trying” in class (every hollow pull-up-your-socks/nose-to-grindstone idiom in the book.  It was infuriating at the time).  I’m sure most of them just wanted to help.  But I needed someone to listen more than I needed someone to talk at me.  

A helpful thing that DID come out of 12th grade (4 years after my name had been put on the list… shoutout to our provincial government for still not caring about investing in public mental health) was that I finally got access to a provincial psychologist.  She came during the second semester of grade 12 and did extensive testing on me to find (surprise! but… not really) ADHD - which explained the colossal difficulties I was having in my academic life due to my chaotic brain not letting me get my shit together in the ways I was being told by neurotypical folks around me to get my shit together.

For those that aren’t informed about ADHD - it’s a form of neurodivergence that can manifest in too many ways to name here, but to fit an elephant in a minivan:  There’s that part of the brain that naturally helps you regulate your attention/concentration/sleep/energy levels/appetite/feelings/working memory/pretty much anything remotely involving executive functioning… That’s nice, right?  I wouldn’t know because apparently mine’s broken. There is also extensive research that directly links ADHD to childhood trauma, as well as biochemical imbalances in the brain.  

I could get all in-depth about ADHD science right here, but this is my story, not an essay,  and it would make for an even longer and more digressive tangent that would likely overshadow THE OTHER SIGNIFICANT THING the psychologist noted in my evaluation.

Amidst a bunch of my brain skills that were, statistically, above average for my age - like my working vocabulary and ability to retain auditory information - many of my visual processing skills - meaning, things like reading something and copying it down accurately or following written instructions without constantly needing to reference them - were shockingly below average for my age.  The tests showed that this was something my brain had immense difficulty doing.  

What’s an example of a visual processing issue in school? Well, I was always the last kid to finish copying text from the board (and I mean, like, multiple paragraphs behind my peers) before the teacher could move on to the next page.  

What’s an example of a visual processing issue in music?  Reading written notes and playing them on an instrument.  When I heard a piece of music, however, I could learn it very quickly.  

Knowing what was going on in my brain brought me a whole world of clarity and validation.  I knew that I was going to lead an unconventional life because of it (whatever “a conventional life” means these days).  I knew that most post-secondary education would be inaccessible to me as a result of my grades and probably be, at that point, more harmful than helpful.  

Knowing what was going on in my brain helped me to understand what I didn’t need anymore.  I didn’t need the validation of my teachers or my peers.  I didn’t need a number on any piece of paper to determine my competence or ‘work ethic.’  

Letting go of school was the best thing I’ve done for myself.

I graduated high school with nothing but a 64% average, and an ADHD diagnosis as my only tools in understanding how to get on a path to thriving as an adult human.  liberating. frustrating. terrifying - but not really. mostly liberating.

Then, my ADHD became manageable and my life got easy and I had no self-esteem issues ever again.  

… No.  That’s not how life works.  I’m 23 years old. I’ve been out of the school system for 6 years. I have deeply instilled productivity guilt (ie. I take on way more tasks than humanly possible to finish in ridiculously tight deadlines), I struggle with anxiety in thinking that friends and coworkers are saying negative things about my personality or quality of work behind my back (maybe my exes and high school math teachers are hanging out?? THE HORROR), my heart sinks into my stomach anytime any human watches me work over my shoulder (I’m a music producer, so if I’m working on songs with people, I become a blundering internal wreck when they understandably want to see what I’m editing). School did those things to me - which leads me into the accountability part of this long-winded ADHD realtalk.

I’d be withholding the truth from you if I didn’t say my teachers played key roles in aggravating my behavioural/emotional/learning difficulties by disputing them as personality flaws.  My frustration in learning would be met, at worst, with punishment and put-downs (I remember not having recess for nearly an entire week somewhere in the first half of 4th grade - which I think is a cruel thing to do to any child, let alone one with energy levels like mine).  I would be met, at best, with more hollow, invalidating advice - more ‘need to stay on task’ with a twist of ‘gotta give it yer all’ and ‘well, maybe if you actually tried…’

None of these messages sent to me were helpful.  I’m still working to unravel those knots.

This is not a dig at those teachers who saw me as the problem child (rather than seeing me as a kid who just needed support and a different work environment. There were about 3 teachers in 10 years who understood that, and did everything in their power to help.  They know who they are and I’m grateful for them.)  I understand how frustrating it is to be pushed to your limit - especially within the bounds of a job that requires you to keep your shit together in some capacity.  I understand that we that we all do our best with the tools we have at the time.  There are no hard feelings - But, I encourage self-reflection and future accountability for your impact on the way you treat any child in your life - because they are just that: a child.  Your impact can be profoundly helpful or harmful.  You will never know what a child is going through until they feel safe enough to tell you.  I didn’t feel safe with many adults - which is why most of my relationships with authority were adversarial ones.  I’m not offering a solution.  I’m just offering a glimpse into my experience.  That’s all this is.  Take it or leave it.

