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diarrheaworldstarhiphop · 6 years ago

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I’m five minutes in and already this seems like something beamed in from an alternate universe. Did this crowd just cheer “doctoral degrees” and then, specifically, “psychoanalysis”?

This big arena debate world where people cheer academic qualifications like wrestling belts is obviously Peterson’s world. And it’s really off-putting. He sits in his chair looking expectant and deep in thought, occasionally letting slip a brief acknowledgment of the surreality of the situation. Zizek, on the other hand, looks bewildered. When his introduction is concluded, he simply shrugs and does a brief facepalm.

Peterson, by contrast, barely flinches. He’s obviously used to this… And that’s the weirdest thing of all.

I’m not really sure what I’m in for here as I sit down to watch this. I’ve heard interesting things about this debate from those who have already watched it — apparently it’s not a complete waste of time — and so I have been tempted to give it a go for myself…

But I’m already aware of the kind of discussion I’m hoping for — and unlikely to get — and this anticipation is probably going to inform my viewing for better or worse…

So, first things first, I feel like I should declare my biases.

I like Zizek (generally speaking). He’s the sort of cantankerous sniffling voice I’m happy to have in the public sphere. I have a soft spot for him, in a way, because, perhaps like many other people my age, he was the first contemporary “Public Intellectual” that I paid any attention to; the first living philosopher I remember hearing and reading about.

However, that’s not to say I know his work all that well. The only book of his I’ve read with any seriousness is his first: The Sublime Object of Ideology — which is still a good read — but the majority of the rest of his written work is unknown to me. (Those films of his are, at the very least, entertaining.) I have, however, read a lot of his earlier articles and writings on communism, but I’ll come back to those shortly.

My understanding of Peterson’s general project is even more limited. I haven’t read his book. All I’ve seen are a few lectures and some click-bait “Peterson destroys…” YouTube appearances. That being said, I’ve found very little to admire or relate to in what I have heard him say. (I’ve previously critiqued one of his UK television appearances here.) But he’s nonetheless on my radar as a cultural figure and I have found his discussions around masculinity to be interesting, if only because of what he leaves out.

I want to briefly talk about Peterson’s views on masculinity because they seem integral to his overall position and you can see much of the same logic that is applied to this topic leaking out into his other opinions. For instance, on at least one occasion, he’s compared the modern “femininsation” of men to the Nietzschean death of God. It’s an apt comparison in some respects — although I’d take it more positively than he seems to do. His argument seems to be that men have lost their purpose, their drive, their grounding, like peasants without God, or a state without its sense of nationhood — the latter being a particularly important similarity, I think, when considering his popularity amongst hypermasculine nationalists. Point being: men are lost without their own inflated (and gendered) senses of self. Peterson is here to give it back to you. It’s not a bad project in and of itself, but he’s pretty terrible at it. His success despite this perhaps says more about the depths of the crisis that we’re willing to accept him as a savior.

What Peterson decries as taking the place of traditional gendered duties and positions within society is what he regularly defines as “contemporary nihilism”. This nihilism is, of course, a huge freedom to many others who have felt traumatically constricted by societal expectations and in contemporary philosophy more generally we have seen the emergence of a new nihilism which explores the outsider epistemologies of occultism with as much rigour as scientific rationalism — you could say it was precisely this crossover that gave the world Reza Negarestani — and so Peterson’s nihilism is, in itself, a very limited concept.

Ray Brassier’s old nihilism, for instance, is a nihilism that grounds itself on the “meaninglessness” of rational truth, which is to say, nihilism is an attempt to decloak oneself of the stories and “realisms” which we allow to structure (but also inevitably limit) our realities. Truth and meaning are not the same thing and so a life of facts and rationality is far closer to nihilism than the popular conception of the term allows. By contrast, despite warning of its dangers when it applies to something he doesn’t believe in, Peterson seems to champion the adoption of ideologies in order to give your life meaning. It is in this sense that he’s often positioned by some as fascist (or at least fascist-adjacent).

Masculinity, for Peterson, appears to be just such an ideology in being held up as an Idea that gives gendered subjects purpose and a sense of duty. But what is odd about this is how much Peterson otherwise critiques ideology. Because, for Peterson, it seems ideologies are only ever collective. Individualism, in particular, is not an ideology…

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… And that’s ridiculous. As Zizek writes himself:

[I]deology is not simply a ‘false consciousness’, an illusory representation of reality, it is rather this reality itself which is already to be conceived as ‘ideological’ — ‘ideological’ is a social reality whose very existence implies the non-knowledge of its participants as to its essence — that is, the social effectivity, the very reproduction of which implies that the individuals ‘do not know what they are doing’. ‘Ideological’ is not the false consciousness of a (social) being but this being itself in so far as it is supported by a false consciousness.

He defines ideology as Marx does (at least implicitly): “they do not know it, but they are doing it“. Such is Peterson’s argument — don’t pay attention to any of that stuff which supposedly defines (or fails to define) your existence, just get on with it; tidy your room. (His insistence on personal cleanliness is, I’ve always felt, near identical to an army induction into self-presentation, and if that isn’t the ultimate immersion in ideology then I don’t know what is.)

Today, despite Peterson’s attempts to rehabilitate it, we see that the particular ideology of patriarchal individualism has been in crisis and so the left embraces the ideological crisis of masculinity, understood as a by-product of a broader crisis of patriarchal capitalism, in order to encourage the emergence of a new consciousness; the emergence of something altogether different. This is not to try and destroy men as such — well, okay, that depends who you ask… — but rather the ideology of Masculinity. In response to this general vibe, Peterson’s blinkered response to this is to try and save patriarchal capitalism by focussing on the individual and selling them an anti-feminist magical voluntarism.

What Peterson doesn’t get is that the argument is not that this crisis of manhood is a result of capitalism’s “failure”, per se — which is presumably why Peterson wants to defend its honour — but rather that this crisis is a direct result of capitalism’s own internal development and indifference.

(It would also be interesting to see what other takes people have on this, actually: “the feminisation of men” — a marxist feminazi psyop or a by-product of free market automation reducing the need for big strong physical labourers? You’d think Peterson, for all his citing of anthropological evidence, would be more on board with the latter, but he’s not… Responses on a postcard!)

The relevance of modern masculinity, and its crisis, to this particular debate is that masculinity is, more often than not, framed as an ideology in being not just a gender but a gender identity. To be a Man, in the sense that Peterson describes, is — sociopolitically and, that is, ideologically speaking — not that different from being a Communist. It is a declaration that says something about your view of the world and how people should expect you to act within it; indeed, how you should expect yourself to act within it. In this way, his is an individualised ethics — and that is how many contemporary men’s groups, for better or for worse, present themselves on both the left and the right, in defining masculinity as an ethics first and foremost — whilst communism instead strives for a collective and communal viewpoint, a “collective subjectivity”, a collectivised ethics, far broader than Peterson’s consideration of (but of course not ignorant to) these kinds of identity markers.

I want to keep this in mind going forwards because I think Peterson’s framing of masculinity actually gives us a good entry point for talking about communism (and his particular framing of communism) and this may help us understand just how flawed and limiting his conceptions of both these things are.

As I mentioned in passing, over the last few years I’ve started to read more and more of Zizek’s earlier work — particularly his articles on communism and, specifically, “the Idea of Communism“. When writing my Master’s dissertation back in 2017, reading a lot about Maurice Blanchot and his Bataillean conception of “community”, the Idea of communism emerged as a central framework through which the questions Blanchot (and others) raised have been continued into the present, and Zizek — as a writer and an editor — at one time contributed a fair amount to this discourse.

I’ve written a lot about the “Idea of communism” before on this blog, albeit under various different guises — the Idea of communism as an event horizon; as a “community which gives itself as a goal”; as a sort of ethical praxis in and of itself, a sort of politico-philosophical First Principle, rather than a solidified (statist) political ideal — it’s under the surface of a lot of my patchwork stuff.

To be clear, what I mean by the “Idea” of communism here is perhaps something akin to the Platonic Idea. To quote Plato himself, writing about his own philosophy:

There is no treatise of mine about these things, nor ever will be. For it cannot be talked about like other subjects of learning, but out-of much communion about this matter, and from living together, suddenly, like a light kindled from a leaping fire, it gets into the soul, and from there on nourishes itself.

The Idea, in this sense, is a sort of ephemeral thing, an event in a process of becoming. It is fuel for discourse and politics but is not, in itself, either of these two things. It’s something else unique to philosophy.

To many this may sound like the beginning of some wishy-washy apolitical intro to communism, but the intention here is to emphasise — what Deleuze & Guattari, in What Is Philosophy?, call — “the Concept” of communism. (This is, arguably, also the intention of U/Acc, in giving philosophical priority to the Concept of Acceleration over its conditioned political vagaries which leave the concept in the corner to their detriment — i.e. the rejection of a state-accelerationism on the same terms as a state-communism, with both being as sensical as the other despite how the latter is so often understood.)

The Concept, in this sense, is a provocation, an invention. To pin it down, to attack it or defend it, is to condition it and use it — which is fine in most circumstances — but there is always something that comes first which we mustn’t lose sight of in the process putting concepts to use. We must be “critical” — just as Peterson describes his preferred mode of thought, which we’ll discuss in a minute — by which I mean that we must not lose sight of the process of engineering which produces the concept when we put it to use. That is the purpose of the Idea or the Concept: that which philosophy always hopes to produce: the simultaneous product of and originator of thinking. (I’m writing on this in relation to accelerationism for somewhere else at the moment so I won’t go into this too much further or else I’ll start plagiarising myself.)

The Idea of communism, then, becomes this original seed which existed before the horrors of state-communism and continues to exist after them. It is a communism produced communally, lidibinally; a kind of communist consciousness; an outsideness; a view to that which isn’t. It is, in this first instance, the Idea of the future, of the new, of what is to come, held in the minds of those affected by it at the expense of that which is. When Kodwo Eshun called himself a “concept-engineer”, this is no doubt what he was positioning himself in favour of, and against the “great inertia engine”, the “moronizer”, the “futureshock absorber.” That’s what the Communist Manifesto calls for too. It’s a provocation, a call to revolution, not just of politics and economics but, more fundamentally, of thought and thinking.

