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haec-est-fides · 4 years ago

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Filodox’s Trials of Apollo Reactions [Part I]

Welcome to part one of a reflective journey through Trials of Apollo ft. my original ebook annotations! I’ll be your host, 2020!filodox.

For this first episode, we’ll be going back to May 2016, the beginning of it all: The Hidden Oracle.

Annotations for this round are brought to you by 2016!filodox.

Is there anything we should know before we begin, 2016!me?

2016!filodox: I swore on the Styx never to read another Riordan book after he killed Octavian. And yet here we are.

... Alright then! Let’s get started.

But first, a more detailed overview on how this series will work: I will excerpt bits and pieces of the books based on what I highlighted / annotated on my first read. Beneath each quote, I will share what I wrote in the annotation. Below that, I will (occasionally) laugh at my past self, clarify the note, or say how my view has changed.

I encourage questions, comments, and concerns (of which there may be many), so go ahead and use that replies feature if you feel so inclined! However, these are just my opinions and (occasionally) emotional reactions, so no hate pls. <3 (Or, if you do send hate, pls make it funny.)

Now, diving right in with Riordan’s dedication!

To The Muse Calliope. This is long overdue. Please don’t hurt me.

2016!filodox: Hurt him. He didn’t even name the chapters.

As you can see, I had yet to experience Lester’s haiku and was already mad based on the table of contents alone. I went into this series very salty...

I inflicted a plague on the Greeks who besieged Troy.

2016!filodox: At least he did something right. Once.

I was just,,,extremely ready to die on Octavian’s hill. (Though I was a huge Troy / Aeneas stan before all this, just to be clear.)

Is anything sadder than the sound of a god hitting a pile of garbage bags?

2016!filodox: I actually find this particular god crashing into a dumpster quite amusing.

I also blamed Apollo for what happened to Octavian. I think that had a lot to do with how Apollo acted on Delos in Heroes of Olympus, basically disowning Octavian and whining about how some “creature” scammed him? That was bullshit. Apollo needed to own the fact that he blessed Octavian, but he just abandoned him and denied all the blame. TL;DR I had a grudge, okay?

My mind stewed in confusion, but one memory floated to the surface -- the voice of my father, Zeus: YOUR FAULT. YOUR PUNISHMENT.

2016!filodox: Wait, is this bc everyone blames Octavian and therefore Apollo? Bc lol but also no?

*cough* Octavian did nothing wrong 2k16 *cough*

Zeus will reconsider, I told myself. He’s just trying to scare me. Any moment, he will yank me back to Olympus and let me off with a warning.

“Yes...” My voice sounded hollow and desperate. “Yes, that’s it.”

2016!filodox: Apollo is a self centered frat boy, I forgot...but it is slightly...endearing? *narrows eyes*

Ah, how close I was to stanning Lester in the first chapter, when he was at his most “goddy”. You know, I actually made a rule for myself when I started reading Trials of Apollo that I would not under any circumstances stan Apollo. That was a naive goal, because it was never really a danger.

Regardless, Zeus had held me responsible for Octavian’s delusions of grandeur. Zeus seemed to consider egotism a trait the boy had inherited from me. Which is ridiculous. I am much too self-aware to be egotistical.

2016!filodox: I am going to Murder him.

*chef kiss* the hypocrisy ! the lack of self-awareness !

“I just...I assumed -- I hoped this would be taken care of by now.”

“You mean by demigods,” Percy said, “going on a big quest to reclaim the Oracle of Delphi?”

2016!filodox: That sounds like a decent quest, or you know, QUESTING FOR THE SIBYLLINE BOOKS

I’ve always said I can see the future but an inch to the left. Also, I don’t like Ella.

It warmed my heart that my children had the right priorities: their skills, their images, their views on YouTube. Say what you will about gods being absentee parents; our children inherit many of our finest personality traits.

2016!filodox: AND HE’S MAD ABOUT OCTAVIAN?!

I mean ?

Apollo, when Austin and Kayla show ambition: THEY GOT THAT FROM ME <3

Apollo, when Octavian (or Nero, or Caligula) shows ambition: srry i don’t know him ??

He had a weak jawline, an overlarge nose, and a beard that wrapped around his double chin like a helmet strap. His hair was curly and dark like mine, except not as fashionably tousled or luxuriant. His lips curled as if he smelled something unpleasant. Perhaps it was the burning seats of the bus.

2016!filodox: Nero ???

Not quite sure how to feel looking back at this moment. Call out post @ myself for instantly recognizing Nero, when afaik this scene was before we had any hints that Roman emperors were even a plot point? But here’s the thing: I don’t remember why I could recognize him so easily. I don’t remember where 2016!me obtained this ancient Rome knowledge. A mystery.

On another note entirely, did Nero really like,,,astral project into Apollo’s fever dream to address him directly? Because Rhea does. And sometimes Python does. But Nero? Can he do that?

The man laughed as flames licked at his purple sleeves. “You’re not sorry yet, but you will be. Find me the gates. Lead me to the Oracle. I’ll enjoy burning it down!”

2016!filodox: I too enjoy burning things down. # Nero confirmed

My only comment here is “oh you sweet summer child,,,”

Oh. Perhaps some of you are wondering how I felt seeing [Will] with a boyfriend rather than a girlfriend.

2016!filodox: No, actually. I wasn’t wondering. I was plotting how to kill you, them, and quite a few other people. Do you think I could trade you for Octavian?

Oh man, back at it again with the salt. XD

I could only remember my conversations with Octavian, the way he’d turned my head with his flattery and promises. That stupid boy...it was his fault I was here.

A voice whispered in the back of my mind. This time I thought it might be my conscience: Who was the stupid boy? It wasn’t Octavian.

2016!filodox: I can’t really...explain my emotions upon reading this. I’m still not quite okay, but this...it’s bittersweet in a way. I don’t know if this is a poor attempt at a proper closure, the author’s way of beating a dead horse, or just a way to make Apollo seem pitiable. Whatever it is... Octavian was important enough to remain in Apollo’s mortal memory. He somehow made promises to a god and had Apollo wrapped around his finger. And despite being so much like Apollo, the god blames him. Like everyone blames him. But Apollo also realizes, accepts on an infinitesimal scale, that “it wasn’t Octavian”. He wasn’t perfect, but neither is Apollo. Apollo is (at least) subconsciously admitting his own guilt in the whole affair.

...yeah. I will note that this bit isn’t meant to develop Octavian, but rather uses Octavian as a prop to support Apollo’s development? Which is why it still stings. Like thanks, I guess.

“Your judgement in the past has been...questionable. I wonder if you have chosen the right tools for this job. Have you learned from your past mistakes?”

2016!filodox: Nero has made plenty of mistakes to learn from

Love how I just assumed it was Nero back in chapter 10 and went with it, zero hesitation. Also love how I heard Python say Nero has made mistakes and went “oh absolutely”. In fact, here’s something funny in retrospect that will become more and more apparent: I did not like Nero in 2016. Or, at least, I thought I didn’t. There’s something really odd going on here that baffles me, looking back...

“A triumvirate is a ruling council of three,” I said. “At least, that’s what it meant in ancient Rome.”

“Which is interesting,” Rachel said, “because of this next shot.” She tapped her screen. The new photo zoomed in on the building’s penthouse terrace, where three shadowy figures stood talking together....

2016!filodox: Is it bad that I’m smirking? Because it’s getting interesting ~ *clear malicious intent*

Wow, edgy. Triumvirates are just a neat, Roman thing and I stanned.

“The last triumvirate I dealt with included Lepidus, Marc Antony, and my son, the original Octavian. A triumvirate is a very Roman concept...like patriotism, skullduggery, and assassination.”

2016!filodox: THIS IS WHAT I’VE BEEN TRYING TO TELL EVERYONE. MODERN OCTAVIAN IS A VERY GOOD ANCIENT ROMAN. POLITICS, ESPECIALLY SHADY AF POLITICS AND POWERPLAYS, ARE QUINTESSENTIALLY ROMAN. Also, I’d like to note that it’s confirmed, in this universe’s canon, that Augustus was a son of Apollo.

Ohhhh, wait. I think I’d watched the HBO series Rome by 2016, which would at least partially explain my ancient Rome knowledge. (Amazing tv show btw!)

“He heard them talking in Latin.”

“Latin? Were they campers?”

Pete spread his hands. “I--I don’t think so. Paulie described them like they were adults. He said one of them was the leader. The other two addressed him as imperator.”

2016!filodox: !!!! (obligatory 💕)

I was such a simp for Latin in high school. And the Roman Empire. Still am, but hey.

“The Beast is planning some kind of attack on your camp. I don’t know what it is, but it’s going to be big.”

2016!filodox: Runs in the family I guess

The Octavian / Triumvirate parallels are everywhere... 👀

“The emperors made themselves gods. They had their own temples and altars. They encouraged the people to worship them.”

2016!filodox: # deify me

*smacking my past self with a stick* You stop that! Edgy child!

Anyway, a much better point here is like,,,the Imperial cult was huge in the ancient Roman world. Looking at Apollo’s explanation here, why did only the “worst” three emperors get to be immortal? Did famously “good” emperors like Augustus and Marcus Aurelius have the option of becoming minor gods, but they chose Elysium or something? Are there slightly less infamous emperors just hanging around anywhere as minor gods? A lot of Roman emperors live on in human memory is all I’m saying.

“Wait!” Will said as I reached the door. “Who is the Beast? Which emperor are we dealing with?”

“The worst of my descendants.” My fingers dug into the doorframe. “The Christians called him the Beast because he burned them alive. Our enemy is Emperor Nero.”

2016!filodox: I honestly can’t believe it took this long to reveal this? Was anyone surprised?

Nero’s reveal is rather late in the book compared to Commodus, Caligula, and even Tarquin iirc? But it makes sense, being the first book of the series. Also love how 16-year-old me was like “this reveal is silly because everyone, like me, recognizes Nero on sight” and didn’t question that assumption at all.

“Germani.” Instinctively, I moved in front of Meg. The elite imperial bodyguards had been cold-blooded death reapers in ancient Rome. I doubted they’d gotten any sweeter over the centuries.

2016!filodox: BITCH. See? This is why I love Rome. They knew what they were doing.

Ngl, as someone of Germanic heritage, I felt really represented by the Germani, which is hilarious on so many levels.

He tried to compensate for his ugliness with an expensive Italian suit of purple wool, his gray shirt open to display gold chains. His shoes were hand-tooled leather, not the sort of thing to wear while stomping around in an ant pile. Then again, Nero had always had expensive, impractical tastes.

2016!filodox: I don’t exactly like Nero, and actually think he was quite the shitty emperor, but I guess I mildly respect and “like” him on principle (in this book at least).

OH YOU SWEET SUMMER CHILD. I was so convinced that I didn’t actually like Nero, despite all of the lowkey evidence to the contrary? Who hurt you, past me? (Lmao, it was Tacitus, Suetonius, and Cassius Dio.) My working theory is that I was too much of an Emperor Augustus stan at the time to admit liking Nero. It’s hysterical. Look at me equivocating like a champ.

I’d been so proud of my son, the original Octavian, later Caesar Augustus. After his death, his descendants became increasingly arrogant and unstable (which I blamed on their mortal DNA; they certainly didn’t get those qualities from me).

2016!filodox: I’m glad Apollo and I can agree on something. Augustus was amazing and those who came after him...significantly less so.

See! The propaganda really got to me, what can I say?

Nero clasped his hands as if in prayer. “Oh, my. It seems we’ve had a slight miscommunication. You see, Apollo, Meg brought you here, just as I asked her to. Well done, my sweet.”

2016!filodox: This was obvious but I still find it...gods, the only word I can think of is “delicious”

. . .

“The Beast killed my father. This is Nero. He’s -- he’s my stepfather.”

I could not fully grasp this before Nero spread his arms.

“That’s right, my darling,” he said. “And you’ve done a wonderful job. Come to Papa.”

2016!filodox: Okay, but we should have known this since it became apparent her weapons were Roman. Also, oof. Also also, WHY did Riordan feel the need to add that last line? Why?

ASDFGHJKL: I CAN’T

“After the fire, we’ll rebuild,” he said. “It will be glorious!”

2016!filodox: The amount of times I have used this very logic is worrying.

For (some) context, Firelord Ozai is my favorite character from AtLA. <3

The scene might have been funny except that the Germani were now back on their feet, five demigods and a geyser spirit were still tied to highly flammable posts, and Nero still had a box of matches.

2016!filodox: Oh, I find this plenty amusing!

The emperor stared at his empty hand. “Meg...?” His voice was as cold as an icicle.

2016!filodox: The various ways his tone / voice have been described throughout this conversation are just 💕

*looks at camera like I’m on The Office*

Seriously, though. Nero’s voice is like the central descriptive element of his character because he’s so manipulative. It’s really cool and a great use of detail.

[Meg] turned to Nero. “You told me never to lower myself to my enemies’ level.”

“No, indeed.” Nero’s tone had frayed like a weathered rope. “We are better. We are stronger. We will build a glorious new world. But these nonsense-spewing trees stand in our way, Meg. Like any invasive weeds, they must be burned. And the only way to do that is with a true conflagration -- flames stoked by blood.”

2016!filodox: Real 👏🏻 Gods 👏🏻 Require 👏🏻 Blood👏🏻

I was way too enthusiastic about this whole situation, wasn’t I?

Nero grinned. “Good-bye, Apollo. Only eleven more Olympians to go.”

2016!filodox: Wait, shit, WHAT

Having read Tower of Nero, this probably had something to do with Python interfering with the Fates, huh? But does that mean it’s more Python’s plan or Nero’s? If this was Nero’s plan (with his 12 kids literally replacing the Olympians) that’s,,,really fucking bold.

Then I heard the screaming from Camp Half-Blood.

2016!filodox: Music to my ears ~

I’m presenting every edgy detail of my annotations so I have a proper case file when I inevitably have to face the question “On a scale of one to ten, how relatable is Emperor Nero and why should you have realized it’s a ten sooner?”

In a flash of silver light, the camp’s magical barriers collapsed. The Colossus lurched forward and brought his foot down on the dining pavilion, smashing it to rubble like so many children’s blocks.

2016!filodox: Payback! Dear gods, I can’t stop smiling! I’m just like “YES!” I know this will all probably get fixed or whatever but I’M HAVING A MOMENT.

I’ve learned to appreciate the small wins. <3

Percy grabbed one of the crown’s sunray spikes. He sliced it off at the base, then jabbed it into the Colossus’ forehead.

2016!filodox: As much as Nero is FAR from my favorite, I really don’t like defacing ancient (or replicas of ancient) statues and art...

This is where I just start laughing at myself tbh. I was so insistent on not liking Nero. Like, I sound like I’m in denial. Peak equivocation. What happened to that heart emoji a few chapters back? Why did I suddenly make it about *checks notes* ancient art? Updated translation: nooo don’t ruin the Colossus Neronis it’s so sexy aha

Just as the [arrow] reached its apex and was about to fall back to earth, a gust of wind caught it...perhaps Zephyros looking kindly on my pitiful attempt. The arrow sailed into the Colossus’ ear canal and rattled in his head with a clink, clink, clink like a pachinko machine.

2016!filodox: HOW MANY EX MACHINAS IS THIS ?! The dryads, the arrow, Percy, the enchantment, and THIS ?

One of my criticisms of Trials of Apollo in general is just that the stakes are so much higher and Riordan usually solves that problem by having his heroes win on long odds. The chances of them succeeding at like,,,anything they attempt are astronomical, but of course they manage. It’s not surprising but it does get a little tiring.

“Yo, Nico,” Leo called, “please tell me that’s it for the physical abuse.”

“For now.” Nico smiled. “We’re still trying to get in touch with the West Coast. You’ll have a few dozen people out there who will definitely want to hit you.”

2016!filodox: Oh I’d love to hit him. With the flaming, Imperial gold payload of an onager. Preferably WITHOUT the Pontifex Maximus attached to it -- unless of course you mean the false pontifex, Jason Grace.

Leo was the salt in the wound for this one, ngl. He rekindled my undying ire over Octavian’s death. As I said at the beginning of this, I was extremely ready to die on Octavian’s hill after Heroes of Olympus. That sentiment sticks around for a while...

And we can call that a wrap!

Though it may seem like it, my annotations are not, in fact, a compilation of Nero’s greatest hits. There are a lot of scenes of his that I love (naturally) but I didn’t have anything to say about them when I first read the series. Maybe I’ll share those another time.

In any case, I hope you got something out of this ridiculously long post! Until next time! <3

#trials of apollo #toa #filodox!#I don't know what any of you were expecting but this is what I've got #no these are not all of my annotations #I tried to pick the best ones #oh also #I'm sorry to everyone with hard copies of the books #since I have ebooks it's no problem to search for quotes and page numbers are imaginary #if you want me to put chapters with the quotes I can

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a-woman-apart · 4 years ago

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Separating the Boys from the Men

Yes, that title is click bait, and if you keep reading, you’ve been warned. I’ve got a lot to get off my chest, and it’s going to involve defending masculinity, femininity, and our right to BEHAVE LIKE CHILDREN FOR THE REST OF OUR LIVES because in many ways, we already do.

Let’s get straight to the point. As Millennials, regardless of our age, financial status, or level of “success” (air quotes 100% intentional) we have been accused of being lazy, entitled, and way too enthusiastic about avocado toast. At the same time, we have been described as having enough power to decimate the napkin industry, the diamond industry, and the concept of traditional marriage. We have been accused of a collective “Peter Pan” syndrome, because we “refuse” to cut off papa’s apron strings and get off the proverbial mama’s teats.

Wonderful to know.

Let’s unpack the “lazy” bit. Supposedly, this is tied to the fact that we have access to higher education, we [often, not always] have parents who financially support or house us well into adulthood.

