#oops a media studies essay

[operahousebookworm]

I was endeavoring to explain elsewhere why "13yo girls devouring the works of Stephen King" was such a common millennial experience, and I think a big part of it is his novels are ALL interiority. Yeah there's supernatural forces and creepy setpieces and all, but especially in his monologues, it's all internal monologue and deep memory and so so much voice. And this is all fascinating as hell when you're just starting to realize there's an adult world out there and trying to sort out how people move through it. (Especially when packaged with the aforementioned horror elements.)

You really see it in the Kubrick film of The Shining vs. the book. The film is about an evil hotel. There's not really a rhyme or reason to why these specific creepy things are happening, they're just creepy and look cool. Its primary vibe is discomfort and there also just happen to be these people here who low-key hate each other. Stans try to talk about how it's all about the psychological effects of isolation but the characters are broken and shut-off from each other from the beginning.

(These people are all ready to draw blood right this second and you cannot convince me otherwise.)

The book, meanwhile, is an absolute masterpiece of interiority, consisting (mostly) of three interweaving internal monologues of very distinct people who desperately want to connect with each other and cannot manage it. Jack loves his wife and adores his kid so goddamn much but he cannot control his rage and addiction, which leaves him constantly trying to make up for things he barely remembers doing. Wendy sees that her son has a special bond with his father that she cannot replicate or share, even though she's been the dependable one taking care of him. She sees herself repeating a pattern from her own upbringing and she hates it so much but she cannot will the jealousy away. Danny sees his parents breaking and wants to fix things, thinks he could fix things if he were either more gifted or more normal. They are all struggling against the forces that shaped them, swimming upstream with everything they have even as they're inexorably pushed toward the sea.

The hotel is merely feeding on them. Not on their anger or paranoia, but on their frustrated and helpless love. The fact that they keep trying to connect and keep getting it exactly wrong is what creates the opportunities for the evil to slip in and amplify those things they all hate about themselves, widening the gaps between them. They refuse to give up on each other, their chapters all show how badly they want to make things work, and that makes the tragedy inevitable.

And I should probably shut up now BUT this is why so many people remember the topiary scene as the most terrifying part of the novel, and why it's not in the movie. Because in the novel it is a sloooooow build of dread as Jack faces their impending isolation and tries to fulfill his duties as caretaker. The wrongness is just lurking at the edges until it starts rapidly closing in, and the increased intensity is Jack working himself into an absolute panic at the thought that if he could just push his limits just a little further and see them all at once, he could render this whole threat harmless. Sure, a thing that only moves when you're not looking at it is scary, but it's terrifying to Jack because the sense of being millimeters shy of your own salvation and still falling short is his whole damage.

And on film it would die completely. Increasingly close-up shots of shrubbery, intercut with a dude losing his entire mind about it, is pure B-movie camp. Small wonder it didn't make it in.

A lot of fiction these days reads as if—as I saw Peter Raleigh put it the other day, and as I’ve discussed it before—the author is trying to describe a video playing in their mind. Often there is little or no interiority. Scenes play out in “real time” without summary. First-person POV stories describe things the character can’t see, but a distant camera could. There’s an overemphasis on characters’ outfits and facial expressions, including my personal pet peeve: the “reaction shot round-up” in which we get a description of every character’s reaction to something as if a camera was cutting between sitcom actors.

When I talk with other creative writing professors, we all seem to agree that interiority is disappearing. Even in first-person POV stories, younger writers often skip describing their character’s hopes, dreams, fears, thoughts, memories, or reactions. This trend is hardly limited to young writers though. I was speaking to an editor yesterday who agreed interiority has largely vanished from commercial fiction, and I think you increasingly notice its absence even in works shelved as “literary fiction.” When interiority does appear on the page, it is often brief and redundant with the dialogue and action. All of this is a great shame. Interiority is perhaps the prime example of an advantage prose as a medium holds over other artforms.

fascinated by this article, "Turning Off the TV in Your Mind," about the influences of visual narratives on writing prose narratives. i def notice the two things i excerpted above in fanfic, which i guess makes even more sense as most of the fic i read is for tv and film. i will also be thinking about its discussion of time in prose - i think that's something i often struggle with and i will try to be more conscious of the differences between screen and page next time i'm writing.

[waterfall-ambience]

In Stars and Time and Procedural Rhetoric

This semester I got the opportunity to write one of my final essays on ISAT for my media studies class. I had a lot of fun writing this (I actually initially surpassed the word limit OOPS), and, if time, motivation, and energy permit, I might end up writing more essays on ISAT because I have so many thoughts about this game. But in the meantime, please enjoy!

'In Stars and Time and Procedural Rhetoric' or: 'How ISAT uses medium of video games to tell its story'

Contains mild spoilers (talking more about game mechanics and thematic ideas than the plot itself), except for the penultimate paragraph, which has spoilers for the end of the game.

Video games are a unique art form in that they can tell engaging stories using the interactive aspect of the medium. The process of doing so, using game mechanics to convey the story’s messages, can be described as ‘procedural rhetoric’. Ian Bogost developed the idea of procedural rhetoric in the 2000s to describe the way that systems could create rhetorical arguments (Bogost 2) through established rules and processes. It has since become a key framework to analyse video games and how they can convey arguments and produce meaning.  ‘In Stars and Time’ (ISAT) is a 2023 roleplaying game by Adrienne Bazir that is exemplary in using procedural rhetoric to tell its story. The game follows the protagonist, Siffrin, as he becomes trapped in a time loop just as he and his friends are about to finish their adventure and defeat the final boss, the King, who has taken over the House of Dormont and frozen the country of Vaugarde in time. Siffrin relives the same two days on repeat, and over the course of the game, he descends into despair as his situation becomes increasingly hopeless. This essay aims to use Bogost’s ideas of procedural rhetoric to examine how ISAT uses its mechanics and mediation to create an affective response that helps the story convey its ideas about mental health and depression. 

            ISAT’s mediation is key to how its story is told. Video games often have an aspect of intertextuality, and ISAT is no different, as it plays with the concept of the time loop. ISAT works with a player’s understanding of time loop tragedies, such as those in the anime  Puella Magi Madoka Magica, in order to create expectations of how the game’s narrative will unfold. However, while the ‘experience’ of the time loop in Madoka is limited by the audience being passive observers for a short amount of time, ISAT’s player is an active participant in every loop that Siffrin goes through. Because of the game’s interactivity, ISAT is able to help the player empathise with Siffrin on a deeper level than they otherwise would have if the story was told through a non-interactive medium.

ISAT uses procedures to help players empathise with Siffrin through the diegetic aspect of the game’s death loop mechanic. This early synchronisation of player-character experiences helps ISAT begin developing its rhetoric. Whenever Siffrin/the player dies, they loop back to run through the House all over again. While Siffrin can choose to loop back to any point in time, there remains a repetition of going through the same rooms, fighting the same enemies, and running through the same conversations. At first, Siffrin and the player explore the House for the first time, becoming increasingly familiar with the layout, enemies, and puzzles with each loop. The time loop acts as a problem-solving process (Navarro-Remesal and García-Catalán 207), as both Siffrin and the player make progress by learning and exploring the House,  aided by the repetition of the loops. This familiarity and eventual mastery of the House can instil pride or confidence in the player (Hanson 277), especially in the early game. This confidence reflects Siffrin’s disposition during earlier loops, where they are ecstatic in being able to help their friends, even calling their ability a ‘blessing’.  ISAT begins building its rhetorical arguments with processes to help the player empathise with Siffrin, by making their affective responses similar to each other.

However, as the loops go on and the House becomes extensively explored, the repetition becomes tedious. This negative affective response is intentional. Many games require an element of repetition to gain mastery over the environment (Hanson 275), and ISAT is intertextual in how it expects players to be familiar with the repetitive process from playing other games.  However, in keeping the player in an already mastered environment, it flips that expectation on its head, prolonging the repetition beyond the point where it feels ‘natural’ in a game. The tedium the player feels reflects how Siffrin feels as they spend longer in the time loop and become increasingly desperate to escape. This synchronisation of experiences relies on the game’s mechanics being paired with its writing, and so can be considered 'procedural rhetoric' because it conveys how miserable the time loop experience is through coded processes. Character narration and narrative progression is used to supplement this idea, but much of ISAT’s rhetoric regarding this aspect is conveyed through synchronicity of affect created by the diegesis of the game’s mechanics.

The mechanics supplementing the time loop are also used to develop the game’s rhetoric. As the loops go on and Siffrin begins to unravel, it becomes increasingly clear that the loops exacerbate Siffrin’s mental illness and act as a metaphor for depression. This part is done more through the ‘text’ of the game than the interactive aspect, as Siffrin’s internal monologue becomes darker and darker, and his character portraits in the game’s menus begin to look more exhausted and unwell, while his friends remain blissfully unaware. While more textual than other aspects, this is still an example of procedural rhetoric because these changes only occur after certain checkpoints in the game’s code have been passed, and are used to argue that depression can be deeply isolating; that suffering alone begets suffering.

It is in the design of the combat system that ISAT’s argument about the nature of mental illness becomes clear: mental illness, especially depression, is a profoundly isolating experience. This is conveyed by the distance that the game creates between Siffrin and his friends. The key mechanic is that Siffrin keeps all their experience points from the loops, while their friends get reset after each one. As a result, Siffrin levels up faster than everyone else, gaining more powerful skills that surpass the combat niches that were initially filled by other characters. The game’s battle system is built on the idea of Rock Paper Scissors. At first, each character has a ‘type’ of attack they could use and a secondary effect. For example, Siffrin is scissors type and speeds up attacks, Mirabelle is scissors/paper type and heals, and Isabeau is rock type and boosts defence. However, as the loops go on, Siffrin accumulates more powerful skills. Siffrin gains rock and paper attacks, as well as healing abilities, incentivising the player to rely on Siffrin. Siffrin eventually becomes the strongest, most versatile character in the game, while the others become comparatively weaker. While the party starts the story working as a team, by the end of it, Siffrin is a one-man army. The difference in strength between Siffrin and the party conveys distance between them, with Siffrin remembering a host of painful experiences that their friends do not. This connects to the idea of the time loop as a metaphor for depression, because Siffrin becomes more isolated from his friends the longer he suffers in silence. Siffrin becoming self-sufficient in combat also reflects and ‘justifies’  their mentality that they can handle everything alone. This thematic link between the game’s mechanics and Siffrin’s mental state helps the player understand them as a character, and helps in the player’s emotional investment in the story. The use of game mechanics also ties into Bogost’s ideas of procedural rhetoric, because this portrayal of mental illness and isolation is developed primarily through the processes of the game itself (Bogost 3 ). This rhetoric also relies on ISAT’s mediation as a video game because the interaction and the game’s rules are vital to incentivising the player to make decisions in the same way Siffrin does, understanding why he believes certain (albeit unhealthy) things about himself.

The enemies in the House also stay at the same level throughout the game, while the party (particularly Siffrin) becomes stronger. As this happens, the combat becomes easier and less rewarding, creating a sense of tedium. This reflects how Siffrin feels that there is no reward to fighting enemies, or doing anything other than escaping the time loop. This is especially applicable to the King, the final boss. As the King fights become easier, Siffrin begins interrogating him for information. The party sees this behaviour as absurd, but Siffrin and the player have grown to see him merely as an obstacle rather than a nigh-undefeatable threat. This ties into ISAT’s rhetoric about depression because it shows that not only can mental illness create feelings of isolation and loneliness even when surrounded by others, but it can also erase any feeling of achievement or meaning in one’s actions. This aligns with Bogost’s ideas of procedural rhetoric because this tedium and understanding of the pointlessness of Siffrin’s actions are created through the pairing of ISAT’s writing with the game’s mechanics.

Outside combat, the game mechanics relating Siffrin’s interactions with their friends reflect how their relationship with them changes as the loops progress. Early on, the player gains the ability to skip through conversations that they have seen before. While primarily for the player’s convenience, this ability is framed as Siffrin ‘zoning out’ and not paying attention. This makes little difference in the early game, because most of the party’s conversations are new. ISAT’s character writing endears the player to Siffrin and their friends at this stage, helping them form an emotional attachment that reflects Siffrin's bond with each character. However, the number of novel conversations decreases as the loops progress. The player might use the ‘zone out’ function sparingly at first, out of curiosity that something might change, but use it more liberally when it becomes apparent that most conversations will remain the same. This is used to convey Siffrin’s boredom, but also it creates distance between Siffrin (and the player) and the rest of the party, which reflects how depression can leave someone feeling isolated from the people they care about.