Masculinity — reconfigured as a concept — (and femininity too, for that matter) can be thought of in much the same way, as a becoming, which may signify certain horrors, past and present, but as a future may instead be something which gives itself as a goal. And there is every chance that that goal might be unrecognisable to our current sense of the cloistered Ideal.

Like it or not, the best word we have for this process, related to gender anyway, is queering.

Everything else is cage.

Anyway, I’m rambling…

What does any of this have to do with anything? Well, it has everything to do with Peterson’s opening statement.

The Idea of communism is seemingly an alien concept to him. The very Idea of philosophy seems alien to him, for that matter. He’s a man of blinkered systems and boundaries and “truths”, and to such an extent that “truth” ends up undermining his own arguments. His pursuit of an absolute logic — so common to many North American conservative pundits; “facts don’t care about your feelings” — only makes the holes in his reasoning more apparent. Encapsulated in a wall of logic that he has built around himself, he starts to undermine his own apparent superiority by being incapable of giving himself the room to breath and produce thought. He’s like a real life Vulcan, his ironic flaw being the bemusement which erupts from his consideration of the adaptability of those illogical and mentally vulnerable humans (read: leftists).

What makes this difficult for some to see, however, seems to be the effort Peterson puts into superficially privileging the opposite within his own work. Early on in his opening statement, for instance, he says:

It doesn’t seem to me that either Marx or Engels grappled with one fundamental — with this particular fundamental truth — which is that almost all ideas are wrong … It doesn’t matter if they’re your ideas or something else’s ideas — they’re probably wrong. And, even if they strike you with the course of brilliance, your job is to assume that, first of all, they’re probably wrong and then to assault them with everything you have in your arsenal and see if they can survive.

Such is philosophy — and, on that note, I’m reminded of a particular passage from Deleuze and Guattari’s What Is Philosophy? where they write that the Greeks distrusted the Idea, the Concept, “so much, and subjected it to such harsh treatment, that the concept was more like the ironical soliloquy bird that surveyed the battlefield of destroyed rival opinions (the drunken guests at the banquet).”

And yet, for Deleuze and Guattari, the Concept doesn’t seek truth. It might emerge from certain judgments and appraisals, from thought, but truth is not its end. If truth were the goal for Marx and Engels, it might be called the Truth Manifesto. But it’s not. It is called the Communist manifesto because communism is its goal — a politics of multiplicitous and unruly communality.

Here we see the first glimpse of Peterson’s own nihilism — again, despite his apparent rejection of that -ism and its affects on thought. We might ask ourselves: What is it to introduce your position with a statement as vacuous as “almost all ideas are wrong”? Deleuze and Guattari, again, do a far better job of articulating the stakes of this suggestion which, again, seem totally lost of Peterson:

A concept always has the truth that falls to it as a function of the conditions of its creation. […] Of course, new concepts must relate to our problems, to our history, and, above all, to our becomings. But what does it mean for a concept to be of our time, or of any time? Concepts are not eternal, but does this mean they are temporal? What is the philosophical form of the problems of a particular time? If one concept is “better” than an earlier one, it is because it makes us aware of new variations and unknown resonances, it carries out unforeseen cuttings-out, it bring forth an Event that surveys us. But did the earlier concept not do this already? If one can still be a Platonist, Cartesian, or Kantian today, it is because one is justified in thinking that their concepts can be reactivated in our problems and inspire those concepts that need to be created. What is the best way to follow the great philosophers? Is it to repeat what they said or to do what they did, that is, create concepts for problems that necessarily change?

From this we can say that the prevalence and continued existence of “Marxists” and Marxism is that the problems Marx (and Engels, of course) pointed to remain relevant today because we remain under the problematic system of capitalism. Many further concepts have been added to the arsenal but the original ground remains unresolved. Capitalism — as another -ism — endures for the same reasons. We have yet to settle the problem of capitalism as a response to the end of feudalism and instead treat the conceptual framework of capital as eternal rather than temporal, a being rather than a becoming.

Now, the Idea or Concept of communism can perhaps be summarised in similar terms. Communism is the name of a becoming-to-come, a postcapitalism. Peterson, instead, in wanting to rehabilitate what we already have, doesn’t get this. But still he continues to use the language of someone who does whilst nonetheless remaining trapped in his own circular argument.

For example, again in his opening statement, he calls Marx and Engels “typical” — as opposed to “critical” — thinkers because they accept things (that is, the problems of capitalism) as they are, as given and self-evident (to capitalism), and don’t think about their own thinking, which is to say that they also present their critiques to their readers as if they were self-evident. Peterson says no — these problems are inherent to nature, not capitalism. But in shifting the goal posts rather than engaging with the text directly he portrays himself as guilty of what he decries in them.

In doing this, Peterson sidesteps the entire point of the Marxist project, particularly as it is framed in the Manifesto: a project which attempts to systematise a deep understanding of capitalism (as in Marx’s Capital) and then critique the material reality of capitalism, provoking action against it (as in the Manifesto). If anything, Peterson might have come out of this better if he’d read anything but the manifesto. Instead, he misses the entire point, failing to get under the skin of Marxism because he fails to acknowledge its attempts to get under the skin of capitalist realism and reveal to us the ways in which that which is, that which we see and accept as the nature of reality, is instead a contingency. In this sense, “all ideas (capitalism tells you) are wrong” could be the brainlet summary of the Manifesto in itself, and in this sense, if it is an ideology, it is one which defines itself by what it escapes.

It is here that the circle of Peterson’s argument completes itself before its even really begun. What is it to critique critical thinking in this way? What is it to critique critique through naturalised tradition? Does this make Peterson a critical-critical thinker? Or is he instead just a critical-typical thinker? Either way, his is a position that eats itself. Peterson, however, seems good at supplying the gall to ignore your own inability to take your own medicine.

This is the entire problem with Peterson’s argument going forwards too, which might be summarised as: “Marx and Engels say that this is self-evident within capitalism and must be challenged — I say, actually it is self-evident within nature and nature is sacrosanct so back off.” Peterson’s form of “critique” is simply to take pre-existing critiques of our sociopolitical world and place them within a broader (supposedly) scientific context and, in the process, turn his own critical thinking back into (by his own definition) a typical thinking. He’s literally bending backwards over his own arguments.

Take, for instance, his analysis of the first “axiom” of the Communist Manifesto — his summary of Marxist historical materialism being that the very engine of history is economic class struggle. Peterson flippantly throws out the relevance of economics and says, sure, class struggle exists, hierarchies exist, but they exist in nature too so why are we so upset about them and put all the blame on economics?

In framing it this way, he seemingly misses the main point that our hierarchies are not “natural” — they are instantiated by capitalism as an economic system. To say that hierarchies have always existed ignores the sense in which economics defines class. It is to ignore the very nature of our hierarchies, in the present epoch, as economic — that is, how economics forms them — which we can interpret as not just being about how much your earn but also how much you are worth, connecting slavery to wage-slavery and encompassing the fallouts of both. Contrary to this, Peterson’s is the sort of argument that takes scientific observations of the natural kingdom and then uses them to reconstruct a sort of secular Divine Right of Kings. It is a gateway to a racist and eugenic thinking.

It is from this flawed analysis that Peterson goes on to make the point that went viral in the aftermath of the debate. He says:

it is finally the case that human hierarchies are not fundamentally predicated on power and I would say that biological / anthropological data on that is crystal clear. You don’t rise to a position of authority that’s reliable in a human society primarily by exploiting other people. It’s a very unstable means of obtaining power.

This clip has done the rounds online already, as it gets a very audible laugh from the crowd, and rightly so. It’s perhaps the most moronic comment anyone could make — but it is also a comment that can be split into a right half and a wrong half, further demonstrating Peterson’s circular reasoning.

People do rise to positions of authority through exploitation — that is true not just of capitalism but the feudalism that birthed it and it is also, arguably, true of the animal kingdom too (depending on how you define exploitation — the exploitation of behaviours, habits, circumstances?) — but it is also right to say that this is an unstable means of obtaining power. Rather than that instability meaning people don’t do it, it leads to the sort of resentment and protest that Peterson dismisses as unfounded. His entire logic system starts to fall into place. Reading the Communist Manifesto at aged 18 and presumably reading it with all the nuance of an 18 year old, Peterson has embarked on a career of self-fulfilling criticism based on the logical fallacies of a teenager.

From this point, it is very hard to take anything else he says seriously. What follows is a long, meandering and confused rant that ends with the basic point: “Actually, relatively speaking, the poor are richer now than they once were… As are the rich…” Thank you, Dr. Peterson. Truly insightful.

I’m left wanting to bail out at this point. I feel like I’ve wasted 40 minutes of my life but I try and stick it out for Zizek’s opening statement at least.

From the outset, it is far more interesting. Taking on the three topics of the debate’s title — Communism, Happiness, Capitalism — he considers the ways in which “Happiness” is not such a simple and virtuous goal for us to give ourselves, especially under a system like capitalism which does all it can to grab the steering wheel of our desires. (It’s an argument I’ve made myself before when writing about Mark Fisher’s Acid Communism — a communism that is “beyond the pleasure principle”.) Zizek says:

I agree that human life or freedom and dignity does not consist just in searching for happiness — no matter how much we spiritualise it — or in the effort to actualise our inner potentials. We have to find some meaningful cause beyond the mere struggle for pleasurable survival.

Zizek’s statement from here is actually quite brilliant, and subtle. He eschews any temptation to echo Peterson’s polemic book report and instead implicitly skewers everything wrong with Peterson’s own body of work and, indeed, the entire situation of their meeting under the cover of the debate’s own title. It’s very cunning.

For instance, he says a few minutes later:

Once traditional authority loses its substantial power it is not possible to return to it. All such returns are, today, a post-modern fake. Does Donald Trump stand for traditional values? No. His conservatism is a post-modern performance; a gigantic ego trip.

