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my-bated-breath · 4 years ago

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On an Immensely Popular Post

Disclaimer: What I’m writing here may not be completely accurate -- like most works of art, literature, and even STEM tend to be -- and as a new fan of ATLA, a few of the metas I publish may be obsolete or unintentionally insensitive. That being said, I like to believe that I can contribute something valuable to this fandom. In all my (real) metas, I wish to be as objective as possible and not rely on my biases, fanon, or common “knowledge” that may just be misconceptions. If anyone reading this finds something to be false or contrived, I am always welcome to constructive criticism. What I am not welcome to is senseless hate or bashing.

My first experiences with the ATLA fandom begun a long, long time ago, but the most recent and powerful revival of my love for ATLA started with me actually watching the show and soon after, with me falling into the endless abyss of ATLA metas on Tumblr. Sifting through the well-written analyses and the emotion-based rants had taught me a lot about critical thinking and the power of influence, so now I’d like to present a meta that critiques an extremely popular post with over 60,000 notes. And since it’s so popular, this is the part where I must make yet another disclaimer.

Disclaimer: I hold nothing against lesbians4sokka (whose name has now been changed to comradekatara). They have the right to share what they want, but since this particular post has become so influential that it’s still being reblogged regularly to this day, I believe it is within my right to criticize it - emphasis on “criticize,” which is different from “hate.”

Now that that’s out of the way, let us begin:

Lesbians4sokka/comradekatara covers 3 main subjects in their post, which I will quote/summarize below:

(1) Ma/iko: “...the entire foundation of mai and zuko’s relationship was built on how miserable they were together, and how they would just sit there and hate the world together— letting their misery fester as they enabled each other’s depression— and I think that’s really unfortunate because they would work so well as friends if they weren’t trying to make their dumpster fire of a relationship work.”

(2) Zutara: “similarly, what makes zuko and katara’s dynamic so compelling is that they share the same flaws, only as opposed to mai’s apathy and misery, it’s katara’s rage and guilt that zuko identifies with. they both share trauma over having lost their mothers, and both in a similar way (sacrificing themselves for them) and they both cope with their grief through rage, often misplaced… katara and zuko have a deep & profound friendship, but if they were to be in a relationship, they would only bring out the absolute worst in each other thru enabling each other’s rage and emotion-driven decision making.”

(3) Z/uk/ka: this pairing makes for a healthy and wholesome relationship because throughout the boiling rock, we see that “sokka and zuko make an excellent team, as they balance each other perfectly. sokka thinks big picture, and plans ahead, but zuko will charge into situations.” They inspire each other, they trust each other unconditionally, they become more open and supportive of each other, they share a lot of common interests and narrative parallels, and in general, just make each other happy (which could work both platonically and romantically).

As for my response: I’m sure many of you are expecting me to start to save the “best for last.” That assumption would be incorrect because I actually have the least to say about point 3.

I agree that Z/uk/ka can be a good relationship. Their dynamic is funny, playful, supportive, etc. etc. (there are so many positive adjectives I could use to describe their dynamic, the list could go on forever). And they could make a great couple.

…

What, did you expect more from me? That’s it, I’m done.

I’m not here to attack Z/uk/ka as a ship, because while I can never actively ship it (I’m a sad, narrow-minded exclusive shipper, always had been and always will be) I can objectively appreciate them as one. It’s points 1 and 2 I’m more concerned about.

Now, since we’ve already begun working backward, I’ll begin my critiques on point 2: I could write extensively about the parallels between Zuko and Katara, including but not limited to shared pain and a few shared flaws - and just a few, because their weaknesses diverge in many important places. However, since I’m trying to write as objectively as possible and since Zuko-Katara parallels have already been discussed to death, my analysis will focus elsewhere.

However, something from comradekatara’s post that I would first like to address is this-

[Zuko and Katara] both cope with their grief through rage, often misplaced. in the southern raiders, they both act deeply insensitively towards sokka by acting as if his grief over his mother’s death is somehow less valid simply because he is a lot quieter in his coping mechanisms and doesn’t project his rage & guilt onto everyone else.

- or rather, the idea that Zuko and Katara’s shared pain causes them to act insensitively towards Sokka (and though the post does not mention it, Aang as well).

(Note: these points have already been covered by countless metas before mine, so you can skip/skim this section to read a newer argument in the next section.)

Even ignoring the fact that the Southern Raiders had many out of character moments, Katara’s insensitivity towards Sokka is first and foremost a reaction against his insensitivity towards her.

_____

Dialogue from Season 3, Episode 16 “The Southern Raiders”:

Aang: Um ... and what exactly do you think this will accomplish?

Katara: [Shakes her head in dismay.] Ugh, I knew you wouldn't understand. [Begins to walk away.]

Aang: Wait! Stop! I do understand. You're feeling unbelievable pain and rage. How do you think I felt about the sandbenders when they stole Appa? How do you think I felt about the Fire Nation when I found out what happened to my people?

Zuko: She needs this, Aang. This is about getting closure and justice.

Aang: I don't think so. I think it's about getting revenge.

Katara: [Angrily.] Fine, maybe it is! Maybe that's what I need! Maybe that's what he deserves!

Aang: Katara, you sound like Jet.

Katara: It's not the same! Jet attacked the innocent. This man, he's a monster.

Sokka: Katara, she was my mother, too, but I think Aang might be right.

Katara: Then you didn't love her the way I did!

Sokka: [Hurt] Katara!

_____

While I believe that Aang’s principles of forgiveness are morally sound, the way he pushes his beliefs onto Katara undermines much of her grief. At first, Aang tries to relate to Katara’s experiences by comparing them to his own, but there is a forceful connotation to his dialogue that suggests that Aang considers himself to be the moral authority compared to Katara. Hence, Aang judges Katara (“I think it’s about getting revenge”) without trying to reach out and understand her, forgoing the empathetic common ground in favor of taking on the moral high ground.

Thus, when Sokka tells Katara, “she was my mother, too, but I think Aang might be right,” Sokka is not only saying that Katara should choose forgiveness, he is implying that Aang is the ultimate moral authority on this matter and that Katara should accept that. Moreover, similarly to Aang, Sokka’s opening line, “she was my mother, too,” had the potential to establish common ground between himself and Katara, but the added “but…” places Sokka on the moral high ground against her instead. Of course, when we remember that just two lines ago Aang equates Katara to Jet, Sokka agreeing with Aang seems even more thoughtless and unsympathetic.

So when Katara lashes out against Sokka, ostensibly “acting as if his grief over his mother’s death is somehow less valid simply because he is a lot quieter in his coping mechanisms and doesn’t project his rage & guilt onto everyone else,” it is important to note that Sokka undermines Katara’s louder, more visible way of grieving as well (though that discounts that for most of the show, Katara only uses her grief over her mother’s death to sympathize with others).

Moreover, Katara’s line, “then you didn't love her the way I did!” is hurtful, yes, but it is not necessarily equivalent to “you didn’t love her as much as I did.” Katara’s love for her mother is different from Sokka’s because her pain over her death is different -- after Kya’s passing, Katara had to carry the emotional burden of becoming a pseudo-mother to Sokka (see Sokka and Toph’s conversation in “The Runaway”), a burden that did not cease after she joined the GAang (see the entirety of “The Desert”). To Katara, Kya was not only her mother, but the representation of the childhood she lost and the sacrifice made to protect her life. Sokka simply does not have that same relationship with Kya.

I do not mean to say that Sokka and Aang unfairly taking on the moral authority in this situation means that this authority instead belongs to Katara (and Zuko) - “The Southern Raiders” is filled with questionable moments from all parties involved. However, TSR is an episode that delves into Katara (and Zuko)’s relationship with a mother’s sacrifice, so how Zuko and Katara respond to this specific trauma from their past does not dictate how they respond to painful circumstances in the present/future. Let’s see how this is true.

Sozin’s Comet, Part 1: The Phoenix King

No doubt Zuko and Katara felt some form of frustration upon Aang’s disappearance, so let’s see how they “[enabled] each other’s rage and emotion-driven decision making”:

Here, Katara and Zuko make a decision together that turns out to be calm, rational, and not at all emotionally-driven despite their mutual frustration and worry towards Aang.

Sozin’s Comet, Part 2: The Old Masters

Zuko holds immense pain and self-loathing over betraying Iroh, yet Zuko and Katara’s conversation does not enable/exacerbate negativity from any party involved (since Zuko often translates his grief into anger, and Katara was evidently angry at Zuko’s betrayal). Instead, their conversation is open, encouraging, and constructive.

(Note: this is where the review of points made by previous metas ends.)

Hence, to say that “[Zuko and Katara] would only bring out the absolute worst in each other [through] enabling each other’s rage and emotion-driven decision making” - when we are given in-canon examples of the opposite being true - would be a sweeping and inaccurate generalization.

But for the sake of argument let’s say that, hypothetically, Zuko and Katara’s relationship would fail because they only bring out the worst in each other. And here’s where the argument falls apart for me - Is the argument here that Zuko and Katara have an incredibly meaningful friendship yet somehow this “friendship” causes them to enable each other, thus encouraging each other’s worst flaws and regressing each other’s growth? Is a healthy friendship - much less a “deep and profound” one - not one where two individuals can learn from each other in positive ways and balance each other’s shortcomings?

Or is it something different we’re saying here? Are we saying that two individuals can have a “deep and profound” friendship and yet the moment their relationship shifts from platonic to romantic, they are terrible for each other?

While many significant platonic bonds are stunted when they become romantic, I still believe it to be common sense that some of the best romantic relationships stem from a platonic foundation. But since much of “common sense” on the internet sees that “sense” is nonsensical and “common” is a nicer way to refer to mob mentality, I have done my research to show how Zuko and Katara could have been an excellent case of a friends-to-lovers relationship.

An excerpt from my meta, “Research Shows that Zutara Would Have Been the Ideal Friends to Lovers Dynamic.” (give it a read if you want to see references to relationship-research and an overanalysis on diction/tone)

The reason why Zutara is framed as a “toxic and unhealthy” relationship is that their romance would be a classic example of the enemies-to-lovers trope, a trope which modern media has not been particularly kind to. However, when executed correctly, enemies-to-lovers can produce a healthy and loving relationship, frequently relying on friendship as an intermediate between the “enemy” and “lover” stages in the most well-executed versions of this trope. Meanwhile, the trope of friends-to-lovers is just as popular as enemies-to-lovers, though the specific dynamic required between two individuals to achieve this transition is not well-known. Recognizing this, Laura K. Guerrero and Paul A. Mongeau, both of whom are involved in relationship-related research as professors at Arizona State University, wrote a research paper on how friendships may transition into romantic relationships…

According to Guerrero and Mongeau, “...scholars have argued that intimacy is located in different types of interactions, ranging from sexual activity and physical contact to warm, cozy interactions that can occur between friends, family members, and lovers…” Guerrero and Mongeau then reference a relationship model where the initial stages (i.e. perceiving similarities, achieving rapport, and inducing self-disclosure) reflect platonic/romantic intimacy through communication while the latter stages (i.e. role-taking, achieving interpersonal role fit, and achieving dyadic crystallization) often see both individuals as achieving a higher level of intimacy that involves more self-awareness.

In the rest of my research-based meta I demonstrate how Zuko and Katara’s platonic interactions in the show fit into the stages of communicative intimacy (i.e. perceiving similarities, achieving rapport, and inducing self-disclosure) that Guerrero and Mongeau describe as being mutual between friendships and romances. As such, crossing the line between friends and more-than-friends most likely would not cause a dramatic shift in the Zutara dynamic since much of Zuko and Katara’s platonic intimacy easily translates into romantic intimacy. I’ll end off with another excerpt from my meta.

Excerpt from “Research Shows that Zutara Would Have Been the Ideal Friends to Lovers Dynamic.”

“...it would be remiss to simply dismiss the Zutara dynamic as one that would instantly become toxic should they pursue a romantic relationship.”

With that little thought in mind, let’s move onto point 3: an exploration of friendship, romance, and why toxicity is not exclusive to the latter.

Let’s start with what I agree with:

“The entire foundation of mai and zuko’s relationship was built on how miserable they were together, and how they would just sit there and hate the world together— letting their misery fester as they enabled each other’s depression...”

I’m not sure how necessary it is for me to elaborate on this point given that it’s already been accepted by comradekatara and perhaps 60,000+ other users on Tumblr (a gross exaggeration but this remains unimportant), but in her essay, “Zuko, Mai, and the Nature of True Intimacy,” Araeph contributes more nuance to the concept of Ma/iko and mutual misery, stating that,

Unfortunately for [Zuko and Mai’s] relationship, Mai is and will always be a pessimist—a character trait, not a character flaw, in her. The key difference lies in how Mai and Zuko use their negative feelings. When Zuko sinks into negativity, he gives up on any actions that will materially change his world for the better; Mai, on the other hand, can remain negative even at the height of her character development, and it does not impede her ability to act.

So while Mai enables Zuko’s depression, Zuko does not necessarily do the same for Mai. Nonetheless, throughout their relationship for the first half of season 3, neither of them communicate constructively or push each other to grow as people.

This may be the third disclaimer I’m making, but I first want to say I have nothing against Mai. However, I do have something against the idea that “[Mai and Zuko] would work so well as friends if they weren’t trying to make their dumpster fire of a relationship work.”

Their relationship is a dumpster fire, yes, but will the flames cease simply if the amount of intimacy in the relationship changes?

comradekatara state themselves that their entire romantic relationship is quite depressing - they are only able to connect through empty physical intimacy and mutual hatred of the world. Without that, there is little left for them to bond over. Once Zuko overcomes his conflicting morality and inaction from the first half of season 3, he becomes someone who is strongly guided by his principles and beliefs. However, for the entirety of the series, Mai is characterized by her moral apathy. To cite from Araeph again,

It is moral intimacy that is the last and worst omission for Mai and Zuko… Zuko’s struggle to find and follow his principles is the most central aspect of his character, yet it is a struggle Mai neither understands nor respects…

Lack of moral intimacy (not sharing the same core beliefs) is something that applies to both platonic and romantic bonds. Thus, just as transitioning from a meaningful friendship to a romance does not inherently create toxicity in a relationship, switching from a romance that exacerbates one (or both, depending on how you interpret it) party’s misery does not necessarily erase the preexisting negativity in a relationship - perhaps some of it may subside, sure, but as long both parties continue to fail at communicating and understanding each other, even their friendship seems bleak at best. In this case, Mai and Zuko may work well as conditional friends, or in other words, friends who are only friends when they have something to mutually be miserable over. And this tiptoes the line of speculation, but they could be a formidable political team. But unless the Ma/iko dynamic shifts drastically in the lovers-to-friends transition, I’m not sure if there’s much potential in a friendship between them.

In conclusion, there is a lot I don’t agree with from comradekatara’s post, but if there’s one takeaway I want to impart onto everyone who’s read this far, it’s this: crossing and uncrossing the line between platonic and romantic bonds is not always a transformative experience for the relationship, and the nature of human relationships is a complex spectrum -- not a light switch that can only be set between healthy and unhealthy.

Thank you all for reading!

#atla #atla meta #my bated breath analyzes #this is more pro-zukka than anti-zukka #but I will include neither in my tags #zutara #anti maiko #once again this is a critique #not a post meant to tear anyone or their views down #my bated breath's posts

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hanijunk · 4 years ago

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Alright boys, girls, and nonbinary folks of the world. It’s 5:36am (1/30 when I first started) as I decide to give up on my attempt to continue to focus on learning statistics, avoid studying for my two upcoming midterms, and put off my two actual essays for two different classes.

Instead we’re going into a dive about ✨ KazuFuuma ✨ . Is this me telling you you gotta ship it? No of course not, you’re entitled to your own ships! You don’t really gotta care about it as a ship. But I do want people to recognize it’s THERE canonically, and how disregarding it is extremely unfair to Kazuki as a character particularly. Also, I’m working on the assumption anyone clicking this at least knows the bare bones about what KazuFuuma (ex. You know they are a ship of Kazuki/Fuuma from Dolce, you know they are childhood friends, you know who Dolce is, you know about Honeyworks, etc.) I’ll be making references to specific things, but I won’t always go into heavy detail. Might just hope you know it or take my word for what it is, and go into analyzing it. Some I’ll put direct references to find, but some I’ll trust you can find it yourself. If you somehow read this MAMMOTH and want reference to a specific thing mentioned, hmu I can help you find it!!

Also I hate tumblr formatting sm if you legit wanna read this 7 page essay but hate tumblr format lmk I'll add it as a google doc link instead too. anYWHO

Before actually getting into the meat of things lemme preface some stuff.

Again it’s like almost 6am so this will be disorganized and very train of thought (and likely long due to the fact when I fly by the seat of my pants I’m known to get unnecessarily extensive). It’s definitely gonna be in large part why it’s important to recognize as a romantic relationship foundation and what about it shapes Kazuki’s character in particular. Maybe a bit of how it’s been built up and its general focus and implications. Dunno yet. We’ll see LMAOO

I say f*ck. Not a lot, just a handful of times. This ain’t something scholarly this is for my own enjoyment so if you don’t like that might not wanna read. And it’s not like spitefully I just curse a lot if you haven’t...read my tags before lol

Again this is through the lens of a Kazuki stan. Of COURSE I’m going to have some level of bias, but if anything that bias may help more than hurt because that means I become FIXATED and think a lot about Kazuki. Which plays into establishing just how important it is that Kazufuuma��s relationship is recognized, especially in a romantic light at this point. Lmfao.

I’ll have a few more prefaces about the actual content below but to keep this from getting too long if you wanna read come below the cut owo

I have extremely limited knowledge of Japanese just taking a few classes in highschool (so like 3 yrs ago) and live in America. This means a lot of my knowledge is gathered through the english translations of the super duper incredible and lovely people in the Honeyworks fandom who provide translations (delaix and takanenene esp have provided so much for me being able to understand Dolce) and my own limited Japanese paired with Google Translate for things that remain untranslated.

This only will be drawing on information I have come in contact with and have access to and making assumptions based on that, most (if not all) of which is in the public domain. So things like the Dolce Manga Volumes released via Animate, exclusive 4komas, and Light Novels are out of my area for the most part (apart from again snippets of translations thanks to this fandom’s godlike and generous translators).