When a child is told again and again by the daily authoritative figures in their life that they have an attitude problem, that they are disruptive, lazy, manipulative, attention-seeking, a liar, a cheater (the list can go on but I won’t let it) - I guarantee you, the child will eventually believe it.  And I did.  I deeply internalized these labels to the point of identifying with them.  I’m still working hard as an adult to remind myself that while many of my teachers accused me of causing chaos in my learning environment, I was simply (and unknowingly) mirroring my own internal chaos.  The chaos I had created around me was a cry for help, not admonishment.  

To further the accountability segment of this experience I’m sharing with you, though I can’t offer a solution to “fix” the institution of public education (because institutions generally don’t function unless they’re flawed to begin with), I think a set of solutions may lie somewhere within trauma-informed and neurodivergence-informed teaching and the public school system being provided with the adequate resources to embrace neurodivergent students - to embrace traumatized students, not accommodate them.  I think a set of solutions may lie somewhere within mental health being taken seriously (with FUNDING, not lip service) by the Government of Prince Edward Island.   That’s all I’ll say for now.

I don’t think my experience is special - far from it.  In fact, I know that my experience is not, and never will be one-of-a-kind.  I started writing this when I sat in front of a piano and tried to do what my brain would never let me do.  I looked past the page and saw this part of my life staring back at me.  I’m not even a writer, but I felt like I had to write it down.   Looking back, I realize that I didn’t even begin to understand my own story until someone else told me theirs.

So - whether you’re a teacher or a student or both - if you’re struggling in the school system, this is dedicated to you.  If you have been turned away and invalidated by those supposed to help you, you need to know that the labels placed upon you only hold as much power over you as you allow.  Being pained by what you can’t control doesn’t make you weak, it makes you a survivor.  Surviving is hard. Surviving is so hard, but you will begin to heal.

I’m 23 years old.  I’m many things. I read music with my ears.  I’m mastering the art of looking past what’s in front of me.  

- Russell Louder

[grison-in-space]

when you work with others, you also gotta react to THEIR stupid irrational opinions on your names, like whether they get all scared if you refer to yourself as murderbot and think you're gonna murder them right now, or whether they get offended on behalf of ART just because you call it an asshole every time you tag it.

Like, one of the reasons I don't share my notes with my students unless I'm trying to teach them about the strategy of taking truly idiosyncratic notes (because changing tone to that level requires you to actually think about what you're reading and form an opinion on it, making you process more) is because my academic notes are usually really informal and idiosyncratic and involved a lot of semi serious declarations of idiocy or failures in logic that I want to circle back to and interrogate. Sharing those with students without context or cues to when I'm joking and when no actually I mean it Geoffrey your entire theory about condition dependent selection is dumb and I will circle back around to the field one day and destroy you... can be tricky, especially since sometimes students without the context for informality in academia can sometimes think I'm being more dismissive, more aggressive, and more generally nasty than I actually am intending to be. I can translate shitposting notes me quickly and easily, but other people tend to get weird emotions about it that I then have to manage and that's annoying.

I'm working with someone else who has the same style of communication right now, and it's great for me because I can slip right into yelling weasel mode with them and be understood but less great in that I've also had to do quite a bit of explaining to more junior people who believe in formality and, like, respecting existing institutions that half the insults I'm hurling at other people apply equally strongly to me and my work, and that both the criticisms and the praises are equally true even if I have a personal policy of making a point to share the praises rather than the criticisms if I haven't been specifically invited to be critical at this juncture.

Basically it's really nice having to not modulate semi serious high strung hyperbolic play dialogue meant as much as anything else to entertain myself in order to manage the potential reactions of people without the same context I have, and I can definitely see MB being cranky about having to keep that mind when communicating (gross).

We were in a junction in the Preservation Station mall, a circular space where three small corridors met, one a short passage that led through to a large secondary main corridor: the Trans Lateral Bypass. (All the corridors here had names, a Preservation tradition that was only mildly annoying.) (Fugitive Telemetry, p. 2)

i love this bit because it's not at all unreasonable to have a way to distinguish corridors from each other...what about this is even mildly annoying, murderbot? that they are descriptive instead of numbered Corridor 1, Corridor 2, etc.? would love for you to come to my neighborhood and see all the streets named after dead people. it could be worse!

the thing is, mb assigns designations to things all the time. Ship, Transport, Hostile One, Human Four, whatever. these are names too. so why is it okay when mb does it but not otherwise? maybe it's that mb is used to working alone, which means it gets to make up the designations itself and they don't have to make sense to or be available to anyone else. but when you work with others, you have to coordinate with them to refer to things the same way so they know what you're talking about and vice versa.

the trans lateral bypass already having a name that mb didn't give it is a minor thing, but it's still an indication that mb is not operating independently here and it's necessary for mb to follow the lead of others. mb has a bit of a kneejerk reaction to not having total independence, because independence is so closely intertwined with autonomy for it. but they aren't the same thing, and you don't have to have total control over your environment to be an autonomous person. mb knows this, but knowing it and Knowing it are different, and maybe that's where the mild annoyance comes in.

[heartofaquamarine]

Jargon and Language: Primer, Climate Science, Instant Messaging and Romance.

