#still a question whether heterogeneity matters

[forwomenbiwomen]

Via PNAS Sex beyond the genitalia: The human brain mosaic [note: this is a commonly cited study for the “proof” of transpeople being born with the wrong brains] 

“Whereas a categorical difference in the genitals has always been acknowledged, the question of how far these categories extend into human biology is still not resolved. Documented sex/gender differences in the brain are often taken as support of a sexually dimorphic view of human brains (“female brain” or “male brain”). However, such a distinction would be possible only if sex/gender differences in brain features were highly dimorphic (i.e., little overlap between the forms of these features in males and females) and internally consistent (i.e., a brain has only “male” or only “female” features). Here, analysis of MRIs of more than 1,400 human brains from four datasets reveals extensive overlap between the distributions of females and males for all gray matter, white matter, and connections assessed. Moreover, analyses of internal consistency reveal that brains with features that are consistently at one end of the “maleness-femaleness” continuum are rare. Rather, most brains are comprised of unique “mosaics” of features, some more common in females compared with males, some more common in males compared with females, and some common in both females and males. Our findings are robust across sample, age, type of MRI, and method of analysis. These findings are corroborated by a similar analysis of personality traits, attitudes, interests, and behaviors of more than 5,500 individuals, which reveals that internal consistency is extremely rare. Our study demonstrates that, although there are sex/gender differences in the brain, human brains do not belong to one of two distinct categories: male brain/female brain…Our study demonstrates that although there are sex/gender differences in brain structure, brains do not fall into two classes, one typical of males and the other typical of females, nor are they aligned along a “male brain–female brain” continuum. Rather, even when considering only the small group of brain features that show the largest sex/gender differences, each brain is a unique mosaic of features, some of which may be more common in females compared with males, others may be more common in males compared with females, and still others may be common in both females and males. The heterogeneity of the human brain and the huge overlap between the forms that brains of males and brains of females can take can be fully appreciated when looking at the entire brain…In other words, even when considering highly stereotypical gender behaviors, there are very few individuals who are consistently at the “female-end” or at the “male-end”, but there are many individuals who have both “female-end” and “male-end” characteristics. Furthermore, although one’s sex is enough to predict whether this person would have more “female-end” or more “male-end” characteristics, it is not enough to predict this person’s specific combination of “female-end” and “male-end” characteristics”.

[ignitification]

I found it interesting how HK brought up Dabi’s burn victims in the latest chapter from the civilians. I also love how how they are putting the blame on E for it 💀 It does make me wonder tho, I wonder how society will react if the villains are saved? Of course their opinion may not matter (I mean, on a personal note it’s their fault for allowing heroes to be in the position they are without thinking for themselves, like the Shigaraki situation could have been avoided otherwise. But that’s just me!) but it makes me wonder if they’ll react negatively or reflect on their views of a “villain” 🧐

That's actually a very interesting question!

I do agree with the bit of 'their opinion does not matter' because I absolutely feel the same way. I kinda ranted about my issues with hero society here, and the point still stands: villains' origin cannot be attributed to one factor only and they cannot be alienated from society forever, otherwise they wouldn't do what they are doing (and this goes especially for Stain, Spinner and Dabi - whose main objective is after all, to reform society!). However, the point your brought up of the riots, and furthermore the chaos we saw in this last arc (after Jakku), is definitely proof that society does not intend to fare at the same pace it has been lately.

If not positive for the villains, there lingers still a question in the air, whether whatever the heroes have been doing is actually right. It might seem inconsequential for the villains (because the public still blames them for their deeds) but at the same time, it shows the cracks that both Stain and Shigaraki strained for. If there is doubt, then there is hope. Which bring me to think that maybe, a redemption which is not only focused on their heroes counterparts (Izuku - Shigaraki / Shouto - Dabi) might be possible, if not even targeted.

I think here it really might depend on whether Horikoshi will go with the leitmotiv of changing society, who now as it is is broken, and maggots are crawling out, because it is rotten - therefore aiming at a public rehabilitation of the villains, with the notion of villain and hero changing, and Izuku being the Symbol of this new era, or instead he might go with a route where the villains are saved but the public is informed that they are not a threat anymore, and that the only ones who know the details are the ones involved. However, regardless of how this will be handled in the manga, I think that the notion of 'villain' itself will change, and it might take on a different meaning. But that won't change everyone's mind, as right as it should be in such a heterogeneous society. There will be people who will look at the villains negatively, and others that instead will try and take action to make society a better place, so loopholes creating villains are slowly cancelled. It would be interesting to see how Spinner and the heteromorph Quirks right will be handled, because this issue is just piled on top of the 'villain' label, for him.

A thing will happen for sure though : a reaction, a strong one, will be the fallout of the heroes we know as such today. After all, things are always bound to change!

[lisalowefanclub]

Multiplicity and what identification and representation means to Us

Madeline: I don’t remember there being many cool, attractive, and overall desirable but not fetishized (bye yellow fever) representations of Asian people in mainstream media while I was growing up in the early 2000s. The Asian media I did consume was introduced to me by my dad, so you can imagine the kind of outdated and endearingly weird characters I was exposed to as a kid. Think blind Japanese swordsman Zatoichi or humanoid child robot Astro Boy, both of which originated in Japan around the 60s. As for celebrities, I occasionally heard people talking about Lucy Liu or Jackie Chan, but only as defined by their stereotypical Asian-ness. My point is that this kind of cultural consumption fell into one of two categories: that of obscurity, which suggests that cultural objects are created by Asians for Asians (bringing to mind labels like “Weeb” for Western people who love anime), or that of hypervisibility grounded in stereotypical exoticism. You’d be hard pressed to find a film that passes the Asian Bechdel test.I didn’t discover K-pop until coming to college when I became curious about who my white friends were fawning over all the time. Since then, it’s been really neat to see how K-pop has become popularized as one of the many facets of America’s mainstream music and celebrity culture, especially when artists write and perform songs in Korean despite the majority of their audience lacking Korean language fluency. This suggests that something about the music is able to transcend language barriers and connect people despite their differences. Today it’s not uncommon to see Korean artists topping Billboard’s hot 100 hits, being interviewed on SNL, winning American music awards, gracing the cover of Teen Vogue, or being selected as the next brand ambassador for Western makeup brands like M.A.C. If you were to ask your average high school or college student if they know Blackpink, BTS, or EXO, they would probably be familiar with one of the groups whether or not they identify as Asian.What does this mean, then, for young Asian-Americans to grow up during a time when Asian celebrities are thought to be just as desirable as people like Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, or Michael B. Jordan? What does it mean to see an Asian person named “Sexiest International Man Alive”, beating out long-time favorite European celebs? What does it mean for popularity to exist outside of the realm of the racialized minority and for it to build connections across minority cultures? Of course, fame can be toxic and horrible-- it is, at times superficial, materialistic, gendered, fetishized, and absolutely hyper-sexualized-- but I for one think it’s pretty damn cool to see people who look like me featured in mainstream American culture.I’ve found that throughout the semester, my understanding of Asian presence in America (American citizen or otherwise) has been deeply shaped by our discussions of identity politics and marginalization, another class I’m taking on intergenerational trauma, and my own identity as a Laotian-American woman. Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about the similarities between American proxy wars in Korea (The Forgotten War) and Laos (The Secret War), both of which involved US bombing of citizens in the name of halting communism. Taking this class has challenged me to reconceptualize how we make sense of mass atrocity in relation to a pan-Asian identity, especially when contending with how trauma and violence can act as a mechanism for cultural production, and I look forward to exploring this more in my thesis. 

Cyndi:  K-pop is always just the beginning. Enough in and of itself, any interest in the genre at all reinvigorates the consumer to become more engaged with the world in which it exists. Two years ago, I got into a big, but in hindsight pretty silly, argument with my mom when I started going to a Korean hair salon (because of my K-pop delulus / Jennie prints) instead of seeing Maggie, our Vietnamese hairdresser who I can usually only see twice a year on our bi-annual visits to California to visit extended family. My mom told me the Koreans don’t need our money, they are already richer than we will ever be. Who are ‘the Koreans’? Who is ‘we’?? Is every person of Korean descent doing better than every person of Vietnamese descent in America? And #why is my mom being A Hater? Surely, sharing our identity as ‘perpetual guests’ in America should create some sort of solidarity, or at least, allow for transitory economic collaboration??? I give my money to white people all the time: to McDonald’s (Cookie Totes), to Target, to Swarthmore College. 

K-pop cannot be the end. As much as I enjoy the music, the show, and the celebrities, I also know in my heart that the current international interest in K-pop will not last. As an almost perfect and perplexing exemplification of modern global capitalism, the industry will over-expand and thus wear itself out. I always see the subtle disappointment on my language teachers’ faces when they ask me how I came to take interest in Korean, and I have to answer ‘K-pop’, because that is the truth; that is not where I am at now, but it will always be how I began. It has become clear to me that this disappointment is not just a generational difference. Maybe these old people are jealous of pop stars like how I also have to question whether I am secure in myself when I see a 14 year old accomplishing things I as a 21 year old could never accomplish in my long life. I am coming to understand that part of their reaction comes from the fact that there is a fine line between cultural appreciation and cultural appropriation, that pop culture is ephemeral, but they have lived their lives as entirely theirs. Casual or even consuming interest for the parts of culture that are bright, and clean, and easy cannot ever stand in for true racial empathy, though it is where many of us start. Identity in K-pop is merely another marketing technique, but to the community of fans and lovers, it is something that is real, lived, and embodied. I find that looking at K-pop always brings forth my most salient identities in terms of gender, race, and sexuality. As much as female group members express affection and jokingly portray romantic interest toward one another, would it ever be accepted if these jokes were no longer jokes, but lived realities? Even if the K-pop industry itself did not seek to produce fan communities of this magnitude, these communities that have been founded in response to it are here to stay.  Lowe argues that “to the extent that Asian American culture dynamically expands to include both internal critical dialogues about difference and the interrogation of dominant interpellations” it can “be a site in which horizontal affiliations with other groups can be imagined and realized” (71). A recent striking example is Thai fans’ demand to hear from Lisa on the protests -- a primarily youth-led movement against the government monarchy--going on in Thailand. Although she is, of course, censored and silenced on this topic, the expectation is still there; fans are holding their idols to a standard of political responsibility. 

Jimmy: I haven’t really paid much attention to K-pop until working on this project. Sure, my cousins would do anything to go see BTS perform in person, but I didn’t care so much. Or maybe, I was just not saturated with the cultural zeitgeist. Whereas they live in the center of a cosmopolitan city which imports and exports, my hometown hums white noise. Increasingly, though, K-pop has entered into my life and the wider American cultural space. Now, K-pop tops the charts and is featured on late-night talk shows. Whether or not you are a devout follower, you have probably encountered K-pop in some form. It was not until I went to Swarthmore that I have “become” Asian American. Back home, my friends are primarily either white or Vietnamese-American. And even though I did recognize that I had an “Asian” racial identity mapped onto me, I did not consider it to be based on any politics. After engaging with and working within  Organizing to Redefine “Asian” Activism (ORAA) on campus, as well as taking this course, I have a better grasp of what it means to rally around an Asian American identity. It is a way to organize and resist. Reflecting on my political evolution, I feel comforted and alienated by the cultural weight of K-pop in America. It is amazing to see the gravity of cultural production shift away from the West. And to have global celebrities from Asia is great. Yet, K-pop is limited as a platform for Asian Americans to create identity. What are the consequences when mainstream ideas about contemporary “Asian” culture are still perpetually foreign from America? Is Asian American community just built around transnational cultural objects like K-pop and bubble tea? Does the economic and cultural capital of K-pop held by its idols obscure or erase the heterogeneity and multiplicity of Asian Americans? 

Jason: The first time I heard K-Pop was when Gangnam Style came on during a middle school social event when everyone is standing in their social circles doing their best not to be awkward when teacher chaperones are constantly staring at the back of your head seeing if any wrongdoing would occur. At that time, I could never imagine the K-Pop revolution that would occur within the American music industry.  Anytime I turn on the radio it is only a matter of time until a BTS song will start being blasted from the speakers. It is crazy to think that K-Pop has become so widespread within American popular culture that mainstream radio stations in Massachusetts are so willing to play K-Pop, even the billboards of 104.1 “Boston’s Best Variety” are plastered with BTS, because they know that is what their audience wants. Eight years ago, during that middle school social Gangnam Style was more about being able to do the dance that accompanied the song rather than the song itself. This has completely changed as more and more people are finding themselves becoming devout supporters of K-Pop. This class and project have continuously been pushing me out of my comfort zone by engaging in literature that I would never have read and discussions that I would never have imagined participating in. I have even listened to more K-Pop over the past couple of weeks than I had ever before in my life. I was impressed by myself when a song by BLACKPINK came on and the radio host said here’s some new music that I knew that the song was from their first album that came out around a month ago. I am grateful that I have been pushed out of my comfort zone and “forced (by having to actually do the homework)” to engage in the material of the class. Who knows how long this K-Pop fascination will last in American popular culture, but I am glad that I could be a part of it rather than letting it pass me by and staying within my comfortable music sphere of country, pop, and British rap.  

[overcoming-lethologica]

Fork and Knife Thoughts

The other day I was with my girlfriend and her mother and the topic of the best way to hold your table utensils came up. To keep it consistent we were referring to a formal setting and with a meal that requires both a fork and a knife.

My position was fork in the left hand and knife in the right. You cut with your dominant hand (right for most) and, having cut the piece, serve it into your mouth with the fork in the left hand. In my opinion, this method optimizes both function and aesthetics.

My girlfriend’s mom also said it should be knife in the left and fork in the right. But then, after cutting the piece, you place the knife down switch the fork from your left to right hand, and then serve yourself. When you want another bite you switch the fork back to your left hand, pick up the knife with your right, and repeat.

Now I thought her method of juggling utensils seemed impractical and kind of silly looking and I had never before heard of it being done that way. Her reasoning was that it was proper etiquette. The conversation then expanded to the importance that should be given to such etiquette in the world today and I wanted to share some of my thoughts on the topic here.