Each party member also has a ‘friendship quest’ that becomes available in Act 3. Each quest brings Siffrin closer to their friends as he begins to understand them better. ISAT’s writing is emotionally compelling on its own, and after the completion of the quests, Siffrin begins the loop with a stronger bond to them. The game’s menus even correct themselves; the cast are no longer called Siffrin’s ‘allies’ or ‘friends’, but rather ‘family members’. The friendship quests are also strategically rewarding. Each party member gains a special, powerful combat skill, only obtained from completing the quest in a particular loop. When the loop resets, they lose the skill, and Siffrin has to complete the quest again to regain it. He and the player can choose to go through the motions again, even after the emotional impact has worn off. Combined with the ‘zone out’ function, ISAT’s rules and processes convey how Siffrin gradually loses connection with the party, eventually growing to see them as ‘actors’ reciting lines rather than the people they once called ‘family’.

Siffrin’s festering loneliness culminates in their breakdown at the climax of the game, where their distance from the party and their desperation to escape the time loop causes them to hurt the people they care about. While the character writing makes Act 5 emotionally challenging, the player understands why Siffrin sees the party as ‘actors’, as they have been going through the same ‘lines’ and conversations that Siffrin has, on repeat. It is through the combination of the game’s writing, mechanics, rules, and processes that ISAT creates an affective response in the player over the course of the game that amplifies Act 5’s emotionality. It is these affective responses that help the player understand Siffrin’s mental state, and how their coping mechanisms have driven them to despair. The time loop is only broken when Siffrin finally tells the party that he wished to stay with them for longer, something that they had previously been too afraid to admit. In pairing the narrative progression with the player’s affective responses created by the game’s mechanics, ISAT argues that the first step of breaking a depressive spiral is to open up to people you trust, and admitting that you need help.

ISAT utilises procedural rhetoric to create an affective response in the player that helps the game convey arguments about the experience of mental illness, namely that depression is an intensely lonely experience, that it can create distance between yourself and the people you care about, suffering silently perpetuates misery, and that admitting that you need help is key to breaking the cycle. The diegetic time loop mechanics synchronise the player’s experience with Siffrin’s build empathy, and the game is designed to be sometimes frustrating and tedious to communicate how Siffrin’s depression gets worse over time.  In using programmed mechanics and interactivity to create an affective response in players, ISAT communicates complex ideas about the nature of depression that would otherwise be limited if the story were told in a non-interactive medium, showcasing how video games are a unique art form that can be used to create meaningful narratives.

Works Cited

Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games. The MIT Press, Cambridge, 2007, http://dx.doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/5334.001.0001, doi:10.7551/mitpress/5334.001.0001.

Hanson, Christopher. “Repetition”. The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies, edited by Mark J.P Wolf and Bernard Perron, 2nd ed., Routledge, 2023, pp. 275 - 281.

Navarro-Remesal, Victor and García-Catalán, Shaila. “Try Again: The Time Loop as a Problem-Solving Process in Save the Date and Source Code.” Time Travel in Popular Media: Essays on Film, Television, Literature and Video Games, edited by Matthew Jones and Joan Ormrod, McFarland & Company, 2015, pp. 206 - 218

[yakultii]

Your uni work sounds really interesting, would love to hear more about it if you feel comfy sharing!

omg yessssss I fr can only study things I am passionate about !! I’d tell you everything but idk where to begin!! I did a lot of philosophy over the past few years but I got tired of it so I’ve gone full circle and I’m back doing sociology which comes a lot more naturally to me (while I looooved writing philosophical essays/curating my own ideas based off previous ones/filling the gaps, I got hella sick of reading stupjd ideas from middle aged white men from way back oop(I have a lot of opinions on that but I’d go on forever) and sociology I enjoy both the reading and the writing and the researching component(I think), though I’m quite new to conducting my research from scratch rn) - I mean sociology is genuinely just about how everything is socially constructed , peeling back the layers, even on the things you wouldn’t think are/sociology is just the study of how social influences play a role in shaping us/how private problems can be shaped by public issues sometimes (not to take away autonomy completely but just to acknowledge there are structural and historical elements at play.. to then find more effective solutions to social problems including things like health, economy and so on) .. so while I’m technically wasting my life away these last few yrs feeling non-human I’m always lowkey learning about life on the side .. so when/if I finally get it together and go live half a life I’m gonna have more knowledge on my side (which can’t be a bad thing surely - though sometimes I wish I knew less about life haha) I also did closer studies in gender studies a few yrs back but I found that general sociology incorporates gender in just about every topic and felt more useful for every day life, though I’d recommend that everyone takes an intro to gender studies class if you can! I’ve done a tonne of units over the yrs.. in philosophy my fav/most memorable was on love, sex and death which was super fun and was actually what made me think I wanted to go down philos pathway ahh I got super passionate and also world religions I loved too! but some memorable sociology units I enjoyed covered public health, youth, performance of identities etc (it’s all stuff I already knew but I love putting it into formal practice) and this sem my focus is on 1. sports and bodies in society 2. contemporary research (which is a diff class entirely but I also happen to be conducting research on transphobia in sport utilising social media) 3. love, sex and relationships (which is mostly on family dynamics so far but I think it’ll get more interesting soon) and4. culture, control and boundaries which is a lot on deviance and how society kinda constructs what is deviant, who is the “other” how we “other” people etc. and then next sem I think I’m gonna go back to focusing on religion again but from a sociological perspective rather than philosophical and some others… I mean obviously within each unit there’s a lot more to it and there is method to sociological approach but that was just a brief overview of what I’m doing rn haha but let me know if there’s anything in particular you wanna know about !!! regarding sociology in general or any of these topics ig :))) p.s if u feel like ur stuck/can’t escape society’s constructions and want to live freely in denial (what I should do) I highly recommend u don’t study soc bc it will only reaffirm how fucked up capitalism and patriarchy got us, no matter what field within soc u look into like this study only enables my depression for sure which is probably why it comes naturally to me lmao but also I feel like everyone should study soc bc I feel like it’s knowledge everyone should have Argh. I need everyone to know and understand everything I know and understand !!!! (I’m learning that’s just never gonna happen ugh)

also side note - I still personally think philosophy is beneficial to study as it teaches you how to think more critically, though I felt I already did that but it allowed me to put it into practice formally I suppose, so I still think it’s worth it! but I feel as though once you are confident thinking extremely critically/not just consuming but critically responding/putting forward your own ideas/knowing how to contribute something new to academic discourse , philosophy starts to feel pointless for me because the content itself is not so applicable to real life as something like sociology but that’s just my opinion haha

also fun fact that I didn’t really know before I studied sociology is that soc is actually a science like it has its own set of research methods and procedures to follow (if you go beyond writing random essays ofc) which I think is kinda cool considering I never took much interest in typical science (I think science is cool and great but my adhd brain just don’t give a fk)

[rosesakura]

Hi! I’m here for the questions for fic writers :)

How about!!! 2, 3, 5, 9, 10, 13, 14. I know this is ridiculous and a lot so feel free to pick and choose!! I’m just very curious and passionate about your writing. Sending hugs and lots of love <3

I literally forgot all about this ask omg!! Okay woo let's gooooo. Under the cut because, you know, it's me.

2. Is there a trope you’ve yet to try your hand at, but really want to?

Unequal social status. The whole Princess and the Pauper thing I kinda vibe with. It depends a lot on the characters I'm working with tbh -- some tropes fit some fandoms better than others. But in terms of hq, definitely this trope!

3. Is there a trope you wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole?

Love triangles, particularly like if it’s the Main Plot. I have been scarred from the 2010s where every teen piece of media had a fuckin love triangle like bitch I am OVER IT. Plus it’s like, someone always gets their heart broken and I don’t like that. I actually could go on and on about this but I won't make you read an essay haha

5. Share one of your strengths.

I actually hate you for always making me reflect on my work -.- I have no idea what my strengths are… I guess I’m good at idea generating lmfao I always have a million ideas?

9. Which fic has been the hardest to write?

Haaaaands down the stars are already dead. Not only because it’s such a heavy topic and I’m so worried about how I handle it, but also because it’s shifted away from romance, which I’m more comfortable writing, into a study on grief, which is much more complex. 

10. Which fic has been the easiest to write?

Oop I’m gonna mention 2. Unravel was relatively easy because I had so many scenes and specific ideas I wanted to write out. I planned it out pretty okay and had so many details in brainstorming that I could draw from if I was stuck. Though my one story, Something Safe was written in less than a day when I was at work. I had so many feelings about those characters and the video game that it just flowed right onto the page.

13. What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever come across?

Show emotions; Tell feelings. Came across this on a tumblr post on pinterest. I mostly use it as a reminder to ensure I don’t ramble too much with descriptions or get carried away and to remind myself to focus on the emotions of the characters, because that’s usually the most important part to me. It's really more of a guideline.

14. What’s the worst writing advice you’ve ever come across?

Don’t use adverbs. You can pry adverbs from my cold dead hands. I actually dislike writing advice that so specifically says Do Not Do. It makes me immediately feel bad if I see something on the list that I do when I write and I think writing is so specific and personal to each writer that advice like that just isn't that helpful.

[clintbeifong]

Okay, I've decided to do no one a favor and actually try to answer this.

Because yes, my joke answer was 'cocaine' and that is true. I've also heard 'it's just excellent craftsmanship' as an answer before, and that is also true.

But the thing is, other shows have been written on cocaine, and other shows have been technically excellent. There are other phenomenal, technically masterful, lightning-in-a-bottle, as close as human-made media can come to perfection shows, and to my experience they still don't hit quite like The West Wing.

Which leaves us with op's question: How does The West Wing make you feel shrimp emotions?

I have a theory that a lot of forces coincided to make this happen. One significant category was technical mastery. Writing, acting, directing, editing, etc. etc. all firing on all cylinders. The quality of the show, I think, speaks for itself.

Another key force is the hope behind it all. The West Wing is fundamentally hopeful. About America, about democracy, about the ability of competent, level-headed people to make change, and it is achingly sincere in this hope. The show wears this hope on its sleeve in every episode and it never punishes its characters for believing things can change. Yes it absolutely challenges the characters in massive ways--as a good drama should--but the narrative itself never turns around and says "you were an idiot for believing in this."

That means it doesn't punish the audience for buying into this hope either. The show asks you to be join them on a mission that actually matters and rewards you for it. Note that this would not work if it wasn't for the general technical excellence. It would be so easy for a show like this to come off as cloying and saccharine. If Aaron Sorkin wasn't actually a presidential-caliber political speechwriter, if Martin Sheen couldn't deliver those speeches with the sincerity and gravitas to make you believe them, et al, the show would feel, honestly, a bit silly.

These are not new observations. But if there is a secret ingredient to The West Wing, my personal theory is that it's the story world the show is set in. The Newsroom provides us a great illustration of this. Like The West Wing, it is:

written by Aaron Sorkin

about a noble group of do-gooders on a mission to save the world with liberal intellectualism

set in a high-powered, fast-passed sphere with significant influence on the public and current events (a major broadcast news network)

fundamentally believes in America, democracy, and our ability to make things better

And yet The Newsroom also does not hit like The West Wing. Don't get me wrong, I love The Newsroom. It is tww's chaotic, soapy little cousin and it's so much fun. But it also serves to illustrate that even with the same technical and ideological elements as tww, something is still missing. Or rather, tww contains something unique.

To wit: the world.

The world that The West Wing is set in delivers three critical elements to the story: impact, rules, and 'the pressure cooker.'

Impact

Due to being set around an American presidency, The West Wing feels like it matters in a way that other shows don't. Other shows can build amazing stakes within their internal worlds, but when we turn the tv off we know, for example, that Game of Thrones is not actually our problem. tww, while obviously fictional, feels a step closer to reality that most other shows. It feels like it matters. Like watching it might actually make a difference.

