#sometimes one just needs to outsource one's decisions

[muirmarie]

i've been so good at sitting my butt down and writing a minimum of 500 words a day (I don't plan to do this forever, and I do allow myself some skip days (like yesterday!), but I know myself, and the goal is to build momentum and habits so I do plan 500/day for the foreseeable future - and it's working! so far! I mean it's been like a month! and i've been consistent!), but -

but the story i started to sketch out at the same time as the time loop one (9. mccoy makes breakfast) is I think veering a little too close thematically to my last few, (even tho it's jim pov and mostly just silly shenanigans, but still) and i wanna change it up, so i'm thinking either:

2. strip poker

[Cons: I have to look up poker rules / Pros: VERY different vibe lmao / Cons: did I mention I need to do research. i wanted a brain empty story next / Pros: I do extremely want to write rampant cheating / Cons: I'm gonna have to learn how one even cheats in poker ugh / Pros: I am preemptively giving myself permission to beat any angst out of this fic with a baseball bat if I have to]

10. late night walk

[Cons: i have no plot / Pros: where we're going we don't NEED plot / Cons: i do want to write something heavier on the Kirk/Spock of it all bc I haven't really gone deep on that at all, and I don't know if this is the right one to do it / Pros: this fic will just involve me blasting music in my headphones and vibing, and jesus christ NO MORE MATH, i know the time loop math/science probably wasn't anything to write home about but it was HARD for me to keep it straight in my head lmaoooo, and I know the poker one will need more math brain stuff bc. poker. math. you get me.]

22. hayride

[Cons: I know in my heart this is going to be one of those where the frame is going to fight me. I'm gonna want to write all the fun little scenes, and then have to grit my teeth and stitch it all together / Pros: this is literally just fluff. / Cons: it really would be nice to be able to pick one I can write straight through and I KNOW the frame is gonna fight me. i KNOW it. / Pros: i can make that Vulcan eat some cotton candy. I can make Jim wear a pair of jeans that hug his butt SO well. I can graciously allow McCoy to kiss a horse's cheek. slightly drugged on hay fever meds jim kirk being so soft and sweet and handsy with the other two. basically all the reasons the frame is gonna fight me lmaoooooo]

or lastly just say screw it and keep writing the mccoy makes breakfast/bones can never tell jim no fic, which again, does have the major plus of being a jim pov (i'm really enjoying that!) and also so many silly shenanigans! but also. also. leonard horatio mccoy why do you always want to fight being loved. i am in your house. i am begging you to let me write a fun silly story. i am begging you to stop doing this to me.

someone just tell me which one to work on so i can get my minimum 500 words today when i'm free later on without facing The Struggle of Choice =/

[catspawcreates]

Y’all… I don’t usually broadcast much private life, but I had to pivot away from graphic design after my dept was outsourced early this year. (I’m still working on the zine tho!)

It was a big decision in order to ultimately provide and have stability for my kids. This summer was awful for art jobs all over (as many of us have seen and heard). While I’m sure the industries affected will recover, I just couldn’t wait. Rejection after rejection, barely getting a few interviews… I made a big shift

I’ve been in school the last few months learning how to drive big rig trucks. I know it’s a weird transition on paper, but I’m moving forward.

Today was the day of my CDL test.

…I got up… put on Sun & Moon socks for support! (Picture below)

It was unexpectedly snowing

On the way to the test site, the transmission on my van mostly crapped out

My van tried to overheat multiple times on the way

I still miraculously limped along and made it on time to test for my CDL (I had left Really Early thank goodness)

Guess what….

………

I passed! 💫

I now officially can legally drive a big truck and get a job to support my little family (and maybe an art hobby or three 😹)

I’m still dedicated to my Catspaw vision and art journey. Nothing much is changing here that hasn’t already changed. There is a lot more in store!

Sometimes you have to take the path that curves and winds to get where you need to go, but no matter your journey, just keep moving forward, one step at a time.

Many hearts. Much support for all of you and wherever your journey leads you.

[novadreii]

Mmm actually I think we do owe love and care to our loved ones! We do owe each other things sometimes! There is a duty of care in our relationships that we should do our very best to uphold. It's the basis for human connection? An informal agreement we have with someone dear to us that we will support and cherish them and not just when it's easy and in the ways that feel effortless to us but also in the ways that they feel most loved.

We owe each other consideration. We owe each other a chance to chime in on important things and we should not make unilateral decisions. We owe each other reassurance sometimes too! Gasp!

I know that we're unlearning our generational trauma collectively but what's the point if we draw such hard boundaries around ourselves that nobody is let in, and nobody is helped, loved or considered when they really need it?

What is the point of being connected to another human being if it's understood between the two of you that if shit hits the fan, they are loyal only to themselves and you can get fucked?

I get it. We need to be self-sufficient. We can't rely on someone to the point of falling apart when they leave the house. But entering into a relationship or close friendship (or nurturing our existing familial relationships that are healthy) is a declaration that we CAN but don't WANT to be 100% self-sufficient anymore. We'd like to outsource a portion of our bandwidth to the other person. And in exchange, we take on some of theirs. It can't be rainbows all the time: again, most of us are traumatized by our parents in some way. We have behaviours that make us unpleasant sometimes! But why does that necessarily mean that we cut each other off when we show symptoms? When we actually need to cash in on some support the most? Where pray tell lies the nuance between "cut off abusive people who have no intention of changing" and "sometimes our loved ones can act ugly on the road to healing, but as long as they commit to bettering themselves I will see them through it"???? Does the latter not exist at all?

The act of caring and being cared for is one of the only fucking things we have left that can sustain our hearts in this bleak world. If you don't want to be burdened with the expectation of reciprocation in your relationships then what is the point of seeking connection? You are missing a fundamental fucking variable.

[grison-in-space]

I'm honestly curious how you square the criticism of paternalism with the apparent conviction that people (or at least some people) are better off with some kind of minder, or in some way unfree. These read as basically the same things to me, so what qualifications need to apply to the latter to make it acceptable?

You know what, that is a fair question. I think what I was trying to articulate last night is actually a little more complicated than that, but I definitely did not lay out the connective tissue to get there, and I see how you got that reading. (I am very much one of those people who thinks by speaking, sometimes, and I am absolutely doing some of that by this point.)

First: I don't think that some people are better off unfree, full stop. I really want to emphasize that very strongly here.

Second: I was trying to articulate some of my tension with the notion that 100% unbounded freedom of choice is inherently the ideal to which all individuals (do? should?) aspire. ARA philosophy focuses really heavily on the idea that any curtailment of choice or influence from humans to animals is inherently coercion and therefore immoral. It focuses very strongly on the idea that freedom to choose is the highest possible value to strive for.

And I think that partaking in society is inherently to accept curtailments on at least some freedoms, in exchange for receiving the support and resources of the greater social whole. (If nothing else, sometimes things I would like to do are also things that will upset someone else in my shared social world, who will then impose consequences on me about it.) What I was trying to do is articulate that trading some of those freedoms in exchange for the benefits of a society can be, and often is, a pretty good trade. That's why sociality exists in the first place, even in the existence of some pretty harsh hierarchies within some species.

I was not very clear about this, I freely admit.

The thing you gotta understand about me is that I think in terms of trade offs. Life is a series of imperfect decisions made to allocate finite resources (if nothing else, time) between series of conflicting demands and desires. Understanding those decisions is essentially my bread and butter. And everything has a cost—even preference itself.

Now, in terms of humans, one of the things that humans are genuinely rather unusual about is our collective capacity for delayed gratification, impulse control, and abstract reasoning. When we talk about animals, we have to recall that informed consent in this sense is essentially impossible to acquire: without language to convey abstract options and with much less capacity to consider future outcomes, it's harder to present these ideas to animals the way you can with humans.

And... for all that humans are unusually good at those things, we're not always that good at them! I was trying to reach for and articulate that my own experiences with decision-making in the present instant don't always square with my longer term goals and values, and that reasoning through the long term consequences of my actions like a perfectly logical actor isn't always something I am capable of doing in all moments of all time. Which is why I build in structures to outsource some of that cognitive load. I think there's a considerable cognitive load that comes with decision-making in an infinitely complex world, and I think that part of the utility of society is to help structure choices so that you don't have to engage in the cognitive effort of gathering information for every potential choice you could make and then making it. The structure lets us conserve effort and reserve energy for other goals and decisions.