I was watching an old episode of @actuallykylekallgren‘s review show Brows Held High, specifically the episode on the 2004 sci-fi film Primer. While I enjoyed the episode, towards the end I ran into a bit of a problem, particularly with how Kyle describes the use of technical jargon in the film. (And don’t worry, I’ve chatted with Kyle about this on twitter. This isn’t a  call out...well, it sort of is, but he knows it’s coming and is okay with admitting his earlier stuff has flaws? So anyway.) Primer is an odd little movie about the creation of a time machine and time travel. One of the notable things about it is that the creator, Shane Carruth, deliberately copied the way that scientists and engineers use shorthand terms and a very specific kind of working slang, and recreated that in the scenes depicting the scientists building the time machine. There is no exposition for the sake of the audience, no companion for the Doctor to turn to and say “Wibbly wobbly timey wimey”...actually, that’s unfair. That takes it in a completely different direction; on a spectrum with technical terminology on one end, technobabble in the middle, “WWTW” is way over on the other side labelled “It’s not actually important, don’t worry about it”.

In the BHH episode, Kyle calls this a badly told story, comparing it directly to Carl Sagan and other popular science personalities like Bill Nye. The problem, the episode indicates, is that the film should have been used as an opportunity to explain the physics of time travel; using science fiction as science fact.

I kind of have two issues with this Actually, I have three issues but one is more tangential, so let’s start with the first two. Firstly, to be honest Primer is a far better depiction of the daily lives of scientific research than almost any other film. We don’t spell out every single concept each time we talk about them; we define it once and generally assume that when talking to people in our field. This is reflected in the sets and designs of the time machine itself; the film is shot in very ordinary surroundings, mainly industrial parks, while the machine itself is a simple grey box and...yeah. Lots of scientific work takes place in areas like that and using equipment like that. I recognised a lot of the hallways in Primer not because I’ve been to those specific places, but because I’ve seen so many places like that where scientific research is carried out. If I wanted to I could probably construct an argument for how this is good for the story Primer is trying to be, the scifi realism it aims for, but that’s not really the point of this essay. The second point is pretty simple. This is not actually jargon. It is not a description of the physics of time travel, because as far as I am aware, no one has built a time machine. Time travel, as portrayed in this movie and films like Back to The Future, scientifically is not just not a theory, it hasn’t even clawed it’s way up to being a hypothesis; it is at best speculation about the nature of something that we can’t even say exists (there have been experiments that appear to break causality on the quantum level, but they keep ending up coming out as having only appeared to break causality. At least as far as I know, it’s been a while since I moved from physics to climate science). The third issue I mentioned is more of an oddity of the episode in the context of the rest of Brows Held High. BHH is a show primarily about movies, and as such it spends a lot of its time looking at cinematic concepts and terminology. I mean heck, the phrase “cinematic language” pops up a lot. While Kyle usually explains these terms, it feels weird to have him complaining about a movie using specialised language, in a show dedicated to exploring particular concepts using specialised language. More specifically, he often examines movies using cinematic language in ways I, an audience member outside the field of film theory, would not understand; references to particular films, techniques I don’t notice till someone points them out to me, ect. What I’m saying is Kyle both uses jargon on his show, and does not call out the use of jargon in other films, because he is used to using those terms. For him, it is not jargon. It is language. And this is what I want to look at. Jargon is usually considered to be specific technical terms that only people in a particular field understand. I kind of think this is a useful construct, but I want to widen the definition to look at other kinds of language and other situations that we might call jargon. Let’s start with some classic jargon.

An isopycnic-coordinate oceanic circulation model formulated with the aim of simulating thermodynamically and mechanically driven flow in realistic basins is presented. Special emphasis is placed on the handling of diabatic surface processes and on thermocline ventilation. The model performance is illustrated by a 30-year spinup run with coarse horizontal resolution (2° mesh) in a domain with North Atlantic topography extending from 10° to 60°N latitude.

This is not something I just wrote myself. It is from the abstract of a scientific paper I have open in another tab. To me, that’s a perfectly understandable paragraph. I don’t have to look anything up (well, okay, I did have to check isopycnic but to be fair there’s a lot of iso’s in climate science) to understand it. To other people, that is a wall of jargon (to be honest I’d be curious as to what non-scientists think it means. It’s surprisingly simple. If people want I can explain it but for now it is left as an exercise for the reader).

I think we can all recognise that as jargon. Everyone okay with defining that as jargon? Okay, good! Now that we have an example of jargon, let’s quickly give a definition of jargon. Jargon, as we are using it here, is a form of specific language used between an in-group that is not understandable by members of an out-group. That’s the most general definition, but usually the in-group is very particular, and usually professional in nature.

What you might not have noticed is that above, in the paragraph where I talk about how Primer can’t describe the theory of time travel because that’s not there in a coherent enough form to be described, is that I was using the words “theory” and “hypothesis” in their technical form. In casual speech, a theory and a hypothesis are basically the same thing. in scientific terminology however, there’s a clear difference. A hypothesis is a prediction of what we expect to observe, and notably even here in this definition I am using jargon because I have left out the word “falsifiable” from in front of the word “hypothesis”. A hypothesis is a prediction with a clear way of shown to be wrong. A theory is a hypothesis that has succeeded in not being falsified enough that we take it as essentially correct (empirical science has no method of absolute proof. At least not philosophically).