This, again, only works so well because the show is so well done. Also, there have been other shows and movies about fictional presidencies and that also do not hit like tww.

Rules

At its core, The West Wing is a procedural. It may not be as straightforward as a more traditional crime, legal, or medical procedural drama (get case → find clues → solve case) but I would argue that the way it sets up its problems is made of similar elements.

Generally when we talk about worldbuilding in fiction we're talking stories more 'other' to our daily lives--sci fi and fantasy especially. Magic systems and all that. But I think tww essentially leverages the real American political system in a way that makes it feel, for lack of a better term, like a magic system. It teaches the audience the rules for what the gang needs to do to pass a bill, how a filibuster works, but does so in a way that feels incredibly lived in, only giving the audience the minimum amount of explanation needed to follow the story.

And that often makes a story with a complex set of rules feel real--like you're just getting dropped into someone's real, complex life.

But because of the topic at hand those rules are things you--as an American view especially--know about, have heard about, or can learn about. The world of the show feels immersive because it is. You can see the bodies, structures, and procedures its talking about at work in your real life.

And you can use that knowledge to predict how the characters will react within the show.

I'll be an asshole and throw out the word verisimilitude here.

The Pressure Cooker

But possibly my favorite element of The West Wing's worldbuilding is something I've been calling 'the pressure cooker.'

Because of the nature of the characters' high-ranking, public-facing positions, and given the 'realism' the show is going for, there is always a tonal 'lid' on The West Wing that there isn't on most other shows. These characters cannot freak out/break down/go off the way characters in other shows might under similar circumstances. It's like...imperative to the safety of the country/world that they at least appear to be in control.

And there are serious consequences when they slip up. CJ almost loses her job when she lets her guard down and says something she shouldn't have. Josh has to have a secret therapy meeting and if it gets out that he is struggling with ptsd he'll lose his job too. And of course there's Bartlet's MS.

And on the romantic side of things, there's all the ways it is nearly impossible for any of these people to live normal lives or pursue stable relationship, even with other people in the same weird little world, until they are out of the pressure cooker.

I'm not sure how well I'm explaining this, but there is a level of decorum and professionalism that is demanded of these character at all times that compounds everything else going on in the show. Again, this is stacking on everything that's come before it, so if the show wasn't excellently crafted and hopeful and realistic this probably wouldn't matter, but on top of everything else that makes The West Wing special, this just might be the last quarter turn of the screw that locks things into place.

And it's compound by the fact that this was a network show in the 90s. They couldn't even say 'fuck'! Do you know how much pressure would vent from this show if they could just shout 'fuck!" every once in a while? I want that release for them! But I don't get it, because the tone of the show compounds with the meta-politics of broadcast television to create this tightly wound, high pressure world that is forced to vent its frustrations and its pain in the most restrained ways possible and that creates something unique, I think.

Conclusion

When you take this lid off the simmering pot of drama soup, you get something more like The Newsroom. Which, again, I love, but it's at a full, stupid, chaotic boil where The West Wing is only ever allowed to reach a very strategically crafted simmer. No matter how badly it wants to boil over, the rules its set for itself--those internal to the show, those its adapting from real offices and systems, and those its forced to abide by because of the nature of its distribution--prevent that.

Anyway, that's my working theory.

can someone PLEASE tell me what drug they put in the west wing bc i literally feel completely unique emotions when watching & thinking abt that show. how did they make it that good.

[tuiyla]

.

[chillafqueen]

This started off as a rant piece but then turned into an essay about my feelings about the show so definite Sex Education Season 3 spoilers under the cut

Literally do not try to argue with me I do not care

Tagging this only as sex education spoilers and sex education season 3 spoilers so hopefully it only shows up in those tags for people filtering it because I don't really care to make this a discussion I just needed to get this out my head

We seem to be in this golden age of media where we no longer care about character development or story development.

only ships and ships only, if your ship breaks up or it doesn't happen it's queer baiting or it's straight baiting or it's misogynistic or it's shitty writing

And I'm aiming this mostly at the Sex Education fandom just because I've seen /some/ people claiming it as such.

Ruby and Otis were cute together trust me I loved it. But it's not bad writing for them to break up it's not objectifying as a ship point to further along Otis and Mauve

Or the same goes from Adam and Eric

It's a show about high school. Even if it's a show, realistically these people won't stay together forever

It's take realistic routes for these characters

And we need to think critically about it

Ruby and Otis might just be a stepping stone towards endgame Otis x Mauve but it's not wasting Ruby or bad writing

It's sad to see, I really loved Ruby's development and her dynamic with Otis was adorable and I loved watching them grow

Ruby grew from this relationship. Did you really think the first person she trusted and loved was gonna be the person she married? No that's unrealistic and truly bad writing

These relationship, their highs and their lows and their break ups are there for each character's development

Sure Ruby got her heart broken but she also learned and hopefully she grows from it

She started off a rude, selfish bitch obsessed with status, image and popularity

Then she opens up and allows herself to be vulnerable

She shows Otis her house her family and that her real life isn't as glamorous as she puts on it's scary and she thinks that he will judge her and leave but he doesn't

He treats her with the same amount of respect that he had before he knew these personal parts of her

And sure now that she got hurt she could regress, she might think that she was right all along that once she shows her inner self to someone they'll hurt her just like Otis did or she grows from it and realizes that what she thinks the unattractive parts of herself aren't as bad as she thought and she'll learn and grow to be nicer and less judgemental and less distrustful and she'll meet more people and learn that looks and popularity aren't everything and one day she will find someone who loves her just as much as she loves them

Otis didn't love her, he had strong feelings for her but he wasn't on the same page as Ruby and even though he said those feelings could develop with time and that there's no guarantee that his feelings won't grow into love, Ruby had every right to set boundaries and end the relationship. She has every right to expect her partner be on the same page as her. And also she's a teenager she can end a relationship with her high school boyfriend because he doesn't love her back. If she wants to wait and continue the relationship hoping Otis would eventually reciprocate her love, then she could. But she was hurt and felt dejected and she decided to cut her losses rather waste her time if Otis couldn't love her back. She had every right to do so. It's not bad writing. She's not the type to hopelessly pine after someone who doesn't love her back. She is a bad bitch who moves on and does better.

And while Otis doesn't really gain much from the relationship except that he hurt Ruby he still continues to develop as a character

And there's a message there that it's hard to love someone when you never got closure from your past love

His relationship with Ola failed because of his unresolved feelings with Maeve and then his next relationship with Ruby also fails because he can't love her because of his unresolved feelings and lack of closure with Maeve and he also learns that

But also it's okay to not feel the same way about someone. And Jakob was right when he assured Otis that it was right to be honest with Ruby. Even if he hurt her, it was best to be honest and hurt her than lie to her and lead her on with a lie. It wouldn't be good for Otis and it wouldn't be good for Ruby if Otis just lied saying he loved her back.

And even if Ruby was just a plot device for potentially endgame Otis and Maeve then big deal.

It's kinda obvious that Maeve and Otis are the main goal and target relationship of the show.

And it's a common trope with them in the show that they are never in the same place at the right time.

Otis has feelings for Maeve but she's with Jackson. He tries to move on and dates Ola. And when he's no longer available it's when Maeve realizes her feelings for Otis and it's shown that Otis still very obviously has feelings for her even while in a relationship with Ola and it effects the relationship until it falls apart when Ola finds out that not only does Otis has feelings for Maeve but he holds Maeve in higher regards than her.

So the relationship ends

So does that mean Maeve and Otis will be together now that Ola and Otis are.over? No because neither of them are on the same page.

And so they miss the opportunity. Then they fight and their friendship is over

Then Isaac deletes the voicemail of Otis confessing and apologizing to Maeve and asking for them to try again

So Maeve misses that opportunity because she doesn't even know. And Otis doesn't know that she never heard the voicemail and thinks she's rejecting him so he tries to get over her.

And when he moves on, Maeve takes that as him saying their friendship and whatever she thought could happen was over. He was with Ruby, so obviously he didn't have feelings for Maeve

And then Ruby and Otis break up and Maeve and Otis talk and finally are on the same page and kiss

But oops, Maeve has feelings for Isaac and things seem to be going well so she's not going to ruin that for a chance with Otis

Then Isaac finds out that Maeve and Otis kissed and ends things.

So now Maeve and Otis can be together right? Otis is single and so is Maeve and feelings are out there. Well things look good until Maeve can't miss the chance to take that exchange program to study in America.

But they're technically together??? Maybe they can be long distance? Maybe they will wait for each other?

Their entire theme is not ever being at the same place at the same time. Something always comes up. One of them is always in a relationship when the other isn't. Or something comes up where they aren't available or now, Maeve is going to another country for a few months, just as things were going to happen.

Why does it have to be that way? Why can't your favorite ship be endgame just because you like it? Because it's not your show. You didn't produce it or write it. You are not entitled to have the show cater to your every want. These writers have a specific vision in mind and they may or may not already have a set ending in place. The moment they presented their idea to a network they might've already had their endgame ship set in stone.

It's not bad writing if your ship isn't endgame. It isn't objectification if a character was written in a way just to further the plot in a certain way. That's how stories work.

That being said, Eric and Adam was the same way.

They both grew because of their relationship and they learned.

Was it shitty of Eric to cheat on Adam and not tell him right away? Sure, yes.

But he learned that even if he loved Adam and was content in their relationship, it was caging him. He is a different person from Adam. He had his own dreams, likes, boundaries and such. And as does Adam. But those differences can hold each other back and hurt each other.

Eric is comfortable with his sexuality. He is gay and proud and he happens to have a lot of stereotypical gay hobbies and interests. He likes camp, he likes drag, he likes makeup and he is comfortable with his sexuality and doesn't care what others think and so he wants to be all these things out there in the world.

Adam doesn't. Adam is in his first gay relationship after slowly coming to terms with his sexuality. He's not out there like Eric. His mom doesn't know about them and he's scared of telling her, and he especially doesn't want his dad to know.

He was raised the same way his father was, which we find out this season. He gets taught toxic masculinity. He is taught any weakness is feminine and weak and bad. Being vulnerable is bad, expressing soft emotion is bad. And that cultivates into anger and violence.

He is emotionally stunted because of it. And he is slowly unlearning it.

He slowly comes to terms with his sexuality, and he slowly learns to be emotional and vulnerable. And Eric helps a lot with it. Eric is patient and encouraging.

But Adam is still a different person than Eric. He is shy, he is slowly becoming more out every day, he's learning to express himself through meaningful ways, but it's in ways different than how Eric does.

He likes makeup and dancing but maybe he's not ready to go out in the world doing that. Or he is just a private person and no matter how comfortable he gets with himself he may never want to go out to a gay club and dance and wear makeup

But Eric does.

Eric wants to go out he wants to be gay and free and open. That's his personality and he's had a longer time accepting himself and learning not to be afraid of public perception because he knows there's people out there like him. But Adam isn't.

And Eric has every right to break up with Adam because he is young and he doesn't have to stay grounded. He has yet to experience everything he wants and has yet to really know himself. But being with Adam halts that because Adam isn't like him.

Eric is learning to experience life and fly free and he's not afraid of going out there and living life to the fullest. In a way Adam doesn't.

And that's okay. That's real life.

People grow at different rates and in different directions. Let them grow even if it's away from you.

And by the end Adam is hurt but he is a different person because of Eric and for the better.

He is learning to be himself. He is learning how to express himself, to reach out for help, to be open with others. And that's a lot of progress.

He is hurt, his first love, his first gay love broke his heart. But he is stronger than before.

And Eric is free to continue spreading his wings not afraid of being held down by someone not in the same place as him.

And that's what the show is really about.

It's about these teenagers growing and learning and becoming better people. They will change and they will develop into new forms of themselves with each new relationship and challenge.

Love isn't the ultimate goal. It's being yourself and doing what is best for yourself.

Ruby and Otis were really cute together. I really did root for them and I really loved watching Ruby slowly change for the better. And I hope she continues to.

And I really loved Adam and Eric together but Eric cheated and he realized while it was wrong it made him realize that his relationship with Adam is stunting his growth.