I don't have to know why the fire code says there needs to be an egress window in my basement bedroom and think about whether the future risk of fire justifies the definite immediate cost of paying for the window and accurately assess the risk of burning alive; I just need to know that my city fire code says my choice is to have a bedroom with an egress window or not have a bedroom there. Risk assessment is really hard and it carries a lot of uncertainty; yielding my judgement to a trustworthy authority is a way to conserve effort.

Of course, how do we know an authority is trustworthy? That's the thing that is hard; the consequences of yielding choice to a structure that is not actually built to support you are stark. And authority isn't always trustworthy by default.

I view the ideal role of the state as a way to structure our society such that we leave maximal room for freedom while minimizing the amount of effort and discomfort it takes to attain longer term collective goals for safety and comfort. The inclusion of humans with all kinds of experiences in that power structure to the extent that we can do so, with expertise in various situations outsourced to people who have dedicated significant time to thinking deeply about those cases, helps us to minimize the risk of authority wielded to oppress rather than to guide. (And yes, circling back to disability and mad pride, the experience of people with cognitive, emotional, and perceptive disabilities absolutely needs to be a part of that structure.) We collectively build authoritative structures that shape our choice making environment such that we have relatively little room for harm and increased freedoms elsewhere.

That's humans. We can think far enough ahead and communicate well enough to make that work. Animals generally can't. So when we think about the ethics of human/animal interactions, it's likewise important to make sure that we are listening as carefully as we can in order to try to navigate that trade off as carefully as possible, with the caveat that it IS a trade off rather than an unalloyed good juxtaposed against a certain evil.

[reasoningdaily]

Across a sterile white table in a windowless room, I’m introduced to a woman in her forties. She has a square jaw and blonde hair that has been pulled back from her face with a baby-blue scrunchie. “The girls call me Marmalade,” she says, inviting me to use her prison nickname. Early on a Wednesday morning, Marmalade is here, in a Finnish prison, to demonstrate a new type of prison labor.

The table is bare except for a small plastic bottle of water and an HP laptop. During three-hour shifts, for which she’s paid €1.54 ($1.67) an hour, the laptop is programmed to show Marmalade short chunks of text about real estate and then ask her yes or no questions about what she’s just read. One question asks: “is the previous paragraph referring to a real estate decision, rather than an application?”

“It’s a little boring,” Marmalade shrugs. She’s also not entirely sure of the purpose of this exercise. Maybe she is helping to create a customer service chatbot, she muses.

In fact, she is training a large language model owned by Metroc, a Finnish startup that has created a search engine designed to help construction companies find newly approved building projects. To do that, Metroc needs data labelers to help its models understand clues from news articles and municipality documents about upcoming building projects. The AI has to be able to tell the difference between a hospital project that has already commissioned an architect or a window fitter, for example, and projects that might still be hiring.

Around the world, millions of so-called “clickworkers” train artificial intelligence models, teaching machines the difference between pedestrians and palm trees, or what combination of words describe violence or sexual abuse. Usually these workers are stationed in the global south, where wages are cheap. OpenAI, for example, uses an outsourcing firm that employs clickworkers in Kenya, Uganda, and India. That arrangement works for American companies, operating in the world’s most widely spoken language, English. But there are not a lot of people in the global south who speak Finnish.

That’s why Metroc turned to prison labor. The company gets cheap, Finnish-speaking workers, while the prison system can offer inmates employment that, it says, prepares them for the digital world of work after their release. Using prisoners to train AI creates uneasy parallels with the kind of low-paid and sometimes exploitive labor that has often existed downstream in technology. But in Finland, the project has received widespread support.

“There's this global idea of what data labor is. And then there's what happens in Finland, which is very different if you look at it closely,” says Tuukka Lehtiniemi, a researcher at the University of Helsinki, who has been studying data labor in Finnish prisons.

For four months, Marmalade has lived here, in Hämeenlinna prison. The building is modern, with big windows. Colorful artwork tries to enforce a sense of cheeriness on otherwise empty corridors. If it wasn’t for the heavy gray security doors blocking every entry and exit, these rooms could easily belong to a particularly soulless school or university complex.

Finland might be famous for its open prisons—where inmates can work or study in nearby towns—but this is not one of them. Instead, Hämeenlinna is the country’s highest-security institution housing exclusively female inmates. Marmalade has been sentenced to six years. Under privacy rules set by the prison, WIRED is not able to publish Marmalade’s real name, exact age, or any other information that could be used to identify her. But in a country where prisoners serving life terms can apply to be released after 12 years, six years is a heavy sentence. And like the other 100 inmates who live here, she is not allowed to leave.

When Marmalade first arrived, she would watch the other women get up and go to work each morning: they could volunteer to clean, do laundry, or sew their own clothes. And for a six hour shift, they would receive roughly €6 ($6.50). But Marmalade couldn’t bear to take part. “I would find it very tiring,” she says. Instead she was spending long stretches of time in her cell. When a prison counselor suggested she try “AI work,” the short, three-hour shifts appealed to her, and the money was better than nothing. “Even though it’s not a lot, it’s better than staying in the cell,” she says” She’s only done three shifts so far, but already she feels a sense of achievement.

This is one of three Finnish prisons where inmates can volunteer to earn money through data labor. In each one, there are three laptops set up for inmates to take part in this AI work. There are no targets. Inmates are paid by the hour, not by their work’s speed or quality. In Hämeenlinna, around 20 inmates have tried it out, says Minna Inkinen, a prison work instructor, with cropped red hair, who sits alongside Marmalade as we talk. “Some definitely like it more than others”. When I arrive at the prison on a Wednesday morning, the sewing room is already busy. Inmates are huddled over sewing machines or conferring in pairs over mounds of fabric. But the small room where the AI work takes place is entirely empty until Marmalade arrives. There are only three inmates in total who regularly volunteer for AI shifts, Inkinen says, explaining that the other two are currently in court. “I would prefer to do it in a group,” says Marmalade, adding that she keeps the door open so she can chat with the people sewing next door, in between answering questions.

Those questions have been manually written in an office 100 kilometers south of the prison, in a slick Helsinki coworking space. Here, I meet Metroc’s tall and boyish founder and CEO, Jussi Virnala. He leads me to a stiflingly hot phone booth, past a row of indoor swings, a pool table, and a series of men in suits. It’s an exciting week, he explains, with a grin. The company has just announced a €2 million ($2.1 million) funding round which he plans to use to expand across the Nordics. The investors he spoke with were intrigued by the company’s connection to Finland’s prisons, he says. “Everyone was just interested in and excited about what an innovative way to do it,” says Virnala. “I think it’s been really valuable product-wise.”

It was Virnala’s idea to turn to the prisons for labor. The company needed native Finnish speakers to help improve its large language model’s understanding of the construction-specific language. But in a high-wage economy like Finland, finding those data laborers was difficult. The Finnish welfare system’s generous unemployment benefits leaves little incentive for Finns to sign up to low-wage clickwork platforms like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. “Mechanical Turk didn’t have many Finnish-language workers,” says Virnala. At the same time, he adds, automatic translation tools are still no good at Finnish, a language with only 5 million native speakers.

When Virnala pitched his idea to Pia Puolakka, head of the Smart Prison Project at Finland’s prison and probation agency, she was instantly interested, she says. Before the pandemic, another Finnish tech company called Vainu had been using prisoners for data labor. But Vainu abruptly pulled out after a disagreement between cofounders prompted Tuomas Rasila, who had been in charge of the project, to leave the company.

By the time Virnala approached her with his proposal in 2022, Puolakka was eager to resurrect the AI work. Her job is to try and make the relationship between Finnish prisons and the internet more closely resemble the increasingly digital outside world. So far, she has been installing laptops in individual cells so inmates can browse a restricted list of websites and apply for permission to make video calls. She considers data labor just another part of that mission.

The aim is not to replace traditional prison labor, such as making road signs or gardening. It’s about giving prisoners more variety. Data labeling can only be done in three-hour shifts. “It might be tiring to do this eight hours a day, only this type of work,” she says, adding that it would be nice if inmates did the data labeling alongside other types of prison labor. “This type of work is the future, and if we want to prepare prisoners for life outside prison, a life without crime, these types of skills might be at least as important as the traditional work types that prisons provide,” she says.

But how much data labeling offers inmates skills that are transferable to work after prison is unclear. Tuomas Rasila, the now estranged cofounder of Vainu, who managed the prison project there for a year, admits he has no evidence of this; the project wasn’t running for long enough to collect it, he says. “I think asking people, who might feel outside of society, to train the most high-tech aspect of a modern society is an empowering idea.”