So, question. You likely got what I meant up there, even if you don’t know the technical definitions of those words in the way I was using them. But these are technical terms being used in comparison to each other in a short hand. So...could we say that’s jargon?

What is the exact line between language, and jargon? What happens when you have a technical definition that is close enough to how you might construct the same sentence in a casual sense that it can still be understood? 

(On a side note, originally I was going to use the terms theory and law here, since colloquially, a law is treated as more important than a theory, but in scientific terms they have different meanings. A law is a generalised statement of observations. A theory provides an explanation for why this occurs. The law of evolution might be “the distribution of alleles in a population varies over time”, while the theory of evolution provides an explanation for why these alleles change and what factors control the change in the distribution...but I couldn’t work a law into the bit above so I went for hypothesis and theory, which have the same meaning in casual language but different specific meanings. Anyways...)

Let’s broaden the discussion a bit more, and bring in a different form of language.

I have a lot of problems understanding body language. I can read facial expressions a bit better, but trying look at body language is like trying to decipher a cryptogram for me. This actually caused quite a lot of trouble for me as a teenager, as I kept misreading people’s body language, particularly my mum’s who has a very idiosyncratic body language. I can now generally read my immediate family, but I’ve known them for over twenty years, and that’s a lot of time to build an individual vocabulary of someone’s quirks, particularly when you live with them. I can’t generalise this knowledge, I can’t read most people’s body language.

This has resulted in me actually finding it far easier to read intention and mood in text than in person. I don’t have the conflicting signals I’m misreading from their body language, just their words, the bit I get, and people’s writing style in causal IM style conversations often changes depending on mood. I might need to see a couple of examples of someone’s texting, but I can generally read someone’s mood pretty accurately from text. It is rarely the words that change, but the grammar and punctuation they use around those words. Someone who usually uses capital letters drops to lower case; something’s wrong. Someone who is usually very loose uses full sentences and punctuation? This is something serious. And so on.

Neither of these forms of meaning are usually deliberate on the part of the person doing the communicating, but a.) they are a form of conveying information and b.) I can understand one, putting me in an in-group, and I cannot understand the other, putting me in an out-group by the definitions above. So then, my next question is can something be jargon, even if the language being used is not deliberate?

Here I run into a weird problem. Instinctively I’d say no, that jargon is a deliberate short hand within groups, and that there’s a difference between not understanding the jargon in a particular field and say, not understand French. There’s a line there, and it might be fuzzy, but if we expand jargon too widely we end up with something useless, or at least indistinguishable from the concept of language in general. But, at the same time...I find it fairly easy to slip this into the definition of jargon. It’s a specific meaning added to the sentence. The fact that it is done with how the sentence is communicated, and not the sentence itself might mean that we put it outside the definition of jargon but should we? I mean English is notorious for requiring emphasis to create meaning (for example the sentence “I never said she stole it” has seven different meanings depending on which word you put the emphasis on), and this has a clear out group and in group; I have shown how I can construct an out group for one and an in group for the other by myself!

So then the next question might be to approach it the other way. Is it useful to class these as jargon, as opposed to simply different languages? I’d say yes, it is fairly useful; saying that body language to me is jargon is a good way to get across the difficulty I have in understanding body language. It’s a useful term, and it fits the definition so I’m actually going to have to say yes. Body language and IM punctuation can both be jargon, and like all jargon you can move from the out group to the in group, and vice versa if you don’t keep up with the evolution of the terminology.

You might say it’s weird that I’m spending this much time defining jargon and trying to work out it’s limits, but I have my reasons outside of sheer academic interest (or; how far can I stretch this mental tool). One is professional; I am interested in communicating science to the public, something that is particularly important for climate science for fairly obvious reasons, and thinking about how to carry out this communication, not just in terms of the vocabulary I am using but the grammar and indeed the punctuation I am using is important. Working out what people will call jargon is really useful there.

Secondly, calling something jargon I think has subtle implications on how it positions you in relation to the people around you. I am aromantic, and to be honest a lot of the way that people discuss romance is, to me, a clear example of jargon. A while back I asked people to define romance, and what made a romantic relationship different from other kinds, and they really struggled. The response I got a lot involved some variation on the phrase “It’s a feeling...you just know”.

The thing is, I’m aromantic. I don’t just know. That feeling being described is a shorthand for something I do not understand. That is jargon.

The thing is, things like body language and romance are expected to be understood in society. By classing them as jargon, a lack of this understanding I think is flipped; it isn’t that people who don’t understand common implications and social language are “abnormal”, but rather that it is a form of jargon they don’t understand. And from politics to science to art to, yes, film theory and describing building a fictional time machine, there is always jargon we don’t understand.

[jonryatrash]

What do you think of people saying jon/Arya is just a strong sibling love? I know real life relationships shouldn’t be used as almighty proof, but I actually have a brother (twin) who I’ve always been super close to, he’s the best person I know and my favorite person in the world. If people don’t know we are siblings, and just see us talking, they think we’re dating. AND YET: We don’t act like Jon and Arya do. Their level of closeness is way farther than that. It can’t be just sibling love

My short response: Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt. 