So now, my question is, Gen X (the entitled ones, ironically) and Salty Boomers, YOU DIDN’T?

What do you call that “inheritance” you received? What do you call that education your parents paid for that was less than 1/3 what we have to pay? For Boomers, how do you explain the lavish weddings, cheap [and apparently nuke proof] home appliances, and “nights out on the town” that you were able to afford by working at whatever passed for a McDonald’s back in the day? Working on a farm, at a grocery store, or in retail used to ACTUALLY provide a livable wage; for us, those are a “side hustle” and we still have to get a “big boy job” that usually requires an education that can put us over $100,000 in debt by age 30.

Hate to say it, but if you hadn’t made most of your income “during the War” or in the absolute economic boom that followed it, you wouldn’t survive 24 hours in our shoes before having an emotional collapse.

Despite the disastrous living conditions of the U.S. in the 21st Century, not much has changed in how men define their level of “manliness.”

Financial gains (stocks, bonds, portfolio, bank account)

Bro “gains” (a.k.a. “gym gains”, how “Gaston” they are, including whether they want to go for the Adonis, Apollo, or Brawny boi look, or just how far they can throw something or how “boyish” they look if strength isn’t an option and they suffer from femme-levels of body dysmorphia)

Body count (since we’re in a time of peace and not literally war, this is LITERALLY a modern term describing how many people you’ve slept with, and I have never heard an adult man, regardless of sexual orientation, who isn’t a little concerned about putting those notches in the bed post, and if not that, VERY concerned about his bedroom performance: it’s quality vs. quantity)

Kill death Ratio (I know this is a video game term now, but did you know that before video games, men in England used to regularly get on horseback, get a bunch of hounds together, and chase down tiny foxes and rabbits? FOR FUN?!?!? Did you know, that before modern sports ((including Esports)), men used to just fight to the death, regularly, even if an official war wasn’t going on? It was known as “dueling”, and in less socially developed societies, men still behave like this. So the next time you complain about “male rage” and how heartless it is to make live chickens fight, note that even though we’ve quelled male anger and hostility on some level, you will NEVER be able to take away man’s urge to destroy. Boys and men will always like knocking things over, building things from the rubble, and ruling shit. It’s what they do-- and we women can and do, too, but we have a LOT more risk-aversion and self-preservation, which is a blessing and a curse for our species-- but we just need to make sure humanity as a whole stays...chill)

So what, say ye, has changed about how WOMEN define themselves now vs. in the past. I would say that very little has changed, but the level of internalized misogyny, insecurity, and good-old fashioned denial has SKYROCKETED.

Let’s look at some terms of how the majority of women value themselves.

Financial Security (few women will admit to “wanting to be rich”, because that sounds kind of “Trump”, but plenty will talk about having minimum income requirements for their partner(s), wanting to retire at a young age so they can “travel the world”, wanting to eliminate their debts, etc. It’s different language but essentially it translates to: I want to work so hard or marry into so much wealth that I never want to worry about money after age 35. #Hustle)

Looks (it doesn’t matter if you want a Kardashian butt, you’re in the body positivity movement, or you just want to “dress like a bawse” women are just as obsessed with clothes, image, and body weight/shape/size as they ever were, it is just that now that we’ve “slain the patriarchy” we have more fashion options than ever before, because “boy clothes” are just as “in” as femme ones)

Ability to attract a partner (some women, like me, “chase”, but thanks to biology, most women, regardless of sexual orientation, seem to enjoy being pursued more than being Artemis-style hunters. This is evidenced by the fact that when the feminist owner of Bumble changed the rules of the dating website to where women had to start conversations with men rather than vice versa ((a move that had ostensibly zero effect on lesbian matching)) 72% of women that she later surveyed stated that they liked it better when men were approaching them rather than the other way around. I am sure Bumble’s female CEO was shook ((as was I)), especially because she made the change to empower women, and apparently 72% of women didn’t want the power because it meant they now had the power to face rejection, and it made them uncomfortable. Big yikes. So much for #EndPatriarchy and #ChivalryisDead ?)

Playing house (this is probably going to get me some unfollows, but I’ll take my chances. Women, regardless of sexual orientation, often seem to be REALLY into having babies or just “playing house.” There’s also men like this, too, “Family men” as they’re aptly called, men in love with fatherhood ((or just being called “daddy”, and that will never not be weird)). So many women who never want to pop out a baby describe being taken by an OVERWHELMING urge to fuck during their “fertile window” ((or is that just me?)) and seeing every baby alive as the cutest human being ever once we pass the tender age of 25. The biological clock is REAL, and I learned the hard way that being bisexual and having immense fear of pregnancy and childbirth didn’t spare me from the awful truth of my biology.

I really don’t want to keep making references to modern video games, but they seem to serve the dual purpose of being deeply satisfying and helping us to quell “problematic” urges, including that one to dominate and destroy the world. For a lot of women gamers, though, our choices ((on a broad scale, every #girlgamer is different)) deviate from men’s in some interesting ways.

#1: We still love The Sims Franchise way more than guys do

Not only do we love it, but while a lot of men (again, #notallmen) tend to build elaborate neighborhoods to extensively mod and destroy them in terrifying ways, I still see women gamers taking obscene amounts of time to design homes, raise happy little families, and cause TERRIFYING blood feuds by having Sims marry Sims from rival families ((I guess we’re more Shakespeare than we thought, eh ladies?))

#2: We make up most of mobile gaming

Most male gamers think mobile games “aren’t real” and I tend to agree, but a mobile game is invaluable for when I, a woman, have time to kill between the 3 jobs I hypothetically have and I and don’t want to whip out something like a Nintendo 2DS that is both unwieldly and attracts the eyes of every impoverished, thieving human being in a .5 mile radius. #RiskAversion. These games are often low-quality, mindless, and insanely easy, but that is WHY WE LIKE THEM. Our entire life is a job. #Hustle

#3 We also love farming sims and RPGs

While we-- and most male Millennials-- beg god to not have to birth calves, milk cows, or labor in the tomato fields under the hot sun, most of us have no objection to having our virtual avatars perform the same back-breaking tasks to the tune of cheerful chiptune music. Also, even though men definitely enjoy them, too, I have never met a woman gamer who didn’t enjoy a nice RPG; why do you think we’re such avid readers of fantasy/romance YA?

We want to be transported to a different world, and if you won’t take us there, we’re happy to go there virtually ((because we probably can’t afford travel; we’re still millennials)).

Ability to murder people who threaten our young or our partner(s) (Okay this one is a bit more complicated, but I’m just going to tell you a bit about female animals. DON’T MESS WITH THEIR BABIES IF YOU WANT TO LIVE. Human females, are, in that regard, just as savage, if not more so, than our male counterparts.

I’ve never heard of any woman ((outside of prison, maybe)) who killed another woman for “looking at her weird” or saying “your mama” too many times. I’ve heard plenty of women threaten literal murder because another woman ((or man, we’re #progressive)) came too close to her romantic/sexual partner, or another human being threatened harm on our kids or our “squad.”

I don’t know where the meme truly originated from, but “Don’t talk to me or my son ever again” is SUCH a Mom thing to say. So much misandry is wrapped up in the idea that men are predators, and that is true, but not in the excessively sexually deviant ways you think ((that’s only sometimes true)). They just like hunting things, including people, but if you give them a toy to play with ((I MEAN ACTUAL TOY OMG)) they seem alright. Let them go play with their cars, Xbox, [insert whatever] or something. They’re men, okay, they’re easily distracted/impressed/occupied.

Women, on the other hand, have seemed to be having an EXTREME amount of trouble curbing that baby-making urge, or the Excessive Nurturing Urge, that one that makes you ask your grown husband if he’s remembered to pack lunch for work or if he remembered to pack money for his playdate with his bros, because he’s gonna need money at Six Flags and you aren’t going to bring it to him because he should’ve remembered, you reminded him 30093390 times.

THAT’S NOT HIS FAULT. HE HAS MANAGED BY SOME MIRACLE TO STAY ALIVE FOR 33 YEARS. THAT’S YOU, SWEETIE. STOP BEING SUCH A MOM. GO BE A NURSE, DOCTOR, OR SOCIAL WORKER OR SOMETHING OMG.

In summary...

What separates the “men from the boys” or the “women from the girls” isn’t the era that we were born in to, our economic status, or whether we’ve been able to “conquer” our biology. That’s definitely not possible yet, chiefly because transhumanism involves a lengthy, ethics-guided process, and even if we all turn into cyborgs, the goal is to become BETTER humans, not LESS humane. Societal advancements have done more in terms of making us healthier, less destructive citizens of planet earth than raw technology ever can and ever will. Rapid technological advancement, when not combined with respect for morality, ethical standards of living for humans and all other life forms, almost always leads to human slavery, widespread abuse of animals, sex trafficking, and environmental destruction, because the “rules of supply and demand”, when not governed by strong international trade laws, dictate that consumers should be supplied with whatever they demand, because the suppliers can profit, and their right to profit should be defended at any cost.

So, in summary, I believe that “adulting” involves giving up on entitlement. What separates a truly childish human being-- regardless of their actual age-- from someone who is, in essence, “adulting” is experience, and how much those experiences serve to broaden that person’s perspective. It is an extremely childish, self-centered view, to think that you “deserve” anything for being “a good person” or, in the case of many a “woman child” or “man child” in media and in real life, just being “not so bad.”

Grown-ups are able and willing to do something that is known as “delaying gratification” which is the simple ability to delay a temporary pleasure for a long-term gain. Grown-ups are also able to perform true “cost-benefit analyses” to determine if a course of action, business deal, or even relationship is worth their time and effort. Finally, grown-ups are able and willing and able to make an informed choice and stick to it; in essence, we don’t try to “have our cake and eat it too” we understand that once we’ve eaten that cake, the cake is gone, but we also realize that if we are willing to work hard and make sacrifices, we can earn the ingredients to make ourselves another cake to eat, even if we might need a lot of help from other adults in getting those ingredients (we call this teamwork and cooperation).

Children, on the other hand (in literal and metaphorical terms), are very impatient. They get angry when things don’t go their way, and instead of taking the steps needed to improve their situation, they storm off and return home. It doesn’t matter if their home is with their parents, with their 3 roommates, or with their husband or wife, these people throw tantrums, refuse to communicate/cooperate, and stew in their displeasure until someone feels sorry for them and fixes their problem for them. They lack the ability to work through daily life problems and refuse to take any responsibility for how their actions or inaction contributed to their dilemma.

There is one difference with an actual human child or teen, though, is that they have an excuse. Their brains are still developing, and they haven’t had the chance to live through these situations yet; these are new challenges to them. Even if they do have a “bad attitude”, with help from peers and patients, principled adult mentors and teachers, these cantankerous kids can grow into well-adjusted, able adults. The high levels of neuroplasticity in their brains actually make it so that it is easier for them to accept large amounts of sensory data and to learn from processing and practicing using it.

An “adult child” is someone who, more often than not, has been coddled instead of challenged. These people have often faced no significant hardships in life. There is a reason why, even after we have recognized the immense downsides of authoritarian parenting and have demonstrated psychological harms of corporal punishment for kids, we still call “bad kids” and “irresponsible adults” spoiled.

Authoritarianism produces rigid, scared people who often struggle with critical thinking and self-esteem or end up being authoritarian parents themselves, but that last one is actually one of the less likely options. Children of authoritarian parents often develop Borderline Personality Disorder or become defiant against authority (shocker). Overly permissive or overly neglectful parenting, though, are parental styles most associated with producing narcissists, who often become authoritarian parents, because when their kids challenge them, they completely lack the patience or emotional capacity to deal with it and resort to “because I said so”, stonewalling and/or physical abuse as forms of “character-building.”

The reason why overly permissive parents spoil their kids is because kids actually do need discipline and guidance, and so these kinds of parents produce kids who are outwardly capable and confident but completely lack any of the life skills to justify it, and when they ask their parents for advice they are just met with a bunch of hippie mumbo jumbo or told to just avoid the conflict rather than resolve it. These kids grow into adults who are still sad little kids inside, because they never grew up, but now they’re sad little kids who are articulate and well-spoken and now can-- and often have no choice-- but to con their way through adult life because they’ve maxed out Charisma and they have almost no points in Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom, or Dexterity.

The only parenting style worse than Authoritarian and Neglectful/Permissive is Mixed, in which a child grows up in a COMPLETELY unpredictable environment where the rules of the game change from day to day, and parents either give their children no attention at all, or they practically lock them up and throw away the key. Being raised like this is associated with the worse outcomes for the child throughout life.

So, why am I now talking about parenting styles? Because, for all that we love to trash Boomers and large swaths of Gen X on this page, we can’t forget where they came from, so we cannot allow them to forget WHO THEY MADE. It isn’t an accident that even though we live in the times of incredible economic hardship, WE are the generation (and Gen Z, to some extent) that got hooked on reality TV, video games, and social media in incredibly unhealthy ways. A lot of us 30+ millennials are growing out of it, and a lot of us have realized that it is an invaluable (and damn near unavoidable) way of marketing our products and talents. We’re often self-employed because that’s our only option in most cases.

The issue with Gen Z (who, while we called “Zoomers” now just all themselves “Doomers” and I think we should be a bit concerned about that) is that unlike us, they have no memory of “Before the Internet.” We remember dial up, we remember before that when you played outside untl the sun went down. They don’t have the privilege of being linked to that history.

Now, we have to be the Bigger Person. It’s our time to be Grown-Ups. Gen Z feels really fucking lost right now, and hearing us whine about our parents probably makes them pretty pissed off, when some of us older millennials are the parents, aunts/uncles, and older siblings to Gen Z kids. Even if we can’t be mentors, we have to lead by example, because we have a responsibility to these kids. A lot of them aren’t stupid, they see exactly what’s happening and they feel incredibly hopeless about it. Greta Thunberg is still 16 years old. She shouldn’t be out there doing that; I mean seriously, climate change is accelerating, but it isn’t even as bad as Al Gore said, it’s still reversible, but the fact that SHE FELT SHE HAD TO makes us shitty people. ALL OF US.

So you know, we all need to stop being hypocrites. We need to stop being entitled. We need to stop thinking this is about us. It isn’t. Not even close. We’re not important, even if our videos go viral or if we’re swimming in cash next to hot models by a huge swimming pool. America’s fucked up. I hate to sound Republican, but it’s because of our values. We suck at valuing what’s important, and if we don’t change that soon, it’s really going to suck to live in America.

It already does.

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moderate-brainrot · 4 years ago

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legion lore is bullshit 😐

But first; some disclaimers

First of all, I literally love the entirety of legion so this is not even remotely hate, in fact it’s genuine care. They deserve so much better that it hurts my brain, and I’m going to complain about the lore until they fix it (which they never will so don’t bother waiting for me to stop).

Secondly, I’m a shitty interpreter. Although the story of DBD is left ambiguous and vague on purpose, there are still some set things that are supposed to be in place. I tend to take a humanistic approach, the same way I did with Lisa and Rin’s backstories, so this could sound like I’m sympathizing, or excusing. That’s not really my intention but also I’m probably biased, I make an effort not to be but! We all make mistakes. Small story details and choices of words tend to mean very little when I’m looking at the lore, so precedents that someone else may have identified might not even be considered important to me. I’m trying to piece together a coherent and interesting conclusion.

I also wanted to note that I will not consider “the legion is out of place!!!! they clash with the entire cast!!!!!” in this whole rant because? it’s stupid as FUCK, nobody complains about ghostface being in the game, and they (unfortunately) are very similar in terms of age group (Danny is implied to be pretty young, not as young Frank though). I think legion fits in alongside the other killers just fine. It really wouldn’t make sense if you only had traditional representations of “evils” anyway. These evils are supposed to come from every corner of the world, it would only make sense if one of the evils happened to be a band of delinquents.

Okay, here we go.

I think the legion is a good idea. A nice concept. I think their powers and perks were thought out and nicely intertwine with their personalities/characters.

HOWEVER,

the lore for them is so shoddily put together that all you really have to piece together an actual character is their appearance. That only really works to some degree. I feel like the players know who the legion are. You can feel what they stand for just by looking at them. They are cynical, unforgiving, and callous just like normal teenagers would be. Except these teenagers are deeply disturbed so they solve their problems with murder.

HOWEVER,

You get NONE of this from the lore. It’s an observation. That’s not exactly the best thing. Your killer shouldn’t have to be explained, but when the lore is left with so many loose ends, you’re asking a lot from the player. There is very little to go off of.

The lore, essentially, is this:

Frequently moved around foster kid, Frank, is looking for an escape from his newest family since the new town is so unbearably boring. He tries to get out by finding another adoptive family but he meets Julie, who is also looking for a way out of the bland town. Frank goes to the parties Julie hosts and meets Joey and Susie (who were SUCH afterthoughts that they don’t even have fucking last names). They start hanging out in this abandoned place, and for whatever reason, Frank suddenly wants to do crime and have his new crew trained into soemthing.... “”powerful””???? They become neighborhood bullies and do delinquent shit.💡 Joey gets fired from his job and Frank says that they should all go vandalize the shit out of it.💡 They go to vandalize it but some janitor guy happens to be there and he grabs Julie, she cries out for help and Frank stabs the janitor in the back because of his.:.. “”dark impulses””...ok.💡 Then Frank says “okay now you guys have to kill him” and Joey stabs the guy in the ribs, Susie however refuses and Julie does it for her until Susie actually has to stab him but Frank moves her hands for her.💡They go to mount ormond (hey) to dispose of the body💡 and They’re digging the janitor’s grave when Frank sees some weird shit in the woods and goes to it and then doesn’t come back.💡 The rest of the legion follow his footprints before they even bury the body which leads to thick fog™️ and now they are killers in the realm.

The lightbulbs are for notes I made while reading the tomes.