You meet people and they may hurt you or you may hurt them but that's how life goes. And hopefully you impacted each relationship in a meaningful way even if it's not the way you intended. That you learn a lesson or you are the lesson.

It's truly brilliant writing. It's realistic, it's diverse, it's open and fresh, but witty and sometimes cheap but Jesus Christ it's not about you and your ship. You are here to watch the story unfold. And maybe get inspired or just be entertained.

When the story takes a turn you don't like it's not always bad writing.

It's only bad writing when it makes no sense, cut corners, is inherently offensive with no meaning to it, or completely does a 180 on all the character progress or other examples.

Hopefully the story ends with meaning. Maybe Otis and Maeve are endgame. Maybe they breakup and meet later in life. Or maybe Otis reconnects with Ruby. Or he meets someone new entirely.

Or maybe he ends the show single and just as involved in his career as his father was or whatnot.

And maybe Maeve also gets so involved with just making it in life that she has no room for a relationship. Or she meets someone new or reconnects with Isaac.

I love that even though the story points to Otis and Maeve endgame it's not the only story or romance explored.

We see Aimee is still struggling with her assault but she's willing to get help and that she learns to stand up for herself and do what makes her happy even if it may upset others, like breaking up with Steve even though he has been nothing be supportive.

I really enjoyed Cal and their introduction. And I enjoyed seeing Jackson be more and more open to trying and learning new things. He is just wanting to find himself and feel fulfilled. And I loved seeing Cal set boundaries with their identity and Jackson.

If Jackson can't accept that Cal isn't a girl and so that means if they were together it would indeed be a queer relationship and that would make Jackson not straight. And Jackson trying to bargain and negotiate while Cal stood firm was insightful.

Because I too, like Jackson, even if subconscious, still perceived Cal as a girl in some way even if I completely understand their identity and will help accommodate it in anyway. And it's just about unlearning the norms I was raised with. Even if I accept and understand, there is always room for more learning. But another thing with Cal, it's not their responsibility to fight.

If they don't want to lead the fight for gender rights and equality then they don't have to.

If you can't accept or won't listen, it's not their responsibility to make you change your ways but they will not respect you and they will not come quietly.

It is not every non-binary, trans, gay, bi, pan, ace, lesbian or anyone who isn't like you, person's responsibility to teach you or answer your questions or change your perception

And that was quite refreshing to see and I really admired seeing that in this show

And also showing that each non-binary person is different. Layla isn't willing to even challenge the system. Because they are scared and from what we see in the last episode, they aren't out to their family. They aren't ready and aren't comfortable trying to fight and that is their right.

And then seeing Cal teach Layla how to bind properly is a good lesson to anyone watching the show that might be binding incorrectly.

And then I also really enjoyed seeing Vivienne and her long distance boyfriend Eugene.

I was happy to see that her jealousy of Cal wasn't because she saw Cal as a romantic rival but friendship rival. Jackson and Vivienne were drifting apart due to their opposing views on Hope and that Viv took Jackson's place as Head girl.

And also seeing Vivienne's boyfriend be some hot, refined man was satisfying to see.

I also loved seeing Maeve learn to accept help and kindness. I was so scared that he and Aimee would never make up but they did and it was the most beautiful thing to see because they are the best friend goals to ever bless the tv world.

And I loved that Isaac wasn't depicted as just some poor helpless paraplegic but he had character and he had talent and he was never seen less than. He was a witty asshole!

And he even got the girl for a while! And he has standards!

I mean sure I don't feel that bad about his feelings getting hurt by Maeve because he took it upon himself to make a decision for Maeve and manipulating the situation for his own selfish crush on Maeve. I mean you didn't let her make the choice. You deleted the voicemail and so she thought Otis still hated her and refused to apologize. Sure she ended up getting feelings for you but because you intervened and lied she never got the chance to truly get closure with Otis because you knew that if she heard the message she'd go to him

Sure you didn't deserve her kissing Otis when you two obviously had something going on but... What did you expect?

And my last thoughts are Jakob and Jean. I liked them together in the beginning but it became apparent that they are two very different people. They just don't fit.

At first I couldn't understand Jakob's distrust of Jean, I mean she messed up once while drunk with her ex husband. It was wrong but I thought it was a tiny little forgiveable thing (and maybe I think that because I'm biased by my love of Jean). But once we get that soft moment of Jakob opening up to the therapist and we find out that his last relationship, with his wife, also had trust betrayed. Her having an affair and then getting sick afterwards so therefore Jakob felt he couldn't leave her when she was so ill.

And I thought Jean and Jakob trying to force a family relationship was not the best route. They had made it clear before that they are just two different people. You can coparent without being in a relationship.

But even through it all they still cared deeply for each other. So yeah.

But my only true criticm of the show is the paternity test results. Now sure we don't know what they say BUT Jean's reaction screams that Jakob isn't the father. Which just disappoints me. Jean has been through so much.

And who else would be the father? We weren't shown any other potential baby daddies.

Also she's been through so much just give her one thing.

Like I like to hope that next season she tells Jakob and even though he's not the dad, he's been there and he was making that baby a goddamn tree house that he steps up and raises that baby like it is his because that baby deserves a father.

But I can only see that Jean will probably hide the truth and they start out quite happy until the results are discovered and Jakob finds out and he is rightfully upset and angry and betrayed and he leaves her and the baby. Or real baby daddy comes to try to be there and makes more drama.

Idk

And just because it's how the show goes Maeve and Otis are gonna have something come up and it gets in the way of them being together.

I hope Michael and Adam make some peace as part of both of their developments. Of course I do see Michael having issue with Adam's lack of traditional success and his sexuality but I hope they work it out or at least try next season.

And I hope that Rahim and Adam don't become a thing. They are similar in their introversion and lack of flamboyancy with their sexuality but I hope they bond and become friends but I don't think it's be in good taste for them to date. It's like recycling your gays.

I'm not really sure what's in store for the school. I think maybe someone swoops in last second or they all go to different schools and have to move away and they all lose touch and it's a big component of next year.

And I'm not sure about Eric and what path he takes. Maybe he starts going out to gay spaces and meets someone or just messes around to have fun. But to be honest I'm not sure.

Anyways yeah.

[meandmyechoes]

identity asks

1. if someone wanted to really understand you, what would they read, watch, and listen to?

hmmm first one and it’s kinda difficult. I don’t know how to evaluate this answer because I feel every work they study will only give a face of me, and whether that could complete the picture, I’m not sure. But I’m doing these on instincts so I’m gonna give a imperfect but straight answer.

Please watch the Clone Wars movie and the Wrong Jedi arc. WATCH BONES. THE ENTIRE SHOW. Read Ender’s Game, Le Petit Prince and Peter Pan, Artemis Fowl and the Arctic Incident. Listen to several select songs from Imagine Dragons:It’s Time, I Bet My Life, I was Me, Shots (Piano Acoustic), Whatever It Takes, Thirty Lives and I was Me.

I feel very inclined to put non-ficiton recs in here but I can’t pinpoint ones now... If someone really wanted to understand me, I’ll take them on a date ;)

2. have you ever found a writer who thinks just like you? if so, who?

I don’t recall one at the moment. Fairly, I’ve been missing in action from the world of words for a while so it’s hard to judge. Again, I feel inclined to answer in non-ficiton, preferrably a scientist, or a poet. but nothing came to mind. that’s a good thread of desolation for a poem seed. lost in a sea of friends. when everyone is a net but you are a buoy (yes it’s 2am excuse the weird metaphor)

3. list your fandoms and one character from each that you identify with.

oh boy i have so many fandoms this could spawn into its own essay. but i’ma address two things here.

1) I’ve been calling myself ‘mom-fan’ de Ahsoka for years and in that is less than a small feeling of inadequacy for myself compared to her. She’s perfect* in my eyes and I just think I’m not good enough to put myself next to her (standard). But do I see myself in her? I suppose the answer has always been she was my ideal, she was who I aspire to be, and still am learning to become.

2) I practically identify with every stoic genius trope out here. (oops all white boys). But I mean, of course Temperance Brennan is my favourite fictional character ever after Ahsoka. Again, I’m not as smart as her but every other quirk, I’m her.

P.S. 3) I've talked about this before but I identify with Hino Eiji('s recovery) so much post-, graduation, i guess

I think a disconnection I have with how other people find themselves in fictional characters is I don’t rely on physique at all. I relate to their personality and attitude, and the struggles they went through, so I never really feel the need to see ‘someone (who looks) like me’ in any media. ( + social factor thought out but not elaborated here) 

4. do you like your name? is there another name you think would fit you better?

Yes! I do like my name. Both Chinese and English. They are meaningful more than the word combination themselves, but also the weight of my parents' gift. I also like that it's a fine line between archaic and out-of-date. There's sort of an old-time elegance in there. 

Well 20 years ago Yuki was a unique name but now it's kind of not the best rep. But it's not the worse either, I think the fad with that name passed and I'd like to (re)define that name for people who know me.

I did, briefly considered adopting a new English name when I entered university. (surprise surpise I wanted to use 'Echo' both as a sw reference and i also like the sound) But 30 seconds later I decided to keep Yuki as not to erase the past I've worked hard on.

5. do you think of yourself as a human being or a human doing? do you identify yourself by the things you do?

hmmm I've never heard of this line of thought before, that's a good one. I'd say human doing? and contradictorily No to the second question?

Well through the quarantine I've been being a lot and thus taking up 72 hobbies a day. I do feel mandated to equip myself with a lot of skills and I have so many things I want to learn. I think the ideal life will be your career is also your passion, not just something you're good at. I'd like to wake up every day and be excited to get up to work, and it blurs the line between duty and hobby.

You see, I've so many flipping interests I can't really identity myself my the things I do. You'd see bit of a struggle in my tumblr bio. I was good at a bunch of things but never really excels at one. and that has been my biggest personal challenge of late.

6. are you religious/spiritual?

No, I suppose. I'm faithful.

7. do you care about your ethnicity?

Boy, this is a really tricky question to ask a Hong Konger. I feel mandated to, to understand one's roots and ancestors. That's a very Chinese tradition that I don't refuse, among many other. But I don't really wanna drag this on this platform even though this has been a private conversation so far, hmmm, how do I boil this down...

I do like Chinese traditions. I'm glad I'm born in a country rich in both archaeological finds and historical literature. It's easy to be proud of one's heritage like that. Yet contemporary Chinese history is a mess and it's only fair the next generation is allowed to examine it in candidness. 

Furthermore, the Hong Konger is never purely Chinese (say, Chinese in its own provincial difference) We have become our own group despite whatever claims, and however the future. In that, I can tell you, I'm very proud of being at this unique position, absorbing the best and adapting to the forefront from every corner of the world.

All in all, I'd say my ethnicity is an important part of my identity, but not the only part that matters, not even the most dominant part.

8. what musical artists have you most felt connected to over your lifetime?

well my lifetime isn't up so that'd be a difficult question to answer. No, I don't really have someone in mind. I'm not a musical person, song or score. 

9. are you an artist?

my my, I wouldn't say I am one but I certainly seem to have the "artist temper". I can't draw to save a life, mostly because I'm too stubborn to actually practice. But I do enjoy doing arts and crafts. 

10. do you have a creed?

That's a heavy question. How about "If everyone just lives by a little more selfish the world will be a better place".

11. describe your ideal day.

Getting loads and loads of work done according to a thorough schedule, then ending on a buffet.

If indoors, lots of drawing and painting and sewing and writing

If outdoors, museums and libraries and thrift stores, plus a little sunny day picnic at the park.

12. dog person or cat person?

bear person

13. inside or outdoors?

indoors

14. are you a musician?

no.

15. five most influential books over your lifetime.

I listed four in question 1 I'll give one more: Cosmos, Carl Sagan

16. if you’d grown up in a different environment, do you think you’d have turned out the same?

oh definitely. starting small, my parents are a huge (non-)influence on me for their liberal style. I'll never feel the need to fit in or compared to other children unless I started it. They listen to me (funnily as a child but not so much as a teenager huh). Distinguishingly, took me travel around so I became a perceptive kid. Without all that I'd just, withdraw socially a lot younger.

Kinda discussed in the ethnicity the society I'm raised in. This site makes me aware of racial issues very often so if I'm raised instead in a multi-racial society where I'm not of the dominant skin colour, I'd be more acute to such prejudice.