My longer response is a little more involved because I have to explain my complicated relationship with the Waterstones Letter and the question of authorial intent. 

So brief personal backstory: I have a MA in English Lit, so I’m trained to do close textual analysis and text interpretation. (Now I’m getting a PhD in a similar enough field that I still do a ton of close textual analysis). A question that has repeatedly arisen in literary theory is whether or not we should give a damn about what the author meant to convey, whether or not we give the author any special consideration as we read texts. Here’s the brief run down thanks to wikipedia: 

Wimsatt and Beardsley claim, "the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art". The author, they argue, cannot be reconstructed from a writing—the text is the primary source of meaning, and any details of the author's desires or life are secondary. Wimsatt and Beardsley argue that even details about the work's composition or the author's intended meaning and purpose that might be found in other documents such as journals or letters are "private or idiosyncratic; not a part of the work as a linguistic fact" and are thus secondary to the trained reader's rigorous engagement with the text itself.

So on one hand, I really don’t care about what GRRM means or intends for any of this. On the other hand, the secondary source material (like the Waterstones Letter) reframes the story in particular, exciting ways. It offers a clue in how we should read the text, almost like a cheat. Part of that cheat is the original intention for the Jon and Arya relationship, especially what we see in those early chapters of AGOT. 

IF we’re willing to say that it’s worth knowing authorial intent, then when you look at Jonrya interacting, especially in book one, you know it’s meant to set up their epic romance in later books. The question then arises: has GRRM changed that plan as the series has developed with each book? To answer that, we have to ask ourselves whether Jon and Arya read any differently than they did in book one in terms of how they think of each other. And well, bb boy Jon just called his sister his heart, broke his vows, and then died for her. That’s exactly in line with his characterization in Jon I/Arya I/Jon II (aka The Winterfell Arc, for my purposes). At no point do we read that and think “wow, that’s super uncharacteristic.” But more importantly, Jon didn’t break his vows for his father or his brother. This isn’t about family. And Robb was special to Jon. He says in Jon I or Jon II that Robb was his brother, best friend, and rival all rolled into one. They’re the same age. They had the same life milestones together. In some sense, they are twin-like in that respect. But Jon didn’t leave to help Robb. I’m sure you can find someone who would explain that away as, by the time that we get to the fArya stuff in ADWD, Jon is in a different place and has matured, etc. All this might be true. But he knows the Others are coming, and he still makes a move that could compromise the Night’s Watch, which is already in a super awful position as is. Why? I think GRRM tells us why in that initial outline. 

I do hear a ton of people in Jonrya fandom say “My brother/sister would never do X/Y/Z; that’s weird.” And you, a twin, are saying the same thing. I think it’s a legit way to get people to understand why we ship Jonrya. But, I think we can also turn to the text (and maybe leverage the Waterstones Letter even though that makes me a little blerg to do so) and easily see that Jonrya is a thing, and it’s only gaining more momentum. 

Jon died thinking of Arya. If anyone thinks that Jon 2.0--back from death and changed--is going to suddenly forget about her or feeling differently about her....yeah, no way in hell. If anything (and if we’re getting a book version of Bastard Bowl), he’s going to be more obsessed with Arya in future books, in line with a Jonrya endgame. 

[sargenthouse]

Jess Gowrie on Chelsea Wolfe’s Hiss Spun // Modern Drummer

Story by Adam Budofsky via Modern Drummer | Photo by Priscilla C. Scott

Drummer and singer reunite on one of the more highly anticipated albums of the year.

You know when you put your ear right up to a perfectly tuned floor tom and tap the head ever so slightly, and if the room’s quiet enough it sounds like that pillowy rumble could be coming from the very depths of the earth, and it might just go on forever? And you know when you’re at a metal show and the drummer launches into a double bass attack that’s so loud and low and forceful that you can feel your internal organs shiver and shake? Well, Jess Gowrie certainly knows those feelings. In fact, on Chelsea Wolfe’s seventh album, Hiss Spun, she’s the one pushing the music to the farthest ends of that dynamic spectrum. It’s an extremely satisfying thing to experience, and it perfectly frames Wolfe’s songwriting and arrangement style, which spans the fragile delicacy of acoustic icons like Nick Drake and the classic howl and drone of, say, the Cure’s Pornography or the Melvins’ Houdini.

The fact that Gowrie’s playing works so well with Wolfe’s music is no accident. Though this is the drummer’s first appearance on one of the singer’s solo albums, the two spent three years together in the Sacramento, California, band Red Host during the mid-aughts, a period when, as Wolfe has said in prior interviews, she was being influenced by the drummer’s taste in heavy music. “I have a hard time taking a hundred percent credit,” Gowrie tells MD. “But back then my friends and I were definitely listening to bands like Marilyn Manson and Queens of the Stone Age. So by default it sort of got her into it too.”