💡(1). The legion start off by doing the most juvenile shit. Graffiti, yelling at neighborhood children, and stealing. They don’t sound like deeply evil entities, they sound like pathetic teenage swine, bullies. They’re supposed to be oppressive and unforgiving, but they are too passive to be taken seriously. They should have made it so they were never really killing people but just stabbing people, lots of them. That’s a lot more violent/evil than petty crimes.

💡(2). Frank’s first thought when Joey gets fired is to dare Joey to GRAFFITI HIS FORMER PLACE OF WORK???? NOT KILL HIS BOSS? NOT BURN THE SHOP DOWN? JUST SPRAY PAINT??? You would think that his mind, apparently attractive enough to the entity, would go to darker places than vandalism.

💡(3). Only Frank had these “”dark impulses™️””, so Why are there even four legions instead of just fucking one. He literally had to guilt everyone else to stab the man. He is completely alone in experiencing this impulse.

💡(4). What happened to “It came to a point where they would do anything he asked. Nothing was off-limits when they put their masks on.” ?? Susie downright refused to stab the man the first time she was handed the knife. It was only when Frank guided her hands that she “did it” (which she didn’t because it was Frank controlling the blade). Sure, Frank is manipulative, but the lore can’t decide if he’s good at it or not. The legion seems less like a group and more like a cult with Frank at the forefront. It’s very contradictory.

💡(5). The legion are chaos fiends. That’s their whole thing. Burying the body creates zero chaos or worry anywhere. The dude was a janitor, if you bury him there’s a good chance that nobody will notice which defeats the entire point.

💡(6). Frank goes in first. I really think that’s where it should’ve ended. I think it would make him more evil. He would’ve abandoned his ragtag “troops” to selfishly escape the possible consequences of murder after he made them reliant on him. But since they follow after him, it seems more like they found him rather than he abandoned them.

I think the legion is seen as a group of muderous juveniles who were so bored of their town that they decided to cause as much chaos as possible to make it less unbearable. That’s pretty evil. Way more evil than killing one dude impulsively and bullying kids less than half their ages. It would make sense with their power, why it’s not so focused on killing, but on the bigger picture, spreading fear and pain across a wide scale. This also ties in with their mori. It’s very quick, boring, and underwhelming. This could be because the legion don’t care for killing people that much, they want action, drama, and chaos. Depending on the strategy, you leave the survivors with deep wounds that take time and effort to patch up, when they can do easily be slashed down again, it’s pretty despairing, empty of hope. It’s also a little charming I think it adds to their overall immaturity, moving on looking for more survivors to hit rather than viciously hound your prey and finish them off.

THAT BEING SAID,

The legion’s power makes no sense when it’s not on Frank. In the lore, Frank is the only one who showed any remote desire to kill, but even then it was presented as an impulse, a reflex even. So Why in the fresh HELL would Susie have this power? She didn’t want to kill anybody . Julie and Joey as well. Julie probably only felt guilty and indebted to Frank for saving her, and Joey was literally presented as the guy who likes to show off. Of course he’s not going to be openly reluctant, it would shatter his persona. I really think they got too carried away with the ritualistics surrounding the murder that they forgot character values are a thing. Sure the fact that they all stabbed him is symbolic but their reactions do not match up with the mechanics. They could’ve done so much more with the characters and mechanics if EVERY LEGION HAD THESE “”DARK IMPULSES™️””

They’re given to us in-game as delinquents. So I think they should ALL be punkish dammit!!!!

That’s the end of my rant;

for now.

will probably elaborate some more later but I haven’t slept yet and it’s time for school so ..

囧rz.. anyways

legion love club:

idc if frank is a manipulator he can come manipulate this dick

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pass-the-bechdel · 4 years ago

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The Good Place season three full review

How many episodes pass the Bechdel test?

91.66% (eleven of twelve).

What is the average percentage per episode of female characters with names and lines?

46.26%

How many episodes have a cast that is at least 40% female?

Ten of the twelve, with seven of those hitting 50%+.

How many episodes have a cast that is less than 20% female?

Zero.

How many female characters (with names and lines) are there?

Twenty-two. Seven who appeared in more than one episode, three who appeared in at least half the episodes, and three who appeared in every episode.

How many male characters (with names and lines) are there?

Thirty-one. Twelve who appeared in more than one episode, three who appeared in at least half the episodes, and three who appeared in every episode.

Positive Content Status:

Same-same. The female characters are still great, bi rep exists, the racial diversity remains strong (though I have my doubts about the writers’ capacity to portray cultural diversity). It’s not gonna blow anyone’s mind, but it’s all there, and that’s a good thing (average rating of 3).

General Season Quality:

A hot mess. Not hard to watch in any way, not infuriating, but frustrating, yes, and at times wasteful. It doesn’t have a strong sense of the creative team having known what they wanted to make, and this is not the format for just winging it and seeing what comes out.

MORE INFO (and potential spoilers) under the cut:

So. I referenced LOST at one point during this season, and the advice Mike Schur was given about avoiding narrative stagnation, and I mentioned that I don’t actually think that was ever a problem for LOST. The reason for that is that LOST made its charactersation so thoroughly integral to the plot that even when it seemed that nothing particularly important was happening, plot-wise, something was always happening character-wise, and that was by association, vital plot. It’s also part of the reason I am die-hard for that show, because character is my be-all and end-all, without which, a story hardly has a point in my eyes.This is the lesson I wish Mike Schur had taken from LOST, because the characters in this show? They’re all wonderful in their own distinct ways, but they also haven’t really developed since the first season (or the humans haven’t, anyway). The reason for that - touched on already, variously - is that those bastards keep on being reset, their memories wiped, everything new again so that they can repeat the same character development, but offscreen where it doesn’t take up any of that important plot space. And because their characterisation isn’t moving anywhere (it’s...stagnating), they essentially function as placeholders in the plot, not necessary or meaningful pieces.

This reminds me of another show that I ended up having big problems with, Orphan Black, which suffered from (among many issues) a lack of character agency. The characters in The Good Place do have at least some agency, they are allowed some decision-making power, but not a lot of it, especially in this season where they’re mostly just buffeted around by plot machinations they can’t control and often, don’t even understand, and it doesn’t make for very interesting viewing (this is why Michael and Janet get all the best fodder: they have more agency than the human characters, they comprehend their situation in order to make informed choices on behalf of the others, and they’ve been shouldering all of the character development responsibilities since the beginning of season two). When plot drives characters too much instead of the other way around, the characters start to feel inconsequential, because their personalities aren’t going to impact their (after)lives, so they might as well not have any.

The thing about the characters not developing is that the centrepiece of the plot - the question of whether or not they can improve - is itself based on the idea of the characters developing, but since they already answered that question in the first season, the show now just keeps on repeating it in different scenarios with everyone ‘learning ethics’ from Chidi, which is nebulous and largely glossed over anyway. The changes of scenario don’t matter, firstly because the result is always the same (but not in a profound way, just in a lazy ‘we didn’t want it to get confusing by having people or events contradict something that happened before in some version they don’t remember’ kind of way), and secondly because we never see any real substance of the scenario changes, we just get clips and time skips. This leaves us with a narrative which rarely seems to have intent, just the occasional glimmer of insight or direction (i.e. when Jason highlights the impact of poverty (though the show has failed to translate that into a large-scale critique of systemic inequality), or the whole ‘no ethical consumption under capitalism’ thing), and the characters act as pawns but not, often, as conduits. The lack of real plot substance, as explored by the characters within it, kinda ironically leads to the very same stagnation that Schur was supposedly trying to avoid: the plot sometimes makes wild leaps from one thing to another, avoiding developing in any way for fear of spending too long on an idea and consequently not stopping on anything long enough to let it matter, and then at other times it stalls completely and wallows for the sake of just talking about some philosophical concept, even though just talking about something without both connecting it to the characters and watching it unfold meaningfully is exactly how you get a stagnant story (and a badly paced one, too). If it doesn’t matter, it’s not plot, it’s just window dressing. Anyway. I’m having deja vu and I think I’m in danger of just reiterating everything I complained about before (if I haven’t already), so I’m gonna let this one go and see how they pull it together (if they pull it together) in season four, which I have not seen yet so I am hoping for a pleasant, cohesive surprise. It could still happen.

#The Good Place #The Good Place season three #Bechdel Test #female representation #full season review

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takashimasubuchi · 5 years ago

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Interviewed by Zoomin’ Night

by Zhu Wenbo and Zhu Songjie 2020/5/18

1．Maybe you could introduce yourself first. How old are you? When did you start playing guitar, and when did you start playing this kind of music? I mean, quiet, with blank and some special skills, beautiful improvisation music.

I was born in 1984. I have been living in Tokyo since I was born.I started playing guitar when I was in junior high school. I don't remember why started.Maybe I wasn't interested in anything else. Pelktopia that I played with Hironobu Shimazawa is my first carrier to play this kind of music as you say. We had been playing for 2 or 3 years and released some LP, CD-R, and cassettes. This unit played by half composition and half improvisation with Folk, Blues, and Minimalism feeling.We had a common language of music and similar aesthetic sense for sound.So we were able to develop music constructively. I still think the music in this unit was great.Many of my ideas for improvisation were born at this time. After that, I started to play as a solo player. At the beginning of my solo career, I was playing drone music with many pedals. But I think this was a big failure for me. I was just turning the knob and just fun pedal's effect. It is the best way to fill in time and space. But that’s just it. I got too far away from my roots and physical myself. I felt I had to create the sound more fundamentally in a primitive way. It was around 2015 that I started to have the current style.

2. Before playing this kind of music, what kind of music did you play? What kind of chance made you decide to change at that time?

First. I started playing as an electric guitarist in some bands, I mean something like a Rock'n'Roll guitarist. I guess every guitarist will yearn for it when young. At the same time, I was obsessed with a lot of black music. especially I love Blues like John lee hooker and Son House. I learned what is free for me back then and making space in music from them. I was also absorbed in jazz and copied mainly Wes Montgomery and learn the method by self-taught. But I couldn't play it properly. Also, I felt cramped in the chordal system. I feel that It was a necessary experience to identify what is important for me. But I eventually stopped playing in band and electric guitar. Because I felt it is difficult to play primitively and genuinely. I felt dishonesty with electric instruments my own. I want to be physically involved in my instrument without any knobs and cables. Fortunately, I don't get tired of playing acoustic guitar. There are still many discoveries from playing.

3. Maybe you could share some details about guitar. Do you have any special or personal interests on guitar playing? Such as special tuning, microtone, objects on preparing, or some other special playing skill…..

I have been trying many open and irregular tuning. Thereby I can find a new sound and resonance from the guitar. I'm really into my main guitar which is Martin D-28 Authentic 1931. I want to bring out all the possibilities of this guitar. Sometimes, I try a prepared guitar and some objects. For example, I was rubbing a metal bar on the fret to make overtone and drone on 2527's Track2. But my main focus is playing by fingers of both hands just normally. This is the best way to express subtle elements.

4. Most of your performances are improvisation. What do you think about in improvisation concert? Or maybe the question could be, what do you try to keep the notice on normally in your performance?

I'm thinking about "music" When I play as a solo.I mean like phrase, scale...or Whether I'm doing well what I practiced. especially I am interested in polymodal. I want to combine some scales to connect to song myself or something like a story. Free or not free, something new or already done in the past. these are not big subjects for me. These are meaningless to think about. Because I feel like a dead-end no matter where I go. I think it should be democratic when I play with other players, like our social ideals. We have to construct something good through conversation in music. As many say. a really good situation is not to think anything during performance.

5. What kind of music do you listen when you are driving? Last time I took your car, you played Morton Feldman’s piano box. But don’t you think Feldman is too quiet for traffic?

No. I don't think so. My car is very quiet. It's easy to listen to Feldman's music.

6. So maybe you could share us your music taste. What is all-time favorites? Maybe you could give us a top 10 choice. And what do you listen in these days?

This includes music that I don't listen to anymore. But I listened to often. In order I listened 1「Electric Ladyland」Jimi Hendrix 2「Live at Sugarhill」John Lee Hooker 3「Original Delta Blues」Son House 4「The Complete Live At The Plugged Nickel 1965」Miles Davis 5「Olatunji Concert 」John Coltrane 6 「Riley: The Harp Of New Albion」Terry Riley 7 「In Bern」Loren Mazzacane Connors + Jim O'rouke 8 「Semi-Impressionism」Tetuzi Akiyama + Toshimaru Nakamura 9「For Bunita Marcus by Stephane Ginsburgh」Morton Feldman 10「Dead Pan Smiles」Riuichi Daijo

My recent favorite is below. Some of them are not recent releases.

「Bending Contumax」Jean-Luc Guionnet Jean-Luc Guionnet is saxophonist and organist. I didn't know him until recently. this is amazing enormous work by improvisation from 2008 to 2014. I feel this is very structural in spite of early intention feeling. Published by No School Recordings run by Masahiko Okura.

「Memoria」Takumi Akaishi Takumi Akaishi is a Hardy Gurdy player who lives in Tokyo is very unique. This was made from Hardy Gurdy and field recording with his great poetic sense. Published by Art Into Life, a Japanese record shop and label in Tochigi prefecture.

「Œuvres Électroniques」 Eliane Radigue This was bought during my 2019 European Tour in Basel at Plattfon Records. This is a box of 14CD. You can know her pursuit of sound but need time to listen to everything!!

7. Please tell about Straytone. You told me that you have a long and deep collaborations with him. How many years did you play together? What is the collaboration based on? Compare to other musicians, is there any special meanings of playing with Straytone to you?

We have a different idea about music and playing. Straytone attaches importance to the context in music more than me.I'm gradually becoming less concerned about context. On the other hand. I think He does not attach importance to improvisation more than me. We can complement each other for making music.

8. The cassette remind me of Tetuzi & Toshimaru. Actually at the first time I saw your performance I found out Tetuzi’s influence. And for Straytone’s sound, I have to say, it is very closed to Toshi’s nowadays sound, though they use different instruments. I think in this cassette, Straytone’s sound does not sounds like most modular synthesizer musicians. So how do you think about Tetuzi & Toshimaru? Do you try to reference, borrow or avoid some idea from this classical Japanese duo?

I think that Tetuzi Akiyama and Toshimaru Nakamura are The most important improviser.「Semi-Impressionism」is the earliest music I've ever heard of improvisation music that's not jazz. This is my opinion on them. In particular, I was directly influenced by Tetuzi Akiyama as guitarist. His greatness is flipped over the concept of all avant-garde. It's like a dadaist but more based on his intuition and honesty. Toshimaru Nakamura is a very important person culturally of electronics improvisation scene. But he does not hesitate to break the culture himself and constantly update himself. He seems to be challenging himself at every concert without any attention to appearance. They play universal language and techniques in spite of based on very personal interest without systematized academic methods. They paved the way by this attitude especially for players without musical education or career. There have been groups with similar concepts in the past like AMM or Musica Elettronica Viva. But they are based on more western values or academism.

In the past, if we want to play with someone we had to learn the methods and languages that are already. Like Jazz, Classic also Rock music. Maybe It's also included "Free Improvisation". But They proved that we could play using each personal interests, techniques, and ideas without systematized academic methods or languages. It doesn’t mean there is no need to learn or practice. We got an environment that we can pursue what we feel really important to us individually. At the same time, we can communicate in music in any country, musical background, and culture. We can express each identity and exchange ideas in the music directly.

9. The cassette title is 2527. What did the name come from?

It is a secret.

10. Please also tell us about Permian, the venue you run. Could you describe it? How is the neighborhood and how does it looks inside? When did you start running this place? Why do you want to run a “only improvisation” venue? Sorry that I have never been to Permian before, next time I will, I promise!

Permian started in 2018. Running by me,Riuichi Daijo and some musicians. We often talked about almost venues have a lot of superfluous things for the concert. like bar counter, records, and BGM. We don't provide any drink, food, and BGM to concentrate on the concert and playing. An audience can choose admission fees between 1,000 to 3,000yen of every concert. By this, the audience can determine the value of the concert with independence. There are many cafes and bars nearby. But finding an improvisational audience is difficult. Improvisation is primordial practice and starting point of all expressions. It is should be open to more people. I hope that we always try to re-grab music from zero by each concert.

11. If you have to choose 3 favorite improvisation musicians, who will it be?

Tetuzi Akiyama John Tilbury John Coltrane

12. In the description I found about your album "R, R, R", it was mentioned that some of your guitar playing has the feeling of John Fahey. Do you agree with this statement? Has John Fahey's music influenced your listening and playing?

Of course, I listened to a lot of albums of John Fahey. But I’ve almost never copied his guitar. I am strongly influenced by what is called American Primitive, just like him. But I think I'm not the same lineage or context as him. I have big respect for traditional music but maybe I'm not interested in inheriting. It's not my role. As I said, I copied a lot of guitar from the 60's Rock group, Blues and Jazz music when I played electric guitar. But my acoustic guitar style is Almost self-taught.I've almost never copied someone's play except some Blues. Sometimes, I try to copy Morton Feldman's piano piece by guitar.

13. Are you more focused or relaxed when you play? Do you think there is a big gap between your performance and recording? In which state(relaxed or focused) do you prefer when making music?

To be honest, I want to relax and play. If I try to concentrate, the feeling runs away.

#article

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sportsgeekonomics · 5 years ago

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The Crystal Ball: Predictions of what the NCAA will say when they finally (claim to) allow a limited exercise of athletes’ NIL rights

Today the NCAA issued an open letter to California Governor Gavin Newsom, threatening to cut California schools out of NCAA championships, threatening litigation, and also casually mentioning that when they get around to allowing some form of NIL rights, it is not going to be, um, well, real in the sense of allowing athletes to operate in the market. To this last point, they write:

“The NCAA continues to focus on the best interests of all student-athletes nationwide. NCAA member schools already are working on changing rules for all student-athletes to appropriately use their name, image and likeness in accordance with our values ...”