**I don’t like giving too much context on the people I converse with because I don’t want to encourage predisposed judgment but our differences of perspective in this conversation were much more apparent than I’m used to so I think it is fair. The context is that she is a conservative in her 50s and I am a progressive in my 20s. We are both white and American.**

Our discussion was initially confused and, in my opinion, encroaching on problematic until I tried to set up a structure that differentiates levels of etiquette (which I see on a vertical scale, with ascending expectations as the class setting levels up) and cultural differences (which ought to be laterally acknowledged) and the intersection between them. I imagined a grid where cultures were the columns and, in each column, there were rows that represent the different class levels within that culture. In each intersecting square, one could find the expectations of a person in that class and culture. Striving to be thoughtful of this differentiating structure I hoped to be able to avoid thought experiments that cast certain cultural practices as inherently superior or inferior while still being able to look at that important dimension to analyzing the etiquette system.

Devising this structure in itself was an interesting takeaway and it helped me organize my thoughts on her initial argument. She had encouraged me to think about it in the context of another country, saying if I were to travel to Japan it would be expected of me to be conscious of their cultural etiquette system. I should learn when it is proper to bow and I ought to be thoughtful not to cross my legs and show the bottom of my feet which is seen as dirty and disrespectful. This is a thought experiment I agreed with. I think it is both respectful to your hosts and enriching to your own worldly view to relate to them. The disconnect for me was that cultural differences and etiquette differences are not the same. In the matter of the fork and the knife, we are both white Americans and yet the issue persisted. I struggle differently with the matter of etiquette because I hold more importance in preserving worldly differences than I do class ones.

Another part of the conversation I found really interesting was when we looked homeward, specifically the Northeast U.S., and questioned what is/should be expected in this region in different situations. What I find particularly interesting is the fact that the Northeast is not nearly as homogeneous as other countries and how that affects this question. This is where I was most saw our different ideologies coming into effect.

Her position was that our region is a majority white and it is the current reality that what she has labeled “the traditional English etiquette system” has established itself in our area. Therefore, like someone going to Japan, one moving here should learn English etiquette in order to be respectful and successful in this area. Now she was not saying people ought to assimilate in all settings and she supports different cultural experiences and practices. Her belief is that in personal settings, like her own home or church, and formal settings, such as business meetings and banquettes, people ought to learn and practice these English etiquette rules in order to be proactive citizens.

My concern with this position was that if these formal settings that mark upper-class America (and upward movement) are centered around the knowledge of the “traditional English etiquette system” than non-white citizens and non-upper-class white citizens will have an inherent disadvantage in the US (apart from all there other disadvantages of course). Etiquette in this scenario appears to me as an arbitrary system of practices that unfairly divides each new generation’s class consistent with their parents.

**I want to add that I’m not trying to be a party pooper (or I guess in this case banquette pooper). I enjoy and support a fancy dinner or event and, from what I have been taught, I think it can be a respectful thing if your host values it. I just take issue with it being a judging factor on the individual (and family) whether good or bad since it is so subjective across the world.**   

My final thoughts are that I intend to fully uphold cultural awareness and respect to those who host me in my life but I challenge that the expectations of a region should mirror the demographic they govern. Furthermore, I believe that in a heterogeneous leaning society such as the United States, the cultural and class expectations should not be monopolized by one group and ought to be flexible in order to encourage a more vibrant and prosperous melting pot.

[lucyhblack]

Summary: And we are reaching the end of the Classes!! Only two more to go (thanks to the Angel!).

The last two Classes are intrinsically interconnected, but I must warn you that there is not much to be said (but much to be speculated) about these two, so I hope you will not be irritated by the little information that I will present.

Legendary

The Legendary Class has no distinguishable characteristics other than its power.

That's right, there are no distinguishable physical, magical or behavioral characteristics apart from the Families to which each individual belongs. In short, the pokesans of this Class look and act like pokesans of the Fell , Swap or Classic Family (and Swapfell of course).

Having the same characteristics physics, colors of magic and overalls, habits and customs, identical to any pokemon of any of the Families, you must be wondering how to identify them in the wild, and the simple answer is:

There is not.

There is simply no way to distinguish them from ordinary pokesans unless they reveal themselves to you. And when I say reveal, I'm being literal. You will only know that you are facing a Legendary if he reveals his power, or he tells it himself.

(However, as these pokesans do not usually get involved with other beings and avoid direct combat, it is rare that they reveal themselves lightly)

So why classify these pokemon into a Class? Why not just put them in something like a category of their own?

There are many researchers who also think that the Legends should be re-classified, but due to two factors, they remain united in one Class (not to mention the work that would be to approve this change. All meetings, studies, specifications, not to mention changes in publications, classes, etc ... A lot, a lot of work, better leave it as is).

And what are these factors?

Its origin and power.

As I said, the only thing distinguishable about these pokesans is their power. Legendaries are proven (in the next Class I will explain this little technical detail more), the strongest pokemon. No other pokemon, no matter how trained and skilled, can compare to a Legendary and it is said that only Misticos can overcome them.

Due to their great power, they have the ability to communicate freely with any being (be it Monster or Pokemon) without needing a bond. They can either speak telepathically (even if they are not Psychic) or with normal Monster language.

(Since other pokemons have or get this ability, this fact cannot be considered a determining characteristic of the Class, although they seem to do it more easily than others).

It is also because of their power that these pokesans have a long life. Every Lendario pokesans is hundreds of years old and due to its longevity there are many stories (and legends, poems, songs, etc.) about them.

We only have a small number of registered pokesans in this Class, but our world is vast, so it is likely that there are many more of these pokesans scattered around than we really know (even more so because they tend to be so discreet and indistinguishable).

Although these days it is more rare to find them, it is not completely impossible to happen. Some of these pokesans are well known and even worshiped in certain regions, either for having lived there for a while, or for something they did (like helping, protecting or punishing Pokémon and Monsters and even founding or sharing knowledge with civilizations).

There is a belief that it is easier to find one in these regions, but since several trainers, researchers and hunters have tried and failed, there is not much credibility in that assumption.

And then we will enter the second factor of why these pokemon were classified in a Class.

It is said that these pokemons were created by the Misticos with special purposes (and when we say created we mean that the Misticos made them with magic, and not that they are puppies of the Misticos), often to fulfill a specific function, or to guard/protect something or a location.

Although this is a consensus in all legends, there is no evidence for this fact. Still, considering this as a "characteristic" common to all, we use it to reinforce and validate the classification of these beings, so heterogeneous, in a single category.

It is a pity that despite the reports and legends of their deeds from the past (and not so past) and sometimes having lived with Monsters, we have practically no other data about them.

(Thank you very much for nothing Monsters of the past. You could have at least written more technical details and less poems about the achievements of these pokesans!).

What we know about the Legendaries is that they are discreet, mysterious, nomadic (although they can take up residence in a certain place for an indefinite period of time), very smart and powerful. They have a long life and are single-stage pokesans (have no evolution). They are proud and committed to their "duty".

Despite their great powers they rarely demonstrate it in battle (so even if they cross paths with one of them the chance to realize that it is a Legendary is quite small), but they are capable of incredible feats when necessary (including large-scale influence on the nature and even other Pokémon and Monsters).

He has solitary habits, but sometimes they end up "adopting" the duty of leader or protector of a pokemon pack for a while (usually is when they take up residence for a while).

We have no knowledge of their Heat Cycles (if any) or whether they can reproduce (there have never been stories about the Legendary crossings between either among them or among other pokemon).

But this lack of data is expected to change in the coming years, since finally one of these mysterious pokesans has been captured (if we can say that) and we hope very soon to have more information about this Class (of course, if that this punk of Boss sends his reports correctly!!).

***

Honestly I am not completely satisfied with this chapter, but I am already in it for months and I rewrote it about 3 times and that was the best I got.

Thank you for reading! Comments, criticisms, questions are always welcome!

[perkwunos]

Trained in the conventions of objective science, Smuts had been advised to be as neutral as possible, to be like a rock, to be unavailable, so that eventually the baboons would go on about their business in nature as if data-collecting humankind were not present. Good scientists were those who, learning to be invisible themselves, could see the scene of nature close up, as if through a peephole. The scientists could query but not be queried. People could ask if baboons are or are not social subjects, or ask anything else for that matter, without any ontological risk either to themselves, except maybe being bitten by an angry baboon or contracting a dire parasitic infection, or to their culture’s dominant epistemologies about what are named nature and culture.

Along with more than a few other primatologists who talk, if not write in professional journals, about how the animals come to accept the presence of working scientists, Smuts recognized that the baboons were unimpressed by her rock act. They frequently looked at her, and the more she ignored their looks, the less satisfied they seemed. Progress in what scientists call “habituation” of the animals to the human being’s would-be nonpresence was painfully slow. It seemed like the only critter to whom the supposedly neutral scientist was invisible was herself. Ignoring social cues is far from neutral social behavior. I imagine the baboons as seeing somebody off-category, not something, and asking if that being were or were not educable to the standard of a polite guest. The monkeys, in short, inquired if the woman was as good a social subject as an ordinary baboon, with whom one could figure out how to carry on relationships, whether hostile, neutral, or friendly. The question was not, Are the baboons social subjects? but, Is the human being? Not, Do the baboons have “face”? but, Do people?

he baboons’ social semiotics directed both to her and to one another. “I . . . in the process of gaining their trust, changed almost everything about me, including the way I walked and sat, the way I held my body, and the way I used my eyes and voice. I was learning a whole new way of being in the world—the way of the baboon. . . . I was responding to the cues the baboons used to indicate their emotions, motivations and intentions to one another, and I was gradually learning to send such signals back to them. As a result, instead of avoiding me when I got too close, they started giving me very deliberate dirty looks, which made me move away. This may sound like a small shift, but in fact it signaled a profound change from being treated like an object that elicited a unilateral response (avoidable), to being recognized as a subject with whom they could communicate” (295. In the philosopher’s idiom, the human being acquired a face. The result was that the baboons treated her more and more as a reliable social being who would move away when told to do so and around whom it might be safe to carry on monkey life without a lot of fuss over her presence.

…

Writing about these introductions to baboon social niceties, Smuts said, “The baboons remained themselves, doing what they always did in the world they always lived in” (205). In other words, her idiom leaves the baboons in nature, where change involves only the time of evolution, and perhaps ecological crisis, and the human being in history, where all other sorts of time come into play. Here is where I think Derrida and Smuts need each other. Or maybe it is just my monomania to place baboons and humans together in situated histories, situated naturecultures, in which all the actors become who they are in the dance of relating, not from scratch, not ex nihilo, but full of the patterns of their sometimes-joined, sometimes-separate heritages both before and lateral to this encounter. All the dancers are redone through the patterns they enact. The temporalities of companion species comprehend all the possibilities activated in becoming with, including the heterogeneous scales of evolutionary time for everybody but also the many other rhythms of conjoined process. If we know how to look, I think we would see that the baboons of Eburru Cliffs were redone too, in baboon ways, by having entangled their gaze with that of this young clipboard-toting human female. The relationships are the smallest possible patterns for analysis; the partners and actors are their still-ongoing products. It is all extremely prosaic, relentlessly mundane, and exactly how worlds come into being.

Donna Haraway, When Species Meet

[purkinje-effect]

The Anatomy of Melancholy, 20

Table of Contents Go to first. Go to previous. Go to next.

Drug culture and human experimentation tw’s.

...This track out of time is coming full circle.

To the East end of Lexington, the remains of Mystic Lakes lay under the ruins of the Route 3 overpass. Angel had assisted ‘Choly in bathing in the water of the Mystic River, both by providing a lookout and getting his back for him. He wished more than anything that he could have simply laid back and soaked, but the area was neither secure nor private. ‘Choly dried himself off just enough to comfortably put on his surgical corset, then with bated breath requested the garment bag from Angel’s storage.

It felt like a step backwards in every sense to be in uniform again. The khaki slacks, dress shirt with US lapel pins, and tie tied precisely. Grateful for impeccable tailoring, he’d have to wait for his suspenders to dry. He toed into his dark brown dress shoes, then affixed his wrist and ankle braces. The Pharm Corps overcoat, complete with its twin caduceus lapel pins, the double silver shoulder bars to mark his rank, and over his heart all the bars from nearly ten full years’ service. His hands went over them in guilt. For the first time since he stepped foot in Lexington, he questioned what he was doing.

Self-agency was a bitch.

The sound of laser fire behind him jostled him from his moment of remorse, and he jumped.

“What! What was it--!”

“There was no saving those articles, Sir,” the Handy Bot elucidated, unable to hide its relish at dispatching with them in such a way. “No amount of Abraxo could have gotten out those stains. You’ve worn them an entire month straight. Today was simply the last straw. Ha Ha!”

‘Choly frowned at his robot meaningfully, forced to commit to the wardrobe change long-term.

“I... suppose it’s for the best,” he ultimately dismissed. “Abraxo is better served for just about anything but cleanliness.”

With a long, distant pause, ‘Choly stared out over the water, able to see Medford from where he stood. Finally putting his PipBoy back on his right wrist, he faced Angel with an odd smile.

“It’s going to be dark soon. We should get back. I have... work to do.”

He sat in the wheelchair as Angel unfolded it again for him, and they were off again through the heart of the city.

“Forgive me for saying so, Sir, but it does my servos such a delight to see you in uniform again. I’ve... missed circumstance.”

“I suppose for lack of anything else, for better or for worse, one can always fall back on the familiar.”

Angel served ‘Choly a small dinner of Cram and a sweet roll, to recover what nutrients he’d lost that afternoon. Once it was dry enough, ‘Choly brushed his hair back into a fresh french twist, then he excused himself for the night, to sort out his own demons. With the Merrick Index and a fresh holotape loaded, he made his way up to his garden office.

As night fell, the incandescent lighting from the office’s wall sconces soothed him, but he still supplemented their illumination with two candles on the edge of the desk in the middle of the room. He stood, and folded up the wheelchair in the corner. Makeshift planters framed the outer edge of the floor and filled the shelves lining the opposing walls, and he had even coaxed a melon plant to take to a hanging planter in the far corner. He smiled as he tended to each bedpan, each wash basin, each bucket and pot in which he had cultivated some manner of strange postapocalyptic life. The delicate pale lavender flowers with their dark foliage, the shallow muddy pan in which he’d revived a cutting from large red water lilies, the handful of tiny glowing stalky mushrooms he’d transplanted from one of the bathrooms in the place. And then his most endeared project in the room, his successes in transplanting the brain fungus from the break room refrigerator.

He then took a seat in the swivel bucket chair at the desk. For some time, he sought mental quiet staring out beyond the overpass outside his accidental window. He opened a fresh can of purified water at the desk and nursed on it in favor of alcohol for the evening, then popped a Mentat under his tongue and got to skimming the leaves of notes he’d tucked into the front cover of the pharmaceutical reference.

