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realstraykids · 6 years ago

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One of the most frequent asks I get is “how do you make your gifs?” Previously I had just linked my FAQ where I have some resources on how to gif listed, but I figured to (hopefully) stop receiving the same ask over and over, I’d just make a tutorial on how I personally gif!

* Please note that everyone has different giffing styles and settings preferences, so the following is just how I make my gifs. Other people are likely to do things differently!

This post will be a comprehensive guide that includes details about DOWNLOADING VIDEOS, USING VAPOURSYNTH TO MAKE GIFS, USING PHOTOSHOP TO MAKE GIFS (+ a blurb on TOPAZ), and COLORING.

This post was last updated on July 30, 2020. Keep reading to get started!

DOWNLOADING VIDEOS

I use a number of sources to download videos/get video clips, depending on the origin of the video. In general, I try to gif from videos that are at least 1080p - the higher, the better. It’s almost impossible to make gifs look high quality if they don’t originate from a high quality video! Below are the sources I use:

TS files: kpop24hrs (you need an account), kpopexciting, occasionally torrent links from Google or download links from Twitter (search the group name + date in YYMMDD format + .ts)

Youtube videos: 4K Video Downloader

Vlive videos: Soshistagram

Twitter videos: Twitter Video Downloader

Instagram videos: Dredown

Long videos: If I don’t have the space (or patience) to download a certain video, or if it’s not a downloadable video (e.g. Fanship, paid online concert, etc.) then I screen record with Quicktime Player

(Side question: what’s a TS file? A TS file is essentially a very high quality video that you can find for live show performances and aired music show interviews! TS files are generally 60fps, so they’re how gifmakers can make those super clear and smooth live performance gifs. If a TS file is available for what you want to gif, use it.)

USING VAPOURSYNTH TO MAKE GIFS - OLD AND NEW VERSION

05/2020 update: I have re-installed Vapoursynth to its latest version, so I am including updated instructions/screenshots for both the old version (that I downloaded ~mid-2018) and the latest version.

After I’ve downloaded my video, I use Vapoursynth to crop, resize, sharpen, and denoise gifs. Vapoursynth is like Avisynth in that both programs can be used to crop and resize gifs without losing video quality, but VS has the added capabilities of sharpening and denoise. VS is the reason I don’t need to use Topaz on any of my gifs! You can install Vapoursynth here.

First you drag your video file to the Vapoursynth app installed on your computer. You’ll be prompted to enter a start timestamp in HH:MM:SS format (so if you want the video to start 5 seconds in, you would enter 00:00:05). Then you put the encoding duration also in HH:MM:SS format (if you want the video to be 8 seconds long, you would enter 00:00:08). Generally I’ll look for the exact moment I want to gif and enter the start timestamp 1 second earlier and have the encoding duration be between 3-5 seconds.

After you’ve entered this, a resizer.html window will automatically pop up. Below are screenshots of examples of my normal settings for my performance gif 4sets (ex. here or here) for both the old and new versions of Vapoursynth.

Old version:

New version:

Below is an explanation of the parts:

GIF Size | The gif widths (the first number) recommended for Tumblr:

1 gif per row: 540px

2 gifs per row: 268px

3 gifs per row: 177px

You can use any height, but these are the ones that I tend to use:

1 gif per row: 243px or 300px most frequently, but sometimes I’ll do 220px/201px/400px/450px/540px depending on how large or small I want them

2 gifs per row: 350px

3 gifs per row: 300px, occasionally I’ll do 375px or 400px if it’s a very long video (e.g. some fancams)

Opacity | Don’t worry about this; it just changes how you view the video in the window.

Preprocessor | This refers to how the video will render! Super important because you’ll be given the option of 60 vs. 30 - these numbers refer to frames per second. For live performance gifs, I always use qtgmc 60 fast (slow in theory gives you better quality gifs but I’m far too impatient for that). For all other gifs, I do not use any preprocessing method. A basic rule is that if you’re using a TS file, you should preprocess it because it’ll de-interlace the file. If you’re using an mp4 or mkv or any other file, you don’t need to preprocess.

Extra Sharpening/Sharpening | Pretty self-explanatory. You can move the slider up or down depending on personal preference! I try to keep the sharpening low unless the video quality is especially bad. In the new version, I use FineSharp over VCFreq because I find the latter a little harsh for my tastes.

Denoise/Denoise Filters | Will help remove noise from gifs. In the old version, I almost always used the Light setting unless the video is super grainy, and then I might have chosen Medium instead. In the new version, I use KNLM at its lowest setting. I’ll only bump it up if the original video is quite grainy.

Once you’ve configured all your desired settings, you can copy & paste the output in the resizer.html window to your Vapoursynth editor file and enter the beginning and end frames.

The editor file for the old version:

The editor file for the new version:

To make the gifs in the old version, just save the file and then wait until everything finishes processing! In the new version, you have to go to Script > Encode video, and then under the gif preset click ‘start.’ Wait until it finishes encoding. On my laptop, this takes anywhere from 20 seconds to 3-4 minutes, so sometimes you have to be patient. This is the end of the Vapoursynth portion of gifmaking.

USING PHOTOSHOP TO MAKE GIFS

To create gifs in Photoshop, go to File > Import > Video Frames to Layers and then select your video file/output file from Vapoursynth (output.mov). These are my settings to create the frame animation:

Once your frames have been imported, you can delete frames and add a coloring psd on top of all your layers.

Photoshop is also where you adjust the timing of your gif. In general, these are my settings:

30fps: 0.04/0.05

60fps: 0.02/0.03/occasionally 0.04 if I want it to be super slo-mo

Honestly, just use whatever timing setting that looks good to you! Some prefer faster gifs, others prefer slower, so just do what you like and things will be okay.

Save through File > Export > Save for Web (Legacy) with these settings (you can play around with selective vs. adaptive or diffusion vs. pattern; they all have slightly different looks, but 256 colors is a must):

Make sure your gif is under 8mb - to decrease a gif’s size, I usually delete frames and/or use selective color to increase the black percentage for whites, neutrals, and blacks.

After you save, you’ll have your gif! Below is the same moment giffed in different ways to illustrate how much a difference that file type + giffing style can make. You can tell that the TS file is higher quality and less grainy than the mp4 file, but it really isn’t unless you use Vapoursynth that the gif becomes super sharp and smooth. This is because if you import a TS file straight into Photoshop, it will only import at 30fps because the video itself is interlaced. You have to run it through a de-interlacer (like VS) to actually get a 60fps clip.

With regard to TOPAZ*, I mentioned above that because Vapoursynth has sharpening and denoise functionalities built into the program, I no longer use Topaz. However, if you do not have access to Vapoursynth, then I highly recommend downloading Topaz (download links can be found through quick searches on Tumblr) and using Denoise and Clean to adjust your gifs. A warning: Topaz can take a long time to process and many gifmakers have a love/hate relationship with it, so be prepared for that. The way you apply Topaz is to select all your frames and layers, then do Filter > Convert to Smart Filters. Add the Topaz/smart sharpen adjustments, then Flatten Frames Into Layers. Once that has happened, hit Convert Frames > Flatten Frames to Clips and then Convert Frames > Make Frames from Clips.

COLORING

I get questions a lot on coloring and the truth is that coloring is an art - I by no means consider myself an expert, but I do experiment a fair amount with different settings and layers so I at least have a decent understand of what’s possible when it comes to coloring.

A few tips I’ll give:

Everyone has different coloring preferences! Whatever coloring you like may not be what others like, and that’s okay. Don’t be afraid to experiment!

PSDs are good for learning how to color - download premade ones and look at how other people made them: what layers did they use? in what order did they put them? what blending mode? at what opacity? These are all questions you’ll need to ask yourself when you create your own PSDs. (Remember not to edit others’ PSDs if they do not allow it, and given them due credit when necessary. Also don’t claim as your own!)

Tips to bring out idols’ natural tan/unwhitewash: increase vibrance, decrease brightness + increase contrast, use selective color and decrease cyan and increase black on the reds channel, use a gradient map that goes from a black/dark red to light pink/coral and change the blending mode to soft light or decrease opacity of the layer to 20-40%.

Below are some examples to show how much a difference coloring can make. I’d consider a basic PSD one that has less than 10 coloring layers/doesn’t make much change to the actual coloring of the gif besides lighting adjustments. More complex PSDs generally have 15 or more layers (the ones I used below in have 16-25+) and drastically change the colors in the original gif. You can also mix PSDs too - for a lot of my performance gifs, I’ll first add a basic PSD that increases the contrast of a gif to make the skin glow, and then I’ll add an additional PSD that adjusts colors and other various lighting aspects.

You can see just how much of a difference coloring makes:

Don’t be afraid to experiment with different layers/styles! Everyone has individual preferences for how they like their gifs to look, and in a sense, coloring is the main way you can make gifs “yours.”

FINAL NOTES

Giffing is hard and requires a lot of patience - you definitely won’t be able to make amazing gifs right when you start! Even though I’ve been giffing for close to a year now, I still dislike many of the gifs I make and think that I can definitely improve. Don’t be afraid to reach out to other gifmakers for advice and help - 99% of the time, they’ll be happy to answer your questions!

I have posted a sped-up version of my gifmaking process here that you can also use as a resource!

Please let me know if I’ve missed something, and feel free to reach out if you still have questions. Good luck!

#gif tutorial #this tutorial also took way too long omg #*text #*gif #*mine #ps #*gif tutorial

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womenofcolor15 · 6 years ago

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Kodak Black Issues Half A** Apology To Lauren London For Disrespectful Comments, Power 106 Cancels Him While T.I., The Game & More Go In

Kodak Black issues a half a** apology to Lauren London after T.I. and The Game got on his a** for disrespecting her and her late boyfriend Nipsey Hussle. LA's Power 106 has banned his music, thankfully. Get it all inside...

Kodak Black had social media in a massive uproar when he went on Instagram Live making disrespectful and insensitive comments about "shooting his shot" with Lauren London following the murder of her longtime boyfriend Nipsey Hussle.

In the video, the "ZEZE" rapper insinuates he would give her a year to grieve over Nipsey before he tried to holler, and while she's in bereavement, he would be a shoulder for her to cry and lean on.

“Lauren London that's baby, though. She about to be out here single. She’s finna be a whole widow out here,” he said. "I'd be the best man I could be for her. I'll give her a whole year. She might need a whole year to be crying and shit for dude (Nipsey)."

“I ain’t trying to shoot (my shot) at her.” he added. “I’m saying...She can do two, three years. I’ll try to be like the friend if you need to holla or a shoulder to lean on. She can call my line.”

He must not realize his colorist, basic, non-rapping, self-hating, misogynistic, yuckmouth, alleged rapist (his trial is upcoming), P.O.S. a-- could NEVER. The audacity.

Check it:

Kodak Black on IG talks about Lauren London being single and a widow, that she only needs a year to grieve for Nipsey Hussle, before Kodak will get at her.

This is so shameful and disrespectful pic.twitter.com/4bWiUj2Kt3

— RapVineyard (@RapVineyard) April 6, 2019

So disgusting and ignorant!

After the clip went viral online, rapper T.I., rapper The Game, and singer/Kodak's label mate Tank called him out. Tip and Game's responses were much more aggressive than Tank's. Following their videos being posted, Kodak got back on IG Live to try and explain what he meant, but his explanation didn't really clarify much of anything. Watch it all below:

youtube

By the way, Kodak hopped in Tip's comments on the video he posted and replied, "or what?"

That's not all the backlash he has received:

Power 106 FM DJ Justin Credible said his station will NOT play Kodak's music and the station co-signed:

View this post on Instagram

We stand with #NipseyHussle and the fam S/O @justin_credible for telling it like it is. (: @qonair)

A post shared by Power 106 (@power_106) on Apr 6, 2019 at 10:18pm PDT

Power 106 radio personality Big Boy also hopped on social media to react to Kodak's ultimate disrespect:

View this post on Instagram

I won’t disrespect my timeline posting a pic of Kodak Black. However, I will say this, I’m not here for the blatant disrespect and fake ass apologies. To disrespect the King Nipsey and The Queen Lauren, is where I draw the line. Hip Hop has been very disrespectful lately. Not only is this disrespectful to Hip Hop, but this is disrespectful to a beautiful human being, spirit and a legacy. Sometimes I feel a certain way, but I don’t publicly speak out. I just don’t fuck with the person, place or thing. This one, I can’t just keep it on a personal chill. I’ve been a child of Hip Hop for a looooooong time. Hip Hop raised me and I’ve raised Hip Hop. I’m not new to this or fake with this. I’m a soldier!!!! I’m not just Phone Taps and funny interviews. Check my pedigree. I will not stand by and let Kodak Black come between an allegiance I have with dear FRIENDS. Nipsey’s honor can’t be disrespected like this. We must put a shield around @LaurenLondon and his ENTIRE Family. We can’t allow these things to happen. Nipsey wouldn’t. We look the other way and forgive too easily. I’m a black man first and I love all that deserve my love. I’m with unity, however, we must discipline our own as well. This isn’t about radio or dropping records, that’s been done. This is about protecting a LEGACY and holding people accountable. This may not change Kodak Black now, but I pray it changes his or someone’s future. For all those out there that wanna disrespect and play with royalty, I advise you to think “THRICE”. Long live the spirit, knowledge and wisdom of Nipsey Hussle. This has to be the standard FOREVER!!! The Marathon continues (I’m blocking the bullshit from now on. Try me)

A post shared by Big Boy (@bigboy) on Apr 7, 2019 at 8:10am PDT

Very well said.

This morning, the "Tunnel Vision" rapper offered up an apology to Lauren "if" he disrespected her. He said he knows he didn't disrespect her, but if he did, he's sorry. Check it:

youtube

This isn't the only ignorant thing he's said, and not the only time he swears he doesn't see the problem.

During his IG Lives over the weekend, he said he'd only "seen" Nipsey once before. However, there are pictures of Kodak and Nipsey dapping each other up at Diddy's 49th birthday party at celeb hotspot Ysabel in West Hollywood last year.

What we're not going do it this:

No, he's not a kid, Lil Duval. He's old enough to know right from wrong at 21-years-old. He chooses to be wrong, so he's certainly old enough to suffer the consequences. Especially if he's so strong in his convictions that he's absolutely right about what he said. Everybody else can also be convicted in reacted how they choose.