Whilst Zizek takes firm aim at Trump, Peterson lingers on the edge of his seat. You wonder how much he knows that he is also in Zizek’s sights. Whilst Peterson through criticisms at a 170-year-old target that just don’t stick, Zizek DESTROYS his opponent in a philosophical proxy war.

If Trump is, according to Zizek, the ultimate postmodernist president, Peterson appears, by proxy, to be the most successful postmodernist public intellectual — the attack-dog of YouTube conservatism, the spewer of the very postmodernism he declares his enemy through his snake-oil salesman act of Making Men Great Again as a neo-traditional ideology.

Zizek powers through point after point from here and everything starts to blur into one. It’s not easy to follow without the post-stream benefit of stopping and starting, but there is substance here — substance, I am nonetheless told by the better informed, that Zizek has already repeated again and again through his most recent books and public appearances. There is nothing new here, but it is in part worth listening to just to see Peterson’s face. He is out of his depth. And it shows.

Whereas Peterson’s history lesson is under-informed, Zizek’s history lesson, encapsulating the 20th / 21st century development of hegemonic ideologies, ends simply with a door through which Peterson blindly walks, being the capstone to Zizek’s own argument simply by being himself. Little else needs to be said. The undertone of Zizek’s argument seems to be: “You want postmodernism? You’ve just seen a masterclass… And wasn’t it shit!” It’s very entertaining.

But honestly, I’m burnt out. It’s hard to adjust to Zizek’s rapid-fire drive-by of our contemporary moment after Peterson’s lacklustre ahistorical ramble. Maybe I’ll come back and watch the follow-up back and forth at a later date… But I doubt I’ll want to blog about this any further.

UPDATE: This, from Quillette of all places, is spot on:

The debate about whether there’s a straight line from Marx to Stalin is an important one, especially given the revival of interest in socialism in the contemporary West. Everyone should want the key participants in that debate to be as well informed as possible. Marxists should want to sharpen their minds by having to confront the best versions of anti-Marxist arguments, while anti-Marxists should want a champion for their position who knows Marx’s writings inside and out. Unfortunately, as he’s shown on many occasions, Jordan Peterson doesn’t fit this bill.

#xenogothic

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historicalemily · 6 years ago

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history resource pack: historical theory and method (or history books about history)

so what is historical theory and historical method?

historical theory refers to the exploration of the nature of history and evidence. specifically it concerns issues around objectivity, accuracy, and questions of bias.

historical method is the practice of history including techniques and guidelines by which historians use evidence to research and write about the past. historiography is the study of how historians have studied a specific topic using particular sources, techniques, and theoretical approaches.

list of books about historical theory and method:

Evans, Richard J. In Defense of History. W.W. Norton, 2000.

This book is about how history is read, written, and researched in the postmodern age. Evans covers a wide range of topics from questioning whether there is such thing as objective fact to causation, sources, and morality. I definitely recommend this book!

Turabian, K. L. A manual for writers of research papers, theses and dissertations, 7th edn. Chicago, 2007.

This book is an absolute essential! This book not only covers the technical aspects of citations, but also includes an additional section from other editions that provides step-by-step help for people who might be new to doing historical research. It is a little lacking on writing style, but is great for providing technical information about structure, citations, and the process of writing.

The Chicago manual of style, 16th edn (Chicago, 2010).

Chicago is the citation style used by historians and understanding it is very very important! You’ll likely get to the point where you’ve memorized the basic structure of books and articles, but for the more complicated sources (cartoons? advertisements?) it is really helpful to flip through the guide and figure out what to do and it is definitely more reliable than just googling it.

Green, A. and K. Troup (eds), The houses of history: a critical reader in twentieth-century history and theory. Manchester, 1999.

I haven’t personally read this book (yet… I’ll be reading it for a class next semester), but it is the required book for my college’s Historical Methods course which is a required research course of history majors. It focuses on different schools of thought which have had the greatest influence on the study of history.

Tosh, J. The pursuit of history: aims, methods and new directions in the study of modern history, 5th edn. Harlow, 2010.

This book is a great introduction to the historical discipline! It is especially good on addressing biases in history and how best to approach historical sources. I really recommend it for college history students.

Loewen, James W. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. Touchstone, 2007.

This book is slightly different from the rest, but I included it because I’m super interested in the way history is taught in school and why it’s taught the way it is. This book compares multiple American history textbooks assigned in public schools in the US (including the book I used for American history in high school) and analyzes the way history is taught. Definitely less focused on academia, but still an interesting read and he does go into some depth on the historiography of the periods he covers.

Wineburg, Sam. Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone). University of Chicago Press, 2018.

This brand-spankin’ new book is next on my to read list! Again, it’s more focused on the teaching of history in the modern era and the issues in the way history is taught in public schools. It seems to be less of a historiographic approach than Loewen’s book, but personally I think that how history is taught is a huge issue right now (especially in the United States) and I’m super excited for what this book has to offer.

If you all know any more essential books about historical theory, method, or about how history is taught, let me know! These are just books I’ve read (or will be reading soon) in my college career so far and are good starting points for studying historical theories and methods 😊

#history resource packs #resource packs #historical theory and method #studyblr #historyblr #histblr #history studyblr #resources #sources #my post

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initiala · 6 years ago

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Hook Echo (5/9)

Summary: They’re in a rut. That’s what Deputy Emma Swan tells herself over and over again as her boyfriend, Killian Jones, grows more and more distant, and more frustrated, due to complications with his dissertation research on tornado formation. But storm season’s more than halfway over and this dry spell is doing nothing to make things easier for him–or their relationship. Will everything blow over, or is there a greater storm on the horizon?

Rating: E

Content warnings: Graphic depictions of injury resulting from natural disasters, minor character death

Hmmm... things are starting to change up top. I wonder what that means?Thanks again to @optomisticgirl, @spartanguard, and @idoltina for all they did on this.

This is also on AO3 or FF.Net if that’s how you wanna roll.

Killian was gone by the time she woke up. And really, "woke up" was a stretch — she hadn't slept well at all the night before; in fact, Emma had still been awake when Killian came home from the bar. She'd lain there for hours, stewing, not sure who she was more upset with, but when he came to bed she immediately rolled over and clung to him. "Emma? You should be sleeping, love."

She shook her head. Killian sounded exhausted, but there was worry in his voice when he asked, "Darling, what happened? You left earlier than I thought you might, you didn't say goodbye. I didn't even see you or the girls leave. You're not really angry with me for taking your underwear, are you?"

Emma half rolled her eyes, nudging him to put his arm around her, which he obliged. He stroked her hair and it felt so nice she almost started crying all over again. "It's not the underwear," she said quietly. "Did - did Liam say anything to you?"

There had always been this unspoken agreement between her and Liam that they not mention their disagreements with each other to Killian, but she was starting to think it was a mistake. It almost felt like tattling, and she really didn't want to make him feel like he had to choose between her and his brother, but even after almost three years, it felt like Liam was still trying to put a wedge between them. And for what, because Killian was almost done with his studies? That was the same excuse he'd been using for years, and still Killian hadn't finished. It wasn't his fault, and it certainly wasn't hers.

She'd only forbade the night chases last spring, after all. And after what had happened, Liam should be thanking her for that, not scolding her.

Killian's hand stilled for a moment, then resumed his ministrations. "He mentioned something about abusing my break privileges, but that was about it. Why, what did he say to you?"

It took all of her willpower not to get up and drive over to Liam's place in that moment and rip him a new asshole the way he deserved, once and for all. It fucking figured that he would lay all the blame on her, take everything out on her, and let his brother off scot-free. Killian seemed to notice something was up because he sounded much more alert when he said, "Emma, if Liam spoke out of turn to you, I need you to tell me."

She sighed, her anger deflating just as quickly as it had built up. "It's nothing he hasn't said before," she mumbled. "Though he was a little more… crass about it this time."

He was quiet for so long she thought he'd fallen asleep. She jumped when he spoke again. "I'll talk with him about it. You'd think he'd bloody give up and accept things by now, but no, that requires someone without a pig's brain in their head."

Emma chuckled weakly, relaxing more into his embrace. She appreciated that he wasn't in denial or tried to downplay the fact that Liam and her didn't really get along. He'd have to be blind, or an idiot, to miss the fact, but she at least attempted to play nice and be polite while they were around his brother. It just bothered her that with how much she knew Killian talked about her, Liam had only found more fault with their relationship; surely he didn't just focus on the bad things, right? There were plenty of good things to talk about too.

Right?

She shook her head of those bad thoughts. "I'm a big girl, Killian; I can handle Liam."

"Aye, love, I know. Still doesn't mean I can't tell him to stuff his opinions back up his arse where they came from."

They'd fallen asleep not long after that, Emma a little more uneasily than Killian, but he could sleep through a, well, through a tornado.

(Which she knew for a fact that he could, and he'd been steaming mad about that the next morning.)

Still, she must have dropped into a deep sleep at some point because she never felt him get up or heard him pack his overnight bag and leave. After she ate, she decided to spend the day getting some prep work done on the painting they'd been putting off doing; she threw on some working clothes and spent the morning stripping the wallpaper in the hallways. The house was always weirdly quiet when Killian was gone so Emma kept the radio on, blaring a classic rock station and singing along to keep herself from going back to what had happened last night with Liam.

God, she really wanted to just punch him in the nose.

The front door opened and startled her so much that she almost fell off the stepladder. "Jesus, Mom, ever heard of knocking?" Emma said, climbing down and turning down the volume a little.

"I have, though you still haven't learned to keep your music at appropriate levels," Ingrid said, though she smiled. "I knocked three times."

Emma winced. They really needed to get the doorbell fixed - whatever the previous owner had done before moving out hadn't lasted through the winter. "Yeah, well, you did always say I could do whatever I wanted once I had my own place."

Ingrid laughed. "That is true. Anyway, I stopped over with a couple of things, mind if I put them in the kitchen?" Emma waved her on, then followed to wash the dust off her hands. "I didn't know you and Killian were doing remodeling already."