Cut to 2017, and we find the two putting their heads, hands, and hearts back together in the service of creating an album concerned with, as Wolfe puts it, “cycles, obsession, centrifugal force, and gut feelings.” Producer Kurt Ballou (Converge) helped flesh out the idiosyncratic tones that Wolfe is known for by providing a wide variety of snare drums and encouragement to try some unique production techniques. “I played on two different kits,” Gowrie explains. “One we called the trash kit, and it was set up in the basement, where it was really reverby, and the other was more like your regular live kit. A lot of times I’d record the entire song on both those kits, and we would use certain parts played on each of them.”

Ultimately, Gowrie’s most important considerations for parts and sounds depended on Wolfe’s voice and melodic sense. “One of the awesome things about playing with Chelsea,” Gowrie says, “is that she has a real talent for writing melodies that are very catchy yet unpredictable. When I approach writing drum parts with her, I concentrate on the melodies almost more than the riff itself, because they dictate the mood, the vibe. And then when we went into the studio and really [focused on] the tone of the drums and which kit, snare, and cymbals we’d use, it really mattered to me how her vocals sounded on each track. On the song ‘Twin Fawn,’ for instance, I played on a banjo instead of a snare, which is very different from just playing with the snares off. It worked so well with her vocals, and that was the main objective.”

MD: Tell us more about the making of Hiss Spun. You mentioned playing off of Chelsea’s melodies.

Jess: Lyrically as well. I never really thought about it until working on this record, but I was doing it without even knowing it. But lyrically and melodically, if the drummer has that kind of ear to separate themselves, the drums can become that kind of instrument too, not just like the 2 and the 4. Some of my favorite drummers I feel do that same exact thing. And it just dawned on me that that’s what I do, with Chelsea especially, even going back to when we were originally in Red Host together.

MD: And the way you play together has probably improved with each time you get together to create new music.

Jess: Yeah, hopefully. You’ll never be the best, you always have to try to get better. And her albums I think speak volumes about stepping up each time.

MD: There are great extremes in her music—sometimes it’s very quiet, sometimes it’s very slow. Drummers often look forward to playing fast or loud, but it can be just as much fun going the other way, if you embrace it. Do you have any thoughts on playing slowly or quietly without losing the intensity?

Jess: Totally. It’s interesting you should say that. I teach drums as well, and one of the things I stress, especially to the beginner, is practicing slowly with the metronome, and then taking the speed up. Like you said, everybody wants to go super fast, but if you don’t start slow, it’s going to be sloppy when you do get fast. You have to build up to that. Some of the slow dynamics on the album, once again, I’m trying to support the melody, but making it interesting by playing with mallets instead of sticks. It’s not reinventing anything, but it really adds something interesting to it without being all crazy or weird or fast. And I’ll just try to put accents in that shine, instead of relying on power and volume. It’s more about placement with the finesse of, like I said, a snare that’s turned off, or mallets.

MD: Do you encourage your students to record themselves?

Jess: I actually record our lessons, in part so that I don’t have to write everything down; we can go back and reference it. But also, we’ll do exercises in the beginning. Before we even get on the kit, we’ll do exercises on the practice pad—a lot of slow, boring stuff, they probably think, but in the end it’ll pay off.

MD: With Chelsea you’re also sometimes playing very quietly, like on the song “The Culling.” It’s so nice to hear drums played that quietly on an album. Drums can actually sound “pretty” at a low dynamic. That can be very demanding. I know in my own playing, I have to really take care not to get too loud during fills. It’s a constant struggle.

Jess: Absolutely. I think that’s really hard for any drummer. Because guitars have volume knobs. With drums, you are the volume knob. But when I went into playing with Chelsea again, I knew her style, and I knew that there were going to be slow songs, quiet songs, more intense songs. And it wasn’t until we started jamming on new stuff, not even knowing what songs were going to be on the record, I felt like we kind of pushed each other. That’s why I think it sounds different but it still sounds like Chelsea. Because it boils down to her vocals and melodies; they really shine on all her records. So my job is to definitely not play over those and distract, but to support. And if it was a quiet moment, then I had to figure out what to play on the drums. Sometimes there were no drums. And a lot of times I knew that there shouldn’t be. And I think that’s a sign of maturity with any type of musician, knowing when not to play a damned thing.

MD: You can even look at it selfishly: the longer you’re away, the better it sounds when you come back in.

Jess: Absolutely; a lot of the songs do come back in with a crashing moment. And it’s definitely amplified, especially live. We’ve been playing “The Culling” live in Europe. People have never heard the song before, and it starts off slow, with the mallets and the turned-off snares, and all of a sudden it comes in—bam—and you can see the reaction of the people, because they have no idea what to expect. It’s really interesting.

Another thing that’s rad about working with Chelsea—and maybe this is because we do have a past—but she definitely trusts her musicians to have ideas and their own personalities in their playing. She was very trusting with me just hearing the track and suggesting, “It could go like this….” We would discuss it, obviously, but when you can let other people be free to express themselves, you’re going to get a really good product, and an evolution in your albums, and improvement. Letting people in that small circle is really important.