If you haven't heard, Kodak Black was charged with first degree criminal sexual conduct after a woman made claims that he raped her after a concert in Florence, South Carolina in 2016. According to the AP, he will have to return to SC this summer or fall. A trial set for April was continued and no new date has been set.

Some people on Twitter are upset that NO ONE canceled this dude when the rape allegations first came out, or when he would post sexist and colorist videos/comments on his social media handles. Here are a few of the tweets:

Kodak Black: *is a rapist* Y’all:....

Kodak: 'I Don't Really Like Black Girls Like That' Y’all:...

Kodak: “I'm fuckin' Young M.A, long as she got a coochie” Y’all:...

Kodak: Ima give her [Lauren] a year of crying and shit

Y’all: pic.twitter.com/SrD1mPfQQh

— Shane Jamal (@shanejbernard) April 6, 2019

So let me get this straight... it takes Kodak Black to harass Lauren London for y’all to say something?!

Y’all wasn’t having this same energy when he was charged for multiple sexual assaults prior to this . Hate y’all dumb mfs

— Don Juan (@YungBG_) April 6, 2019

Oh, so now Black folks wanna do a FULL STOP Kodak Black regarding his Nipsey and Lauren comments, but not rape charges. pic.twitter.com/V20uUw45X2

— Carlos (@PushaCeeeeee) April 7, 2019

Kodak Black: Multiple rape charges

twitter:

Kodak Black: assault charges on women

twitter:

Kodak Black: holla at Lauren London

twitter: pic.twitter.com/sOb6FGnaSo

— (@zepblackstar) April 6, 2019

Tell us your thoughts about this whole situation in the Yappa app below!

EDITOR'S NOTE: TheYBF.com will not be supporting Kodak Black. Breaking news in regards to his alleged rape victim or anyone he hurts receiving justice though, will be shared.

EXTRAS:

1. NBA YoungBoy has officially been charged in his marijuana case. He was hit with 2 misdemeanors - possession of less than an ounce of marijuana and disorderly conduct - stemming from a case back in February in Atlanta. STORY

Photos: Arturo Holmes / Shutterstock.com/Backgrid

[Read More ...] source http://theybf.com/2019/04/07/kodak-black-issues-half-a-apology-to-lauren-london-for-disrespectful-comments-dropped-fro

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bentonpena · 4 years ago

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The Decentralized Web Has Plans, if Not Solutions, to the Misinformation Nightmare

The Decentralized Web Has Plans, if Not Solutions, to the Misinformation Nightmare https://bit.ly/2Xp8pCa

Last week President Donald Trump accused Twitter of stifling his speech after it accused him of spreading misinformation.

In an escalating series of actions, Twitter took the unprecedented step of fact-checking the U.S. President and then shielded another presidential tweet for “glorifying violence.” In response, Trump pushed out an executive order taking aim at a longstanding law that minimizes liability for most content published to online platforms.

This tit-for-tat between the U.S. government and a big tech firm seems likely to bubble on for months and could have long-term ramifications for the nation’s democratic processes. At stake is how people communicate online, and the role of public and private institutions in enforcing moderation.

As political conversations become more web-mediated, and the presence of misinformation grows, trust – the basis for effective communication – becomes eroded. And questions arise over the legitimacy of centralized authorities – be it the government or Facebook – to unilaterally influence civic life.

For online platforms, there are two sides of the coin: either they “censor too much content, or they let lies and misinformation run wild,” Bloomberg editor Joe Weisenthal writes. Heads or tails, Twitter and Facebook lose.

While Trump, if somehow he social media platforms are categorized as publishers, will ironically limit his (and everybody else’s) ability to speak what comes to mind: no matter how dubious.

The problems of centralization

It didn’t start with a coin toss. Partisan infighting, conspiratorial posts and fake news are all accepted parts of this presidential election cycle, as in the last. But a video of the age-old Iowan political tradition – taking the human arena of politics into the realm of chance – didn’t help.

At stake in the 17 second clip, published last February, were three delegates and a razor thin margin of victory. The video shows a young adult wearing a pressed blue blazer flipping a coin to settle a split district during the contentious Iowa caucus. Posted to Twitter at 10:23 p.m., Iowa time, from a BBC journalist, the footage received weeks worth of watch-time by the next morning.

“As for how it was received, Trump retweeting it gave it a lot of attention on the right, who saw it as an example of Democratic incompetence,” Andrew Zurcher, the seasoned reporter who filmed and tweeted the moment, said in a direct message. “After the Iowa results ended up so close and controversial, I’ve found a lot of Bernie people pointing to it and saying it was part of a conspiracy against their guy.”

Neither of the candidates – Senator Bernard Sanders and Mayor Pete Buttigieg – involved in the controversy are in the running. But the fallout represents the unending problems of divisive, attention-grabbing online political discourse.

Like a Rorschach test, a viewer takes along his or her prejudices and biases into the frame. For some, it’s a video of a Florida student flipping and fumbling with a coin. Seen another way, it’s a caught-on-tape moment of party officials colluding against an outsider Democratic candidate. In the words of podcaster Joe Rogen, at the time, a tepid Bernie Sanders supporter, it was “hilariously rigged.”

“He looked at it, and he turned it. Manipulated it with his hands,” the YouTube personality said, referring to the out-of-state student, chosen to carry this weight for his perceived impartiality. Rogan’s candid appraisal directly contradicts Zurcher’s, who believes it was a “somewhat awkward teen who hadn’t done a lot of coin-flipping, and certainly not under that kind of pressure,” he said.

But first-hand accounts, even from “blue checks” representing legacy outlets with decades or centuries of clout, don’t carry the same currency anymore. Truth is no longer or a matter of top-down consensus, but produced through the crowd.

High levels of polarization and low levels of media literacy, have heightened the general level of paranoia and conspiracy surrounding this election, said Ray Serrato, a Berlin-based freelance disinformation researcher.

Serrato looks at the Iowa debacle as a case study in a new form of “sense making.” The easy spread of fake news is baked into the fabric of the internet. Distortive algorithms equate engagement with profit, prioritize clicks over facts, and lead to the promotion and production of emotionally charged content. In turn, this sharpens divisions, confirms biases, and ultimately leads to a never-ending battle over perceptions.

For many in the blockchain community, the problems of a highly concentrated, ad-driven web model have their solutions in decentralization and open source tech. Take away the secrecy under which algorithms are given free reign to run, and you’re halfway there. Add in internet-wide reputation-layers and new economic models to produce and disseminate content, which blockchain can achieve, and “the forever war” is won.

It’s a solution Jack Dorsey, CEO of Square and Twitter, has given some thought. He said last week, if Twitter is to fact check, then its fact checking procedures should be “open source and thus verifiable by everyone.”

This move towards accountability follows plans to move Twitter to a decentralized standard, announced late last year under the code-name Blue Sky. “[W]e’re facing entirely new challenges centralized solutions are struggling to meet. For instance, centralized enforcement of global policy to address abuse and misleading information is unlikely to scale over the long-term without placing far too much burden on people,” he said at the time.

Jack Dorsey speaks at Consensus 2018, image via CoinDesk archives

Neither Dorsey nor Blue Sky representatives have responded to a request for comment.

Opening Twitter’s architecture could lead to a more durable form of social media, where posts aren’t subject to censorship and companies aren’t in control of who uses the platform or how it’s used. While Dorsey notes the process could take years to accomplish, a number of firms have kicked off the process.

In the years since many consensus-driven efforts hit the servers, these aspirational solutions to defanging fake news through decentralization have been far from successful. Projects launched with the express aim of revitalizing online discourse have sputtered out, and outlets creating new economies to pay for quality journalism are faltering.

The limits of these platforms point to a nascent industry attempting to find its footing. Although many projects are doomed to fail, each is a step in the right direction: towards a more secure, censorship resistant internet, where all users are stakeholders in a platform’s success.

Civil

It’s no longer news to say Civil has flopped. After a high-profile launch, disastrous initial- initial coin offering, and reports of journalists going under-compensated, many interested observers lost faith in the project that’s attempting to restore trust in the business of news-making.

Matthew Iles, CEO of Civil Media, doesn’t disagree with the sentiment. Responding to Modern Consensus editor-in-chief Leo Jacobson’s “objective take” (Iles’ phrase) last February that “Civil never got off the ground,” Iles said, “I’m not disputing that.”

Now, months later, Iles said the project is shutting down.

Founded by industry professionals from Politico and NPR, the project quickly drew the attention of mainstream and crypto trade publications alike, for its lofty ambition to steer journalism from the perils of “advertising, fake news, and outside influence,” Iles wrote in an early blog post.

The idea was simple. Disintermediate journalism from the machine. What this looks like in theory is a consortium of media self-organized around a constitution – that outlines their journalistic ethics – and protocol. A token ecosystem allows readers and sister publications to hold outlets accountable. Further, blockchain and wallet tech can create novel ways of funding hard-hitting journalism.

In practice, however, Civil executives failed to court major media partners including New York Times, Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. It’s most notable partner, The Associated Press, seemed to be a deal any media company can strike: an arrangement to reshare content.

Additionally, the token economic system that was to spur independent journalism by reducing the reliance on advertising and subscriptions failed. CVL, the native token of the Civil ecosystem, was worth essentially nothing at launch. And the platform it powers hadn’t “made product market fit,” Iles said. (The interview was conducted last February. Iles has not responded to recent requests for comment.)

“We’re not going to be dogmatic,” Iles said about keeping the token, “The only thing that drives what we do next is whether or not we think it will advance our mission.” This was the same mission that captured the media’s attention in the first place, when Civil made resolute to “kill the term fake news,” by decentralizing the news business.

Under radio silence, following a barrage of bad press, Civil’s project hadn’t changed. In fact, it’s ambitions grew larger. To decentralize media, Civil, and it’s lead investor ConsenSys, planned to decentralize the web.

Speaking to a number of former and current executives, CoinDesk learned that Civil was throwing its weight behind a highly-ambitious initiative to reinvent identities online and track media distribution. Categorized under the bandied-about Web 3.0 moniker, these tools may have had the power to crack the monopolistic hold that Big Tech has on internet users.

That is, if the project hadn’t run out of money.

Speaking anonymously, a high-ranking ConsenSys executive called the initiative a drive towards a “multipronged reality.” Civil planned on releasing software that would have made decentralized online identities and content verification tools commonplace. This wasn’t a departure from Civil’s initial business model, the executive said, but a new emphasis on its software-as-a-service effort.

However, Civil’s track record with in-house design had been spotty. A former editor with the Civil consortium said, who requested anonymity, “the development team originally planned to have their own CMS, but ultimately went with a WordPress-based interface.”

“They squandered money on that. They could have saved time, trouble and money. There were all kinds of delays and problems,” they said. Additionally, in the past year, several key executives have disembarked from the project beset by a sense of misdirection and shifting goalposts.

Matthew Iles confirmed that the company was unable to solve its problems with funding and management – though had hopes the company’s new direction would have been profitable. Now, he and his seven person tech team will join ConsenSys directly, to develop new product strategies, Iles told Poytner.

To be sure, Civil had notable successes, over its more than three year run including growing to 100-odd members, attracting millions of readers (myself included), and instituting technical breakthroughs. In 2018, Popula, an early member, became the first publication to append a full-text copy of an article on the Ethereum blockchain. An occasion Popula journalist and editor Maria Bustillos says was marked with tears in her eyes.

She said today: “Civil was a great first step in realizing the promise of fully distributed blockchain technology as a safeguard of press freedom and speech rights. I’m very grateful to Matthew Iles, Joe Lubin and everyone at Civil and Consensys for starting so many great ideas rolling, and for founding so many great publications, Popula included.”

Sludge editor David Moore, a founding Civil partner, continues to build Web. 3.0 tools that will enable micro-tripping and identity solutions.

“There’s a lot of opacity that exists in various distribution channels,” he said. By creating a decentralized ID system, “you’re solving for the fake news problem and you’re solving for the revenue model, ensuring creators are paid for the value they produce.” As a grantee, Sludge has always been independent of Civil and will be unaffected by Civil’s closure.

“Civil will always hold a special place in my heart. It was a grand experiment – a moonshot – and we knew the odds were long,” Iles told Poytner.

“Civil is one of a handful of companies pioneering radically new models for an industry that’s over 200 years old,” Elena Giralt, a former project lead at Civil, who is no longer aware of the day-to-day goings-on, said. “There was a lot of pressure to get it right the first time. A token curated registry and governance tool and means of exchange, it’s a lot of moving parts and some things aren’t going to work right out of the box.

“These initiatives should get credit for exploring new spaces, with the caveat that not all of these approaches will prove successful.”

TruStory's trial with token economics

Partisan infighting over a suspect coinflip, or so-called censorship of the President, is precisely the sort of discord that TruStory was designed to quiet. Founded in 2018, the debate platform leverages a token-economy to crowdsource consensus making, and hopefully arrive at the truth by staking it to an economic outcome.

Instead of fractious and fraught debate led by anonymous or self-serving identities without “skin in the game,” TruStory users bring contentious ideas to the table to be met with fact-based, reasoned arguments. Interlocutors are motivated by their own financial interest, as their claims are staked with TRU coin. A reputation layer further ward against users making bad faith or purposely misleading arguments.

Preethi Kasireddy (Credit: Preethi Kasireddy, via Twitter)

“Twitter creates unnecessary factions among people. It’s an environment where you’re not trying or incentivized to understand the other person, but only to respond with a hot take. That’s what drives engagement,” Preethi Kasireddy, TruStory’s founder, said in a phone call in February.

The USC alumni and rising Silicon Valley star, dreamt up the project after watching countless videos of Balaji Srivassan on YouTube, she said. She realized the best parts of blockchain – its ability to form consensus, record events, and motivate participants of an ecosystem – were also applicable to the variegations of discourse online.

It was a model that others believed in. Even before having a clear business plan, Kasireddy was able to raise $3 million dollars from the likes of True Ventures, Pantera and TechCrunch editor Alexia Tsotsis’ Dream Machine fund, among others. Alex Van de Sande, the ethereum guru known for his hesitancy to sign on to projects, joined as a technical advisor.