However, others consider this new form of prison labor part of a problematic rush for cheap labor that underpins the AI revolution. “The narrative that we are moving towards a fully automated society that is more convenient and more efficient tends to obscure the fact that there are actual human people powering a lot of these systems,” says Amos Toh, a senior researcher focusing on artificial intelligence at Human Rights Watch.

For Toh, the accelerating search for so-called clickworkers has created a trend where companies are increasingly turning to groups of people who have few other options: refugees, populations in countries gripped by economic crisis—and now prisoners.

“This dynamic is a deeply familiar one,” says Toh. “What we are seeing here is part of a broader phenomenon where the labor behind building tech is being outsourced to workers that toil in potentially exploitative working conditions.”

Toh is also skeptical about whether data labor can help inmates build digital skills. “There are many ways in which people in prison can advance themselves, like getting certificates and taking part in advanced education,” he says. “But I'm skeptical about whether doing data labeling for a company at one euro per hour will lead to meaningful advancement.” Hämeenlinna prison does offer inmates online courses in AI, but Marmalade sits blank-faced as staff try to explain its benefits.

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By the time I meet Lehtiniemi, the researcher from Helsinki University, I’m feeling torn about the merits of the prison project. Traveling straight from the prison, where women worked for €1.54 an hour, to Metroc’s offices, where the company was celebrating a €2 million funding round, felt jarring. In a café, opposite the grand, domed Helsinki cathedral, Lehtiniemi patiently listens to me describe that feeling.

But Lehtiniemi’s own interviews with inmates have given him a different view—he’s generally positive about the project. On my point about pay disparity, he argues this is not an ordinary workforce in mainstream society. These people are in prison. “Comparing the money I get as a researcher and what the prisoner gets for their prison labor, it doesn't make sense,” he says. “The only negative thing I’ve heard has been that there’s not enough of this work. Only a few people can do it,” he says, referring to the limit of three laptops per prison.

“When we think about data labor, we tend to think about Mechanical Turk, people in the global south or the rural US,” he says. But for him, this is a distinct local version of data labor, which comes with a twist that benefits society. It’s giving prisoners cognitively stimulating work—compared to other prison labor options—while also representing the Finnish language in the AI revolution.

Without this kind of initiative, Lehtiniemi worries that non-English languages are being locked out of this next generation of technology. Smart speakers still struggle to understand Finnish dialects. “Not all Finnish people speak English very well, so there's a need for these local forms of data labeling as well,” Lehtiniemi says. Metroc isn’t the only company that has been forced to get creative about finding Finnish data labor. In 2011, the national library created a game to incentivize volunteers to help digitize its archive. In 2020, broadcaster YLE teamed up with Helsinki University and the state development company VAKE to ask volunteers to donate recordings of them speaking Finnish.

There is a sense in Finland that the prison project is just the beginning. Some are worried it could set a precedent that could introduce more controversial types of data labeling, like moderating violent content, to prisons. “Even if the data being labeled in Finland is uncontroversial right now, we have to think about the precedent it sets,” says Toh. “What stops companies from outsourcing data labeling of traumatic and unsavory content to people in prison, especially if they see this as an untapped labor pool?”

It's also not clear whether labor conditions in Finland's prisons—which famously focus on rehabilitation—could be replicated in other countries with a less progressive approach to justice. In the US, 76 percent of prisoners report that prison labor is mandatory, according to civil rights group, the ACLU. “The prison system in the United States is very, very different from what we have in Finland or Nordic countries. It's a completely different idea,” says Rasila. “In Finland, there is an exclusively positive feeling around the project because everyone knows that this is very voluntary.”

AI companies are only going to need more data labor, forcing them to keep seeking out increasingly unusual labor forces to keep pace. As Metroc plots its expansion across the Nordics and into languages other than Finnish, Virnala is considering whether to expand the prison labor project to other countries. “It’s something we need to explore,” he says.

[bilboyagathechickenfootedhobbit]

Regarding your response to that post on advertisements, if you ever get a moment could you think up some of the key "easter eggs" you mentioned to look for in ads or do you have any recommendations of educational videos/books that you studied in class? Sorry if this has been asked before. Your perspective seems so intriguing.

So I had like, WAY too long of a response to this and was like, nobody wants to read your damn thesis 😂 So here’s my hopefully more concise answer (surprise, it’s not actually any more concise).

I took that class over a quarter century ago (Hi, I’m old 👋) and aside from retaining the visceral lizard-brain memories of “ADS EVIL DO NOT CONSUME” I don’t recall exact specifics, and sadly, my textbook has been lost during one of my many moves.

One thing I vividly recall: women’s placement in ads. They are almost ALWAYS shown in a physically lower position than men. The exception being if a minority man is in the ad, then a white woman would sometimes be allowed to be placed above him, but a woman of any minority would still be placed lower than the minority man. It reminded me of certain building laws in the city: nothing can be taller than this building. Except in the ads, it was: nobody is allowed to appear taller than this white dude in any way.

That’s a minor thing, but it was one of the more blatant things that I couldn’t help but see EVERYWHERE once I realized it.

I think the main takeaway I took from that class that served me so well as a young woman in a capitalist society was simply realizing that, to any major brand, I am just an object, a consumer, a rube to swindle. They don’t actually care about how plump my lips are or how healthy my skin looks or how shiny my hair is or how fashionable I am. They only care about my personhood insofar as it better enables them to adjust their sales techniques to rob me of my money. And if I avoid them entirely, or as much as possible in this ad-saturated culture, then I can make purchasing decisions based on my actual needs and not the imagined needs some corporate shill came up with during a board meeting.

So yeah, that was my shorter answer, sorry for the wall of text. I’m always happy to discuss the gross ways in which advertising affects us and how we can avoid it and how much better life is without ads. I grew up in the era of heroin chic and anorexia, and ads were a nightmare. They’re worse in ways now, for sure, especially with it being outsourced to influencers, but at least we get to see stretch marks and different body types nowadays. Even if all the “fat” body types are still hourglass figures, it’s better than the parade of skeletons that was forced on teenage girls in the 90’s. That shit is still fucking with my generation nearly three decades later.

I wish I had recommendations, but even if I did, they’d probably be so outdated since the game has changed so drastically in the years since I took that class. Between 24-hour cable and social media, advertising has mutated into an entirely new, horridly evil beast that I’d honestly hate to study.

[chemicalpink]

ଘ(´•×•)⊃━☆ a (not so brief) life update

In case you've been wondering where I've been cause by now we all know I tend to just disappear.

A few days ago I felt like oversharing a bit for anyone interested, I feel like getting to this point of sharing is due and will allow me to stop this irrational fear of the internet that I have somehow developed as it tallies to my accountability on this blog.

So hang tight! Cause this is about to be a wild ride...

I'm not regressing to the very beginning cause this isn't about to be a therapy session but I will go back to the near beginnings of this account during the pandemic.

A little before lockdown as I was asked to collaborate as a customs specialist for a pop-up store (which then I found out to be BTS') so I got into them after my job was done. A bit after going down the rabbit hole I started this blog, without very much planning into it, just merely creating a safe space for the people with whom could potentially like the same things I did.

A few months into it, as a last year International Relations student on my way to law school, and with a bit of sleep deprived courage, I applied for an internship at BH online, not expecting much since I barely knew Korean and was most definitely stuck at home in a whole different continent. But things surprisingly worked out, I didn't get paid at all but it was a great learning experience. BH became HB and I got to experience that from the inside, my day went like this: school from 7am to 5 pm and work from 9pm to 3am (sometimes more)

I obviously never got to work directly with any idols, my work was merely global and very much law related. Customs, contracts, negotiations with international enterprises. When the lockdown was done with, I was asked to move and become a permanent worker of theirs, so I did. However, it involved a lot of moving around so I wasn't exactly based anywhere and living costs are quite a thing. During this time I was also profiling myself as a diplomat, so it was in all of our best interests that I became outsourced.

Which brings us to a timeline closer to the present, the person that was in charge of contacting me for the gigs that I used to do for them suddenly quit and while I'm sure they were doing whatever was best for them, left me fending for myself during may-june. I came back home with my parents during june-july and networked for a bit– at least enough to regroup my possibilities so during august-september I was allowed to staff and collaborate (on a lower level) on some big concerts/tours.