There had to be some way to distract Jared from seeking out cyclomorphine as his wonder drug. Now knowing Jared’s means and motives, he could prepare all necessary phrasing with care.

Perhaps, he could shift all focus imaginable on synthesizing the most potent Jet possible. Ultra Jet, fermented to be extra concentrated. It’d probably require a substrate to the mix, to boost the cultures. Jet Fuel, a heterogeneous mix of flamethrower fuel. A literal attempt at lighting up the third eye, it could plausibly take the form of an inhalant, injectable, or edible. Buff-Jet, as Berries-Carey had once proposed, an attempt at throttling pineal uptake of the entheogen. He could provide an entire veritable candy shoppe of chems to the raider outfit.

Anything but cyclomorphine. Surely, the constituents had died with civilization. He didn’t want to think about the finite morphine stock in the lab downstairs, if even in the context of how once it ran out, Psycho might be impossible to synthesize ever again.

Owing to the source of his hypothetical Buff-Jet recipe, he eyed the brain fungus mounding up in the pan along the wall. The most psychedelic mushrooms he knew of, they all tended to grow on dung, or on other fungi. He wondered whether the secret to infusing Mentats with Jet would either be found in feeding brain fungus to brahmin... or cultivating brain fungus in brahmin manure. He annotated these ideas, in the hopes of running them by Jared. He never wanted to sample Jet again in his life, if he could help it... and yet, the fingers of addiction crawled at the fringes of his personal space.

Of course that acute an exposure would have rendered dependency. Revolted to be reminded again of the afternoon’s experience, he squirmed in his seat and eyed the bottle of whiskey on the desk. He shook his head of the compulsion and drank more water, then did his best to focus on his task.

Flipping through the Index, he browsed the various formulas for synthesizing saucier chems like Daddy-O or Daytripper. They required patent-protected precursors, for the most part, and he sighed in nuisance that recreating these sophisticated synthetics was beyond him in his current capacity. He wondered... Perhaps, in other branches of the pharmacy warehousing, he might put his hands on pharmaceutical precursors such as these. For as much as he endeared himself to the sublingual facility of Mentats, barring Berries there was no crisper clarity than that bestowed by Daddy-O. Chasing the injection with Daytripper... usually smoothed out the resultant short temper and social clumsiness of having your brain run faster than your mouth. No contraindications existed strong enough to deter the intent from stacking Daddy-O with Mentats, either.

Though, as far as mode of dosage went, if ‘Choly had to pick how he took a chem, he far preferred to eat or drink it. Needles had such a high rate of injection site necrosis, depending on the chem, and regular Daddy-O abuse was right up there with Psycho in terms of that risk. He trusted Berries, no matter how clinical and exact the cholinergic high of Daddy-O felt. He didn’t much trust inhalants, either. Alimentary uptake was the safest, in his clinical and personal opinions both, and that left him right back at Mentats.

He eyed the brain fungus again, and sniffed pathetically. Perhaps the night that had birthed Melancholy from Berries and Jet Carey might have gone differently, had the Berries and Jet been compounded for compatibility. To his knowledge, drug culture hadn’t determined the means to marry psychedelia with nootropics, possibly for the best, and yet... in his desperation to find something, anything, better and more appealing than Psycho, he found himself seriously deliberating the means to precipitate Jet-Tats. The chemist fell asleep at his desk, scrawling chemistry notes.

“Sir, it’s time for breakfast,” Angel chirped from the office doorway.

‘Choly picked up his head and looked to the Handy, then nodded and followed in the wheelchair with his half-can of water. Once in the break room, Angel offered a box of Sugar Bombs and a mug of black coffee, which he greeted. After some time, he cleared his throat.

“Call it nerves if you want, Angel, but I would like to store a few things in you for safekeeping. You’re the safest place I have to hide just about anything. You’re... holding something very valuable right now, in fact. Could you...”

Angel had a blind spot just about where its owner had installed the false bottom in its storage, so it swerved and dilated its ocular lenses curiously before turning its back to 'Choly so that he could take a look inside himself. He pocketed the revolver, and tucked the Merrick Index inside along with all his notes. While he was in there, he counted only five bottles of Melancholia.

“Here, follow me around for a bit and add to your stock as indicated. All the Melancholia... And all the morphine and cyclomorphine... and all the barberine... Toiletries...” The list went on for around an hour before Angel insisted he be on his way to work.

“Things will be just fine, Sir. You were most ragged when you came home yesterday. Today will go so much more smoothly, I assure you!”

“I certainly hope you’re right.”

Jared already manned the Jet rig by the time Angel parted ways and ‘Choly wheeled across the assembly line floor to meet him.

“Ah, chemist. I expected you to be late. Yesterday must have done a real number on you.” Jared glanced at him, then got a better look when the initial glance didn’t add up. “You changed clothes.”

“You’re certainly chipper and compassionate today.” ‘Choly watched with a thoughtful frown as the black raider finished loading the bucket of manure into the spigot. Suddenly, in proximity to the rig, he felt utmost gratitude to port an ensemble with head-to-toe military grade water and stain repellent. “Yeah, after yesterday, the clothes I had were done for. What’s on the agenda?”

“Well, if your memory didn’t conveniently lapse, you should have brought me something very specific. Do you remember what that was?”

Deadpan, ‘Choly produced the Nagant from the hip pocket of his military jacket and held it out for him handle first. Jared looked it over, then checked out the rudimentary sight on it. With a low, impressed whistle, he aimed the thing at 'Choly. The chemist flinched despite knowing the firearm had no bullets.

“So this is a Russian pistol. I’ve been thinking. Little verbal slips here and there. You being able to confidently identify the make of this thing. Supposing you are a man out of time. That you really are from before the War. You were a Commie, weren’t you?” He laughed darkly at 'Choly, who straightened in his seat.

“I’m Russian. That’s right.”

“From the look of that uniform, you didn’t fight for the Reds, though. You defected. Betrayed your country.” The raider walked to the other end of the assembly line with the revolver in hand, forcing ‘Choly to keep up to sustain the uncomfortable conversation. At a workbench, he began to tinker with the thing to get acquainted. “What made you do it?”

‘Choly trembled, not sure whether he was more indignant or threatened.

“You have to know? Same reason I plied for your graces. Money, at first. Asylum. Opportunity. The Chinese were already vying to subsume the Motherland before the United States military approached me and offered me a pardon of my nationality in exchange for my service. They could overlook that I was Russian, as long as I did what they needed of me without question. I’ve...” He swallowed. “I’ve always followed anything that looked like security, and... this... this outfit is the most secure I’ve felt since I thawed out.”

He bit his tongue before tacking on a not that it’s a good frame of reference.

“An answer I both did and did not expect from you. I’m strangely pleased with you, chemist. Lacking your brains, I wish more people in my outfit had your sensibilities. You have your priorities straight.”

“Do I? I just handed over your capacity to administer whatever chems you want, to whomever in the room you want. Tell me I haven’t just fucked up. Promise me I didn’t just make the second worst mistake in my life.”

“And what, pray tell, do you say takes the cake?”

“Not being more adamant with my commanding officers, as to the side effects our experiments were having on the soldiers. We lost lives just through gross clinical negligence. I nearly lost my humanity in all my years of service, forced time and again to prioritize results over the safety of the test subjects. And... and you’re asking me to stand by while you do exactly what I did two hundred years ago.”

“A... military chemist.” Jared’s eyes went wide, and he turned from the dismantled gun with a wild grin as he gripped Melancholy by the shoulders. “You’re a fuckin’ Deenwood chemist. Holy fuck-in’ shit. I knew I struck gold when I laid eyes on you. You’re going to cook Psycho for me. The Jet ain’t cutting it.”

‘Choly’s head swam hot and his extremities numbed. When his left leg began to spasm, he clamped his elbow down on it forcefully to glare at Jared.

“The hell do you know about the Deenwood Compound.”

“I know that these experiments you’re doing your best not to describe were perfecting Psycho. Don’t play stupid with me. You can take credit for all your fine work. God!” The raider let go of him to throw up his hands in delirious disbelief. “I’ve got a fuckin’ Deenwood chemist right in front of me. And you’ve wasted all this time dicking around with Buffout, and Jet... when you could have been making my outfit the good shit! God--!” He cackled, and suddenly the gun itself paled to everything else transpiring.

“I, I can’t entice you with literally any other chem on the planet, can I.”

“Barring X-Cell, you’re the best thing I’ve ever had in my sights.”

The mention of the highly experimental drug boxed ‘Choly’s ears, and he did his best to ignore just how much Jared seemed to know about ‘Choly’s employment.

“I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the precursor for Psycho is extinct.” Another worst possible remark, at the receiving end of Jared’s instantaneous glower he choked down errant saliva despite a dry mouth. “Cyclomorphine is a morphine analogue. Painkillers. Opiates. Morphine comes from a plant called opium. Without it, Psycho can’t exist.”

“Painkillers...” Jared crooked his tongue in the corner of his mouth a moment, and stared a hole through ‘Choly. “Painkillers, like hub?”

“What.”

“Hubflower. Those dark purple plants with the light purple flowers. What else could you have wanted them for? Wastelanders keep the petals to chew on when they’re hurting. Makes the whole tongue go numb.”

“Are you trying to tell me... that there’s a good chance my office contains potted descendants of the poppy.” His heart clung to his throat. Jared had sidestepped every possible objection he could have to the prospect. “I have potted plants... in my office... the flowers of which--” His voice broke off in a sweating squeak.

“Cool it, you little Nimrod. Don’t blow a gasket. What’s the matter with doing for my outfit what the government had you do? You know it pays well. How did you put it? All the money, asylum, and opportunity you could ask for. You're not in a position to turn me down. Fuck this shit. We’re done with the Jet. We’re going for the gold. You’re going to test hub to confirm it’s a match for the chem you need. And you’re going to be my Psycho cook.”

“I... certainly look the part, don’t I.” Shakily, he raised his right hand to his forehead and saluted him to the best of his abilities. “Captain Alan Carey of the Deenwood Pharm Corps, at your employ.”

Go to Next »»»

[findingalexius-blog]

What did we learn?

As the 2020 presidential election begins to rev up again, there is a single question haunting all of us: what can we learn from the election of President Trump? Whether you agree with what he says or not, there is something valuable to be gleaned in his rise to power and shell-shocking victory.               Perhaps the first thing we can learn is that his victory wasn’t shell shocking.            

Most major news sources are still based in major cities. Their sources and attention is on the places they are, and where political power seems to collect. Many were watching and reporting on the political buzz of urban environments, while downplaying rural votes. It is easy to see how a rural upsurge came as a surprise to a media source so focused on urban happenings.

But, Trump did not tap into the rich urbanites that spawned him. He (perhaps accidentally) tapped into the white, rural masses of America – the people who seem most distant from playboy millionaire New Yorker. In an ironic turn of events, Trump is the Bill Clinton of white conservative America. President Trump has a distinctly unpolished way of addressing topics. He does not use complex language or take nuanced stances. When he speaks extemporaneously, his words are clear and his rhetoric powerful to those desperate for someone to validate their opinions about the nation. These everyday Americans saw themselves reflected in his irreverent relationship to the political machines which so readily ignored the importance of their vote. In politics as in art, representation matters.

Still, these facts have been mulled over by political theorists and activists alike. What did the election teach us about Democrats? Well, there’s a lot to say there as well.

First: Democrats were angry. Nay, they were furious. The moment that seats were up to election in midterms, hundreds of minorities flooded the playing field to form a diverse canvas of candidates. It was part gut reaction to the identity politics presented by President Trump, and part active efforts by the Democratic Party after the 2016 loss.

Next: Liberal candidates also learned that some bending may be necessary. The Democratic Party is inherently different from the Republican Party in its heterogenous nature. It is easy to be incredibly conservative because the base is largely homogenous. It is more difficult to be very liberal, because there is such a large gradation of democratic ideology exists. While candidates like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rallied against ICE in the primaries, they had to come back towards center to win whole states. AOC was further whipped into position when she became Congresswoman, and fell into line behind Nancy Pelosi.

Finally: the Democratic Party cannot run on an anti-Trump platform, but it can run on policy. There simply aren’t enough radical liberals in the nation to win over districts with a solely anti-Trump campaign – there certainly isn’t enough support to carry Senators. On the other hand, there are enough people who like common sense government to support policies to overturn the House of Representatives.

Not all members of the new class of Democratic candidates got all of these parts. It is still too soon to see who will evolve into what. But one thing is clear: they are united in their zeal. It has only been two years of Republican control, and the DNC is thoroughly tired of the situation. What remains is to see whether the public will fall into line with these intentions of running on common sense policies.

That’s the final piece of this puzzle: the American public is still seething. Many Americans are infuriated by the actions of President Trump. His national approval is incredibly low, especially in the wake of the nation’s longest ever shutdown - which he abandoned without the key campaign promise that he began the shutdown for. The players on the DNC have learned to fall in line, as demonstrated in AOC’s willingness to play nice in the sandbox. The strategy is to run and govern on policy not drama. But even the best laid plans can be destroyed by the tsunami of public opinion.  

Only time will tell whether the American public will get the message – whether they will go high as Michelle Obama suggested, or go low as the current political climate lures. All we can do is wait with baited breath, as the next presidential election begins to unfold.

[otome--gokoro]

tbh i wish i could be this productive with my homework

@sunyounqs

I have to start by saying that no matter how much you like them, how good you think they are, or how many notes they have, Tumblr posts are not reliable sources, because they can be written by literally anybody. I could probably find multiple posts saying ‘RACISM AGAINST WHITE PEOPLE IS A THING’. Would you believe me because of that? Obviously not. Newspaper articles are also kind of iffy because they don’t cite and they’re not obliged to be objective, whereas academic sources (usually) have to be reviewed and vetted by multiple academics in the field before they can be published. Opinion pieces in magazines are not good sources, because they’re opinions. Opinions are biased. You need to be objective.

I called you out for being racist to white people. You countered by saying reverse racism is not a thing, and you failed to acknowledge that what you said was still prejudiced and offensive. I then asked you this:

And yet, when I asked if you were intending to apologize or acknowledge you were wrong to say that, you avoided the subject and told me that it’s okay for you to group white people from any country together because you’re talking about racism. The appropriate thing to do when you say something offensive, whether it’s meant to be or not, is apologize.

By the way, if you had said that you did not think it was offensive, I would have stopped responding to you altogether.