Together with a team of experienced designers, Kasireddy built a beta platform where free speech reigned. “Dangerous ideas” were brought forward, and the conversations – ranging from the legitamacy of polygamy to proof-of-work – sometimes spilled into the surrounding crypto community. It was the beginning of a seachange Kasireddy believed the world was waiting for.

But now, the project is mothballed.

Stalled by a lack of growth, and a weakening crypto economy, Kasireddy decided to shut down the project and return investor funds. In a farewell blog post, she said the market wasn’t ready for an application like Trustory.

“We’re the Myspace to Facebook,” she said. “Something like TruStory will exist, but the number of people that know about crypto or that want to use it for anything isn’t there.” Despite Kasireddy’s significant social following, and much positive press, Kasireddy said the application “struggled to get even 1,000 active users.”

Ideas to continue the project, like abandoning the token layer or raising an additional blanket of funding to cover them during the crypto winter were rejected. “We didn’t want to do another Quora or Reddit,” she said.

The Coinbase alum is now taking an indefinite leave from crypto, and is convinced 90 percent of token projects will shut down.

“A lot of crypto projects are too intellectual and academic and not something a real person could use on a daily basis,” Kasreddy said. “They make sense on a theoretical standpoint but not a social standpoint.”

Problems with decentralization

As Civil and Trustory show, operating a decentralized platform aiming to combat fake news is operationally difficult. But problems may exist at the theoretical level too, beginning with the ill-defined notion of decentralization.

Decentralization is dependent on context, Nathan Schneider, an assistant professor in media studies at the University of Colorado, said. “The rhetoric around decentralization implies technical systems, though is often more about social configurations,” he said. And it’s this rhetoric that often conceals the centralized social structures that technology was supposed to eradicate.

When Facebook and Twitter were first gaining traction, they were lauded as forces for democracy. Social media, critics bellowed, disintermediated information from power, while connecting the world. In some sense, they were the public internet’s first experiments with mass-decentralization – if not at the protocol level, then in their missions.

At heart, decentralization is about power, and where power should lay. Trump bemoans that internet platforms have the power to stifle conservative speech, while social media companies are gradually moving towards the conclusion that the powerful shouldn’t be able to spread misinformation to millions. The solution of disempowering both, by letting people control their internet experience has proven wooly.

A lack of user interest is part of the problem, but as Ray Serrato, the disinformation researcher said, “There is no technological solution, it’s why social media firms struggle to tackle the problem. You have to understand the political and social context of speech.”

Trading via CoinDesk https://bit.ly/35KxIA1 June 2, 2020 at 04:17PM

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manifestomindset · 7 years ago

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Who watched the Watchmen? I did. And it sucked.

So I finally got around to viewing Zack Snyder’s 2009 film adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ 1986 graphic novel Watchmen. His, his proudest achievement. The movie who’s title is uttered in confidence to anyone who dares question or critique the artistic merit, intelligence or worth of film auteur Zachary Edward “No, Batman [Begins]’s cool. He gets to go to a Tibetan monastery and be trained by ninjas. Okay? I want to do that. But he doesn’t, like, get raped in prison. That could happen in my movie. If you want to talk about dark, that’s how that would go.” Snyder. The much lauded adaptation of the so-called “Unfilmable comic”. How does it fare you ask?

It’s a fucking embarrassment.

Zack Snyder’s Watchmen, is like....having an edgy teenager attempt a shitty recreation of the Mona Lisa in MS Paint and then calling that a proper adaptation. It’s like having the Chainsmokers do a cover of a Beatles song. Watchmen is nothing more than a self-congratulatory hollow shell of it’s source material with a severe lack of self awareness and understanding of Moore and Gibbons’ work.

From the opening fight scene between Ozymandias (a poorly casted Matthew Goode, who’s poor American accent turns Ozzie’s already forced monologues into distracting rants) and The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), to the modified ending, it is abundantly clear that not only does Snyder completely miss the point of the original graphic novel, but yes, Alan Moore was right, Watchmen was not meant to be adapted into a film (more on that later).

Unlike the comic, which portrays violence in brief yet brutal moments of time suspended within comic panels that are drawn to highlight the mortality and limitations of the character’s within, Snyder almost fetishizes it, slowly panning the camera over the broken bones and gore, filling up every action scene with redundant slo-motion and speed up edits, ridiculous “whooshes” and deafening “thuds” (it’s important to note that the original comic omitted all sound effects that you would normally see in a standard cape-comic at the time), and exaggerating physical feats to the point of it being laughably cartoony, which is literally the exact opposite of what Moore and Gibbons were going for! Snyder and co. even go as far as using said cartoony sfx in Silk Spectre I’s rape scene which completely deflated any dramatic weight the scene would’ve had on the narrative ( “Just make it sound awesome,” Jenkins recalls of Snyder’s reply to his Day 1 question: How do you want the film to sound?). If the scene was executed without those sfx and filmed tastefully it might’ve you know, actually meant something but I guess that’s asking too much of Snyder. Keep in mind that Snyder thinks that scenes panning over a blood and skeleton-encrusted ceiling is him “restraining” himself, Jesus Christ.

It’s also important to note the awful soundtrack of this film. Literally every song used is so on the nose with what tone and reaction they’re trying to elicit from the audience I wouldn’t be surprised if Snyder came out and said that when he was a kid a classmate named “Subtlety” used to bully him. It’s the only explanation I can think of for the music choices, and really his entire directorial style. It almost feels like every track was used as a place-holder, like when planning the scenes out Snyder wrote “I want a song similar in tone to All Along the Watchtower when they’re walking up to Ozzie’s base”, but instead of finding a more subtle song to enhance the scene they just....went with the most obvious choice. And in many cases said song choices are incredibly distracting. Take for instance, the use of Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen and Jennifer Warnes during the NiteOwl, Silk Spectre sex scene, a scene that was supposed to show how much of NiteOwl’s masculinity and personal complications are tied to his superhero persona (and if you’re invested in his character, elicit a feeling of satisfaction when he finally gets that p u s s), but instead I just ended up laughing at how fucking stupid the juxtaposition was. A song like Hallelujah should only be used in a sex scene if it’s centered around a horny teenage nerd losing his virginity in a raunchy comedy, not a deconstruction of how masculinity ties in with a man’s alter ego. It’s the same with the use of Ride of the Valkyries when Dr. Manhattan is fighting in Vietnam, that shit’s been parodied so much overtime that using that in a sequence meant to show how powerful he is comes off as comedic.

A perfect example of a film using music to highlight tones and themes within a specific scene would be Goodfellas. That film has three album’s worth of music spread evenly throughout and it worked beautifully. Martin Scorsese used snippets of music (all of which were period specific too, none of the songs were released after whatever time period a scene is taking place in) to effectively highlight and enhance the mood of whatever’s going on in the scene, beautifully punctuating them, unlike Watchmen��s soundtrack, which does nothing beyond distracting the audience from what’s going on in a poor attempt at trying to manipulate an emotional response. Fuck like, I don’t even like the Guardians of the Galaxy movies but even I can admit that James Gunn was able to organically integrate the soundtrack into the plot of the movie and make it poignant.

Visually its a mess too. Part of what made Watchmen a touchstone of American comics is how well Dave Gibbons stitched it together and how it flows visually. The original graphic novel is brimming with numerous visual motifs and cues, alongside a beautifully realized world that effectively and subtly feeds the audience information about the setting and story without needing to verbally beat us over the head with it. The panel-to-panel flow that Gibbons used (in this case a 9-panel-per-page format inspired by Steve Ditko) could easily be translated to film but somehow Hack Snyder, Larry Fong and William Hoy couldn’t even get that right.

Let me reiterate: the director, cinematographer and editor of Watchmen collectively could not even take the visual flow of the comic---the element of the comic that is the easiest to adapt from one visual medium to another, and adapt it properly.

People who say that Snyder’s films are like “comics come to life” either have a poor understanding of comics, don’t know that Speed Racer fucking exists, or just think that empty, meaningless homages to comics that lack the context and meaning that made said comics work count as “coming to life”. Probably all fucking three.

It’s also interesting to note how poorly the film is designed overall. It’s almost as if the set designers, costume designers, cinematographer and director were all on different pages when making this film, which again, kinda proves Moore’s claim that the comic is “unfilmable”, given that Watchmen was largely the collaborative effort between three guys (five including the editors Len Wein and later Barbara Randall, whom Gibbons claims didn’t really effect the production of the comic beyond “traffic control”) whereas a feature film involves hundreds of people throughout it’s production cycle. The set designs were either uninspired or blatantly obvious (The Comedian’s apartment is so blatantly on the nose, filled to the brim with Silk Spectre iconography that really adds nothing to his character given that the film doesn’t comment or do anything with it), and it’s worth pointing out that the sets and costumes originally had the same bold color palette as the comic (another staple of Moore’s work is the retention of some of the more “traditional” aspects of whatever genre he’s riffing to add more dramatic weight when the character drama begins to unfold, in Watchmen’s case it was the goofy costume designs and bold colors of traditional cape-comics), but was later desaturated in post. Why the fuck have all of these designers go through all of this fucking trouble to stay accurate to John Higgins’ original coloring if you’re just gonna make everything fucking monochromatic.

I thought it was really neat that a bunch of veteran comic artists (Adam Hughes, David Finch and John Cassaday to name a few) contributed some of their own modern takes on Gibbons’ original designs, but Ryan Meinerding was the final concept artist and you know what that means: Needlessly complicated superhero costumes!!!!

Look, I love Meinerding’s artwork but ever since the end of Marvel’s Phase One all of his costume designs have been getting increasingly monochromatic and convoluted. Just look at his designs for Cap alone between The First Avenger and Iron Man 4: Age of Ultron and you’ll see what I mean. Here, his designs aren’t bad but in the cases of Silk Spectre, NiteOwl and Ozzie they’re so disconnected from the characters and the story.

The entire point of Dan Dreiburg’s character is that he’s an everyman schlub who’s heroism from within transcends his own self-loathing and fears and helps him move past his limitations. Dressing him up in a really cool, slick Batman costume and having him execute these powerful, cartooney action scenes robs him of the everymaness that his character is based upon.

Silk Spectre is, for some reason, covered in latex, (which doesn’t make any sense given that her costume was created in the 60′s and thus looks like something an aspiring legacy hero would adopt while staying truthful to the themes of sex appeal in her predecessor’s costume) and rather than use this clear difference to push her character forward (the primary conflict of Laurie Jupiter’s character is that she’s tired of living in a confusing world created by her mother and her contemporaries and is sick of just being an object her mother can vicariously live through) by having her name herself, I dunno, “The Latex Lady” or something in an attempt to distance herself from her mother its just there for....sex appeal I guess.

And then there’s Ozymandias’ costume, a much more Hellenistic take on the character that sports both molded body armour and an obvious parody of Joel Schumacher’s infamous “bat-nipples”. This misguided design undercuts the most important aspect of Ozzie’s character: the fact that yes, he’s the real deal. The entire comic (primarily through Rorshach’s personal thoughts towards him) builds Ozzie up to be somewhat of a charlatan. Something’s a bit suspicious about him but overall he seems to be nothing more than an incredibly successful business mogul with an amazing physique. Moore and Gibbons essentially constructed him to be the personification of what was the ideal form of masculinity in the 80′s, which in the cynical world that Watchmen builds meant that all of the nonsense about him being “the smartest man on the planet” who could “catch a bullet with his bare hands” was just hyperbole. The moment Ozzie actually fucking catches the bullet shot by Silk Spectre is the moment Moore and Gibbons solidify him as an antagonist bigger than anything the characters have faced before, and essentially one-ups Dr. Manhattan as this world’s only “real” superhero. When he’s clad in kevlar it removes the dramatic tension in being shot, thus undercutting his big character moment, and pasting nipples on his costume in an attempt to parody a movie that was already a decade too old (and that fans had essentially moved past with the release of Batman Begins and The Dark Knight) ended up being nothing beyond a stale joke.

And then there’s the modified ending. I have no problem when an adaptation of a source material changes details from said materiel to create a new story or allow said adaptation to stand on its own, so long as that change is at least well thought out and justified within the logic of the adaptation. Changing the ending so that instead of a really interesting, horrifying Lovecraftian/Cronenbergian squid destroying NYC to tricking Dr. Manhattan doing the same thing seems smart and ideal for a film at first.......until you realize that, in both the comic and the film, Manhattan agrees completely with what Ozzie has done, which begs the question as to why Ozzie had to go through so much trouble when he could’ve just asked Manhattan to destroy NYC for him. In the comic, Moore and Gibbons justify this by setting it up so that Manhattan would be both benign enough to just go along with American interests while at the same time be vulnerable enough to be controlled through a romantic interest. And from Ozzie’s perspective, it made sense to just create a threat from the ground up that’s sole purpose (down to the brainwaves it fucking emits) was to elicit fear and horror amongst the planet’s superpowers to unite and prevent any possibility of nuclear conflict, rather than use someone like Manhattan, who can actually be reasoned with. We, as a species, fear the unknown, and as powerful as Manhattan is, everyone in the world of Watchmen know everything about his life and his creation (which would subsequently lead to the eventual discovery of how to actually defeat him as Ozzie was able to do, briefly.)

(art by Nick Perks)

It also removes the most metatextual aspect of the original work. When it comes down to it, Watchmen is about a bunch of superheros attempting to stop a giant monster from destroying NYC. At it’s bare bones the story within Watchmen isn’t all that different from your average Silver Age Marvel or DC team book. Part of what made that story brilliant is that Moore and Gibbons gave that story weight and consequences. What if superheros actually existed in real life? How would that effect WWII and the Cold War? What would the world look like? What would motivate these superheros? How would the US government react? What kinds of villains would exist in this world? etc etc etc. Moore and Gibbons answered all of these questions and framed them around really well constructed parodies of Charleton Comics characters. That’s what makes Watchmen good, not it’s violence, or its sexual content, or how “gritty” and “serious” it is.

Speaking of Dr. Manhattan, I do not like Billy Cudrup’s performance of him at all. This isn’t Cudrup’s fault, Cudrup’s a great performer, its just that Snyder doesn’t know how to direct actors. We’re talking about a director who somehow made Henry Cavill, a man who oozes charisma, into a plank of fucking wood in both MoS and BvS. (Not so friendly reminder that Snyder honestly thinks that Superman, on a whim, can become as disconnected as Manhattan. If that doesn’t explain why Superman is such an inconsistent plank of wood in the DCEU or tell you how fucking ignorant he is towards both characters, I don’t know what will).