MD: Going back a bit when you were discussing constructing parts in regards to her melodies and such, watching videos of bands that you’ve been in over the years, you seem to have a loyalty to that concept. Even when the music might be considered more wild, you seem to be very conscious of coming up with cool parts and orchestrating. Is that something that you’ve been conscious of for a long time?

Jess: I think so. I think it’s something I got from the drummers I listened to growing up, like Jimmy Chamberlin from Smashing Pumpkins and Matt Cameron from Soundgarden. They’re jazz drummers that are playing rock music. So their beats are more interesting. They’ve got the chops to spice things up but not overplay. I’m definitely not a jazz drummer, but learning those songs and playing along to them, it definitely forms you when you’re approaching a section: What can I play here that has personality but has a groove and works with what everyone’s playing, not just me? That’s what I get from Matt and Jimmy; their drumming is phenomenal and it’s perfect for their bands.

Photo by Calibree

MD: So what bands are you still actively playing with? You’ve played with Happy Fangs, I’m Dirty Too….

Jess: Unfortunately those bands are no longer. I’m Dirty Too in theory will always be a band, because it’s just me and my friend Zac Brown, and whenever we have time we’ll work together. But we haven’t had much time lately. The active bands I’m in are Horseneck, which is kind of a post-hardcore/metal band, and Chelsea.

MD: I was listening to Horseneck this morning; that’s a pretty recent release, right, the Heavy Trip album?

Jess: Yeah, it came out in February, though it was recorded a while ago.

MD: You have dates with Chelsea through November.

Jess: Right. The album came out September 22, and we’re touring the States now, but there will be European dates after that. And who knows, maybe even a second go-round through the U.S. next year. Then whenever I’m not out with them, Horseneck will book things around Chelsea’s schedule so I can play with them. So basically I never get to sleep. [laughs]

MD: Then when you’re home you’ve got lessons.

Jess: Yeah, though I’ve slowed down on that because I have no consistent schedule anymore. But for students who are open to me cancelling and rescheduling, I’m there for them. But I keep my schedule as open as possible for Chelsea and Horseneck.

MD: I was reading a story about I’m Dirty Too where you had to at one point decide to do the singing, which is great, you were basically letting circumstances lead you in a certain direction and following it. And then when I put on the record I was like, You sing great! I’m not even sure what you were shy about.

Jess: You have to keep in mind, I’m Dirty Too came out after Red Host broke up. So going from Chelsea to me singing…I mean, Chelsea is such a good singer, I had high standards for who my next lead singer was going to be. That’s why we ended up doing it. Because, honestly, we just couldn’t find anyone that fit the bill. I’m definitely a drummer, there’s no confusion in my mind what instrument I play. But it was cool, something different. I’d played drums forever, and this added something new. I could write lyrics, things I’d never done before. It was just fun. But Zac plays in the band Tycho, which is a huge instrumental band that was just nominated for a Grammy. So that’s why we don’t have a lot of time to play together. We’re always going to be friends, so….

MD: So have you been doing any singing since?

Jess: No. Nope.

MD: Well, keep it in your back pocket, because you sounded good.

Jess: I don’t think it’s my calling. I mean, you’re being very nice, but I don’t necessarily agree. [laughs] I do appreciate the compliment.

MD: Let’s talk a little more about specific songs on the Chelsea record. When the drums enter on “Vex,” at first I thought, “Oh, this song has a drum machine on it,” maybe because your bass drum pattern is this really insistent 16th-note pattern. But then I heard the hi-hats opening a little and I was like, “No, no, this is live drumming.” Can you talk a little about that song?

Jess: That song was one of the first we jammed on. At first Chelsea and I were going to do a side project together, and that was going to be for that. But then the more songs we jammed on, it quickly turned into, Oh, we should play together for real. So that song has definitely evolved from how it started to what you hear on the record.

Something that Kurt was very good about in the studio was knowing when the drums should have a sort of muffled, almost drum machine tone, versus and open, boomy live room sound. And that was such a tight, drum-machine-like beat that it made sense to muffle everything and, like you said, once the hi-hats open, the song sort of opens too. I think we might have even changed the snare for that part for when it opens up too.

It was really nice to have enough time in the studio to play around with that sort of thing. You know how you end up playing around with amps in the studio all day long? Well, I never had the opportunity to do that with drums until this experience. With this album, we had a month in the studio, and I’m used to having three days to play the songs. And that’s totally changed, from now on, all my studio experiences. Even if I don’t have all that time at my disposal, I’ll take the time to tune differently and experiment with the kit. And that’s definitely one of the songs where that shines. So this was a dream. You know, I didn’t want song number seven to sound tired, which can happen. We’d be like, Okay, let’s just pick up tomorrow. So on every song I had energy, which was great.

Everything in my mind had to be as perfect as it could be, even if that’s an impossible thing to ask for. So demoing the songs first…my boyfriend has a studio, so I went in there with him to write the beats and figure out the tones so that when we went in with Kurt, I was ready. I ended up having more time than I needed for the recording, so it was awesome.

MD: Can you talk specifically about what gear you used for the recording, and how that may or may not have differed from what you play live?