Nevertheless, the inability to acknowledge that you were wrong to do this proves to me that you’re not really up for discussion - you’re up for people agreeing with you. I don’t agree with you and I can’t agree with you, which is why this is going to be my last response to you.

Kpop in Japan

Kpop consumption in Japan is gendered. You may not have read this source that I originally suggested.

“Where are the men? There are, of course, male fans of South Korean popular culture, but kandora and K-pop have remained largely the province of women. A predictable corollary is the predominantly male constitution of the anti-Korean Wave movement. The discourse of Ken-Kanryū spans a range of criticisms, from the lack of originality of South Korean drama or music and the artificial character of South Korean stars (as evidenced by the prevalent use of plastic surgery) to the political criticism of the South Korean state and big business and the generalized dislike of Korean people and things Korean. The most visible political action so far has been a series of demonstrations in front of Fuji TV Station, which has been closely associated with kandora (see Furuya Tsunehira 2012). A common refrain is that most Japanese are not interested in watching kandora and that the Korean Wave is manufactured by South Korean political and business interests as well as by Japanese promoters bent on profit (Bessatsu Takarajima Henshūbu 2012). The discourse manifests a mixture of chauvinism (“Japanese culture is superior”) and xenophobia (“I don’t want foreign shows on Japanese TV”). Hollywood movies have been shown on prime-time TV, though it should be noted that they are almost always dubbed in Japanese. What underlies a visceral dislike on the part of many Japanese men is a baffling reality that “their” women—mothers, sisters, and friends—have been smitten by South Koreans, threatening at once their patriarchal and patriotic longings. Usually lumped together with other voices of the netto uyoku (the Internet-based right wing), anti-Korean Wave men tend to seek family-like solidarity with other xenophobic forces to counter the threat to the purity—and their ownership—of the family and the nation (Yasuda 2012, 320–325).

Contemporary right-wing nationalism in Japan is noteworthy for its appeal to young men, but its salient feature is its almost completely male constitution. The postbubble economy (the entire span of the conscious life of many young Japanese men) has been a relentless mixture of longing for the good old days of rapid economic growth and bemoaning that the future may be stationary or possibly stagnant. Almost no one believes in the post–World War II social order—sometimes called the 1955 system after the year in which the Liberal Democratic Party became consolidated, and coinciding with the beginning of rapid economic growth after the Korean War—in which many men could look forward to lifetime employment with steadily rising standards of living. It was also the time when the nuclear family became the indisputable norm, consolidating the gender divide between working husband-fathers and housewife mothers. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, few could trust their faith in the postwar 1955 system. Many young men, especially those unable to attend college, now find the future uncertain and economically unstable. As the mass media constantly pontificate on the rise of furītā (the contraction of the English “freelance” and the German “arbeiter” [worker]) and nīto (NEET, as in “not in education, employment, or training”), these men seem to lack any obvious place or prospect in Japanese economy and society (Honda 2007). In turn, some of their mothers (and wives) seek to explore, if only in the realm of fantasy, other possible lives beyond the confines of domesticity.  The Korean Wave, in this sense, is an interloper for some young men just as it is an escape for some women. The unusually passionate hatred for South Korean popular culture expresses, if only in part, the collapse of the postwar order of male superiority and domestic stability.” (19-20)

Lie, John. 2014. “Why Didn’t “Gangnam Style” Go Viral in Japan?: Gender Divide and Subcultural Heterogeneity in Contemporary Japan.” Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review 3(1): 6-31. doi:10.1353/ach.2014.0005

That is not to say that there are no male Kpop fans. Of course there are. It is just statistically not very likely. 

Let’s look at the Big Bang tour numbers you posted. Unfortunately, I think YG might have inflated those numbers. Based on the tour information they provided (18 concerts across 4 venues), it is impossible to have had 911k attendees. I am assuming here that they did not have any stage extensions that required the removal of seats and that they sold out every concert.

Tokyo Dome max. seating capacity: 55k x 6 nights = 330k Kyocera Dome max. seating capacity: 36,477 x  6 nights = 218,862 Fukuoka Dome max. seating capacity: 42k x 4 nights = 168k Nagoya Dome max. seating capacity: 40.5k x 2 nights = 81k Total: max seating capacity for 18 nights = 797862

That is a significant difference. It might be possible if they were violating fire safety regulations and adding extra seats…? Maybe they were counting people who stood outside (but even so, a 111k difference?) But that’s on YG, not you. Just thought you should know.

By the way - ‘the first foreign artist who has held dome tour for three years in a row in Japan’ is really not that big a deal.

1) Popular Western artists don’t usually do tours in Japan. More often than not, Japan is just one stop on a world tour, or an appearance at a festival. Most artistes just play in Tokyo, maybe Osaka, and that’s it.

2) Most popular Western artists work in the cycle of album production, album release, album promotion (world) tour, rinse and repeat. That cycle is usually more than a year long - Taylor Swift’s 1989 World Tour took a little over 7 months to complete, and another 7 months to prepare for, not including rehearsals. It is highly unlikely for them to be able to tour in Japan every year. Heck, most of them don’t even tour in their own countries yearly.

The way you compare Taylor Swift’s and Big Bang’s tour numbers directly (2.3 million in 83 shows vs ‘911k’ in 18 shows) is not fair. Her tour includes many smaller venues (10~15k) in America, while Big Bang’s is a dome tour, and their smallest venue is 36k. Of course Big Bang has a higher average number of attendees per concert. Both of Taylor Swift’s shows in Tokyo Dome sold out. Her entire world tour sold out. Did Big Bang’s Japan tour sell out? I have no idea. I should hope so, given those inflated numbers. But they didn’t specify that it was, which is odd.

The question still remains why you chose Kpop over Jpop. You say it’s okay for you to suggest Kpop because you think it’s popular in Japan. However, it’s not okay for white people to suggest Western music (that is also popular in Japan.) It’s not okay for white people to suggest Western music just because they don’t know Jpop, but in the same situation, it’s okay for you to suggest Kpop because you’re Asian/not white? How is it that they’re obliged to go and do research on Youtube while you don’t have to?

Are you saying that it’s inappropriate for white people to suggest music that they know because they are white?

“I don’t think it was unreasonable for me to say Japanese people listen to more Japanese music than Western music.”

Yes, and nobody said that. I said it was less likely for Japanese people to be listening to Kpop than to Western music. Oricon’s monthly chart for non-Japanese music has more Western artistes than Korean. You seem unwilling to concede. All right.

“they see the characters through the lens of a white person”

I am really curious about this one because I literally have no idea what you mean. Do you mean that people are viewing characters through their perspective as a white/Asian/whatever person? Because I don’t feel that that is something you can get rid of. Even if you try to learn about someone else’s culture, it’s still secondary to you. You are approaching it from an outside perspective, your own perspective, whether you’re white, Asian, or a freaking rainbow.

Tbh it sounds to me like you are saying, white people shouldn’t participate in fan activity because they’re white and must therefore demonstrate their cultural sensitivity to you before they can contribute, whereas you get a free pass to do whatever you want because you’re Asian?

“Here, a fallacy fallacy, which is when you presume that just because a claim has been poorly argued, or a fallacy has been made, that it is necessarily wrong.”

I did not say you were necessarily wrong. I said your argument was automatically suspect. If you give me an example that is inaccurate, I will doubt the rest of your information. I will not assume it is 100% wrong. But I will be skeptical. I will look more closely at the rest of what you say because it might also be wrong.

Here’s an example.

Your argument: Big Bang is more popular in Japan than Taylor Swift.

Your proof: Big Bang had ‘911k attendees’ in 18 shows, while Taylor Swift had nearly 2.3 million in 83 shows.

What you did not mention/know: Big Bang’s numbers might have been artificially inflated, plus theirs was a Japan dome tour while Taylor Swift’s was a world tour that included a lot of small venues.

And thus the validity of your argument is called into question, because your proof did not hold up. Are you automatically wrong? No. But I’m going to regard your original statement with a great deal more skepticism.

Race

“I bring it up because the voices of POC are often dismissed and spoken over especially on race-related issues. “

I am a POC. @slbp-owns-ayame is a POC. I personally don’t feel like my opinions are being dismissed or spoken over by white people, Asian people, or really any people at all, based on my ethnicity. If you have something to say, it is my responsibility, as a person, to listen to you. I don’t see why you feel that white people are especially obliged to listen to the voices of the POC (to be specific, you), while you are not required to listen to the opinions of other POC? Because you are also a POC? So you’re allowed to step all over the opinions of other POC because you are also one? 

I really don’t understand why you think it’s okay to sling mud at all white people. Do you not realize that European Caucasians are culturally different from American Caucasians? You say that you are not implying that French culture is not the same as German culture and therefore it’s okay. But to me, you are erasing the differences between European Caucasians, American Caucasians, and Caucasians that live in non-white majority countries. You saying that ‘all white people this’, ‘all white people that’, that’s like saying all Chinese people eat dog meat. All Chinese people let their children pee on the street. This is clearly not true. Would you be insulted if someone said that to you? When you say ‘all __ people do this’, ‘all ____ people do that’, no matter what word falls in that blank, it is going to be an overgeneralization, a stereotype, which is problematic. You seem to think that ‘all white people are racist’ is acceptable. Replace ‘white’ with any other word and you will see that it is not.

By the way, how do you even know for sure that all these people you’re angry about are white? Did you ask them? Are you assuming?

I pointed out to you that your words were inappropriate. Your response was that reverse racism does not exist. You neatly sidestepped the issue of whether your words were offensive or not. You did not acknowledge it. You did not apologize.

You say that reverse racism doesn’t exist. Fine. I can’t find an academic definition of it tbh so I’m inclined to agree with you. I can’t know whether something exists or not if I don’t know for sure what it is.

You insist that you are not racist towards white people because it’s impossible to do so, because they are a majority. Fine. By your definition of racism, that is accurate. By my definition of racism, which you have probably seen seeing as you have gone through my anon responses, you are absolutely being racist.

If you insist it is not racism, then so be it. I can’t change your mind. But it is definitely racial prejudice. You have acknowledged that your words were offensive. You know that you were not right here. And yet, instead of acknowledging your mistake like a decent human being, your defense is that you are allowed to sling shit at white people because they’re a majority and therefore are not allowed to get offended??

It does not damage your credibility or stance if you admit that you are wrong. If anything, that shows that you are a reasonable person who is willing to acknowledge your mistakes. Unfortunately, that is not the behavior you are exhibiting.

You certainly don’t seem like you know Japanese history well. But I can give you the benefit of the doubt. You just need to know this - if you’re going to yell at people about how inaccurate they’re being, your knowledge better be on point.

You are guilty. Not of ‘seeing characters through the lens of a white person’, whatever that means - I note that it’s conveniently impossible for, you, an Asian, to be guilty of this simply by the virtue of not being white. I accused you of pushing your personal experiences onto Japanese characters. You used your own experiences to suggest music, did you not? You said that you aren’t familiar with Jpop, but you did not go on youtube and look it up like you are suggesting other people do. If you so strongly believe that this is how things should be done, why didn’t you do it yourself? Were you lazy? Did you just pick songs that you already know and like?

I’m not attacking you for doing that. Everyone does that. It’s just that it’s hypocritical when you say that other people aren’t allowed to do that, but you are, because you’re not white.

And while we’re talking about race, what is this whole ‘Asians vs white people’ thing you have going on? It’s not a war. When you align yourself against an entire group of people like that, it’s othering. It’s a harmful attitude that helps no one. You keep talking about your opinion ‘as an Asian’. I’m also Asian. So what? Have you considered that maybe the ‘white people’ you seem to love hating on don’t want to interact with you about their supposed wrongdoings because it feels like anything they say will be dismissed with, ‘well you’re white and I’m Asian and therefore I’m right and your opinion is invalid’?

Women

I did not say that women don’t face discrimination. It’s hard to measure empowerment because there are so many factors involved. I did not say that POC women do not face more discrimination than white women. I fully acknowledge that all these issues exist, and need to be addressed.

I think you are coming from a very macro-level viewpoint. There are empowered women who are not white, as well as non-empowered women who are white. Therefore, your sweeping statement, to me, sounds like erasure of these people, which is funny because that’s what you complain about. Erasure.

Fan Content

Admittedly, I don’t follow that many people, and I don’t consume that much fan content. I certainly had never heard of that Glee AU until you talked about it. I honestly thought you were talking about something else until someone sent me a link. It feels like you are deliberately seeking out content that offends you.

Japanese people can exist in Ohio. Japanese people can be born anywhere in the world. Japanese people born overseas are allowed to speak another language as their first language. By insisting that Japanese people in America must behave in accordance with your idea of how Japanese people should, you are erasing the existence and experiences of these people.

I have never thought that fan content creators in the SLBP fandom were being disrespectful of the source material. If anything, I feel uncomfortable about how people sometimes exoticize Japan. If we’re talking about being inaccurate with Japan and its culture and history, I urge you to first consider that these characters we love are tall and pale with multi-colored hair, in the 1500s.

“In the context of making music headcanons, if anyone feels that they don’t have the time to do extensive research on Japanese music, or can’t be bothered to, then alright. How about, “I think Character A would enjoy singing pop songs a lot. Character B would love to slow dance with his partner, soft jazz playing in the background.” It’s as simple as that. It hurts exactly zero people, and doesn’t take much effort.”

That’s not what you did, though. I agree, this is a good idea. But have you considered that maybe, if you said this from the beginning instead of being all WHITE PEOPLE ARE THE SCUM OF THE EARTH AND I’M OFFENDED, people might have listened to you, instead of getting annoyed with you?

Your Attitude

It does not take away the validity of your argument, even if I don’t understand exactly what the point you are trying to make is. But it makes you unlikeable, and people don’t want to listen to someone that they don’t like. If people are offended by you, they’re not going to want to listen to you, even if your point is 100% valid. I am saying that the way you approach things is just not great. I’m sorry if you feel that this is unfair to you.

The SLBP fandom has a history of anon hate, so people have the tendency to disregard what anons say. If you go on anon, it seems like you are trying to hide your identity, and if you’re proud of what you’re doing, why hide? You certainly seem to take pride in what you’re doing. Why go on anon then? Are you scared of being identified? From this point on, people might look at any anon message that references whitewashing and think, ‘maybe that’s sunyounqs again.’ Furthermore, the anon ask character limit is really short and nowhere near enough to explain your point. A message that says ‘you’re whitewashing and you’re wrong and I’m offended and you need to change’ is not convincing without an explanation. There is absolutely no conceivable reason why people should believe you right off the bat. 