I will not be drawing on anything from the first Dolce album with the exception of Nade Nade. From a meta standpoint, I consider those songs as songs made as performance media as opposed to character explorations. Nade Nade is the exception because (1) it was released a whole year before the album and (2) you can tell it’s explicitly an exploration of Fuuma and Kazuki’s interpersonal relationship even if it’s in a slightly more performance based context than the songs that came out with the Dolce LNs. Easiest parallel I can make to show this is if you held Non-Fantasy, Yume Fanfare, and Samishigariya up against each other, you could tell the difference in intended audience and intended purpose the same way the Dolce 1st album, Nade Nade, and the songs of the LNs do respectively. Even if there is some basis to ground Kazufuuma, for the purposes of this essay I’ll be acting under the assumption the 1st album falls under the Non-Fantasy equivalent category.

THAT WAS A LOT OF PREFACING CONSIDERING LIKE 2 PPL WILL PROBABLY READ IT I just have a tendency to anytime I do anything analytical lay down ground acknowledgements for myself to work on just...cuz it makes me feel less guilty for any accidental misinformation even if I’m writing towards my future self to read lolll IM SORRY WITHOUT FURTHER TO DO HERE’S THE BRAIN DUMP

First let’s go ahead and establish why it needs to be recognized as an important relationship. Again, I’m a Kazuki stan. He’s my favorite character not only of Dolce but also of the entire Honeyworks series, and as much as I love him for reasons outside the ship, whether you like it or not Kazufuuma is an essential aspect of his character and narrative. Of course there’s the fact that him and Fuuma are childhood friends, so that’s going to in part define their characters and interactions with each other and those around them. They’re both going to be relevant to one another and important to one another’s stories to an even greater extent than the rest of the members of Dolce. But on Kazuki’s side at least, it’s an EXTREME amount. A running plotpoint in Dolce Diary is the sheer amount of dedication Kazuki has to Fuuma and how much his thoughts and decisions are influenced by Fuuma, whether it be how he feels happiest spending time with Fuuma, how he decided to get his piercing to represent he wanted to protect Fuuma, how he doesn’t want to dislike food so he can eat what Fuuma dislikes, etc. Not to mention running jokes about his borderline overprotectiveness and downright possessiveness of Fuuma, how proud he is when Fuuma gets praised, or that one 4koma that literally explicitly states he can read Fuuma’s mind when he thinks motherfucking ‘dirty thoughts’ about his childhood friend (Fuuma). I still don’t know what the fuck to make of that last bit. Genuinely. Or the fact it’s a fucking running joke. As in it’s not a one off. It’s been brought up multiple times. Kazuki what the fuck.

That’s not to say that he doesn’t have character outside of Fuuma or he doesn’t interact with people other than Fuuma. He’s great friends with Sara, Girisha, and Kippei and is shown time and time again to have fun interactions with all of them, generally acting as the best support friend for every member of the group, not Fuuma alone. For instance how he helps Kippei with his self confidence issues or stays over at Sara’s to protect him from a cockroach (which he fails at lol). Nor is that to say all his interactions involving Fuuma focus solely on his devotion to Fuuma, especially in instances where the manga focuses on Dolce as a group dynamic (though even in that setting there are times where jokes about his devotion are thrown in). He’s kind, he’s stupid, he’s friendly, he’s an amazing character in his own right, and I love him for all those reasons. But that doesn’t change the fact a major part of his character and his character interactions are rooted in Fuuma, and arguably some of his most interesting, eccentric, and notable behaviors and traits revolve around Fuuma (again the mind reading for example).

Hell let’s take it one step further. If you look at the character bios of the Dolce members, you get everyone’s motives for being an idol and interests. Of them, Kazuki is the only one to have another character mentioned directly, not to mention that supporting Fuuma is explicitly stated to be his primary motive as to why he became an idol. Not even Fuuma’s sister is mentioned, though two arguments can be made for this. The first would be that Fuuma’s backstory about wanting to fulfill his dream for himself and his sister was decided later to explain Fuuma’s choice to crossdress though it can be argued it was intentionally done to leave it as a reveal at a later date, to which I would argue I don’t think this backstory was a choice in post. While Fuuma’s dedicated Dolce Diary extra exploring that backstory was released a little less than a year after Dolce was revealed, the preview to set up Fuuma’s backstory was actually the first thing released after the character bios on the Dolce Official Twitter page if you exclude a drawing of Dolce from Yamako. The second argument could be that information about his sister was intentionally withheld to set up the reveal when Fuuma’s extra released to explore it. However, going by that logic (which I do agree with), that would also mean that Fuuma’s inclusion and importance in Kazuki’s character bio also set up his dedicated extra, which I don’t think would be incorrect to assume considering what his actual extra turned out being.

Which brings me to the thing that makes it inexplicable to write off the romantic implications behind Kazufuuma: Kazuki’s dedicated Dolce Diary extra, Suki. I shipped Kazufuuma before even knowing of Suki, sure. But the fact that Suki even exists is a shock to me and drove into me the fact that Kazufuuma wasn’t just my own projection. Again, it’s not a surprise that Fuuma shapes Kazuki’s life. They’re childhood friends, of course they’re going to be important to each other. But this extra explicitly brought Kazuki’s feelings towards Fuuma under a direct spotlight. At first I was thinking oh, this extra was just to acknowledge the fact that Kazuki and Fuuma’s relationship can have romantic implications, but the end of it the conclusion that we got was that it didn’t matter what type of “like” he felt for Fuuma. Originally, I thought it wasn’t anything more than saying there are all types of like, and it doesn’t always need to be explicitly defined, but I appreciated the fact they were aware that they were writing Kazuki in a way that conveyed romantic implications.

Then I thought about it because, again, I love Kazuki of course I’m going to think about his character extra, and realized...that’s not how these character extras have worked. There are only three character extras out as far as I know and have read: Fuuma, Kippei, and Kazuki. If we look at Fuuma and Kippei’s, each extra had a conclusion, sure, but they didn’t have a resolution. Rather, they were simply setting up explicitly what each character’s primary character arc and conflict were. Fuuma’s extra brought attention to the fact that he’s particularly a crossdressing idol by exploring the motives behind it. His choice to be a crossdressing idol is constantly under fire both by himself and the world around him. He’s not immune to those who consider his crossdressing strange, and a part of his story is both finding people who accept his decision to crossdress and to succeed for himself as a crossdressing idol. It’s an essential part of how we understand and define him as a character and it’s a central part of how he interacts with the world around him. For Kippei, it lays the severity of his insecurity under the spotlight and his journey and motives for improving himself. Again, this isn’t something isolated and resolved in the extra; his extreme insecurity and negativity is constantly affecting how he interacts with practically everyone from his fellow Dolce members to his fans despite the fact in all honesty? He’s fucking insanely talented in his own right, his own brother mentioning how smart he is and how he has amazing reflexes. For Kippei, his negativity is an essential part of how we understand and define him and central to how he interacts with the world as much as Fuuma’s decision to crossdress is to him.

Which brings us back to Kazuki, of course. In his dedicated extra, in the chapter that’s supposed to explore and establish and bring attention to an essential part of his character, the aspect of himself under investigation is how he feels about Fuuma. It’s not just how he behaves around Fuuma, it’s explicitly an exploration of his feelings, on top of the fact it’s explicitly an exploration about whether or not he likes Fuuma r o m a n t i c a l l y. Literally the conflict is spurred on by someone outright asking “Do you like him?” and having to clarify “I mean romantically.” What they decided to focus on for Kazuki’s character and emphasize and establish is that Kazuki’s like towards Fuuma toes the line between friendship and romance. His ambiguous feelings towards Fuuma (if we leave them inconclusive as Suki did) are just like Fuuma’s crossdressing and Kippei’s insecurity in the sense the weight of whatever those feelings may be are seen in how he interacts with the world around him and influences his behaviors. It would be another story if they introduced the potential and shut it down all within the extra, because then his central conflict would to me be less directly open to romantic potential and more simply about how his arc was meant to explore the dynamic of the behavior of an extremely dedicated best friend. The fact that he may be romantically attracted to Fuuma or may be only platonically dedicated to Fuuma is instead something that looms over Kazuki in the same way Fuuma’s decision to crossdress constantly looms over him. It’s what Dolce wanted to point to and say this is Kazuki’s central character conflict and central arc: exploring what type of feelings he has towards Fuuma.

Sure, it can be argued that there’s only three Dolce Diary character extras, there’s not enough to be sure about that being the purpose of the extras unless we get the other two’s extras. First, at this point I honestly don’t know if or when they’re going to release an extra revolving around Sara and Girisha just because not only has it been over a year and a half since the latest Dolce Diary Character Extra (Kazuki’s) was released despite the gap between the first and latest Dolce Diary Character Extra (Fuuma’s and Kazuki’s) were within a year of release but also because the Dolce 4komas and comics they’ve been posting to Twitter have decreased (last one being over half a year ago) potentially due to them deciding to focus on releasing Dolce manga content through the purchasable volumes instead. (This is not particularly related to the Kazufuuma argument, just wanted to put out there my two cents on what Sara and Girisha’s extra/focal arc would be. Based on a large part of the Dolce Diary in conjuncture with Can’t an Idol Fall in Love, I’d argue Sara’s would be his journey to regain his passion for performing, and if it’s not that I’d say it’d be coming out of his self-imposed isolation and opening up to people again. As for Girisha, I have less of a concrete idea but I’m assuming it’d be something pertaining to how people often misconceive him whether it be in tandem with his determination, his optimism and sociability, or his stupidity/ability to ignore those misconceptions and work past them. But Girisha is treated like the comedic relief 90% of the time so I’m not entirely sure, but his primary conflict is definitely rooted in misconceptions of him being his roadblock imo. #MoreGirishaContentPlz) That being said, I personally feel like the three are already enough evidence, especially considering it would be honestly even more cruel for Kazuki’s character-centric extra to be focusing on something that wasn’t essential to his character and character arc, anyway. And though it’s not explicitly stated that these chapters are extras exploring a central character, you can kind of tell based on how they are (to my knowledge) the only Dolce Diary updates with cover/title cards each which include their focal character front and center. So working off that fact, the Kazuki-centric chapter established that a pillar to his narrative was his feelings towards Fuuma and that those feelings are still open to romantic potential.

But if you follow me, this is why up until Can’t an Idol Fall in Love With Another Idol’s release, I was terrified of them writing that off. I would have been ok if it was just an arc that was given attention then continued to actively work in the background, as all the character arcs have been over all of Dolce’s content. The fact that they might be giving Fuuma a love interest and giving Fuuma a love arc while Kazuki’s feelings were still up in the air and were still the primary highlighted narrative for him would have been fucking scuffed. To me, it would be like… why would they make him so Fuuma-centric to the point that even his dedicated chapter was not just focused on Fuuma but focused on the ambiguity and potential of him having romantic feelings for Fuuma, yet reduce him to being Fuuma's designated right-hand man. Don’t get me wrong, friendships are just as important as romantic relationships. But again, rather than conclude Kazuki’s answer in Suki to be that his feelings were of friendship, they left it open ended and allow audience members to be actively aware that Kazuki’s feelings towards Fuuma still had potential to be romantically coded. It would just be so weird to quickly close off that narrative by giving Fuuma a love interest as opposed to letting Kazuki conclude it himself. It would be fucking beyond frustrating for me, at least Eventually, I kept trying to drive my hopes that they would explore Kazuki’s narrative at all down to the ground because it was a Fuuma-centric novel; maybe if anything they’d explore those feelings in his own novel after the fact. But then they kept having little drops here and there of Kazuki being even the slightest bit relevant and I’d go back to questioning “Are??? They??? Is this on purpose??? Do they know what they’re doing or are they just doing this because Kazuki’s just so important to Fuuma as his best friend that he’s there as his right-hand I genuinely can’t tell???” And um. Welp.

Safe to say Can’t An Idol Fall in Love sold me on the fact that they know what they’re doing LOL. And to anyone who thinks that Kazuki’s feelings can still be read as ambiguous in CAIFILWAI as opposed to explicitly romantic - whether it be due to a fear they may pull the “I like him as a friend” card or due to the disbelief that they have an explicit mlm main character in the Honeyworks series - I’d like to cover any bases that may make you think this way. If you think it’s just Kazuki acting like a protective friend, why do you think he calls Yui a rival? If you’ve only seen the MV and think it’s ambiguous or can be taken as the "likfe" for friend, then does that mean you think Yui’s feelings toward Fuuma are also ambiguous or as a friend? With the way Yui responds, she is trying to rival Kazuki’s feelings towards Fuuma. She and Kazuki recognize whatever feeling it is that they hold towards Fuuma, both of their feelings are the same type. I don’t think most people would argue that Yui’s confession about Fuuma was one of pure respect and friendship. Plus, if anything I’d argue of the three characters in the MV, Fuuma is the one whose feelings are left the most ambiguous despite him being the central character. It’s heavily implied that he may be forming feelings for Yui, but nowhere is it established either in the song or in the MV, especially if you compare it to Kazuki and Yui’s declarations or if you compare it to Sara’s feelings for Uru in Can’t An Idol Fall in Love. Fuuma’s romantic narrative here is trying to figure out how he feels for Yui, while for Kazuki and Yui they’ve established a rivalry because they both have mutually established they like Fuuma romantically.

If the MV isn’t enough for you and Suki isn’t enough for you for...some reason…??? You can check out the snippets of the light novel which the wonderful takanenene translated: one which revisits the conflict set up in Suki and one that covers the confession scene in the MV in more detail. If the fact that the conflict set up in Suki (aka the lurking feeling of not knowing if all he felt for Fuuma was only platonic or more than platonic) was specifically reestablished in the LN for anyone who didn’t keep up with Dolce Diary didn’t tip you off that it was something important, his behavior in the confession scene as depicted by the LN definitely should have. He’s possessive about his spot by Fuuma’s side. He doesn’t want that spot to be taken by anyone else. Even if he knows that they can help Fuuma, he wants it to be him. And this line: “Kazuki then trails off his words, quietly saying ‘That’s why…’ and then gave Yui a slightly painful smile, his cheeks turning red,” before he declares Yui a rival and states he likes Fuuma. If you can tell me you read that line and are still on the fence about Kazuki’s “like” towards Fuuma being romantic, please message me and I will see how I can get through to you. Like it wasn’t even just a romantically coded confession. It’s just a romantic confession. That “like” is romantic. And I’m so proud that he’s not only come to understand for himself how he feels, but that he’s confident enough to ask the person he sees as a romantic rival to speak in private and not only clarify her feelings for Fuuma but before she can even do that firmly establishes that he loves Fuuma with conviction. Kazuki my boy I’m so proud of you. *sniffs*

And that’s it for establishing Kazufuuma as at least canonically one-sidedly canon and why there’s not only no reason to deny it but also why denying it is a fucking disrespectful move towards Kazuki. He’s a character, sure, but that doesn’t change the fact you shouldn’t write off his struggle to come to be convicted enough to say it out loud. This has been something weighing on him at least a year, if not more (all I know is it started when both he and Fuuma were in some year in middle school). And as a character in a piece of media, I’ve been saying this the entire time, but brushing it off as non-romantic is literally chucking a fucking pillar of his character’s story into the gutter. And to those who may be saying Kazuki’s confession came out of nowhere and is pandering reread this entire fucking essay again I dare you to do it and tell me to my face it’s pandering. Again. Writing off the buildup as pandering is disrespectful to him, disrespectful to his character and narrative, and disrespectful to the wonderful people who have been creating Dolce so diligently and have crafted this narrative for us. Saying his “supposed feelings” and “ambiguous confession” is pandering is like saying Fuuma’s crossdressing is pandering which. If you say either of those I will find you and I will shank you in the fucking gut. Even if you’re not fully into Dolce, recognize these characters are actually very well developed and executed amazingly, as per every Honeyworks character that has come to exist. I don’t blame you if you weren’t aware of the weight of Kazufuuma, but now that you read this I hope you are. That’s mainly what I needed to get out there, but as follows will be me more exploring how Kazufuuma has been built up and generally waving my hand off at where it may be going. If you want you can dip, thanks for reading up to here because I know I repeated a lot because it’s just. So important to drill into your head and has been something I’ve been hung up about constantly. LOL

As for where exactly they’re taking it from this point on, I honestly don’t know. In all honesty, I didn’t even expect them to take it the direction they did. But honestly, I think the direction they went with it is really interesting and better than I could have imagined, in my opinion at least. Honeyworks never ceases to amaze me with their storytelling and narrative choices, and I don’t think there’s any that stand out to me as being severely questionable that they haven’t reapproached at some point down the line. And, again, I think they’re treating this with a lot of care and deserved respect. So I’m just gonna be gushing about how smart they set it up and how smart they’ve been executing it and maybe my own hopes on the direction it could go.

Whether they make Kazufuuma reciprocated I have no real clue or bearings, but to me my gut reaction is they will. Of course, I’m biased, but again if you trace things all the way back to 2018 and step through Dolce’s content and growth from there, I’d say even if they didn’t know if they could execute it like this and see it to fruition, I’d argue that Kazufuuma has been at least heavily implied since the beginning as a relationship they wanted to explore from both sides of the relationship. Obviously I brought up Kazuki’s character bio already, but if you look at the *goes to count* 5th Dolce Diary update already has a joke jabbing at the fact that Kazuki is technically Fuuma’s type (and the way Kippei and Kazuki excitedly react is so cute). The fifth update. And as stated before there are tons of Kazufuuma moments in Dolce Diary, whether it’s played for comedic effect or played straight (and this is post Suki but oh my god I’ve said it before I’ll say it again get yourself someone who looks at you the way Kazuki looks at Fuuma oh my jesus). But song-wise, I mentioned the one Dolce album song I would bring up is Nade Nade and this is where it comes!

Not only is Nade Nade specifically focused on Kazuki and Fuuma’s relationship as opposed to the whole of Dolce despite being the first song, it included the setup/preview of the Fuuma-centric extra prior to the full release of the Fuuma-centric extra itself and was released early as fuck. Literally between the 6th and 7th update to Dolce Diary. Sure, it could be to isolate them as a duo for marketing purposes (they’re very often the two promoted idols together if the whole of the group aren’t included), but the way it’s established as a perspective song as opposed to a general idol duet is what fascinates me. Anyone who didn’t know about Dolce prior and only followed Honeyworks for music would be first introduced to these characters through this song alone, and maybe this is where my Kazufuuma bias comes from but I was one of those people LOL. I thought it was just a cute one-off relationship that they had set up for the purpose of a song and that it was an implied friends-to-lovers story that would never get a conclusion. Also I mistakenly thought Fuuma was a girl oop-. In the full context of Dolce, this song in part helped establish Fuuma and Kazuki more solidly as a unique duo out of all of Dolce, but it also specifically explored through Fuuma’s eyes just how much Fuuma recognizes and appreciates the unwavering support Kazuki gives him to follow his dreams as he wishes. For Fuuma, he loves Kazuki too, though whether it holds any romantic potential in the same way Kazuki loves him has never been explored to nearly the same extent. But Fuuma appreciates how Kazuki’s remained by his side and does everything he can to support him, so Nade Nade explores how his way of expressing his love and thankfulness to Kazuki is by never saying that he needs Kazuki by his side. He’s glad Kazuki’s always been there for him, and his reciprocation takes on the form of being ready to unwaveringly support Kazuki and not ask for more than he already has, even if it meant Kazuki would be leaving his side, despite the fact that he really does wish they could remain together forever just as Kazuki does. The one point he lets himself say something vaguely close to always wanting to stay together, he gets a surprised expression out of Kazuki and says an ambiguous “suki dayo.” Of course, this it much less romantically coded than what we get from Kazuki in Suki and CAIFILWAI, but there is an interesting emphasis put on it nonetheless. Keep in mind, this is all established through the song, which released long before not only Fuuma’s character-centric extra released but also Kazuki’s character-centric extra released, so there is at least a substantial setup for Fuuma’s feelings towards Kazuki’s being strong as well and possibly grow to be reciprocated one day.