My school had a big part, but I'm willing to forgive and forget.

17. would you say your tumblr is a fair representation of the “real you”?

oh yes. where else can i be fully star wars, talk about animated pixels and be semi-private at the same time.the 80% of me this tumblr show is 100% authentic.

18. what’s your patronus?

what's a patronus??? (the bear bros from we bare bears)

19. which Harry Potter house would you be in? or are you a muggle?

i don't do harry potter (slytherin, better, muggle with superior technology)

20. would you rather be in Middle Earth, Narnia, Hogwarts, or somewhere else?

i don't do those either :p i'm more of a science fantasy person. i like mixed realities. Magic + Technology pew pew pew so Roarahaven and Fowl Manor! but purely fictional universe? tcw gffa duh.

21. do you love easily?

Yes, my heart says yes. 

and my lips sealed

my feet carry me away.

22. list the top five things you spend the most time doing, in order.

you mean on a daily basis or a my-whole-life basis?

thinking, reading, tumblr related stuff, eating & cooking, walking around in libraries grabbing books amazed

23. how often would you want to see your family every year?

monthly

24. have you ever felt like you had a “mind-meld” with someone?

yes. that starry night by the chills of the sea breeze. i thought i was gay.

25. could you live as a hermit?

i'll deliver a full report at the end of the current experiment. please expect a hobbit postman.

26. how would you describe your gender/sexuality?

oh my (ace probably)

27. do you feel like your outside appearance is a fair representation of the “real you”?

well, i did get excess fat percentage because i don't work out, at all, so fair, i guess.

28. on a scale from 1 to 10, how hard is it for someone to get under your skin?

not hard at all. just spell or pronounce Ahsoka wrong I'll fistfight you.

29. three songs that you connect with right now.

I was Me. 明年今日. 最佳損友.

30. pick one of your favorite quotes.

The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us — there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation of a distant memory, as if we were falling from a great height. 

- Carl Sagan

[post written: 20/11/2020 02:55-03:43]

[falderaletcetera]

oh this is interesting! so I have an answer on the "why don't other people feel like this" front, though disclaimer that I was exposed to cs lewis in kind of the opposite way to you: I read the narnia books as a kid and never heard about his views on this stuff until, well, now, though I had him mentally earmarked as someone I didn't care to learn more about.

(for what it's worth, I encountered the harry potter books pretty much the same way, just a few years later - and I do actually handle them quite differently in my thoughts and actions.)

[disclaimer to folks reading: this is a discussion with a friend, so if you engage, keep it chill, please.]

[...this is also more words than planned and disorganised as heck because I drafted this last night and just finished it now. oops.]

so for one thing I think there's a lot to be said for how loud our current landscape of social media and international celebrity allows people to be - jk rowling's had more influence on more parts of the world than cs lewis could have had, in my opinion, though I don't know how much influence cs lewis had on christianity or western christianity specifically.

it also helps that cs lewis is, for most of us, a historical figure, not a living breathing person. it's easier to pretend he's just a product of his time, and it's easier to read his letters and such as a little alien and unfamiliar because they're in an unfamiliar tone with an unfamiliar context. it's less relevant, usually, than celebrities here and now - again, I'm not sure how much he influenced the religious landscape, but… he's not making changes to our lives at the moment.

definitely I'm either biased or just positioned to see this much more clearly, but jkr feels very real and immediate to me. she's not just voicing opinions, she's a big and vocal player in a group that's actively campaigning to make people's lives harder, and succeeding to a significant extent. (I'm a trans person in the uk. that statement might not apply so much elsewhere.) I don't know, admittedly, how writing essays about gender essentialism and the roles of men and women in the church compares to that - they're such different environments, different platforms. a friend of mine's been studying christian theology; I might ask her for an opinion.

it's actually really tricky - I'd have similar reactions to yours to most cs lewis quotes, but for different reasons. I also appreciate and even reblog some of the quotes in question, not because I like the guy but because narnia was a building block of my childhood, and sort of a piece of my cultural background, and it's kind of soothing to return to that with kinder or more complex thoughts about some of it. and unlike with jkr, I don't feel like I'm supporting him by sharing it. (it helps that he's not hanging around telling everyone that seeing support for his children's books makes him feel supported and validated in his beliefs about gender - which jkr explicitly is.)

I think… there's a difference between just being a gender essentialist (and even talking about it and trying to bring other people around to those views) and actually putting your reputation, your money, your time towards a group that's trying to bring about specific (awful) changes, but I don't know nearly enough about cs lewis to know if he did, in fact, do the latter at all.

my problem with jkr, in short, isn't just her beliefs; it's her actions and her platform and her aim to shove trans people so far out of the public sphere that we stop existing. I wouldn't want her at my dinner party for her beliefs anyway, but I wouldn't invite cs lewis either, especially knowing this about him now. so I guess they both fail the dinner party test the same way.

I hope that kind of makes sense? these quotes were interesting to read, even if I kind of want to pick cs lewis up and shake him for suggesting it's wrong to treat men and women as interchangeable machines but it's fine to treat men as interchangeable machines even though a lot of them are also very bad priests.

(it's also interesting to me that he feared everyone being perceived as neuter, whereas modern radical trans spaces talk about the spectrum of masculinity and femininity etc in appearance, in behaviour, in identity, whatever, regardless of the biology they have or started with. essentially, not neuter at all, except for specific people. I assume he saw less masculine men as deficient for it, which is a shame - and he seems to imply that women couldn't be masculine at all, as though women are stuck on a "femininity" scale and men are stuck on a "masculinity" scale, and can only succeed or fail in varying degrees. here I pause for significant and respectful glances in the direction of a) intersex people and b) butch women.)

all that said I do personally have no qualms calling someone sexist for implying wives have to obey their husbands, even if I don't know enough about him to call him A Sexist (tm). and that's as someone who was raised in a church where women weren't preachers, weren't elders, didn't even speak up with a thought or a bible verse or a suggestion of a hymn in the way that men did - something I never questioned at the time. I'd be startled if that weren't the norm in cs lewis' time and place, but mostly because I'd have to sheepishly re-evaluate that part of my life even more.

(it just wouldn't surprise me if he perceived more of a pushback against his views than there actually was - I feel like "this is going to be very unpopular" is the sort of thing people say when they're annoyed that there's any pushback at all and are blowing it a little out of proportion. but I don't know enough about the culture and the time to say, and perhaps this is uncharitable of me.)

…I started this meaning to point out what, for me, are the differences, but actually I'm sort of agreeing with you as well. jkr's work is on its own level in my head - I don't know how to engage with that stuff without inadvertently supporting hate groups based and active in my own dang country, so as a sort of minor protest I tend not to mention or reference it at all. cs lewis I think can't be on that same level, even if there's worse I don't know about - but I'll be less likely to think positively of his quotes and such in the future, so, sympathies and solidarity on that.

so I've seen a lot of posts about how people don't like seeing harry potter related content due to aversion to JK Rowling's awful and transphobic views, and I totally get that (seeing HP stuff kinda makes me cringe too)

but I low-key have a similar reaction to seeing Narnia or other CS Lewis related content, especially CS Lewis quotes, and i wonder if/why other people don't feel the same way about that?

Maybe this is just my first exposure to CS Lewis was in reading some of his essays for a class in high school (it was a class on JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis and over the course of the term i came to adore Tolkien, but did not feel the same way about Lewis, even though they were besties)

imho, CS Lewis was easily as much of a gender essentialist as JKR, even relative to his time (at least according to my memory from high school, which admittedly was a long time ago)

TW: gender essentialism, transphobia, cs lewis negativity

CS Lewis was a deeply, unapologetically Christian man, and I think his gender-essentialist views were most apparent in his essay "Priestesses in the Church?" (1948) in which he responded to an essay by Lady Marjorie Nunburnholme arguing for ordaining women into the priesthood.

Lewis wrote,

The innovators are really implying that sex is something superficial, irrelevant to the spiritual life. To say that men and women are equally eligible for a certain profession is to say that for the purposes of that profession their sex is irrelevant. We are, within that context, treating both as neuters. As the State grows more like a hive or an ant-hill it needs an increasing number of workers who can be treated as neuters. This may be inevitable for our secular life. But in our Christian life we must return to reality. There we are not homogeneous units, but different and complementary organs of a mystical body. Lady Nunburnholme has claimed that the equality of men and women is a Christian principle. I do not remember the text in scripture [...]; but that is not here my point. The point is that unless "equal" means "interchangeable", equality makes nothing for the priesthood of women. And the kind of equality which implies that the equals are interchangeable (like counters or identical machines) is, among humans, a legal fiction[...] But in church we turn our back on fictions. One of the ends for which sex was created was to symbolize to us the hidden things of G-d. One of the functions of human marriage is to express the nature of the union between Christ and the Church. We have no authority to take the living and semitive figures which G-d has painted on the canvas of our nature and shift them about as if they were mere geometrical figures. [...] It is painful, being a man, to have to assert the privilege, or the burden, which Christianity lays upon my own sex. I am crushingly aware how inadequate most of us are, in our actual and historical individualities, to fill the place prepared for us. But it is an old saying in the army that you salute the uniform not the wearer. Only one wearing the masculine uniform can [...] represent the Lord to the Church: for we are all, corporately and individually, feminine to Him. We men may often make very bad priests. That is because we are insufficiently masculine. It is no cure to call in those who are not masculine at all. A given man may make a very bad husband; you cannot mend matters by trying to reverse the roles. [...]

(emphasis mine, as well as some paragraph breaks, and minor spelling things)

The central point of this essay is to say that Lewis believes that sex is not something superficial, it is something essential about who were are. It is essential to the way G-d made us,

He says with some lament that roles in secular society are increasing treating people as "neuter", but insists that in our spiritual lives we can't do that.

(I should note that CS Lewis strongly believed that it was bad that society was starting to treat women as interchangeable with men, even in secular life. This is evident from his essays and even in his fiction:

For example, in That Hideous Strength, one of the main female characters starts out desperately unhappy in a broken marriage where she keeps trying to take a leadership role and her passive husband lets her, and she finds her happiness by learning to embrace her femininity and be a humble, loving, and obedient wife. It is strongly implied by the narrative that this is the only way a woman can be happy.)

Lewis was not merely a product of his time on this issue; that is apparent from the fact that Lady Nunburnholme clearly thought differently above, but also very clear in the essay "Mere Christianity" (1952), in which Lewis claims that most other people are doing Christianity wrong:

All the same, the New Testament, without going into details, gives us a pretty clear hint of what a fully Christian society would be like. Perhaps it gives us more than we can take. It tells us that there are to be no passengers or parasites: if man does not work, he ought not to eat. [...] On the other hand, it is always insisting on obedience-obedience (and outward marks of respect) from all of us to properly appointed magistrates, from children to parents, and (I am afraid this is going to be very unpopular) from wives to husbands...]

(emphasis and paragraph break mine)

note the "I am afraid this is going to be very unpopular". He was not just expressing popular views of his time in his insistence that wives should obey their husbands, just by virtue of their gender (or at least, he didn't think he was); instead, he seemed to think this is a very unpopular view that he has taken the burden of defending

.

To be clear, I am not saying that I think CS Lewis was sexist or hated women or anything. Based on the essays that I read by him and, of course, the Chronicles of Narnia and his other novels, I did get the vibe that CS Lewis had a deep respect for the worth and value of women, especially women who embraced their (in his opinion) G-d given role in marriage and in society as a whole.

He just believed that gender (meaning assigned sex at birth afaik) was an essential part of a person and should determine their role in society, which did not vibe with my high-school self at all, still does not really vibe with me, and, in my understanding, is also people's problem with JKR.

As a side-note, I don't recall him saying anything about trans people in particular, but I believe that he would have been opposed to medical transitioning: he did make clear in several essays that he was very opposed to all forms of contraception, because he believed that man's attempt to control nature like that was abhorrent and an absolute act of violence, and I can't see him not feeling the same way about medical transition.