I understand that Manhattan is supposed to be subdued and disconnected from everyone and everything around him but would it’ve killed them to add some reverb to his voice or something? Cudrup, left aimless by an inept Snyder, has nothing to do but read out his lines like a fucking text-to-speech program. If I was blind I’d assume Dr. Manhattan is just a stuffy philosophy professor. Every scene with him is like the “Bueller.....Bueller.......Bueller....” scene from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, but instead of being funny it’s meant to be meaningful and deep, maaaaan.

This bland performance undermines Manhattan's “big scene” so to speak, when Manhattan is confronted with the possibility that he’s been giving everyone round him fucking cancer an is so distraught that he leaves the fucking planet. At this point in the comic the portrayal of Manhattan alongside the driving forces of the plot have us invested towards what’s going on, but since the movie chooses to make Manhattan boring as possible and truncates the plot significantly, we don’t fucking care. Instead of the scene coming off as a dramatic turn for the character that leaves you breathless in awe and anticipation, it just comes off as weird and sudden, especially with that hard cut to Manhattan on Mars.

Back to the subject of changing aspects of an adaptation from it’s source material, Watchmen also fails at fixing the problems of the original graphic novel. The best adaptations of a piece of work should be able to stand on their own from the respective source material and also learn and improve from said material’s mistakes. The Godfather is an often used example of an adaptation that transcends it’s source material not only by remaining largely faithful to it but at the same time greatly improving on the original novel’s faults. That’s not to say that Watchmen is as deeply flawed or as boring as Mario Puzo’s original Godfather, quite the opposite in fact, but my point is that every adaptation has a responsibility to improve on the mistakes of it’s predecessor. In Watchmen’s case, it’s the sexual assault of the first Silk Spectre by The Comedian.

Some of you may be asking “Wait, how is that a ‘mistake’?” The entire point of the assault in the novel was to help exemplify the paradoxes of human behavior (specifically Silk Spectre I forgiving and even going so far as loving The Comedian despite him sexually assaulting her) while also celebrating the miracle of human life (in this case Silk Spectre II, Laurie, being the result of their seemingly impossible relationship) which, in turn, restores Dr. Manhattan’s faith in humanity in the third act of the book when him and Laurie discover that she is in fact, the biological daughter of The Comedian, a man she learned to hate.

However, the question should be raised: Did Silk Spectre I need to be sexually assaulted for this specific plot point to work? I ask this because one of the many consistent problems with Alan Moore’s writing, from his run on Marvelman, to Lost Girls, is his very callous and flippant use of rape and violence against women as a plot point in his stories (“We know Alan Moore isn’t a misogynist but fuck, he’s obsessed with rape”-Grant Morrison). In Watchmen specifically, the whole Spectre-Comedian dynamic could’ve still worked without n explicit sexual assault, provided that another sufficient event occur between the two characters supplant the rape scene, and be polarizing enough to make the birth of a child between the two character’s nearly impossible. Again, the entire point of that sequence was to paint very complex portraits of The Comedian and Silk Spectre I, while also setting up Silk Spectre II’s birth to be seen as a miracle in Dr. Manhattan’s eyes enough for him to actually give a fuck about humanity.

I just find it appalling that a guy who fancies himself a proponent of “female empowerment” would look at this scene and instead of trying to come up with a better solution to Moore’s morbid fascination with rape in his stories, film it in the same fetishistic way the rest of the fucking action sequences in the film are shot. Who the fuck adds slo mo and cartoony whooshes to a rape scene.

Oh, Watchmen’s violence isn’t exclusively towards women either. Every queer person and POC within the novel is violently killed. The Silhouette, Hira Manish, Joey, little Bernie, and Dr. Malcolm Long all dead by the end of the novel, which is incredibly (ahem) problematic. What do Snyder and co. do to remedy this problem? Fucking nothing. Wait actually, they did do something; greatly mitigate or completely erase said characters’ significance within the narrative of the film.

Again, part of this stems from the narrative of Watchmen being greatly condensed to a feature-length film, as many of these characters are secondary and tertiary within the plot and where thus cut out to provide more focus to the main characters and their conflicts and backstories. That being the case, would it’ve killed WB and the casting department to maybe cast more people of color for the main cast? Literally none of the main characters absolutely needed to be White, all of their conflicts and characteristics aren’t exclusive to White People. Ozymandias is probably the only character out of the bunch who’s Whiteness ties in with the construction of his character (given that, again, he is constructed to be a parody of what the 80′s thought was the “ideal man”, it makes sense that said man would be an incredibly fit, business savvy White guy). Hell, even the subplot of Silk Spectre I being embarrassed by her Polish heritage (and Laurie’s subsequent reclamation of said heritage) can be applied to any ethnic group within the United States.

Back to the modified ending, I think the worst part about the ending is how it doesn’t challenge you. Rorschach is constructed from the very beginning to be this unlikable, creepy weirdo. He’s a far right libertarian, the realization of what a vigilante like Batman would actually be like with the personality and thinking process of guys like Alex Jones, Peter Molyneux and Paul Joseph Watson, the exact opposite of a decent human being. It would’ve been much easier to have NiteOwl be the central character, but Moore and Gibbons chose Rorschach because at the end of the day Watchmen looks you in the eyes and asks “Hey, if Alex Jones/Peter Molyneux/Paul Joseph Watson were all actually right about the world, would you follow them?”. Ending the movie with a fucking Desolation Row by MCR acts like some sort of definitive victory by Rorschach and not an ominous question that hangs in the air and that’s supposed to make you sick.

The biggest irony about Watchmen is that rather than revolutionize the superhero subgenre of films the same way it’s source material did (said honor instead goes to The Dark Knight which set the tone of what cape-movies would be like until The Avengers came in and ushered the next “Age” so to speak of superhero films), it falls disastrously short and instead almost acts like a morbid blueprint of all of the shitty decisions that would plague the upcoming DCEU

Obvious music choices that are so on the nose with what emotions they’re trying to elicit from the audience that it’s almost to the point of parody? Check (Suicide Squad)

Tone deaf fetishization of violence? Check (Man of Steel, Batman v Superman and Suicide Squad)

Talented but occasionally misplaced cast that has no idea what to do because the directors and writers don’t fucking know how human beings work? Check (all of the above)

Awful costume designs that sits between “bland” and “overcomplicated” and occasionally fail to further the characterizations or themes within the film? Check (this also applies to most of the MCU given that Ryan Meinerding is the head of Marvel Studios’ Visual Development Department)

Really fucking pretentious, over written, lofty dialogue that attempts to elevate the events of the film and the one dimensionality of the characters? Check (all of the above)

A complete lack of understanding and respect for the specific books they’re adapting? Check (all of the above)

Really stupid “Hhhuur durrr, wat iff sooper heeros weer GODZ?!?!?” (a detail that, coincidentally, is barely touched upon in Watchmen and is shoved in by Snyder) shit that again, is used by Snyder and co. to “elevate” the source material and genre they’re so embarrassed to be in? Check (MoS and BvS)

Needlessly convoluted, dumb “”””””””plot”””””””””? Check (all of the above)

Attempts at sociopolitical commentary that falls so hard on their face it’s almost impossible to believe that the films were made by 30+ year old adults and not a bunch of 14 year old boys? Check (all of the above)

A one-dimensional antagonist that spews out empty platitudes? Check (all of the above)

Very obvious, terrible attempts at world building and feeding the audience information through visual language? Check (all of the above)

Awful fucking editing that harms the already broken narrative even further? Check (BvS and SS)

Uninspired, bland and obvious cinematography that looks like something a first year film student would make? Check (MoS and BvS)

Tone-deaf narratives that don’t make sense a post-9/11 world? Check (all of the above)

Need I say more? Ironically enough Watchmen suffers from all of the problems that it’s source material was making fun of and indulges in all of the stupid “grim-dark” tropes that largely defined superhero comics in the 90′s.

It’s not entirely Snyder and co’s fault that Watchmen is shit, we also have to acknowledge the fact that making a Watchmen movie in 2009 would’ve been a bad idea no matter who was helming it. The primary reason that Watchmen was so electrifying and engaging in 1986 was because it pushed the boundaries of what established superhero comics even further than their contemporaries could and took well established tropes and ideas within the genre and again, gave them weight, consequences and turned them on their head. Given that Watchmen is a movie and not a comic book, it lacks the framework that it needed in order to be a valid and relevant deconstruction. The contemporary superhero genre in film at the time was only 9 years old and had barely began to coalesce into the superhero genre that dominates tv and movies that we know today. Back then there were very few established franchises that were relevant at the time, a majority of which were just mediocre, pale adaptations of their comic book counterparts, so there wasn’t much that a Watchmen movie built from the ground up could work with. In 2009 Watchmen was too late to ride the wave of relevancy the original graphic novel had created but also too early to plant itself as a deconstruction of a genre that had barely reached its adolescence in the film industry. Not only that, a narrative as dense as Watchmen would’ve never worked as a feature film, and the movie we got is clear evidence of that, forced to truncate its plot to fit within a reasonable running time.

This is partially why superhero tv shows are and have been so successful, and why the upcoming HBO adaption of Watchmen does have some promise. Superhero stories are, by nature, episodic, which is part of the reason why The Adventures of Superman, Batman ‘66, Wonder Woman ‘77, The Flash, Supergirl, Luke Cage, The Flash, Legion, Jessica Jones, Powers, Daredevil, The Tick, The uh, The Tick, etc are such great adaptations. Adapting Watchmen to TV is a massive step forward.....the only problem is they hired Damon Lindelof, who, may I remind you, was the mastermind behind such quality products such as Cowboys and Aliens, Lost, Prometheus, Tomorrow Land, World War Z, and Star Trek: Into Darkness. Yeah. Doesn’t inspire much confidence, hiring a man who’s infamous for making already complex narratives more confusing and pretentious. Let it also be known that this man is also partially responsible for Tomorrow Land being shit and because of that Disney cancelling Tron 3 and all of their future live-action movies that aren’t a Star Wars film, a needless remake of one of their own animated properties, a Pirates of the Caribbean film or a Marvel Movie. Let that fucking sink in.

This also bring up another important question: Did Watchmen even need to be made? For one, its important to address one of the more prevailing criticisms of this film. One of the many notable things Alan Moore is infamous for is his complete disdain and subsequent renunciation of any film adaption of his work. While some might argue that this is a bit hypocritical (especially towards the use of Moore’s concepts and characters by other writers such as Grant Morrison and Geoff Johns, which is pretty fucking stupid from Moore to hate on them for creating stories using his ideas considering so much of his fucking work is derived from other peoples work but I digress), it still stands that the primary creative mind behind Watchmen didn’t want this film to be made. This is an issue considering how much blind support this film receives by so many supposed fans (Snyder included), which in my eyes is quite disrespectful towards the original work’s author. If you truly loved a property and the people behind it, why would you support an adaptation one of the creators openly disavowed, and a shitty adaptation at that?

Now is it surprising that Snyder doesn’t really care or understand why Moore didn’t want this film to be made? No. This is the same guy who later, blindly praised Bob Kane for his creation of Batman, which was a pretty tone-deaf move considering that most of Batman’s mythos was created by the much underappreciated and abused writer Bill Finger (fuck, most of the art credited to Kane was allegedly done by “shadow artists” or stand-ins while Kane was down in Florida chasing pussy), and most of the industry and fandom largely resents Kane for the slimey opportunist he is. Whatever, Snyder doesn’t understand half the shit he’s adapting anyway, why should we expect him to respect or fully understand the creative elements behind them? Anyway, this film really only exists to make money, not because there was a strong demand for it or a cultural need for it to exist.

This leads to my secondary point: Even if there was a more earnest, sincere creative motivation for this film to be made, there’s almost no point considering that there were other superhero properties that have already adapted many of the subject matters and themes of Watchmen and did it exceedingly better than this shit film.

The Incredibles gets the most credit for beating Watchmen to the punch (Justice League Unlimited also heavily dabbled with Watchmen’s themes and naturally understood it better than this shit film. Friendly reminder that both of these properties were aimed at kids and in JLU’s case explicitly exist to sell fucking toys. Remember that next time a DCEU stan jerks off Snyder’s shitty work for being “dark” and “mature”) when it came to deconstructing superheros.

It’s almost astounding how much The Incredibles has in common with Watchmen. Both are deconstructions on superheroes based round parodies of popular characters dealing with heavy themes of masculinity, legacy, domesticity, heroism, and nostalgia (while it is important to note that there are much heavier themes of objectivism in The Incredibles compared to Watchmen, who’s objectivist themes are mainly focused on Rorschach alone), framed around a high-stakes mystery thriller set in a world where superheros are forced to retire and are largely regarded with disdain, fighting an antagonist that used to align themselves with the superheros. For all intents and purposes, The Incredibles is a much more effective adaptation of Watchmen, which further negates the need for this film to even be here.

I dunno man. Watchmen sucked. I’m tired and annoyed with it being held as some paragon of superhero films because it’s fucking juvenile and can barely stand to most superhero movies today. I’m tired of the original novel being constantly referenced, poorly imitated, regurgitated, misunderstood and dragged through the mud. I honestly don’t really care for Geoff Johns’ upcoming Doomsday Clock, because it’s end goal is to just reconstruct the superhero genre but Watchmen’s central deconstructions and statements towards the genre were already addressed and rebutted by Mark Waid and Alex Ross’ excellent Kingdom Come, a book that fucking came out 21 years ago, further negating any sort of cultural need for Watchmen to exist. There’s a reason why Waid and Ross started the main conflict of Kingdom Come off by killing almost all of the Charleton characters that Watchmen parodied.

The industry and general community had collectively learned from and moved beyond Watchmen, its DNA can be found in almost every modern superhero comic. Constantly going back to it and revering it as the epitome of cape comics is regressive. It’s like if people kept holding the Subaru 1000 as the absolute best standard for cars when we have 50+ years worth of automobiles that have learned from it and actually perform much better. My final thoughts on the whole thing can best be described by Alan Moore himself:

Get over Watchmen, get over the 1980s. It doesn’t have to be depressing miserable grimness from now until the end of time. It was only a bloody comic. It wasn’t a jail sentence.