I think for me the most fascinating part about Nade Nade is how they tied it back around to Can’t An Idol Fall In Love with Another Idol. Again, without remembering Nade Nade, I still thought CAIFILWAI was brilliantly explored and executed, even if some people would have preferred no love triangle. But honestly, revisiting Nade Nade makes me trust even more the direction they’re taking with this. Whether or not they make Kazufuuma canon mutually (which. Even if they for some inexplicable reason didn’t I’m going down with this ship.), I’m sure they’re putting a lot of thought into the story, because the last bit of Nade Nade directly parallels the misunderstanding that arose from Fuuma mishearing the Kazuki and Yui. Fuuma is resolved to support Kazuki in any area he’s given the chance, and that explicitly includes if Kazuki had some girl he liked, which is what he assumes is going on. The fact that they tied this back around in the form of a misunderstanding was really really smart and Honeyworks is always so good at parallels and references back to their older songs, but for some reason I didn’t expect this. I don’t know how to say why, but the fact that the song that started it all, kicked off both Dolce and Kazufuuma, was directly referenced both visually in the MV with a cameo at the start and narratively despite the central dynamic being predominantly explored in this story in particular was that of Fuuma and another potential love interest and involves said potential love interest for some reason makes me think that (sorry Yui) this is all planned out for Kazufuuma in the grand scheme of things. That being said, I don’t know if me thinking it was planned all along is just me with shipper goggles, but the idea it’s come full circle nearly 3 years later is not shipper goggles and a very very well done parallel in my opinion, whether this trajectory was their plan for Kazufuuma from the beginning or not. Just wanted to gush about that some more.

There’s more I could go into especially if I went into specific details about interactions or specific implications established in Honeyworks' Dolce content about different characters that would be fascinating to explore in relation to and under the lens of Kazufuuma, but I think this is uh...plenty long enough. Plus, I doubt you'll stop seeing Kazufuuma posts from me so those ideas will probably just be miniposts or somethin.

Back to the overarching point of this segment, idk what they’ll do with this story in the end, but do I think Kazufuuma will canon? I’m used to looking at ships that aren’t explicitly apparent with a sliver of skepticism, but all things considered (as I stated before) yeah. I don’t see reason why they wouldn’t now that they’ve explicitly identified there is a romantic dimension to it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Like to me, the setup isn’t something that would be written off as unrequited? And this doesn’t have to play into why I don’t think it will canon, my personal opinion on the Fuuyui relationship (again albeit through the lens of a hard Kazufuuma shipper lmao) has it’s own merits and is really cute, I find it cute in the way I found Koyuhina cute. I personally never really shipped Koyuhina, and especially since they slipped Kotarou into Ima Suki Ni Naru I was more curious about who this kid was and how he played into things I didn’t really see Koyuhina as something that would come to fruition. Similarly, there’s more importance in the overall sense on Kazuki than there is Yui (considering he’s one of the 5 original and focal members of this generation of idols, this would be natural), as well as the fact there’s just way more foundation and exploration in Fuuma and Kazuki’s relationship than there is Fuuma and Yui. As for how much of a balance there is inside the LN itself, the fact that they seem to have spent a substantial amount relaying the foundation of Fuuma and Kazuki’s relationship and re-exploring it (at least in Kazuki’s perspective) at all on top of how much content there is covering their relationship prior to the LN ever since Dolce’s origin just feels like that relationship holds more weight. Pretty much Kazufuuma feels more established as a priority in general. The way I personally hope Fuuyui plays out is whether they wind up holding mutual feelings or not or whether Fuuma doesn’t feel that way towards Yui is they get a relationship akin to Kotarou and Arisa. Albeit, Kotarou and Arisa never viewed each other in a romantic light, but they had mutual respect and solidarity. That’s the type of friendship I hope comes out of Fuyui. And considering there hasn’t been a break-up in any Honeyworks’ canon relationships (nor do I expect there to be… they’re all perfect for each other LMAO) it would actually be interesting if Fuuyui get together but don’t endgame and Kazufuuma is established as the inseparable endgame after some realization or another, though I don’t expect them to go that route nor do I know if that’d be the best way to go about it anyway. Also final point, Honeyworks seems to have a thing for childhood friends trope anyway soooooo owo All in all, don’t know where they’re taking it, just excited to see where it goes.

TL;DR of this *counts* 7 page essay, stan Kazufuuma. Not gonna proof this. Maybe I’ll edit and repost but yall are getting a confusing clusterfuck of ramblings over 2-3 hr periods of me writing across 3 different days at around 5am each day. Uh. If you got this far like and subscribe and-- jk plz reply to this mammoth anywhere you see fit or tell me if you have stuffs to add or counter or whatnot I like hearing people talk about Kazufuuma ;w; I am Kazuki and Kazufuuma brainrot can you tell after reading this? No? Lemme just remind you I’m K--

#honeyworks #dolce #kazufuuma #kazuki haiga #fuuma shirayuki #long post #analysis #character analysis #kinda?#nobody cares trash #also keep in mind this is PURELY for self satisfaction LMFAO read it if u wanna dont if u dont idgaf either way #anyway kazufuuma canon fight me #or have intellectual conversation with me #if you want it on a google doc bc it's easier to read hmu #if you can't tell i think about kazufuuma too much #how much of this is repetitive? probably a lot...

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vvatchword · 3 years ago

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I waited and waited for my company to host an open enrollment for benefits. I had heard we were going to receive better insurance in a variety of ways, and I needed it. I made some REALLY dumb mistakes last time and paid for it out the wazoo. I’m talking about over 7% of my yearly income went to medical necessities, which is no mean amount, I’m here to tell you.

So they finally open it… for one week only. The third week of January, to be precise. Thus, my insurance card was in some kind of limbo of the post-office variety by the time February opened up. Obviously, I had appointments scheduled into February, and I dithered between going to them or putting them off. In both of the most potentially expensive appointments—involving a psychiatrist and a neurologist—it seemed more important to go than not.

Yeah so guess whomst was not on my insurance

In the neurologist’s case, I checked beforehand, and they didn’t tell me I WASN’T in-network (I should have checked independently but wtf). In the psychiatrist’s case, I was under the assumption that I had used her with this particular insurance previously. I was incorrect.

Additionally, the costs of my medication went up. WAY up. I just paid $45 for Adderall. I’m not even sure why?? My pharmacy is in-network and I thought I was getting generics, and I made sure to examine my medication allowances before signing up. I thought it would be $15 at most. I have no idea what the fuck happened. I’m going to have to check AGAIN. No doubt some kind of layered bureaucratic definitions deeper than hell.

I double-checked everyone else and double-checked with them. My cost with the therapist is going up $10 per session. I lost my dietitian entirely. My allergist is… maybe? My PCP is going to stay the same, but this isn’t the biggest win, given that I barely have a relationship with the office.

So, to really put this into perspective: I just lost my psychiatrist and my dietitian, both of whom I’ve been working with for some time and trust and like, and depending on some of the other nonsense going on, I may lose my pharmacy and my allergist as well. I JUST started allergy shots, since allergies have been literally debilitating (apparently for good reason).

I hate American healthcare so much right now y’all have no idea

I also descended into a pit of despair again and seriously considered how to escape this godforsaken system

Joke’s on me, the only way to escape is to fucking die

#storysnob

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atheistforhumanity · 4 years ago

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My Experience With Magical Thinking

When I was a young child church was not a part of my life, although I'm sure God was a character I was aware of from grown-up's everyday talk. It wasn't until around 7-8 that my father was pulled into the LDS church. As a kid I had two personal struggles going on. The first was my conflict with being in this place with the nerdy goody-goodies. The second was with whether I actually believed in all this god stuff. The second dilemma rarely got any serious thought. However, it had definitely seeped into my way of thinking and God became ubiquitous part of life. I won my fight to stop going to church at 13, but before I left I had one experience where I took God seriously. At around the age of 11-12, I was in LDS boy-scouts and away at camp. Our tents were like the old fashion military tents with giant green blankets thrown over two poles and staked into the ground. They were permanently open on both sides. Inside our cots were on a half-foot wooden platform to keep us off the ground. One night bears roamed into our camp. I cannot remember if we didn't dispose of our garbage correctly, but I could hear the bears circling my tent. My bunk mate was sound asleep at first. As I listened to their large heavy movements only a couple feet from my head on the other side of this thick blanket-like tarp, my anxiety increased greatly. I was sweating and struggling to breath correctly. One of the bears stuck their massive head into the tent, sniffing the floor just two feet from me. I was scared senseless. At some point my bunk mate woke up and asked what we should do. My response was to pray you F'n ass off.

The years went on and I continued to live under the assumption that God was real, because everyone I knew thought so, even if you weren't a follower of his. As a young adult, I found myself in need to clean up my life and make some serious changes. I joined a fellowship of like minded people and became “spiritual, not religious.” This concept can be summed up as believing there is a god that I can have a relationship with, but that doesn't mean all those crazy stories are true. I was very serious about this for 6-7 years, and I did make great strides in personal growth. It was around this time that my education was expanding and changing the way I look at the world. It occurred to me that I wanted to have the most accurate world view possible, being critical and honest about my views, not just wishful or wantful. A big part of my spiritual beliefs had been that god worked in our lives and we had to be conscious of these signs and benefits. However, during my reexamination of my world view I could not find any critical evidence of such 'workings.' I had to be brutally honest with myself and the idea of 'knowing' god's will was a highly subjective game of trial and error. No one or thing had ever spoken to me. I saw that positive coincidences do not constitute proof of magical interference in the world (perhaps I'll do another post specifically about that). I shifted my belief to be that I thought a god existed, but he made no interference in the physical world, expect to provide me the mental and emotional strength to deal with life. This may not seem like a huge shift, but this simple version of believe was directly in conflict with all my friends and family.

It was another 3-4 years before this middle ground position was unbearable and indefensible. Further education and study of philosophy forced me to face one simple question. If I did not discover god's existence through some path of evidence, then what reason is there to assume he actually exists? Only after studying many other myths and conspiracy theories did this principle I used over and over finally seem applicable to my own belief. I had literally zero reasons to believe that any gods existed ever! Anytime you are dealing with a question that is factual in nature (i.e. does blank exist), if the thing in question does not arise from a set of facts or hard evidence then the thing in question can only have been fabricated in the mind. This was my epiphany that brought me to the conclusion of atheism. Simply applying this question to any type of magical thinking that exists (i.e. astrology, witch-craft, etc.) radically changed how I viewed the whole world.

I was a believer in some type of magical thinking for roughly 2/3s of my life. After all that time, I can say with confidence that those beliefs were born of two qualities, and those are wishfulness and selfishness. When I was a child, I had a habit of wishing for things so hard I'm shocked I never had an aneurysm. No one really corrected this belief though. All my children's shows implied that wishing was a valid method to achieve a goal, and parents are always telling kids 'maybe.' This worldview about wishfulness later manifests in a belief in god or religion, because we all SO desperately want to believe that there is some sense of cosmic justice. Every culture in the world is obsessed with the ideas of living forever and cosmic justice. Human beings have always skipped the question of what is true for the question of what do we want to be true. The operation has been that if this idea I have about a god is true then it makes my life better, therefore I believe it is true. That's where the selfishness kicks in. One thing I observed about myself and other people is that we hold our world views extremely close to our hearts. When I had to clean up my life and make changes, I also had to accept that my entire worldview was incorrect and needed a total revision. This experience was unbelievably taxing and painful mentally and emotionally. I dare say, such a core change borders on traumatizing for the mind. As human beings we are incredibly selfish in that we refuse to even entertain that we may need to subject ourselves to that pain. This is why people willingly do amazing mental gymnastics to preserve their important worldviews. Obviously, religion or other forms of magical thinking are usually at the top of the chart for prized personal beliefs. We're too selfish to face the pain of being wrong.

This has been a short summary of my experience with magical thinking. In the future, I would like to explore the question of whether humans are constitutionally capable of escaping magical thinking. Thank you for reading.

#atheism #religion #magic #spiritual #astrology #witch-craft #education #critical thinking #personal

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thedreadvampy · 4 years ago

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this is kind of a Hot Take (and rlly long) so don't feel pressured to post this

also no one cancel thedreadvampy over posting this ask if she does these are my beliefs and not necessarily hers kthx

I'm honestly really uncertain why people are so militant about aphobia on this site. like obviously aphobes are Not Nice People and it's good to be against their shitty beliefs. But I've been on this site for ~5 years and I have never, in my memory, seen an aphobe (with the few exception of like. literal nazis but their main label isn't aphobe). I have seen a lot of people who were then harassed/cancelled being called aphobes in addition to a lot of other things like (homophobic, racist, abusive, etc) but as far as I bothered to figure out, the label of aphobe came from one specific phrase they used or one post they reblogged (though I can't be bothered to Deep Research so I genuinely don't know on this one).

(I have seen casual acephobia in my own personal life. however, that is not Tumblr.)

I have seen scores of posts along the lines of "aphobes are bad" "aphobes dni" etc etc.

Maybe it's just who I follow, but it seems like there's a lot more anti-aphobe sentiment than aphobes. Which is good! It's the goal! However, I think it's possible that that anti-aphobe sentiment has not become "look how few aphobes there are! yay!" it's "there are hidden aphobes all around us and you have to interrogate everyone to know who to ostracize"

You're a fairly popular figure in the mechs/tma fandoms and the thing about Tumblr is that it hates popular figures. And more than that, you're visible, so a) people will see if you answer a bunch of questions about ace things, and b) you exist in everyone's brains more than little blogs.

to be clear. to be absolutely crystal 100% clear: I am not saying that people got together and went "let's interrogate all the popular blogs so we can pretend theyre acephobic and have fun bullying people," I'm saying it's possible that what was once a positive emotion, "we don't tolerate intolerant people" has possibly, in some people, morphed into a fear that intolerant people are hiding all around them. And frankly, that fear can be understandable (not right, not kind, but understandable), especially if they face hate irl and their only outlet for emotion is tumblr. shit, Tumblr is one of my emotional outlets.

I don't think it's bad to engage with these people in good faith, or to answer questions, but I think it's possible that some of them are coming from the "intolerant people are hiding all around us and must be ferreted out" kind of perspective instead of a "hey I wanna check that this person isn't an intolerant asshole before following/supporting them" or "I want to engage with a person who may be ignorant" (I'm not attempting to imply that you're ignorant). Im not saying "not answer their questions" this is just, like, my opinion. I'm not making a lot of actionable statements here.

that's my whole Hot Take, hopefully I made some kind of sense, I just honestly feel kind of mad on your behalf that you have to go thru an interrogation to be Not Tumblr Cancelled. If people were generally having a nuanced discussion then that would be fine but you've already stated several times that ace/aspec people are valid and deserve love and respect etc etc. which as an aspec person makes me feel that your blog is safe for me, and I don't feel the need to play 20 Questions Are You Sure You Aren't An Aphobe

I don't know how much of this I entirely agree with and I refuse to think

(not about this. just in general. today I refuse to think)

my main response to this is:

a) I think my confusion is I have less than 1500 followers I think I always assumed the You Are Now A Public Figure People Have Opinions On mark had to be higher than that but this appears to have been a totally incorrect assumption

b) I don't feel like. a threat of Cancellation except inasmuch as I don't want Kofi to eventually get any kind of kickback if I turn out to be or people understand me to be a shitty person. I didn't ask for a platform or do anything to deserve it, if I get distressed it's largely just that I don't want to be a shitty person! and I have a whole thing about. I don't ever feel secure in my ability to say I'm NOT being shitty so like if enough people start saying AH RUTH THEDREADVAMPY IS A GARBAGE PERSON I definitely do stay wondering if they're right even if I think my position is morally defensible. like I'm very easy to get into a spiral of I think that's highly defensible but maybe I'm just in denial/trying to cover my ass/self-justifying so I can avoid accountability/etc. like this is a thing and it's why I'm very uncomfortable with absolutism, a lot of my family in my experience have a phenomenal capacity for denial and for rewriting reality into something they Fully Believe despite all the evidence, and so I'm really conscious of the possibility that I'm doing that and I wouldn't. know about it. it's a really really powerful subconscious force and that's been like. a big fear point for me my whole life. that I could be being a cunt and be obviously being a cunt and be so deep in denial that it just doesn't register at all. this is like. the thing I fear most. So I DO want people to tell me if I'm being a dick because the only way I can 100% know I'm not just in denial is if I can trust people to call me in, but I really, really, really struggle with when people say I'm being a dick and I disagree, not because they're harassing me necessarily but just because it really sends me into a spiral of doubting my own ability to be sure about like, anything. at all. it's a whole unreality thing which is, uh, it's MINE to deal with, it's not something I would want to put on other people, but it very much does affect my responses and I didn't mean to write this but hey, no therapy last week and it shows.

oh also c) on reflection I don't agree that there's very little aphobia on Tumblr (although as I've said I'm not ace or aro so my opinion should hold little weight) but I do think that there's a lack of give and take, not just in aphobia stuff but also in general, in these kinds of conversations, like sometimes yeah people are actively hateful but I don't think there's any room for misunderstanding, poor phrasing, or questioning, and I understand that that's coming from a really genuine place of pain and devaluation of aro/ace experiences but I also think people jump straight to assuming active malice very fast, and often explicitly consider "actively not stating an opinion" to be an offence on the level of "actively staying a harmful opinion," which I think is unhelpful. like. we learn by listening, there are times in my life where I would have been lying at the time to agree unconditionally with something like "I think we should believe survivors" (I was a 2000s teen who hung out with 4channers) but I also was conscious of the harm that it would do to publicly debate from the perspective that No We Shouldn't Believe Survivors, so you know I waited and I listened and I thought about it and ultimately I came to a position I could say with my chest. but like. The online social more that you Have to have an opinion and I Have to hear it to prove that you have the Right opinion is. uncomfortable to me to say the least. I don't think it gives you much room to learn and improve, especially given that everything on the internet is permanent and often treated as if it forever reflects your current beliefs. like I have changed my opinions So Much since I was 16 and if someone went back through a tag on my blog to Prove My Bad Opinions they could paint pretty much any picture they wanted with 12 years of changing opinions.

anyway yeah like. no I don't fully agree with this ask but I appreciate the alternate perspective. I also did not mean to write another wall of text I'm just very much In A Brain Hole today and sometimes words Just Happen.