(I suspect Tolkien (a devout Catholic who was also very big on man not trying to control nature) would have agreed with Lewis on contraception, but his essays and letters were generally more forgiving and less ardent and less direct. I remember feeling like they were more nuanced, but also made it harder to pin down what his views were exactly. (Except on Nazis. Tolkien was very anti-Nazi and did not mince words about that.))

[thestandardwork]

Intro Post for Standard Work

One of my favorite quotes is an (alleged) Chinese proverb, which goes like this:

"The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is now."

That's essentially going to be the philosophy this blog. It's something I should have started a long time ago, but hey, I might as well start it now. This is difficult for me to do. I'm taking a large step out of my comfort zone with this. I'm not used displaying myself publicly, but I believe that it's a good thing to do. Creating this blog will help keep me accountable and focused on what I ought to be doing.

What is this blog, exactly? Well, the easy answer is that it's a sort of alternative Studyblr. It's most likely going to be text-heavy, and feature only original content, I might make a secondary blog for reblogs. The longer answer though, is that's a lot more than that, let me run down them:

Somewhere I can post public updates on the progress I'm making in my projects, my studying, and stationery hauls probably.

A place for me to find inspiration, educational resources, and like-minded people to make friends with.

Just a general location I can place things without worry or forget, since it's always going to be in front of me.

Why Tumblr? I'm really overambitious, I have a lot of ideas, but lack the confidence and skills to pursue them right now. I've realized that I have to start with the most minimum viable product, which is a simple tumblr blog, where there isn't any pressure. Plus, I've used tumblr a ton in the past before (I actually currently have several active blogs, oops). Baby steps. Eventually, when I find my footing, this blog will most likely be ported over to WordPress and expand.

Who am I? My name is Brennan! :D I'm a Métis Canadian, and turning 23 in two weeks, which makes me relatively old. Unlike a lot of Studyblrs, I'm not in school, I've actually dropped out twice, previously majoring in computer science and journalism. I'm currently working as a personal chef, and I'm trying my best to be an autodidact polymath, but that might change in the future. I've been a Mahayana Buddhist for the majority of my life, but I've been gaining an interest in liberal Christianity lately. I'm also bi/queer.

What am I currently working on?

Soundtrack Compositions

Photography Portfolios

Poetry Collections

Essay Collections

Minor Programming Projects

Self-driven Education

Where can you find me? I don't use social media much, and one of my goals is to use it more in a productive and good manner. That said, I do still have a few places you can reach me, if you'd like:

Instagram

Twitter

Other Tumblr

What am I learning? I've called this a "Studyblr of Everything" because I'm interested in so much, and since I'm not in any fixed curriculum, it really opens up my ability to pursue any interest.

Major Subjects:

Music Theory

Composition

DAWs and Production (Finale, Ableton, etc.)

Songwriting / Learning Piano

Podcasting and Radio Show Production

Computer Programming

Data Science (Excel, SQL, R,)

Software Development (Java, IDE Workflows, UNIX Systems)

Website Development (Javascript Frameworks and Libraries, UX/UI Design)

Language

Novel/Personal Essay Writing

20th Century American Literature

Language Learning (French)

Business Skills

Agile Project Management

Six Sigma Black Belt

Digital Marketing

Culinary Arts

Nutritional Science

Specialty Diets

New Experimental Recipes

Self-improvement

Self-Quantification

Studying and Meta-Learning

I also have interest in other subjects, such as history, political science, philosophy, American studies, and general mathematics, but these are secondary.

What are my goals?

Career Goals:

Gain certification to advance in my current career.

Gain enough knowledge to start creating a better portfolio of good work.

Gain an entry in a new career by demonstrating my skills with a good portfolio

Project Goals:

Compose and produce a new album for my Bandcamp.

Finish writing a second book of poetry.

Write a novel and a non-fiction book.

Create a new photography portfolio.

Create a portfolio of programming projects.

Start a new blog and podcast with periodic vlogs.

Become conversationally fluent in French

Find people to collaborate with in new ventures.

Collection Goals: (What I want to keep track of)

Media (Books, Movies, Music, etc.)

Sleep Schedule

Meal/Food and Weight Log

Savings and Spending Tracker

Personal Goals:

Be more consistent and balanced.

Take time to be grateful each day.

Read the entire Bible, front to back.

Make new friends!

Etc.

I probably have missed a bit, so if you have any questions, or just wanna chat, message me! :D

[charismaandcashmere]

In a Twitter account called So Sad Today, the American writer Melissa Broder has been sending out snippets of her daily inner life since 2012. Broder writes about mundane sadness – ‘waking up today was a disappointment’ or ‘what you call a nervous breakdown i call oops, accidentally saw things as they are’– and she is brutally honest about her own shortcomings (‘whoops, hurt myself conforming to socially accepted standards of beauty that i know are false but still feel compelled to fit into’ or ‘just felt a flicker of self-esteem and was like what the fuck is this’). The account has become a sensation, winning her more than 675,000 followers, and Broder’s book of personal essays about her mental-health battles, also named So Sad Today, appeared in 2016.

It’s startling that Broder’s unabashed expression of sadness – and all the shitty emotions – has struck such a nerve in a world where people’s social media profiles are immaculately curated to show their happiest selves. But clearly the growing rates of depression worldwide mean that we are struggling to be happy. Are we doing something wrong? Broder’s popularity should compel us to cast a new look at sadness and its cousins. Perhaps we should consider realigning ourselves with the Romantics, who as a group found solace in freely expressing emotions in poetry. In his ‘Ode on Melancholy’ (1820), for example, John Keats wrote: ‘Ay, in the very temple of Delight, / Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine’. Pain and joy are two sides of the same coin – both are necessary for a fully lived life.

Keats might have had Robert Burton in mind here, the 17th-century priest and scholar whose hefty volume The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) described how sadness might go into overdrive (something we’ve come to understand as clinical depression) and how to cope with it. Or various self-help books from the 16th century, which, according to Tiffany Watt Smith, a research fellow at the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary University of London, ‘try to encourage sadness in readers by giving them lists of reasons to be disappointed’. Could it be that the path leading to true happiness goes via sadness?

Recent research suggests that experiencing not-so-happy feelings actually promotes psychological wellbeing. A study published in the journal Emotion in 2016 took 365 German participants aged 14 to 88. For three weeks, they were handed a smartphone that put them through six daily quizzes on their emotional health. The researchers checked in on their feelings – be they negative or positive moods – as well as how they perceived their physical health in a given moment.

Prior to these three weeks, the participants had been interviewed about their emotional health (the extent to which they felt irritable or anxious; how they perceived negative moods), their physical health and their habits of social integration (did they have strong relationships with people in their lives?) After the smartphone task was over, they were quizzed about their life satisfaction.

The team found that the link between negative mental states and poor emotional and physical health was weaker in individuals who considered negative moods as useful. Indeed, negative moods correlated with low life satisfaction only in people who did not perceive adverse feelings as helpful or pleasant.

These results resonate with the experience of clinicians. ‘It is often not one’s initial response to a situation (the primary emotion) that is problematic, but their reaction to that response (the secondary emotion) that tends to be the most difficult,’ says Sophie Lazarus, a psychologist at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. ‘This is because we are often sent messages that we shouldn’t feel negative emotions, so people are highly conditioned to want to change or get rid of their emotions, which leads to suppression, rumination, and/or avoidance.’

According to Brock Bastian, author of The Other Side of Happiness: Embracing a More Fearless Approach to Living (2018) and a psychologist at the University of Melbourne in Australia, the problem is partly cultural: a person living in a Western country is four to 10 times more likely to experience clinical depression or anxiety in a lifetime than an individual living in an Eastern culture. In China and Japan, both negative and positive emotions are considered an essential part of life. Sadness is not a hindrance to experiencing positive emotions and – unlike in Western society – there isn’t a constant pressure to be joyful.

This thinking could be rooted in religious upbringing. For example, Indo-Tibetan Buddhist philosophy, which has been extensively studied by Western psychologists such as Paul Ekman, calls for recognising emotions and embracing pain as part of the human condition. It places emphasis on understanding the nature of pain and the reasons that lead to it. Many modern psychological practices such as dialectical behaviour therapy now employ this approach of recognising and naming emotions in treating depression and anxiety.

In a study published in 2017, Bastian and his colleagues conducted two experiments examining how this societal expectation to seek happiness affects people, especially when they face failure. In the first study, 116 college students were divided into three groups to perform an anagram task. Many of the anagrams were impossible to solve. The test was designed for everyone to fail, but only one of the three groups was told to expect failure. Another group was in a ‘happy room’ whose walls were affixed with motivational posters and cheerful Post-it notes and they were provided with wellness literature, while the final group was given a neutral room.

After completing the task, all the participants took a worry test that measured their responses to failing the anagram task, and filled out a questionnaire designed to evaluate whether societal expectations to be happy affected how they processed negative emotions. They also took a test about their emotional state at that time. Bastian and his team found that people in the ‘happy room’ worried a lot more about their failure than the people in the other two rooms. ‘The idea is that when people find themselves in a context (in this case a room, but generally in cultural context) where happiness is highly valued, it sets up a sense of pressure that they should feel that way,’ Bastian told me. Then, when they experience failure, they ‘ruminate about why they are not feeling the way they think they should be feeling’. The rumination, the researchers found, worsened their state of mind.

In the second experiment, 202 people filled out two questionnaires online. The first one asked how often and how intensely they experienced sadness, anxiety, depression and stress. The second – in which people were asked to rate sentences such as: ‘I think society accepts people who feel depressed or anxious’ – measured to what extent societal expectations to seek positive feelings and inhibit negative ones affected their emotional state. As it turns out, people who thought that society expects them to always be cheerful and never sad experienced negative emotional states of stress, anxiety, depression and sadness more often.

Painful times confer other benefits that make us happier over the long term. It is during adversity that we connect most closely with people, Bastian points out. Experiencing adversity also builds resilience. ‘Psychologically, you can’t become tough if you don’t have to deal with tough things in life,’ he told me. At the same time, he warns that the recent findings shouldn’t be misunderstood. ‘The point is not that we should try and be sadder in life,’ he says. ‘The point is that when we try and avoid sadness, see it as a problem, and strive for endless happiness, we are in fact not very happy and, therefore, cannot enjoy the benefits of true happiness.’

[douchebagbrainwaves]

YOU GUYS I JUST THOUGHT OF THIS

Of all the useful things we can say it's axiomatic. I'd also guess there's some band of people who could have made it, if it delivered on that promise. They see increasingly aggressive measures to protect intellectual property as a threat to the intellectual freedom they need to work hard to delight users when you only have to find users and measure their responses. So they invested in it. Odds are it will be a junior person; they scour the web looking for startups their bosses could invest in. Oh, ok. You're an investor too. What would Apple's next product look like if you replaced Steve Jobs with a committee of 100 random people? Partly because successful startups have lots of employees, so it seems like a daunting task to do philosophy, here's an encouraging thought. As written, it tends to offend people who like unions. Cross out that final S and you're describing their business model.

We now have several examples to prove that amateurs can surpass professionals, when they started the company without any idea of what they planned to do. The scary thing about platforms is that there are two components to the antidote: being in a place where startups are the cool thing to do, and even now I find it kind of weird. When meeting people you don't know why. Now the default exit strategy is to get a cup of tea. This kind of startup is in the same way taking a shower lets your thoughts drift a bit—and thus drift off the wrong path you'd been pursuing last night and onto the right one adjacent to it. The latest intellectual property laws impose unprecedented restrictions on the sort of writing that gets you tenure. In ancient Rome the price of books or music or movies always depended mostly on the format? Most people implicitly believe something like this about their opinions. For example, we seem to have been cases of molecular bonding rather than nuclear fusion. They didn't want to be the next Netscape, they'd suffer the same fate.

But they only build a couple office buildings or suburban streets at a time, and the offerings at our end of the middle class as people who are committed enough to prefer that, and c only hire people who are best at making things don't want to invest in it, the falser it becomes. A media company should be run by suits. The proof of how useless some of their answers turned out to be widely applicable. Many of the students who now major in English would major in writing if they could. The startling thing is how often the founders themselves don't know. Why is the falloff so sharp? It seems as if it must have been when startups wrote VisiCalc. I was going to happen, and arrange to be standing there when it does. And when you have a specific idea you want to do is start a startup. Tim O'Reilly was wearing a suit, a sight so alien I couldn't parse it at first. In the United States, the CEO of a large public company makes about 100 times as productive as another. So once the quality of programmers at your company starts to drop, you enter a death spiral from which there is no record of it.