"Kind of a spur of the moment decision," Emma said over the water. "He's over in Norman and I don't have anything to do until my shift starts at six. Figured I'd get a jump on some things."

"Killian went to Norman?"

She dried her hands slowly. "Yeah," Emma said, avoiding the look Ingrid gave her. "There's some thesis stuff going on."

"Bad thesis stuff, I take it."

"That's what we're going to find out."

"Mm."

Emma never did like it much when Ingrid made that noise. It meant she knew too much, or had guessed at whatever it was Emma was hiding from her, like the fact that her high school boyfriend was actually in his twenties or how he was having her hold on to his pot for him. She watched as Ingrid pulled a pint out of the freezer and sat down with it and a couple of spoons at the table. "I was going to leave this for you to try at your leisure, but I think you need someone to talk to. Ice cream helps."

"Mom…"

"Sit. I'm experimenting with some flavors for June and I need a second opinion."

Ingrid's latest kick was trying to out-do Ben & Jerry's by taking what she called 'sub-par ingredients' and replacing them with some more local flavor. She kept it to one new flavor a month and there were running polls and commentaries on her social media pages about which ones might become permanent additions to the roster. It was a very popular scheme and Emma hadn't seen Any Given Sundae this booming in years. "You know if it's not rocky road I'm not really interested," she said, sitting across from her.

Ingrid rolled her eyes as she took the top off the container. Whatever the flavor was, it was blue. "I can't believe I raised you to be such an ice cream snob."

"You bought damaged goods, you knew this going in."

The look Ingrid gave her was hard to read, but there was never any pity or sympathy in these kinds of expressions. Just some scrutiny and a little bit of reproof. Emma tried not to squirm under her gaze. "Something's going on with you and Killian," Ingrid said finally. "You haven't been this hard on yourself or this distant in years."

She gestured with her spoon for Emma to take the first bite. More to keep herself from answering the thinly veiled accusation, Emma did - blue raspberry and there were… Swedish Fish? She winced, swallowing. "Ok, I get it, you're going for a more ocean-related Phish Food, but no Swedish Fish. Gummy stuff only tastes good on froyo."

"We do not mention the accursed in this house, Emma."

"It's my house, Mom. I can talk about froyo all I want. Froyo froyo froyo."

Ingrid rolled her eyes again and took her own spoonful. Then she made a face too. "Alright, I see your point. Maybe I'll have something for July… No, I was working on that Independence Day themed neapolitan, so maybe it'll be for August, a last hurrah of summer. Hang on, I have more. In the meantime, talk."

Emma blinked at the speed at which her mother changed both marketing tactics and conversation topics. "About what?"

"Whatever it is that has you so… you."

"Mom."

"Emma."

She sighed in disgust, stabbing at the ice cream for more of the blue raspberry - gummy fish aside, her mom did make a mean blue raspberry - and shoving it in her mouth. "It's not me and Killian," she said, ignoring Ingrid's look about talking with her mouth full. "It's me and Liam."

Ingrid's brows furrowed for a moment, then understanding dawned. She opened the new pint and Emma was relieved to see chocolate in this one. "He's still giving you a hard time."

"I don't think I'd call it that anymore. He's just... " Emma sighed. "He's just mean about it now. And I don't get it. He doesn't give Killian that hard of a time - I asked. He only lays into me about it, like I'm the only one with any say in this relationship. We bought a house, for Christ's sake. You don't buy a house with someone you're only screwing around with."

There were brownie bits and fudge swirls in this one and Emma nodded in appreciation before taking another spoonful. Ingrid looked pensive. "Have either of you tried talking with Liam about his behavior?" she asked. Emma started to respond, but Ingrid held up her hand. "I don't mean taking him to task for it, I mean asking him about the root cause of all of this. It's gone on too long for it to be jealousy or something petty."

Jealous? Liam? Of them? Emma almost laughed at the idea, and would have if she wasn't so pissed at him. "We probably have," she said. "I don't remember, but Liam doesn't listen to me. If Killian has, it hasn't gotten anywhere. He said he'd talk to him again after what happened last night."

"What happened last night?"

Her face warmed. Fumbling for the words, Emma tried to explain what had happened at the bar without going into explicit detail, though she had zero doubts that Ingrid was well aware of what she meant by 'visiting Killian' and the context in which Liam's current anger happened in. The look she gave her confirmed that. "He was on break," Emma said, the defense feeling weak.

"Well, I'd still call it impolite at best," Ingrid said, making Emma wince, "but I'm not going to sit here and lecture you. It's already done and you're a grown woman. So I can see where Liam might be a bit irritated for last night, but it's hardly the worst thing to ever happen."

Particularly when it wasn't even the first time she and Killian had had sex at the bar, but Emma wasn't about to mention that. Alluding to it at all was humiliating enough. "It just isn't fair that he went after me and then Killian gets off scot-free," she grumbled, digging into the ice cream. "It takes two to tango."

"I don't need to remind you that life isn't fair," Ingrid said. "But I can maybe see where Liam's a little blind when it comes to his brother. We tend to develop blind spots about our children."

Emma thought back to when Killian had first told her about losing his parents, how Liam had practically raised him after their father died. She supposed Ingrid had a point, but it didn't mean Liam had to be an asshole about it. She said so, and Ingrid smiled. "I didn't say it was right," she said. "But sometimes it helps to see where someone is coming from."

Just then, Emma's phone rang, and it gave her an excellent excuse to avoid figuring out how to continue that particular conversation with Ingrid. It wasn't a number she recognized, though it was local, so she answered with her professional voice in case it was one of those stupid robo calls. "Deputy Swan speaking."

"Ah, Emma. This is Nemo Bhavsar, Killian's advisor."

Her eyebrows went up. "Dr. Bhavsar, hi." She shared a confused glance with her mother. She knew Killian had listed her as one of his emergency contacts, but he'd only left a couple of hours ago. "Is everything okay? I thought Killian was meeting with you today."

"He did, we just concluded the meeting."

"That was short."

He laughed. "Indeed, but for good reason. There's a strong front coming off the Rockies and I managed to get some funding to allow Killian to take a team out to Wyoming, possibly into the Dakotas if he follows it. We've had luck there in the past and I think this is just what he needs to finish everything."

The sinking feeling of fear for him was buoyed by the small hope that he might be done soon, but Emma was still confused. "I'm glad to hear that, but I'm a little confused on why you're calling me about it?"

Dr. Bhavsar exhaled - not quite a sigh, but close. "Killian gets this look in his eye when he's focused, one where he quite forgets the proper courses of action outside of accomplishing his task. I thought it might be better to notify you now, rather than receive a phone call when he's three states away."

She frowned; he wasn't wrong, per say, but she'd also never seen Killian get that worked up that he'd completely forget to call her. "Well, you've known him longer," she said dubiously.

"It's an academics thing, I'm afraid. When one gets caught in the single-minded pursuit of knowledge, one can lose sight of what's truly important. I've seen it many times before."

She pursed her lips. She hoped he was wrong in this case, but she knew better than to bet on that. Though, she remembered one of the things Liam had implied the night before, that without her Killian could focus better and actually accomplish what he'd set out to do. That hit her like a punch in the gut. "Well. Alright, thanks for giving me a heads up."

"Not a problem, Emma. Have a good day."

"You too." After she hung up, Emma stared absently at the ice cream starting to melt along the edges of the carton, chocolatey blobs against the scooped and scraped lines dotted with fudge and brownie bits. She didn't like to think that maybe Liam was right, that maybe a few days away from her would be good for Killian's research, would be good for him in general. But the thought was there, racing around and around in her brain like a merry-go-round out of control. She glanced up at Ingrid, who looked concerned. "Well," Emma said, forcing some optimism she definitely did not feel, "looks like I might be taking care of all the painting myself over the next few days."

It did make her feel better that Killian called later that night; he and Will were still on the road with two research assistants, somewhere in Kansas. He sounded excited about the prospects ahead and Emma couldn't help but smile as she listened to him go on about the models and figures. "How long do you think you'll be gone?" she asked, tucking her legs up against her tighter.

"If the line of storms stays strong, we could be after it a week or so. Depends on what we run into."

The urge to say something sappy gripped her tongue, but she held off, not wanting to embarrass him in front of his peers. Or maybe it was the lingering thought that he'd do better without her nearby. "Okay. I guess you'll be too busy to call much?"

"Probably, but I'll try to touch base when I can, love."

God, Liam couldn't have planned this better, if he even knew about it. He'd be crowing. Asshole. Emma swallowed, her heart both very full from missing Killian already and hurting because of what his brother had said. "Stay safe, Killian. Good luck."

"As safe as possible."

"I love you."

"I love you too."

Then it was just her, her erratic work schedule, and the messy house she'd made for herself. Emma sighed, and she swore it echoed through the empty house.

When she wasn't working, she kept the TV on rather than the radio. The noise helped to drown out the lingering taunts and obsessive thoughts in her mind. But there was another bonus to it. She primed every wall in the downstairs except for the kitchen while watching more Weather Center Live and Local on the 8s segments than she could remember ever watching in her life, even living with Killian. If there were going to be any updates on the front he was going after, she wanted to know as soon as possible.

She also watched a lot of weird survival-type shows about extreme weather conditions and even something about killer bees, but that usually got interrupted by news updates.

And it was on the news updates that she finally got word of Killian.

She was painting the living room - a dusty turquoise color she liked and she hoped he didn't have any objections to - when she heard the news break sound clip. Emma paused, watching the broadcaster move in front of the green screen and showcase the severe storm they were tracking in eastern Wyoming. Her lips pursed, worry causing her heart to beat a little faster, and she went back to painting, keeping one ear on the TV and waiting to hear what happened.

"We've got a regular correspondent, storm chaser Killian Jones, on the line. Killian it's good to hear from you, can you tell us what you saw there?"