You send your anon message, and when you get a response you don’t like, you continue stalking that person’s blog, and then run back to your own to make that snarky post that I originally replied to. That’s not the behavior of a mature person who’s ready for a calm discussion. I mean, you were literally acting out that one Spongebob meme.

Actually, I really don’t understand why you didn’t just message these people directly, and make your point in a polite manner without being condescending. Wouldn’t that have been more productive? I mean, I don’t know how many followers you have, but I’m assuming that these people you throw shade at don’t follow you. How do you even know that your posts will be seen by them? It’s like you’re yelling into a void.

These tags are clearly aimed at @koudaiin. You didn’t take the initiative to message her directly. You wrote a vague post that was about her (which you seem to have deleted?) and then you posted this after she announced a social media hiatus which was unrelated to you. You didn’t even have proof that it was linked to your post. Why did you assume that her hiatus was because of you? ‘The audacity’? The audacious one here is you for assuming that you, a stranger to her, wrote a post that you don’t even know if she read, and that it was enough to make her take a break.

I am not trying to attack your character. I’m trying to suggest that you need to change your behavior if you want people to pay attention to what you say. Re: your age - I mention your age because I remember a time when I was 18 and convinced that I was right about everything. I was not. There are plenty of older people here in the fandom who feel the same way I do. It’s clear to us that you see things in black and white (hahaha unintended pun), when nothing is that simple.

Judging from these tags, you seem to think that people are not responding to you because they aren’t seeing your posts. But I’ve had multiple people tell me that they are not responding to you because judging by the way you write and the content of your tags, you don’t seem like someone who is willing to have an open, reasonable discussion. I had people tell me not to bother interacting with you because of that impression. From the way you have spoken about this issue so far, you seem to be portraying yourself as some sort of savior that has come to enlighten the ignorant masses on their wrongdoing. That attitude helps no one.

You have a valid concern about whitewashing. You seem to be convinced that whitewashing in this fandom is rampant. In that case, I suggest you find another example, because this one has been driven into the ground already. If you want to convince people that you are right, I suggest that you take some time to think about what you want to say, and be careful to phrase yourself in a way that does not offend people. Take a break, concentrate on your exams, wait for people to (hopefully) forget how offensive you have been. In the meantime, at least try to hide the ‘white people need to stop’, ‘everything white people do that I don’t like is bad’ attitude that you have going on. It’s not endearing you to the group that you need to be convincing, and if you want to make a positive impact for your cause, then you need them to be willing to listen to you.

Good luck to you. You’re going to need it.

[elliepassmore]

Exit West Review

3/5 stars Recommended for people who like: contemporary fiction, very mild magical realism, metaphors, refugee representation, LGBTQ+ characters So I had to read this book for a class and I'll say that the book and I started out on the wrong foot from the get-go and it went downhill, then uphill a bit, then just plateaued. For starters, I bought the book without reading the synopsis or really knowing anything about it, but since the class is a writing class and we were talking about the representation of refugees in media, I was expecting this to be nonfiction. Gratitude goes to my mother, who actually read the synopsis and pointed out the book was fiction, because at least that was a better way to find out than when I opened it for the first time. The second issue that offset the book's and my relationship is that, however much of a metaphor the book is and however much it's about refugees and global migration, it's also largely about romance and while I read books with romance, there is something about reading a book that is even partially about romance that I just don't fuck with. So there was that. Or, perhaps, you could classify some of the books I read as being about romance, it's more about the genre, which is contemporary fiction, which I definitely don't touch with a 10-foot-pole. I live and interact in reality, I don't need to read about it fictionally too. Anyway, the book and I got off on the wrong foot, but I will say that it isn't a bad book, it juts isn't a good one. The author waxes poetic, which I actually like and find nice to read so long as the author doesn't go overboard (re: Ernest Hemingway). I thought a lot of the intangible descriptions were really poignant and apt for the situation, like this line: "so by making the promise he demanded she make she was in a sense killing him, but that is the way of things, for when we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind" (98). It's a bloody fantastic line and it's one of the few that I highlighted in purple (personal pleasure) instead of green (relevant to class). However, I think because Hamid is so intent on writing in this manner and on getting all his metaphors into the book he fails in adding emotion. Like...that line is great and I love it, but I don't feel it and I don't feel Nadia feeling it. There are plenty of raw lines in the book, but there are so few lines that actually impart any sense of emotion onto the reader. Nadia and Saeed fall in love and we read the description of that, but I didn't receive any of the emotion behind it. (view spoiler). I think, ultimately, this is what killed the book for me, because let's be honest, as long as we can relate to the character's and feel the situations then we have an opinion of the book one way or another. Maybe we relate and feel and still hate the book with a burning passion, or maybe we relate and feel and love the book more than any other, or maybe the book falls somewhere between, but I don't think I've ever had a book that properly got me to relate to a character and feel for them where I was left with just no opinion at the end of it. I don't dislike Exit West, but I don't like it either. It just sort of exists as a book I read and will analyze in class and that will be that. Beyond the lines and lack of emotion, I will say that this book is very obviously a giant metaphor. I will also say that I am shocked at how many of my classmates believed that the 'doors' in the book were metaphors in the book (they are not, they are literally doors in the book, the metaphor is purely for the readers). For starters, this book opens up in Unnamed City in Unnamed Middle Eastern Country at the brink of Unnamed Conflict in an Unspecified Time with Unspecified People. Right? So it could be anywhere, anytime and I actually think Hamid actually does a good job capitalizing this later on in the book, but for the first half it's just annoying. The conflict doesn't actually matter, the doors do. The doors represent migration, obviously. People go through the doors and end up in places like San Francisco and Mykonos and Tokyo. People in the countries with doors either have people leaving or people arriving. Those countries with people arriving don't want people arriving...and you see where this is going. There's this whole conflict about rich countries guarding their doors to prevent people coming through and leaving doors to poorer countries unguarded in the hopes people will return to wherever they came from. There is, in the book, a 'crisis of migration,' and it causes a rise in hate crimes. There are nativists and there are nonnativists, there are the police and the refugees, there is the desire for homogeneity and the reality of heterogeneity. I'm really not being superfluous when I say the entire book is a metaphor, it really is. It's a reflection of the 'migrant/refugee crisis' of today and people's reactions to it, and it's a reflection of globalization and the increased speed and efficiency of global travel, and it's a question of what really constitutes a national identity and borders and whether these things can be chipped away at if people from different cultures come to live in a new area en masse. Writing it like this, I can really see the potential for the book. I really, really think Hamid had a great idea when he sat down to write a book that was a metaphor for all those things, he just didn't execute it very well. Of course it is also a metaphor for romance and how people can love each other fiercely in one place and time and then find out down the line that they are different people for one reason or another and don't want to let go but also don't want to hold the other person or themselves back, which is a metaphor that I would prefer in a different book entirely, though it does fit in this one. Going back to the idea of Unnamed Place, Time, People, etc., is another idea Hamid had that just wasn't executed that well, though its potential definitely picks up in the latter half of the book. I started reading the book and immediately placed Nadia and Saeed in some Iranian city, 1970s. Iran-entering-Revolution. Cell phones were invented in 1971, the Revolution began in 1973, that's probably enough time for Nadia and Saeed to have them. Chat rooms have pretty much always been a thing, though I did skip over the fact they need internet to function, and that definitely wasn't invented for another decade, but it was really when I was analyzing the first half of a book with a friend from class that I began to see holes in the time-frame. For starters, she pointed out they had internet. She also pointed out they used social media, which is another thing I just happened to skip over (really shows the bias effect). She was convinced it was set modern day, I still thought it was in the '70s. Then I began reading the second half of the book and began to wonder if it's set in the future. There are iridescent, hummingbird-sized drones and robots that "walked or crawled like animals" (154), and just casual drops of things in general that made me wonder if the book was set forward in time. I've come to a new conclusion, perhaps a crazy one, but it's the one I'm sticking with since the book is a metaphor anyway, and that's that the book is set in all times. Nadia and Saeed are simultaneously in the 1970s and the 2010s and the 2050s. The book is a metaphor for migration and globalization and perhaps a little bit about the rise of hate and the far-right, and those things can occur anytime in anyplace and the confusion of when and where and who is intentional because it's everywhen and everywhere and everyone. The only names we are given are Saeed's and Nadia's and their starting place is not given and, as mentioned, there is no time period given either, but fragments of many, and so they could just as easily be in the 1970s or 1980s (if you ignore the Internet and social media) as they could be in 2009 or 2015 (if you ignore their cellphones have antennas) or even 2056, or you could say whatever and assume like I am that they and the events of the book are transcending time just as they are transcending space. Exit West has a lot of really great concepts that just weren't executed all that fantastically. I can definitely tell it had potential to be a really great book, but the lack of emotion in the writing really just kills it for me. I also feel that some of the concepts weren't fully fleshed out, the doors being a fantastic example. I can't even express how many people in my class thought the doors were a metaphor the characters were using for something else instead of a metaphor the author was using for us. Plus, we get to see the immediate impact of the doors, but there's not really a mention of their long-term impact and we don't see any sort of discussion going on for how this is transforming the world aside from "oh we have more refugees now." I also thought the ball was dropped when it came to the nativists in the book. They have a couple of riots and something burns down in London and suddenly it's all good? That doesn't make any sense at all, but Hamid builds them up to this conflict and then after the conflict they aren't really mentioned again for the rest of the book. There were also just some weird things Hamid included, such as the details about Saeed's parents' sex life. Like...I didn't need to know the mom was super horny and the dad became impotent, and it's also not at all relevant. Hamid also goes into some detail about Nadia's shrooms dealer, but the character doesn't really play a role except for that one scene where he...delivers...shrooms. He could've been described and added in in one sentence instead of with detail, but Hamid added it anyway. It makes me wonder if he'd've had more room for some of the better concepts to be explained/fleshed out more if he'd dropped some of these bits. But anyway, I don't really have an opinion about the book itself, parts of it yes, but not the entire thing.

[glitchinthesystemspiderbyte]

[21] Glitch in the System - A View to a Kill

By K. Too many stairs happen. _

At Widowmaker’s behest, they held off on the Eiffel tower until evening.

“We can go back tomorrow morning, if you’d like,” she conceded, arm in arm with the hacker as they strolled leisurely along the raised bank of the Seine. “But the first time? After sunset. You will thank me.”

“But why?” Sombra asked, incredulous and well over the sniper’s cryptic avoidance of further explanation.

Slowing to a stop, Widowmaker cast a long, appraising glance about them as if searching for an answer along the riverside and the buildings beyond. A moment passed, two, before she set a hand lightly against the small of the shorter woman’s back and turned her toward the city proper.

Before them, civilian life carried on as usual, humans and omnics milling from place to place, indistinct in their sheer number and made even moreso in the constancy of their movement. To anyone else, it was a crowd; to her, a network of interconnected details, all glaringly obvious beneath the watch of an eye trained for single targets. Up close, she could discern the little tells and tics that colored their character: fingers in bags they didn’t own, warm smiles shared between couples, little kindnesses and slights in equal abundance.

“It’s nice during the day, oui; a good view. But, at night? It’s different,” she explained, leaning in to speak warmly just behind Sombra’s ear. “The light against the dark - you watch everything in vignettes, good and bad, and it all looks exactly the same.”

It was true: from a distance, those individual variables blended into something else, removed and beautifully neutral in their simultaneous homo and heterogeneity. That dichotomy provided an impartiality she found comfortable and familiar.  Were she anyone else - anyone more innately empathetic or prone to hesitation when it came to taking lives - she suspected that added element of dehumanization would better facilitate her ability to do her job. Bearing no such burden, it served simply and effectively as a quaint macrocosm of the way she saw the world: a window through which to watch the chapters of others’ stories unfold.

Glancing over her shoulder, Sombra searched Widowmaker’s ever-impassive expression for further illumination and found, unsurprisingly, nothing. Despite the little changes she saw in the spider with every passing day, Widowmaker remained mostly unreadable beyond the occasional shift in tone. Greater provocation was generally required for more than that, so much they both questioned independent of one another whether she was putting it on for familiarity’s sake or if that default was simply there to stay.

“What?” Widowmaker asked, her response to that lingering glance little more than the quirk of an eyebrow.

The hacker’s vague agitation gave way to a resigned but bemused smirk. “That is some flowery-ass shit if I’ve ever heard it, spider,” she chuckled, stumbling a few steps forward with the gentle shove she received as a retort.

“Like I said: you will thank me,” the assassin repeated coolly, stifling the smile threatening the corner of her mouth.

“Yeah, yeah. We’ll see.”

To no one’s concern, the afternoon moved at a snail’s pace, their aimless wandering punctuated by Sombra’s sporadic inquiries regarding a given building or landmark. Widowmaker served as the reluctant tour guide, recalling historical odds and ends as she was able. The details came less readily than she preferred, particularly given her time in Paris over the preceding few years was limited to rooftop traversals over a handful of hours at most. Still, the salient points remained, occasionally accompanied by others more obscure - those ineffaceable bits of information borne of grim history or urban legend, their veracity questionable but intriguing all the same.

With the aid of the Métro, their exploration took them across the Seine toward the nexus of streets which encompassed the Palais Garnier, its neo-baroque ornamentation looming well overhead. Widowmaker quietly hoped it would not warrant their stopping, acknowledging with passive frustration the creeping dryness in her throat and the way her heart turned suddenly to lead as they approached. Despite the sniper’s efforts to feign interest in anything and everything but the Palais,  Sombra lead them on a straight shot toward the home of the Paris Opera Ballet, slowing toward a stop adjacent its front and casting her gaze upwards.

“I know this place,” she muttered, eyes narrowed as she scanned its architecture for the singular detail which might reveal the source of her recognition. “It was in something. I know it.”

Widowmaker followed the line of the other woman’s sight, golden eyes surveying the the building with the pointed curiosity typically reserved for marks as she considered the memories it dragged from beneath the surface to the shores of consciousness. She craned her neck, tracing the lines of friezes and columns and its golden avant-corps; among them, she could recall countless rehearsals, years of ribbon and tulle and stage lights and the orchestra’s uniform movement setting the pace for her own. Sometimes, bolting from balcony to balcony under enemy fire, she remembered those moments, comparing the synchronicity between stage and pit and the measured, calculating movements by which murder could effortlessly mirror art and finding amid the comparison a grace in conflict she never expected.