During this time however (july-september) I was mostly reliant on my parents and coincidentally, their work slowed down by a lot. The rather small amount of money I got from working here and there was spent on my medical treatment (during july my doctor let me know that I needed to get diagnosed properly for lupus and by august my treatment costs were up by a lot) I tried picking up freelance tutoring (a pain, truly) and other small hustles that didn't require me to tire myself out too much since most of my days I spent aching all over, while also caring for my mother who had to have an emergency glaucoma surgery.

Oh and I cried and felt miserable during my birthday so.

I believe that's where we are at. I can't exactly get a job since I need to apply to an unpaid internship in order to graduate law school but I can't apply for an internship because one of my teachers just suddenly decided to fail me in their class (which means I need to pass it first) so I try to get by with small, low commitment hustles and now I'm picking up more seriously my ko-fi content. Which is why, I haven't been on here.

Those damned retrogrades hit me good ngl.

I do want to say though, I am not in a state of emergency, however, I am not living comfortably, but I'm trying my best to pick myself up and be nice to myself with the decisions I make and actions I take by the minute. While also trying to save up to go visit my 17 year old sister that has just moved away to study medicine.

I am grateful for what I have and I cherish you all that have remained close to me (even in this infinite nothingness that is the internet) and I hope you've been treating yourselves kindly during this time. If you'll have me, let's navigate the rest of the year together.

If this gains a lot of traction, I'm privating it lmao. I have no issue now talking about it since I'm no longer working there but I made those NDAs myself so I know what I'm up to.

[johannwolfgangvongoethe]

organizing care + being a legal guardian + struggle tweeting irl

enstars thought collection below. i dont know how we got here.

anyway, so this is a post where i talk about my vague ideas on whats up with kanames health and care situation. like, legally speaking.

(spoilers for everything surrounding kaname, obbligato specifically)

basically. i am an avid tatsumi and himeru enjoyer and healthcare business and law is? my hobby? idk if you can call this a hobby? so i have been absolutely obsessing over every little throwaway line we get about how kanames long-term care is organized. because depending on who is currently responsible on paper... that could really influence a lot, right!!! since right now kaname is unable to make health decisions for himself.

we all know (ore-)himeru is going through a lot and the possibility of an added responsibility and financial burden of a guardianship on him is something that is very interesting to me.

point of the post so this post isnt much about existing laws (as they are extremely complicated, even if youre native to a region and language), i mostly want to discuss what we know and the possibilities and the mental burden of carrying legal responsibility on top of internal emotions (grief, guilt, loneliness, despair and hopelessness, possessiveness even, and whatever else himeru has going on).

its smth that strongly gnaws on you. i think everyone who ever had to apply for care/benefits will know how horrible of a process it is.

boring health stuff i tried to look up japanese law surrounding how long-term payment and guardianship is organized and who qualifies for both. i am german so obviously most of my knowledge only concerns the legal situation here, unfortunately. i am Assuming enstars just follows the laws of irl japan and as such at least a considerable chunk of financial burdens should be lifted by the countries mandatory insurance.(70%) BUT the long-term intensive care situation for people under the age of 40 is murky (relevant long-term care laws exist for the elderly and aim to provide financial relief. but idk how theyd handle the case of a teenager, especially one that, we can assume, used to be in the foster system. the jpn foster system is its own can of worms) no surprise, disability/care related payment plans for young people, esp those who have never been employed or paid into insurance, are always like. ridiculously convoluted. sometimes nonexistent. so who knows which laws specifically affect kaname here.

(ore-)himeru mentions him still being at a hospital (in romantic? date chapter 5) so that is a vital clue that this has not been outsourced to some other care facility. so i wonder... how expensive is this currently. must be intense. i am just willing to bet his legal guardian (will get to this in a second) has to make financial efforts, on top of the papers and forms and emotional burden that such an arrangement brings with itself. additionally, its somewhat obvious but ill specify it anyways: we are talking about a full-time in-patient situation. (ore-)himeru mentions the circumstances of kanames current health in chapter 1 of the epilogue of obbligato. (while not fully comatose, kaname is not lucid. he does some vocalizing sometimes but communication is not possible.)

so. HiMERU and all that makes you wonder... are the himerus connected via guardianship. we know from obbligato that kanames mothers is dead, he grew up alone (the tojo family not being in the picture, apparently), and while their father is alive, he was not in a position to care for either of them himself, health-wise. (and financially, i am willing to bet) so, responsibility would just jump to the next relative; that being the adult brother. young adult who barely made it back to the country! but working and adult and insured nonetheless, therefore qualifying.

i would assume (ore-)himeru did not need to step up/wasnt really in the picture either (at least health system databases might not have been aware of him) but he visits him in the hospital. even before that, he attempted to become at least somewhat involved in kanames life by his rough attempts to coach him. and most of all, you know how much kaname means to him. i am just going to assume he claimed him.

and like, thats a shit situation for someone in their early 20s (or however old he is). that would be horrible for anyone in a more stable situation at a more established age.

the emotional baggage of it all. not only have you just met your half brother and just gotten around to the idea of having family, you instantly get it taken from you again. the loss and grief and guilt must be unimaginable.

(ore-)himeru has.... unbelievable issues when it comes to... his attempts to prepare what he thinks would be an ideal life for kaname. whether in hope of one day handing it over or just as a sad tribute to what could have been or an attempt to keep “himeru”, the artistic vision, alive. however much of this is happening in what percentage and on what conscious level.

so to the urge to make “himeru” famous, this would add the absolute need to make himeru famous as a source of steady good income. of course (ore-)himeru is desperate to do well out of pride and love but financially and on paper he would be responsible for two people, adding to the pressure to be as successful as possible.

(additionally, while it does not justify (ore-)himeru’s actions, himeru also dodged a public scandal by staying an idol and performing as per usual. there were no news about an idol being beaten and staying unconscious and that by itself provides protection from the public for kaname. especially since his family is infamous to begin with. i wonder how much this would have mattered.)

matching themes? personally as a disabled person, as far as guadianship and custodianship goes, i have a lot of feelings. we all experienced it when we were younger and probably felt powerless in front of our parents sometimes. so experiencing this in your adulthood is GUTTING. yet, it can be absolutely necessary. and while guardians and custodians are often looked down upon, a lot of them are family members with their heart and mind in the right place, who make good decisions for someone they love. it cannot be underestimated how much paperwork and exhausting+annoying communication with your insurance provider goes into it.

so between this and (ore-)himerus behaviour in general i see a lot of matching themes.... mostly control and perseverance and, ofc, a certain flair of being very very condescending towards the person you are supposed to protect. after all, kaname cannot make any decisions right now, not about his health or “himeru”. and perhaps one day maybe his state will change and he will suddenly be more aware of his surroundings and forced to confront what happened without his influence. and he will find that his brother made responsible comprehensible decisions when it comes to his health but, without any need or agreement, took extreme liberties when it comes to his name. they are both important parts of him and (ore-)himeru having that double responsibilty and going wild with it is scary to me. and probably also scary to him. but he is too deep into it at this point.

idk. does any of this make sense. is this interesting. personally, the added layer of pressure and drama is interesting to me. to me its like... it supports all the themes we find in himeru anyway and makes his struggles worse, it just neatly fits into place.

personal related kaname thoughts will the story ever make him more lucid? who knows! i am terrified, personally, of the possibility.

enstars has its fair share of insensitive to offensive writing and i cannot imagine this going well. i cannot imagine them writing this in a way that is respectful and includes a realistic rehab process that restores a realistic amount of physical and neurological functions. especially since... not gonna lie guys. at this point. idk how much quality of life kaname can regain in his current state.

+the added trouble he would get in because (ore-)himeru, essentially, stole his identity is straight up infuriating. i dont think i have to mention this. where do you even start and TRY to live a normal life after this shit.

and thats sad. bc i love kaname dearly. he is an extremely silly, bratty, lovable character to me and i want the best for him so i have these horribly detailed harsh expectations. maybe it will never happen and ngl, that would be perfectly fine with me, too.

disclaimer etc etc i dont know shit about the japanese health system and if you somehow happen to know how intensive long-term care for an underage person that grew up in the foster system would be financed (like, who is responsible??!?!??!?!) please let me know >:) i love learning about health systems. a lot of the stuff i wrote above is just really basic common sense, i just wanted to talk about it.

[traumendesmadchen]

Chronotopia January Update: Always Tied

I hope the new year is treating you well! If you’ve read my latest year-end post on the team’s devblog, you probably already know that I didn’t have a great time in 2022. In fact, I started 2023 quite depressed due to December’s fallout. I have good and bad news to announce and they are both kinda intertwined.