Since the NCAA’s values do not include that athletes are entitled to the full market value of their NILs, I think we can read this as a pre-announcement of an intent to restrict athletes rights. (side note, if it’s a right, it’s not supposed to be restrictable)

But the NCAA is so predictable in this desire to arrogate athletes’ rights for their own benefit, that with a fairly high degree of confidence, I believe I can predict several other “features” of the new NCAA NIL policy. To wit:

1) It will involve an artificial cap on what an athlete’s “true” NIL value is, determined by a committee of college administrator types, and designed to ensure that athletes are not “overpaid” for their NIL rights.

Recognize that in most situation where we are concerned about young or naïve people contracting with savvy businesses in the market, we have legal protections to ensure the less knowledgeable people are not taken advantage of by being paid too little. But the problem the NCAA will be worries about will be a needless concern that young men and women will be paid “too much.”

This shows you the NCAA’s concern is not to ensure the rights of the athletes to open-market compensation, but rather to ensure they do not get their full value, for fear of what this will say about how valuable college athletes actually are.

2) The committee’s concerns will be

a. Fear that payment for NIL value will be inflated by payment for athletic value

This has two major problems. The first is a purely economic one. There is virtually no athlete for whom his/her endorsement value is separable from his/her athletic value, esp. prior to retirement. When Klay Thompson does an ad for Kaiser Permanente, a large portion of why he is chosen as the endorse, and why he can command payment above a union scale commercial actor is because he is an awesome basketball player, and his value to Kaiser Permanente hinges critically on the fact that he is beloved in Oakland, where Kaiser Permanente has a presence.

For a car dealer in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, the value of Tua Tagovailoa depends critically on him playing well, and doing so for the Alabama Crimson Tide. If he were to transfer to Clemson, his value to the Tuscaloosa dealer declines to zero, or perhaps even negative. So thinking that these values are somehow severable is foolish.

The second is a civil/economic rights one, which is the idea that a school or sports body should somehow have the right to decide whether two adults transacting in the market for perfectly legal conduct should have their collective judgment of a fair price questioned. In particular, for this third party to step in and override the athletes’ right to engage in commerce to make sure he/she gets less than the market’s own assessment is essentially granting to the NCAA/School ownership over a stream of payments that ought to belong solely to the adult full-citizen.

b. Fear that only the rich schools will be able to offer NIL deals/com balance

There are two fundamental misunderstandings baked into this concern. The first is a belief that caps on individual earnings improve competitive balance in sports. They do not. There are dozens of sports economics papers in professional and college sports that show that caps on what individual can earn doesn’t improve the fortunes of “poor” schools, but instead just changes how the “rich” schools use their money to get talent. (I’ve summarized a lot of them, and discussed the empirical data in the past). If amateurism rules improved competitive balance, we would not have the concept of a Power 5 conference, because all conferences would tend to have an equal chance at being powerful in any given year. We would not have UConn and a handful of other school dominating women’s basketball year-in and year-out. Alabama and Clemson would not be favorites, again, to be in the college football championship after having met up in the CFP the last four years in a row.

Economics has known for 60+ years that talent flows to where it is most valuable, regardless of whether the talent itself receives a share of the profits of not. Prior to free agency, the New York Yankees were more likely to be in the World Series than they are today. This is know as the “Invariance Principle” and you can check out this paper I co-authored for a good discussion of this principle if you’d like. Essentially it says that Alabama will out-recruit Fresno State for QB talent as long as Tuscaloosa has more demand for football talent than Fresno, and allowing that demand to lead to athletes receiving a share of the Tuscaloosa revenue will not change the relative success of Alabama. Ask yourself how many times, currently, Fresno state is able to beat out Alabama if they want the same athlete even when “pay” is capped equally at a scholarship. (spoiler: never)

The second misunderstanding is to think about spending on athletes like a pure consumer luxury good and to imagine a school/community acting like a family with a (short-term) fixed income deciding whether or not to take a vacation. That analogy is horrible for thinking about how major universities decide how much money to allocate to their various means of generating revenue and reputation as educational nonprofits. In that budgetary environment, the value of a star athlete is assessed, not against whether the family can afford a luxury, but rather whether the benefit of adding that athlete is worth the cost. Because it is a business decision, if a school like Fresno State felt it would generate more economic/reputational benefit from a star quarterback than Alabama would, they would offer more. But Fresno’s market is not as lucrative as Alabama’s and so it’s not that Fresno “can’t afford” to outbid Alabama, rather it’s that Fresno’s break-even point is lower than Alabama. So it’s rational for Fresno to stop bidding even when Alabama is willing to continue to up the stakes, and Alabama thus gains the asset.

This is not a argument for fixing prices at the point where Fresno would break even, since all Alabama then has to do is invest in other assets, better facilities, better coaches, etc., (can you say indoor waterfalls?) and since Fresno is already at break-even, for Fresno to invest even a dollar more is wasteful. In other words, it’s not that it’s unfair that Fresno can’t afford to outbid Alabama, it’s actually economically rational for Fresno to let Alabama pay more for talent, because it would cost Fresno more than Fresno would benefit, while the reverse is true for Alabama. It’s win-win for Fresno not to overpay and for Alabama to get the ability to commercialize the athletes’ value. Allowing the money to flow to the athletes instead of the Waterfall Construction Industry just ensures the value reaches those who generate it.

c. Purported Fear that NIL rights will involve too much time away from school

This is somewhat perplexing, for several reasons. The first reason is that shooting a commercial or lending some pre-existing video to a sponsor is not a very time-consuming activity, certainly not compared to the time it takes for a college sport team to travel to a road game (or several) over the course of a week. College Basketball athletes miss something like 40 days of class a year. Suddenly now we’re worried about an afternoon photo shoot?

The second reason is that, of course, activity of this sort can be focused on the summer.

But the third is that the prior goal of making sure athletes aren’t “overpaid” for their NIL goes firmly against the goal of ensuring athletes do not focus on NIL activity too much. If an athlete needs, say, $100,000 to help pay of his mother’s mortgage, wouldn’t it be easier on his time to let him film one lucrative endorsement for $100,000, than to declare that level “too much” and thus force him into doing twenty $5,000 deals? Not everyone has a dollar goal like this, but the best way to ensure anyone who needs money will not do too many side-jobs is to make the first side-job pay enough to cover the financial need.

d. Unsavory advertisers.

This is not as ridiculously as the other concerns. Every sports employer imposes these sorts of terms on their athletes, whether it is a requirement not to endorse a competitor of the team’s official sponsor, or not to advertise for illegal products, or gambling (given that it may be perceived as lowering the integrity of the sports contests themselves, etc.) But the difference here is that these terms are all negotiated as part of an employment contract. If a team wants to tell an athlete s/he can’t advertise for a beer brand, that is baked into the salary they settle on for his/her services, and generally, the salary will rise as the endorsements are more restricted.

In contrast, the NCAA wants to impose these sorts of restrictions, but not compensate the athlete for them. They want to treat the athlete like an employee in terms of imposing rules of employment, but it does not want to grant the athlete all of the benefits of employment, whether it be workers comp, the right to unionize, or even social security matching. To the extent the NCAA needs to control what products an athlete can endorse (which I question), they should be forced to bargain for those concessions, not allowed to simply assert an artificial right to declare them forbidden by fiat.

3) It will involve some mandatory “tether” to education, such as requiring an endorser to offer a summer internship as part of the contract.

By itself, working to get athletes more exposure to the business side of sports is a fine goal. But (a) it contradicts the goal of limiting the impact of the NIL work on school time, and (b) it may force an athlete into internships ill-suited to his/her career aspirations. Take the example of Bryce Love, a recent star at Stanford who also plans to become a medical doctor. He was the runner-up for the Heisman Trophy in his penultimate season at Stanford and he could have easily gotten lucrative endorsement deals from any number of advertisers. But would forcing him to do a summer internship at adidas have helped him get ready for medical school?

So yes, let’s encourage endorsers to offer these sorts of internships, but let’s not allow the NCAA to impose a one-size-fits-all mandate on athletes. There is also ( c) the question of how to handle the star with multiple offers. If the total amount is going to be capped, and if then an internship is also required, an athlete will find his/her ability to do more than one or two sponsorships curtailed as well, which effectively would impose a cap on total earnings on top of individual deal earnings.

4) This will all be done in an effort to maintain a “line of demarcation” between college and pro sports.

Of course, there is, and always will be, a strong demarcation between pro sports and college sports, which is that to play college sports, the athlete must be a student at the college. As long as that “tether” is maintained, no one will confuse the two. It's simple guys: College Athletics = The Athletes Attends College.

Beyond that, further demarcation is unnecessary from the point of view of avoiding consumer confusion. If a real college student is wearing Nike shoes because his school is being paid for him to do so, and suddenly that changes so that he is wearing Nike shoes because his school AND he himself are both being paid, it’s hard to see this as blurring the line. The only way the line between pro and college would be blurred, is if consumer questioned whether the college athlete’s education was genuine. As long as it is, the availability of endorsements, and true access to an open market for those endorsements, will not change that fundamental distinction where College Athletics = The Athletes Attends College.

If the NCAA is worried that endorsements blur this line, it is really a signal they are not confident that college athletes really DO attend college in the same sense as a normal college student. This should be a sign to California to push back and tell the NCAA to focus on fixing that problem, rather than limiting athletes’ economic opportunities to cover up for the NCAA’s failure to ensure all athletes are receiving a true college education.

Conclusion

This ends my prognostication of what we’re going to see from the NCAA. Almost surely, the NCAA plan will seek to override the market assessment of athlete NIL value with the express goal of lowering their income and controlling their efforts to commercialize their image. Whatever the NCAA plan is, it will almost certainly reject the best method of determining fair market value, which is to let transactions in a fair market set value. It will arrogate to the NCAA the athlete's right to determine who he/she endorses, how much he/she can bargain for, and how much time he/she wants to devote to this, in a way that schools do not do for any other student. At core, it will not accept that this is about the athletes’ rights as adults in society, and instead will consider that doling out a slightly higher level of compensation, but denying the fundamental right of market access, should suffice. It is a “how much cash will you need us to dole out to stop insisting on athletes’ getting all their rights” kind of deal.

This is the key. The purpose of ensuring athletes recover their NIL rights is because, well, rights are fundamental. Athletes’ are not second-class citizens – and we should not be fooled by “well, this is less exploitative than before” when the real standard should be “this is no longer exploitative at all.”

This is why my work with the HBL is so vital to my efforts to try to restore college athletes’ full sets of rights. Even when a state passes a law restoring a limited subset of college athletes’ full rights, the NCAA is ready to go to court to use the full weight of our legal system to make sure this doesn’t happen. The NCAA is never going to be on board with the simple concept that College Athletes have equal rights to College Coaches. And so, no matter what the legal question, the fact is we will not see the NCAA pay athletes their full market worth unless and until someone else enters the market and forces them to do so. That someone is going to be the HBL.

The HBL will be the first professional college basketball league. We’re not worried that consumers will be confused; rather we’re confident that when we put teams on the court with the bulk of the elite collegiate talent, fans will be excited to watch, sponsors will be excited to be associated with our league, etc. The league is run by Ricky Volante and NBA legend David West, and you can learn more about us at HBLeague.com.

Remember #AmateurismIsACon

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zippityzap · 7 years ago

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Sonic Underground Retrospective: Episode 27: Six is a Crowd

Should've taken that left turn at Albuquerque

Is this what Mobius looked like before Robotnik took over?

!!!!!

WAIT

I REMEMBER THIS EPISODE!

I didn’t realise it until now, but this is one rather important one. Hoo boy, buckle in folks because this one's a doozy!

Oh...wow. That hair.

...That was the Doctor Who theme Manic just hummed there. I doubt that was an intentional reference, but still.

So, the twist is unveiled, and we find that this is an alternate dimension where Sonic and co. rule with an iron fist while Robotnik is the good-hearted resistance leader. It’s not exactly a unique set-up as you guys probably know, the Archie comics did something similar with 'Moebius' and Anti-Sonic/Scourge.

My biggest issue with these kinds of stories though is handling the Nature vs Nurture angle. If you say these characters change their sense of moralities because of destiny or 'just because' it can come off as lazy writing,

However, if you try to reason how the alternate characters grew to become opposites of their regular counterparts (while still keeping their social webs roughly the same) you can end up with a tangled web of plot holes and weird or non-existent logic.

Merely the thought of bringing this story over to my own adaption is giving me a headache.

(For reference sake I'll refer to the alternate dimension counterparts of the characters as Anti-[x])

Why does Anti-Manic dress like a thief if he's a ruler? They gave Anti-Sonia a new outfit, so they don’t have an excuse.

Why do the Anti-Triplets hate music? There is literally no reason. At least the other alt traits are extensions/exaggerations of the triplets character flaws, for example, Manic can be a kleptomaniac, Sonia can be vain. The music thing comes out of nowhere.

I swear Manic's singing VA is too good for this show. I hope he went on to have a successful career after this show.

Not a bad song. It's catchy. I’m bopping my head along to it.

I just had a thought. Where’s the Aleena of this world? I doubt this version had to separate her family, so in that case, what’s happened to her? Logically she would also be an evil ruler here.

How come both the Anti-Triplets and Anti-Robotnik have Swatbots?

Could you imagine how much of a mindfuck that would be? You're eating your dinner when a skinnier version of you runs in, jumps on the table, eats your food and proceeds to absolutely roast you?

And to be honest I’m not completely sure what they were going with this Anti-Sonic. I think Sonic has more interesting flaws other than an obsession with chilli-dogs to exaggerate.

Sigh...I understand the message they were going for here, but realistically if the Anti-Triplets were cruel enough to ignore pleas of mercy from the few people who did enter the palace, realistically why would a trip into the slums suddenly work miracles? Even in our own lives how many of us can say we've watched a charity PSA, proper heart-wrenching stuff, and did nothing? Sadly, it'll take more than one little homeless girl to thaw an icy heart.

Normally Aleena appearances are nice, but that was a little on the nose, I felt.

Personally, I don’t like it when Aleena's contact with her children is too direct like that, because it ruins the build-up of the moment (or at least the moment we would've got had the show not been cancelled) of the proper reuniting. Hinting and teasing is fine, but you need to hold back enough so that when the time is right, you can strike an emotional sucker punch.

This episode… I want to like it because the concept is interesting. It’s a look at how things might’ve been different. ‘What if?’ episodes are always intriguing. And I will give credit where it’s due, it attempts to take the path of emphasizing or exaggerating character flaws for the Anti-versions of the characters, which is one of the better ways of doing this sort of story as that opens the opportunity for the prime universe counterparts to do some introspection.

The problem is that there wasn’t as much detail or explanation as I would’ve liked. Granted, it’s a 22-minute episode of a kids cartoon show that had the budget of spare change and pocket lint, I can’t ask miracles, but I think this encompasses a problem the show has in general.

The show knows how to introduce very cool and interesting concepts, hell, the entire show is one great big interesting concept, but the writing team hasn’t thought ahead. They haven’t taken the time to sort out details or figure out how things are going to play out on a bigger scale, so we end up with rushed, or at times, zero explanation.

And admittedly the haphazard Aleena appearance at the end has also left a bad taste in my mouth, for reasons I’ve already discussed.

#sonic the hedgehog #Sonic Underground #Sonia The Hedgehog #Manic The Hedgehog #Queen Aleena #sonic underground retrospective #retrospective

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aion-rsa · 3 years ago

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The Suicide Squad: Inside James Gunn’s DCEU Supervillain War Movie

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In November 2019, I found myself in the middle of a war zone. Well, the closest approximation of a war zone I’ve ever found myself in during my time visiting the sets of blockbuster movies. If I had been brought to this particular set in Atlanta on a sunny autumn afternoon without knowing what movie it was that I was supposed to be getting a peek at, the scene presented to a group of journalists probably would have convinced me that this was some new war movie or straight up action blockbuster, and not one that features a collection of DC villains and antiheroes at its core.

The set in question is called “Jotunheim” and it’s apparently an objective Task Force X needs to conquer in The Suicide Squad. But for all intents and purposes, this could be the kind of Nazi fortress that the gritty characters of movies like The Dirty Dozen or Where Eagles Dare need to conquer, whether or not they get out alive. That’s no accident, according to director James Gunn.

“A lot of the film is within the genre of war caper films,” Gunn tells reporters later that day, specifically referencing The Dirty Dozen, Kelly’s Heroes, and others. “It’s not really something that’s existed for a long time, but in the late 60s that was one of the most vibrant genres of the world. [We wanted to] kind of … add on to it with The Suicide Squad.”

There’s no sign of Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn, Idris Elba’s Bloodsport, or any of the other oddball DC characters at the center of Gunn’s newest movie as we stroll the Jotunheim set. Whatever wild action took place here seems to have been resolved long before our arrival. But the evidence is everywhere and it must have been one hell of a fight.

From the decrepit guard tower and busted fence at the perimeter to the entrance of Jotunheim (which has a massive hole blasted in it) is probably a distance of 100 meters or so. And virtually every inch of that shows the scope of whatever took place here: burnt out bunkers, overturned and semi-destroyed jeeps, sandbagged guard stations, and so much debris, a mixture of real rocks and carved foamcore and plywood “masonry.”

“It’s a giant construction project” producer Peter Safran jokes about the number and scale of practical sets that have been built for The Suicide Squad. “The idea is to do as much practically as we possibly could.”

That reliance on practical sets and effects wherever possible is a theme that keeps coming up throughout the day as we tour sets and look at production artwork, scale models, weapons, and more.