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greytulip5-blog · 5 years ago

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The James Beard Journalism Awards Still Favor Privilege Over Diversity

Earlier this week, the James Beard Foundation (JBF) announced that it is making a series of changes to its annual award selection process for 2019 in an attempt to make the so-called “Oscars of food” more diverse and inclusive. While some alterations are wholly positive, like eliminating the uber-insular Who’s Who of Food and Beverage in America, others seem like little more than lip service — particularly for food journalists. One of these changes, as first reported by the New York Times, is waiving the $150-per-story submission fee for first-time award entrants as a means of “attracting new voices.”

Almost immediately, in text messages and on social media, culinary writers — the very people the JBF is, ostensibly, trying to help — started talking about how the shift seems somewhat haphazard. In addition to the fee waiver for first-time entrants, the Beards will welcome early submissions in the cookbook, broadcast, and design categories by waving the entry fee entirely. But restaurateurs and chefs continue to be able to nominate themselves for free, while journalists and food writers outside the narrow number of first-time entrants will still be required to shell out money to be considered. And any entry fee at all means that the awards continue to be a pay-to-play system that ensures the majority of voices are left out of the conversation.

For those not in the industry, it might be hard to see how much a James Beard Award can mean to a food writer. Though anyone with access to the internet can write about food — self-publishing has democratized media, mostly for the better — a Beard Foundation nomination or win opens many, many doors, especially for young writers and editors who otherwise might not be noticed by the industry. Award winners can command higher rates, more lucrative book deals, and access to chefs and contacts they might otherwise never have met.

But the $150 submission fee for the chance to even be nominated for a Beard award — let alone win — is ludicrously high, and as such has long been exclusionary for writers from underrepresented communities, freelancers, and those just starting out. Freelance writers are notoriously underpaid, with one study by Payscale reporting that the average annual take home pay is $38,915, or just over $24 per hour.

Any entry fee at all means the awards are a pay-to-play system that ensures the majority of voices are left out of the conversation

The first time I submitted a piece for the Beards on my own dime, I had been paid $300 for it — total — so lost half my income just for the chance to win a prestigious, and hopefully career-boosting, award. I had to weigh the cost against the other things $150 could go toward — rent, groceries, electric bills, health insurance — and finally, tentatively, decided to go through with it. I wasn’t nominated, and probably should’ve just bought groceries. Another year, I truly couldn’t justify spending the money, and my parents gave me the entry fee as my Christmas present. (I wasn’t nominated then, either.)

The Beards are the tip of the iceberg of a sprawling, complex field (journalism) that’s historically easier to navigate if you’re someone of means. I was born and raised in Eastern Kentucky, and have never lived in New York City, the country’s major media hub. It might sound a little naive, but I have always been surprised — and, honestly, continue to be — by just how many of my peers were able to take unpaid or low-paying internships as a first step towards breaking into the industry. Food journalism — all journalism, really — continues to assume that all its writers have a safety net of monetary support to fall back on, or are young and hungry enough to take whatever’s given and gut it out in hopes of one day being invited into the inner sanctum of a staff job (or those dwindling publications that offer a dollar a word). Do you have an aging parent to care for and, in turn, can’t pay your own travel to report a story? Can’t afford daycare on the $200 offered for a heavily-reported, 2,000-word story that takes a month of research? That’s a personal issue, the industry will tell you, so you’re out of luck. But don’t worry, there’s always someone else out there who is willing to do it on the cheap.

The roots of the barrier-to-entry issues in food journalism might run deep, and this plays out in other media awards, as well. The American Society of Magazine Editors charges an absurd $395 per entry, while the Online Journalism Awards costs $175 to enter. (The contest for the Pulitzer Prize, it should be noted, is free; it’s funded by Columbia University.) But there is an opportunity for the James Beard Foundation, as a highly visible platform in food media, to set an example — and that could start by completely waiving the submission fee for writers.

As several writers suggested on Twitter, the Beards could allow writers to submit their stories for free — all writers, regardless of previous entry — while continuing to charge a fee for publications. If they’re really worried about the coffers running dry by losing out on writer submission money, there could be a nominal fee for those journalists who are previous award winners. And if some kind of fee is an absolute must, they could make more concerted efforts to offer financial assistance to freelancers or more-seasoned writers with limited means.

But I know — and have long known — the system is rigged towards the well-off: the legacy food publications and the deeply insular community of writers and editors in cities like New York continue control the tides of award-giving and, more importantly, who is even given the chance to tell their story in the first place.

And I know, though we’ve made baby steps towards greater diversity and inclusion over the past couple of years, that without a great upswell of writers who are willing to stand up to machinations of a well-oiled food prestige machine, it’s likely that paltry offerings — like, say, waving a $150 award fee for first-timer submitters — will continue to be seen by groups like the Beards as very forward-thinking and generous. But until the Beards are accessible to everyone who is courageous enough to submit their story for consideration — freelancer or staffer, just-started-out or seasoned veteran — the award is nothing more than a shiny necklace of privilege.

Sarah Baird is a writer whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, GQ, The Guardian, The Atlantic and more. She divides her time between New Orleans and Kentucky.

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ideahood58-blog · 5 years ago

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The James Beard Journalism Awards Still Favor Privilege Over Diversity

Any entry fee at all means the awards are a pay-to-play system that ensures the majority of voices are left out of the conversation

Sarah Baird is a writer whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, GQ, The Guardian, The Atlantic and more. She divides her time between New Orleans and Kentucky.

Eater.com

The freshest news from the food world every day

By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy and European users agree to the data transfer policy.

Source: https://www.eater.com/2018/10/4/17934186/james-beard-awards-media-journalism-diversity-access-fee

#read more #see more #check it out #interesting #learn more

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armeniaitn · 3 years ago

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Honoring the life of Aurora Co-Founder Vartan Gregorian

New Post has been published on https://armenia.in-the.news/society/honoring-the-life-of-aurora-co-founder-vartan-gregorian-74565-07-06-2021/

Honoring the life of Aurora Co-Founder Vartan Gregorian

On June 5, the Aurora Humanitarian Initiative held an Aurora Dialogues Online event titled “Vartan Gregorian. The Aurora Co-Founder,” focused on Vartan Gregorian’s extraordinary life as humanitarian, educator and mentor. The tribute was moderated by David Ignatius, Associate Editor and Columnist for the Washington Post, with speakers including Aurora Co-Founders, Aurora Prize Selection Committee members and Aurora Prize Laureates. The viewers also had a chance to watch several videos featuring Vartan Gregorian over the years and hear him speak about the issues closest to his heart.

To kick-of the event, David Ignatius greeted all participants and the audience. “[We are here] to pay tribute to the late Aurora Humanitarian Initiative Co-Founder and my dear friend, the incomparable Vartan Gregorian, who was an inspiration to us all and a man whose intellectual and moral legacy will live on and influence generations of thinkers and scholars,” said Mr. Ignatius, turning the floor over to Aurora Co-Founder Noubar Afeyan.

Noubar Afeyan, Co-Founder of the Aurora Humanitarian Initiative and Founder and CEO of Flagship Pioneering, set the tone for the tribute: “Over many years that I knew Vartan, I always felt he was looking over my shoulder and over the shoulder of all those he knew. What’s even more impressive though is that through his life’s work Vartan also looked over the shoulders of many thousands, if not millions more, most of whom he didn’t know.”

It was hard for Lord Ara Darzi, Chair of the Aurora Prize Selection Committee and Director of the Institute of Global Health Innovation at Imperial College London, to remain composed and not overwhelmed with emotion as he spoke about Vartan Gregorian. “He was authentic, he was selfless, he was generous to many, including me. He was poetic, he was a romantic, he was a legend. Also, his wit, his infectious smile and the twinkle in his eyes made him a superb member [of the Selection Committee]. I’ve learned a lot, watching him in action for a number of years,” said Lord Darzi.

One of the people who have experienced Vartan’s life-changing touch was Dr. Tom Catena, Chair of the Aurora Humanitarian Initiative, 2017 Aurora Prize Laureate and Medical Director of Mother of Mercy Hospital, Nuba Mountains: “He was the guy who grew up in different cultures, around people of different religions and different beliefs. And I think this really made him the man he was. He was a guy who could really get along with anybody and I think everybody felt that he was their friend.”

This sentiment was echoed by Marguerite Barankitse, 2016 Aurora Prize Laureate and Founder of Maison Shalom, who said: “He was a symbol of hope, a symbol of love, of humility, of compassion. He was a holy man. He’s a saint. He has achieved what is written in the Holy Bible. He changed the world into a paradise.”

Other speakers were also eager to list Vartan Gregorian’s achievements while simultaneously highlighting his unwavering modesty. Samantha Power, USAID Administrator, former US Ambassador to the United Nations and former Aurora Prize Selection Committee member, referred to Vartan Gregorian as her “hero friend”. “The loss is immeasurable, but the fact that he had Aurora and the energy that it gave him was incredible. <…> His own courage, his own fortitude, his own resilience are so self-evident. He is the embodiment of a self-made American man, but for any of us who’ve had the privilege of Vartan telling his own story, you would think that he had almost nothing to do with it,” said Ms. Power.

Vartan Gregorian truly lived by the principles he was striving to instill in others, noted Ernesto Zedillo, Aurora Prize Selection Committee Member, Director at Yale Center for the Study of Globalization and former President of Mexico: “When I tried to distinguish one element of Vartan’s interaction with the world, with humanity, with the people he had contact with throughout his life, the common element was generosity. And I think it was that generosity that led him to such incredible achievements. And generosity means love, love with which he did everything, and I think that is what made it possible.”

It was his unique personality that had Mary Robinson, Aurora Prize Selection Committee Member, Chair of The Elders, former President of Ireland and former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights captivated the moment she met Vartan Gregorian when he was still President of the Brown University – and not only captivated her, but also her husband, as she warmly remembered. “From the beginning, we were absolutely enchanted with this incredible President of the University – his humor, his knowledge. When I worked from New York for 8 years, we had a lot of long discussions about human rights and other issues,” she reminisced.

Shirin Ebadi, Aurora Prize Selection Committee Member, Nobel Laureate, Iranian lawyer and a human rights activist and Founder of Defenders of Human Rights Center in Iran, talked about Vartan’s unrelenting quest for tolerance, understanding and peaceful coexistence, quoting an ancient Persian tale about the common source of all religions – humanity. “If a group spreads hatred in the name of religion or ideology and considers violence permissible, be certain that they have made a mistake and have gone astray. <…> I would like to pay tribute to Vartan Gregorian, my mentor, and to remember his efforts to spread knowledge, thanks to which he paved the way for peaceful coexistence,” said Shirin Ebadi.

This was a cause the next speaker, Mirza Dinnayi, 2019 Aurora Prize Laureate and Co-Founder and Director of Luftbrücke Irak (Air Bridge Iraq), could certainly get behind as someone who has seen his people persecuted for years and continues to fight for their lives today: “When I remember Vartan, I see an Armenian single mother who brought this great man and hero to the world, as a gift to the humanitarian family of the world. So we should also spread this ideology of humanism, of peace, of coexistence.”

Vartan’s high spirits were a guiding light for many, as were his compassion and commitment, noted Nobel Laureate Leymah Gbowee, Aurora Prize Selection Committee Member and Founder and President of Gbowee Peace Foundation Africa: “An eternal optimist, I never ever think that there’s no hope in the world I live in, because not having hope is not having life. <…> Vartan was someone who showed me, in those very short six years, that indeed, remaining indifferent to the suffering of others was not something that he did. He treated you like you mattered. He treated everyone like they mattered.”

There was a certain light in Vartan that shone not only though his words, but most importantly, his actions, added John Prendergast, Aurora Prize Selection Committee Member, human rights activist and Co-Founder of The Sentry: “He believed in the things most of us could not yet see and he worked to make them happen. The concept of “bari luys,” good light, was very important to him. He saw it as hope for a better future. <…> He was transcendent in his ability to live in hope for a better future and in working to see that better future come to pass.”

As Vice President of International Program and Program Director for Russia and Eurasia at Carnegie Corporation of New York and Aurora Creative Council Member, Deana Arsenian has probably spent more time at Vartan’s side than, perhaps, all of the other speakers combined. She expressed her gratitude for the event and a little sadness due to the inability to “compress my 30-year relationship with a person who can only be described as a force of nature into one moment,” so she could share it with others. She did try, however, telling the audience a touching story of Vartan finding time in his busy schedule to talk to two five-year-old’s he met on the street during his trip to Yerevan in 2016, adding that it showed his “warm and fuzzy inner personality.”

In conclusion of the event, Ruben Vardanyan, Co-Founder of the Aurora Humanitarian Initiative; Co-Founder of Noôdome, thanked everyone and revealed his certainty that the cause that was so crucial for Vartan Gregorian will still go on, honoring his legacy. “Vartan had an important role in doing many projects in his life, but this was a unique project for him because he was one of the Co-Founders of Aurora, together with us. For him, it was critical that we continue, because Aurora for him was important not only as a humanitarian issue. He liked that we found a way to keep this global agenda connected to the Armenian world,” said Mr. Vardanyan.

Read original article here.

#Yerevan #Society

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cathrynstreich · 5 years ago

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Celebrating 40 Years: Real Estate Magazine Through the Years

Editor’s Note: In 2020, RISMedia’s commemorating our 40th year, and celebrating our incredible milestone with photos, stories and more, in Real Estate magazine and on RISMedia.com. We extend our gratitude to our partners for their steadfast support, and to you, our readers, for allowing us to continue delivering on our mission. As our Executive Vice President Darryl MacPherson (DMAC) often says…”Onward!”

In 1985, RISMedia created the National Relocation & Real Estate Magazine, aimed at connecting and educating industry professionals in the relocation sector. For a bargain $2.25, National Relocation & Real Estate, then a quarterly periodical, gave our readers a referral resource, with covers exploring novel roads, such as “Taking Relocation In-House – Good Idea?” and, later, “Changing Industry Standards: Time for Accountability?”