She embodied that grace here as part of the corps de ballet; she embodied it still, leveraging the precision and fluidity of movement to equally beautiful but lethal means. Somehow, recognizing that consistency among the trajectory of her life made the other memories the opera house evoked - roses, Gérard, a handful of faces she now counted among Talon’s opposition - more bearable in how fateful they felt.

“Any ideas?” she asked, willing the unsteadiness of her own voice away as she leaned over to Sombra.

“Some stage show,” the hacker shrugged. “Broadway kind.”

“Fantôme?”

“Mm, yeah. That sounds right.”

“Drivel,” Widowmaker quipped. “Leroux’s writing deserved better. They kept a box for him here, you know. For a while.”

“The writer?”

“The phantom,” the sniper replied cryptically. Sombra eyed her with a combination of disbelief and, somewhere beyond it, concern - recognition of the faintest wavering of her partner’s tone, the ghost of tiredness that passed over her features in fleeting seconds.

“One: bullshit,” she started. Then, more gently: “Two: you okay?”

With a slow inhale, Widowmaker watched the steady flow of visitors coming and going. Among them, she could almost discern her own ghost, duffel bag over one shoulder as she passed through the crowd.

“I danced here,” she explained. “I was supposed to perform La Sylphide; I still remember the routines. I was so excited.”

That admission somehow lightened, even if only incrementally, the heavy sadness she felt like a stone in her chest, dead and cold - the shadow of a dream, tucked between the bones of a woman dead in everything but form. Until recently, she could neither recognize nor understand the inkling of unfulfillment she harbored in the wake of its destruction. In the wake of that comprehension, she couldn’t help but wondered whether it truly mattered - after all, she was no longer a ballerina, and the Palais was no longer her stage. Then, her performances were for hundreds; now they were for the world - who hadn’t seen replayed footage of Tekhartha Mondatta’s assassination?

In a way, it felt as though she had simply mastered a different medium.

As Sombra pushed her fingers past the edge of her coat pocket to intertwine them with her own, Widowmaker allowed herself that appreciation, grim as it was, and with it felt some small weight lift itself from her shoulders.

“This is… good,” she said, giving the hacker’s hand a gentle squeeze. “Thank you, cherie.”

Despite the cold, they picnicked in the park adjacent the tower, watching the sun’s early winter descent with a bottle of wine and the casual banter that came more readily to the both of them as the days progressed. Some topics were fleeting, their subjects particularly tender: Sombra’s pitiful handful of family memories, the expectation of perfection which governed a young Amélie Lacroix’s adolescence; others were easier: the hacker’s love and leverage of cybernetics, Widowmaker’s reading habit and the quiet exchange of literature she shared with Akande subsequent his freedom. Few of these exchanges were of importance, per se, but both rendered them a degree of attention and sincere curiosity that sometimes saw a particular topic prolonged beyond a half-hour or more.

The setting of the sun and the disappearance of its final rays brought with it the inevitable drop in temperature which pushed Sombra closer, shoving as much of herself as she was able beyond the open front of the assassin’s coat in an attempt at warmth that was as vehemently lazy as it was innately futile. Widowmaker laughed at her efforts, a thin, bemused smile haunting the corners of her mouth as she climbed to her feet and offered her coat to her partner.

“It will do you more good than me,” she insisted, ignoring Sombra’s protestations as she pushed the garment in question into her hands with a firmness which offered no compromise. “Do not be a child.”

“Fine,” the hacker grunted, tossing it over her shoulders. Tilting her head, Widowmaker stared at her a long moment as that same, fey smile not only returned, but blossomed into something broader and brighter.

“What?” Sombra asked, pointedly aware the sniper’s smile was entirely at her expense.

“Two coats,” Widowmaker snickered. “Very in this season.”

Turning up her nose in a fit of mock insult, Sombra gathered their trash in a single armful and turned on her heel, her colleague in tow as they made their way to the edge of the park, depositing the remaining odds and ends of their dinner the garbage as they cleared its borders. She slowed to a stop before the east and west legs which served as half of its foundation, craning her neck in a vain attempt to take in its full height.

“We are not taking the stairs,” she declared as Widowmaker grasped her by the hand and pulled her wordlessly toward the nearest entrance. “Really. We’re not.”

“Oh?” the sniper asked over her shoulder. “I can carry you if you get tired,” she offered flatly, leaving the statements intent as either sincere or a joke purposefully ambiguous.

“We are not. taking. the stairs,” Sombra repeated, pointing upward at the latticework looming above them to further reiterate her statement.

Rolling her eyes, the taller woman took her hand anew and doubled back toward the entrance. “We have to take the stairs to the second floor; if we queue, we will be here a week,” she explained. “There is only a lift to the observation deck, if I recall; no stairs. I promise.”

“Fine,” Sombra agreed. “How many stairs to the second floor?”

“About seven hundred.”

“You are the actual worst.”

“I am aware, cherie.”

They spent their first hour on the topmost observation deck in relative silence, moving slowly about its perimeter as they took in the city from nearly 81 stories above. Paris sprawled beneath them, a patchwork quilt of buildings silhouetted by hundreds of thousands of lights. Each collection of radiances contained somewhere within the field of their glow some small microcosm of life, their details indistinguishable at their height. From where they stood, fleeting interactions between two humans, three, sometimes more bore remarkable likenesses to one another; it was difficult to tell which meetings were happy, sad, welcome, or otherwise, but they were all beautiful amid the interplay of light and shadow the city offered them from below.

Eventually, Sombra excused herself to the first of the tower’s two uppermost floors, leaving her partner in search of a brief reprieve from the cold amid the considerably more crowded interior deck. Widowmaker simply nodded her understanding, losing track of the minutes which comprised her absence as she leaned against the railing and considered the sight before her. She had expected it to be more difficult than this, had expected it would evoke the same, sharp pinpricks of feeling her family’s effects or wedding photo had. After all, it was home - had been home for almost her entire young life. Yet, as she stood over all of Paris, she couldn’t help but feel that  faint notion of catharsis she had earlier that day: the same gratification she felt when she won the asinine sharpshooter game no fewer than ten times, the same closure she felt at the Palais that afternoon. The same, small weight, suddenly gone and remarkable in its absence.

It felt like saying goodbye, bittersweet but necessary and, ultimately, good.

“All right, all right. It’s pretty.”

Sombra’s voice, smug but amused as she returned to the sniper’s side, heralded by the ding of the elevator behind them as she looped an arm through Widowmaker’s.

“I know” the assassin replied airily, leaning in to plant a single, soft kiss against the shaved side of Sombra’s head. “It is how I see everything. In a way, I take it with me everywhere I go. A… fond memory, I suppose.”

Giving her arm a gentle squeeze with her own, the hacker nodded her understanding despite her visibly straining to ignore a collection of people gathering at the elevator behind them, their murmuring growing markedly louder. “Same reason I like cities. Close, lots of people; I can disappear or I can be the center of attention. My choice. Feels like home.”

Behind them, a gentleman cursed his displeasure, pressing the button to the lift repeatedly as the small crowd milled about him. Widowmaker offered the gathering a single, curious glance over one shoulder: where a light should have illuminated the button, there was only unresponsive darkness.

“Sombra,” she said flatly, returning her attention to the city stretching about them on every side. “Did you hack the tower?“

From the corner of her eye, she could see the faintest curl of the other woman’s lips, a flash of amusement and the stifling of laughter.

“You didn’t.”

“I might have,” Sombra chuckled.

“Sombra,” the sniper chided her, shoving an elbow into her partner’s side, the gesture softened by her own furtive amusement. “Why?”

“Well, first of all: because I could,” Sombra explained, resting her head against Widowmaker’s arm. “Other than that? You seemed happy.”

Sighing, Widowmaker slid that same arm about the hacker’s waist, pulling her closer. “You are ridiculous. Thank you.”

*Read from the beginning or check out our intro post! All stories tagged under #glitchfic

[divinecuration]

The decay of the aura according to Walter Benjamin / the curatorial mapping / the presence of hiddenness in subculture and Berghain

In 1935 Walter Benjamin compared the performances of the stage actor and the film actor. He found two differences:

the screen performance is less unitary than the stage performance. It can be stitched together from different takes and repeat performances, incorporate real life footage, be altered, edited, etc. Unlike the organic unity of a stage performance, it is a patchwork of fragments sewn together into synthetic unity.

a screen performance is more readily susceptible to critical engagement. It can be rewatched by an audience many times over, slowed down and reversed, examined in its minutiae.

Both are products of the intrusion of the camera as mediating interface between actor and audience, restructuring the normative field on both sides. (Technical mediation is always normative restructuration. The poiesis of the artisan is conditioned by obligations to matter itself; the technics of industry is conditioned by obligations to the machines that operate on matter.) One reciprocal relation is replaced by two unilateral relations. The film actor, according to Benjamin, is not tested on their representation of a character but on themselves as a representer, on their capacity to depict and represent. (The question of realism was never important to theatre; for cinema it becomes central.) The camera is a surgical tool, dissecting for inspection. At the same time it removes the audience from the performance space, denying the actor their source of feedback and masking the criterion of inspection. The new anxiety of the film actor, likened by Benjamin to the feeling of standing before one’s image in the mirror, is the product of a technical operation which both imposes a regime of testing and obscures its own criteria. The attitude of the audience to the stage performance is modulated from involvement and reciprocity to unilateral scrutiny. The camera tests; the audience test with it. The performance is assessed on its traces of authenticity, even as its production for reproduction is necessarily an act of artifice. 

The screen performance is transmittable and reproducible. The stage performance, an organic unity of heterogeneous components tied to particular presence and audience, to accidents of circumstance, therefore untransmittable, is multiplied, dissected and resynthesised into a new, transmittable unity---which is then scrutinised for exactly those particularities and presences destroyed in its creation. The public gaze is always forensic, an interrogation of a scene for the fading traces of what is always-already gone. For Benjamin as with Baudrillard later, the transformation in perception is equivalent to a mutation in the law of value structuring social reality. In the age of communications technologies and media saturation the unique and individual is still what is valued, but valuability itself is always subservient to the principle of reproduction. The anxiety described by Benjamin is a product of the contradictory imperative to be reproducibly unique.

Benjamin understood this mutation in terms of a libidinal drive towards closeness. The aura is described as “the unique phenomenon of a distance”, with its decay attributed to “the desire of contemporary masses to bring things ‘closer’ spatially and humanly.” But the analysis is tangled. We are told the aura is both presence and distance, and the bringing-close that mechanical reproduction makes possible (the surgical close-ups of the camera, the hypervisibility of far off things) also results in loss of presence. Closeness and presence are set in opposition, yet Benjamin never unwraps this paradox. But it can be understood if ‘closeness’ is held to refer to aesthetic closeness and ‘presence’ to normative closeness, which is just involvement, participation, interiority. The production of aesthetic proximity is an operation of framing that severs obligations (in the broad sense of an attunement to act in relation to, as in the obligation you have to pay attention to the rattlesnake you’re in the tank with). Normative decontextualisation is the molding of exteriority, the division of a social space by transparent membranes that explode involvements and multiply viewpoints via the same mechanism. The drive to closeness then is a drive towards a kind of aesthetic disentanglement, a clearing away of obligations towards things in order to get a better look at them. The libidinal drive towards closeness is in fact a striving for liberation from obligation, from the labour implied by a commingling of narratives.

Benjamin’s analysis of ritual value yields a similar puzzle. The aura of an artwork is grounded in ritual, its decay relating to the privileging of exhibition value over ritual value. In the case of ritual objects, the absence of mass visibility is a clue to their true nature. Their value and function—whether aesthetic, magical, devotional, or archival—is internal to their lifeworld, the concrete social context that produced them. To this extent they can never exist purely for display. Embeddedness within a lifeworld ensures that they are always infused with a residue of the social symbolic, the concrete and particular human relations that are their telos and referent. It is this quality of concrete embeddedness which is the distinctive mark of the aura. Perceived hiddenness is just a consequence of the fact that there is no need for exhibition in the case of an embedded object, since its audience already belong to its lifeworld. And so it is that that which remains embedded is rendered invisible in a world that registers as visible only that which has been abstracted for reproduction, that which has been placed in a frame for transmission and scrutiny. The framing operation---always a technical operation---is just that which de-embeds an object, an event, a message, a person. It is a violent foregrounding which translates particularity into the abstract universality of a media space. This is always a threefold process:

the decomposition of a complex particular into heterogeneous parts.

a selective and exclusionary mapping of parts into a new medium which homogenises them under a common characteristic.

the resynthesis of the mapped parts into a new unity bound by an identity which essentialises the new characteristic. 

A particular building is composed of material properties, shapes, spaces, locations, histories, intentions, perspectives, air flows, warpings, movements of shadows---decomposed as a series of photographic details it is rendered as an aesthetic object in the Instagram interface, each detail mapped to a square image of a specific size, saturation and hue unified by filters, a similarity in camera angles and distances, etc.---whatever is required to make the series hang together as a grid of square images. Whitespace is never innocent. The synthesis of the new unity both maps the mappable to a homogenous space, and excludes whatever is too bound to particularity to be mapped (the memories, the histories). What is excluded is condemned to technical invisibility, which is always equivalent to metaphysical unreality. Excluded particularity never goes anywhere; it remains present while sentenced as unreal. Benjamin’s anxiety is just the haunting of exalted ghosts by the discarded living.

The real is reclusive---the reality principle ensures it. Photographs of subculture always seem tacky, for no other reason than that their scenes have not been contrived for camera. A definition of subculture might be: a subset of culture with its own practice of value denying the criterion of reproducibility as mark of the real. Artifacts of subculture are always infused with ritual value tied to concrete people, histories, places, times, events. Tackiness, or the unaesthetic, is the product of placing a ritual object in an exhibition context. The internet is full of photographs and videos of free parties, but they are mostly lame. Good parties don’t photograph well, because all energies are directed into the production of unreproducible particularities. As far as the value logic of media space goes, they end up hidden without ever trying to be, the invisibility of the uncurated.

Meanwhile Berghain makes a policy of hiddenness. The ban on photography ostensibly serves to protect its authenticity, but really it functions by deflecting from the fact that if people were to take photos in there, most would be bad: it is all noise and darkness. The worry is not that photographs would undermine authenticity, but that they would reveal the wrong kind of authenticity (the authenticity of the familiar and unaesthetic) and discharge the mystique. Hiddenness as policy is a protection of aesthetic visibility as a virtuality. The active hiddenness practiced by Berghain (which would be pointless for any genuine underground) is a tactical move which has the opposite effect of its stated aims: it is both artificial creation of a gap in media’s reach and the aesthetisation of this very gap. Protection of authenticity is an alibi for the protection of the reproducibility principle. All this amounts to is an extension of the logic of media space into the gap, into physical reality itself. In its aesthetised hiddenness Berghain becomes hypervisible in potentia. Free parties are happening everywhere, yet they are nowhere to be seen.