“We built literally three football fields of a set and that’s so unusual in this day and age,” production designer Beth Mickle says of Jotunheim. “You just never do that. We wanted to have real rubble behind them in the battle sequences, and we wanted to see the building that they’re attacking. For that scene to exist in a film today is just highly unusual. And we’ve done that set and then a dozen others of that scale, so it’s incredible.”

Both the war movie vibe and the love of practical effects are very much in evidence on another set, a convincing indoor recreation of a jungle with a guerilla camp nestled in the middle of it. There’s dirty laundry hanging, filthy pots strewn around, a crumpled pack of cigarettes, and a half empty bottle of watery beer…and what appear to be bloody chunks of skull and assorted viscera littering the grass. Like Jotunheim, something went down here, and whatever it was, it wasn’t pretty.

The Characters of The Suicide Squad: Meet Task Force X

It all stands in almost stark contrast to the wacky assortment of brightly-colored characters that make up the actual team. The concept art and costume tests for these characters were suitably colorful and wildly offbeat, and it’s almost hard to make this line up with the gritty, war movie vibes of the Jotunheim and jungle sets. But storyboards reveal a nighttime action sequence on a beach, with the Squad invading the fictional nation of Corto Maltese, and were it not for the colors and unique designs of the characters wreaking havoc, this too would be evocative of just about anything other than a superhero movie.

A production office is papered with life sized posters of Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), Captain Boomerang (Jai Courtney), Peacemaker (John Cena), King Shark (performed by Steve Agee and voiced by Sylvester Stallone…although we don’t know that at the time), Blackguard (Pete Davison), Savant (Michael Rooker), Mongal (Mayling Ng), Weasel (Sean Gunn), The Thinker (Peter Capaldi), Ratcatcher 2 (Daniela Melchior), Javelin (Flula Borg), Amanda Waller (Viola Davis), Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman), TDK (Nathan Fillion), and Bloodsport (Idris Elba).

Looming large is also Idris Elba’s ominous, armored character who we now all know as Bloodsport, but who the studio remained cagey about identifying during this set visit for some reason, leaving reporters to speculate on the identity of the badass in blue, black, and gold. Between the color scheme, the armor, and an impressively intimidating assortment of weapons left out on a table for reporters to ogle as it’s explained that each weapon transforms into or folds out of each other, speculation about Bloodsport ends up occupying a fair amount of the downtime between interviews.

So what exactly could possibly hold such a motley crew together?

“You have to remember that all either have been wrongfully accused or done horrible, morally wrong things,” John Cena says. ”You can see the good in people, you can also see the evil in people… All of these people have real bad personality problems. So I think when you get that type of group together, that’s what makes it fun. Everybody is kind of different. But I think criminals see criminals, they just size everybody up. I think every one of them is like, ‘how is this person going to stab me in the back?’ That’s the world they come from.”

Cena is playing the authoritarian Peacemaker, a character who sees himself very differently than many other members of the Squad do. But the actors behind two of the stranger characters in the film, offer some additional perspective on the team dynamic.

“There’s people in this story that really want friendships, and people that don’t want anybody near them, just like all of us,” says David Dastmalchian, who plays Polka-Dot Man. “I think all of us have felt at times like we are totally disposable to either our employers or society or you name it. So that’s been interesting, in the relationship [between the characters] with the dynamic that starts to build or break down.”

“These are all characters that for the most part, probably don’t even know the existence of the other ones,” Steve Agee says. “Some of them do, and it’s the story of The Suicide Squad. They are forced to be together, and do this task, this mission. So, part of the story is just watching these people adapt to being around each other.”

Flula Borg (who gave journalists a rambling, uproariously funny interview about his character which you’ll see more of on DoG soon enough) spoke about how his character relates to Viola Davis’ team leader, Amanda Waller.

“Judging from all the relationships that Javelin has I would say poor, non-existent, unhealthy, crosses lines, should consider not interacting with other humans,” Borg says. “Javelin doesn’t worry about how people treat him. He treats them … What’s the golden rule? He has the Javelin rule, which is like ‘suck it, I’m cool.’ I think that’s his rule.”

Even here with the characters, the commitment to practical effects is strong, especially in areas where you’d fully expect them to rely on CGI. For example, Daniela Melchior, who plays Ratcatcher 2, has a little helper rat named Sebastian. While the hordes of rats the character is capable of commanding will necessitate CGI, at least some of the rats are real.

“We have three female rats [that play Sebastian],” Daniela Melchior says about the um…practical rats that the movie is using. “It’s a little bit distracting sometimes because I have to act lazy and tired like I don’t give a shit about whatever is happening… and I’m just like, ‘come here.’ But she doesn’t want to come, she wants to find new places and go, so we’re like, ‘okay, we’ll try one time with the rats, we’ll see what happens.’”

And when one of the rats playing Sebastian doesn’t want to do as they’re told, only then does the movie revert to CGI to get the desired “performance” from the furry co-star.

“I don’t know if I can say this,” Melchior says conspiratorially. “But actually, [some of the cast] are a little bit afraid of rats…I’m always trying to say ‘look, she’s so sweet, she wouldn’t hurt you.’”

From Suicide Squad 2 to The Suicide Squad

Like the characters themselves, The Suicide Squad has something of a rough past. The first movie failed to become the surefire franchise-starter the studio hoped for in 2016, and while a Suicide Squad 2 was put into development almost immediately, it wasn’t until Gunn became available that the project finally solidified.

“There was no plan before James,” Safran says. “There were other writers that had worked on various Suicide Squad scripts over the years, but… this was starting from ground zero, starting from scratch. All the characters that he selected were just characters that he was a fan of and wanted to play with. I think, in typical fashion for James, he picks more obscure characters…he liked the idea of being able to take these characters and imbue them with whatever characters he really wanted, or characteristics that he really wanted to play with.”

One of the “characteristics” Gunn wanted was to truly tap into the spirit of DC’s long-running and beloved Suicide Squad comics of the 1980s, which were co-created and stewarded by Jon Ostrander.

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“I don’t think of it so much as an interpretation of what Ostrander wrote but I do think of it as a continuation of what he did,” Gunn says. “It’s very much in line with that. When he was first putting this team together, he was only able to get certain characters. For him, it was the fun of taking these characters that weren’t as well-known and developing them in a real way. And it’s one of the greatest superhero runs of any comic book series.”

(Gunn also notes that Ostrander has a cameo in the film.)

As for whether or not The Suicide Squad is a sequel to or a reboot of the previous film, all involved are both diplomatic and evasive. The official line is that any characters that were together in the previous film do already know each other, but as for the actual events of the 2016 movie, that’s where things get murky.

“We just don’t address it any tangible form,” Safran says. “Yes, they’re the characters and actors that played them in the first movie, but we really wanted to make sure that this stands on its own two feet. It’s not a sequel, but there are some characters that were in the first movie, so it’s not really a full reboot either. So we just call it James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad.”

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Inside Jotunheim

Later in the day, journalists are taken inside Jotunheim via soundstage, an indoor construction that appears almost as sprawling as the outdoor set. As we saw outside, the remnants of what was likely a furious battle are all around. A stuntman in full Peacemaker gear is hanging around as we see Robbie’s Harley, Dastmalchian’s Polka-Dot Man, and Agee as King Shark (“the studio is trying to play down the whole Polka-Dot Man/King Shark universe they’re building,” Dastmalchian jokes) make their way through the rubble. Elba’s Bloodsport isn’t visible, but we’re assured he’s part of the scene.

While it’s Sylvester Stallone voicing King Shark in the film, it’s Agee on set here, wearing a grey mo-cap suit with the kind of padding you see on MLB umpires and somewhat shark-shaped wire headgear. He also appears to be holding a skull.

Harley, however, is wearing the ornate red dress glimpsed in the trailer (although it’s somewhat the worse for wear at the moment). As she navigates the carnage in Jotunheim, Gunn calls out for Robbie to “hum a little tune.” She does just that, conjuring exactly the kind of aimless musical free-association you’d expect from a mind like Harley Quinn in the midst of battle.

“Harley’s been through some things as you can see by this point in the film,” Robbie says to reporters between takes. When it’s noted that Harley’s baseball bat, a fixture in the previous film, is nowhere to be found in this scene, she jokes “My baseball bat is back home in LA, next to my bed, in case anyone breaks in…I’ve got other weapons in this one.”

We don’t get to see these Squad members engaged in any combat during the shooting of this scene, and it’s not clear if this is the interior from the same “entrance” that had seemingly been blasted into the outdoor structure, or somewhere else inside the fortress. But the clues all point to one thing: like everything else in this movie, where The Suicide Squad goes, destruction and chaos follow.

The Suicide Squad opens in theaters and on HBO Max on Aug. 6. We’ll have more from our set visit in the coming days.

The post The Suicide Squad: Inside James Gunn’s DCEU Supervillain War Movie appeared first on Den of Geek.

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internetandnetwork · 4 years ago

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A Comprehensive Guide to the Secret Sauce of PPC Success

Automation in SEM is a powerful tool that is continually growing and evolving. What began as basic bid rules have developed to cover almost all aspects of an account and campaign.

To be honest, many advertisers are scared of automation as they feel that it takes away some degree of control from them, or they cannot see everything that’s happening behind the scenes.

Nevertheless, these feelings are entirely logical and hence should not be disregarded. It’s natural for all of us to want to understand and trust the tools we use.

One way to build trust in automation and confidently utilize these tools is to zero in on Input, Output, and Results. More importantly to focus on leveraging automation consciously and on purpose – matching desired results to automation features.

Integrating intent with powerful automation and intelligent human input will result in the secret sauce that will help you and your campaigns thrive!

SEM RESULTS

While goals and KPIs are excellent and crucial for marketing success all the way, they are not the entire picture. You need to think about some of those less tangible but probably more essential results you are driving towards by opting to implement automation in your marketing campaigns.

Perhaps you want to save some of your precious time (bid strategies, scripts, scheduled Google Import) or scale your business efficiently (auto-applied ad suggestions and Smart Campaigns)?

Maybe you have assigned yourself the job to augment your ad strategy to be more inclusive and connect deeply with your target audience (Responsive Search Ads)?

Or perhaps you wish to build the best keyword research machine around to boost your reach on search (Dynamic Search Ads)?

No matter what your desired result is, knowing what you want to accomplish in advance will help you:

Match your results to automation features

Finish the work of getting quality input ready

Clearly define what output equals success

INPUT FOR PPC AUTOMATION

When it comes to automation, if there is one thing we have heard consistently, it’s that you will get out of it what you are willing to put in.

So the question is: what could your input seem like? Let’s see.

Clearly defined goals and KPIs

Ample data and time frame

Effective ad messaging

Powerful landing page copy

Let’s understand this with an example. Suppose you want to have lasagna for dinner, but you are able or willing to spend only 30 minutes cooking and using spaghetti noodles and ricotta cheese.

While there is a slight chance that you could get lucky and end up with a weird but delicious meal, let’s be real here. You will most probably wind up with some hot, terrible-tasting stuff on the table.

So the thing is, in order to get the desired output, your input must be sufficient.

QUANTITATIVE OUTPUT

Now, your input was of good quality. So, you can just set it and forget about it, isn’t it?

No! That’s not the way it works.

Yes, automation is about efficiency, but that does not imply that you get to take a back seat. Taking full advantage of automation features requires a little patience, iterative testing, and deep curiosity.

If results are qualitative goals, the output is quantitative in this context – insights gained, time, performance.

Did your overall performance trend up or down or remain constant?

Is automation saving your time and increasing your efficiency or acting as a time suck and blocker?

It is our responsibility to conduct a SWOT analysis and even mid-stream examinations to find out what worked well, what did not go well, and what needs to be improved moving forward.

ACTUAL EXAMPLES OF SEM RESULTS, INPUT, AND OUTPUT IN ACTION

Thinking and talking in the abstract is one thing and doing the work is entirely a different thing.

So the real question here is: how to put the Results, Input, and Output concept into action? To understand this better, let’s take a look at a few examples:

Google Import

Result: You want to save some of your time while managing your campaigns across Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising.

Input: First, you need to set up Google Import, then schedule recurring imports, and finally set email alerts.

Output: New ads, keywords, and campaigns created in Google will be automatically added to Microsoft Advertising. You will save X amount of time every week, month, etc.

Smart Campaigns

Result: You want to grow your business online with minimum time and ongoing management so you can focus on managing your business.

Input: Enter your business and billing details, set your advertising goals and basic ad copy in just a couple of minutes.

Output: Automation drives quality traffic to your website, and precise, understandable results surface on demand.

Auto-Applied Ad Suggestions

Result: You want to stay updated with the latest ad formats and optimize your ad copies with minimum impact on your time.

Input: Analyze ad suggestions in the UI or analyze email notifications to accept suggested ad additions or revisions.

Output: Better campaign performance (assess KPIs such as CTR, conversion rate, etc.), high-quality ads, and X amount of time saved

Responsive Search Ads

Result: Let’s say you want to deliver search ads that are inclusive as well as let you learn what value-based messaging resonates genuinely with your target audience.

Input: Pinpoint the words and phrases from the nine feelings of inclusion (hope, relief, acceptance, confidence, clarity, safety, zest, relaxation, celebration) or the three metaphors for inclusion (balance, connection, openness) that you want to test. Next, build Responsive Search Ads (RSAs) that test these words and phrases or metaphors across the 15 title slots and four body copy slots.

Output: Utilize asset performance reports to find the title and body combinations that worked the best, build new ads to continue testing these themes, and spread this messaging to other aspects of your marketing efforts.

WRAPPING IT UP

Automation is, without a doubt, a powerful tool available at our fingertips. When we match that power with solid intent and follow-through, that’s when we achieve success. Understanding your desired results for using automation ahead of time, doing the work to give high-quality input, and analyzing the output to make decisions together makes the special secret sauce that we all need for PPC success. So now that you know this secret recipe, what are you waiting for? Go ahead and start cooking (or automating)!

Hariom Balhara is an inventive person who has been doing intensive research in particular topics and writing blogs and articles for Tireless IT Services. Tireless IT Services is a Digital Marketing, SEO, SMO, PPC and Web Development company that comes with massive experiences. We specialize in digital marketing, Web Designing and development, graphic design, and a lot more.

SOURCE : Secret Sauce of PPC Success

#PPC #advertisement #campaign #marketing #Google #SWOT analysis #Google Ads #Microsoft Advertising #business #Tireless IT Services #digital marketing #seo

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moranegative-blog · 7 years ago

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Most of the time, when you have a sympathetic or anti-villain, they have a goal, and then their struggle is about what they do to achieve that goal. That’s part of where the sympathy comes in, the goal is something that’s understandable if not downright noble. And where the villainy comes in is that they’re willing to stoop to immoral methods to get the job done. Like take Killmonger, who wants to put an end to the suffering and mistreatment of Black people, but is willing to turn Wakanda into a conquering nation in order to do that. Or Magneto, who wants to prevent the extinction of mutants, but is willing to kill off the other humans instead. Their emotional conflict stems from the fact that they know these methods are not good things to do, but they also don’t see a better way of legitimately accomplishing their goals. So they do them anyway, at the expense of their conscience.

It’s not that they aren’t fallible or selfish, and you can still make a case for characters like this not seeing better ways because of personal conceit or pessimism or an additional desire to get revenge or an ultimate lack of sufficient concern for the damage being done, or other obvious flaws. But the general idea is that they want to accomplish something that will ultimately be good.

Kylo Ren, though, doesn’t really articulate anything like this. He doesn’t feel conflicted about the methods he’s had to use in order to accomplish an important goal he’s deemed worthy of the cost, or else presumably he’d try and use his reasoning to sway Rey over to his side at some point, and thereby illuminate a greater design to his actions. So, it seems his internal feelings of conflict are what is driving him to do terrible things. He kills his father because he thinks that will make him feel less conflicted, that it will let him just accept being on the Dark Side. But why is he on the Dark Side? Because he’s decided that’s where he has to be, after Luke’s rejection. What good, though, does he think he can accomplish on the Dark Side? Not much, going off of his admission to Rey that he thinks he’s a monster. The dude doesn’t misguidedly believe that the First Order is really doing the galaxy any good (which would be messed up and obviously incorrect, but at least put him on the same ground as Anakin). The FO’s just another means to his own personal ends. And his own ends are… murdering people until it resolves his internal conflict.

In other words, he kills people because he hopes killing will make him feel better. It’s almost the opposite of the usual MO for this kind of villain, where he kills people despite knowing that it will make him feel awful.

To my mind that really does put him more in the company of bad guys who aren’t suited to believable redemption arcs or compelling sympathy. He already vastly prioritizes himself over everyone else, or else, he wouldn’t be party to so much death in pursuit of personal equilibrium. It’s what people are referring to when they call him disturbingly entitled. Which is why I’m having such a hard time actually seeing him as anything much deeper than a tragedy. He doesn’t have a goal or drive I can sympathize with. Just a list of bad things that have happened to him, and then a list of crimes he’s committed because... being a victim makes you into a villain, I guess. Wow. What a hot take.

And the narrative doesn’t really seem to acknowledge that he’s been party to the actual deaths of people. Like, the tone of TLJ’s ending treats his conflict with Rey almost purely as a matter of ideological differences, even though Kylo Ren’s decision to murder everyone in the Resistance is what is creating the tension of the final act. But while it’s easy to view death as an abstract in the sense of this being fiction, in-universe, he has killed a ton of people and abetted the deaths of a whoooole lot more. And his conflict doesn’t even seem to stem from that. He hesitates to kill his own loving mother, but he still is also willing to just let her die so long as he doesn’t have to pull the trigger himself. And with everyone else, he’s a-okay with murder and expresses zero remorse. His conflict is discussed, but it seems like a totally personal thing, revolving around his concept of identity and his immediate relationships. Not something stemming from remorse or grief over being party to terrible acts. He doesn’t seem to regret being a monster, he seems to regret that monsters don’t get to have moms and girlfriends.