In 2005, the flagship magazine was officially rebranded as RISMedia’s Real Estate. Today, Real Estate is the brokerage business’ foremost resource, with executive insights, interviews and national reporting, along with monthly must-reads including the cover story, Great Spaces, the National Association of REALTORS® Power Broker Roundtable, and, every year, RISMedia’s Power Broker Report, the industry’s longest-running ranking, and RISMedia’s Real Estate Newsmakers, celebrating the who’s-who making news in real estate.

Here, we turn back the clock to the covers of yesteryear, beginning with the early iterations and through to 2019, with color from John Featherston, our founder, and Maria Patterson, our executive editor. What Happened With IBM?

The Changing Industry: The Players, the Trends and the Future (Spring 1986)

AmeriNet: The New Network (1987)

What Happened With IBM? (1988)

Dallas: Corporate America’s No. 1 Relocation Destination (1989)

Tarbell Realtors®: The First Family of Real Estate (1990)

The Challenge for Industry Standards: Time for Accountability? (1993)

The Top 250 Power Brokers of 1997 (1997)

John Featherston: In the formative years, I saw the value of identifying and connecting real estate professionals, mainly brokerage owners of multi-office firms. At the time, there weren’t many. Then there was the growing desire to connect these firms with third-party sources of new business. In this case, it started with corporate relocation and referrals; however, I believed the value would be much greater connecting local and regional real estate leaders with both third-party sources of new business and other real estate professionals. At first, a directory was the “connector”—then, in 1982-1983, we started with a limited magazine section of our annual directory, which ultimately evolved into our magazine in 1985.

A Brand World

She’s the One: Margery Marshall Takes Charge at Prudential Relocation (July 2001)

Who Is FNIS? (May 2003)

The Self-Made Style: EXIT Realty’s Residual-Based Philosophy Leads to Unprecedented Growth (March 2004)

A Brand World: Cendant’s Many Signs of Success (June 2004)

Future Focused: Bank of America Sets Its Sights on the Future of Homeownership Services (July 2005)

Prudential Real Estate: Maintaining the (Online) Edge (May 2006)

Changing the Lending Landscape (July 2007)

Maria Patterson: This group of covers takes me back to my early days with RISMedia! They really reflect the industry’s migration further and further into the digital world in the 2000s…and the growing pains that came with it, from the debate over VOWs to navigating the new online arena in which real estate was now happening. These covers also underscore what RISMedia has always done best: spotlight the industry’s movers and shakers. I also love this selection of covers because they say so much about the evolution of the magazine’s design. In this timeframe, we dropped “National Relocation &…” from the title and began experimenting with some fantastic conceptual artwork to tell more of an editorial story. Seems like just yesterday that we worked with Steve Ozonian on the “Future Focused” piece—still one of my favorite cover looks!

Bailout

Bailout: Will It Help Restore Real Estate Consumer Confidence? (Nov. 2008)

Staying Strong: Power Brokers Help Mend the Market (April 2009)

Real Estate’s ‘RREIN’ Makers (Dec. 2010)

Can Investors Bring Real Estate Back? (Sept. 2011)

MP: Well, this selection of covers speaks volumes. We were plunged into the Great Recession right along with so many of our clients and friends. I remember floating the idea by John and Darryl of eliminating the print magazine and moving strictly to a digital publication—so many publishers went that route during the recession—but their response was an adamant “no!”…and I was thrilled! We persevered with the print magazine, serving as a stable information source for an industry that was rattled to its core, and delivered many important stories to help real estate professionals understand the changing landscape, and find new strategies to stay afloat. This time frame also spawned RISMedia’s role as a B2C content provider, beginning with our RREIN Network. You can’t tell here, but the RREIN cover was actually a really cool tri-fold that showcased our early RREIN members—many of whom are still our loyal partners today. Clearly, we really showed our design chops with these covers. I love that Beatles White Album look on the “Investors” cover! Stop Chasing Unicorns

A New Generation Rocking Real Estate (Feb. 2012)

The Face of Urban Luxury (Nov. 2014)

Building a David vs. Goliath Strategy: How Homes.com Plans to ‘Out Better’ the Giants (Nov. 2015)

Realogy Presents ZAP! (March 2016)

Stop Chasing Unicorns: How HomeSmart Is Positioning Itself to Be the Ideal Brokerage That’s Real (Oct. 2017)

RISMedia’s 2019 Real Estate Newsmakers (Dec. 2018)

Dream Big. Stay Humble. Realty ONE Group Creates a Legacy for the Future (June 2019)

MP: Looking at these covers from this past decade really makes me smile, and makes me very proud. I think the diversity and the willingness to push the envelope on design so accurately reflects how this industry emerged from the recession—by being creative, taking risks and thinking way outside the box. Each of these covers comes with a story, too. The Better Homes and Gardens “Rolling Stone” cover won a Hermes Creative Award, and Leighton Dees was such a good sport to do all that jumping! The “Urban Luxury” cover was a shot we took at a Halstead listing in a jaw-dropping Manhattan high-rise apartment where we hosted our CEO Exchange reception. Realogy and HomeSmart were so impressively bold to move forward with the “ZAP” and “Unicorns” covers. Of course, our inaugural Newsmakers cover is something I’ll never forget—talk about a bold and creative undertaking! I can’t wait to see where this industry takes us next, and how it will continue to inspire the evolution of our design and our content.

Suzanne De Vita is RISMedia’s senior online editor. Email her your real estate news ideas at [email protected].

The post Celebrating 40 Years: Real Estate Magazine Through the Years appeared first on RISMedia.

Celebrating 40 Years: Real Estate Magazine Through the Years published first on https://thegardenresidences.tumblr.com/

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terabitweb · 5 years ago

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Original Post from Google Security Author: Sarah O’Rourke

Posted by Guilherme Gonçalves, Site Reliability Engineer and Kyle O’Malley, Security Engineer Intro This is the final post in a series of four, in which we set out to revisit various BeyondCorp topics and share lessons that were learnt along the internal implementation path at Google.

The first post in this series focused on providing necessary context for how Google adopted BeyondCorp, Google’s implementation of the zero trust security model. The second post focused on managing devices – how we decide whether or not a device should be trusted and why that distinction is necessary. The third post focused on tiered access – how to define access tiers and rules and how to simplify troubleshooting when things go wrong.

This post introduces the concept of gated services, how to identify and, subsequently, migrate them and the associated lessons we learned along the way.

High level architecture for BeyondCorp

Identifying and gating services

How do you identify and categorize all the services that should be gated? Google began as a web-based company, and as it matured in the modern era, most internal business applications were developed with a web-first approach. These applications were hosted on similar internal architecture as our external services, with the exception that they could only be accessed on corporate office networks. Thus, identifying services to be gated by BeyondCorp was made easier for us due to the fact that most internal services were already properly inventoried and hosted via standard, central solutions. Migration, in many cases, was as simple as a DNS change. Solid IT asset inventory systems and maintenance are critical to migrating to a zero trust security model.

Enforcement of zero trust access policies began with services which we determined would not be meaningfully impacted by the change in access requirements. For most services, requirements could be gathered via typical access log analysis or consulting with service owners. Services which could not be readily gated by default ACL requirements required service owners to develop strict access groups and/or eliminate risky workflows before they could be migrated.

How do you know which trust tier is needed for every service? As discussed in our previous blog post, Google makes internal services available based on device trust tiers. Today, those services are accessible by the highest trust tier by default.

When the intent of the change is to restrict access to a service to a specific group or team, service owners are free to propose access changes to add or remove restrictions to their service. Access changes which are deemed to be sufficiently low risk can be automatically approved. In all other cases, such as where the owning team wants to expose a service to a risky device tier, they must work with security engineers to follow the principle of least privilege and devise solutions.

What do you do with services that are incompatible with BeyondCorp ideals?

It may not always be possible to gate an application by the preferred zero trust solution. Services that cannot be easily gated typically fall into these categories:

Type 1: “Non-proxyable protocols”, e.g. non-HTTP/HTTPS traffic.

Type 2: Low latency requirements or localized high throughput traffic.

Type 3: Administrative and emergency access networks.

The typical first step in finding a solution for these cases is finding a way to remove the need for that service altogether. In many cases, this was made possible by deprecating or replacing systems which could not be made compatible with the BeyondCorp implementation.

When that was not an option, we found that no single solution would work for all critical requirements:

Solutions for the “Type 1” traffic have generally involved maintaining a specialized client tunneling which strongly enforces authentication and authorization decisions on the client and the server end of the connection. This is usually client/server type traffic which is similar to HTTP traffic in that connectivity is typically multi-point to point.

Solutions to the “Type 2” problems generally rely on moving BeyondCorp-compatible compute resources locally or developing a solution tightly integrated with network access equipment to selectively forward “local” traffic without permanently opening network holes.

As for “Type 3,” it would be ideal to completely eliminate all privileged internal networks. However, the reality is that some privileged networking will likely always be required to maintain the network itself and also to provide emergency access during outages.

It should be noted that server-to-server traffic in secure production data center environments does not necessarily rely on BeyondCorp, although many systems are integrated regardless, due to the Service-Oriented Design benefits that BeyondCorp inherently provides.

How do you prioritize gating?

Prioritization starts by identifying all the services that are currently accessible via internal IP-access alone and migrating the most critical services to BeyondCorp, while working to slowly ratchet down permissions via exception management processes. Criticality of the service may also depend on the number and type of users, sensitivity of data handled, security and privacy risks enabled by the service.

Migration logistics

Most services required integration testing with the BeyondCorp proxy. Service teams were encouraged to stand up “test” services which were used to test functionality behind the BeyondCorp proxy. Most services that performed their own access control enforcement were reconfigured to instead rely on BeyondCorp for all user/group authentication and authorization. Service teams have been encouraged to develop their own “fine-grained” discretionary access controls in the services by leveraging session data provided by the BeyondCorp proxy.

Lessons learnt

Allow coarse gating and exceptions

Inventory: It’s easy to overlook the importance of keeping a good inventory of services, devices, owners and security exceptions. The journey to a BeyondCorp world should start by solving organizational challenges when managing and maintaining data quality in inventory systems. In short, knowing how a service works, who should access it, and what makes that acceptable are the central tenets of managing BeyondCorp. Fine-grained access control is severely complicated when this insight is missing.

Legacy protocols: Most large enterprises will inevitably need to support workflows and protocols which cannot be migrated to a BeyondCorp world (in any reasonable amount of time). Exception management and service inventory become crucial at this stage while stakeholders develop solutions.

Run highly reliable systems The BeyondCorp initiative would not be sustainable at Google’s scale without the involvement of various Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams across the inventory systems, BeyondCorp infrastructure and client side solutions. The ability to successfully achieve wide-spread adoption of changes this large can be hampered by perceived (or in some cases, actual) reliability issues. Understanding the user workflows that might be impacted, working with key stakeholders and ensuring the transition is smooth and trouble-free for all users helps protect against backlash and avoids users finding undesirable workarounds. By applying our reliability engineering practices, those teams helped to ensure that the components of our implementation all have availability and latency targets, operational robustness, etc. These are compatible with our business needs and intended user experiences.

Put employees in control as much as possible

Employees cover a broad range of job functions with varying requirements of technology and tools. In addition to communicating changes to our employees early, we provide them with self-service solutions for handling exceptions or addressing issues affecting their devices. By putting our employees in control, we help to ensure that security mechanisms do not get in their way, helping with the acceptance and scaling processes.

Summary

Throughout this series of blog posts, we set out to revisit and demystify BeyondCorp, Google’s internal implementation of a zero trust security model. The four posts had different focus areas – setting context, devices, tiered access and, finally, services (this post).

If you want to learn more, you can check out the BeyondCorp research papers. In addition, getting started with BeyondCorp is now easier using zero trust solutions from Google Cloud (context-aware access) and other enterprise providers. Lastly, stay tuned for an upcoming BeyondCorp webinar on Cloud OnAir in a few months where you will be able to learn more and ask us questions. We hope that these blog posts, research papers, and webinars will help you on your journey to enable zero trust access.

Thank you to the editors of the BeyondCorp blog post series, Puneet Goel (Product Manager), Lior Tishbi (Program Manager), and Justin McWilliams (Engineering Manager).

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Go to Source Author: Sarah O’Rourke How Google adopted BeyondCorp: Part 4 (services) Original Post from Google Security Author: Sarah O'Rourke Posted by Guilherme Gonçalves, Site Reliability Engineer and Kyle O'Malley, Security Engineer

#Google Security

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biofunmy · 5 years ago

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Back to Basics for a Designer Whose Business Got Too Tight

Scott Sternberg would prefer you not call him “quirky,” as has happened many times before. It’s “a word people like to use for me a lot,” Mr. Sternberg said, “which I don’t love.”

So we will not repeat the offense, further than to note that, while Mr. Sternberg may not be quirky, there he was, in all his Peter Panish youthfulness, with his penchant for stripy shirts and Polaroid film, seated in a geodesic dome of his own design as vintage monitors played the funny little videos he creates, ruminating about utopia.

If Mr. Sternberg has a quirk — let’s say for a minute that he does — it is for ginning up not just clothes (which he does) or videos (which he does) or even geodesic domes (which he has, for his label’s first-ever pop-up, in the SoHo branch of the furniture seller Design Within Reach), but also an entire world in which all of these things come together, with its own rhythms, cadence, colors and meticulously designed aesthetic.

Mr. Sternberg, 44, is what is usually called a fashion designer, insofar as he is in the business of making and selling clothes. If you know his name, it is most likely that you remember his former label Band of Outsiders, which, from 2004 to 2015, had a profound impact on the way stylish American men dressed, squeezing them into slim shirts and skinny ties and Sperry Top-Siders: prep-school style in quotation marks, self-aware and self-effacing.

Mr. Sternberg thinks of himself less as a designer or a creative director than as a world builder. He and Band of Outsiders parted company, and his new brand, Entireworld (aha!), is less exclusive and less niche; a collection, essentially, of basics. It is clothing considered from the bottom up — one if its founding garments was a pair of underpants.

Now with a few more staples to round it out, Mr. Sternberg hopes for nothing less than to dress the entire world. A year into its life, the question is: Can he?

The Entireworld world, a fantasyland in Disney colors (Disney World is an acknowledged influence), is a cheerful, welcoming one. Mr. Sternberg’s Band of Outsider tailored jackets could once run $1,800 or more; Entireworld’s T-shirts are $32.