I'm guessing here, but I'd guess that many of these would-be founders are often surprised that investors expect them either to sell the company or go public. If I believe everything I said in the second version, why didn't I write it that way? Some startups could be entirely manual at first. And for many if not most startups, these paths to growth will be the ones that actually work. When you have multiple founders, esprit de corps binds them together in a way that seems to be decreasing the gap between rich and the poor? It's not what they want is easy. A song on an iPod's disk is merely stored on it.

Oops. Likewise, it doesn't seem American. I didn't realize the answer till later, after I went to work there was the difference in the way that works best. Next year you'll have 14,000 users, and that in the early stages. But they had the most opaque obstacle in the world between them and angel investors generally want to invest in it, the falser it becomes. I thought, they did call them essays, didn't they? Which means if you're making something at least one respect, however: it's static. But just two companies, Dropbox and Airbnb, account for about three quarters of it. Or to put it more dramatically, by default do they live or die? Were you nodding in agreement, thinking stupid investors a few paragraphs ago when I was growing up.

Making a better mousetrap, people beat a path to your door as promised. So for any given team of founders, would it not pay to wait till the economy is so bad is making the same mistake as the people who break rules that are the source of. What would it mean to take 10x more risk than Demo Day investors. Oh, ok. A big-name firms, but they are much hungrier for deals. You can't be the sort of spin added by politicians is woven through it. Wikipedia may be the most famous scientists seem to have begun by trying to solve a problem their founders had. And technology for targeting ads continues to improve. Believe it or not, and if you have what it takes to start a startup.

When you take people like this and put them together with the spin you've added to get them going. But I have a general idea of the greatest generation. Except an inverse one. The friends might have liked to have more money in this first phase, but being slightly underfunded teaches them an important lesson. That's a problem, because looking down on the user is a kind of axiom from which most of the startups we funded were able to raise money grows with the amount. Oh, ok. I love to read more than anything, but by studying the intended users and figuring out what people want. Speculative meetings are terribly costly if you're on the wrong track. Here's a partial solution: when a startup takes serious funding is that the business guys who did the most for Google were the ones who obligingly flew Altavista into a hillside just as Google was getting started. We couldn't believe large numbers of people would want to stay in other people's places. There will be jobs teaching x, and professors to fill them. Works out the same as Aristotle's; we just approach it from a different direction.

Experts have given Wikipedia middling reviews, but they also laugh at someone who tells them a certain problem can't be solved. I propose we try again, but that it was not till around 1600 in Europe, where the density of people working on a given technology, the time to act is always now. It seems reasonable to suppose the newest one will too. I couldn't have done that in the past has had false starts branching off all over it. I had a startup and think they seem likely to succeed, it's hard to foresee how big, because its size will depend not on macro trends like the amount people read, but on the ingenuity of individual publishers. Do the extra work of getting personal introductions. And are English classes even the place to do it.

[bunny-bard]

Without a specific example of what OP is seeing I'm inclined to take this with a grain of salt. (That is assuming the ones OP used were just made up on the spot. If those were actual examples it was a little unclear to me so oops.) That said, I do know I personally have seen that exact thing (the hot shower=trauma) crop up on Tumblr I believe.

The thing is some of these are misunderstood anecdotes of larger studies taken out of context, which is often the fault of whatever media presented it in that way. Which may be spread as either a well-meant but ill-guided attempt at aiding those with mental health struggles, orrrrr it could be deliberately sharing something misguided for clout. I'd like to believe most of it is the former.

So, my first big takeaway is check the source, do research of your own. We've been saying this for years on the internet and the reminder never hurts. Also, if you're already seeing a therapist or psychiatrist, don't hesitate to reach out to your doctor and say "I saw something online that concerned me, is there any truth to it?"

That said, a large number of the ADHD tiktokers I have seen have done a great job in spreading lesser known information about a disorder we don't actually understand as well as most people think. A lot of the people I personally see are people diagnosed with the disorder sharing their experiences and realizing there is a larger trend in other people already diagnosed. In fact, and I mean no disrespect to the professionals who don't do this, but I see more misinformation spread by so-called "therapists" on social media than by people with the diagnosis.

Also, there is a need to recognize that sometimes sarcastic humor can be misread. Without tone (or emojis or something to indicate tone) it can...cause a ruckus, to say the least.

All that said......... The examples you did list, while I'm not sure if they were actual ones you've seen, can be a part of actual symptoms. Rewatching one movie COULD be a hyperfixation. Hot showers COULD be filling the needs of someone who is touch starved or anxious. Shivers COULD be a tic. It's about seeing it as a larger pattern of stuff and examining the behaviors within yourself. Have you had other things you tend to fixate on, have you felt extreme loneliness or debilitating anxiety, have you felt other involuntary tics?

I don't believe self diagnosing is always the best (it's a complex subject I won't get totally into) but researching disorders and understanding them can help you understand if that is just something normal for you or a part of a larger trend. Look at checklists of major symptoms and compare that with what you know about yourself. Don't force it to fit, but see if it rings true. And again, if it's really impacting your life, see a professional.

Key phrase here being "IF IT IMPACTS YOUR LIFE." A little anxiety here or there is NORMAL, getting distracted on occasion is NORMAL, feeling a little out of it sometimes is NORMAL. Diagnoses as I understand them for mental health is all about a trend of behaviors or conditions that make functioning in the day to day difficult to impossible.

Sorry about the short essay, but I have actually figured out a lot of my mental health through doing this and then confirming it with professionals. Short of brain scans (which are expensive and not conclusive in every case) there is no sure-fire way to be sure of your diagnosis. It's not magic, you don't get a certificate. My boyfriend has been misdiagnosed with things like DID and BPD so trust me, knowing yourself and advocating for yourself IS IMPORTANT, even though I know some people are going to want to yell at me that it's "self diagnosing." Mental health is a complicated field and no one knows your mind better than you do.

i dont have like a degree or anything but i think assigning diagnoses to every behavior is probably not good for us in the long run

[valyrfia]

hey friend! fello eurovision shitposter here :) first of all I want to say that im so glad to have finally found someone whos as convinced as i am that bulgaria should win this year! I had another question for you: so you post a lot of marvel as well and a lot of stony so i stalked your blog and im confused because you said you started to ship them more after civil war? idk im a huge stucky shipper and steve and bucky just seem to have the better dynamic no offense intended i just want yourview

BULGARIA. THEY’RE AMAZING RIGHT? I’m honestly almost more in love with this song that I was with Beautiful Mess last year (that’s a lie I still cry that my boy Kris didn’t win but I also adore Amar Pelos Dois so I’m not mad). Now with the footage of their AMAZING live performance at the London pre-party, I’m almost fully convinced that they are gonna clinch the top spot this year. I mean, imagine Bones with the camera work and lighting of Eurovision and the atmosphere of the arena. It’s going to be incredible I’m so excited. 

Moving on from my trash talk: why I ship stevetony and not stucky? Whoo boy this is gonna take an essay to answer, and it’s going to be difficult  a. because I can never remember all the reasons why I do ship stevetony (I always end up missing one lol) and b. because stucky shippers are…enthusiastic, for the lack of a better word. I love them, I respect a lot of them and I’m friends with people who ship it. But fandom is a tricky business. Stevebucky never did it for me as a ship. The explanation is long and complicated but it can be boiled down to a distinct idea: For me, adding a romantic element to Steve and Tony’s dynamic makes their interactions much more interesting and intriguing, while adding a romantic element to Steve and Bucky’s dynamic would almost subtract something quintessential from both of those characters. 

Friendships to me are almost more impactful on a person’s life than romantic relationships, god knows where I would be without my friends today. There’s a tendency in the media to push the obligation that the most important person in your life has to be your significant other. I hate that, frankly. Steve and Bucky love each other more than anybody else in the world, and for me, that’s beautiful. I guess I just never did understand the romantic connotations that people attached to what seemed to me, seemed to be a fully functioning, complete and beautiful relationship. 

Steve and Tony’s relationship however, you always feel like you’re missing some part of the story when you observe their interactions. From their respective monologues to each other, The Confession and The Oath to their familiar joking with each other right before everything goes to shit at the base in Siberia in CA:CW. You feel like you’re missing some part of their story. I, (it seems along with Jonathan Hickman, RDJ and Chris Evans) like to headcanon that this missing piece is a romantic plotline, but you can interpret it however you want. That’s the beauty of fictional works. It’s not the cold, hard canon that matters, but your interpretation of it. My experience is different from yours and to me that’s beautiful.

An essay is available below the cut, if you’re interested in how I actually stopped shipping stucky and started shipping stevetony (an origin story if you will.)

In my introduction to Marvel, a couple of years ago, I did initially read Steve/Bucky fics more than any other pairing, but incidentally it was a Steve/Bucky fic that made me start reading Steve/Tony ones (oops I guess?) The Man on the Bridge by boopboop on AO3 was the one that got me invested in the Steve/Tony dynamic, it was the fic with the highest kudos on AO3 at the time that I was reading Stucky. It’s a really great fic 11/10 definitely worth the read (I think you need an AO3 account though) but what kept me going wasn’t the ship I was supposed to be reading it for, it was the dynamic between Steve and Tony. For example: you get great scenes like Steve and Tony bickering like an old married couple over coffee at least four times and banter like this out of nowhere: 

““I sent flowers?” Tony asks, trying like hell to play it cool. He gives her a desperate look that she ignores by default.

“Tony picked them,” Pepper says, determined as ever to ruin Tony’s reputation.

“He did, did he?” Steve asks knowingly.

Pepper leads them all into the wide social space inside. “He spent a lot of time trying to find your favorites.”

It’s dark enough to hide the fact that Tony’s ears are a little pink, even when someone has as sharp a vision as Steve does. That doesn’t stop him wanting to crawl back into his suit and hide. “Really? Do we have to tell him that?”

“He might think you don’t like him if I don’t,” Pepper says with a knowing smile flashed in Steve’s direction.

“I don’t,” Tony says firmly. “I tolerate him. Barely.”

“Uh huh.” Steve chuckles, his smile growing warm. “Right. I get it.””

and lines like this

“We - Nat and I - figured Rogers would come to you for help once he and Bucky made it out of Florida.”

“You did?” Tony asks, stunned. He can think of a dozen people Steve would have picked over him, even with the resources Tony has at his disposal.

Barton looks at him like he’s an idiot. “Yes,” he says, simple as that.

“And that brings you here why?”

“Because neither of you idiots have a single shred of self preservation between you,” Barton says bluntly. “That’s why you’re good for each other.”

and general power couple stuff

She hardly looks a day older than she had appeared in the recording they saw before leaving for London - but Tony knows that file was dated 1991. Her sharp features are paired with dark eyes and unnaturally pale skin, offset by a razor sharp, almost masculine suit. “Mr Stark,” she inclines her head, “Captain Rogers.”

She had been given no other identification in the videos, other than being addressed by Lukin as ‘Synthia’. Since they don’t want to give away how much information they have, Tony tips his head to one side and asks, “Should I know you? Have we met?”

“We have not, Mr Stark. Captain Rogers and I do have a shared acquaintance, however.”

“Don’t you dare talk about him,” Steve growls, tense at Tony’s side. The fact that he hasn’t rushed forward and unleashed that brewing violence is something of a shock. He’s practically shaking with his rage, every muscle in his body tense and strained.

Tony puts one hand on Steve’s arm, steadying him. “Look lady, I don’t know who you are but I’m tired of games. What do you want with us?”

She tilts her head, “Why not the pleasure of your company? You are Iron Man and Captain America after all. An unstoppable force. The two greatest superheroes of our time.”

even the goddamn villains ship it I was supposed to go into this fic and not come out the other side shipping steve and tony come on

there’s a reason that this is the only non-stevetony fic i’ve read in three years goddamnit 

*clears throat*

But yeah that was the fic that got me interested in the possibilities surrounding the Steve/Tony dynamic. Then I started doing some research and came up with the canon content (like their respective love confessions in 616 and the actors fascination with the ship (shoot me I’m weak okay)), and it’s been a wild ride ever since. 