I mean, on the one hand, if he was a character in a story with different stakes and collateral damage, then I feel like I would absolutely sympathize a lot more with his internal conflict and identity crisis. If he wasn’t killing other people over it, then yeah. Sure. Kylo Ren the radicalized victim of a cult would make for an interesting character in a lower-stakes television drama or something. Or maybe an episode of Law & Order about him killing his father.

But that’s not the story he’s in. The story he’s in has shit like the destruction of the Hosnian System. He has committed war crimes, and he hasn’t even gone ‘I’m trying to destroy the Force to free the universe from endless cycles of conflict for once and for all’ or some shit like that. Nothing he’s trying to accomplish is of a scale even remotely equivalent to his crimes. It’s all because of his personal drama.

This is a negative and critical post but I’m not actually trying to be spiteful, here. I was willing to give the character a chance because I like a good conflicted villain. But bad things happening to him is just one single component of that, and arguably less important than another, which is a visible streak of nobility or compassion or moral fortitude. A goal, a vision, a genuinely good intention even if it’s been warped somehow by trauma or has forced him to make difficult decisions. TLJ is basically trying to take a character with a backstory that’s like a less sad version of Harry Potter’s (he got creeped on by the obsessive magical bad guy but his parents didn’t even die before he started personally killing them), and trying to juxtapose it against a body count that would make The Joker blush. And Rey’s supposed to play Beauty and the Beast with this guy who literally tries to shoot her out of the sky when she refuses to let him kill all her friends?

Nope. Nooope. I don’t care how much ‘light’ she senses in him, I sincerely do not. I need to see it, from the audience, in some way that makes me think this guy is not going to be perpetually at risk of murdering everyone the next time things go south for him. Without that, then even the saddest backstory is just tragedy, not grounds for any kind of turn-around or redemption arc.

#anti kylo ren #anti reylo #kylo ren critical #tlj critical #anti tlj

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michaelandy101-blog · 4 years ago

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The MozCon Virtual Video Bundle Is Here (Plus, Our 2019 Videos are FREE!)

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The MozCon Virtual Video Bundle Is Here (Plus, Our 2019 Videos are FREE!)

This year’s MozCon was unlike any other. In the midst of a global pandemic, we pivoted from planning our traditional 1,600-plus in-person shindig to an online conference that ended up bigger and more well-attended than anything we’d done before. MozCon Virtual was a delightful journey into the unknown. Just a few of the practical lessons we learned:

And while it may have felt a little different this year, with 21 industry experts covering topics all the way from easy-to-implement machine learning to effective content promotion to crafting a keyword strategy that accounts for a world in crisis, MozCon Virtual offered up the same caliber of high-quality content as any in-person event we’ve ever thrown.

And we’re happy to share that if you missed the conference live, the MozCon 2020 video bundle is now available for your viewing pleasure!

Start watching now

For $129, you’ll gain access to every presentation and speaker deck to watch as many times as you’d like. Schedule a viewing party with your team and get everyone on board with the best digital marketing advice, data, tools, and resources for the coming year.

If you’d like a taste of what this year’s video bundle’s got cooking, check out Rob Ousbey’s talk from this year’s event:

A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

Throughout a decade in SEO consulting, Rob needed to extract data from websites on many an occasion. Often this was at scale from sites that didn’t have an API or export feature, or on sites that required some kind of authentication. While this was primarily a way to collect & combine data from different SEO tools, the use-cases were endless.

He found a technique that helped immensely, particularly when traditional tools couldn’t do the job — but hadn’t seen anyone using the same approach. In this very tactical session, Rob will walk through the steps he’s used to extract data from all sorts of sites, from small fry to the giants, and give you the tools and knowledge to do the same.

As a bonus, Rob’s put together a list of handy resources on his website to support you as you pursue your own data collection dreams!

Watch the MozCon 2019 videos for free in our SEO Learning Center!

Now that our MozCon Virtual videos are out in the world, we’ve released all the content from MozCon 2019 for free in our SEO Learning Center. Twenty-six sessions full of actionable insights and digital marketing advice await you — read on to see what goodies you might have missed last year!

Web Search 2019: The Essential Data Marketers Need

Rand Fishkin

It’s been a rough couple years in search. Google’s domination and need for additional growth has turned the search giant into a competitor for more and more publishers, and plateaued the longstanding trend of Google’s growing referral traffic. But in the midst of this turmoil, opportunities have emerged, too. In this presentation, Rand will look not only at how Google (and Amazon, YouTube, Instagram, and others) have leveraged their monopoly power in concerning ways, but also how to find opportunities for traffic, branding, and marketing success.

Human > Machine > Human: Understanding Human-Readable Quality Signals and Their Machine-Readable Equivalents

Ruth Burr Reedy

The push and pull of making decisions for searchers versus search engines is an ever-present SEO conundrum. How do you tackle industry changes through the lens of whether something is good for humans or for machines? Ruth will take us through human-readable quality signals and their machine-readable equivalents and how to make SEO decisions accordingly, as well as how to communicate change to clients and bosses.

Improved Reporting & Analytics Within Google Tools

Dana DiTomaso

Covering the intersections between some of our favorite free tools — Google Data Studio, Google Analytics, and Google Tag Manager — Dana will be deep-diving into how to improve your reporting and analytics, even providing downloadable Data Studio templates along the way.

Local SERP Analytics: The Challenges and Opportunities

Rob Bucci

We all know that SERPs are becoming increasingly local. Google is more and more looking to satisfy local intent queries for searchers. There’s a treasure-trove of data in local SERPs that SEOs can use to outrank their competitors. In this session, Rob will talk about the challenges that come with trying to do SERP analytics at a local level and the opportunities that await those who can overcome those challenges.

Keywords Aren’t Enough: How to Uncover Content Ideas Worth Chasing

Ross Simmonds

Many marketers focus solely on keyword research when crafting their content, but it just isn’t enough if you want to gain a competitive edge. Ross will share a framework for uncovering content ideas leveraged from forums, communities, niche sites, good old-fashioned SERP analysis, tools and techniques to help along the way, and exclusive research surrounding the data that backs this up.

How to Supercharge Link Building with a Digital PR Newsroom

Shannon McGuirk

Everyone who’s ever tried their hand at link building knows how much effort it demands. If only there was a way to keep a steady stream of quality links coming in the door for clients, right? In this talk, Shannon will share how to set up a “digital PR newsroom” in-house or agency-side that supports and grows your link building efforts. Get your note-taking hand ready, because she’s going to outline her process and provide a replicable tutorial for how to make it happen.

From Zero to Local Ranking Hero

Darren Shaw

From zero web presence to ranking hyper-locally, Darren will take us along on the 8-month-long journey of a business growing its digital footprint and analyzing what worked (and didn’t) along the way. How well will they rank from a GMB listing alone? What about when citations were added, and later indexed? Did having a keyword in the business name help or harm, and what changes when they earn a few good links? Buckle up for this wild ride as we discover exactly what impact different strategies have on local rankings.

Esse Quam Videri: When Faking It Is Harder than Making It

Russ Jones

Covering a breadth of SEO topics, Russ will show us how the correct use of available tools makes it easier to actually be the best in your market rather than try to cut corners and fake it. If you’re a fan of hacks and shortcuts, come prepared to have your mind changed.

Building a Discoverability Powerhouse: Lessons from Merging an Organic, Paid, & Content Practice

Heather Physioc

Search is a channel that can’t live in a silo. In order to be its most effective, search teams have to collaborate successfully across paid, organic, content and more. Get tips for integrating and collaborating from the hard knocks and learnings of merging an organic, paid and performance content team into one Discoverability group. Find out how we went from three teams of individual experts to one integrated Discoverability powerhouse, and learn from our mistakes and wins as you apply the principles in your own company.

Brand Is King: How to Rule in the New Era of Local Search

Mary Bowling

Get ready for a healthy dose of all things local with this talk! Mary will deep-dive into how the Google Local algorithm has matured in 2019 and how marketers need to mature with it; how the major elements of the algo (relevance, prominence, and proximity) influence local rankings and how they affect each other; how local results are query-dependent; how to feed business info into the Knowledge Graph; and how brand is now “king” in local search.

Making Memories: Creating Content People Remember

Casie Gillette

We know that only 20% of people remember what they read, but 80% remember what they saw. How do you create something people actually remember? You have to think beyond words and consider factors like images, colors, movement, location, and more. In this talk, Casie will dissect what brands are currently doing to capture attention and how everyone, regardless of budget or resources, can create the kind of content their audience will actually remember.

20 Years in Search & I Don’t Trust My Gut or Google

Wil Reynolds

What would your reaction be if you were told that one of Wil’s clients got more conversions from zero-volume search terms than search terms with 1000+ searches per month? It’s true. Wil found this out in seconds, leading him to really look at his whole client strategy through a new lens. It also made him question company-wide strategies. How prevalent is this across all clients? Don’t they all deserve to get these insights? It required him to dig into the long tail, deep. To use big data and see PPC data as insights, not just marketing.

What would your reaction be if you were told that Google’s “bad click” business could be generating as much annually as Starbucks or McDonalds?

Wil will be making the case for big data, agencies, and why building systems that looking at every single search term you get matched to is the future of search marketing.

Super-Practical Tips for Improving Your Site’s E-A-T

Marie Haynes

Google has admitted that they measure the concept of “Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness” in their algorithms. If your site is categorized under YMYL (Your Money or Your Life), you absolutely must have good E-A-T in order to rank well. In this talk, you’ll learn how Google measures E-A-T and what changes you can make both on site and off in order to outrank your competitors. Using real-life examples, Marie will answer what E-A-T is and how Google measures it, what changes you can make on your site to improve how E-A-T is displayed, and what you can do off-site to improve E-A-T.

Fixing the Indexability Challenge: A Data-Based Framework

Areej AbuAli

How do you turn an unwieldy 2.5 million-URL website into a manageable and indexable site of just 20,000 pages? Areej will share the methodology and takeaways used to restructure a job aggregator site which, like many large websites, had huge problems with indexability and the rules used to direct robot crawl. This talk will tackle tough crawling and indexing issues, diving into the case study with flow charts to explain the full approach and how to implement it.

What Voice Means for Search Marketers: Top Findings from the 2019 Report

Christi Olson

How can search marketers take advantage of the strengths and weaknesses of today’s voice assistants? Diving into three scenarios for informational, navigational, and transactional queries, Christi will share how to use language semantics for better content creation and paid targeting, how to optimize existing content to be voice-friendly (including the new voice schema markup!), and what to expect from future algorithm updates as they adapt to assistants that read responses aloud, no screen required. Highlighting takeaways around voice commerce from the report, this talk will ultimately provide a breakdown on how search marketers can begin to adapt their shopping experience for v-commerce.

Redefining Technical SEO

Paul Shapiro

It’s time to throw the traditional definition of technical SEO out the window. Why? Because technical SEO is much, much bigger than just crawling, indexing, and rendering. Technical SEO is applicable to all areas of SEO, including content development and other creative functions. In this session, you’ll learn how to integrate technical SEO into all aspects of your SEO program.

How Many Words Is a Question Worth?

Dr. Peter J. Meyers

Traditional keyword research is poorly suited to Google’s quest for answers. One question might represent thousands of keyword variants, so how do we find the best questions, craft content around them, and evaluate success? Dr. Pete dives into three case studies to answer these questions.

Fraggles, Mobile-First Indexing, & the SERP of the Future

Cindy Krum

Before you ask: no, this isn’t Fraggle Rock, MozCon edition! Cindy will cover the myriad ways mobile-first indexing is changing the SERPs, including progressive web apps, entity-first indexing, and how “fraggles” are indexed in the Knowledge Graph and what it all means for the future of mobile SERPs.

Killer CRO and UX Wins Using an SEO Crawler

Luke Carthy

CRO, UX, and an SEO crawler? You read that right! Luke will share actionable tips on how to identify revenue wins and impactful low-hanging fruit to increase conversions and improve UX with the help of a site crawler typically used for SEO, as well as a generous helping of data points from case studies and real-world examples.

Content, Rankings, and Lead Generation: A Breakdown of the 1% Content Strategy

Andy Crestodina

How can you use data to find and update content for higher rankings and more traffic? Andy will take us through a four-point presentation that pulls together the most effective tactics around content into a single high-powered content strategy with even better results.

Running Your Own SEO Tests: Why It Matters & How to Do It Right

Rob Ousbey

Google’s algorithms have undergone significant changes in recent years. Traditional ranking signals don’t hold the same sway they used to, and they’re being usurped by factors like UX and brand that are becoming more important than ever before. What’s an SEO to do?

The answer lies in testing.

Sharing original data and results from clients, Rob will highlight the necessity of testing, learning, and iterating your work, from traditional UX testing to weighing the impact of technical SEO changes, tweaking on-page elements, and changing up content on key pages. Actionable processes and real-world results abound in this thoughtful presentation on why you should be testing SEO changes, how and where to run them, and what kinds of tests you ought to consider for your circumstances.

Dark Helmet’s Guide to Local Domination with Google Posts and Q&A

Greg Gifford

Google Posts and Questions & Answers are two incredibly powerful features of Google My Business, yet most people don’t even know they exist. Greg will walk through Google Posts in detail, sharing how they work, how to use them, and tips for optimization based on testing with hundreds of clients. He’ll also cover the Q&A section of GMB (a feature that lets anyone in the community speak for your business), share the results of a research project covering hundreds of clients, share some hilarious examples of Q&A run wild, and explain exactly how to use Q&A the right way to win more local business.

How to Audit for Inclusive Content

Emily Triplett Lentz

Digital marketers have a responsibility to learn to spot the biases that frequently find their way into online copy, replacing them with alternatives that lead to stronger, clearer messaging and that cultivate wider, more loyal and enthusiastic audiences. Last year, Help Scout audited several years of content for unintentionally exclusionary language that associated physical disabilities or mental illness with negative-sounding terms, resulting in improved writing clarity and a stronger brand. You’ll learn what inclusive content is, how it helps to engage a larger and more loyal audience, how to conduct an audit of potentially problematic language on a site, and how to optimize for inclusive, welcoming language.

Get the Look: Improve the Shopper Experience with Image and Visual Search Optimization

Joelle Irvine

With voice, local, and rich results only rising in importance, how do image and visual search fit into the online shopping ecosystem? Using examples from Google Images, Google Lens, and Pinterest Lens, Joelle will show how image optimization can improve the overall customer experience and play a key role in discoverability, product evaluation, and purchase decisions for online shoppers. At the same time, accepting that image recognition technology is not yet perfect, she will also share actionable tactics to better optimize for visual search to help those shoppers find that perfect style they just can’t put into words.

Factors that Affect the Local Algorithm that Don’t Impact Organic

Joy Hawkins

Google’s local algorithm is a horse of a different color when compared with the organic algo most SEOs are familiar with. Joy will share results from a SterlingSky study on how proximity varies greatly when comparing local and organic results, how reviews impact ranking (complete with data points from testing), how spam is running wild (and how it negatively impacts real businesses), and more.

Featured Snippets: Essentials to Know & How to Target

Britney Muller

By now, most SEOs are comfortable with the idea of featured snippets, but actually understanding and capturing them in the changing search landscape remains elusive. Britney will share some eye-opening data about the SERPs you know and love while equipping you with a bevy of new tricks for winning featured snippets into your toolbox.

Ready for more?

You’ll uncover even more SEO goodness in the MozCon 2020 video bundle. At this year’s special low price of $129, this is invaluable content you can access again and again throughout the year to inspire and ignite your SEO strategy:

21 full-length videos from some of the brightest minds in digital marketing

Instant downloads and streaming to your computer, tablet, or mobile device

Downloadable slide decks for presentations

Get my MozCon 2020 video bundle

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pencilsponyforge · 7 years ago

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Surface deep beauty.

As my time with Surface pro grows short I have mapped out my user experience with it into a nice little review and background study on the device.

Among my first hours of experience I already realized this device is not for an illustrator, it might be handy for concept artist or some light CAD work, it has some use for design work and rough sketching if you aren’t a big fan of crosshatching. But comics, line-art, large scale illustrations with precise detail work or fancy model sculpting there will be only frustration, wasted hours and harrowing system instability to make your time awaken nightmare.

The graphic here serves to illustrate the prime grievances aside from the crosshatch issue, which is more due to pen lag and awkward pen tip calibration, or rather, lack of pen tip calibration causing the cursor to actually drift to the side, on the direction of where the pen is angled because the device can’t compensate for the tilt in axis as well as wacom can.

Fast strokes track fine, the n-trig does tolerable job at calculating the path of the line as long as it doesn’t have time to stop think where the pen is right now.

Backlight bleeds at some parts of the panel more than others, which of course is not nice. But it’s not distracting unless the background is all black.

In overall the screen is really good for color reproduction and photo editing, definitely would recommend for that kind of use, if I had to come up with a use for a surface book.

The I/O of the device is a bit lackluster, we have mini displayport, 2 USB ports and memory card reader and then awfully placed headphone jack that makes zero sense and just increases the risk of device damage. As it happens to locate in upper right hand corner of the display itself.

The device is unstable as mentioned before, blue screen of death about once a day, especially if you dare to use chrome over Microsoft’s edge browser. Paranoid conspiracy theorist in me might even think this was intentional. But it also happens in other applications that Microsoft is not even competing against.

The screen and its resolution truly are the only redeemable parts of this device as the GPU is anemic, feeble and kicks in only as a last resort. It doesn’t overheat though, no thermal throttling fear with the GPU likely because it already is so anemic and under clocked that it to hit high temp means you left it on the stove.

And then there’s the touch screen feature, which is nice, in tablet mode, but then again there’s this okay keyboard and touch pad tacked on this bunch of tech, and once you separate the display of surface from its heavy bottom (T H I C C) that bottom half doesn’t function as a separate keyboard and touch pad neither for that matter. and it would be so easy to make it bluetooth up with the rest of the surface that it makes you wonder “why not?”.