Emma whipped her head around, watching as footage was shown on the screen from what must be the aftermath, listening to Killian talk about the storm. He sounds tired, she thought. And frustrated, which meant he didn't get what he needed out of this one. The scene certainly looked like there'd been a tornado, a couple of downed trees and debris everywhere, a caved-in house and an overturned pickup. "No deaths," she heard him say, "just a few minor injuries the first responders are tending to, but my team and I will be helping where we can before following this one."

Emma turned the volume down. She'd gotten what she needed, Killian was alright and he was going to be a bear about not getting what he needed, and it was going to be a long couple of days while he chased this system across the country.

Part of her wanted to run over to the bar and snap her fingers at Liam - Emma being around didn't have any effect on how Killian's research was going. The other part felt ashamed for feeling any vindication from his failed chase.

Really, though, overall she just felt drained.

She was going to need more paint.

The next couple of days passed much the same, but as Emma moved on from the living room to the dining room (a green that looked nice with all the whitewashed trim) and then into the hallways and stairwell (a neutral caramel that went with everything), Killian seemed to pop up on every evening storm report. Even on TV she could see how frustrated he was, the way he ran his fingers through his hair and the slight clench of his jaw during a question; that was the third day of chasing this particular system, when they were close enough to a nearby affiliate for a news team to come out. The other times were all phone-ins.

She didn't watch the livestreams, if Will did any; it would only make her more anxious, and they'd started muting them, mostly due to how much swearing went on when the chases went live, so it wouldn't help her figure out what was going on anyway.

Killian didn't call at all in that time and she had absolutely no idea what to think about that. Well, she kind of did, but it was such a mess of conflicting emotions that she didn't have the strength for sorting through right now, and so she just hoped she had no idea why he hadn't called.

Still, it was surprising to come home after a late shift at work to find the TIV in the driveway. Surprising, and a little hurtful that he hadn't called to say he was coming home, but Emma was glad to see the monstrous thing in one piece, nary a scratched pirate flag in sight - and hopefully the man who captained it was in one piece as well.

She opened the front door, thankful the smell of paint had died down with all the windows being open, and noted that all the lights were off downstairs. Emma left her shoes by the door and locked up, then went upstairs quietly. The upstairs was dark, too, and she shuffled around in the bedroom to get her things, trying not to make any noise - but her own silence alerted her to the fact that she didn't hear Killian.

He wasn't one to snore, but he could breathe pretty loudly when he put his mind to it. She flicked on the bedside lamp and noted with a frown the bed in much the same state as she'd left it that morning. Where was he?

Leaving everything in a heap on the bed, she went back downstairs. The hall light illuminated enough that she could see into the living room and just make out the lump on the couch that hadn't been there earlier.

Her heart sank with every step she took. She took in the empty beer bottles on the floor, the blanket that was half on the floor at this point and exposing his tightly folded arms and his scrunched up legs, and even in the poor lighting she could see the scowl that remained on his face even in sleep. Emma wanted to wake him, to bring him up to bed and hold him and ease away his frustrations, but her pulse just hammered in her throat every time she tried to open her mouth.

She could be glad he chose to come home, but it hurt to see him balled up on the couch, clearly having drank himself to sleep, rejecting the idea of the comfort of their bed and her arms.

So she swallowed past the lump in her throat and fixed the blanket, tucking it up around him and making sure it wouldn't slip down again. She hesitated, then felt a pinch of disgust at herself for doing so; she brushed his bangs away from his forehead and pressed a kiss there, not daring to hope he was waking up when he stirred a little under her. "I love you," she whispered.

She lingered for a moment, watching him, then slowly walked back to the hall, turned off the light and went upstairs, alone.

Two years ago…

"Swan!"

The front door slammed shut, jarring Emma out of her pleasure-filled daze. The sound of feet on the stairs and Killian talking as he ran happened faster than she could react. "There's an imminent event, the instability levels are the highest I've seen in ages, we're guaranteed to get something and I know I promised you-"

He stopped at the top of the stairs, his words cut off as he took in the sight of her spread out naked on the bed with her vibrator clutched in one hand. Killian blinked, slowly, mouth dropping open a little. "Interrupting, am I?" he asked, his voice sounding strained.

She was a little strung out, her body thrumming from a peak just out of reach, and she couldn't help but laugh a little. "Well, it's hot, and I was bored."

Her lofted bedroom had been stifling when she'd woken up; Mary Margaret was off at work and Emma had slept late after getting in around three in the morning. She'd opened the little windows above her bed and turned on the fans, but it only helped so much. So then she'd figured, whatever, she was home alone, she was a grown-ass woman, she could be naked in her own apartment if she wanted to.

And well, then she'd gotten bored scrolling through her phone.

Emma sat up, wincing a little as her core throbbed in protest. "What's going on with some imminent event?" she asked.

Killian crossed the room in two strides, his hands going to her shoulders as he gently pushed her back down on the bed. "Different imminent event first," he said, dropping to his knees.

"What - are you serious?" she asked. He took hold of her legs and gently pulled her forward until her ass was just at the edge of the bed. She felt warm in a way that had absolutely nothing to do with the temperature of the room; bad enough that he'd walked in on her going to town on herself, but now he was putting aside something urgent just to- "Oh God," she cried, her head falling back as he parted her with his fingers and licked a long stripe up her center.

She was definitely sensitive, definitely ready to come, and now she definitely didn't care about anything else other than keeping her boyfriend's head between her thighs.

He tasted her with short, firm strokes, easing her legs up over his shoulders and then gripping her hips with firm hands. She couldn't catch her breath, straining under his cruel ministrations. His tongue swirled around her clit and dipped down to her entrance and Emma's fingers dug so hard into her comforter that she expected the cross-hatch marks would never go away. God, she'd been so close when he'd hurried in, lost in a fantasy where they were playing a game of pirate and kidnapped princess; she wondered how he'd take such a game, if he'd be willing to make her submit to his whims, but that was a conversation for when he wasn't doing that with his tongue inside of her.

She made a whining noise when he pulled away, but she hadn't noticed his hand leaving her hip - something firm nudged her entrance and she lifted her head, looking down at him in confusion and he grinned at her, winking when he flicked the 'on' button of her vibrator. Emma gasped, her toes curling and her legs tightening over his shoulders, and then that absolute asshole bent down and pressed down on her clit with the flat of his tongue. Her gasps quickly turned into pleading moans, his name tumbling from her lips with a few curses tossed in for good measure. She couldn't hear him over the low thrum of the vibrator, but she knew he would be chuckling because he was an asshole like that, and her hips seemed to be rutting up against his face all on their own. She scrambled for a better grip on the bed, but his other hand found hers and she gripped him tight. "Killian - oh, fuck, Killian -"

And then she was flying, bucking wildly into his face and felt so good that it almost hurt, her skin was so overly sensitive from his attentions and her earlier play with the vibrator.

Killian turned it off and gently pulled it out of her while she trembled from aftershocks; she was sure she'd never be able to unlock her fingers from his, she was holding onto him so tight, and he looked at her with a mix of smug satisfaction and gentle adoration as he stretched out on the bed next to her, bringing their clasped hands up to his mouth to kiss her fingers. "Still bored?" he asked.

Emma exhaled, then turned her head to look at him. If she wasn't so overwhelmed by the aftermath of her orgasm, she'd be overwhelmed by the amount of feeling in the look he was giving her - the amount of feeling in her chest she wanted to express. But it was like a vice gripped her tongue, and she could only reply, "No, but now I think I need a nap."

He grinned and then, with an amount of energy it would take another decade for her to muster, he bounded to his feet and went to her wardrobe, tossing a t-shirt, jeans, and a lightweight plaid shirt at her, all while talking. "No time for naps, Swan, though I suppose you can do that in the car." He went to her dresser then, looking through the drawers. "As I was saying, there's an imminent event and we need to be on the road."

A pair of her own underwear hit her in the face, then a bra. "We?" she asked, not moving; she couldn't, really, her legs felt like jelly and laying on the bed felt nice.

"Yes, love, 'we'. I did promise you I'd take you on a chase when the opportunity presented itself, didn't I?" He paused, looking into the drawer thoughtfully, then tossed a pair of socks at her as well. "It'll be muddy if we have to get out of the TIV, so boots or trainers please. Work boots, not your everyday ones."

With enormous effort, she managed to sit up, moving the clothes off of her and onto the bed next to her. "You do realize that you've effectively rendered me useless for a few hours."

"That's why you'll be in the back. Will's driving, I've got the computers. You'll be along for the ride, a third set of eyes, but you can nap in the car until things get underway."

She raised her eyebrows at him. "You really think Will's going to be okay with you bringing me along and then me just conking out in the back for most of it?"

"He'll be fine."

"And you don't get to tell him why I'm so out of it."

Killian gave her another cheeky grin and she rolled her eyes, giving in. She grabbed everything and padded down to the bathroom to put herself together. She kept in mind that they'd be in the car for most of the day, and out in the wet and the wind if they got out, and braided her hair after brushing some dry shampoo through it. When she came out, Killian was cooling his heels by the door, and Emma raised an eyebrow at him again. "Am I going to eat at all today or is this a 'grab what you can when you can' kind of day?"

"We'll stop by Granny's on the way to Will's. Come on."

In fact, it seemed like he'd called ahead before he'd even gotten to her place, because Granny had two bags of take away waiting for them at the counter. "You bring her back in one piece now, you got it?" she asked, glaring at Killian pointedly over her glasses.

"If she's not in one piece, then it's because I'm also not in one piece."

Emma, blushing a little from Granny's overprotectiveness, gave a smile of thanks as Killian paid and they hurried back to the TIV.

They ate as he drove; Will still lived in Norman, so they were going to backtrack a little before making their way west and south to meet up with the cold front Killian was pinning all of this on. This was the first time she saw the TIV's interior all set up for a chase; instead of the brackets being used for Killian's computers, Emma just set up the trays to put her food on, smiling sweetly when he gave her an exasperated look. "It's a lot lighter than two laptops and all your batteries and wifi cables and whatever," she argued, spreading her onion rings out in front of her and sorting them from smallest to biggest, just because she could.