A New Roadmap

My partner and I have been dreaming of going to Japan for a very long time now and this dream should finally become reality this year. I’m elated, of course, but that trip has to happen in March and I’ll be away for almost a whole month. Needless to say that the deadline I had designated for Chronotopia: Second Skin is now entirely out of the question, which is why I have been feeling quite depressed lately. I know I’m often joking about a curse but I’m very tired of missing every single one of my milestones. You must be too.

This led me to take a painful decision. Up until now, I’ve been helping fellow developers on their own projects and it constantly required my attention. I’ve frankly spread myself too thin, I need to go back to the basics. That’s why I declined several offers and had to cut some collaboration short so that I could focus on Chronotopia as much as possible. January turned out to be a transition period as I wrapped everything I needed to do on those projects. No more outsourcing contracts for a while! It’s a financially dangerous decision but I’m hellbent on not wasting any more time.

I’m now hoping to put a new roadmap in place. Something that should look like this:

February: Fixing all remaining bugs (more on that below)

March: /

April: Directing harmonization

May: TL revisions

June: Completing intimate scenes and, hopefully, release

This time I included an extra month just to be safe so let’s pray that it’ll be enough!

Early Bug Report

For those of you who applied, I hope you’re enjoying Chronotopia’s beta so far! To be perfectly honest, I haven’t received a lot of feedback yet: I suspect releasing the build in the middle of the holidays might not have been the smartest move, ahah.

But I did receive reports of the point system still leaving a lot to be desired, effectively locking people out of the endings. Since it had been a persistent issue with private beta-testing already, I will have to rethink the whole system to ensure this won’t happen with the final version. If you have this problem, don’t hesitate to send me a mail and I will provide you with a guide in the meantime. Not having the end of a story is a shame, after all!

Likewise, I’ve been told the translation bug was back. I thought I had managed to nip it in the bud before the beta started but that was unfortunately wishful thinking on my part. Sometimes special text stubbornly refuses to be displayed in English when it’s supposed to be your chosen language because the main version of Chronotopia: Second Skin is considered to be French. One especially egregious example would be a full letter that appears on-screen during the C routes. Needless to say that I need to find a workaround!

Many thanks to the testers that reported both of those issues, I will work on fixing them shortly. I’ll likely put an end to the beta phase after I’m back from Japan so, until then, please keep the feedback coming!

[dearmrsawyer]

Went to The Vamps a few nights ago and had the most fun :) there's something about them?? I don't enjoy a party and I think seeing the Vamps is how a party is supposed to feel lol. They're so FUN, i love sharing a room with them.

I drove up to Sydney to see them, had a great solo concert experience and drove back home. It's the first time I've driven myself to a concert because generally my family see it as a chance to have a night in Sydney while I'm at the show, so I'm always accompanied by a couple of people for the drive. But my brother was away that night and my mum had to stay home so my grandparents wouldn't be alone, so I drove myself and although I was nervous i really enjoyed it! (Also I think my first Vamps concert was the first concert I ever went to alone, and now I'm addicted - I love going to concerts alone)

I was thinking on the drive home about how, aside from work, that's the longest I've been alone since moving into my current house. I haven't been in a very good place for the past year, I know that my life doesn't belong to me right now. It belongs to nonno and nonna, as do any decisions I make about my time. I can't pop out whenever because we need to make sure someone is always home, and I spend many of my free days at home because one of the carers had to cancel their shift (or training a new carer because mum is at work/away). Mum cooks for them 3 or 4 times a week so i'm not very good about cooking when I need to, I eat toast at work for lunch a lot lately lol. And like realistically i don't even have the energy to cook more than I do or leave the house anyway! I feel like I never get to recharge enough to reply to my friend's texts from November, let alone do anything else lol. On new year's day I was thinking about how the new year is like a figment, there's not a single thing about this year that can be different from last year, and felt like I was suffocating. I know it sounds awful to feel that way about living with nonna and nonno. I feel bad because i do like 10% of the caring, probably even less than that, and anything i don't do is on mum's shoulders. I know she's living in survival mode too, but i don't want to talk to her about how hard some days feel because i know she'll carry it and try to find a way to take some of it off my shoulders, and it'll just put more on hers. I know she'll feel like she forced me into this situation and i don't want her to because the reality is that I wouldn't change a thing, this is the best case scenario - the idea of outsourcing my grandparents' care feels far worse than whatever difficulty we have to live through to take care of them here. But it's still difficulty. I try to soothe myself because i know it's the best option, and i get to have all this extra time with them while they're still here. I don't usually feel better lol but i know it's the truth. I'm not very chatty on here because this is all i have felt for a long time, it feels so inane to express other thoughts/feelings that are so small compared to these mammoth feelings towering overhead. Putting it here/reading it again is annoying even me! sick of my own internal monologue!! Also trying to express these feelings is yuck because I feel like I can't express them properly lol, i have lost the ability to communicate. Anyways, I do try to express other thoughts sometimes, to have moments when i feel i have acurately expressed a thought! And hopefully I have the energy/words/will to be able to express more here and there!

I have a more of concerts coming up this year:

Harry on 3 March with my best friend (I'm excited but i'm still pretty disappointed to be seeing him tour Harry's House, which I'm not super in love with 😭 Fine Line is such a beautiful album, I wish i could see him give it all his attention! I love a couple of songs on HH, and there are a couple more that I like listening to but i just can't cope with singing a menu, i can't, i can't sing 'fried rice' 'cook an egg' and feel like i still have my dignity, harry)

MCR on 19 March also with my best friend (we will be seeing each other twice in one month, exactly the number of times i saw her in 2022 lol)

Kisschasy with an old friend from highschool (they're playing at the uni, which is RIGHT behind my house! I'll literally just walk there!)

Also we're going to see Lano and Woodley's new performance and i can't wait, it's going to be so fun

oh AND the local theatre company is doing a Midsummer Night's Dream in the botanical gardens. It was supposed to be December just gone but they postponed because of rain so its this coming December instead. I'm going with my best friend to that too

Trying to think about all of these and how I'm doing more Things this year, and I will hopefully feel like i'm getting more Me moments and maybe this will help average out the general ~life feelings

[maifrenthebesto]

As a single guy, having girl friends is an adverse effect of your history of dating trials and lessons. You talk to multiple girls trying to find someone with a similar level of interest to yours towards them, with the least likelihood of them choosing someone else over you.

You can usually make friends with girls despite the lack of romantic interest if there is reciprocity, however reciprocity is often the main metric by which guys gague interest in their current friend, so this leads to problems where girls aren't allowed to even be civil towards guys without sparking a flame on their forgotten forge.

As time goes on, and interest recedes from the potential relationship, you are inadvertently known by a handful of girls, and their respective underlying networks. She needs to share why yes, why not, and why maybe, and also for instances where the nos are important for the community at large to be known, usually via groupchats, but not entirely limited to. These are sometimes structured as a sort of hierarchy, with certain girls within the network being delegated tasks for the higher rank or "conventionally attractive" girls who run these groupchats like mafiosos.

Go check this, go find that, what do you know about this, what did we find about that?

At face value, this is an effor for girls to protect girls from strangers they meet, especially girls that go out often and have an interest in finding someone compatible, and while there might be an initial interest, they have to be approved by the council before you can be given the green light to escalate the situationship into the next level. Unless you're the matriarch and you can just veto the council's decision.

I a much more fond of rogue users, not exactly acting solo, since no one really is (if you're doing it alone, you're doig it wrong//it takes community to bring people together) but rather they report the findings of their own investigation to their cohorts for feedback, rather than having someone else do it for them, they are ultimately their own matriarchs. Delegating the task is done to save the mental resources consumed when doing it yourself. Along the way, without a good history of retention, you get used to doing it so often, that it's just faster to outsource your obsessive phase to someone else to see if you're gonna be going in after all, or if the guy will be passed down the hierarchy's food chain if there's even interest remaining after the process is finalized.

There's something in the eyes and faces of people who detach themselves so much from their intimate side that is just palpable, and saddening. It's the same dying light present behind the loneliest of eyes.

You can't really say it or bring it up right away, and if you do, there will be consequences. News of a problematic guy will spread like wildfire in the circles that care to maintain their structural agenda to preserve the flow of the system.

Some dystopian Mean Girls meets WatchDogs fever dream where in the pursuit of empowerment and taking back control, you sawed off the bridge you used to get to the top of the mountain, and you sell access to your gatekept sense of self plank by plank.