The battery life is okay, haven’t had it run out on me in middle of anything important, though that’s mostly because I haven’t done anything important with this travesty of a device. Speaking of travesties the arrow keys on this keyboard are the biggest fuck you to anyone with fingers instead of spiders spindly legs. The left and right keys are normal key size thingies but the up and down are half-size and when ever you go for that up arrow you hit shift instead.

And now the PEN

Surface pen. Oh boy. This one’s a matter of taste I suppose, I might be spoiled by the gentle comforts of wacoms pens, but this chopstick of magnetic terror feels bad! All about it, the tip is somehow rubberized, so it feels slippy but really fragile and you worry it’ll break or wear out soon. the glossy as hell screen together with pen does not provide fifth of the control and traction that wacom’s tips and screen texture do, so indeed if you aren’t big on texture and natural feel you might enjoy surface a bit more, to me it was like drawing on vaselin with a lubed dildo, so even less precision than the already wiggle wobbly n-trig alone could rob from me. The pen needs a quad A battery (aaaa) and that’s not cool. A single battery like that, (one you can get only from specialized stores so no running to nearby 24/7 mart for a battery) is a little guillotine blade hanging over your project if you happen to run out of battery over weekend or in some countryside town.

So then, what we have in Surface book (performance base) is a pretty much a overpriced ( for the quality of components and their performance ) slab of really stylish looking hardware to make those apple users feel like owner of a BMW next to a Bugatti, that then coughs and sputters and veers into the ditch.

So yeah, aside from getting nice windows software compatibility and way more games to play with, better file system and decently heavy paperweight, you’re also getting bluescreens of death, bad drawing experience and anemic GPU that isn’t even on par with the quadro series in terms of precision and reliability in exchange of the performance.

Surface book a weird mix of luxury and bullshit. I would not buy it, until they march out significantly updated version of it.

Relevant article to general device reliability off the box:

https://www.thurrott.com/mobile/microsoft-surface/132832/heres-microsoft-saying-internally-surface-quality-reliability

#review #tech #art #digital drawing

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batterymonster2021 · 5 years ago

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Daphne Koller: What we're learning from online education

New Post has been published on https://hititem.kr/daphne-koller-what-were-learning-from-online-education-9/

Daphne Koller: What we're learning from online education

Translator: Morton Bast Reviewer: Thu-Huong Ha Like lots of you, i am one of the vital fortunate individuals. I was once born to a household where education was once pervasive. I am a 3rd-iteration PhD, a daughter of two teachers. In my childhood, I performed round in my father’s college lab. So it was taken for granted that I attend one of the fine universities, which in flip opened the door to an international of possibility. Lamentably, many of the persons on this planet are not so fortunate. In some elements of the world, for instance, South Africa, education will not be without problems available. In South Africa, the academic approach was constructed in the days of apartheid for the white minority. And as a end result, in these days there may be just no longer sufficient spots for the various extra folks who need and deserve a high quality education.That scarcity resulted in a drawback in January of this year on the institution of Johannesburg. There have been a handful of positions left open from the ordinary admissions approach, and the night time before they had been speculated to open that for registration, hundreds and hundreds of persons lined up outside the gate in a line a mile long, hoping to be first in line to get a kind of positions. When the gates opened, there was once a stampede, and 20 people have been injured and one girl died. She was once a mom who gave her life seeking to get her son a risk at a better lifestyles. However even in parts of the world like the us where schooling is available, it could now not be inside attain. There has been a lot discussed in the last few years in regards to the rising cost of wellness care. What would now not be particularly as obvious to humans is that for the period of that same period the cost of greater education training has been increasing at practically twice the price, for a whole of 559 percentage considering that 1985. This makes education unaffordable for many individuals.Eventually, even for individuals who do manage to get the better education, the doorways of opportunity would now not open. Simplest just a little over 1/2 of contemporary school graduates in the U.S. Who get a higher education definitely are working in jobs that require that schooling. This, of course, just isn’t genuine for the pupils who graduate from the highest associations, but for a lot of others, they don’t get the value for his or her time and their effort. Tom Friedman, in his latest ny occasions article, captured, in the best way that no one else would, the spirit at the back of our effort. He stated the colossal breakthroughs are what happen when what’s instantly possible meets what is desperately necessary. I’ve talked about what’s desperately necessary. Let’s speak about what’s immediately feasible. What’s all of a sudden possible was verified by way of three huge Stanford lessons, every of which had an enrollment of a hundred,000 folks or extra.With the intention to realise this, let’s look at one of those classes, the computer learning classification furnished by means of my colleague and cofounder Andrew Ng. Andrew teaches one of the higher Stanford classes. It can be a computing device learning category, and it has four hundred folks enrolled every time it can be furnished. When Andrew taught the computer learning category to most of the people, it had one hundred,000 people registered. To be able to put that quantity in viewpoint, for Andrew to reach that identical size viewers with the aid of teaching a Stanford classification, he would have to do this for 250 years. Of course, he’d get quite bored. So, having seen the have an effect on of this, Andrew and that i made up our minds that we wanted to relatively try to scale this up, to convey the exceptional best education to as many persons as we might. So we shaped Coursera, whose intention is to take the quality guides from the first-rate instructors at the fine universities and provide it to each person around the world without cost.We presently have 43 publications on the platform from four universities across a range of disciplines, and let me show you just a little little bit of an outline of what that looks like. (Video) Robert Ghrist: Welcome to Calculus. Ezekiel Emanuel: Fifty million men and women are uninsured. Scott web page: items support us design more robust institutions and insurance policies. We get fantastic segregation. Scott Klemmer: So Bush imagined that someday, you’ll put on a camera right in the center of your head. Mitchell Duneier: Mills needs the student of sociology to increase the nice of intellect … RG: hanging cable takes on the form of a hyperbolic cosine.Nick Parlante: For every pixel within the photo, set the red to zero. Paul Offit: … Vaccine allowed us to do away with polio virus. Dan Jurafsky: Does Lufthansa serve breakfast and San Jose? Well, that sounds humorous. Daphne Koller: So that is which coin you choose, and that is the 2 tosses. Andrew Ng: So in huge-scale computer learning, we might like to give you computational … (Applause) DK: It turns out, probably not particularly, that scholars like getting the quality content material from the exceptional universities without spending a dime. Considering that we opened the website in February, we’ve 640,000 pupils from one hundred ninety countries. We have now 1.5 million enrollments, 6 million quizzes in the 15 classes that have launched thus far were submitted, and 14 million movies have been viewed. Nevertheless it’s no longer almost the numbers, it is also concerning the individuals. Whether or not it can be Akash, who comes from a small city in India and would in no way have access on this case to a Stanford-fine path and would in no way be ready to find the money for it. Or Jenny, who is a single mother of two and wishes to hone her talents so that she will be able to return and whole her master’s degree. Or Ryan, who are not able to go to school, because his immune poor daughter can not be risked to have germs come into the residence, so he couldn’t go away the house.I’m particularly joyful to claim — recently, we’ve been in correspondence with Ryan — that this story had a joyful ending. Child Shannon — you’ll discover her on the left — is doing a lot better now, and Ryan bought a job via taking a few of our courses. So what made these guides so exceptional? In any case, online course content has been available for a even as. What made it special was that this was once real direction expertise. It started on a given day, and then the students would watch videos on a weekly groundwork and do homework assignments. And these can be actual homework assignments for a real grade, with an actual cut-off date. You will discover the points in time and the usage graph. These are the spikes showing that procrastination is international phenomenon. (Laughter) at the end of the path, the scholars bought a certificate. They might gift that certificates to a prospective enterprise and get a greater job, and we know many pupils who did. Some scholars took their certificate and presented this to an educational college at which they had been enrolled for actual university credit score.So these students have been rather getting something significant for his or her funding of time and effort. Let’s speak a little bit bit about one of the most components that go into these publications. The first aspect is that while you move faraway from the constraints of a bodily school room and design content explicitly for a web based structure, that you could break away from, for illustration, the monolithic one-hour lecture. Which you could spoil up the material, for instance, into these quick, modular units of eight to 12 minutes, each and every of which represents a coherent thought. Pupils can traverse this fabric in one-of-a-kind approaches, relying on their background, their talents or their pursuits. So, for example, some scholars might advantage from a little bit little bit of preparatory material that other scholars might already have. Different pupils probably concerned with a distinct enrichment matter that they need to pursue in my view. So this format makes it possible for us to break free from the one-dimension-fits-all mannequin of schooling, and allows for pupils to follow a way more personalised curriculum.Of course, we all know as educators that scholars do not study by sitting and passively gazing movies. Perhaps one of the vital biggest add-ons of this effort is that we have to have students who apply with the fabric with a view to relatively realise it. There may be been a variety of studies that reveal the value of this. This one that seemed in Science final year, for instance, demonstrates that even simple retrieval follow, where scholars are simply presupposed to repeat what they already learned gives substantially accelerated results on more than a few fulfillment tests down the road than many other academic interventions. We have now tried to construct in retrieval follow into the platform, as well as different forms of practice in many approaches. For illustration, even our videos will not be simply movies. Each couple of minutes, the video pauses and the scholars get requested a question. (Video) SP: … These four things. Prospect concept, hyperbolic discounting, status quo bias, base fee bias. They may be all good documented. So they are all good documented deviations from rational conduct. DK: So here the video pauses, and the pupil varieties within the reply into the box and submits.Absolutely they weren’t paying concentration. (Laughter) in order that they get to try again, and this time they received it proper. There may be an not obligatory explanation if they need. And now the video strikes on to the subsequent part of the lecture. This can be a sort of straightforward query that I as an trainer could ask in class, however once I ask that type of a query at school, eighty percentage of the scholars are still scribbling the last thing I mentioned, 15 percent are zoned out on fb, after which there’s the smarty pants in the entrance row who blurts out the reply earlier than anybody else has had a risk to consider about it, and that i as the teacher am terribly gratified that someone actually knew the reply.And so the lecture moves on earlier than, quite, lots of the students have even noticed that a query had been requested. Right here, each single scholar has to engage with the fabric. And of direction these easy retrieval questions are not the tip of the story. One needs to build in far more meaningful observe questions, and one also needs to provide the scholars with feedback on those questions. Now, how do you grade the work of 100,000 pupils in case you don’t have 10,000 TAs? The answer is, you need to use science to do it for you. Now, fortunately, science has come a long way, and we can now grade a range of interesting varieties of homework.In addition to more than one alternative and the forms of short reply questions that you noticed within the video, we will additionally grade math, mathematical expressions as well as mathematical derivations. We can grade items, whether or not it is economic items in a trade type or physical items in a science or engineering category and we are able to grade some lovely subtle programming assignments. Let me show you one that’s certainly pretty simple however fairly visible. This is from Stanford’s pc Science a hundred and one type, and the students are imagined to colour-proper that blurry pink photograph. They’re typing their program into the browser, and you will discover they did not get it rather right, lady Liberty continues to be seasick. And so, the scholar tries once more, and now they obtained it proper, they usually’re instructed that, and they may be able to transfer on to the next task. This capability to engage actively with the material and be told when you are correct or flawed is relatively main to pupil learning. Now, of course we can’t yet grade the range of labor that one wants for all guides. Primarily, what’s missing is the form of vital considering work that’s so most important in such disciplines because the humanities, the social sciences, business and others.So we tried to persuade, for illustration, a few of our humanities college that multiple alternative was once not one of these dangerous technique. That did not go over rather well. So we had to come up with a further solution. And the solution we ended up using is peer grading. It turns out that earlier experiences show, like this one by way of Saddler and just right, that peer grading is a surprisingly mighty strategy for offering reproducible grades. It was tried best in small classes, but there it confirmed, for instance, that these pupil-assigned grades on the y-axis are clearly very well correlated with the teacher-assigned grade on the x-axis. What’s even more surprising is that self-grades, the place the pupils grade their possess work significantly — so long as you incentivize them appropriately so that they can not give themselves a ideal ranking — are definitely even better correlated with the instructor grades. And so that is an amazing method that can be used for grading at scale, and is also a priceless learning method for the students, on the grounds that they sincerely gain knowledge of from the experience.So we have the most important peer-grading pipeline ever devised, where tens of hundreds of students are grading each different’s work, and particularly effectively, I have got to say. But this isn’t practically pupils sitting alone of their dwelling room working by means of problems. Around each and every one among our guides, a community of scholars had fashioned, a global community of men and women round a shared intellectual endeavor. What you see here is a self-generated map from pupils in our Princeton Sociology one zero one direction, the place they have put themselves on a global map, and that you may fairly see the global attain of this type of effort. Scholars collaborated in these courses in a form of one of a kind ways. First of all, there was once a question and reply forum, where scholars would pose questions, and other pupils would reply these questions. And the really effective factor is, for the reason that there have been so many pupils, it means that although a student posed a question at three o’clock within the morning, somewhere around the world, there would be someone who used to be unsleeping and dealing on the identical problem.And so, in lots of our publications, the median response time for a query on the query and answer forum used to be 22 minutes. Which isn’t a degree of carrier i have ever offered to my Stanford scholars. (Laughter) And you’ll discover from the pupil testimonials that pupils clearly to find that given that of this colossal online group, they bought to interact with every different in lots of methods that have been deeper than they did in the context of the bodily school room.Scholars also self-assembled, with none kind of intervention from us, into small be trained businesses. Some of these were physical study corporations along geographical constraints and met on a weekly foundation to work via quandary sets. This is the San Francisco gain knowledge of crew, however there were ones in every single place the arena. Others had been digital be taught companies, typically alongside language lines or along cultural traces, and on the bottom left there, you see our multicultural universal be trained group where people explicitly desired to attach with folks from different cultures. There are some large possibilities available from this form of framework. The first is that it has the skills of giving us a wholly unheard of appear into figuring out human studying. When you consider that the data that we are able to gather here is certain. That you would be able to collect each click, each homework submission, each forum put up from tens of hundreds of pupils. So that you would be able to turn the be trained of human studying from the hypothesis-pushed mode to the info-driven mode, a metamorphosis that, for instance, has revolutionized biology.You should utilize these data to realize foremost questions like, what are just right finding out techniques which can be amazing versus ones that are not? And in the context of particular courses, which you could ask questions like, what are one of the misconceptions which can be extra normal and the way will we support pupils repair them? So here is an illustration of that, also from Andrew’s machine finding out type. It is a distribution of mistaken answers to one in every of Andrew’s assignments. The answers occur to be pairs of numbers, so that you may draw them on this two-dimensional plot. Each of the little crosses that you just see is an extra wrong reply. The big pass at the high left is the place 2,000 students gave the unique same wrong answer.Now, if two pupils in a category of a hundred give the same wrong answer, you can certainly not become aware of. But when 2,000 scholars give the equal mistaken reply, it is kind of tough to miss. So Andrew and his students went in, looked at a few of those assignments, understood the root cause of the misunderstanding, after which they produced a exact error message that may be offered to each student whose reply fell into that bucket, which means that pupils who made that equal mistake would now get personalised suggestions telling them easy methods to fix their misconception much more with no trouble. So this personalization is some thing that you could then build via having the advantage of tremendous numbers. Personalization is might be one of the vital biggest opportunities here as good, considering it presents us with the skills of fixing a 30-yr-historic drawback. Educational researcher Benjamin Bloom, in 1984, posed what’s called the 2 sigma quandary, which he observed with the aid of learning three populations. The primary is the population that studied in a lecture-centered school room. The 2d is a population of pupils that studied utilizing a standard lecture-based classroom, but with a mastery-headquartered strategy, so the pupils couldn’t move on to the following topic before demonstrating mastery of the prior one.And finally, there used to be a populace of scholars that had been taught in a one-on-one guideline making use of a tutor. The mastery-established populace used to be a full general deviation, or sigma, in success scores higher than the standard lecture-headquartered type, and the person tutoring gives you 2 sigma improvement in performance. To realise what that means, let’s seem at the lecture-situated study room, and let’s choose the median efficiency as a threshold. So in a lecture-centered classification, 1/2 the pupils are above that degree and 1/2 are below. In the character tutoring instruction, ninety eight percent of the pupils are going to be above that threshold. Assume if we could train so that 98 percentage of our pupils could be above typical. For this reason, the two sigma concern.In view that we are not able to have enough money, as a society, to furnish every student with an individual human tutor. However possibly we are able to afford to furnish each and every pupil with a pc or a smartphone. So the query is, how can we use technological know-how to push from the left side of the graph, from the blue curve, to the right side with the green curve? Mastery is handy to obtain utilizing a pc, considering a pc does not get tired of showing you the identical video 5 occasions. And it does not even get worn out of grading the equal work a couple of instances, we now have noticeable that in some of the examples that I’ve proven you.And even personalization is some thing that we’re establishing to see the beginnings of, whether or not it is through the personalised trajectory through the curriculum or one of the vital personalised feedback that we’ve proven you. So the purpose right here is to take a look at and push, and see how a ways we can get toward the golf green curve. So, if this is the case first-class, are universities now out of date? Good, Mark Twain certainly proposal so. He mentioned that, "university is a location the place a professor’s lecture notes go straight to the scholars’ lecture notes, with out passing through the brains of either." (Laughter) i encourage to vary with Mark Twain, though.I consider what he used to be complaining about is just not universities but as a substitute the lecture-established format that so many universities spend so much time on. So let’s go back even additional, to Plutarch, who stated that, "The intellect isn’t a vessel that wants filling, but wood that wants igniting." And maybe we should spend much less time at universities filling our students’ minds with content by lecturing at them, and extra time igniting their creativity, their imagination and their challenge-solving advantage through definitely talking with them. So how do we do that? We do this by means of doing energetic studying in the study room. So there’s been many stories, including this one, that exhibit that should you use lively studying, interacting along with your students in the study room, efficiency improves on each single metric — on attendance, on engagement and on finding out as measured through a standardized test. You will see that, for example, that the achievement ranking almost doubles on this distinctive experiment. So perhaps that is how we must spend our time at universities.So to summarize, if we could present a high nice education to every person world wide for free, what would that do? Three matters. First it will establish education as a essential human right, where someone around the world with the capacity and the inducement would get the skills that they must make a greater life for themselves, their households and their communities.Second, it could allow lifelong learning. It’s a disgrace that for so many folks, learning stops once we conclude excessive institution or after we finish school. By using having this amazing content material be to be had, we’d be in a position to learn some thing new every time we desired, whether it’s simply to increase our minds or it’s to change our lives. And ultimately, this might permit a wave of innovation, when you consider that potent ability may also be determined wherever. Maybe the following Albert Einstein or the subsequent Steve Jobs is dwelling somewhere in a far flung village in Africa.And if we would present that person an schooling, they’d be in a position to come up with the following colossal idea and make the sector a better place for all people. Thank you very a lot. (Applause) .