"No respect," he said with feigned dismay.

"Nope," she said, startling a laugh out of him. "Respect is for men who don't barge into my apartment unannounced and then give me excellent orgasms."

He hummed, an amused glint in his eye. "I'll keep that in mind."

She finished her breakfast-slash-lunch just as they pulled into Will's apartment complex; it was very much a student apartment block, one on the lower-end amenities-wise, but if Will was having similar money woes as Killian, it wasn't unexpected. Killian honked twice; Emma glared at him. "We have to get out anyway, just go and knock on his door."

"It's how he knows it's me!"

"And him opening the door to your face wouldn't let him know it was you?"

"Well, then we both have to get in the TIV and this way I'm getting things situated while he gets in."

Emma rolled her eyes, shaking her head. Men. They got out and she went to sit behind the driver's seat while Killian got his computers set up; Will hurried down the stairs and practically vaulted into the TIV. "Bloody hell, it took you lot long enough," he commented, barely buckling his seatbelt before getting them back out onto the road.

"We stopped to eat," Killian said mildly. Emma hid a smirk at his phrasing; she still felt pleasantly worn out from earlier. "And yes, there's something for you, you heathen."

While Will drove, ate, and managed to cuss out half the drivers on the road all at the same time, Killian started filling them both in on their plan of attack for the day. At this point, he'd gotten everything connected and running on his laptops and he could point out the wind and temperature patterns on his charts to Emma, who by now could at least understand what he was talking about, if not make an educated guess on what his charts meant.

They'd head west and south, possibly heading into Texas if they didn't meet up with the line before then. They would get into position to launch their probes, and possibly intercept if it could be managed. More for Emma's benefit, Killian explained how they had helmets and extra harnesses in the seats to keep them as restrained and safe as possible in case something went wrong with the intercept.

She watched him as he talked, fascinated at how animated he was about the whole process, from safety measures to tiny points of data. She couldn't see his eyes too well, he was wearing sunglasses even if he wasn't always looking back at her, but the enthusiasm in his voice was more than a little infectious. Yes, she'd asked if he'd take her out with him sometime, but it didn't mean the prospect wasn't more than a little scary; only now was she realizing that scary was okay - as long as he was there with her.

At one point, she leaned forward enough so that she could play with the hair at the nape of his neck while he talked; slowly, as if he reacted without realizing it, he relaxed into her touch. She smiled when he make a noise of content, but Will's reaction wasn't so pleased. "Oi, if you two are going to be all touchy-feely for the duration, I've got no problem letting you two get out and walk to Texas from here."

"Oh, stop it," Killian admonished.

Emma eyed the back of Will's head, pursing her lips. "Hey, I'd play with your hair too, if you didn't keep it cut like you were still a cadet."

"It's more practical this way."

She hummed, lightly scratching at Killian's nape one more time before sitting back in her seat. Killian turned a little to look at her, an exaggerated pout on his lips, and her stomach did a little flip.

God, she was so fucked for this man.

Smiling, she turned away, watching the endless farmland pass by outside. It was fairly repetitive: field of crops, dilapidated barn, the occasional pasture filled with some livestock, house, repeat. Eventually, it proved to be just soporific enough to put her to sleep, the excitement of the morning catching up with her.

She didn't know how long she slept for, and when she did wake it was hard to convince herself to open her eyes; the seats were comfortable with all the extra padding - another safety measure. Also, Killian and Will seemed to be having a rather heated discussion about her.

"Mate, I just don't see why you brung her."

"She wanted to come. I promised her ages ago I'd take her out, she wants to see what I do besides stare at Excel sheets."

"She don't take you out where she works."

"She's police, Will. Why are you so bothered by this? We've had other people work with us before."

"That's the thing, innit? They work with us. She's just - a bloody tourist, like one of those groups that charge you a couple hundred and drag you around the countryside and go 'welp, looks like it was a bad day, folks, sorry, no refunds'."

"She's not dead weight. If we need an extra pair of hands, she'll be more than capable. I thought you liked her."

Will's voice was quiet and Emma knew she needed to make it known soon that she was awake, but she also really wanted to know the answer to this. She and Liam were still less than friends, and she wanted to hear if Will thought similarly. "I do like her. This isn't against her, this is... I dunno, mate. I don't like feeling like I'm just playing chauffeur or third wheel on some kind of 'impress the girl' tour."

Killian sounded like he'd had a small epiphany. "This isn't about Emma. This is about Ana."

"Don't wanna talk about that c-"

They hit a hole in the road that caused the whole back end to jolt and Emma let out a little shriek of surprise as Killian swore. "Bloody fucking lazy-ass, penny-pinching, corrupt sons of-"

Will pulled over and Killian barely waited for him to stop before getting out and going around to inspect the front tire where they'd hit. They could still hear him cursing ODOT and all the holes they hadn't patched up on the highways, and Emma let her head fall back with a sigh. "How much of that did you hear?" Will asked, surprising her.

She caught his eye in the rearview mirror. He didn't look guilty so much as he looked embarrassed that she'd overheard. "Enough," she said, "to know that I seem to have this problem with the people in Killian's life."

"I'm sorry, lass," he told her. "Shoulda waited to talk to him without you nearby."

She shook her head. "Not sorry you said it, though."

"Like that mind-reading bastard said, it's not about you."

"Ana."

He sighed. "Don't wanna get into it, but she's a right bitch of the first order. Thought she was everything, instead she took everything. Look, I do like you, not that my opinion matters 'coz I'm not the one dating you, but you're good for him." Killian continued to swear outside and Emma smiled wanly. "Ain't never seen him happier, present situation excluded, and that might be what put a bug up my arse about it. So I'm sorry - my shit getting in the way."

She pursed her lips. Yes, it stung. Could she fault him for letting his own feelings cloud his judgement? No. "Next time you have a problem, just take it up with me personally; don't go through Killian. He's got enough on his plate."

He caught her eye again and she saw the crow's feet form around his eyes as he smiled. "He does, but I dunno if I wanna go head on with you, lass - you'll knock me dick up through my teeth if I'm not careful."

Emma just smiled, not confirming or denying anything, as Killian got back in and practically ordered, "It'll hold for now, just drive."

They stopped a little while later for gas and to put a little extra air in the tire, just in case; Will was the one to get out this time, leaving Emma and Killian alone in the TIV. Killian shoved his sunglasses up on top of his head, pinching the bridge of his nose. "I'm sorry if you heard-" he started, but she interrupted him.

"We already talked about it. He apologized, we made a sort of deal that we'll butt heads with each other about anything else in the future. He'll leave you out of it."

He looked guilty, and she unbuckled herself to lean forward and play with his hair again. "I didn't want today to go like this," he said. "Losing my temper like that, letting Will run his mouth. I wanted to share this with you, and I feel like it's just going badly."

Emma closed the space between them and kissed his cheek. "It's not your fault. I'm not even mad, I'm just… you have a lot of people who love you, and I'm a little worried about how much I have to prove to them that I - that I care about you too."

His eyes flicked up to hers, completely catching on to her stumbling over the words. They were just shy of a year of dating and they hadn't said it yet. Oh, she'd almost said it - back in April, for instance, when he'd taken her for that picnic and taught her about storms. One morning a few weeks ago when he'd surprised her at the station with hot cocoa and a bear claw, she'd covered up the urge to say it by taking far too large a bite out of her breakfast.

This morning, laying naked in her bed when he'd eaten her out and not asked for anything in return.

She knew he felt it. The way he was looking at her right now definitely said it. But he was waiting for her to make the first move, letting her set their pace, and she was just too damned scared to say it.

Even though she was almost positive she felt the same way as he did.

The door opened and Will got back in, so Emma just kissed Killian on the cheek again before sitting back in her seat.

Dark, heavy clouds sat low in the sky as they got back on the road and Emma scanned the cloud base carefully for any signs of activity. Lightning lit up the cloud interior here and there, and the occasional cloud-to-ground bolt made her start with surprise, but she reminded herself that this was what they'd come out here to chase and it would only get worse - if they were lucky.

Odd, to think that the worse the conditions, the luckier they'd be.

"Emma, love, do you mind navigating?" She looked up and saw Killian offering her the smaller laptop. "I'll give you where we need to be going and you tell Will where to turn. It gets trickier to look between both screens sometimes, especially when I have to send emails."

"Sure." She thought she'd do better with her phone, but she'd use the thing that didn't suck up her data plan out here in the middle of nowhere. "You're writing emails? Now?"

"Updates to the National Weather Service, love. Strictly business."

They stopped just on the edge of the storm and got out - Emma mostly to stretch, but Will and Killian wanted to get their anemometers and barometers and whatever-meters balanced to the area before going in. Killian took some photos too, while Will set up a GoPro on the front dash. "I can stream this on our social pages," he explained while Emma watched. "With social media, news stations can pick stuff up, let people know how bad it is, and we can get some cash from it."

Killian came up beside her, slipping his arm around her waist and tucking his hand in her pocket. She leaned into him and he pressed a kiss to her temple. "I let Will deal with Twitter and whatnot, I'm not good with the hashtags and selfies and whatever else kids are doing these days."

"You're such an old man," Will grumbled, looking down at his phone.

"Selfies are easy," Emma said, taking his camera from him. She held it in front of them and she felt his head bump into hers as they leaned in close.

Okay, selfies with an actual DSLR weren't as easy as they were with the phone, but she had to admit the photo came out nice anyway. Even if her hair was escaping from its braid, wisps of it all windblown and sticking up a little from all the static in the air.

"Now how do I put this on Twitter?" Killian asked, a teasing tone in his voice.

"First you shove it up your arse-" Will stopped, laughing as Emma reached over and smacked him on the arm.

A rumble of thunder reminded them why they were out there. "Alright, it's now or never," Killian said. "Let's get the helmets on now so we don't have to scramble if we get close to an intercept."