When you control the top, it is easy to think that you're the reason someone would climb the mountain. You think you're the view, when all you're doing is obstructing it, and keeping others from seeing that there's anything else up there besides your throne.

Why am I even thinking about this? It's so hard to see these invisible lines connecting all of us and not bring them up to anyone.

Please judge me based on the quality of my outlets, if you're gonna judge at all.

I'd ask that you don't judge at all, but you wouldn't be here if that was something you'd consider.

It's hard being soft.

You are already my friend.

At my age, few people are looking to have more friends who are girls, they want to find someone to build with, and they fall into these clandestine information trade's dissecting tables.

Hey the FBI does it, so why shouldn't you? I argue they shouldn't either but that hasn't stopped them, yet. Trust me, they told me.

That's why every once in a while they give us stories about how they found some fringe internet circle doing nefarious activities. They show us to keep justifying their invasion of privacy.

And we're in the belly of the beast, it's eat or be eaten.

This is my body, so go ahead and eat this now.

This is my blood, so go ahead and drink this now.

We breathe the same air, don't we?

[alliance00]

C-Suite Recruitment Strategies: Finding the Perfect Executives

Introduction

How do you find the right leaders to steer your organization toward success? That's a question many business owners and recruiters will keep them awake at night. Recruiting for C-suite positions is like putting together the final pieces of a puzzle: these leaders shape your organization's vision and culture. But where do you start?

In this article, we will demystify the art and science of C-suite recruitment, discuss some best practices in C-suite executive search, and empower you to learn how to excel at C-suite hiring with real-world tips. Let's get started!

1. Why C-Suite Recruitment Matters

The C-suite is not more of management. It is the nerve center that constitutes your organization. Their decisions are the ones taking risks and changing the current scenario of your company and deciding its future. For poor hiring at this point, the cost will be great both in terms of finances and reputation. Hence, their recruitment process should be to the point and thorough.

2. Understanding the C-Suite Landscape

What is the C-suite? In simple words, it is CEOs, CFOs, COOs, and many, many more. Different in their natures but what seems common is what they aim for: the purpose of driving success. And first, knowing what you need—and why—is part of any recruitment process.

3. Defining the Perfect Executive

Take a minute to think before beginning what the ideal candidate should be. What are your must-haves? Communication skills? Strategic thinking? Industry-specific knowledge? Setting it at the outset saves much hassle and time in the end.

4. Crafting a Clear Job Description

Your job description is your first impression. Make it count! Clearly outline the role's responsibilities, required skills, and company culture. Be transparent about expectations to attract candidates who align with your vision.

5. Leveraging Recruitment Agencies

Sometimes, outsourcing is the smartest move. Specialized recruitment agencies excel in C-suite executive search by connecting businesses with top-tier candidates. Their expertise can be a game-changer for hard-to-fill roles.

6. Tapping into Professional Networks

Treat your professional network as if it's a treasure trove. There is nothing better about LinkedIn for connecting with great industry leaders. Personal referral often gives the best result, somebody vouches for that individual's qualities.

7. The Role of Technology in Recruitment

Technology had made recruitment a more smart process by way of AI-driven platforms, applicant tracking systems, and many such others that facilitate better hiring. For example, predictive analytics enables the search for applicants by scanning and matching them in your set conditions, speedier the hiring.

8. Assessing Cultural Fit

Sure, skills and experience are necessary; however, cultural fit is, too. A leader can really throw a wrench in the workplace if he doesn't fit your organization's values. Use behavioral interviews to discern whether a candidate shares your company's ethos.

9. The Interview Process: Asking the Right Questions

The opportunity to drill down comes forth during your interviews. Your open-ended questions, such as, "How do you deal with failure?" or "How is your leadership style," will give you a hint of the candidate's actual character and problem-solving skill.

10. Handling Confidentiality in Executive Search

C-suite recruitment is sensitive. Confidentially, both parties are assured-the company and candidates-since nondisclosure agreements and discretion are utilized along the way.

11. Onboarding Your New C-Suite Executive

Onboarding is not just in the first week, but as a planned process it should take place with the set milestone, team introductions and cultural immersion. Effective onboarding sets up for long term success.

12. Learning from Recruitment Failures

Every failure teaches a lesson in disguise. Reflect on past hiring mistakes to improve future processes. Was it a lack of clarity in the job description? Perhaps a rushed decision? Addressing these gaps strengthens your strategy.

13. The Importance of Employer Branding

An attractive employer brand will always get top-notch people. Display through your website, social media, and even employee testimony, value of your company, the great achievement, and what type of culture is created.

14. Adapting to Industry Trends in Recruitment

Indeed, the recruitment landscape is changing rapidly. One should always be on par with trends like remote work, diversity initiatives, and continuous learning; otherwise, one's strategies remain ineffective.

15. Conclusion & Key Takeaways

Finding the right C-level executive is a form of art in itself, requiring equal doses of strategy, technology, and instinct. Your focus should be on defining your needs, leveraging networks, and assessing candidates holistically. Remember, finding the right leader is not merely filling a position but shaping the future of your company. For expert assistance in executive recruitment, contact us at Alliance Recruitment Agency—we are committed to helping you identify and onboard exceptional leaders who can drive your organization’s success.

View source: https://recruitmentagencyfranchise.hashnode.dev/c-suite-recruitment-strategies-finding-the-perfect-executives

[abdullahgfdsg]

Is Making Music Hard? Sometimes (so here are 8 tips)

Making music is like telling stories �� your stories. It’s your take on life and it’s totally creative. There’s no right or wrong way to do it.

So, is making music hard?

Sometimes yea, it is. But other times, not really. There’s a lot of nuance to it.

But either way, it’s super fun and a hyper-creative way to express yourself.

So let’s unpack things.

Making Music vs. Writing Songs

We need to split some hairs — making music doesn’t mean writing music (for this post).

Making music is more about the production process, but writing songs is more about the (non-production) ideation stages.

So I’m assuming you’re here because you’re curious about producing music.

But either way, the tips down below should help no matter what.

So, Why Is Making Music Hard?

Sometimes, making music is hard. Even the pros have off days.

But what makes writing difficult varies a lot and things tend to ebb and flow. One day, everything may be flowing, but the next day everything is falling apart.

Still, there are some things that usually make things worse:

Comparison culture

Life stress

Distractions

Musical burnout

Skill deficits

Your mood

The difficulty of the song you’re trying to write

Explore more: ➤ My Favorite Music Production Tips

How to Make Music Easier (8 tips)

1. Write Intuitively

Listening to your gut instinct is a musical soft skill.

But it’s hard, given all the modern distractions and social pressures to create or sound a certain way.

Intuitive songwriting is writing based on instinct and gut reaction. It’s songwriting without thinking too much about your decisions.

One way I like to tap into this is by setting a timer to gamify things. This adds some urgency and takes away the nuance of trying to make something “good” or “perfect”.

But just remember, creativity is a naturally intuitive process. So let things flow as they want.

Explore more: ➤ Intuitive Songwriting 101

2. Optimize for Flow

The best place to create from is in a state of flow.

Ideas pour out, intuition takes over and time disappears. It’s flow state.

Making music involves a lot of decision making, technical skills and confidence. And optimizing for a flow state makes these things less logical and more creative.

So here are some way I like to optimize for flow while making music:

Get rid of distractions

Make time for music (and nothing else)

Lean into spontaneity

Fix flow bottlenecks (like skill deficits)

Explore more: ➤ How I Harness A Creative Flow State

3. Play to Your Strengths

As a musician, some things will come easier for you.

For me, writing melodies and hooks feel natural. But singing, mixing and mastering used to disrupt my workflow. This made songwriting frustrating and annoying.

So to make things easier, I leaned on my strengths and fixed my weaknesses.

Playing to your strengths makes music production way easier and more fun.

But just remember that while leveraging your strengths makes things easier, skill building still makes you stronger. So it’s best to balance both.

Eventually, you can also outsource certain parts of the process.

But if you’re new to making music, just focus on skill building and learning the basics. Your natural strengths will come out sooner or later.

4. Fix or Outsource Your Weaknesses

If strengths make music-making easier, then weaknesses do the opposite.

So if you want to make songwriting easier, either fix or outsource your weaknesses.

For example, outsourcing the mixing and mastering stage is pretty common for many producers and solo artists.

But if you want to focus on skill building, then schedule in specific times to work on your weaknesses.