#i don't want this to pop up in Discourse tags that will double ruin my brain off scrolling experience #but i do want people to be able to filter this stuff out #I'm gonna go wiiiiiiith #thedreadvampy adiscourse #so I'll try to tag everything surrounding the question of aphobia and me with that #no gonnae tag my general depression posting with it though that's just What This Blog Exists For

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samyazaz · 4 years ago

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Re: the victorian corset post, how are you finding the low cut of the bust? I am also poking at the idea of switching away from bras, but I'm wary of the very low bust not being supportive enough to keep from, uh, bouncing. (I also just realized I defaulted to late Victorian -- sorry if that's an incorrect assumption!)

So, to start with, it seems to me, from my own fledgling experience as well as so much costube watching, that Victorian undergarments are kind of designed for the corset to provide support from underneath while the shift worn underneath it helps to contain things from above, which helps to make up for the low cut of the corset, I think. I don’t yet have a proper shift yet, I’ve been wearing a knit tank top underneath it instead, which doesn’t provide the same firm confinement that woven fabric would, but it seems to be working all right even so. That said — I mean, I’m hustling around all day at work and I feel very secure, but I’m not running, if you’re worried about that sort of bouncing. One of my concerns, though, was the fact that my work requires me to often pick things up from off the ground and I was concerned that bending over so far in it would cause me to spill out, but even with a knit tank instead of a proper chemise, I don’t really find that happening.

I’ve just put it on again this morning to test for bouncing for you, and while my knees are definitely not going to be up for actually running or jumping, I did bounce on the balls of my feet and it seemed okay to me. There’s some jiggling, but I’d say less than there would be in a normal bra. And, like — if you bounce in a normal bra, your whole boob bounces, right? Because the cups are soft and it’s only really using gravity to keep things in place. But the corset’s support comes from underneath, so while the top might jiggle it doesn’t really seem to bounce the whole boob up and down the way it would in a bra — the lower half of my boob isn’t moving up and down at all, when I bounce, and so you don’t get that same sort of up and-down movement of the entire boob, which is the part that I, at least, find the most uncomfortable and unpleasant.

Again, I can’t speak to actually trying to jog or run in this thing — but, if that’s the level of support you’re looking for, Mariah Pattie has done a whole series of videos on her YouTube channel about adapting 18th century stays for modern use, including a sort of half-length sports bra substitute that she made and went running in: https://youtu.be/u4aOgymBGVw

youtube

I think it’s absolutely possible to get something that will work to keep you from bouncing, just definitely do a mock-up — I did one for mine and ended up bringing the top edge of the bust in by about two inches in my final version, which may have helped contribute to it containing things fairly securely. (I also added a lot more bones than the pattern called for, which probably does as well.) And it’s worth remembering (as I had to remind myself a few times in the making of mine), that if you’re doing this for daily use rather than historical costuming, you don’t have to stick with historical shapes and silhouettes! You can raise the bust line if it makes things more comfortable or secure for you.

#corsetry #needs a tag apparently #answered asks #kingedmundsroyalmurder

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rpbetter · 3 years ago

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Hi Vespertine. Sorry to add to the pile, I promise I will send in some writing related things to compensate later. I also misgendered that user in a comment by accident with she/her. I blocked them, but they still looked at my blog, and they made a post that said by using the wrong pronouns, which they thought was intentional and meant to hurt them, I purposefully called them a hysterical woman stereotype. Obviously that wasn't true. I was just going off a comment someone else made on my blog where they used she/her, and I thought I had to correct myself. It was a case where good intentions, even if I was not happy with the user's behavior or expected to talk to them again, I was still going to use the right pronouns, but my intentions were warped by someone with an agenda. I'm sorry to hear you're getting the same heat. I didn't use my rp blog to interact with the user or talk about them because I was sure something like this would happen, either by them or other people like that callout blog, and I think other people had the same idea. I dodged a bullet there, but I'm still paranoid. I'm paranoid I'll hear a notif and see my rp blog in a callout for this, because someone hunted it down, or a callout for trying to talk to the person who started all the drama. Nobody should be scared to talk about someone on their own blog. Nobody should be scared to talk openly, in general. Nobody should be called out for trying to talk with someone either. This culture of fear is so disturbing to me.

Hey there, Anon!

Oh, I would love that, but you totally don't have to, of course. Don't feel bad for adding on, I'm here for anything at all, and honestly, with the job I'm doing IRL right now, it's really hard for me to concentrate well enough on finishing any of the advice posts (at least, to be the quality y'all deserve). It's a hot topic, it's included so, so, terribly many people in the RPC. It's also one that's generating some great, needed conversations. So, it isn't like you're adding to anything bad, annoying or distracting me, or contributing to the inflammatory side of this.

Hell, it's got to be really nice for some of the people in messages I've received to see proof that they weren't alone in this experience. I can keep publishing the hate anons for exactly that reason, and I can promise people they aren't the only ones (in this or in any such horrible behavior), but it's different to see it coming from a third party! So, thank you for that.

Though, I am deeply sorry that you were treated to more than a ringside seat in this debacle.

It's not very encouraging to be thoughtful and respectful of other people when literally nothing you can say or do will result in anything other than more twisting of your words, and that's a big problem I have with this shit. Things like actual transphobia, intentional misgendering, actual infantalization and shit treatment of ND people, actual harassment, etc. etc. etc. matter. It's just more trivializing of real problems for the sake of blowing nonexistent bullshit up, and that is immensely disgusting to me. The fact that you damn well know someone out there has had the reaction to this behavior of, well, fuck you then, fuck trans people is really upsetting.

Like, yeah, let's be real, if you require social rewards to do the right thing, you have some problems lol but at the same time, you know who does require social rewards to develop themselves? Young people. And the RPC is largely comprised of people in their early twenties who, for a variety of possible reasons, are still at that point

Furthermore, no, it's not anyone's job to be good representation at all times, especially when that performance comes at a cost to themselves, but maybe don't go out of your way to be the person that is the necessary push in the wrong direction of someone's formative experience with people of your community. If it's costing you nothing to not clown on serious issues, but is costing the entire world another bigot for you to clown on serious issues, the choice should be a bit obvious here. Whenever you're in a safe place - physically, emotionally - and capable of that kind of logic, exercise it, damn.

It's definitely a better course of action than playing out skewed activism by vilifying innocent people, more worthy of one's effort than losing their collective shit over a very easy mistake. One that I'd say was even less avoidable in your case. AGAIN, how, exactly is anyone supposed to know this shit when they're blocked? When they aren't subverting the blocks they, themselves, put in place? I know for a fact none of them are looking at the information of the people they choose to try to drive out of the RPC, but everyone else is supposed to make zero reasonable assumptions, check and recheck blogs they have made an effort not to visit for good reason. Sounds absolutely reasonable and sane!

So, you know what? I'm going to be even more offensive here and talk for a moment about why these mistakes are reasonable.

When we see a post and reblog it, it's not unreasonable to assume that the OP had knowledge we didn't. Since we blocked the offending party, but they're discussing them. OP uses the incorrect pronouns, we end using the incorrect pronouns as well. This is not malicious intent. It isn't intentional at all, it's just having a discussion. A discussion that wouldn't have even transpired if they hadn't taken it upon themselves to (what a coincidence) take personal issue with a RPer they repeatedly took out of context and decided to shame for it, before proceeding to get an even bigger stick and pot.

When we decide to block a blog, it's our responsibility to stay off of it. Not go looking at it for any reason. That is now off-limits. When someone blocks us, it's also our responsibility to respect that decision, no matter how outrageous it was, no matter what we might need to verify. That's the issue with blocking when we don't exploit how easy it is to get around blocking on tumblr; we've cut ourselves off from any further meaningful communication, including passive communication like rules and posts. Kind of like how you cannot expect an apology to mean a damn thing when you've blocked everyone you harassed, then made that apology in a post on your blocked blog. Don't put up walls you expect people to see through, then get upset when they can't see through them.

As a community, the RPC is primarily afab. That's never a problem to bring up when someone wants to be angry about their female muse not getting equal attention and so on, but it's a problem to discuss any other time, about any other problem. Dealing with the things that we're socially raised to ascribe to as afab people is that problem. It's reflected in our behaviors, interests, and speech. We may not want to live in a gendered world, we may eschew that, but we were raised in a gendered world and it shows. One which has a lot of complications for being that, like almost everyone feeling safer around afab people by default of the All Men Are Bad, All Women Are Harmless bullshit.

We not only know that the RPC is primarily afab, we tend to assume comfort, especially in hostile situations, by assuming those pronouns in others.

And it so does not matter how much any of us like it, some people have more masculine or feminine tones. Even in text. That means neither that someone's gender identity should be disregarded nor that this text-based presentation is correct, but like every other unfair thing that exists, it's a thing. Like you, Anon, you genuinely come across in tone as primarily neutral, slight lean toward masculine. Even if I wasn't inclined to do so, not knowing you and all, I'd use they/them for you instinctively because that's what your speech is giving me. That isn't any more unreasonable than ascribing another set of pronouns based on the same information.

Oh yeah, I know, lurkers, the difference is that they/them is the appropriate choice when one does not know. I know that logically, but people aren't always operating like robots, weirdly enough. We default to a lot of instinctive behaviors, and we aren't always operating at the top rung of cognition either. Being human works like that, it's really that simple and not malicious if you're not reading that into it.

As we're all aware, it is being read into, and your experience is exactly why; you now feel worried every time you get a notif, you've been outed as a supposed transphobe, and while it is incredibly fortunate you stopped this from transpiring on your RP blog, it still transpired somewhere and has had a negative effect. If they find they correct thing or set of things, they can get so many more people to dogpile you over it. Get enough people to do that, make someone miserable enough, especially people who are already going through a hard enough time already, they'll leave.

It is a terroristic act, and it has the effect of all terroristic acts; people are afraid to exist outside of shifting bounds (that shifting is a part of the terrorism). They can't have an opinion, write any muse/topic they wish, be honest on their own blogs, support the "wrong" topics, muns, or blogs. Attacking people for a mistake, not allowing them to address it either, just furthers all of that. It's showing the community what happens when you aren't on the "right" side, even if that isn't even the case. They certainly turn on their own quickly enough.

So, of course, it's a culture of fear and it is disturbing as hell. No one has any right to make someone feel unsafe over fiction or a hobby or a difference of opinion. Everyone has the right to say whatever they want on their own blogs, to talk openly, and yes, to try to talk to others without feeling at risk.

Even if what someone says is genuinely unpleasant. This isn't the way one handles it. By all means, have a problem with something, have a problem with someone, but grow up and talk to them openly, without bringing everyone you can dredge up to join in. I have no issue with people arguing, I have an issue with bullying. If it's your whole goal to harass people without consequences to the end result of deactivation and lockstep behavior from everyone else, that's what you're doing, folks. Bullying.

If you can't win an argument, especially one your own ass began, in any other way than this, you're not engaging in an argument.

#vespertine #answered #anonymous #callout culture #rp harassment

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resetpermalik · 4 years ago

Photo

Mass Music Measurements Survey Form

A freeCodeCampChallenge

Gaining Speed

This marks my second freeCodeCamp challenge. As I mentioned in my after action report from the first FCC challenge (tribute page), it took some time to finally gain traction and fully complete that project. That was a problem with (one) unnecessary complexity of design and (two) a lack of planning (before I began to code.) It was my assumption that if I laced the project with many working parts, I would learn much, much faster; also, that by getting right to the code, I could pick up the syntax, semantics and general knack for writing (code) in less time. And wow, I was very incorrect in thinking so.

As a response to my previous poor start (with my tribute page,) this time I was better able to address some lessons which had only occurred to me when halfway through the last project. So this time, I really dialed in the importance of streamlining my initial paperwork designs, learning how to more proficiently use Figma and some of its tools, how to better approach icon design with Photoshop and vastly improve my entire workflow. This provided (not only) an easier build, but also a more efficient angle by which I was empowered to catch more lessons along the way.

In the next few paragraphs, I will detail just which specific advantages I picked up in terms of HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript capability. In addition, I will move through some of the tactics I employed to help me finish this challenge with much more confidence than the last.

Planning Stages

When I set out to hand-write the marked goals (set down by FCC’s challenge,) I do find it tedious. The thing is, I am copying (in my own words) precisely what the challenge is demanding of me. Let me elaborate…

With every line, I am telling myself that I really do not need to do this. I mean, I can pretty easily peer over at the other browser window (when necessary) and see exactly what my marching orders are. Though albeit true, there are a couple of key differences in (one) reading from FCC and (two) writing/reading my own notes.

As I write out every expected step of my project, I can build an image immediately for how I would like my creation to take shape. This falls in line with the visual aspects and design, the color scheme, the functionality of each element and the code itself. It is a powerful method to which I will pay better respect going forward. (I already have plenty of ideas on how to implement more potent procedures — like larger drafting paper, (which will allow for a greater landscape on my pages, maybe using a tablet for notation and perhaps a few voice recordings along the way)). Now, I may be getting ahead of myself! Back to the plans..

And so writing out the objectives is terrific for lots of reasons, but moving to the drawn design itself — this may be the most crucial bit yet. Here’s the deal. When I physically drew the (expected) survey form, I may have well completed the whole project. So what does that mean?

I took so much liberty in imagining what the design should resemble. More specifically, I let my mind wander and allowed thoughts to spill out onto the legal pad before me. This (in combination with my understanding of how everything needed be expressed in code) let me structure my rough draft with such a degree that the next step made the actual coding like an exercise in copy and paste. I’ll expound…

I was drawing parts which were effectively elements of HTML. This was followed by some (more precise) markings of pseudo-code (which amounted to about all of the HTML I required to code for the whole challenge.) So, when I say the planning has proved to be useful, this would be an undestatement. This attention to planning has made it possible for me to avoid the ‘nuts and bolts’ in my code editor. Now, this advancement is massive, because the saved time and effort was a testement to why I was then able to better learn more intricate detail when coding. And now let’s get to those lessons and the code at large.

Within Earshot of Paper and Pencil

My goal is not to elaborate on the use of specific technologies, but more-so the process itself. however, I will briefly touch on Figma and Photoshop…

Using Figma helped me focus on each element and understand how they more literally fit together in the puzzle. I was able to name every piece such that it would show me what my HTML element should be in code and how each need be named. Also, I took those separate entities and grouped them such that I could postion everything exactly as I wished. My next goal with Figma will be to utilize the ‘component’ feature and truly unroll some strong functionality of the software.

Regarding Photoshop, I made a logo for my survey and spun it into a favicon with relative ease. In an attempt to create animations and advertisements for my affiliate site, I have better come to understand Photoshop’s effectiveness. Thereby, building my icon was fairly straightforward. I simply pieced it together with a couple of layers and exported the PNG. I still want to be able to employ SVGs for this application; but until now, I haven’t perfected the craft. I will leave that for the coming FCC challenge. Onward!

Coding the Beast

The first topic to address here is quite obvious for me… SUITE TESTING.

When I began coding this project, I wrote my HTML boilerplate and immediately tied in the FCC testing script so I could begin verifying my code at every turn. I’ll elaborate…

I ran into a few issues with debugging throughout my last project; those were problems which resulted in code errors piling up on me simultaneously. And, while an error (for which you don’t know the remedy) is frustrating…several of those errors (all at once) becomes infuriating. Luckily, I ran into a great solution. Unit testing.

By instantiating the FCC test suite before I began coding the bulk of my project, I was then gifted the opportunity of verifying each of the sixteen goal posts.

In more detail, nearly no problems snuck up on me while coding the breadth of this project because I was adamant on addressing them in real time (as they appeared). What a true life-saver...

Input Text (element, attribute)

I found it repetitive and annoying at first, when the 10th goal of this challenge asked me to give both the input and label elements their own respective and corresponding ids. This was because I (very simply) did not understand the request. Along with that, I definitely didn’t understand why it was being asked (to begin with.)

That said, I now realize that the goal was to identify the label for the text field, in addition to the field itself. In understanding this distinction, I have now been able to find value in this very feature.

By giving ids to both my labels and input texts, I was then able to style each distinctly and find them with more ease (while peering though my HTML.) Now here’s real solid tip which I will not soon forget.

Don’t Pick More Than One Option!

So, I was writing the code for my radio buttons and what happened next is certainly a rookie mistake. When I navigated to my browser (in order to test the options,) I found that EVERY one of my buttons was clickable. And this, for obvious reasons, is not ideal.

This solution was super easy. All I needed to do was unify (or make each value the same for) the input-radio buttons. After I placed cloned values for each radio button, only one option could then be chosen. Success!

Nitpick the Name and Ids

This is something which should possibly be glossed over. But, when working with various input fields, I was asked to employ many names and ids for each.

While I’m not entirely certain (even now) whether there is a standard for which comes first, I have come to realize that name attributes should possibly supercede id attributes.

Using Visual Studio Code, it seems to like placing names before ids. And in a real life estimation, using name over id seems to be old-fashioned, but admirable.

More seriously, I understand in code, name will be less subjective (while more actionable) and ids will more far more particular and prone to alteration.

Dropdown

I was in a position to use dropdown boxes twice in this project. The problem I came across was that my options continued to begin with the default option as selectable. While I learned the solution quickly and with ease, I believe it should be recorded as vital.

When inserting a placeholder option in a dropdown box, in order to keep it from being a clickable entity, you have to style it as such.

I called the id of the option in my CSS sheet and set its display as none. That easy.

Pseudo Class and Element Selectors

Very little of my experience with this challenge dealt with pseudo class or pseudo element selectors. But, I will cover (in short) what I did learn (with these topics in mind.)

Using a pseudo element selector is the best (or maybe only) way to call an attribute from an HTML element and style with CSS.

This is how I was able to change the appearance of my placeholder text in each input-text.