As they strapped in, belt and harness this time, and Emma settled her helmet on, she suddenly wondered why they hadn't seen any other chasers out, and mentioned it. "There's at least three other teams that we know of out now," Will said. "Just texted 'em. This storm's big enough to come at from a few different directions, so we coordinated a little."

"And I've been emailing with a few as well. We're all working for the same goal," Killian added. "It's not like one person gets to grab the singular prize and they win. Everyone has different reasons for chasing, so the only real reason we have to coordinate is so that if someone gets in trouble, the others can go help out. We're all looking at the same section of the storm, so you'll see another crew soon."

She had a thought; she could see their location on the map, so maybe these other crews were visible too? And there it was - if she zoomed out on the map, she saw what he was talking about; everyone's GPS location was there and she counted five other teams in the area. She went back to the original map positions as Killian started reading off probable target areas and Emma got to work figuring out how that translated to the GPS.

Rain splattered against the windshield, slowly at first with fat drops of rain, but soon increased to a torrential downpour. Killian didn't want them to get stuck in the rain too soon, so he and Emma worked together to get them towards the southern side of the storm, still east of where the hook was starting to form on the map. But the rain was persistent, even as it tapered to a more visible hindrance, and as they moved closer to their target area, hail started to pelt against the hard outer shell of the TIV. "That's good, right?" Emma called over the racket it was making.

"Hopefully!" Killian said.

"If it don't break our equipment!" Will added.

Emma saw another map come up on Killian's computer, this one mottled reds and greens. "Wind directions," he said. "We're looking for red and green close together, it signals they're in rotation and either a funnel cloud or an actual tornado."

He brought the radar and the wind map up side by side, and Emma joined Will in actually scanning the skies for signs of activity. "All the technology in the world can't make up for human senses," Will said.

She thought it was interesting how they balanced -Will could do the technologically social side of their job but preferred to use his eyes to do the actual work, Killian was helpless at social media but could run several programs at once to detect tornadic activity. Even if they were good friends otherwise, she was starting to see how they worked well as an actual team; friendship could only help so much in a working relationship.

"I think - yes, we need to go a bit northeast to get ahead of it, but there might be something," Killian said.

Emma scanned her map and told Will where to turn next. She zoomed out and saw a few other teams heading the same way. "Three others think the same," she said.

"Good. We'll get into position and deploy the probes, and then hopefully we can intercept."

"And it'll be a good day for everyone," Will added.

She looked out the window, looking towards the south and west of where they were. The rain made it a little harder to see, but she could still tell where the cloud bottoms were; wispy, low-hanging cloudlets darted along faster than the darker mass above, and she wished she knew more about what she was looking for in the churning gray clouds. For all that she'd lived most of her life in the Midwest and Tornado Alley, she'd never seen a tornado in person before, just the aftermath.

They put in another couple of miles before Killian launched the probes; it was one thing to know that it was basically like having six giant t-shirt cannons sticking out of the TIV, but it was another for all those air pressure valves to be released at once, right near Emma's head. "Sorry," Killian said, his voice dimmed by the ringing in her ears.

"What?" she asked loudly.

"I said - oh, bloody hell, you're teasing."

"Only a little." Emma looked at her map again. "Will, skip this next road and turn left on the one about a mile down the way."

"What? That'll put us way out of the way of the probes."

"Yeah, but the wind map says they'll get picked up and carried off - and the storm's turning."

She glanced up and Killian was looking back at her with sheer delight on his face. "You're learning, Swan."

She smiled, pleased that he was so pleased at how quickly she was picking everything up. The rain suddenly dropped off and Will swore. He gunned it, and all three of them looked off to their left. "I see it!" Will shouted. "Funnel cloud!"

Killian had his phone out in a second to call it in, while Emma scanned the clouds for what he was talking about. She only saw the wispy cloudlets, though, until Killian hung up and said, "Look behind the scud, it's a bit pointy -"

"The what?"

"Little wispy bits, they're called scud, look behind them for the funnel."

She looked again and saw what he was talking about: the thin funnel cloud was rotating as it slowly stretched downwards. "Can we get ahead of it?"

"Doin' me best, lass."

The engine roared as Will floored it again. He asked how many roads were available for turnoff ahead and she told him three; he took the second one, slowing down enough so that the whole TIV didn't tip over during a turn but just barely - they still leaned uncomfortably far and the tires were actually squealing a little before they got some traction and rumbled off on down the road. She wondered just how just further they'd go, watching as the funnel cloud reached the ground and a cloud of debris swirling upwards around it, when they slowed suddenly and the TIV shook as they went offroad. "Deploying," Will said, parking and pulling on a lever that dropped the lower armored flaps.

Killian had his own buttons to push, the ones that deployed the spikes deep into the ground and anchored them in place - in theory. One of these days, they might not work as well as they'd hoped, but he'd told her that in all his intercepts so far (three, in the last five years or so) the safety measures had worked without fail.

"Now what?" Emma asked.

"We wait," Killian said, his eyes on the tornado.

"If you're the praying type, I'd do that too," Will added.

Emma wasn't sure she liked the sound of that, but she swallowed hard and gripped her harness for something to do with her hands. The TIV started to shudder as the wind outside picked up. "It's not the funnel that's the problem," Killian said. "It's the wind's all outside it and what they carry. The funnel's just the middle."

He said all of this very calmly and Emma wondered if that's what she sounded like when describing a crime scene, and if people thought she was crazy for being so calm about something so dangerous, too.

Something bashed into the TIV on the passenger's side and she yelped. "See?" Killian said.

A small rain of debris started to join in beating up the TIV, along with the rain, and Emma's fight-or-flight instincts were extremely unhappy with her current situation. The wind outside roared and she squeezed her eyes shut as the shaking grew more violent. There were some serious regrets about asking to come chase sometime and she felt very much like she'd gotten into something way over her head here. She wasn't the type of person who put much stock into praying, but she thought it might not do any harm to asking whoever might be listening to get them through this in one piece.

Something touched her knee and she opened her eyes. Killian was reaching back for her, giving her a reassuring look as he twiddled his fingers at her. She took his hand and he squeezed it, just as the view outside of the windows grew dark with the amount of dirt flying through the air.

Emma didn't think she blacked out at all during the interception, but if she had to recall it later, the only thing that came to mind was how dark and loud it was, and the warmth of Killian's hand in hers. It felt like it lasted for days, and she didn't realize it was over until he tugged on her hand a little to bring her out of whatever trance she'd gotten lost in. "Come on," he said.

She blinked - surely he didn't mean what she thought he meant. But no, he did, letting go of her hand to undo his safety harness and seatbelt; Will was doing the same. She followed their lead, a few beats behind; she left the helmet on, though, she didn't want a rogue two-by-four falling out of the sky and bashing her head in.

The sky was already lighter as the storm rolled on ahead. Emma joined them on the road, watching as the tornado started to rope out in the distance. Killian was taking pictures again, Will filming with the GoPro. Emma felt the adrenaline start to wear off, and leaned back against the TIV for support, not caring how filthy her clothes were going to get. Killian turned, putting the camera on the passenger's seat. Evidently, his adrenaline was still pumping, because he pulled her up and whirled her around, a grin on his face. "That was the best intercept we've had in ages, love, you were brilliant!"

"Me?" she asked, breathless.

"You," he said. "You picked up on everything so quickly, you made that last call on where to go, and without it we wouldn't have gotten nearly so many results. We make quite the team, if you don't mind me saying."

Finally, she started to grin. She was tired - exhausted, really - and everything was sort of catching up to her all at once. "We do," she said, "and don't take this the wrong way, Killian, but as much as I love you I never want to do this again."

His face went slack. "What?"

"I never want to go chasing again. I think this was more than enough-"

"No, the part before that," he said.

Emma paused, trying to remember what she'd said. She'd gotten to see what he did, which was what all of this had started out as, and she loved him, but this had been more than-

She loved him.

She'd said it out loud.

She met his eyes, the fight-or-flight instinct coming back, and he was looking at her with such raw hope that it gave her the courage to ask, "The part where I said I love you?"

"Aye," Killian said, his voice cracking. "That's the one. You bloody maddening woman, you'll be the death of me."

He picked her up and spun them around again, meeting her lips with a quick kiss. "I love you, too," he said softly, for their ears only.

Emma grinned, bumping his forehead with hers.

Will sighed, loudly. "If you two are done bein' all twitterpated with each other? Can we go find our probes? Get back home before it gets too late and maybe start looking at the data?"

Killian hardly spared a glance to his friend. "Dunno, mate, we might not get back early enough for data mining. We've probably all earned a good rest after today, don't you think, Emma?"

She smiled coyly, hoping he was implying what she thought he was implying. "Oh, definitely. Take a look at it with fresh eyes tomorrow."

After all, she did have to repay him for this morning.

#csbb #captain swan #cs fanfic #cs ff #cs smut #amanda writes #hook-echo

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gaming-rabbot · 6 years ago

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Salmon Run and Presentation

A (not so) brief dissertation on narrative framing in video games, featuring Splatoon 2

With the holidays in full swing, I took advantage of a deal one day when I went into town, and finally got my hands on Splatoon 2. Having loved the prior game as much as I did, waiting this long to get the sequel felt almost wrong. But like many another fellow meandering corpus of conscious flesh, I am made neither of time nor money.

Finally diving in, I figured I might take this excuse to remember that I write game reviews, sometimes. You know, when the tide is high, the moon blue, and the writer slightly less depressed. I ended up scrapping my first couple drafts, however. You see, a funny thing was happening; I kept veering back into talking about Salmon Run, the new optional game mode the sequel introduces.

Also I might look at the Octo Expansion later, on its own. After I get around to it…

Look, the base game already has a lot of content to explore, and as previously stated, I am sadly corporeal, and not strung together with the metaphysical concept of time itself.

My overall thoughts, however, proved brief, so I’ll try to keep this short.

(Mild spoilers coming along.)