[wolfliving]

Chip consolidation

*Moore’s Law is dead.  These huge new intrigues will define the tech biz henceforth.

Here are the reasons behind today's crazy chip deals

by Stacey Higginbotham Look what the internet of things has wrought! Monday, Broadcom, which was bought in 2015 by Avago in a $37 billion acquisition), said it would spend up to $103 billion buying Qualcomm. Let’s not forget that Qualcomm is trying to close a $47 billion acquisition of NXP that should happen some time next year. Meanwhile, Intel and AMD have surprisingly decided to team up to rival Nvidia with a new graphics chip. These partnerships and potential deals are an excellent example of the challenges that chipmakers face as computing and connectivity moves everywhere and becomes more commoditized. These are challenges caused by the growth of the internet of things.

The proposed Broadcom buy of Qualcomm would dwarf the previous year's chip M&A activity. The data includes announced transactions not closed deals and is complete through Q3 2017. Thanks to IC Insights.

The Broadcom takeover offer is an example of consolidation in several markets (communications, embedded computing and mobile) as prices for these components drop and markets shift. Meanwhile, the Intel deal signals Intel’s acceptance that general purpose compute can’t do everything as computing expands to more devices, and if it wants to succeed it has to embrace other architectures to retains its pricing power. That’s the big picture, but there’s also the mundane facts of day-to-day life as a chip company driving these deals. Making chips is expensive, both in R&D and then in getting the parts designed and manufactured. As consolidation occurs, companies can combine R&D and business lines across many different companies, creating greater economies of scale. In chip-making and design that scale does matter. Additionally, more and more companies are designing their own chips, whether it’s Apple in its mobile products or Microsoft for its servers. They do this because they have enough scale, and because the tiny tweaks they can make in silicon can differentiate their hardware or services in ways that leave the competition in the dust. Thus, the original chip vendors are left with a market that isn’t exactly shrinking, but one where if a customer succeeds, might graduate from their products. Let’s hit the Broadcom takeover offer for Qualcomm first. For the last few years, the average selling prices of many of these chips make by Qualcomm, Broadcom, NXP and others have been heading lower and lower. While companies are selling more of them, they are also selling them at lower cost and at lower margins. This is good for the internet of things because it means adding intelligence into a device becomes cheaper, but it’s a double-edged sword. Essentially as software started eating the world, the value now accrues to software, while the hardware that makes it possible becomes cheaper and almost interchangeable. That puts pressure on the chipmakers. Additionally, they too are getting more and more into building software to make popping their silicon into existing devices easier. A company like Whirlpool doesn’t want to spent its time designing boards or tweaking protocols. It wants to buy a product that “just works.” That’s good for the customer and helps the market expand because you don’t have to be a firmware expert to design these chips into your products, but it’s expensive for the chipmakers, many of whom have more software engineers on staff than chip designers. For Qualcomm there’s another challenge at play. Its efforts to swallow NXP (and CSR in 2014)  were all about getting more chips that fit into automobiles, RFID networks and smart home devices because it was seeing its customer base for smartphone processors stagnate. It was attempting to move from the mobile world deeper into the embedded world -- which is what NXP did when it acquired Freescale. As companies like Apple, Samsung, and now, Google, design their own chips for their phones and devices, Qualcomm’s core application processor business is under threat. That’s why we see it seeking new markets such as drones and robotics that also require a bunch of brains at efficient power consumption. As part of Broadcom, which also makes application processors, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and other baseband chips, there’s a huge opportunity to combine communications product lines for servers, mobile and embedded devices. Broadcom, as part of Avago has deep ties in the embedded market through earlier acquisitions of HP’s Agilent and massive ties in the networking world with LSI, PLX Technologies and Emulex. If we’re looking ahead we can even see that Broadcom buying Qualcomm cements its dominance in embedded and mobile, but it also begins to push it further into servers. Qualcomm is one of several companies trying to use the low-power ARM architecture to build servers that would compete with Intel’s x86 architecture that currently dominates. Qualcomm even has a joint venture in China to build such servers.

Before we get to other other big chip news of the day it’s worth adding that if Broadcom does end up with Qualcomm the big question is what happens to Qualcomm's patents and licensing business? Activist investors have urged the company to sell the licensing division, which is currently part of of Qualcomm's fight against Apple. Spinning that out could generate cash to cover the purchase, while giving Broadcom the chip businesses it wants. Whoever buys those patents (Apple has a lot of cash) could build their own networking chips for smartphones and connected devices. Now, back to Intel: Intel and AMD are teaming up to put an AMD graphics core inside an Intel chip for notebook computers. This may not seem like a big deal, but it’s huge. Intel and AMD have been rivals since the creation of AMD. AMD has the only other license to make x86 chips and for decades it has lost money acting as a foil against Intel becoming a monopoly.   Don’t get me wrong. AMD has some awesomely smart engineers who have built technology that leapfrogged what Intel was offering at the time. But execution challenges, and even dirty practices from Intel always dogged it. AMD did see the importance of graphics processors early on. In 2006 it purchased ATI Technologies, which made graphic cards, and ended up with GPUs that would later help AMD stay competitive with Intel as parallel processing became more and more important in compute. It even sold the mobile graphics division to Qualcomm, which then used it to build better graphics into its applications processors. Intel is putting the AMD Radeon graphics tech inside an Intel Core chip designed for the notebook market in a deal that signals Intel’s acceptance of its lack of graphics horsepower. Intel tried to design a graphics chip back in 2008 but eventually gave up after realizing its architecture wasn’t competitive with AMD’s or Nvidia’s GPUs. Mostly the Intel/AMD partnership is about the new Intel recognizing that the heyday of general purpose compute is over and that the x86 architecture can’t do everything, especially in a constrained power environment. Under CEO Brian Krzanich Intel had increasingly embraced the concept of heterogeneous architectures from custom-made chips for machine learning to the ARM architecture of mobile. So why wouldn’t it work with its former arch-rival? After all, like every chip company in a world where non-custom silicon is everywhere and worth less and less, Intel has to survive. To do this, it has to make its chips work everywhere they can and ensure that they still sell for a premium. At a macro level, both deals are a result of more computing in more places putting pressure on pricing, power consumption,as well as the shifting market for semiconductor companies who may see their customers graduate to making their own silicon as they succeed. Stuck in the middle, chip firms have to consolidate to survive.

[stillellensibley]

Lucas Blalock talks with David Campany

LUCAS BLALOCK, MIRRORS WINDOWS TABLETOPS, MOREL BOOKS, 2013

David: Lucas, I’d like to dive in and ask you something about surfaces. It seems to me that photography became modern in the 1920s when it accepted its industrial smoothness. In doing so it made itself available to the expanding inventory of surfaces that proliferate in the modern world – plastics, metals, glass, new fabrics. In denying its own surface it became the supreme recorder of the surfaces of the world (I think of Edward Weston declaring: “The camera should be used for a recording of life, for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself, whether it be polished steel or palpitating flesh.”) Meanwhile modernist painting largely gave up depiction to concentrate on its own surface.  Since then of course things have got more complicated both in photography and painting, as artists move back and forth between the surface of their medium and the surfaces they depict. Does this ring true to you?

Lucas: It does, and it makes me think of the slippage, when describing photographs, between a description of the image content, and one of the physical object. This creates a sort of location problem when talking about photography. I am sympathetic to Weston’s insistence on ‘looking’ but my faith in the camera isn’t his. For me photography is more an act of drawing than one of index or transparency.

In my own work I think this question of surface has been most shaped thinking about collage, and at what point a photograph moves beyond its threshold into another form. I think another way of saying this might be that part of what is at stake in photography’s denial of its surface is a footing in homogeneity and naturalism. I am interested in making pictures that betray these qualities, making heterogeneous or stilted photographs, while at the same time using a consideration of the medium as a boundary.

David: To that end the title of your book is intriguing. Mirrors and Windows: photography since 1960 was of course the title of a MoMA show and book put together by John Szarkowski (in 1984). There Szarkowski seemed to wrong-foot his critics by including all manner of heterogeneous or ‘stilted’ photographs. Robert Cumming’s sculpture/performance photos. John Divola’s theatrical/forensic photos. You’ve added ‘Tabletops’. It makes me think that the tabletop is the classic location for the still-life (plucking and placing) and for collage (cutting and pasting). Then there’s ‘the desktop’ of the computer screen, the location of digital post-production.

Lucas: The title does refer to Szarkowski’s exhibition as well as the table proper in the ways you mentioned. Leo Steinberg’s “flatbed picture plane” (which comes from an essay about Rauschenberg’s collage techniques) was in the air. WINDOWS MIRRORS TABLETOPS is also the neon that emblazons a Silverlake glass shop which I drove by nearly everyday when I was living in California. I kept, rather absently, thinking about the Szarkowski and what this third term might be.  Over the months it started to take on more and more possibilities.

David: What do you plan and what is improvised?

Lucas: Almost everything is improvised, though obviously I often set up the initial terms of that improvisation. For me, being in control of the details doesn’t seem to me to make very good pictures. I am reading Philip Guston’s collected writings and he quotes Paul Valery as saying that bad poetry “vanishes into meaning”. I think some analogue of this is true in photography. To be a bit more specific, when I am working I let the momentum carry my decision making. I set objects on the table but the pictures get made trying to figure out how to look at these things rather than composing them. Shooting in the studio is not so different for me from shooting something outside.

David: Guston had a knack for holding onto remarks that made sense. In an interview from 1960 he recalls something John Cage said to him:

“When you start working everybody is in your studio – the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas – all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you are lucky, even you leave.”

One can’t leave while holding on to every last detail. It’s interesting that historically the street was regarded as the space in which control escaped the photographer while the studio was where it could be regained. That distinction has slowly vanished but what remains is the enigmatic ratio of art, chance and document.

Lucas: I don’t intend to make the claim that the kinds of contingencies at play in the studio are the same as Winogrand’s or Friedlander’s. I shoot with a large format camera and in the end I think that condition informs the pictures as much as where they are made.

David: Of course. There’s a widespread assumption still that the larger the camera format the less contingency there is. Winogrand the speculative hunter-gatherer embracing all chance on 35mm; the large format studio photographer banishing everything unintended (I notice Jeff Wall gets annoyed when people say there’s no chance in his work). Very often I feel the plate camera sitting there stoically on its tripod, is somehow asking to be entertained, daring you to surprise it.

Lucas: It just involves a different attitude. I like this thing Godard said about all films being documentaries because the camera was documenting the performance of the actors (Jeff Wall somewhat echoes this with his idea of the “phantom studio”). Maybe with the large camera it becomes a question of limit instead of encounter – or at least limited encounter or cumbersome encounter. I think about the 4×5 less as stoic than slow and clumsy – even though it can be used in very precise ways.

To return to something else you said, I think that the studio is a site of control. Maybe you could say that Winogrand’s project was about capturing momentary harmony in a situation of seemingly endless contingency; where the studio is more like a laboratory where contingency can be introduced and made variable.  Art historian Svetlana Alpers’ book, The Vexations of Art: Velasquez and Others, deals with the way that the painter’s studio functioned as a site for looking out, or a place for rehearsing how we approach and picture the world. I think that this kind of consideration and picture making invites another set of contingencies, which for me have expanded into the processing capacities of the computer.

David: I think Godard was quite right. Even the modes, methods and materials of artifice are – or become – documents. It makes me wonder whether the criterion by which all art (but particularly photographic art) survives is primarily documentary. A documentary not just of what was before the camera, but of an attitude towards it. This might be as true of a still life photographer as a street photographer. I look at Winogrand’s pictures and I see documents of his world but also documents / examples of particular formal challenges – the stretching of compositional ‘harmony’ until it almost snaps, of becoming ‘stilted’ as you put it. Records of his own undoing, to paraphrase a Scritti Politti lyric. I have that feeling looking through this book too.

Lucas: I hope so, and this “becoming document” is really close to my own thinking about making photographs. One of the things I have thought a lot about in the last few years is what we as viewers bring to looking at photographs now – how Photoshop, digital, the internet, etc. have altered the terms of that looking.

I have put this idea out there before that early jazz audiences not only had familiarity with the standards, but, having come up in a culture where it was expected you could play an instrument or carry a tune, that the technical variations were also widely legible. If you played a tune in 5/4 your audience could hear it, and I think photography is in a similar cultural situation now. Not only do a broad range of people understand the camera, but also, increasingly, the tools of the picture’s digital processing. Imagining and attempting to re-articulate this ground, putting pressure on these expectations (especially your own), is a big part of what it means to make pictures.

David: Improvising with materials before the camera is a kind of photographic jazz people understand. That’s nice. But improvising with Photoshop seems to be a different matter. Photoshop hasn’t reached the ‘jazz phase’ for most people. They use it to standardize, to perfect. A kind of grooming of the image. You don’t take that path at all. You take the same attitude to Photoshop as you take to what you do in front of the camera. It’s experimental.

Lucas: It is. Grooming is a great way to describe its more conventional use! And though, from a practitioner’s standpoint, I totally agree that the software’s possibilities haven’t really been explored until recently, I think that apps like Instagram, celebrity-before-and-after-photos, the Iranian missile picture, and others have really primed us in the software’s potentialities, and it is this literacy I am (possibly optimistically) assuming.

To respond to another part of what you said, there is definitely a through line from how I begin a picture (with the camera) to the way that the digital file is handled. When I first started making pictures that had been fucked with it took me a long time to understand what constituted their limits. The computer is such a powerful tool and in the beginning it felt like there were too many possibilities to make these interventions feel specific or necessary. I found a way forward in Cezanne, Courbet, and Manet and also in Brecht’s writings on theater. This opened to thinking about bringing the offstage of photographic production onstage by parroted procedural corrections gone awry. I was interested in the way that I could make these technologies – designed to have a high degree of transparency (the studio, the camera, and Photoshop) – more opaque. An awareness of the computer’s invisible hand in its “grooming” capacity had already become part of what it meant to look at photographs, and using these tools in a more forward, evident way felt available. All of this was buttressed by seeing work by other young photographers, particularly Florian Maier-Aichen who was using the computer in really inventive ways.