I know pseudo class selectors are the way to alter elements (in a certain state) like ‘hover’ or ‘before’, but I haven’t used them enough to expand this monologue. That said, I’ll press on…

Attribute Selectors

In confluence with my previous words, I may have provided a misnomer to exactly what was being modified with pseudo-elements. But, I digress (and hopefully you see what I mean).

Using attribute selectors is quite different from other selectors, because you will be placing true brackets in as your selector which house your attribute, followed by an equal sign and a set of quotations (housing your value.)

Looks like this [attribute=“value”]. And that’s that!

Media Queries

While I employed media queries for this project, I have yet to fully grasp exactly how to use them (in reference to appropriation and context.) Therefore, I will not go into detail; but, only mention that I used them to alter my CTA button across pixel-widths. Also, I realized that setting a new media query works better when starting with the immediate values from your last screen size.

A Bit of JavaScript

The big task I pushed for in this project was this: change the client-side font family for a text area as the user types. And by big, I mean, it took me about as long as the rest of the whole challenge to learn this functionality with JavaScript. That said, I now understand much better how JS semantics are employed. And, that’s pretty priceless…

For this goal, I inserted a script with an event listener. First, I started with DOMContentLoaded, which allows for firing without the images or styling need be loaded.

The next bit lets my document be called by its (element) id.

Then, it states that my id will be triggered by any input (via an eventListener) and will force my later instantiated function.

The function declared will let the charCode number equal a string which will be console.log(ed) out as my target.value (of Nunito, sans-serif) with proper style.fontFamily.

Conclusion

Attempting to wrap this project up in a nice bow is difficult, as I have onboarded a great deal of information (from one simple survey page.) After completing this task, I am left with a split-brain. While I have learned so much from something, seemingly straightforward, now I am thrilled to make it to the next project and take on those new expectations.

I suppose my takeaway is that I should fine-tune my HTML and CSS understanding and seriously crack open all that is JavaScript. All which, can wait until tomorrow. Cheers!

#freecodecamp #html5 #css3 #javascript #design #coding

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alligaytorrr-official · 4 years ago

Text

You'll never guess who's venting on main because it needs the validation that comes from having one's pain witnessed

It has been so long and still it hasn't stopped hurting to have lost a friend who was important to me, who I loved so much, over misinterpretations of words I didn't even say to her, construed so negatively as to take my meaning as more or less the exact opposite of what I was actually saying in some cases. Words that I was wrong to make public, but that I attempted to keep vague to the vast majority of anyone seeing them, that I attempted to prevent from reaching her, and which may not ever have but for the one mutual friend I trusted with my venting, who had encouraged me to trust him, told me he was comfortable in that position, choosing to share this sensitive writing with her against my wishes.

And sure, it's one thing to share someone's words if they say something really despicable. But that's why I've turned to so many people to gather more perspectives, every single one of whom has given the same conclusion that everything I said was normal to feel, understandable to need to vent. All it would have taken from that one friend was to caution me about what platform I was using to satisfy that need to vent, and not one person would have been hurt. I can't understand why he chose the option that instead could hurt the most people. And though people have acknowledged that it was unwise on my part to make such thoughts public, it certainly doesn't seem like so grave an offense as to deserve complete ostracization, to never be spoken to again, in the eyes of a single person I've received input from.

I do also know that that wasn't the sole reason, yet every other reason I was given doesn't hold up. I have checked and double checked and triple checked with people, and not only have people correctly understood what I meant in the first place, every explanation I've presented as counter to the claims made against me has been confirmed as sound. Why was I told "it isn't something you can explain away" when the things I was being accused of weren't even accurate? Of course I can explain them away if they're wrong! I can't comprehend how so many people have assessed things in the exact same way, but the three people at the center of this could be so certain of their beliefs as to entirely refuse me the opportunity to clarify the situation. It is so frustrating to be so confused. I was confused the night it all happened, and all I have received since is assurance that that confusion was and is warranted.

I have to accept that people who mattered very much to me, who up until the very day they were shown the things I'd posted were on good terms with me, immediately turned their opinions around and resolved to deny any possibility that their assumptions were incorrect - and they were! I loved my ex because she had shown herself to be such a kind and compassionate person, and now it's assumed my only interest was her appearance. I tried so hard to improve my mental health and be as good of a partner as I could be for her - knowing I wanted to ask her out and wanting to be a good partner was part of what motivated me to commit to therapy, my concerns about our relationship helped inform the direction of the skills I worked on, and realizing therapy alone wasn't enough for me to be as healthy as I needed to be for our relationship to work is why I finally sucked it up and went on meds - and now it's assumed all I ever wanted from her was sex, which would be an awfully meager reason for all of that work. I loved and trusted my metamour and struggled so much with paranoia I felt towards them, yet tried hard and succeeded at overcoming it, which they knew because I spoke to them directly to clear up my lingering fears months prior to this situation, and now it's assumed that all along I had thought they were a scheming liar, and it's denied that I was ever upfront with them in spite of that conversation. I was afraid of how it would hurt if my metamour became uncomfortable with polyamory and my ex chose to prioritize their relationship over ours as had happened once before, reasonable as it would be, and now it's assumed that I accused my metamour of making her do it, that it wasn't done of her own volition. I worried about stepping on their relationship if I spent too much time with my ex, which my metamour was so understanding and encouraging about, and now it's assumed I believed, and hated, that they took up all of her time. I adored that I got to share my love for my ex with someone I was so glad to have as a friend, even if I sometimes feared if it was right for me, even if I had discomfort around how much more love my ex seemed to express for them, and now it's assumed that it was not discomfort and uncertainty, but hatred for the fact that they were together, even after I had previously told my ex that that wasn't the case. And I was told that I had always made her feel like I only cared about her looks, despite the many assurances she gave that she was happy to be with me and had no qualms with our relationship.

It's like it was all plucked from an alternate dimension. I don't understand it. I can't understand it. I've tried. I've gone back and forth and back and forth, blaming myself for everything, resigning to the belief that they're right and that I was just blind to how terrible I was, and that I've only fooled everyone else into assuring me otherwise. But. It's concrete evidence. I can only hope I've been as objective as possible in other areas, but people have seen the conversation that laid out what it was claimed I had done, and seen the posts that were deemed so offensive. Not one person can make any more sense of it than I can. Surely, occam's razor would suggest that the wide range of opinions I gathered are most likely sound and the friends I lost simply so convinced of their misassumptions, than that I lied to them and myself for months, am so masterfully manipulative as to have fooled people into taking my side - by showing them hard evidence from which to make their judgments - and that the incessant confusion and search for a way to make sense of the experience is no more than me refusing to accept the truth that I am in fact a terrible person who deserved what I got.

And of course, people are entitled to their feelings. Though I did call out my own paranoia as I did it, I expressed a lot of anger towards my metamour and it would be understandable to be hurt. Though I deliberately distanced myself after our breakup for the specific purpose of preventing myself from expressing such feelings to her, the longing I felt towards my ex at that time was very intense and it would be understandable to be uncomfortable. And if ending their friendships with me was the course of action that was right for them, I can't argue otherwise. But it feels so very extreme, so disproportionate to me and every person I've spoken to. So hard to believe that that could be it. I was reckless in how I expressed my emotions, but it was someone else's choice to knowingly share my words outside their intended audience that resulted in my ex and metamour getting hurt. There's nothing wrong with having and venting emotions and I rightly discerned when I was not ready to express them directly. So why was all the blame placed entirely on me? But additionally, beyond the factual possible transgressions, the bulk of what was treated as justification was outright false. Some of it in direct contradiction to conversations we had already had. So why were they so, so completely determined not to let me speak the truth? They cut me out of their lives entirely, my ex doing it even without any explanation from her. After criticizing my choice to express my emotions about them vaguely to an audience of strangers to them, minus that one mutual friend - and there's nothing wrong with trusting one friend to listen - they quietly spread the assumptions they had made throughout our social circle, as if they were fact. Overnight I lost all of them. Entitled to their emotions and to make their own choices about the relationships they wanted with me based on factual information, they are. To build a narrative off misinformation, refuse to confirm their beliefs, and pass on that narrative to the end that I was isolated like that? To inflict such an incredible amount of pain without ever trying to address your concerns head on? I don't know that I will ever understand how they could do it. Certainly, I cannot understand living with the decision.

And so here I am, ten entire months later, still finding the time to be upset. Of course it would come so strongly now - how could I enjoy the excitement of my favorite artist dropping a surprise ska album yesterday without thinking of how much I miss the person I would have loved most to share that excitement with? Surely some people would have written them all off by now, knowing they chose to do what they did and stand by it. I simply believe too fiercely in the best in people to resign myself to that. I've made attempts to right things that went unanswered, and still I find the belief unshakeable, that there is some prefect way to explain this that could wash it all into our pasts. And so I sit with the feelings of powerlessness, frustration, confusion, with this ostensibly foolish hope that a day will come when we can resolve this, together. It feels so certain that such an extreme response could only have been justifiable to them on the basis that I said and felt these things I know I didn't, and all it would take to fix it all would be to actually be heard. And granted, I already attempted as much with my metamour and it was not met receptively. But I never had that opportunity with my ex, and maybe I'm simply giving her too much credit, but I can't keep myself from believing that this is so out of character for her that there must be a way to put things right. I struggle to at times, but I know at this point I have every reason to trust my assessments, having poured so much effort over so long into examining every possible angle to this situation. Which I'm sure may be unwarranted in some people's minds. But how could I not? Is it not human to try desperately to make sense of that which is beyond our understanding? Certainly the simpler route would indeed be writing them off. I'd rather take the harder route if it's the one that offers more compassion and grace to everyone involved. The unfortunate thing is that knowing them and the experiences they've had in their lives, I really would have expected the same from them. And I guess that's really the key to it in the end. I will take that harder route every time that I can. I can't understand why anyone wouldn't do that for someone they loved. It's only natural then, I suppose, that I'm left hurting so much even now. I just wish I mattered enough to them to set things right.

And, yes, I do recognize the irony in venting publicly about a matter that was predicated on taking issue with me venting publicly. But while I've learned to be more discerning about what I say and where, I have no qualms expressing things I'd readily say to someone directly. In all honesty, I'd rather like if they read it, hoping it could have an impact.

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creativitycache · 4 years ago

Note

ngl asking for people who self-identify as "antis" is already biasing your results because the term originated from fans being defensive over getting called out (eg the types who sincerely think fandom culture is ""puritan""). fair number of people started to use the term ironically and it might be evening out but overall the post calling for responses on the survey still comes off as something written in bad faith?

I wrote a rather long and involved response and then tumblr ate it. Goshdarn.

Fair warning, this is a hyperfixation and I’m coming off of a migraine so this may not be very cogent. Please read this in the over excited tones of someone infodumping about emulsifiers, with no animosity intended.

So, tl;dr and with a lot fewer links, I’m incredibly interested by your perspective that “anti” originated as a derogatory term.

As far as I am aware, the etymological history of the word “anti” being used pejoratively is coming from some very new debates.

I’m also noting that you had no feedback regarding the content of the questions themselves, which I would be interested in hearing as I am genuinely coming from a place without censure.

The term “anti” actually is a self-descriptor that arose in the Livejournal days, where you’d tag something as “Anti ___” for other like minded people to find. (For example, my cursory google search pulled up 10 Anti Amy Lee communities on LJ).

I’m a self-confessed old. I was back in fandom before Livejournal, aaaall the way back in the Angelfire days. Webrings children! We had webrings! And guest books for you to sign!

I’m going to take a swing for the fences here Anon, so if I’m wrong please let me know, but I’m going to guess you became active as a fan in the past 5-8 years based of your use of the term puritan.

There’s actually a HUGELY new debate in fandom spaces! Previously, it was assumed that:

a) All fandom spaces are created and used by adults only.

b) If you were seeing something, it’s because you dug for it.

These assumptions were predicated upon what spaces fandoms grew in. First you had Star Trek TOS fandom, which grew in 1970s housewives kitchens. They were all friends irl, and everyone was an adult, and you actively had to reach out to other adults to talk about things. (By the way- a woman lost custody of her children in the divorce when her ex husband brought up to the judge she kept a Kirk/Spock zine under her bed. The judge ruled this as obvious signs of moral deficiency. That was in the 80s! Everyone is still alive and the parents are younger than my coworkers!)

Time: 1967-1980s. Is Anti a term? No. Who is the term used by? N/A Is fandom space considered Puritanical? No.

Then, when the internet came about, it was almost exclusively used by adults until The Eternal September. 1993 was the year that changed the internet for good, but even years after that the internet was a majority adult space. Most kids and teens didn’t have unlimited access if their parents even had a home computer in the 90s.

This is the rise of Angelfire, which were fansites all connected to each other in “rings”. You had to hunt for content. If you found something you didn’t like, well, you clicked out and went on with your day because you’d never see it again unless you really dug. This was truly the wild west, tagging did not exist and you could go from fluff to vore in the blink of an eye with nothing warning you before hand. All fannish spaces were marked “here be dragons” and attempts were made to at least adopt the “R/NC-17″ ratings on works to some limited success, depending on webmaster.

Time: 1990-1999. Is Anti a term? No. Who is the term used by? N/A Is fandom space considered Puritanical? No.

In 1999 LiveJournal arose like a leviathan, and here is where the term Anti emerges as a self descriptor. Larger communities began to form, and with them, divisions. Now, you could reach so many fans you could reach a critical mass of them for enough of them to dislike a ship. The phrase “Anti” became a self-used tag, as people tagged their works, communities, and blogs with “anti” (NB: this is at far, far smaller rates than today). Anti was first and foremost a tagging tool used and created by the people who were vehemently against something.

You could find content more easily than in the past, but you still had to put some serious elbow grease into it.

In 2007, Livejournal bans users for art "depicting minors in explicit sexual situations”. The Livejournal community explodes in anger- towards Livejournal staff. The account holders/fans view this as corporate puritanical meddling. The outrage continues as it is revealed these bans were part of a pre-sale operation to SUP Services. SUP Services, upon taking over Livejournal in 2008, proceeds to filter the topics “bisexuality, depression, faeries, girls, boys, and fanfiction”.

The Great LiveJournal Migration begins, as fans leave the site in droves.

Time: 1999-2009. Is Anti a term? Yes. Who is the term used by? People self describing, seeking to create communities based off a dislike of something. Is fandom space considered Puritanical? No.

Where do fans go? Well, in the last decade, they migrated to Tumblr and Twitter (sorry Pillowfort- you gave it a good try!)

What’s different about all of these sites? Individuals are able to create and access content streams. These are hugely impactful in how communities are formed! Because now:

a) finding content is easier

b) finding content you dislike by accident is easier

c) content you dislike requires active curation to avoid

d) truly anonymous outreach is possible and easy (for example, you anon! Isn’t it much easier to go on anon to bring up awkward or sensitive topics? I’m happy you did by the way, and that’s why I keep my anons open. It’s an important contextual tool in the online communications world!)

Now the term Anti gets sprightly. Previously, if you didn’t like content, there was nothing you could really do about it. For example, I, at the tender age of way-too-young, opened up a page of my favorite Star Trek Deep Space 9 fansite and pixel by pixel with all the loading speed of a stoned turtle a very anatomically incorrect orgy appeared.

I backed out.

1. Who could I contact? There was no “message me here” button, no way to summon any mods on Angelfire sites.

2. If I did manage to find a contact button, I would have had to admit I went onto a site that wasn’t designed to keep me safe. I knew this was a site for adults, I knew there wasn’t a way to stop it from showing something. There was no such thing as tags. I knew all of this before going in. So the assumption was, it was on me for looking. (Some may have argued it was on my parents for not supervising me- all I can say is thank GOD no one else was in the living room and my mom was around the corner in the kitchen.)

But now? On Tumblr? On Twitter? In a decade in which tagging is so easy and ubiquitous it’s expected?

Now people who describe themselves as antis start to have actual tools and social conventions to utilize.

Which leads to immediate backlash! Content creators are confused and upset- fandom spaces have been the wild west for decades, and there’s still no sherriff in town. So the immediate go-to argument is that these people who are messaging them are “puritans”.

And that’s actually an interesting argument! A huge factor in shaping the internet’s social mores in the latest decades is cleanliness for stockbrokers. Websites can become toxic to investors and to sales if they contain sexual content. Over time, corporations perfected a mechanism for “cleaning” a site for sale.

Please note there is no personal opinion or judgement in this next list, it is simply a description of corporate strategies you can read during the minute meetings of shareholders for Tumblr, Twitter, Paypal, Venmo, Facebook, Myspace, Yahoo Answers, and Livejournal.

1. Remove sex workers. Ban any sex work of any kind, deplatform, keep any money you may have been holding.

2. Remove pedophilia. This is where the jump begins between content depicting real people vs content depicting fictional characters begins.

3. Remove all sexual image content, including artwork of fictional characters.

4. Remove all sexual content, including written works. If needed, loop back to step 2 as a justification, and claim you do not have the moderators to prevent written works depicting children.

I would like to reiterate these are actual gameplans, so much so that they’ve made their way into business textbooks. (Or at least they did for my Modern Marketing & App Design classes back in the early 2010s. Venmo, of course, wasn’t mentioned, but I did read the shareholder’s speeches when they banned sex workers from the platform so I added them in the list above because it seems they’re following the same pattern.)

So you have two groups who are actively seeking to remove NSFW content from the site.

A) Corporate shareholders

B) People are upset they’re seeing NSFW content they didn’t seek out and squicks them

Now, why does this matter for the debates using the term “puritan” as an insult?

Because the reasons corporate shareholders hate NSFW material is founded in American puritanism. It’s a really interesting conflation of private sector values! And if Wall Street were in another cultural context, it would be a completely different discussion which I find fascinating!

But here’s the rub- that second group? They're not doing this for money. If there are any puritanical drives, it’s personal, not a widespread cohesive ideology driving them. HOWEVER! The section of that group that spent the early 2010s on tumblr did pick up some of the same rhetoric as puritanical talking points (which is an entirely separate discussion involving radfems, 4chan raids, fourth wave feminism, and a huge very nuanced set of influences I would love to talk about at a later time!)

These are largely fans who have “grown up” in the modern sites- no matter how old they actually are, their fandom habits and expectations have been shaped by the algorithms of these modern sites.

Now HERE‘s the fascinating bit that’s new to me! This is the interpretation of the data I’m getting, and so I’m out on a limb but I think this is a valid premise!

The major conflict in fandom at this time is a struggle over personal space online.

Content creators are getting messages telling them to stop, degrading them, following them from platform to platform.

They say “Hey! What gives- we were here first. The cardinal rule of fandom is don’t like, don’t read. Fandom space has always been understood to be adult- it’s been this way for decades! To find our content, you had to come to us! This is our space! This is my space, this is my blog! If you don’t like it, you’re not obligated to look!”