This skill-building time is not meant for songwriting, but for focused work. Using creative productivity methods help me with this.

5. Stop Trying to Be Someone Else

Making music is hard and stressful when you’re trying to be someone else.

So stop it.

Besides, the goal should be to find your authentic music style anyways.

Luckily, it’s actually pretty hard to copy someone exactly. Plus, failing at trying to be someone else is a great way to discover what makes you creatively authentic.

So while there’s nothing wrong with copycatting for inspiration and learning, stay aware of it when it comes time to creativity and songwriting.

Find your voice and unique style.

Because no one else can do you quite like you.

6. Totally Step Away

Sometimes, I lose the forest for the trees and get too deep into projects. I lose sight of my original vision.

This is when I know I need to step away.

Besides, it’s impossible to be fully creative 100% of the time anyways, so taking a break is healthy stuff.

Without breaks, we experience musical burnout and making music becomes more difficult.

So I like to step away from my DAW every now and then. And trust me, without fail, I always come back with new ideas, fresh ears and revived energy.

Songwriting gets easier and everything just flows better.

So step away. Take a vacation or just put away your stuff.

Clear your mind and forget about music making for a minute.

7. Write Simpler Songs

There’s no rule that says “good” music needs to be complex.

So write simpler songs — it makes the whole process less cluttered and easier.

This is especially helpful if you’re still a beginner, but it’s also a solid reminder for more advanced musicians.

While it sounds sexy to make a 100+ track production, stuff can sound just as good (often better) with just a few layers.

So keep things simple and go with the “less is more” rule.

8. Optimize for Fun

Remember, you’re making music. It’s creative play — so just have fun with it.

F*ck the rules and who cares if it even sounds good. I mean, get better with focused practice, but have fun first and foremost.

I mainly optimize for fun by simply detaching from metrics or money. Removing expectations sets me up nicely for not caring and just enjoying the process.

So let go and be chill.

It’s more fun this way.

Later ✌️

Is making music hard? Sometimes.

But tapping into your strengths, fixing your weaknesses, writing simpler songs and optimizing for fun makes things easier.

Music production has a definite learning curve, but it’s important to remember that it’s supposed to be fun, creative and an epic way to express yourself.

So enjoy the ups and downs. And stumble with a smile.

[tofangirlonly]

15, 20, 33, 40 👀

15. personality description

I tried to outsource and all I got was “I’m assuming ‘jeremy jordan’ is not the answer here?” so I may no longer have a discernable personality. XD

Hmm. I’d say I’m introverted and also quiet and awkward unless I’m super comfortable and then I’m (sometimes) louder but still very awkward it just hopefully becomes more endearingly quirky at some point XD I go into things whole-heartedly and passionately and feel all the things deeply.

Friends have previously said kind and caring and thoughtful and that I have a soft, gentle heart and spirit (which are beautiful things I may or may not still be).

20. what is your favourite song at the moment?

You are getting Very *at the moment* because I’m terrible at decisions and (as you know) I am looping Jeremy singing At Last excessively right now so: I love him.

I also listened to Not Jeremy today (shocking) and spent a good chunk of time listening to From This One Place by Sara Groves because my heart needed it.

33. something you want to learn

I started needlefelting a little bit a few months ago? I would like to continue learning and playing around with that. Sometimes you need an outlet for socially acceptable stabbing.

I was making a chipmunk and then Chloe got ahold of him…….She likes sheep and also apparently just the wool. She shredded his head. I still have his accompanying little tree stump with a cute little leaf and mushroom though XD

(I have also threatened to collect Chloe’s undercoat chunks during Intense Shedding Time and needlefelt a tiny model of her so. Learning goals.)

40. favourite memory

I was thinking a lot about two specific recurring childhood memories while these questions were marinating so I’m going to go with:

Laying on the bottom bunk at bedtime finding shapes in the wood of the top bunk with Mom

and

Waking up hearing my parents talking across the hall and the low rumble of Dad’s voice trying to talk quietly while I was still asleep. Especially because it’s specifically associated with Sunday mornings when Dad wasn’t going to work super early and often mixed with the extra bustle of them getting things ready on days when we were going to visit my grandma and it captures all the warmth and excitement and anticipation of that

Both remind me of a time of feeling so warm and safe and loved and I need that a lot these days.

[outsourcedresearchservices]

Leveraging Outsource Research and Analysis Services: A Strategic Advantage for Businesses

In today's fast-paced and fiercely competitive business landscape, staying ahead often requires more than just having a great product or service. It necessitates a deep understanding of market trends, consumer behavior, and industry insights. This is where outsourcing research and analysis services can prove to be a game-changer for businesses of all sizes.

Outsourcing research and analysis services involves partnering with specialized firms or professionals to gather, interpret, and analyze data relevant to a company's objectives. From market research and competitor analysis to financial modeling and data mining, outsourcing offers a plethora of benefits that can significantly augment a company's decision-making processes and overall strategic direction.

One of the primary advantages of outsourcing research and analysis services is access to specialized expertise. Instead of relying solely on in-house resources, businesses can tap into the knowledge and skills of professionals who specialize in specific areas of research and analysis. Whether it's conducting customer surveys, performing industry benchmarking, or crunching numbers for financial projections, outsourcing allows companies to leverage the expertise of seasoned professionals without the need for extensive training or recruitment.

Moreover, outsourcing research and analysis services can also lead to cost savings. Hiring and maintaining an in-house research team can be prohibitively expensive, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with limited budgets. By outsourcing these tasks, businesses can avoid the overhead costs associated with hiring full-time employees, such as salaries, benefits, and infrastructure. Instead, they can pay for the services they need on a project-by-project basis, thereby optimizing their expenses and improving their bottom line.

Another significant benefit of outsourcing research and analysis services is scalability and flexibility. Business needs are dynamic, and the volume and complexity of research requirements may fluctuate over time. Outsourcing allows companies to scale their research efforts up or down quickly in response to changing demands, without the constraints of fixed staffing levels. Whether it's a one-time market study or an ongoing analytics project, outsourcing provides the flexibility to adapt to evolving business needs efficiently.

Furthermore, outsourcing research and analysis services can enhance decision-making by providing objective, data-driven insights. In-house teams may sometimes be influenced by internal biases or organizational politics, which can cloud judgment and lead to suboptimal decisions. External research firms, on the other hand, bring an impartial perspective to the table, enabling businesses to make more informed and objective decisions based on rigorous analysis and empirical evidence.

Additionally, outsourcing research and analysis services can help businesses gain a competitive edge by enabling faster time-to-market. In today's rapidly evolving business environment, speed is often of the essence. By outsourcing research tasks to specialized firms with the requisite tools and expertise, companies can accelerate their research and analysis processes, allowing them to capitalize on emerging opportunities and respond swiftly to market changes.

However, despite the numerous benefits, outsourcing research and analysis services is not without its challenges. Chief among these is the need for effective communication and collaboration between the outsourcing partner and the client organization. Clear communication of project objectives, expectations, and timelines is essential to ensure that the outsourced work aligns with the client's goals and delivers the desired outcomes.

Moreover, data security and confidentiality are paramount concerns when outsourcing research and analysis services, especially when dealing with sensitive information. It is crucial for businesses to select reputable outsourcing partners with robust data protection measures and compliance protocols in place to safeguard confidential information and mitigate the risks of data breaches or leaks.

In conclusion, outsourcing research and analysis services offer a myriad of benefits for businesses seeking to gain a competitive edge in today's dynamic marketplace. From accessing specialized expertise and achieving cost savings to enhancing decision-making and accelerating time-to-market, outsourcing can be a strategic enabler that empowers companies to stay ahead of the curve and promote sustainable expansion in an ever-evolving corporate landscape. By leveraging the capabilities of external research partners, businesses can unlock new opportunities, mitigate risks, and chart a course for long-term success.

[talenlee]

Story Pile: 16 Bit Sensation (And Another Layer I Guess)

Ah, Talen month, Talen month! A month where I celebrate media I love, or maybe media I really want to talk about. Media I want to talk about possibly because I think it’s a topic I would normally find too mean, or too cruel to focus on. After all who wants to hear me vent or complain or just drag something for being mediocre.

I do!

It’s Talen Month, and this time around I’m going to do something different in that I’m going to talk about something amazing, something I love, a manga that I think is genuinely, wholeheartedly excellent that you can blitz through in an afternoon, and also, uh, the anime spinoff of it that serves in my mind as one of the examples of how 2023 just was a mid freaking year for anime. I want to talk to you about one of my favourite genres of media, ‘people making things from an insider perspective, with a dash of economic structures,’ and then one of my least favourites, ‘spinoff that is embarrassed to be associated with a much, much better piece of media.’