DC: Beneath all this I do see a grounding in realism in your work. Maybe it’s to do with your lighting, which tends to be even, avoiding chiaroscuro or anything expressionistic. From this baseline you are able to foreground the handling of materials and the manipulation of surfaces. It’s a bit like close-up magic: one has to allude to transparency if one is then going to subvert it.

Lucas: Yes, absolutely! A lot of the choices are very direct. I am trying to make a picture “of” something – the thing or situation in front of the camera – and fulfilling this promise of photographs.

It is great that you brought this around to close-up magic. I have been really excited for years about this Adam Gopnik piece from a 2008 New Yorker about just that. I read it as I was just beginning to figure out this work and it really clarified something for me. I still give it to students and friends. It is called The Real Work.

David: It’s a wonderful essay. When I read it I imagined Gopnik thinking: “I know I can write in a way that could really convey something about close-up magic,” maybe because his sentences are so simple and perfect and thus a little mesmerizing. He describes the way one guy works as being “like a man handling cards rather than like a magician handling props.” Now, which of those are you, Lucas?

Lucas: The man with the cards I hope.

David: Because looking like a man handling cards makes for a better magician handling props?

Lucas: I answered that one sort of instinctively… but yes, because it makes for a better magician – or just one of a certain stripe. There is the transcendental strangeness of illusion that is beguiling, but then there is this other strangeness that is much closer at hand. In this latter kind there is a tension between the performance and the work of performing or the prop and its other life off the stage. For me this is where so much takes place.

David: This is a big book. You made the work and lots more over an eighteen-month period. You’ve been going pretty fast. Markets prefer artists to develop slowly and incrementally but photography does allow for rapid work. Huge artistic ground can be covered quickly. I guess most of your thinking is in the doing.

Lucas: It is really a book about just that. Having a studio practice has allowed for thinking in pictures, or by picturing, where problems get worked out through putting them in play. The book is a kind of primary text from that practice. It doesn’t have the distance of a monograph or a collection – it is more like a notebook. And this kind of accumulation has been very important within the work. I am always looping back to pick up underdeveloped ideas.

David: That’s refreshing to hear, and not so common these days. Perhaps there has been something in photo-art education that has tended to nudge young image-makers into pre-rationalization or post-rationalization, and slightly away from ‘thinking as making’.

Lucas: That is totally possible but I think it also rubs up against the desires of the market you mentioned. There is a lot of anxiety. I think ambition is a really complicated thing in this kind of atmosphere. It’s a shame it’s discouraged (even if just implicitly or internally). For some reason it is really easy to talk yourself out of making a picture… But for me this working method is totally indispensable.

David Campany and Lucas Blalock

Source

[app-ara-tus]

Transpedagogy

new model of pedagogy-as-art

focuses on the pedagogical method as an extension, and sometimes as the very core, of the artwork

“education” refers to the very process of teaching

“pedagogy” refers to the set of ideas that inform a particular method of teaching

“didactic”-describe work that overplays its moral message

“academic”-the conservative instruction of the art academy

“academy”-the old art school model against which modernism built its critique

“scholar”-in art are reserved to art historians or curators

the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College— were places where education and art practice often merged, helping develop the notions of collaboration and inter-disciplinarity that have been so important for the art practice

Beuys “believed optimistically that art could transform all of life and society”

Broodthaers

 “was pessimistic, having no faith in the higher claims of art”

opportunity of making “insincere objects,”

outlining some of the basic rules of the game of institutional critique

dose of humor

Artists options to move forward:

to move beyond the traditional dichotomy artist/museum

assume their own institutionality

Art where the pedagogical experience is not the end, but the means, to articulate a political consciousness in a community.

One attains an “experience” in the most expansive sense of the word, where the artwork may encourage the formation of an ephemeral community; a life experience without any other agenda than to merge the artwork into daily life, purposely ambiguous for an open reading.

“abstract education”-a need to distance oneself as an artist from what is perceived as conventional education but also to make sure that the resulting artwork retains an area of ambiguity for it to be interpreted

“festivalist”-artists who exhibit in the biennial circuit

“professionalization” of the artist-a huge increment on exhibitions, publications and events everywhere, but along with it also a more impersonal character.a devaluation of the single relevance of a given exhibition, publication, or event 

in sync

the emergence of social networks and user-generated content on the web

the global awareness of the need of sustainability in environments an local communities

Rancière’s work

Provides philosophical justification for artists to act as non-specialists and still be able to shed light on a new subject.

artmaking that is engaged in pedagogic practices would be able to emancipate the spectator by circumventing the rigid structures and hierarchies of traditional explication that led to stultification

Freire’s ideas

Inspires many artist-activists in creating works that may make a difference in a particular community.

Most artist don’t apply Rancière’s work & Freire’s ideas 

the image of the artist-star never disappears. the issue of authorship remains ambiguous and unresolved.

In the contemporary art realm, however, a radically democratic approach goes right against the structure of its highly hierarchical system. This hierarchy is hard to escape for some artists, who in the end create works that appear to cater to these democratic ideals while at the same time creating a structure that is ultimately self-selective.

EVALUATION AND CRITICISM

artists, curators and critics employ the term “pedagogy” in a liberal way when speaking of these kind of projects, but are reluctant for it to be evaluated in the standard evaluative ways provided by the education science

we are content with a structure of mimetism or simulacra where it suffices to ‘pretend’ that we do education or that we use pedagogy, to actually using it.

it is perfectly possible to create an experience that functions both as a compelling artwork and as a transformative, open-ended, content-producing, or generative tool for a community, without resorting to didacticism, literalism, spin, or lip service to any given theories of social change.

Questions

what is it exactly that a pedagogy-as-art project teaches

how do we define what their participants learn

where is the line of territory where authorship vanishes, if at all

pedagogy requires a phenomenological understanding of audiences, methodology, curriculum, and evaluation methods

CHARACTERISTICS

embracing the institutional critique legacy, not by becoming an explicit critique of other institutions but by assuming their own institutional autonomy

ephemeral in nature

Self- criticism

balance of the institutional structure and the homespun informality

retain a level of indiscipline within these disciplines in order to secure the subversive. individuals "manipulate the mechanisms of discipline and conform to them only in order to evade them.”

capable to create a performative environment that “stages” social encounters that would make us rethink a wide variety of issues in a critical and imaginative way.

the role that documentation of a given work plays in the way in which it is presented to a larger audience. It is an interesting problem for our vastly globalized and digitized artworld, where it almost doesn’t appear to matter on whether an event actually happened for it to acquire mythical dimensions.

are very difficult to replicate

a lot of “participatory” work, where an audience is given a particular good, but the symbolic value of the credit of the action goes to the artist.

artists who intuitively understand and relate to their local community and know how best to engage with it.

Art Projects

Implementation, where a more or less democratic exchange occurs with the viewers

A documentary or “narrative” stage, where the artist or collective “narrate” 

Audience

preexisting audience —which becomes a much safer and controlled experiment

open to any sort of interaction — which can be much more disorganized and heterogenous in results

[shirlleycoyle]

Medical Textbooks Overwhelmingly Use Pictures of Young White Men

There are lots of conversations about the lack of diversity in science and tech these days. In response, people constantly ask, “So what? Why does it matter?” There are many ways to answer that question, but perhaps the easiest is this: because a homogenous team produces homogenous products for a very heterogeneous world.

This is Design Bias, a Motherboard column in which writer Rose Eveleth explores the products, research programs, and conclusions made not necessarily because any designer or scientist or engineer sets out to discriminate, but because to them the “normal” user always looks exactly the same. The result is a world that’s biased by design. -the Editor

Before it was a television show, Grey’s Anatomy was a textbook. Published in 1858, Gray’s Anatomy (spelled with an “a”) quickly became the gold standard in medical illustration, featuring detailed diagrams of everything from the tiny bones in the hand to the internal structure of the eye.

Gray’s Anatomy is still in print today, in its 41st edition, but if you open the book up and flip through the pages you might notice something. Or really, the dearth of something: women. And it turns out it’s not just Gray’s Anatomy that has this problem—almost all medical textbooks are heavily biased towards depicting male bodies.

In 2014, Rhiannon Parker, a researcher at the University of Wollogong in Australia, set out to quantify just how bad that bias actually is. By analyzing more than 6,000 images from 17 anatomy textbooks published between 2008 and 2013, Parker and her colleagues found that only 36 percent of the anatomical images with an identifiable sex were female.

Even more discouraging is the results weren’t all that different from a study done in 1994, in which 32 percent of images represented female bodies. “I expected there to be a much bigger improvement on representation,” Parker told me.

Not all books were equally biased. General Anatomy, 2nd ed., had the highest proportion of male bodies at 5:1, while Human Anatomy and Physiology, 9th ed. was the only textbook to have the same proportion of male and female bodies. Gray’s Anatomy for Students—a condensed version of Gray’s Anatomy—has nearly three times more men as women.

“The textbook with the worst ratio was edited solely by men”

Interestingly, the editors of Human Anatomy, the textbook with parity, are Elaine N. Marieb and Katja Hoehn, both women, while the textbook with the worst ratio was edited solely by men.

Madelene Hyde, the vice president for content and education at Elsevier, which publishes several top anatomy books including Gray’s Anatomy, said they are “trying more and more to be as balanced as possible with our textbook images.”

“We take gender and racial diversity seriously and are working to include more diverse images in our textbooks,” she told Motherboard in an email.

Read More: The Design Bias of Heart Failure

In some cases, showing a female body makes sense, if the content is specifically about female health. But Parker found that even in cases where there is no reason to show one sex over another, men are more likely to be depicted as the “normal body.” This lines up with previous research from 1992 that found that even when it comes to medical imagery around reproduction, men outnumbered women in textbooks 2.5 to 1.

“For the anatomy titles that do not solely focus on surgical anatomy (interior rather than exterior), we do our best to provide images of diverse subjects,” Hyde said in her email. “When possible, we try to replace older images of rare clinical conditions. As a provider of a significant volume of global health content, we try more and more to be as balanced as possible with our textbook images.”

Parker also saw other trends in her dataset. Even though she was looking for images where the body being depicted might be identified by readers as male or female (whether by genitalia or by traditional gender markers), she also found that bodies were also overwhelmingly white, slim, and young. Of the images of women she did find, 86 percent of them were white (compared to 76 percent of identifiably male bodies).

Medical students who saw gender-biased images were more likely to show implicit gender bias. Illustration: Xavier Lalanne-Tauzia

Male bodies are almost always muscular, while female bodies are drawn thin. Only 2.7 percent of the images the team analyzed depicted visibly disabled bodies. And only 2.2 percent of the textbook images depicted elderly patients. “You don’t have any elderly in these textbooks even though the elderly need more healthcare,” Parker said. “I think that was quite surprising to me, that those types of representations weren’t really in there.”

Parker has also researched the impact the images might have on medical students. In a survey of 456 anatomy students studying at the School of Medicine at the University of Wollongong in 2018, she found that the disparity in bodies didn’t affect their explicit bias, but it increased their scores on implicit bias tests that measure more subtle attitudes.

“People know what they should be saying, what they should be thinking” when it comes to gendered assumptions, Parker said. “But that doesn’t stop the insidious impact of biased images. The way they normalize certain images and body types, you can’t necessarily stop that from impacting your biases.”

There is plenty of research to suggest that biases held by doctors have real, negative impacts on patients. “Coronary heart disease is seen as a male disease,” Parker said. Another study found that many textbooks don’t address the differences in the way coronary heart disease presents in women, opting to show men only, which could contribute to women being misdiagnosed at higher rates than men.

It’s not just coronary heart disease, either. Parker notes that fatphobia among doctors leads to people not seeking medical attention when they need it, and that Black women in America are three times more likely to die in childbirth than white women, which many experts say is largely due to doctor bias against Black women.

Even beyond the bias it could engender, depicting the same body over and over again as white, male, and athletic isn’t the best way to teach future doctors. “I think we all fall into [the idea] we want to draw pretty people; everybody is attracted to pretty people,” said Jill Gregory, a medical illustrator and associate director of instructional technology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “But especially when you’re illustrating a disease of older people, you shouldn’t have a 20-year-old with coronary artery disease.”

Anatomy images on stock images sites are also overwhelmingly male, white, slim, and young. Image: Shutterstock

Stock image sites and online medical resources fall into the same trap. Gregory was recently asked to do a series of medical illustrations for an anatomy class at Mount Sinai. To depict breast health, “the professor had gotten random images off of Google,” she said, which mostly showed a very specific kind of breast—perky, white, mostly with implants. “They’re like these little balls on your chest. Most people don’t have breasts like that,” Gregory said.

So Gregory created an illustration of an elderly breast instead, collapsed with the nipple facing down. She said that students in the course were much more likely to encounter breasts that looked like her illustrations than the ones commonly depicted in books or stock images.

“It takes time for people to say, ‘I should use diverse skin tones, maybe someone in a wheelchair'”

And sometimes illustrators are explicitly told to not include certain kinds of bodies. Parker said that in her research, she heard stories from illustrators who reported being asked not to show female nipples unless the illustration had something to do with breast health, for example.

By using past books as examples, illustrators are also perpetuating the bias. “Frank Nedder, the father of medical illustration—his work is 100 percent white people,” said Gregory. “It’s a matter of not being lazy thinkers and starting to be, like, ‘I shouldn’t just default to the same skin tone.'”

This is exacerbated by the fact that the majority of medical illustrators are white (85 percent of people who responded to an Association of Medical Illustrators survey in 2018 identified as such), a problem that the association started tackling head on a few years ago with a special diversity committee (which Gregory is a member of).

The solution lies in the hands of publishers and illustrators. Gregory says that it’s crucial to explain to people working in the field why this bias is harmful. “It’s really about awareness. It takes time for people to say, ‘Oh right, I should use diverse skin tones, maybe someone in a wheelchair, different kinds of people.'”

But are things getting better? Parker isn’t so optimistic. She points out that doctors have a really rigid idea of what a healthy body looks like, and that’s a hard thing to change. “No, I don’t think it’s changing,” she told me. “I do think that maybe the gender disparity is slowly changing. But the intersections with ethnicity and body type, I don’t think they’re being paid attention to, and are getting worse.”

Gregory, on the other hand, sees progress, even if it’s been slow. She says that even she has changed her methods around this issue over the years. “Ten or 15 years ago I was maybe throwing something in for the heck of it, but now every time I approach an illustration I think about how I can include diversity in my images.” Between that and recruiting a more diverse set of illustrators in the field, Gregory has hopes that things will get better.

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