Meanwhile, at the exact same time, antis are saying “Hey! What gives- this content is appearing on my screen! That’s my space! I didn’t agree to this, I don’t like this! I want it to be as far away from me as possible! I will actively drive it away.”

This is a major cultural shift! This is a huge change and a huge source of friction! And I directly credit it to the concept of “content stream” and algorithms driving similar-content to users despite them not wanting it!

Curating your online space used to be much simpler, because there wasn’t much of it! Now with millions of users spread out over a wide age range, all feeding in to the same 4-5 websites, we are seeing people be cramped in a technically limitless space!

Now people feel that they have to go on the offense to defend themselves against content they don’t like, which is predicated upon not only the algorithms of modern websites but ALSO talking points fed from the top down of what is and what is not acceptable on various platforms.

Time: 2010-2020. Is Anti a term? Yes. Who is the term used by? People self describing,and people using it to describe others. Is fandom space considered Puritanical? Depends!

So I, a fandom ancient, a creaky thing of old HTML codes and broken tags, am watching this transformation and am wildly curious for data.

Also...I uh....I can’t believe this is the short version. My ADHD is how you say “buckwild” tonight.

Anyways...um...if anyone has read to the bottom, give me data?

#Asks&Answers #fandom #anti #fandom discourse #gosh I've been on the internet a long time...#started at the 90s now we hear #I still sometimes think about the dudes who were HELLA salty about the eternal september #they talk about it like it was a war...you bring up Usenet and they go #I was THERE Gandalf

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themockingcrows · 4 years ago

Text

Companionship Through Circuitry Ch 7: Data

Bro/Hal THIS CHAPTER IS NOT SFW cw: voyeurism, masturbation

AO3 link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20942408/chapters/65171512

With a letter received, Bro's long standing questions about Dave finally get an answer, though it may not be the one he hoped for. And when the wasteland is quiet, and an AI is murmuring sweet nothings in your ear, what's a guy to do but respond...?

It was a solid week before Bro left that ramshackle town in the dust, debt repaid as he could get it, and blood spattered boots pointed North. On the off chance that he had mail, he checked in with the next town not far away, and poked his head into the courier station.

“Anything for Strider?”

“Strider?” said a short, gruff looking man as he sized up the long, lean figure ahead of him in the strange sunglasses. ...Eh. He’d seen odder things out here, surely. “Let me check.” A perfunctory glance at the post boxes, and he was heading around the corner to the mail bag, rummaging for bundles.

Bro tapped his fingers on the countertop idly. He didn’t expect anything, really, but it made it easier to pass the uncertainty by at least checking. Anyway, on the off chance he had something, he wasn’t sure what he’d do with it anyway.

“Ah, yes, we’ve got something for a Strider. Ambrose?”

Bro felt his stomach tighten into a steel knot as he saw the thick envelope in the man’s hands, stamped URGENT in bright red letters, and addressed in Dave’s familiar handwriting. He felt light headed, and it took Hal’s eyes flickering in front of his own to make him focus again.

“Er, yes, that’s me. Sorry, was miles away there for a second. I didn’t… I didn’t think anything’d actually be here,” he said, not reaching for the envelope.

“Well, whatever it is, it’s here,” the man said, setting it down on the countertop for him to take. Ambrose stared at it as if it were a bomb before reaching for it, and tucking it into his shirt.

“Thank you kindly,” he said. For once, he didn’t have a letter to send at this station, having written his peace while healing before. He walked across the small town as if in a daze, taking in the sights and smells both pleasant and unpleasant till he found a run down building with a shop out front selling different locally grown items as well as procured items. Bro could smell the tobacco before he could see the cigarettes, and was already feeling around for caps to secure a few.

Why are you shopping instead of reading your letter?

“I’ll get to it,” Bro said, tucking most of the cigarettes away after bumming a light off the shopkeeper. It tasted musty, unpleasant, but it was better than nothing. Not enough, but better than nothing.

You’ve waited this long for a reply and you’re going to put it off? Hal asked, astounded. Aren’t you the least bit curious?

“I’m sober, I’m sore, I’m tired, I’m kinda hungry and my balls itch. Curiosity can wait its turn,” he muttered around his cigarette, more agitated than he could write off with simple annoyance at being pestered.

Truth was, he was terrified of the envelope that was burning a brand against his abdomen, stiff edged and fat with pages. Scared of every inch of paper that lay within. Scared of the still slightly uncertain way Dave wrote his name down compared to his own, as if it were foreign. He smoked till the heat of the smoldering end got too close to his lips, then flicked the entire thing down to the ground and rubbed it out beneath his heel. The last thing anyone needed out here was a fucking fire.

If you’re putting off reading your letter because you’re needing a drink, I’d recommend having the drink so we can read.

“Excuse me, did you just say ‘we’?”

Are you going to remove me when you read your letter? I’m aware already of what your situation is, more or less. I would like to know what he has to say, this Dave of yours.

Ambrose hesitated slightly, and sighed an exhale out through his nose.

“When I read it, I’ll leave you on. But keep your goddamn comments to yourself, you hear me? I don’t want an audio chorus goin’ on while I’m tryin’ to do everything.”

Consider my lips sealed. Hal was quiet for a moment before he probed once more, Are you excited about being closer to the goal?

Ambrose blinked. “How close are we?”

Another few days if we do a quick clip. A week if we go slow. Longer if we keep making stops.

“What about my current pace,” Ambrose asked, knowing he wasn’t as quick as he was pre-injury yet. That would take time. Healing always took time, the bastard.

Your current pace is just fine.

“Besides, should I be askin’ you that question?”

What question.

“If you’re excited. I mean, it’s your body we’re headin’ to right?”

If it is still in one piece, still in place, then yes. I’m quite excited.

“What’s the first thing you wanna do once you’re in a body?” Ambrose asked, glad to have the conversation change direction from the letter that still pressed against his stomach like a threat.

Slap you as hard as I fucking can, for various sundry reasons.

“Okay, dumb question. What’s the second thing you wanna do once you’re in a body.”

It would ruin the fun if I told you everything ahead of time, Hal said coyly. Wouldn’t you just like to know?

“What’s your body gonna look like, anyway? Gonna be all jacked, bigger than me? Big as a mutant? Lift cars over your fuckin’ head?”

Most likely my body will look like a normal humanoid. The specifics are uncertain to me, I’ve never been inside of it to my knowledge.

“...If it sucks, there’s always the Furb-”

I hate that thing, and I hate you.

Bro smirked. “C’mon. It’s useful and you know it.”

I’m aware of what you’re doing now. There’s no fooling me. Open your letter, Ambrose.

The smirk died on his lips, and he ran a hand through his hand, fingers scritching at his scalp, dislodging little bits of dust that clung to the tips from walking the road. He patted his shirt, felt the outline of the envelope… and instead of pulling it out, turned and walked out of town, due North.

What are you doing?

“Travelin’, what does it look like?” he asked. “Wanna make good time, so you can go ahead and slap me.”

Do you mean to put off reading your letter till I can physically force you to open it?

“Nah, I ain’t gonna wait that long. I just don’t think I could sit still any longer. I’ll read it tonight, once I’m settled down.”

...It’s not a bomb, you know. It’s just a letter.

Ambrose rolled his eyes as he walked. “I know. Like I said, I’ll read it tonight.”

Yet, that night came, and he didn’t read it. Nor did he read it in the morning as he ate a cold can of beans, nor as night fell the second night. Instead it remained in his shirt, beneath his folded hands as Ambrose rested by the fire, preparing to go to sleep with Hal perched on his face. It took four days before he finally took it out of his shirt by the firelight and carefully opened it with his pinky finger, ripping the paper as cleanly as possible.

He unfolded the paper and clenched his eyes shut instinctively, unprepared to read what it said.

...It’s okay, Hal said. Open your eyes and read, Bro.

“I am, gimme a second. Eyes were dry,” he muttered, blinking exaggeratedly a few more times before glancing over the paper, rubbing the side of his head as he did so. ...Hal was right. It was okay.

While not filled to the brim with excitement at hearing from him, and not dripping with praise or familial love, there was a pleasant rapport contained within. As well as an apology for not writing sooner. Apparently he’d secured a second job where he lived and was saving caps. It was rough work, but he wasn’t just another body there. He had responsibilities, long shifts, and then long periods of having fun and exploring the new neck of the woods he lived in.

Bro was swept into Dave’s world with not just words, but pictures. Within the envelope had been shoved several carefully done drawings, some highly detailed and some cartoony and shittily drawn with his other hand to get the point across and throw a gag or three in. They earned a chuckle, and a smirk. Kid was improving. The last page of the letter said he would be checking for mail like usual, and would be trying to write ahead of the curve as Bro predicted, judging by his path.

...And that was that. No condemnation, but no forgiveness either. No comments on his near death. No questions in return. Bro scanned the pages twice more before setting them down and patting the ground with his fingertips.

Was it not what you were hoping for? It seemed pleasant to me, Hal said. Your spawn is talented.

“Mm. Yeah, he is.”

You didn’t answer the question.

“I guess I just.. Expected more,” Bro admitted. “I didn’t think I’d get a reply, now I’ve got one. And he didn’t address any of the shit I brought up. Does that mean he’s still pissed at me?”

People don’t tend to spend money and time and effort mailing people they hate, pointed out Hal. I believe your assumptions are incorrect. An option is that he is still processing everything you said, but didn’t want to remain silent.

The iron knot in Bro’s stomach finally, blessedly, began to unwind its barbs from within him in relief. That was a theory that was believable. Maybe it was just him being overly hopeful, but he needed that hope right now.

“Maybe.”

If things were as bad as they seemed, as well, this could be a way of building a relationship with you.

“Are you programmed to be part therapist? The fuck, a guy gets one letter and suddenly it’s time to play psychologist,” Bro murmured, grunting as he rolled towards his bag and rummaged for paper and pen.

Writing back already?

“Yeah. Gonna keep it up, if it’s not gettin’ on his nerves. Won’t write this one as urgent, though. Give it time to get there. After all, should be pickin’ up at the next station after gettin’ your body and heading back.”

Back?

“Yeah. Back home.”

With you?

“Who else? Got big plans once you get your body aside from knockin’ me into next Tuesday?” Bro asked, pen flicking across the paper as he began to write.

Hal didn’t respond right away. Instead he watched Bro write for a few minutes before speaking again. Are you asking me to go home with you?

“...Well. Yeah, I guess. If you wanna be formal about it.”

Why.

Of course he wanted reasons. Bro wet his lips briefly.

“...Becauses I think travelin’ with you is alright, and I imagine it’d be more fun once you’re not sittin’ on my face,” Bro said, slowing his writing to a pause before doodling in the margin, aimless shapes as he thought. “Because I think I’d actually miss you, if you took off once we got that far, after all this shit we’ve already been through.”

You like me, Hal stated rather than asked.

“...Yeah. I like you.”

You wish for me to remain with you.

“Yeah.”

...Once I get my body, would you touch it?

Ambrose blinked. “...Uh. Maybe.” So he knew about that kind of shit, did he? Made sense, to a point.

Why not yes?

“It’d depend on what you wanted,” he admitted awkwardly. Was he being propositioned by an AI? That was a new one. “Rule number one of havin’ bodies: you don’t go touchin’ ones that don’t belong to you without permission.”

Would I have permission to touch you?

He had to think for a moment. Would he be down for that? With a bot? It’d be weird, considering he didn’t know what kind of body they were going to be working with, but he supposed there was always a possibility for adjustments and customization as needed moving forward. Surely the body hadn’t been designed with that kind of functionality in mind, but…

“Yeah,” he decided. “You’ve got permission to touch me.”

Hal’s eyes flickered into his field of vision again, blinking slowly a few times before fading out.

I’m not certain how to touch you, when the time comes. I require data.

“You propositionin’ me?” Bro asked with a slowly spreading smirk.

I would prefer to know what to do when I’m able to do so properly, Hal explained. Then, again, I require data.

“And if I give you data tonight?” Bro asked, pushing his letter away and rolling to his back. “What’s in it for me?”

A better time when I have my body, since I’ll be able to touch you myself.

“You never said if I’d be able to touch you back,” Bro pointed out, reaching down to undo his belt buckle. “And mind keepin’ an eye out while we handle this?”

You will be safe, promised Hal. ...And you have permission to touch me.

“Two dudes touchin’ each other. Sounds gay,” hummed Bro as he flicked his pants open enough to slide a hand in, giving himself a feel and a gentle squeeze to start warming up. “So what kind of data you want, specifically?”

I want to know how best to touch you, Hal explained. The data I require would be how you enjoy being touched.

“Wanna be the best at touchin’ be, huh?”

You could say that.

Bro moved his hand steadily a few times till he was settled at half mast, then shimmied his pants a little lower, freeing himself to the cool night air. He glanced down, and was amused to see Hal’s eyes flicker into view again, this time not fading away.

“Gimme a second, it’s not quite there.”

It’s already pleasant to look at.

“Remind me to teach you some dirty talk, dicks aren’t pleasant to look at,” snorted Bro, continuing to work his fist till he shivered and finally rested at full size against his own palm. “There we go..,”

I take it you’re giving me the data already?

“Yep. Take notes. Slow to warm up, but once the motor purrs it’ll go all night,” Bro hummed, closing his eyes. He’d done this thousands of times in his life, but rarely with an audience, and certainly not one in recent memory. Fuck it’d been a while. He remembered to keep his chin down so he’d be in view of the shades properly, letting Hal look to his heart’s content as Bro’s fingers played over his length familiarly.

Tell me what you would do to me, once you’re able to touch me, Hal said softly, voice a purr from the shades. Bro smirked a bit, enjoying the sound as he closed his fingers into a fist and began to slowly pump himself. Though he was still a little uncertain of the specifics, it was easy to think of how he’d behave with a human partner. Might as well just proceed that way mentally, and figure out what was different when the real thing was on display.

“Well. Let’s see… Prolly warm you up with a bit of kissin’ first, some hands on explorin’ to see what you had to work with. Then I’d run my hands along your body, make sure you felt every inch of me on your skin,” Bro said with a relaxed sigh. Fuck, this was something he’d needed for a while it seemed. A bit of tlc and privacy. ...Well. somewhat privacy.

And if I were beneath you?

“Want me to pin you down, huh?” he asked, fist moving a bit quicker as his mind played out the scenario. “Well. Prolly already warmed you up so you’d be ready for me, by then. Work you open nice and easy till you’re beggin’ for it, bite your neck while I slide on in. Get those thighs nice and far apart for me. Keep on goin’ till I’m good’n deep.”

There was no clarification on Hal’s part about how that might not work, about how he might not be compatible. Instead, there was a soft beeping coming from the shades, like a pulse monitor going off, faster than his own heartbeat.

And if I were begging for it, by then?

“I’d let you have it. Mostly,” Bro said, working his fist a bit faster, but not going all the way down. Instead he fisted the top of his length and went about halfway down, squeezing more towards the middle before working back towards the tip. “Probably work you over with about half of what you got a taste of, before goin’ any further. Make you really lose it before hammering ya.”

The pulse beeping sped up again, a constant pace in Bro’s ear, and he adjusted his own hand to go along with it, hissing softly under his breath as he started to work his whole length again.

And if it were me touching you, like you’re touching yourself right now? If it were my hand instead of yours? Would you find that pleasant?

“Long as it was warm,” Ambrose chuckled breathlessly, unable to help himself but go quicker. It’d been too long, it felt too nice, and with his imagination running wild there was too much fuel feeding the fire. “You’d need a firm grip, I like that most. More towards the middle than the tip. And nice even strokes…”

I think I preferred to imagine you inside of me, to the touching, Hal said suddenly, the firm pulse beeping seeming to mimic Bro’s pulse now that he was letting himself have what he wanted. You said before the engine could last all night. Would it do the same with me if I wanted it?

“Till you were walkin’ funny the next day,” Bro promised, gritting his teeth slightly. It felt too good, it was warm, the voice in his ear was still a purr and his imagination was filling in all kinds of gaps. He just hoped the real deal wasn’t a letdown compared to his lofty imagination.

Come for me, Ambrose.

That did it. Bro let out a soft sound and tensed, shielding the tip of his dick with his opposite hand to catch the mess for easier cleanup. The pulse sound slowly settled in his ear before disappearing entirely, leaving him with the sounds of the wasteland in his ear instead. He opened his eyes finally and saw Hal’s blinking at him before they flickered out of sight, leaving him with the night view from behind the shades as usual.

He exhaled another sigh and sat up to clean up.

“I think I needed that. Been feelin’ pent up for a while,” admitted Bro.

Would you enjoy doing that with me more often?

“Yeah. Yeah, I’d like doin’ that with you, it was nice.” Bro felt, briefly, like he was finishing a date up. There was no second cleanup, but it did make him wonder… “Is there anything I can do while you’re like this to make you feel nice?”

Feeling doesn’t really occur in this state. The closest would be electricity, and that could be dangerous for my stability.

“No electrostim then, got it,” he chuckled. Bro took a glance towards his letter once he was cleaned and tucked away, and shook his head, tucking it back into his bag. He’d work on it tomorrow, the mood was definitely not there right now. Not after that. “But there’s nothin’ you’d like, nothin’ I can do?”

Just speaking with me is good. I’ve recorded data fo-

“Recorded? You just mean data-wise, right? Not actual recording, right?”

Ask me no questions and I will tell you no lies.

He guessed it was fine, if Hal recorded him jerking off. Not like there was anyone to share it with, and even if there was, he’d be able to write it off as being narcissistic to a point. Record himself to use for getting off later. ...Okay, now the idea was intriguing to him. He’d have to see if Hal would allow him to see video files sometime…

I’ve recorded data for the future, when I have my body. I would like to use that data once I’m accustomed to the controls.

“You propositionin’ me again? Want a hot date once you’ve got your own bod?”

Yes! I want to experience what I’ve learned first hand, and see if all of your talk is as good as it sounds.

“I can promise I’m not just talk. I can’t promise I’ll be able to do all that to you right away,” Bro warned. “But we’ll see what we’re workin’ with soon enough, I suppose.”

If I lack genitalia will you make me some?

Bro was quiet for a minute, just sitting there, trying to think of what in the world he’d gotten himself into. “You want me to make you a dick if you don’t have one.”

Yes. I want to use what I’ve learned, and that is what I’ve learned with.

He reached up to rub his eyes beneath the shades, just holding his face for a moment before sighing. In for a penny, in for a pound.

“Right. Uh.. sure. I’ll try to figure out how to do that, if you’re needin’ something. We’ll figure it out.”