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Daphne Koller: What we're learning from online education

New Post has been published on https://hititem.kr/daphne-koller-what-were-learning-from-online-education-2/

Daphne Koller: What we're learning from online education

Translator: Morton Bast Reviewer: Thu-Huong Ha Like a lot of you, i’m one of the crucial fortunate people. I used to be born to a loved ones the place schooling was pervasive. I am a third-new release PhD, a daughter of two academics. In my childhood, I played around in my father’s institution lab. So it used to be taken with no consideration that I attend probably the most first-rate universities, which in flip opened the door to a world of possibility. Sadly, most of the persons on the planet will not be so lucky. In some materials of the arena, for instance, South Africa, schooling shouldn’t be readily obtainable. In South Africa, the educational procedure was developed within the days of apartheid for the white minority.And as a end result, at present there’s simply now not sufficient spots for the many extra persons who want and deserve a high fine education. That shortage resulted in a main issue in January of this yr at the school of Johannesburg. There were a handful of positions left open from the typical admissions system, and the night time before they were presupposed to open that for registration, 1000s of individuals lined up external the gate in a line a mile long, hoping to be first in line to get one of those positions.When the gates opened, there was a stampede, and 20 people had been injured and one woman died. She used to be a mom who gave her lifestyles looking to get her son a chance at a greater life. But even in constituents of the world like the U.S. Where schooling is to be had, it could now not be inside reach. There was a lot discussed within the last few years concerning the rising fee of wellbeing care.What would no longer be relatively as obvious to people is that during that same period the price of bigger schooling training has been increasing at just about twice the cost, for a total of 559 percentage considering that 1985. This makes schooling unaffordable for many individuals. Ultimately, even for many who do control to get the greater schooling, the doorways of opportunity might now not open. Best a little bit over 1/2 of up to date institution graduates in the united states who get a higher schooling simply are working in jobs that require that schooling. This, of course, is just not actual for the pupils who graduate from the top institutions, however for many others, they do not get the worth for their time and their effort. Tom Friedman, in his contemporary the big apple instances article, captured, in the way in which that no person else would, the spirit behind our effort.He stated the gigantic breakthroughs are what occur when what’s immediately feasible meets what’s desperately critical. I’ve talked about what’s desperately crucial. Let’s talk about what’s all of a sudden viable. What’s instantly viable used to be confirmed by using three significant Stanford classes, every of which had an enrollment of a hundred,000 persons or more. In an effort to comprehend this, let’s look at one of those classes, the computer finding out class provided by my colleague and cofounder Andrew Ng. Andrew teaches one of the greater Stanford lessons. It’s a desktop studying class, and it has four hundred folks enrolled every time it is supplied. When Andrew taught the machine studying category to the general public, it had one hundred,000 people registered. So as to put that quantity in viewpoint, for Andrew to arrive that identical dimension viewers by teaching a Stanford classification, he would have to do this for 250 years. Of course, he’d get relatively bored. So, having seen the affect of this, Andrew and i determined that we would have liked to particularly attempt to scale this up, to carry the first-rate nice education to as many humans as we would.So we formed Coursera, whose purpose is to take the excellent guides from the excellent instructors at the fine universities and furnish it to all people around the world without cost. We currently have 43 publications on the platform from 4 universities across a range of disciplines, and let me exhibit you just a little bit of an outline of what that appears like. (Video) Robert Ghrist: Welcome to Calculus. Ezekiel Emanuel: Fifty million persons are uninsured. Scott web page: units help us design extra amazing institutions and insurance policies. We get incredible segregation. Scott Klemmer: So Bush imagined that someday, you’ll put on a camera right within the center of your head. Mitchell Duneier: Mills desires the pupil of sociology to enhance the high-quality of intellect … RG: putting cable takes on the type of a hyperbolic cosine. Nick Parlante: For each pixel within the photo, set the crimson to zero. Paul Offit: … Vaccine allowed us to eliminate polio virus. Dan Jurafsky: Does Lufthansa serve breakfast and San Jose? Good, that sounds humorous.Daphne Koller: So this is which coin you pick, and this is the two tosses. Andrew Ng: So in colossal-scale computing device studying, we’d prefer to provide you with computational … (Applause) DK: It seems, possibly now not incredibly, that pupils like getting the first-rate content from the first-class universities without spending a dime. Due to the fact that we opened the website in February, we have now 640,000 scholars from a hundred ninety international locations. We have now 1.5 million enrollments, 6 million quizzes in the 15 lessons that have launched to this point have been submitted, and 14 million movies have been considered. But it surely’s now not close to the numbers, it is also concerning the folks. Whether or not it’s Akash, who comes from a small city in India and would never have access in this case to a Stanford-first-rate path and would on no account be able to come up with the money for it. Or Jenny, who’s a single mom of two and desires to hone her competencies so that she will go back and complete her grasp’s degree.Or Ryan, who cannot go to institution, given that his immune poor daughter can’t be risked to have germs come into the apartment, so he could not depart the condo. I’m really completely happy to claim — recently, we now have been in correspondence with Ryan — that this story had a glad ending. Baby Shannon — you’ll find her on the left — is doing much better now, and Ryan obtained a job through taking some of our publications. So what made these courses so distinct? In any case, on-line path content material has been available for a while. What made it extraordinary was once that this was once actual course expertise. It started on a given day, after which the pupils would watch videos on a weekly basis and do homework assignments. And these would be real homework assignments for a real grade, with a real cut-off date.One can find the time limits and the utilization graph. These are the spikes showing that procrastination is international phenomenon. (Laughter) at the end of the course, the scholars acquired a certificate. They could present that certificates to a potential enterprise and get a greater job, and we know many students who did. Some students took their certificate and offered this to an educational university at which they had been enrolled for actual tuition credit. So these pupils have been really getting anything significant for their investment of time and effort. Let’s talk a bit bit about one of the vital accessories that go into these courses. The first aspect is that when you transfer away from the constraints of a bodily lecture room and design content material explicitly for an online structure, that you can break away from, for illustration, the monolithic one-hour lecture. Which you can spoil up the material, for instance, into these quick, modular models of eight to 12 minutes, each and every of which represents a coherent concept. Pupils can traverse this fabric in one of a kind approaches, depending on their heritage, their expertise or their interests. So, for illustration, some students might improvement from a little bit bit of preparatory material that different scholars would have already got.Different students possibly concerned with a designated enrichment subject that they need to pursue individually. So this structure allows for us to break away from the one-dimension-matches-all model of education, and enables pupils to follow a way more customized curriculum. Of direction, everyone knows as educators that scholars don’t be taught through sitting and passively watching movies. Maybe some of the largest add-ons of this effort is that we ought to have students who apply with the material with the intention to relatively have an understanding of it. There may be been a variety of reviews that display the significance of this. This one who seemed in Science final year, for instance, demonstrates that even simple retrieval observe, the place scholars are simply speculated to repeat what they already realized gives considerably improved results on various success assessments down the road than many different educational interventions.Now we have tried to construct in retrieval observe into the platform, as good as different varieties of observe in lots of ways. For instance, even our movies should not simply movies. Every short while, the video pauses and the pupils get asked a query. (Video) SP: … These four matters. Prospect conception, hyperbolic discounting, fame quo bias, base cost bias. They may be all well documented. So they are all well documented deviations from rational habits. DK: So here the video pauses, and the pupil types in the reply into the box and submits. Most likely they weren’t paying attention. (Laughter) so that they get to try once more, and this time they received it right. There’s an not obligatory clarification if they need. And now the video strikes on to the subsequent a part of the lecture. This can be a style of simple question that I as an teacher could ask at school, but once I ask that kind of a question in class, eighty percentage of the pupils are still scribbling the final thing I mentioned, 15 percentage are zoned out on fb, and then there may be the smarty pants in the entrance row who blurts out the answer earlier than someone else has had a hazard to believe about it, and i as the instructor am terribly gratified that anyone in reality knew the answer.And so the lecture moves on earlier than, quite, most of the students have even noticed that a question had been requested. Here, every single pupil has to interact with the fabric. And of path these simple retrieval questions usually are not the top of the story. One needs to build in rather more significant apply questions, and one additionally wants to provide the scholars with feedback on these questions. Now, how do you grade the work of one hundred,000 pupils if you happen to would not have 10,000 TAs? The answer is, you have got to use technology to do it for you. Now, happily, technology has come far, and we will now grade a range of exciting varieties of homework.In addition to multiple option and the varieties of quick reply questions that you saw within the video, we are able to additionally grade math, mathematical expressions as well as mathematical derivations. We are able to grade items, whether or not it can be monetary models in a business type or physical models in a science or engineering type and we will grade some lovely refined programming assignments. Let me show you one that is clearly beautiful simple but rather visible. That is from Stanford’s computer Science one zero one category, and the pupils are imagined to colour-right that blurry pink photo. They are typing their program into the browser, and one can find they didn’t get it relatively right, woman Liberty is still seasick. And so, the scholar tries again, and now they obtained it proper, and so they’re advised that, and they can move on to the next project. This capability to have interaction actively with the material and be advised when you’re proper or improper is particularly principal to scholar finding out. Now, of path we can not yet grade the range of work that one needs for all courses. Specially, what’s missing is the kind of principal pondering work that’s so predominant in such disciplines because the humanities, the social sciences, industry and others.So we tried to persuade, for example, a few of our humanities faculty that a couple of option was not such a dangerous method. That didn’t go over relatively well. So we had to give you a different solution. And the solution we ended up utilising is peer grading. It seems that earlier reports show, like this one with the aid of Saddler and just right, that peer grading is a surprisingly strong procedure for providing reproducible grades.It was tried handiest in small classes, but there it showed, for example, that these pupil-assigned grades on the y-axis are without a doubt very good correlated with the teacher-assigned grade on the x-axis. What’s even more stunning is that self-grades, where the students grade their possess work critically — as long as you incentivize them accurately in order that they can’t provide themselves a perfect ranking — are certainly even higher correlated with the trainer grades. And so this is an effective technique that can be used for grading at scale, and is also a priceless finding out strategy for the students, since they virtually be taught from the expertise. So we’ve the biggest peer-grading pipeline ever devised, where tens of hundreds of students are grading each other’s work, and fairly efficaciously, I have to say. But this is not virtually pupils sitting on my own in their living room working by way of issues. Around every one of our publications, a group of scholars had formed, a world community of people around a shared mental pastime. What you see here is a self-generated map from students in our Princeton Sociology a hundred and one direction, the place they’ve put themselves on a global map, and that you would be able to really see the worldwide attain of this type of effort.Students collaborated in these publications in a sort of one of a kind methods. Initially, there was once a question and answer discussion board, the place scholars would pose questions, and different pupils would answer these questions. And the relatively mighty thing is, because there were so many scholars, it means that despite the fact that a pupil posed a question at three o’clock within the morning, someplace around the world, there could be somebody who was once awake and dealing on the identical predicament. And so, in a lot of our guides, the median response time for a question on the question and reply forum used to be 22 minutes.Which is not a degree of provider i have ever supplied to my Stanford students. (Laughter) And you will find from the pupil testimonials that students certainly find that on account that of this giant online group, they received to engage with each different in many approaches that have been deeper than they did within the context of the physical study room. Students also self-assembled, without any style of intervention from us, into small be trained groups. A few of these were bodily be trained companies alongside geographical constraints and met on a weekly groundwork to work by means of hindrance sets. That is the San Francisco be taught workforce, however there were ones all over the place the sector.Others had been digital learn groups, usually alongside language traces or along cultural traces, and on the bottom left there, you see our multicultural common gain knowledge of crew where individuals explicitly wanted to attach with people from different cultures. There are some enormous possibilities available from this variety of framework. The first is that it has the skills of giving us a totally remarkable appear into understanding human finding out. On account that the info that we will accumulate right here is targeted. That you would be able to acquire every click, each homework submission, each discussion board publish from tens of hundreds of students. So which you could flip the study of human studying from the speculation-driven mode to the information-driven mode, a change that, for illustration, has revolutionized biology. You should use these knowledge to have an understanding of essential questions like, what are just right learning systems which can be effective versus ones that aren’t? And in the context of targeted publications, that you would be able to ask questions like, what are one of the most misconceptions which are more long-established and the way can we support pupils fix them? So this is an illustration of that, also from Andrew’s computing device learning category.This can be a distribution of flawed solutions to one in every of Andrew’s assignments. The answers happen to be pairs of numbers, so that you may draw them on this two-dimensional plot. Every of the little crosses that you see is a further unsuitable reply. The large cross on the high left is the place 2,000 students gave the specific equal incorrect answer. Now, if two scholars in a category of a hundred give the identical unsuitable answer, you can by no means become aware of. However when 2,000 scholars give the same incorrect answer, it can be variety of rough to overlook. So Andrew and his pupils went in, looked at some of those assignments, understood the foundation reason of the misunderstanding, after which they produced a designated error message that may be supplied to each pupil whose answer fell into that bucket, which means that students who made that same mistake would now get customized feedback telling them the right way to fix their misconception far more with no trouble.So this personalization is anything that possible then build by using having the virtue of giant numbers. Personalization is might be probably the most largest possibilities right here as good, since it provides us with the knowledge of fixing a 30-12 months-historic quandary. Educational researcher Benjamin Bloom, in 1984, posed what’s referred to as the 2 sigma crisis, which he observed by using finding out three populations. The primary is the population that studied in a lecture-headquartered study room. The 2d is a population of scholars that studied making use of a common lecture-headquartered study room, however with a mastery-founded process, so the scholars couldn’t move on to the following subject earlier than demonstrating mastery of the prior one. And in the end, there was a populace of students that had been taught in a one-on-one guideline making use of a tutor. The mastery-established populace was a full ordinary deviation, or sigma, in fulfillment scores better than the normal lecture-founded type, and the person tutoring offers you 2 sigma development in performance. To comprehend what that implies, let’s appear at the lecture-established classroom, and let’s choose the median performance as a threshold.So in a lecture-based classification, half of the scholars are above that degree and half of are under. In the man or woman tutoring guideline, 98 percent of the students are going to be above that threshold. Imagine if we could coach in order that ninety eight percentage of our students can be above normal. Thus, the 2 sigma drawback. On the grounds that we cannot afford, as a society, to furnish every student with an man or woman human tutor. But probably we will have the funds for to furnish every student with a pc or a smartphone. So the query is, how do we use technological know-how to push from the left part of the graph, from the blue curve, to the proper part with the green curve? Mastery is easy to attain using a laptop, considering a computer doesn’t get tired of showing you the identical video 5 times. And it doesn’t even get worn out of grading the identical work a couple of instances, we’ve seen that in among the examples that I’ve shown you.And even personalization is anything that we’re commencing to see the beginnings of, whether it can be through the personalised trajectory via the curriculum or one of the crucial personalized feedback that we have now shown you. So the purpose right here is to try and push, and see how a long way we are able to get toward the golf green curve. So, if that is so excellent, are universities now out of date? Good, Mark Twain certainly notion so. He said that, "college is a location where a professor’s lecture notes go straight to the pupils’ lecture notes, without passing by means of the brains of both." (Laughter) i encourage to fluctuate with Mark Twain, though. I feel what he was complaining about is just not universities however instead the lecture-based structure that so many universities spend so much time on. So let’s return even additional, to Plutarch, who stated that, "The mind is not a vessel that wishes filling, however wooden that desires igniting." And maybe we will have to spend less time at universities filling our students’ minds with content material via lecturing at them, and more time igniting their creativity, their imagination and their crisis-solving capabilities by way of truly talking with them.So how will we try this? We do this by means of doing energetic studying in the study room. So there is been many studies, including this one, that show that if you use active finding out, interacting together with your pupils in the classroom, efficiency improves on each single metric — on attendance, on engagement and on studying as measured with the aid of a standardized experiment. You will discover, for example, that the success ranking practically doubles on this particular experiment. So maybe that is how we will have to spend our time at universities. So as to summarize, if we could offer a top quality education to each person around the world totally free, what would that do? Three matters. First it might establish schooling as a important human right, where any one around the world with the capacity and the incentive might get the expertise that they must make a better existence for themselves, their households and their communities.2d, it would allow lifelong studying. It’s a shame that for thus many men and women, learning stops once we conclude high college or once we finish university. Through having this robust content material be to be had, we’d be capable to learn anything new each time we wanted, whether it can be just to develop our minds or it can be to vary our lives. And eventually, this might permit a wave of innovation, on account that powerful talent may also be observed at any place. Possibly the following Albert Einstein or the subsequent Steve Jobs is living someplace in a far off village in Africa.And if we might present that individual an education, they’d be ready to come up with the following massive notion and make the sector a better location for every body. Thanks very much. (Applause) .

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