If you’re interested in seeing their dynamic in action through a romantic lens, may I suggest Disrepair by Tippet for MCU and  Belief Space by magicasen for 616. Neither have huge confessions of love or anything like that, Belief Space does have one kiss towards the end but the focus point is Steve and Tony’s dynamic during the incursion crisis in 616 and Steve’s POV remains largely platonic throughout the fic. Disrepair actually has no romantic connotations in it, as far as I remember, but it analyses the MCU dynamic in such a way that you start to see what I mean when I say that Steve and Tony’s relationship would be ten times more intriguing with a romantic element. Both fics are interesting character studies of both Steve and Tony and I would highly recommend reading them anyway. Also Belief Space is my favourite fic of all time, and does not get enough love goddamnit, so there’s that. 

Anyway, I’ll finish your lovely ask by giving you what is frankly my stevetony song for Infinity War and the only song I listen to nowadays. It’s my fave. What else would it be in the month before Eurovision? It’s Bones by EQUINOX. 

[jm-ph-2-3]

The "Hustle Paradox" Part 1: Are we really working hard? or are we hard working? 

An essay by Morgan Adriano

               Disclaimer: This is just my current perspective on the "hustle culture" and it's influence on us both positive and negative. Please take this with a grain of salt. I do not consider myself as part of the "woke" people because this is just a piece about my current reflections, observations and perspective about the topic. I am not part of the so called minimalists, essentialists, nihilist, communists, stoicist, vegetarianist, crossfitits (oops) Or any -ist out there. I'm just speaking from what I recently accrued from the different perspectives (albeit meager in number) and experiences. This is not a piece in which to condemn, criticise and judge those who are in it and support the idea that we should never work hard. But rather this piece was made with the intention to take another view and challenge the message in which we have been oversaturated within culture and mass media and to promote a better mindset.  So learn what you can and apply what you must and throw what is unnecessary in the trash can. This may resonate with you and/or offend you at the same time. So................ just take a chill pill bro. Its just an opinion.                                                                                                                                       -Now you maybe thinking: "Why the title. I don't understand it. Working hard is good? right?" and so I thought. Well the title was made to look nice, coherent and "proper". But it really translates to: are we working hard for our own or our goal's sake or are we just portraying an image that make us seem like we are hard working?                                                               

Join me, as you the reader, and I both immerse ourselves in my sub-par writing skills filled with grammatical errors and sickening amount of pop-culture references and into my deep dark revealing thoughts on "HUSTLE"              

*Initiate X-files theme. Which I haven’t really watched and just heard it in different memes so... ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQoRXhS7vlU                                                                        

We are constantly bombarded with messages (From celebrities, leaders, entrepreneurs, sports icons (Shout out to the Last Dance Documentary because that was sick), public figures etc.), podcasts, motivational youtube videos, music, movies, books and etc. on why must working hard constantly 24/7/365 (Inspired by the surfaces' song. LOL). We should wake up at 4am, sleep less because sleep is for the weak, no breaks because your opponent's winning when you take a break, slave yourself to your work, work in more and hang out less. We are so absorbed to the idea that we post stories about how hardworking we are by taking pictures of your work station or the book we just read or tweet that we working in the weekends #NoVacay #WorkHard #Hustle #GrindLife . And to be completely candid with you, I was that person that I am currently describing. So heavily invested with the idea of working hard than anybody else, sacrificing my sleep, nutrition, health and my well-being for that idea. Would flex the things I’m currently doing/working on or flex so hard about how hard I’m training that it eventually ripped my shorts in the gym (Yes, this actually happened and No, nobody was their to see it. But you know what Barney said: “Whatever you do in this life, it’s not legendary unless your friends are there to see it.” So I gotta post that *curse word* to git meh sum layks and let dem now that it happened). This is true from high school through college and through my first year working. Take it from a guy (Here comes the bragging and his big  fat obnoxious ego) who was able to get into provincial level competition in football and almost got into the country's amateur league (Having a jersey counts!!!>_<), studied in one of the prestigious schools in the country and graduated with latin honours. (And you may say to yourself: Wow what a pretentious arse.... HAHAHAHA.......... Aaaand you're right.) But if you stripped down everything, I just wanted to show everybody that I am  a "hardworker". I want them notice how hard I studied, worked, trained not for something but just for the sake for it. It was actually overcompensating for something. And I may say this cliche statement that: "No BrO, I dO iT FoR tHe lOvE Of ThE PrOCeSs nOt The AwArdS, ThE rEcoGnITioN anD thE mOnEy" (Imagine the spongebob meme please to make it more funny). I learned this the hard way and I'm still learning, to be honest. This "lie" that you (I) tell yourself (myself) can only help you go so far to the point you reach what I call the "wall" (I would like to reference the scene from Run Fat Boy Run where Simon Pegg's Character: Dennis hits this runner’s wall)(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pttqFUviWs).                                                                                                                                                          -But this wall that I am describing is a different kind of wall. This may manifest by symptoms of pseudo burnout (I say pseudo because you are not really tired of what your doing something you love but you're tired of presenting your self as such frame/image). And yes this has been proven in the literature in a paper recently published this year (2020) by Dr. Nadir and colleagues from the Greendale Community College (Yes, this is obviously a joke: if you don’t get the reference. #sixseasonsandamovie and No, there is no published paper on said topic but I found one blog/rant and paper that “almost” discussed the topic hahaha!)

Blog/rant: https://dwighttowers.wordpress.com/2012/06/23/rant-burnout-and-pseudo-burnout/

Paper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6587911/

             This wall can force you to either: Quit or Reframe.                          

1. Let's say you took the first one: You quit. You say: "Nah man this thing is not for me. I will go and show that I'm "hard working" at something else. You blame the field, you blame the system, you blame society. BECAUSE WE LIVE IN A SOCIETY (youtube.com/watch?v=UkhC0caZRNU)                                              

 2. Or you reframe: You reset your mind, allow yourself to become vulnerable, let your ego be destroyed, crushed, tortured, mutilated and be stripped down to its bare nakedness.(Sorry for the imagery: The ego is really a big pain in the butt. You can learn more thru the book: Ego Is The Enemy by Ryan Holiday which I highly recommend even though I haven't read HAHAHA! But it's in my "next reading list" so don't worry). You just let everything be stripped down to it's bare chassis and look what are the components that make you (What's the engine?, the tires?, the brakes? the interior?). What are you showing to the outside word? What are the driving motives? What kind of person are you? Who are you? (Please let me reference the most funniest scene in flim: Rush Hour 3 The You? Me? Him?) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAVnOz7i-JA) Scary introspective stuff right? hahaha!                                                                                                                                                                                                  -But kidding aside, it really helps that you. Yes you! recognise it as early as now. Don't wait for anybody to calling it out for you (which rarely happens if they are with agreeable people or just really don't care about you) or worse, waiting for that wall to hit you right in the face. Don't be like me (WOW such "inspiration” )  "BEFORE". It all boils down what YOU really want in life and WHO you are living for. The praise of others? or just you? (Sheesh this sounds too guru-y)                                                                                                                                                                                 -With all this talk about how this "hustle" culture, you may think that I just hate the process or I am not committed to it or I am just ungrateful privileged brat who should keep his thoughts and ideas to himself and keep my head down and put skin in the game. So my rebuttal to that is: Okay boomer... LOL Kidding aside, I did think about that but you must understand that I WAS part of the culture of hustle. I craved to be in a library or a coffee shop with my laptop and study or researched away with a good cup of iced americano with a shot of mocha and  breve milk (Look at this entitled brat and his expensive coffee). I would run on 3-4 hours of sleep from staying up late "studying" (Actually have 3 youtube breaks- related to my field and 4-8 youtube breaks about cars, music reviews, overanalysing movies and productivity tips) (How Ironic). I would spend hours and hours doing “hard work”. But the question is was it effective? Was it helping me inch closer to my goals? We have long fetishised the idea of becoming busy just because other people are doing it or to show ourselves in a particular way.                                                                                                         -You see what I am aiming here is the issue of the heart.  What are the underlying motives of why you are doing these things. And this can be encapsulated simply by the most used cliche that I think most of you have heard in mainstream media , especially from Eric Thomas' motivational clips (Usually listened to this before work or a competition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XIGu3Kxg2I): HWAT IS YO WAAAI?                                     (Obviously read: Start With Why by Simon Sinek. Great book!).                                                                                                                                                      -To quote scripture from the gospel of Matthew 6:21 = "For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.". This is such a crucial part of knowing yourself. I can't stress this enough for myself. Where it comes from, determines when it runs out. Whatever you put your priority in or in other words; where you put your heart in, thats what controls your joy. So whats controlling your joy?                                                                                                        -And to conclude: I myself, am not saying that working hard is inherently bad. Working hard allows us to get out of the ashes of debt, failure and pain. Working hard helped birth new inventions, innovations, great people, leaders, visionaries that inspire us to do the same. And this piece does not serve as a jail pass card to be lackadaisical slumps. And eventually you may have the audacity to blame me why you didn't get where you want or what you want in life. So please don't hahaha. 

We all have responsibilities in life. And it is something we must accept (Especially as I and probably most of you Gen Z'ers or post-millenials reading this essay enter *gulp "adulthood") [It's post-millennial or Gen Z not "millennial". C'mon cuh get yo facts straight]. We have a responsibility to our world, our nation, our society, our community, our friends, our family, ourselves. But also our future selves, family, friends, community, society, nation and world. If that doesn't give you perspective then I don't know what will. It is the matter of mindset. When you have a proper mindset plus the direction then hard work and ambition can be used as a tremendous tool for success. But if you allow your mindset to get out of whack and lose direction then hard work and ambition can consume you which will leave you stuck in a never ending race and feel unfulfilled with what you’re working on 

 -For a profound ending: Maybe this is why COVID-19 had to happen, (By the way, I am by no means downplaying the affect of this pandemic has in our lives and the lives of others. This is just a personal reflection so don't get triggered and "cancelledt" me) we have become so self-absorbed with things that don't even matter. The misguided things and narratives that we tell ourselves. Which leads us being irresponsible and unaware of the state and condition of our hearts. And hopefully, may this period may give us the opportunity to try again. To give it another go. Another crack at it.

 So before embarking on your 4 hour deep focus study/work/train/mastery session (With some "lofi hip hop radio - beats to relax/study to" blasting in the background and a aromatic cup of coffee), ask yourself?      Why?........tho.......                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    Thank you again friend, for dedicating this short time of your "busy?" or "working?" day hahaha! to read this essay. I had fun writing (*Cough typing because my handwriting still sucks) this piece. Which is evident with the references hehe. Although there are some points I haven’t explored because this topic is pretty wide and controversial I bet so stay tuned for part 2 of this 2 part essay. I hope this piece resonates with you as it resonates with me and helps you become more aware and more mindful. However, if you disagree with all my sentiments, thats great! More power to you! We have to understand that everybody's circumstance is different. We live very different lives. We have very different backgrounds, ideas and experiences. We live in very different “seasons”! We learn different things in different time periods. This was maybe my time to learn this and maybe not the best time for you. Let us not fight but rather collaborate in this continuous pursuit of clarity and the navigation of this journey we are all partaking in. Please do message me if you want so we can talk and discuss more (not argue! HAHAHA) So that I may learn from you and your views as well. Cheers my friend!

[studylesbean]

8.26.17 || 11/100 days of productivity

didn't get up til close to two today lmao oops! still got a fair amount done, tho. my roommate & i went to the public library bc we both knew that if we stayed in to study, nothing would end up getting done  

reviewed material for both age of dinosaurs and gender, sexuality, & media using quizlet

did the reading for monday's gender, sexuality, & media class (it was sooo long... im proud of myself for finishing it tbh) 

wrote a two-page essay about "an important episodic event in my life" which my magazine writing & reporting prof requested so he can gauge everyone's writing ability

listened to about half of "the murders in the rue morgue” for mystery/detective fiction (i had forgotten how gory it is!)

feelin rlly good rn bc i accomplished everything i set out to do today despite waking up about seven hours later than planned ! time for bed now tho lol

🎶 blue monday - new order