I can’t imagine my body is a tin can, Dirk was working with advanced technology. Surely this will work.

“Where there’s a will, there’s a way. You’re lucky I ain’t got nothin’ against bots.”

Robosexual.

“...Sure.”

They sat in an easy silence for a while, the fire flickering and Bro watching out over the wastes. He felt more relaxed than he had in ages, despite part of his mind now focusing on how to built a robotic dick that had some kind of feedback function. There had to be some kind of research with bots, with ‘droids, that had that kind of functionality. Hell, might even turn into a side business: sex modifications for droids and bots.

That’d make for a hell of a letter to Dave. Actually, so was telling him in general about Hal coming home with him. He could hear the teasing already.

“Hey. Hal.”

Yes.

“Do you want me to tell Dave about you comin’ home with me?”

Of course.

“Or would you rather write him yourself, once you have your body.”

Hal was quiet for a moment. You would entrust me to write to your spawn?

“Yeah. If you stop calling him my spawn. I think he’d like to get to know you, once you’re not just sittin’ on my face, and I don’t think I can easily mod to Furby to hold a pen.”

If you even tried, I’d zap you immediately.

“See, can’t even if I wanted to,” Bro said, lifting his hands upwards and shaking his head, giving a shrug. “My hands are tied by the system.”

Bro.

“Yeah?”

...I’m actually quite excited, to get my body. Not just for the reasons we discussed so far tonight. I’ll finally be able to see what Dirk left for me.

“...If it’s not there, we’ll figure somethin’ out,” Bro promised. “And if it’s damaged, I’ll do my best to figure out how to fix it.”

I’ll be able to run diagnostic scans once I’m able to connect, I should be able to tell you how to fix things, or even fix them myself. But Bro, I wanted to ask a favor.

“Yeah? What, aside from beatin’ my meat, do you want me to do for you?”

I would like to find other vaults, before we return to your home.

“Vault huntin’, huh? What for?”

I need to find other instances of Dirk’s work.

“You got it. We’ll hunt down whatever scraps of him and his work you need.”

It felt easier to promise than Bro assumed it would. It felt genuinely good.

#Bro Strider #Lil Hal #Homestuck #my fic

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fortheheavenssake · 6 years ago

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Twitter and Copyright

https://www.canyoucopyrightatweet.com/

I’m all for people being passionate about what they believe. That’s true even if I disagree. But, there’s a point where you have to ask yourself if you have the proper basis for your belief. Our systems of thought all flow from somewhere, but we really should step back and evaluate the basis of our passion a bit more objectively.

This is especially true with the Internet. Clearly, many people believe that everything we do, everything we post, everything we think in the online world is somehow protected. I suppose it makes sense if you are the one doing, posting, or thinking, but it’s not realistic. Since when did the online world cease to function in reality? Simply because people break the law online doesn’t mean there is no law- or worse yet, there is a different law for the Internet. The laws that exist in the offline world exist online as well – objectively.

My interest was raised when a great friend of mine pointed me to a blog post on Mark Cuban’s blog (http://blogmaverick.com/2009/03/29/are-tweets-copyrighted/). The question was quite simple: Are Tweets Copyrighted? I quickly jumped in, throwing in a sentence or two about the danger of that way of thinking. What startled me was the high level of participation and the supposed consensus that Tweets are, in fact, copyrightable and copyrighted. That’s why I’m writing this article.

To understand why the basic assumption is incorrect, you need background. I’ll do my best to set the record straight on what the law is – in theory (since it hasn’t been effectively tested) – and why it should be the way it is. Wherever you land, you’ll certainly know where I stand on this issue. First, let’s debunk some threshold confusion.

Twitter Doesn’t Own my Tweets, So I must

Twitter’s “Terms of Service” state unequivocally that when it comes to copyright, “What’s Yours is Yours.” (http://twitter.com/tos). The ‘terms’ go on to state that “your [the Twitter account owner] profile and materials remain yours.” This is likely the first stage of misconstruction in Twitterlogical thinking, i.e., that simply because Twitter doesn’t make a claim in your “intellectual property,” that there actually exists some intellectual property to own. Twitter did, after all, use those words – intellectual property/copyright. [Note: Granted, there are photos used and possibly other materials that may have copyright protection, but what I’m talking about here in this article is strictly limited to the <140 character Tweets you generate on a daily, hourly or minute-ly basis.] In any event, this may be the first part of confusion.

Twitter (and Facebook, Myspace, etc.,) are not capable of modifying copyright law to create a property right that does not otherwise exist. If the material you post through Twitter isn’t copyrightable to begin with, it will not mystically transform into protectable property merely by being Tweeted. Copyright law is codified in the United States Copyright Act, as implemented/construed/constructed by the Courts. If you’re not a judge or a lawmaker, you can’t create law. You might be able to try and create law by virtue of a contractual relationship, but it won’t change copyright law. My point here is that Twitter can’t tell you whether or not you create or own a copyright – it doesn’t have the legal ability to do so. So if you own any copyrights, it’s not because of Twitter not owning them, it’s because the law provides for ownership of them which initially vests with you, the author.

Fair Use Doesn’t Come Into Play If the

Material Isn’t Copyrightable and Copyrighted

When skipping along through the mountains of materials you find online, you’re certain to find heady discussions of Fair Use. If the word “copyright” comes up and anyone starts talking about what you can or can’t do, you’ll find someone in the crowd who will blow the Fair Use horn. In many instances, it makes sense. Fair Use is a major player in copyright- both on- and offline. But it’s a red herring if you are not dealing with material that is: 1) copyrightable; and 2) copyrighted. As to the former, we’ll get to that. As to the latter, some things are copyrightable (say, for instance, a song), but no longer protected by copyright (i.e., in the public domain). Fair Use doesn’t impact something in the public domain, because it’s no longer protected by copyright and may be used regardless of Fair Use. Being copyrightable, however, is the bigger question. I noticed lengthy analysis of the Fair Use doctrine on Mark Cuban’s blog, but again, if we’re not dealing with copyrightable materials, the analysis doesn’t matter.

A Quick Read of Sections 101 and 102

of the Copyright Act Is Not Enough

What I often find is that people online seek to educate themselves. They read; they investigate. This is true with copyright issues as well, and it’s well documented that many people are not only familiar with the US Copyright Act, but have read parts of it. The truth, however, is that reading the applicable sections isn’t enough. If you can imagine, judges don’t always agree on what the statutes mean, so when a layperson- someone without extensive legal background in the area of copyright law – tries to interpret a part of the Copyright Act, there’s a high probability that it will be interpreted incorrectly. Even if a person is correct in an assumption, it doesn’t mean everyone else has interpreted the law in the same way. In addition, the Copyright Act doesn’t explain anything; it just states the law, which makes it very difficult to understand the underlying motivation in a particular section.

To understand copyright law, you need to know that the Copyright Act is only the beginning. Courts interpret the Act; they apply it to real-life situations. This means that in order to understand why Tweets may not be protected by copyright, you need to know cases as well. We also have areas of copyright law that haven’t been fully explored in the courts, like the Religious Exemption in Section 110, or even the Fair Use Doctrine, which has a mountain of case law and a higher mountain of misunderstanding of its application. What’s my point? Just that here’s much more to understanding a copyright issue that what you’ll be able to discern online. Case in point: I couldn’t tell you if Perl is the best tool for a particular scenario, but I did read the Wikipedia article on it, and discovered that it’s apparently the Swiss Army chainsaw of programming languages. Quiz me on a few more things about Perl and I might be able to answer correctly. Do I really know anything about it? No, but I do have access to Cliff Notes versions of real information. That’s a dangerous way to become an expert on anything.

Does the US Constitution Say Anything About this Topic?

Article 1, Clause 8, Section 8, of the United States Constitution states that: “The Congress shall have Power [. . .] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” You might not believe it, but this tells us a lot about why Tweets may not be protectable by copyright law. It’s about reasoning- why do we have copyright law to begin with?

That question is answered simply that there was a belief that if creators were not able to own and exploit (for a limited time) materials they created, they would not be able to continue to create them (because they would be forced to find other means of financial survival), and that the progress of arts and sciences would be stifled because no one would have incentive to create. This Copyright Clause of the US Constitute made it clear that creators needed incentive to create.

Arguably (and I’m not sure I entirely agree with this argument I’m making), Tweets do not even comport with the Copyright Clause of the US Constitution because they are often social/ego driven and would be created even if there was absolutely no benefit to the arts and sciences (and the financial potential arising therefrom). In other words, it is not copyright protection that provides incentive to Tweeters to Tweet; it is something else. For that reason, one might reasonably argue that Tweets do not fit the underlying logic of the Copyright Clause which gave rise to the Copyright Act. Tweets would occur naturally regardless. This is a slippery slope, though, and Tweets may very well fit the purpose of the Copyright Clause. For that reason, I think it’s worthwhile to point out that many Tweets have no logical tie to copyright protection, but that we can’t rely solely on the US Constitution for guidance.

All Tweets Are Not Created Equal

Tweets range from boring and useless facts (e.g., “wow, it’s cold in Toledo,” “my plane is late again,” “I’m going to poison the neighbor’s dog”) to purportedly-funny, yet useless facts (e.g., “I woke up and farted,” “she must workout,”), to interesting facts (e.g., “Americans consume 1.7 billion pounds of lard every year,” “the average burp contains 1.6 liters of gas”), to references to other facts (e.g., “check out this article in New York Post: tinyurld.com/183*&%,” “Michael Jackson auction canceled: whocares.com”), and everything in between. For this reason, to truly analyze the question of whether Tweets are copyrightable, you must differentiate between types of tweets. There may be a lurking Tweet that is protected by copyright law, but once you finish reading, I think you’ll see the probability of that scenario as being close to or at zero.

Facts Are Not Copyrightable

I’m not going to waste my time citing references to cases. You haven’t retained me as a lawyer and I haven’t agreed to represent you. More importantly, I haven’t received your retainer check. For that reason, you’re either going to have to assume it’s true, or you’re going to have to research it yourself. I’m just going to say what’s what.

“It’s sunny and warm, with a high temperature of 80 today.” That’s a fact. You think I can get dibs on keeping you from writing the same thing? No. Copyright law doesn’t extend to facts, no matter how they are described. [Note: for you ‘scholars’- I’m not saying there isn’t a way to protect a collection of facts and/or the particular expressive elements of the recitation of facts, I’m speaking directly to the facts themselves.] Now take my example and read the last 100 Tweets you can: how many are nothing more than a simple recitation of fact? Sure, there might be a funny word or two thrown in for good measure, but when you do the math- what, 90%? Be honest.

“Barstow’s Desert Dispatch Blasts City Manager for Living Outside of Barstow: tinyurl.com/1B30*%.” Did you grab the title from the newspaper? Well lucky you- that issue is in the courts right now. Newspapers will lose that battle, since titles are not protectable. But what if you made yours up? Well, yours is a title too. You have the same problem as the media giants, except you’re probably not as financially endowed, so you won’t be swaying any judges to make your point.

“She’s got legs and she just got done using them…not bad for a granny.” (Let’s assume this is a fact- a scary one at that.) Well, a fact is a fact. It might be funny or not, but it is, nevertheless a fact. Now this plays into how you might express a particular fact (we’ll get to that in a second), but be clear: facts are not protected.

The long and short of it is this: if 90% of all Tweets are nothing more than recitation of facts. That means that about 90% of Tweets are not protectable. For the other 10%, we’re not done with you yet. It’s all in how those facts are stated.

Idea versus Expression

“It’s sunny and warm, with a high temperature of 80 today.” A safe and conservative reporting of today’s weather. “It’s hot like a mother and the sun is beating me like a stepchild.” Same idea, different expression. Copyright law won’t keep someone from writing about the same fact. In my examples, both talk about the weather in my locale. But they each take a different approach to the same idea (fact). This is a pivotal connection you must make- you can only potentially protect your particular expression of a fact; you can’t keep other people from writing about the same facts.

But at some point – and this is a snag for nearly every posting junkie – the idea and the expression merge. “That’s a big door,” “that’s a large door,” “that’s a gigantic door,” “that door is massive,” “the door is huge” – these are all examples of facts that have merged with the expression of them. There are only so many ways you can describe a particular scenario, and copyright law isn’t going to let you get a monopoly on one way if there aren’t too many other ways to say the same thing. This does away with another 5-7% of the roughly 10% of potentially protectable Tweets.

Think about the Civil War. You can probably find 1,000 or more books on the subject. They all talk about the war, or we assume they do. Why do those books get copyright protection? Assuming they do, it’s because the expression can be individualized to such an extent that the expression rises above the facts. But could you have 1,000 books on me walking from my garage to my car door? Probably not. Not because it’s not possible, but because no one has done (or will take the time to do) it in a way that would be protectable. People would be saying basically the same thing. For most authors (Tweeters included), we write things in a way that is common, or in a way that 100 other people might respond to the same scenario, with little variation.

That leads us to the next reason why most Tweets would never be protectable: Scenes a Faire. These are scenes that necessarily result from a given situation. We all think we’re witty geniuses when we Tweet, but chances are if there were 100 Tweeters standing next to us at the time we experienced whatever it was we experienced, they would Tweet the same thing we did (or close enough to it). This includes common colloquialisms and expressions. Maybe we’re not as witty as we think when everyone else would use the same or substantially same expression. Some things just come up because of circumstances, and not because of creativity.

and Originality Requires Creativity

The most common example I’ve seen on Twitter of individuality of Tweets is the infusion of wit. It should be crystal clear by this point that the mere recitation of a fact is never protectable. The more difficult question is how to deal with wit. At the outset, understand that copyright law will not protect an unoriginal Tweet. We’ve already touched on that, but I know you’re all thinking, “yeah, but I’m funny as hell and so are my Tweets.” Maybe, maybe not, but copyright protection doesn’t have anything to do with humor. Originality is not dependent on it. But the real question requires legal interpretation. Originality in the copyright context is not necessarily what most people would think. Instead, it’s a certain qualitative and quantity analysis that requires a technical understanding of the legal distinction. In most cases, Tweets are not original. The humor added to a fact doesn’t make it original; it only makes it a potentially interesting read.

Size Matters

Over the years, I’ve heard so many conversations about size and length (in the copyright context). “You can use 10% of a book or song without permission, but no more,” “thirty second samples don’t require a license”). These supposed guidelines may generally be false. It’s interesting, because even large trade groups and professional organizations promote the thinking. In reality, most instances of copyright use and copyright protection involve an analysis of length. Since we’re talking about Tweets, we’re going to talk about the length of the Tweet and whether it is protectable in that context.

Titles are not protected by copyright protection. Neither are slogans and short phrases. Why? Because they tend to identify something (as in the case of titles), which renders them factual, even if witty. Also, because the length contributes to an overall belief that they lack legal originality under copyright law, short sentences, phrases, etc., often do not rise to the level of protectability. This is not to say that copyright law will never protect a short statement; rather, it is an issue of likelihood.

The Monopoly of Language

Think about it. If you could prevent someone from saying “Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday dear ____, Happy Birthday to you,” you would be pretty stoked, wouldn’t you? But what do you think the rest of civilization would think – utter contempt (ever wonder why the employees at restaurants won’t sing the standard Happy Birthday song to you?). To be sure, many courts have arrived at disastrous conclusions, whether as a result of political or financial pressure, or due to inadequacy of legal persuasiveness. But a key to copyright protection is the granting of a monopoly. That’s why the law is going to take very seriously any request to protect an arrangement of words. When copyright law protects the written word, it grants a limited monopoly over the arrangement of words, allowing the owner to prohibit others from writing the same thing in the same way.

Now imagine if a court had to evaluate Tweets and consider whether to grant a monopoly to the author of a Tweet. Don’t you find it hard to believe that a court would grant someone a monopoly over your average Tweet? No, seriously, think about it. “Is this really the happiest place on earth? Why are so many people crying?” That was a real-life Tweet from me while at Disneyland. Do I want the courts to keep other people from writing the same thing? Of course not! Should I be able to sue someone from Tweeting the exact same thing? Of course not! You give a monopoly over language to true original authorship, not to a couple of sentences about Disneyland, your dog, coffee or the woman in the elevator with you.

The Problem of Registration

Know what it takes to stop someone from repeating your Tweet? A good lawyer and copyright registration. Some might say it just takes money, but money just hires lawyers; it doesn’t do anything on its own. But let’s just say you believe you own your Tweet and you want to stop someone from repeating it. How would you do it? What could you possibly do?

As the Mark Cuban blog commentators pointed out, copyright subsists in copyrightable subject matter from the moment it’s fixed in a tangible medium of expression. Yes, that’s true, but what can you do with that? Can you sue someone? No, but if you try, the judge will quickly inform you that a copyright infringement lawsuit requires copyright registration. So back up a few steps and consider that even though you may believe you own a Tweet, you can’t do anything practical about it unless you seek copyright registration. Without being condescending- Good luck with that.

Is there a protectable Tweet?

I admit, I think a protectable Tweet exists in theory. I have read hundreds if not thousands of Tweets and have yet to read one I believe would be protectable, but the possibility exists. The question is not: Are Tweets Copyrightable. The question is: Is This Tweet Copyrightable. The copyrightability of Tweets is not dependent on the fact that they are Tweets. Rather, it’s dependent on the analysis of the Tweet in question. The all-encompassing response that all Tweets are either protected or not protected is misguided. The real response is that it depends. However, when you analyze most Tweets, they would never individually pass copyright muster.

I read an interesting post in the thread I’ve discussed throughout this article, and the post mentioned a Haiku. To me, that’s smart thinking. Finding a possible protectable Tweet among the hordes of non-possibility. Maybe a Haiku is your ticket to Tweet monopolization. Otherwise, you probably won’t be able to protect anything.

The Parting Shot

Copyright and Tweets is really about practicality. Many people believe they own everything they post online, be it Tweets, Facebook status, or whatever. The truth is that most people are most likely incorrect in their assumption. I guess the bigger question is what would you do even if you did own a Tweet?

Written by Brock Shinen, Esq.

Brock Shinen is a business, intellectual property and entertainment attorney. He works extensively in the field of copyrights, and is a published writer and speaker on the subject matter. If you have questions about this article, or want permission to reprint it, please contact him at the address listed below.

PRESS CONTACT: Please send all queries to [email protected]

THE INFORMATION IN THIS ARTICLE IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE AND SHOULD NOT BE CONSTRUED AS LEGAL ADVICE. IT IS INFORMATION ONLY.

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skyhooks-notebook · 6 years ago

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My John Wick/Jason Bourne movie which will never be made

(Bourne, of course, is a brutally disillusioned idealist. He had no idea he was signing away his soul. Wick likely sold his soul with his eyes wide open, though he probably only understood the ultimate cost later on - a naive pragmatist.)