Jess: Live I was playing this company called Rocket Shells. They make custom carbon-fiber drums. It’s actually where I work—it’s where I’m at now. The cool thing is that the snare I play is predominantly the snare that you hear on the record. And we did blind tests of all the snares—we’d record a snippet of each snare and see which one worked with each song, and it was almost always the Rocket Shells drum that worked the best. So I was pretty stoked about that. But on the record I really wanted bigger drums than I had. I had a 20″ live, so I used a 22″ Tama. On tour I’m actually using a Tama bubinga kit, with 13″ and 16″ toms and a 22″ bass drum. My cymbals on the record were Zildjians, including a 23″ Sweet ride and an 18″ Rock crash.

MD: What’s your background in drumming? Did you take lessons when you were younger?

Jess: I started playing when I was around six or seven. I’m thirty-five now. I didn’t take lessons then, I was totally self-taught, though I spent so much time playing in the garage, and playing along to your favorite drummers is like the best kind of class you can take. I took band in high school but totally hated it.

MD: Why?

Jess: I got put in a class where the drummer was a year older than me and was in the band the previous year, and he just never let me play anything. He was really good, and I was probably intimidated. But I think he stifled my enjoyment a little. But also, my first band was when I was fourteen, and playing with other people is definitely going to accelerate your skills really quickly. That’s when you learn to write and play off other people. So I tell that to all my students: Get together with friends, and start jamming.

[ill-be-istj-if-no-one-else-is]

Which MBTI type is the most concerned with pretty/aesthetically pleasing things? In terms of fashion, decoration, etc. Or, maybe what type of aesthetic each function typically goes for? (serious question)

(this is actually a pretty good question, but hard to answer)

In my experience:

The SFPs have us all beat. They have a good eye and are able to express themselves but in a coherent way that works together. SFP aesthetics vary wildly though - it’s all about unique expression. To be fair an SFP might not have an aesthetic others find pleasing but it will be one they love.

SFJs often have the most conventionally “pretty” aesthetic, at least female SFJs (male SFJs I know tend to just be fairly conservative/neutral in dress and decor, but in a slightly warm way). However, see below.

STPs and STJs are a major toss-up. ISTP sister for example had a legendarily messy room growing up and doesn’t care much about style. My father is also kind of cluttered and is weirdly specific in how boring he dresses (white collared shirts with his suits only! Why? I don’t know. I don’t entirely understand men’s fashion or lack thereof). However, STJs and STPs both notice and appreciate beautiful things.

STJs, and some SFJs, are weird. Most stuff is pretty neutral and classic but then you get some left-field picks. My own experience is that I go through cycles of “all of my clothing is black or jeans, I should get something else” “Ooh I like how this looks” “wait this doesn’t actually work with anything”. It’s idiosyncratic and self-expressive, but not super cohesive (for example: I wear a lot of solid neutrals, but I love that red and black floral top, and I have that skirt in a very tropical/80s palette that goes with nothing but which I like a lot, and I bought that sweater with penguins on it that one time…) and my aesthetic blog/decor are similarly kind of scattered across a couple different themes. My theory is that our aesthetics are often governed by the personal sensory side of Si and the creativity element of Ne rather than the actually in tune with the outside world Se and cohesive element of Ni, so whenever we try to get a personal, specific aesthetic, Ne is like “but what if…sequins.”

Because Ni-Se is I think better at a cohesive ‘aesthetic’ rather than the aesthetics jumble of Ne-Si, NJs are better at it than NPs usually, but it depends. Some NFPs get really into visual self-expression and are very skilled aesthetically; some could not care less. Similarly, some NJs get very rigidly obsessed with aesthetics in a kind of extreme way (this is where you get those minimalism blogs), and a lot of NJs enjoy art in context, but they’re not in tune with everyday beauty as a rule/prefer conceptual art pieces over aesthetics and unlike the stereotype, tend not to actively surround themselves with beautiful things the way SFPs and some SFJs do.

NTPs are in my experience, the worst at aesthetics on the whole. Some, like NJs, also get minimalistic and that can come off as really nice aesthetically if you like minimalism, but a lot tend to leave the decorating to others and think it’s funny to threaten to buy a Big Mouth Billy Bass or similar items. Or they are super into something I don’t particularly find aesthetically pleasing, like horror movies, but have a relatively good vision.

This post by @istj-hedonist (linking to the reblog with the commentary about STJs particularly) is a pretty good answer to what the aesthetics of each type tends to look like, with the assumption that these are people of each type who have expressed an interest in aesthetics.

So in summary:

SFPs and SFJs are almost always to some extent concerned with aesthetics and probably are the best at conventionally pretty (SFPs might choose not to go with it, but they can do it if they have to).

STJs and STPs usually love beautiful things and notice them but it’s a toss-up whether they actual pursue anything, and how good they are at it.

NJs often love art, but lean conceptual (unsurprisingly) and when they do aesthetics it tends to be minimalist. It may mix with other aesthetics that go well with minimalism (eg: I know an NFJ who used to be sort of minimalist goth)

NPs are a total crapshoot both in terms of what the aesthetic is and whether they’re very aware of it.