Up front before I dive in, I’m going to talk about both the manga 16 Bit Sensation and I’m also going to talk about the anime with a similar name, 16 Bit Sensation: Another Layer. I’m going to spoil details about the storyline of Another Layer, which I don’t think should be a problem because I don’t think it’s any good and it’s not like spoiling it would be in any way a diminishment of your enjoyment of it.

Because I don’t find it very enjoyable.

16 Bit Sensation is a doujinshi that became a real proper published manga, produced by Misato Mitsumi, Tatsuki Amazuyu, and Tamiki Wakaki. It follows the story of Meiko, who goes from a retail job at a rental store to a job assisting illustration to a job doing original illustration and character design and programming for a company called Alcohol Soft, starting in 1993 and running till the late 90s. The manga follows a person who goes from having no access to computers to the stage where she’s buying her own home PC, when that kind of investment was a huge chunk of money spent on a domestic purchase.

Along the way you have a story that shows things like tiny companies restructuring and growing, the way that people’s skills built on one another, and the way that videogames in the 1990s were full of massive, immense technical shifts for the better — like, do you know how many images got made for distributing on screens with only sixteen colours? — and how these shifts didn’t come with immediate access. Like, sure, you get 240 more colours, but now you have to be able to use them, and you need to get familiar with the technology that lets you do it.

In the process you get to see different conversations about what the kinds of games they’re making include, who they are for, and how disconnected pieces can be. A writer generates a script, a programmer makes code, and illustrators make graphics that are to be displayed as part of that script. But those people don’t need to know exactly what’s going on one to another, and sometimes, they can be completely isolated from one another. As the production gets bigger, as the needs for the content of the game gets deeper, they add more people to the creative staff. A writer can strike out entirely on their own and outsource the art. Companies can split and collapse together and it’s entirely possible that just one person’s bad decisions can catastrophically mess with your finances, because this is an industry that was flying without much of a support structure.

Because they were making pornography.

There’s a puritanical attempt to neglect that visual novels, the material that carried the personal gaming landscape on its shoulders through the 90s, was largely pornographic. Anime spinoffs of these games often relied on not mentioning or including the pornography, because, well, you know, this is so good, it’s good even without the pornography! It’s embarrassing, it’s shameful to engage with and do anything with that —

I mean heaven forfend people recognise how much we like, share, and engage with horny media.

16 Bit Sensation: Another Layer is an anime, set in the existing story of 16 Bit Sensation. It follows the story of Konoha Akisato, an illustrator working for a small company that makes eroge in the current 2020s. Distressed by her company’s unwillingness to make her dream games a reality, she accidentallies a time travel plot device and gets thrown back in time to the glory days of 1990s pixel art visual novels. She jumps back and forth between history and the now, seeing how changes she made to the past impact her now.

And look.

Artists have gotten better since then. For example, even a child artist from now, thrown back to 1993, would, with the modern tools we have, be absolutely amazing to the ability of artists back then. Certainly for drawing cute girls in the anime style. Technique and skill have broadened, tools are more available, and people have more ways and tools to practice. I am a firm believer that people are, generally, getting better at niche skills. I have no doubt that Konoha, who is a whole ass adult, could blow people’s minds with the skills she has now, if she could find a way to share them.

Anyway, the anime then follows a sequence of these time hops back and forth that include a boy from that story jumping further back in time to work on a videogame back in the 1980s, and seeing how complicated that process was, and all in the service of uh

uh

the time travelling alien AI art consciousness, that wants to make good? art? By dissolving things in chemicals.

Eventually Konoha’s machinations create a game so good it ruins the visual novel genre, transports it to America, where it starts to look like a different thing, and then in the process kills the videogame and anime industry in Japan, ignoring the way that that also happened in our own history, and part of what helped the industry hold on was the prevalence of niche Japanese media and oh no I am getting angry about this all over again. Ahem. Let me start that again:

The culmination of 16 Bit Sensation: Another Layer is that Konoha travels to a dystopian future. There, Fate looks ugly, because Americans made it, and she hates how the world she crafted through her amazing bishoujou game has the unintended consequence of making videogames, uh, American. She resolves to fix this by going back in time and making another game just as good as the first one, thanks to the power of generative AI tools like Midjourney and ChatGPT and good god I can’t believe I’m saying this, but she’s interrupted and kidnapped in the middle of this process, eventually fleeing from her captors who want to stick her – and other artists – into VR tanks so they can harvest their art. Note that this isn’t seen as being bad for artists, it’s seen as being unfair because it means that whoever has the most money can make the best games.

Then a UFO shows up and sorts the plot out.

I’m not joking.

Or exaggerating.

Cards on the table, if it wasn’t obvious already, I think 16 Bit Sensation is a really interesting manga that I liked a lot. I think 16 Bit Sensation: Another Layer if it was an entirely unique anime would merely be a traditionally mid anime that used an interesting idea as wallpaper to colour a story that was otherwise about something else, clueless about the detail it claimed to be about. The wild disparity between these two does not necessarily mean that 16 Bit Sensation: Another Layer diminishes 16 Bit Sensation in any way. It’s not like a mediocre story set in another more interesting story actually hurts it. What I think makes Another Layer feel so awful to me is the way that it ostensibly strives to be about something in the same way 16 Bit Sensation is, and in the process presents a description of those things that doesn’t understand them at all.

And thing is, that talk about ‘not diminishing’ is – well, it’s just a lie. See, part of the problem is that Another Layer really is diminishing 16 Bit Sensation. If you go check the wikipedia page for 16 Bit Sensation, despite describing the series as the result of a manga that was originally a dojinshi, it introduces the characters by focusing on Konoha, and describing them in terms of their place in the anime. This means that Meiko, the protagonist of the manga, is not mentioned as such, and is mentioned as the fourth character. In the anime, she barely gets lines, which you might imagine is fine because she gets all her dialogue in the manga. But if you liked that manga because of her story, you won’t see it in Another Layer because Another Layer isn’t about that manga.

It’s about not wanting to talk about that manga.

Fundamentally, 16 Bit Sensation is a doujin media that told a story of a really interesting period of the mid-90s about a type of technology and its limitations. It’s about how small businesses with low overheads in an under-regulated environment created remarkable media with a specific kind of technology. The story in the manga puts the technology, the people, and the games front and centre. The way that the media is literally stigmatised and yet also lucrative is presented as a serious part of the story. There’s a serious consideration about what it means to have a young child working even adjacent to it. To simplify it, 16 Bit Sensation is about a thing that happened that you probably don’t understand, and telling its story is both interesting and meaningful. It’s about the history of a type of porn entertainment media.

Another Layer takes this period of history and sanitises every surface. It takes the women who were there, and disappears their story under the story of a modern, current person who disdains the art form they worked on. It is a story ostensibly about a woman who buys and loves h-games who has no opinion or interest in the actual content of that media. It doesn’t want to talk about the limitations of that technology, or the ways people solved problems, and instead makes do by inventing a fantasy of ‘what if you could just make the industry different by wanting it more.’

More than anything else it wants to be about a world-changing game that it literally cannot meaningfully describe or engage with because this anime ostensibly about a game doesn’t know how it could possibly represent a game that good, and the obvious reason why it can’t is because no such thing could exist and the idea that it could comes from the same writing school as ‘with a jump, Jack was free.’ Another Layer introduces ideas that imply it wants to talk about the history of pornographic art in Japan, automation and generative art and bad labor conditions in artistic industries, and then decides to solve all those problems it grotesquely fails to understand with fucking aliens.

I hate Another Layer. I hate the show built out of 16 Bit Sensation. I don’t hate it for what it wants to be, I hate that it’s attached to 16 Bit Sensation. I hate that someone read that manga and thought: You know what this needs? More focus on this boy who we can build up to being the worst kind of gatekeeping nerd. Less focus on why people got into this industry and how they relate to the art of it, more focus on the imagined aesthetics of what these things could hypothetically be about as long as you definitely, definitely don’t look at them.

Another Layer takes an important part of the pornographic history of a vitally important medium and uses it to say nothing. It is about pornography without ever wanting to say the word. It takes an interesting story that manages to circumvent vulgarity, and cannot imagine finding it interesting just telling its story.

It’s like its own Mormon scripture.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!