I don’t post much at all, but here is a thing that happened on my computer. I was thinking about how John Wick and Jason Bourne could be brought together. My thoughts became long, and I started writing it down. This isn’t a story, just a sketch of how I think such a movie could be made. It’s not really edited either, this is all off-the-cuff.

[I only know what’s in the movies. I don’t know other canon from either ‘verse.]

So, if I were making a movie…

The universes of John Wick and Jason Bourne have very different styles, creating a problem.

Problem: - Bourne lives in a Universe where government is large, powerful, knowledgeable and nearly competent. - Wick lives in a Universe where a vast and elaborate criminal underworld exists, where we’ve never seen those major criminal figures worry about law enforcement or government.

The discrepancy must be resolved.

Simple.

Jason Bourne has never dealt with crime. Everything has been political and confined to the intelligence community.

Wick has never dealt with politics or the intelligence community.

So.

We must assume that the intelligence community is perfectly happy to leave common crime in the hands of law enforcement.

- Law enforcement has an unwritten and fatalistic attitude that there will always be some level of crime no matter what you do because it’s innate to human nature. And if you’re going to have crime, it might as well be organized. Let the strongest and most dangerous criminals accumulate power and influence, because they will go a long way to controlling the stupid, the excessive and the disruptive crooks. Better to have one major weapons trafficker controlling the traffic than have a thousand slightly smaller and more disruptive dealers completely out of control. (You can strongly hint that there’s an uneasy, unwritten and largely unspoken agreement between crime and law enforcement, and that it’s often a two-way street.) And if the big crime gets too big, it’s easier to knock it back down to “acceptable” levels because you’ve got bigger targets, which are easier to hit and which make a large and impressive splash across the front page when you throw RICO charges at them.

Plus it would also illustrate that Wickian Law Enforcement at its highest levels is just as dirty, amoral and underhanded as the Bournite Intelligence community.

- So, with a little work and willing suspension of disbelief (which wouldn’t be hard, because who wouldn’t want to see Wick and Bourne on the same screen provided it’s done with at least half an ass), it’s possible to bring the two Universes together.

- We start with Bourne. Someone else, like an hard ass, experienced reporter, is snooping into the government’s history of creating conditioned assassins. Maybe because a public face, like a former intelligence director, has left the shade to become a politician. And many strongly suspect that he’s dirty as fuck, but our snoopy reporter is just figuring out how deep the rabbit hole goes. Our politician was, of course, instrumental in developing programs like Treadstone, Blackbriar, et al.

- The Snoop finds out, one way or another, that one of the earliest failures of these programs was an “asset” who experienced a psychological break, went “off the res”, starting killing people and still turns up now and then to kill more people. To our Snoop, it appears that the government has created an uncontrollable monster who is still on the loose and possibly lurking right outside the White House, dear reader, are you scared now?

- The story, scanty, incorrect and harshly spun, gets printed as above. A few names are named, but mostly dead people (and maybe someone who has already been publicly discredited.) Our politician is not named because our Snoop doesn’t yet have absolute proof linking Mr. Politician to the Treadstone/Blackbriar/etc. machine.

- The evidence still exists. Witnesses still live, in numbers too great to be cleanly eliminated.

- Mr. Politician is sweating bullets.

- The Snoop isn’t done. He wants to find Bourne so he can say, “Here’s your monster, where’s my Pulitzer?” As investigation continues, the story becomes clearer to the Snoop, and the monster starts to look like little less monstrous and little more victimized. Which is an even better story.

- Now Mr. Politician is not only worried that he will be named, he’s worried that if Snoop makes contact with Bourne, or simply as a consequence of Snoop stirring the shit, Bourne will find out who our Politician is and how complicit he was in the program that destroyed David Webb. Mr. Pol knows this is likely to be a death sentence.

- It has become obvious to everyone who isn’t deeply deluded that Jason Bourne is practically indestructible and that sending more valuable and increasingly scarce ‘assets’ against him is just going to result in the loss of those assets. Agents available may be trained and conditioned to within an inch of their lives, but Bourne’s psychological break caused him to exceed his limits, training and conditioning in a way Black Ops programs haven’t been able to replicate. Those with a pragmatic attitude believe that they have no agent who can measure up to Bourne. Politician believes this as well.

- But Mr. Politician knows some things that the intelligence community has never concerned itself with. In his many years of government service, Mr. Pol was also involved with Law Enforcement at various times. Maybe he did a stint with the effa-bee-eye. Whatever. He knows about the Criminal Underworld, he knows that to maintain the ugly equilibrium, the Underworld may be influenced to comply with certain requests. And he knows a name. John Wick.

- Mr. Politician is also savvy about recent developments in the Underworld. He’s got a friend who’s still in the business of monitoring organized crime and keeping tabs on what’s going on down there. Mr. Pol has listened to recent stories with fascination because of certain similarities to a well known government failure who has haunted his dreams for decades. It has become a fact in Mr. Pol’s mind that the CIA will never be able to take down Bourne, but maybe there’s another way.

- Mr. Politician approaches a major Crime Lord and tells him point blank to activate John Wick by any means necessary and set him on the trail of one Jason Bourne. If Wick can’t be activated, Crime Lord will receive his own personal set of extensive criminal and RICO charges, delivered to his doorstep by the entire FBI

- Crime Lord knows if he gets charged, he probably won’t survive because other crime lords are going to want to make sure he doesn’t talk - about them. Also, his family will be endangered no matter which way the sword swings; either the FBI will be targeting them or his fellow criminals will be.

- Crime Lord knows John Wick. They’re old friends. Crime Lord feels a bit conflicted about it, but his first loyalties are to his family and his own hide. So he swallows his fondness for John Wick and commits falsehood, deception, a calling in of favors, maybe a little blackmail and the old Rock-And-A-Hard-Fuck-You-Up-Place on Wick. An elaborate, manipulative lie, that sets a misinformed John Wick on the trail of a man potentially as dangerous as himself.

- Now, we’ve got Jason Bourne being hunted by the Snoop, which has him on alert. We have John Wick hunting Bourne because he believes, once again, that he has no choice.

- We also have a Jason Bourne who is somewhat confounded. We need the scene where Bourne finds out, before contact ever takes place, that someone has taken out a contract on him with an Underworld assassin. Bourne doesn’t know much more about the Criminal Underworld than Joe Schmoe from Kokomo, just what he’s seen in the news and largely ignored, because it never had anything to do with him. Even in all that training years and years ago, there was this gap, because organized crime wasn’t the CIA’s beat. Maybe at first, Bourne even assumes that this Wick character isn’t a threat because he’s just a murderer, a thug, and not a highly trained government operative like himself.

- So in a riveting scene where Bourne and Wick first come into contact, we see Bourne - under the influence of his ignorant assumption - nearly getting killed by Wick and making an extremely narrow escape by use of desperate measures. We also have Mr. Wick limping away, suitably impressed with the skills of his opponent.

- Now we have that stretch of the story where Wick is on the hunt, Bourne is on the run and Bourne is trying to uncover any information he can find about this assassin. Wick doesn’t research much, though, because that’s not how he works. Bourne is a machine; the gears must grind. Wick is a force of nature, like a tornado; most of the info he gets he just picks up along the way, either paying for it or having it given to him by friends.

- Bourne discovers that Wick had a military past, Special Forces, maybe he was fucked over by the military/government in his own way. Or Bourne sees it that way. Bourne finds out about Helen and her death, and maybe not the whole story, but quite a bit about how John cut through a small army of Russian mob mooks for vengeance. He identifies with Wick’s grief and anger. He sees something of himself in John Wick. He sympathizes with the devil.

- John hasn’t done the heavy research. He understands that Bourne is dangerous, perhaps more dangerous than anyone he’s ever met. He consolidates his resources and finds someone else to do his research. He is awaiting a report on Jason Bourne when…

- Bourne stops running, goes to confront Wick and ends up trying to explain, while fighting of course, what he knows about the Dirty Politician and the Crime Lord who has called John out of his troubled retirement yet again, and how Wick has been used and betrayed (this time) until he says something that causes Wick to call truce long enough to hear it all.

- Bourne can see the beginning of a way to solve the whole mess. After some persuasion, Wick is on board and has some ideas of his own.

- Now we’ve got our boys on the same side and it’s only left to decide whether the war will be conventional or nuclear.

- There are two victories we need to see. We must see the destruction of Mr. Politician and Mr. Crime Lord.

- You might-could send Bourne, who doesn’t really give a shit about the covenants and conventions of the criminal world, to the Continental - probably breaking in, instead of checking in. Luring the Crime Lord out into the open, perhaps on the intimation that Mr. Politician is about to take up backstabbing. Draw the Crime Lord out to confront the Politician. Bourne’s plan, reluctantly agreed to by Wick, is to draw the Politician and the Crime Lord together, get evidence and even a full recording of the meeting and expose them both to the world.

Or course, this backfires. Bourne finds himself in a position where he has to kill either Crime Lord or Mr. Politician in self-defense. Probably the Crime Lord.

- It would also be immensely satisfying to see Wick take out the dirty politician with a head shot. Bourne would, of course, be stoically pissed about it all, but it also illustrates the difference. Bourne is willing to let even unrepentant bastards live because he’s tired of having blood on his hands. Wick doesn’t let anybody live who’s fucked him over. Bourne is still conflicted about who and what he is. Wick has come to terms with himself. Bourne believes in atonement. Wick believes in damnation. Bourne still cares. Wick doesn’t give a fuck. Bourne still dreams of inner peace. Wick would settle for a little peace and quiet, would you motherfuckers just leave me the fuck alone already. Get off my lawn. And stop teasing my dog, you bastards.

- You must also show Wick taking an active role in planning, because if Bourne does all of it and says here’s what we’re going to do, then 1) he’s just using Wick as a tool or weapon, instead of treating him like a person and an equal and 2) Wick once again is being controlled by someone else instead of doing what he does best, which is take matters into his own hands (shooting Santino may have looked like a misstep, but who in the audience didn’t love it?)

- I’ve forgotten our Snoop reporter.

We could let Bourne track him down, in which case he will almost certainly die, because going by canon everybody who sympathizes with Jason Bourne must die.

We could let Wick find him, in which case he probably has a much better chance of surviving to publish his Pulitzer Prize winning story provided he’s not armed when he meets Mr. Wick. Hell, Wick could give him a coin, which could buy him entrance and protection at the Continental (even the government doesn’t want to mess with that bunch - like stirring a hornet’s nest with a stick; you might survive, but it will be excruciatingly painful and you’ll look like an idiot the whole time with all the screaming and flailing and jumping around in a panic.)

John Wick’s name will not appear in the story. Only a vaguely defined “other sources”.

- And after all is said and done, Bourne and Wick part company, with mutual respect and recognition. Though they really don’t like each other very much.

So that’s my John Wick/Jason Bourne movie which will never be made. But I had fun.

P.S. Please excuse crappy photoshop, I just wanted something there.

#john wick #jason bourne #matt damon #keanu reeves #movies that will never be made

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homerenovationvancouver-blog · 5 years ago

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The Kitchen Renovation Doesn't Have to Be As Painful As You Might Think

You've reached your own personal tipping point: the toaster won't work when the coffeemaker's on, you're down to one working burner on your stove, only one person can be in the kitchen at a time so your family eats in shifts, and finally the microwave blew on the morning of your big presentation at work, and you decided, "Enough is enough. We need a new, functional kitchen!"

You're not alone. Usually everyone has a particular tipping point; that one last thing that sends them into the renovation pool. You try to hold on for as long as you can because you're dreading the noise, the dust, the inconvenience and the disruption to your daily life. When your space becomes unusable, it's time to do something. But you can't just jump into a renovation, particularly one as costly, time consuming and inconvenient as a kitchen renovation, you need a well thought out plan of attack if you're going to pull it off in the quickest amount of time with the least amount of inconvenience and expense.

Start by developing a Design Plan: A renovation will only be as successful as the research and planning that's put into it. Like any business proposal you develop for work, you need to have a clear goal of what you want to achieve with the renovation. Do you yearn for updated electrical wiring, maximizing storage space, adding an eating area, appliances that work?

You can start by popping into kitchen renovation stores to look at the latest available features in kitchen design. Speak to the staff, tell them you're at the beginning of your journey and see if they have any ideas for you.

Cut out photos of kitchens you love from magazines and put them in a folder. Identify why you like the kitchens you've chosen - is it the space? The lighting? The colour? The style of cabinetry or countertops? It is even helpful to give your designer images of things you definitely do not like. That way they won't propose those very things in your dream kitchen. When you determine what you really want, it will help your kitchen designer draw up the plans that suit you.

If you have a friend who's recently renovated her kitchen, take pictures and identify what you like about it as well and stick it in the folder with your other pictures.

Toronto architect Jacqueline Rhee says that when she sits down with potential clients and they say to her, "Design us something gorgeous," she has to explain that they aren't giving her enough information. She says, "What their idea of 'gorgeous' is and what I might have in mind could very well be two different things. Maybe they want French Country, but I have an idea that they might prefer a sleek contemporary kitchen." The more direction clients can give their designer about their likes, dislikes and what their goals for the space are, the better the design can live up to their expectations.

Budget: The good news regarding a kitchen renovation is that it tends to be a good investment. The Appraisal Institute of Canada estimates that a kitchen renovation will return 75-100% of your investment if you were to turn around and sell your home. However, the sky is never the limit, even for Donald Trump. Just as you would plan your company's annual marketing budget, you need to develop a budget for your kitchen renovation. A general rule of thumb for how much to spend on a kitchen renovation is up to 10-15% of the value of your home. But don't feel like you have to spend that much; if you can do more with less, do it. For example, if your cabinets are in the right location and sturdy but just tired and outdated, consider refacing them. Refacing comes in at about 50-75% of the cost of new custom cabinetry.

Hiring a Kitchen Company and/or Contractor: Most people hire a contractor or kitchen designer through word of mouth. If you've been to a friend's recently renovated house and you like what you see, start asking questions: Who did the work? Did you work well together? Was he on time and on budget? Is the end result what you expected? Was he well-organized or did you scramble to get finishes at the last minute? Were there any major problems during construction, and if so, how did he handle them? If you liked the answers your friend gave you - assuming your friend isn't shell-shocked from the direct grilling she's just received - get his card. Now, find at least two other contractors and/or kitchen companies so you can compare quotes.

Meeting with the Designer and Contractor: If, while you're meeting with a designer or contractor, your gut tells you that no matter how great the work is you couldn't stand being in the same room with him for more than a minute, cross him off your list of candidates. You may have to meet with this person every day. If your personalities don't mix, you'll never be able to solve problems together. Likely, however, if you're getting that vibe, the contractor or designer is too; it's best to part ways before a relationship has begun.

If, on the other hand, your first meeting is fantastic and you're bowled over with his enthusiasm and ideas and you get along as if you'd known each other your entire lives, you still need to do your research. Ask him how many jobs he can handle at once and how many he has going currently and make sure he is bonded and insured.

Further necessary research - the internet is your new best friend: Researching kitchen companies and contractors has become a whole lot easier with the age of the internet. Now there are websites which are specifically focused on capturing word-of-mouth reviews from consumers online. If the companies you're interested in using don't have any reviews, you may want to look at other companies that do and compare their services. Also check out the company's website. If they don't have one, you have to wonder how professional they are.

Another tip you can try is entering the company's name in search engines like Google and Yahoo!. You may find some feedback people have posted on them on various forums. You can also post a question asking if anyone has ever used this company. Finally, check the references he or she gives you as well, talk to a few of his past clients and go see the work he or she did for them.

Once you've chosen your designer, contractor and/or kitchen company, get ready: Ask yourself if you can live through the renovation by setting up a second kitchen in the garage or basement. Do you have toddlers who would be better off away from the construction site? Make arrangements to be out of the house for a specific amount of time and make sure that you and your project team have discussed the most reasonable move-out and move-in dates.

Did you have to factor furniture storage into your budget or can it be wrapped and stored on site? Again, your contractor will tell you which is the best option depending on the size of the job and your storage space availability on site.

During the renovation: Assumptions: One of the breakdowns in communication between homeowner and contractor is in assumptions made by one party or the other. For instance, one woman had purchased bathroom sinks and fixtures for a brand new home. The contractor saw that the powder room fixture would be outfitted with separate taps and a faucet and so drilled three holes in all the sinks because he assumed that all the fixtures were the same. Unfortunately, they weren't and the homeowner had to replace the other fixtures to match the holes.

But incorrect assumptions can just as easily be made by the homeowner. A homeowner handed a water filter kit to the contractor and asked him to install it. The homeowner had read on the box that the water filter was good for the whole house and could be fitted on the main water supply. When she returned at the end of the day, the contractor had installed it under the kitchen sink. She'd never told him where it was to go, she had just assumed that he knew it was meant for the entire house.

Problem solving: In any renovation, no matter how minor, there always seem to be unforeseen problems. It's not as surprising as you might think. What happens behind the walls stays behind them until they're ripped apart. Up until then, you might not know that the insulation used was actually newspaper, or that the plumbing went through the wall that needs to be demolished. How your contractor and you handle these problems depends on how proactive your contractor is.

During Sue and Leon's main floor renovation, the designer had called for the laundry room backsplash to consist of stainless steel tiles; beautiful, but at a cost of approximately $5,000. Sue balked. The contractor suggested instead a row of the tiles, two feet high, just behind the washer and dryer at a cost of $500. Sue was grateful that contractor made her aware of the costs and had an alternative suggestion for her.

The end result -- your dream space: Living through the dust, noise and strangers in your house for weeks to months on end can be tiring. Even though you get along well with the crew and your contractor, you can find your temper becoming short, particularly if there are delays during the project leading to prolonged construction. Recognize that delays are often unavoidable and that one day, you will be back in your home, the workers will be gone and your new beautiful kitchen will be all yours.

On-line Resources: This Old House: This website is a DIYer's dream. There are videos and tips on probably every aspect of renovating a kitchen. Kitchens.com: A wealth of information on everything you ever wanted to know about kitchens, including information on "greening your kitchen." Better Homes and Gardens has an extensive section on renovating your kitchen including an "inspiration gallery" to give you some ideas. The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation: CMHC has an excellent website for any renovation or home purchase. The kitchen renovation area has downloadable charts you can use for reference guides as you go about your renovation planning. Appraisal Institute www.homerenovationvancouver.ca of Canada: The Renova section of this website allows you to input the cost of your renovation and it will calculate how much of a return you would receive if you sold your home.

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