The same sensibility — Mr. Sternberg’s cinematic adorable — animates both. Many of the same friends who posed pro bono for guerrilla Polaroid ad campaigns are now in Instagram videos, singing, mugging or prat-falling: Jason Schwartzman, Kirsten Dunst, Andrew Garfield, Spike Jonze.

Over a series of interviews beginning in April 2018, at its inception, and continuing through Entireworld’s first year, Mr. Sternberg explained his vision of this world and how it was built on the ashes of its predecessor. In so doing, he offered a view into the tectonic shifts in the fashion industry, the instability of the high-fashion, runway model he left behind and the traditional gatekeepers who perpetuate it.

Mr. Sternberg had been featured in every fashion magazine, won the industry’s top awards, hosted Anna Wintour and Kanye West at his fashion shows. Still, he said at a public conversation at Design Within Reach with Deborah Needleman (the former T Magazine editor), “the fashion system can feel like jail.”

Band of Outsiders did $15 million in wholesale business its height, but Mr. Sternberg, overstretched and under-resourced, who sought and received investment, couldn’t keep up with the immense pressure to grow. He found out that his last hope for additional funding passed on the morning he opened the first Band of Outsiders shop in the United States, in SoHo. (The first-ever store had opened in Tokyo.)

He received a loan from CLCC, a Belgian fashion fund, for $2 million, but soon clashed with his new backers. Ultimately, Mr. Sternberg’s company defaulted on the loan and Mr. Sternberg himself walked away from the Band. CLCC assumed ownership, and Band of Outsiders continues without him, with a new design team in place. Mr. Sternberg called their first collection “a disaster.”

The challenges of designing and producing collection after collection of men’s and women’s wear are significant, and Band of Outsiders eventually grew to encompass several lines. The collections were well received but also vulnerable to the whims of trend and timeliness, and the vagaries of inconsistent production.

Even Band’s signature slim cuts were in part a self-fulfilling prophecy: After an initial run of shirts were (correctly) snug, other orders arrived from the factories in similar style. “Everything just came in a little bit small,” Mr. Sternberg said. “I’m not kidding.”

Band’s cuts — like those of Thom Browne, whose shrunken suits were a more conceptual foil to Mr. Sternberg’s easier Americana — helped convince curious young men to embrace a snugger silhouette. But that fit made democratizing and expanding the brand nearly impossible. In any case, high-fashion esotericism had never been Mr. Sternberg’s intention.

“That’s just not me,” he said. “That’s not how I see my legacy.”

If fashion is by definition exclusive, Entireworld is inclusive; fashion segments the world into groups of like-minded (and like-dressed) cohorts, but everyone wears underwear. In a video announcing the creation of Entireworld last year, Mr. Sternberg faced the camera and, as his face dissolved into a montage of stylish men and women (Mick Jagger, Sade, The Dude), acknowledged his past failings and vowed to take a different tack.

“I started thinking about what it would be like to create something more democratic this time, without compromising anything about the design or quality,” he said. “About the stuff we live in every day.”

But now, instead of staging fashion shows and courting the fashion press, instead of depending on the patronage of department stores and boutiques, Mr. Sternberg’s Entireworld is sold primarily from its own website.

Mr. Sternberg runs the entire business out of a bland commercial office building in the Koreatown neighborhood of Los Angeles, from where he conjures a utopia only he can see. He is the man behind the curtain. Entireworld, and the thousand tiny windows onto it offered on Instagram posts and its cheeky, sunny website, is Oz.

Of course, the thing about Oz is that the man behind the curtain is pulling the levers, working to convince you to buy a $32 T-shirt from him, rather than a $10 three-pack from Hanes. He will tell you that his feels better, fits better and wears better; he will not be wrong.

But a basic is a basic, and to many, the difference is hard to parse. Mr. Sternberg is under pressure to make Entireworld so appealing that even its basics have ineffable magic that coaxes credits cards out of wallets.

Mr. Sternberg has to capture that market with less of the support he once enjoyed. “Have we captured the attention of traditional media outlets the way I expected to, the way I did at Band? Eh,” he said, giving a grunt of not-really. He has skipped the fashion shows and presentations he once staged. As a result, Entireworld has made a smaller splash.

But those who love it — those who may be rising to replace the old gatekeepers — have vouched for it. “Basically have not taken this sweatshirt off since I got it last week,” Leandra Medine, better known as the Man Repeller, posted to her Instagram not long after the label’s debut.

At Design Within Reach, Mr. Sternberg had his first real-world test, hanging racks of Entireworld clothes among Alexander Girard dolls and Man Ray chess sets and Hans Wegner chairs. Pegged to New York’s NYCxDesign programming, the Entireworld shop stayed open for 11 days, and customers came away with hot-pink sweatsuits and cotton sweaters.

“It was definitely something we had never done,” said Kim Phillips, the head of public relations and events for Design Within Reach. “It was sticking my neck out there for sure.”

Mr. Sternberg called the experiment gratifying. “An idea like this, I really believe more than ever has a place, especially when I see the sales and repeat sales,” he said. “I think the real challenge is — I know the real challenge is — that the amount of capital it’ll take to get where we need to getis formidable.”

To start Entireworld, Mr. Sternberg raised $1.5 million from a group of private investors, and he has sought further investment to grow and scale it. Within its first year, he said, the company has sold more than three quarters of its initial inventory and reached more than $1 million in sales without paying for any advertising.

Numbers like these, while impressive, mean Entireworld is dwarfed by many of its competitors, limited by finite capital but not in an ideal position to attract more. “There’s a real disconnect,” Mr. Sternberg said, between his values and the goals of the investors he is hoping to attract.

“Investors want a return, and they want a return in a certain amount of time,” he said. “I understand all these things, clearly, but they still don’t change my view that sticking to my guns in terms of what this is and what it should be shouldn’t bow too much to the pressure of what investors think it should be right now.”

And while the signs have been good — Ms. Phillips said that she and Mr. Sternberg were talking about the pop-up traveling to other Design Within Reach locations, and sales continue to climb online — the economic reality of keeping a fashion business afloat is a chilly reality intruding into utopia. The world isn’t Entireworld, yet. But Mr. Sternberg said there had been no question of not trying his hand in the rag trade again.

“Unfortunately not,” he said with a laugh. “I am an entrepreneur by birth. I am at my most ebullient, excited, energetic when there’s a big challenge and a huge bucket that needs these ideas to fill it out. It’s painful. It’s not easy. There’s just this unexplainable, probably illogical urge to do this stuff.”

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mikemortgage · 6 years ago

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Skincare Company, Aesop, Deploys a New International Point of Sale Solution from Cegid

Aesop ANZ stores launch the new Cegid Retail in-store solution, ‘Shopping’, as part of the company’s global store roll-out

PARIS — Skincare company, Aesop, is upgrading its global point of sale (POS) systems in partnership with Cegid, the leading provider of unified commerce solutions.

Skincare company, Aesop, deploys a new international point of sale solution from Cegid

Aesop, was established in Melbourne, Australia in 1987, and formulates skin, hair and body care products of the finest quality. It now has a presence in over 20 countries around the globe, across 200 signature stores and more than 80 counters in select department stores.

In 2017, Aesop made the decision to unify its disparate, legacy store systems across its global bricks-and-mortar retail onto a single POS platform. Aesop selected Cegid to undertake this project due to the strength of its centralised cloud-based solution and international capabilities which supported the skincare company’s global footprint.

The new POS solution, Cegid Shopping, which also incorporates the Clienteling, and Cataloging modules, integrates with the skincare brand’s ecommerce platform, affording Aesop a single view of the customer across its sales channels. This 360-degree view of the shopper ensures a consistent, personalised and seamless customer experience at each touchpoint, to maximise sales opportunities and drive customer engagement.

The robust architecture of the new solution also allows integration with the wider tech stack, from ERP to the CRM and an integrated payments system from Adyen, while a real-time, single stock pool, which is centralised in the cloud, has also enabled automatic store replenishment capabilities.

The new POS solution was rolled-out to Aesop’s 51 Australian and New Zealand signature stores and department store counters over a six-week period earlier this year. The global implementation will continue in Asia in early 2019.

Sylvain Jauze, International Business Development Director at Cegid, said: “Forward thinking brands and retailers, such as Aesop, understand that customer experience and channel consistency are key to ensuring their reputation is enhanced at every touchpoint with their customer. The robust worldwide cloud infrastructure that the Cegid Retail solution delivers will enable Aesop to quickly and flexibly adapt to any technological, business and regulatory developments across its markets on one centralised platform.”

-ENDS-

Notes to editors

About Cegid retail:

Our mission is to enable retailers to never miss a sale in the digital age and seize new growth opportunities by delivering a unified, personalized shopping experience in-store, online, anytime, everywhere. Our cloud based unified commerce platform includes features such as order management, merchandising and inventory management, digital and Mobile POS, Clienteling, CRM and retail analytics and is available in SaaS or on-premise. Over 1,000 retailers and 70,000 stores in 75 countries trust Cegid to reinvent the customer experience, digitize their stores, maximize sales, and succeed with unified commerce. We support clients including Barbour, Clarins, Delsey, Estee Lauder, Gant, Havaianas, Lacoste, Leica, L’Occitane, Paul Smith, Quiksilver, Ted Baker, and Yves Rocher.

Cegid has 2,400 employees and sells its solutions in 75 countries. In 2017, Cegid recorded a turnover of €332 million. Pascal Houillon has been the CEO since March 2017.

About Aesop

Aesop was established in Melbourne in 1987 with an objective to formulate products of the finest quality.

This includes skin, body, and hair care, as well as fragrance and accessories for self and space.

The company explores widely to source plant-based and laboratory-made ingredients, using only those with a proven record of safety, efficacy and pleasure. Aesop products are available online, at signature stores in many major cities, department store counters, and in shared spaces around the world.

Contacts

Sarah Cole mailto:[email protected] 01892-786-917

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android-for-life · 6 years ago

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"Service NSW empowers customers and reduces costs with Chrome Enterprise"

Editor’s Note:Today’s post is from C-suite duo Colin Jones, CTO, and Ben McMullen, CIO, ofService NSW, an agency that helps residents of New South Wales, Australia, connect online and in person with government services. The agency uses Google Chrome Enterprise, Chromebooks and G Suite to reduce IT administration and costs, and to give employees more work flexibility.

When you replace inefficient technology with easy-to-manage tools, you become inspired to build on your success. That’s what we found after we adopted Chrome OS to run our government customer-service kiosks. Once we saw how easy it was to manage and use our kiosks, we started to look for ways to use Chrome OS more widely. By bringing Chrome Enterprise into our offices as well as our customer storefronts, we found we could reduce IT workload, trim network costs, and most importantly, help our employees work better together.

Our journey started with a goal to improve customer service. At 130 Service NSW locations across New South Wales, people can use self-service kiosks for 1,200 types of transactions, like obtaining driver’s licenses and ordering birth certificates. The kiosks offer a much faster way for people to request these services compared to standing in line. Our customers love using them, and since Service NSW launched in 2013, we’ve completed about 70 million transactions.

Before switching to Chrome OS in 2015, our kiosks ran on a legacy OS that lacked reliable remote service features. When kiosks needed repairs or upgrades, field support agents had to visit offices and spend a couple of hours rebuilding hard drives. This meant that kiosks could be out of service for as long as two days.

Once we purchased 800 Chromebase all-in-one desktop computers, we immediately found Chrome Enterprise reduced our costs, streamlined IT management and increased security. Over a six-month period in 2015, we estimated that Chromebases required only 5 percent of the support hours we were spending on the Microsoft devices previously in use.

Because our kiosks didn’t need as much maintenance and could often be repaired or upgraded remotely, their uptime improved, giving customers more kiosks to use. And with kiosks more readily available for users, Chrome OS is helping us meet our goal of performing 70 percent of all transactions digitally by 2019. As we moved resources to the cloud, we found we no longer needed costly private WAN networks for each service location, only broadband and Wi-Fi. Eliminating private networks is an enormous savings by itself. When you add in the savings on devices and IT management, we’re targeting reducing our operational costs by 46 percent per year.

As a result of our successes with Chrome OS in our service locations, we began replacing legacy desktops and software at our head office locations with Chromebooks and G Suite. We're actively rolling out Chromebooks and G Suite to all of our staff in the next 12 months.

In our offices, we see the same reduction in cost and IT administration that we experienced with the kiosks. We also realized that we can give employees much more flexibility in the ways that they work. Their applications and files are in the cloud, so they can do their jobs from any place that has internet connectivity, instead of being tied to an office. And G Suite helps employees save the time they used to spend traveling to other offices. Collaboration has increased now that our employees can work from any device, anywhere, and be productive.

As a result of all of this, Chrome OS has become our digital platform of choice at Service NSW. We’ve recently purchased 1,200 additional Chrome OS devices to replace the remaining Windows desktops at all of our service locations. We expect that we’ll continue to see the same dramatic savings in costs and admin time that we’ve already experienced with our kiosks—and our employees will get the benefits of working in the cloud.

What started as a journey to make our customer experience faster and easier became a solution that made our employee experience faster and easier as well. As we continue on this journey, we’re expecting to see even more positive effects on costs, IT workload, and worker flexibility in the future.

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theconservativebrief · 6 years ago

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One of the most important legacies of LeBron James’s remarkable career will be one of player autonomy. He set the standard for an era of perceived labor power in pro sports. We now believe athletes should have greater agency to set the terms of their employment.

At three critical junctures in his career, James dictated the terms of his employment to the league’s billionaire owners. During his second stint playing for the Cleveland Cavaliers, he exercised self-determination to an unprecedented degree, wresting control of much of the team’s future away from its owner. On a recent podcast, after James said this week he would sign with the Los Angeles Lakers, the Ringer’s Chris Ryan said he thought of LeBron as the first “post-team” player in the NBA.

But James’s career also reveals the limits of labor autonomy in an infrastructure with such a power imbalance. NBA players have negotiated terms from their ownership that are far superior to America’s biggest sports league, the NFL. But their contract can still prevent somebody like LeBron — even the greatest player in the world — from playing for his real market value.

The max salary prohibits James from realizing his full worth. And it’s also helped establish the Golden State team juggernaut that has beaten LeBron for the NBA title in three of the past four seasons. The Warriors just added DeMarcus Cousins this week to a two-time-defending-champion core of Kevin Durant, Draymond Green, Klay Thompson, and Steph Curry. The team’s owner is able to keep this group together, at least in part, because there is a limit to how much those highly skilled players can be paid.

These are the working conditions of perhaps the most singularly gifted worker in America at a time when the Supreme Court is rolling back the collective bargaining rights of public workers who will never attain even the limited autonomy that James’s superstardom has afforded him.

“You can be a superstar basketball player,” Richard Yeselson, a contributor editor for Dissent who has commented extensively on labor issues over the years, told me. “You can’t be a superstar steelworker or nurse or bookstore clerk or elementary school teacher.”

Those will be LeBron’s twin legacies in terms of pro sports’ labor rights: He pushed the boundaries of player agency more than anybody before him, but the inherent restrictions and inequalities of the system he worked under helped create a team that even he, perhaps the greatest player in the sport’s history, couldn’t beat.

James’s career ushered in a new norm of player sovereignty in professional basketball. After years of watching his owner and management team fail to build a winner in Cleveland, he engineered the birth of a new superteam in Miami in 2010. He defied Miami’s front office a few years later to return to Cleveland. Upon his homecoming in Ohio — and with the letter penned by Cavs owner Dan Gilbert, poisoned by contempt for his employee, having aged far worse in the public consciousness than LeBron’s decision to leave — James refused to give up leverage.

He signed a series of one-year deals, using the constant threat of his leaving to force Gilbert — who was gifted a second chance after his team lost one-quarter of its value when James left the first time — to spend exorbitantly on the team to put a championship contender on the floor. Gilbert did, and the Cavs won a title, helping James erase the one conceivable blemish on his personal playing legacy, now made up of four MVP awards and three championship rings.

This is how Will Leitch summed up the influence of LeBron’s decisions, particularly that first move to seize control of his destiny and move to Miami, for NBC News:

Indeed, in the eight years since James’ decision, the idea of athlete autonomy — of a player having more control and power over his or her own career, of not just being an employee of an owner who is not the one out running and dunking — has caught on in the public consciousness in a way it had failed to before. James’ move was the instigating act.

“What LeBron has done now twice — starting with the ‘big three’ in Miami which he pulled together — is to maximize his personal leverage within the overall rules of the NBA road,” Yeselson told me. “And because the NBA contract is the most player friendly and he is the greatest player, he can really maximize his leverage.”

LeBron has been bolstered, as Yeselson notes, by one of the more player-friendly collective bargaining contracts in professional sports. There is nothing as egregiously anti-labor as the franchise tag in the NFL dictating James’s fate; that tag quite literally prevents a player from leaving the team that controls his interests. He also has more freedom than Michael Jordan, to whom James is always compared, who tried and failed in the 1990s to challenge the NBA’s free agency restrictions under the Sherman Antitrust Act.

But that freedom is not absolute. And the restrictions that NBA owners have put on their players bear direct responsibility for the construction of the five-All-Star monstrosity in San Francisco, a team that not even LeBron, for all his individual greatness, seems to have any hope of beating.

The culprit is the NBA’s maximum salary. A player with James’s tenure cannot be paid more than 35 percent of the league’s salary cap, or $35.7 million, next season. The league’s CBA also allows teams that currently control a player’s interest to pay them slightly more, giving teams a financial carrot to dangle over their players to retain them. By any empirical metric, LeBron is worth a lot more than $36 million: When he left Cleveland in 2010, the Cavs lost about $120 million of their value and Miami, his new team, gained another $60 million in worth for its owners, per Forbes.

That fundamental piece of the NBA labor infrastructure has helped Golden State — which also benefitted from great drafting, the archaic ritual that gives teams the opportunity to claim a player’s rights by no more than chance, a literal lottery — build its super-team.

The Warriors had Curry, Thompson, and Green locked up for years on cost-controlled contracts. They were literally the best bargain in sports. Then the max salary — paired with a historic spike in the salary cap as the game grew more popular — gave Kevin Durant an opening to join them. He was going to be paid roughly what he was in Golden State, about $25 million, no matter where he played. Why not join the best team in the league, if the pay is the same, and win a few legacy-defining championships?

“There is so much more money as a result of TV deals that elite players can move without incurring too much of a markdown to intrinsic value,” Michael LeRoy, a professor at the University of Illinois who has studied sports and labor, told me.

But the max salary is the tool that owners have used to assemble such a gaudy collection of talent as we’re seeing in Golden State. Now they’re adding DeMarcus Cousins, an All-NBA center coming off a serious injury, who is signing a LeBron-esque one-year $5 million contract with an eye toward increasing his value, and exercising his right to choose an employer, in 2019.

If the New York Knicks, a bedeviled but historic and wealthy franchise that Durant reportedly might be interested in helping to revive at some point in his career, could offer the two-time NBA Finals MVP an unlimited amount of money, Durant might have left the Warriors already or never gone there in the first place. That’s if New York could have given him a $50 million-per-year contract. He, like LeBron had before him, is keeping his options open with a series of one-year contracts.

But for now, Durant has little reason to leave the best team in the league, maybe the best team in league history, beyond his own whims and competitive desires. The financial incentive is not really a concern, because the owners have artificially restrained how much players, even those of Durant’s caliber, can make.

“Even LeBron can’t get what’s he’s really worth to franchises who increase their market value every year,” Yeselson told me. “There are still maximum contracts, both in salary per year and in lengths — LeBron is probably worth a lot more money than whatever the given maximum is.”

Original Source -> LeBron James and the NBA teach us a lot about labor in America

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topsolarpanels · 8 years ago

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China builds world’s biggest solar farm in journey to become green superpower #GlobalWarning

Vast plant in Qinghai province is part of Chinas determination to transform itself from climate change villain to a green energy colossus

High on the Tibetan plateau, a giant poster of the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, guards the entrance to one of the greatest monuments to Beijings quest to become a clean energy colossus.

To Xis right, on the road leading to what is reputedly the biggest solar farm on earth, a billboard greets visitors with the slogan: Promote green development! Develop clean energy!

Behind him, a sea of nearly 4m deep blue panels flows towards a spectacular horizon of snow-capped mountains mile after mile of silicon cells tilting skywards from what was once a barren, wind-swept cattle ranch.

Its big! Yeah! Big! Gu Bin, one of the engineers responsible for building the Longyangxia Dam Solar Park in the western province of Qinghai, enthused with a heavy dose of understatement during a rare tour of the mega-project.

The remote, 27-square-kilometre solar farm tops an ever-expanding roll call of supersized symbols that underline Chinas determination to transform itself from climate villain to green superpower.

Built at a cost of about 6bn yuan (721.3m) and in almost constant expansion since construction began in 2013, Longyangxia now has the capacity to produce a massive 850MW of power enough to supply up to 200,000 households and stands on the front line of a global photovoltaic revolution being spearheaded by a country that is also the worlds greatest polluter.

The development of clean energy is very important if we are to keep the promises made in the Paris agreement, Xie Xiaoping, the chairman of Huanghe Hydropower Development, the state-run company behind the park, said during an interview at its headquarters in Xining, the provincial capital.

Xie said that unlike Donald Trump, a climate denier whose election as US president has alarmed scientists and campaigners, he was convinced global warming was a real and present danger that would wreak havoc on the world unless urgent action was taken.

When I was a child, rivers usually froze over during the winter; heavy snowfall hit the area every year, so we could go skiing and skating people werent very rich, and nobody had a fridge, but you could still store your meat outside, the Qinghai-born Communist party official remembered. We cannot do that any more.

Sheep graze amid the panels at Longyangxia Dam Solar Park in Chinas Qinghai province. The plant has the capacity to produce 850MW of power. Photograph: Tom Phillips for the Guardian

Anders Hove, a Beijing-based clean energy expert from the Paulson Institute, said that as recently as 2012 solar power was shunned as a potential source of energy for Chinas domestic market because it was seen as too expensive.

No more. Costs have since plummeted and by 2020 China which is now the worlds top clean energy investor hopes to be producing 110GW of solar power and 210GW of wind power each year as part of an ambitious plan to slash pollution and emissions. By 2030, China has pledged to increase the amount of energy coming from non-fossil fuels to 20% of the total.

Earlier this month, meanwhile, Chinas energy agency vowed to spend more than $360bn on renewable energy sources such as solar and wind by 2020, cutting smog levels, carbon emissions and creating 13m jobs in the process.

The numbers are just crazy, said Amit Ronen, director of the George Washington Universitys GW Solar Institute, who described feeling awed by the scale of the Chinese solar industry during a recent trip to the country.

Activists now hope Beijing will up the ante once again following Trumps shock election.

Amid fears the billionaire US president will water down attempts by his predecessor, Barack Obama, to fight global warming, campaigners are calling on Chinas rulers to seize the mantle and position their country as the worlds number one climate leader.

As Mr Trump drops Obamas legacy, Mr Xi might establish one of his own, Greenpeace campaigner Li Shuo told the Guardian on Wednesday .

That campaigners are now looking to China for green leadership underlines the once unimaginable changes that have taken place in recent years.

While China remains the worlds biggest emitter, thanks to its toxic addiction to coal, it has also become an unlikely figurehead in the battle against climate change.

Longyangxia Dam Solar Park in Chinas Qinghai province. Photograph: Tom Phillips for the Guardian

Last September campaigners hailed a major victory in the war on global warming when China and the US jointly announced they would formally ratify the Paris agreement.

Our response to climate change bears on the future of our people and the wellbeing of mankind, Xi said, vowing to unwaveringly pursue sustainable development.

Ronen said: A decade ago, Chinas attitude was: You guys put all that carbon in the atmosphere growing your economy, we should be allowed to put a lot of pollution up there too to grow our economy. Now look at where we are.

Sam Geall, the executive editor of China Dialogue, a bilingual website on the environment, said Beijing viewed having a climate change denying US president as a rare and unexpected opportunity to boost Chinese soft power by positioning itself as the worlds premier climate change fighter.

[China sees it as] an opportunity for them to show leadership, he said. Ive already heard that from people who work in environment bureaucracy in China. They see this as an opportunity for China to step up.

Ronen said Chinas renewable revolution, which has seen sprawling solar and wind parks spring up across its western hinterlands, was part of a dramatic political U-turn that culminated in Beijing throwing its weight behind the Paris climate accord last year.

He said part of the explanation was air pollution repeated episodes of toxic smog have convinced Beijing it must take action to quell public anger and part was climate change.

They are very much impacted by a lot of these climate change weather patterns that are particularly troublesome: drought in the north, flooding they are very vulnerable to, Ronen said.

But Paulson Institutes Hove said the key driving force behind Chinas low carbon quest was economic.

Most of the things that China is doing related to the environment are generally things that China wants to do for the economy as well, he said, pointing to Beijings desire to rebalance the economy away from investment-led heavy industry-focused growth while simultaneously making itself the key player in an industry of the future and guaranteeing its own energy security.

Hove said Beijing saw a huge investment opportunity in exporting low-carbon technology such as high speed rail, solar power or electric vehicles to developing nations in Africa, south Asia and Latin America. This is a 20-30 year mission to develop [clean] markets, he said.

A recent report captured how China was already dominating the global clean energy market, pointing to billions of recent investments in renewables in countries such as Brazil, Egypt, Indonesia, Pakistan and Vietnam.

Xie, the Huanghe chairman, said his company was now making its first steps into Africa with solar and hydro projects under development in Ethiopia.

We are actively going global, he said, warning that the developing world could not copy the wests dirty development model without bringing about the destruction of the world.

Geall said one indication of whether China was prepared to become the worlds premier climate leader would be if it was seen helping to finance more low-carbon projects beyond its own borders such as a huge Chinese-built solar park in Pakistan.

Youd hope to start seeing more of those sorts of projects around the world being financed rather than [China being] just a source of cheap finance for dirty energy projects.

Not all are convinced China is ready or even willing to become the worlds top climate leader in a post-Trump world.

Zhang Junjie, an environmental expert from Duke Kunshan University, believed China would stick to its Paris commitments out of self-interest, particularly since the fight against global warming empowered its environmental agencies to crack down on toxic smog despite strong resistance from vested interests.

[But] if China needs to do more, to commit more, I dont expect that is likely, Zhang added, noting that China wanted to be a climate leader but not the climate leader. Leadership is not just power it is responsibility.

With Chinas economy losing steam, Zhang said tightening regulations on greenhouse gas emissions further would inflict major trouble on its manufacturing sector. Chinas clean industries were not sufficiently developed to provide jobs for all those who would be made unemployed as a result. I would say, dont count on [China to fill the gap left by the US], he said. China has its own troubles now.

Chinas push to develop renewables has not been entirely plain sailing either, with concerns about over-capacity, falling demand for electricity and curtailment, the amount of energy that is produced but fails to make it to the grid.

Hove said despite the rapid growth of the sector, wind still accounted for just 4% of Chinas electricity last year and solar for about 1%. Government subsidies meant many of the biggest solar and wind parks had been built in sub-optimal locations such as Qinghai, Gansu and Xinjiang, far from the southern and eastern metropolises where the energy was most needed.

Those behind the worlds largest solar park admitted obstacles such as energy wastage and transmission had yet to be overcome, but said there was no looking back as China forged ahead towards a low-carbon future.

New energy is surely the future … Its hard to predict the future but I believe that solar energy will account for 50% of the total in 50 years, said the engineer Gu.

Xie said authorities in Qinghai were now so confident the future of China was green that they were planning two massive new solar parks on the Tibetan plateau, with the capacity to produce 4GW of energy.

In a sign of the central governments support for the renewable revolution, Xi recently visited Xies company, urging staff to make every reasonable effort to develop the PV industry.

Xie, who hosted the Chinese president, scoffed at Trumps suggestion that climate change was a Chinese hoax and said such claims would do nothing to dampen his countrys enthusiasm for a low-carbon future.

Even if President Trump doesnt care about the climate, thats Americas point of view, he said. The Chinese government will carry out and fulfil its international commitments as they always have done in the past, and as they are doing now in order to try to tackle climate change.

Xie concluded: I dont care what Mr Trump says I dont understand it and I dont care about it. I think what he says is nonsense.

Additional reporting by Wang Zhen