Gameplay wise, I think the story mode is much improved upon by handing you different weapons for certain levels which were specifically built with them in mind. Whereas the prior game left you stuck with a variant of the starter splattershot all the way through. This keeps things interesting, pushes me outside of my comfort zone, and it’s a good way to make sure players will come from a well-informed place when deciding what weapon they want for multiplayer; which, let’s face it, is the real meat of these games and where most players are going to log the most time.

I also love the way bosses are introduced with the heavy drums and rhythmic chants and the dramatic light show. It endows the moment with a fantastic sense of gravitas, and manages to hype me up every time. Then the boss will have an aspect of their design which feels a bit silly or some how rather off, keeping the overall tone heavily grounded in the toony aesthetics the series already established for itself.

Narratively, I felt rather okay about the story aspect of Story Mode. The collectible pages in the levels still have a certain amount of world building, though this time it seems more skewed toward explaining what pop culture looks like in this world, such as, an allusion to this world’s equivalent to Instagram.

Cynical as it is…

That’s definitely still interesting in its own right, though perhaps it’s less of a revelatory gut-punch as slowly piecing it together that the game takes place in the post-apocalypse of Earth itself, and the inklings copied ancient human culture.

We still got some backstory for this game’s idol duo, though. And that, I appreciate. It means Pearl and Marina still feel like a part of this world, rather than seeming obligatory for the sake of familiarity, given the first game had an idol duo as well.

Meanwhile, perhaps it is a bit obvious that Marie’s cousin, Callie, has gone rogue, and that she is the mysterious entity cracking into the radio transmissions between her and Agent 4. If I recall correctly, that was a working theory that came about with the first trailer or two. That, or she had died.

As soon as Marie says aloud she wonders where Callie has gone, I knew right away. And that’s just in the introduction.

That said, on some level, after stomaching through certain other games and such that actively lie or withhold information to force an arbitrary plot twist for plot twist sake, it feels almost nice to go back to a narrative that actually bothers to foreshadow these things. Plus, having gotten already invested in Callie as a character from the first game, I still felt motivated to see the story through to find out why she went rogue. And, loving the Squid Sisters already, there was a hope in me that she could be redeemed, or at least understood. In terms of building off the prior game’s story, Splatoon 2 is moderately decent.

Also, I mean, c’mon. The big narrative drive might be a tad predictable, but hey, this game is for kids. It’s fine.

That, I think, is something I love the most about Splatoon. Despite feeling like you’re playing in a Saturday morning cartoon, and being aimed primarily at children, it doesn’t shy away from fairly heavy subjects. Such as the aforementioned fact that the humans are all long dead and you’re basically playing paintball in the ruins of their consumerist culture.

Which brings me to what fascinates me so much about Splatoon 2: the way in which Salmon Run is framed.

You see, on the surface, Salmon Run appears to be your typical horde mode; a cooperative team (typically comprised of randoms) fights off gaggles of foes as they take turns approaching their base in waves. Pretty standard for online shooters these days, as was modernly popularized by Gears of War 2, and Halo ODST.

I say “modernly,” as the notion of fighting enemies as they approach in waves is not exactly a new concept for mechanical goals within video games. Rather, the term itself, as applied to multiplayer shooters, “horde mode,” became a point of game discussion when Gears of War 2 introduced the new game mode by that same name back in… 2008?

No, no that can’t be right. I played Gears 2 back in high school (I had worse taste back then, okay?). Which, from my perspective, was basically yesterday. That game being ten years old would mean I myself am old now, and that just can’t be. I’m hip. I’m young.

I am, to stay on theme here, fresh.

But okay, existential crises and game talk terms aside, the writing team behind Splatoon 2 probably decided to absolutely flex when it came to the narrative surrounding Salmon Run. It is one of the most gleaming examples of the nontraditional things you can do with writing in video games, to really elevate the experience.

Let me explain.

You see, narrative in video games typically falls into one of two categories: either the story sits comfortably inside of the game, utilizing it like a vehicle to arrive at the destination that is its audience’s waiting eyes and ears. Or the narrative, on some level, exists rather nebulously, primarily to provide something resembling context for why the pixels look the way they do, and why the goals are what they are.

Not to say this is a binary state of existence for game writing; narrative will of course always provide context for characters, should there be any. It’s primarily older, or retro games that give you a pamphlet or brief intro with little in the way of worrying over character motivation, and the deeper philosophical implications of the plot, etc (though not for lack of trying). These would be your classic Mario Bros. and what have you, where the actual game part of the video game is nearly all there is to explore in the overall experience.

Then you have games like Hotline Miami that purposely sets up shop right in the middle to make a meta commentary about the state of game narrative, using the ideological endpoint of violent 80’s era action and revenge-fantasy genre film as inspiration and the starting point to draw comparison between the two. It’s bizarre, and I could drone on about this topic.

But I digress.

Despite falling into that latter category, that is to say having mainly just an introduction to the narrative context so you can get on with playing the game, Salmon Run is a stellar example of how you can make every bit of that context count (even if it does require the added context of the rest of the game, sort of, which I’ll explain, trust me).

First, a (very) brief explanation of how the game itself works, for the maybe three of you who haven’t played it yet.

A team of up to four inklings (and/or octolings) have a small island out in open waters. Salmonid enemies storm the beaches from various angles in waves. Each wave also comes with (at least) one of eight unique boss variants, who all drop three golden eggs upon defeat. Players are tasked with gathering a number of said golden eggs each round, for three rounds, after which their failure or success in doing so shows slow or fast progress towards in-game rewards.

And it’s all an allegory for the poor treatment of labor/workers, utilizing the fishing industry as both an example and a thematically appropriate analogue. Yes, I’m serious.

First, Salmon Run is not available through the main doors like the other multiplayer modes. Rather, it is off to the side, down a dingy looking alley. And when you’re shown its location, either because you finally entered the Inkopolis plaza for the first time, or because the mode has entered rotation again, Marina very expressly describes it as a job.

A job you should only do if you are absolutely, desperately hard strapped for cash. You know, the sort of job you turn to if, for one reason or another, you can’t find a better one.

An aside: technically, playing Salmon Run does not automatically net you in-game currency, with which to buy things, as regular multiplayer modes do. Rather, your “pay” is a gauge you fill by playing, which comes with reward drops at certain thresholds; some randomized gacha style capsules, and one specific piece of gear which gets advertised, to incentivize playing.

The capsules themselves drop actual paychecks in the form of aforementioned currency, or meal tickets to get temporary buffs that help you progress in the multiplayer faster via one way or another. Which, hey, you know, that helps you earn more money also. Working to get “paid,” so you can get things you want, though, still works perfectly for the metaphor it creates.

When I first saw it open up for rotation, I found out you had to be at least a level four to participate. Pretty par for the course, considering it’s the same deal with the gear shops. But, again, it’s all in the presentation; Mr. Grizz does not simply say something akin to the usual “you must be this tall to ride.” He says he cannot hire inexperienced inklings such as yourself, because it’s a legal liability.

After returning with three extra levels, I was handed off to basic, on-the-job training. Which is only offered after Mr. Grizz (not ever physically present, mind you, but communicating with you via radio), the head of Grizzco, uses fairly typical hard sell rhetoric when it comes to dangerous, or otherwise undesirable work: calls you kid, talks about shaping the future and making the world a better place, refers to new hires as “fresh young talent,” says you’ll be “a part of something bigger than yourself.” You know, the usual balancing act of flattery, with just the right amount of belittlement.

Whoa, hang on, sorry; just had a bad case of deja vu from when the recruiter that worked with the ROTC back in high school tried to get me to enlist… several times… Guess he saw the hippie glasses and long hair and figured I'd be a gratifying challenge.

The fisher imagery really kicks in when you play. Which, I figure a dev team working out of Japan might have a pretty decent frame of reference for that. A boat whisks you out to sea with your team, and everyone’s given a matching uniform involving a bright orange jumper, and rubber boots and gloves. If you've ever seen the viral video of the fisherman up to his waist in water telling you not to give up, you have a rough idea. Oh, and don't forget your official Grizzco trademark hats.

It’s on the job itself where a lot of what I'm talking about comes up the most; that is to say, despite buttering you up initially, Mr. Grizz shows his true colors pretty quickly. While playing, he seems to only be concerned with egg collecting, even when his employees are actively hurting. This is established and compounded by his dialogue prior to the intermediate training level, in which informs you about the various boss fish.

Before you can do anything remotely risky, even boss salmonid training, Mr. Grizz tells you he has to go over this 338 page workplace health and safety manual with you. But, oops, the new hire boat sounds the horn as you flip to page 1, so he sends you off unprepared. “Let’s just say you’ve read it,” he tells you, insisting that learning by doing is best.

This flagrant disregard employee safety, in the name of met quotas; the fact we never see Mr. Grizz face to face, making him this vague presence that presides over you, evaluating your stressed performance with condescension; that we are not simply given the rewards as we pass thresholds to earn them, having to instead speak with another, unknown npc for our pay… It all drives toward the point so well.

The icing on the cake for me is when a match ends. You, the player, are not asked if you’d like to go back into matchmaking for another fun round of playtime. Rather, you are asked if you would like to “work another shift.”

The pieces all fit so well together. I shouldn’t be surprised that, once a theme is chosen, Splatoon can stick to it like my hand to rubber cement that one time. It has already proven it can do that much for sure. But it’s just so… funny? It’s bitterly, cynically hilarious.

Bless the individual(s) who sat in front of their keyboard, staring at the early script drafts, and asked aloud if they were really about to turn Mr. Grizz into a projection of all the worst aspects of the awful bosses they’ve had to deal with in life. The answer to that question being “yes” has led to some of my favorite writing in a video game.

All of these thoughts, as they started forming in my skull, really began to bubble when I noticed Salmon Run shifts become available during my first Splatfest.

Splatfest is, to try and put it in realistic terms, basically a huge, celebratory sporting event. Participation nets you a free commemorative t-shirt and access to a pumping concert featuring some of the hottest artists currently gracing the Inkopolis charts.

The idea, the notion, that a hip young inkling (or octoling) might miss out on one of the biggest parties of the year because they need money more than they need fun? It’s downright depressing.

It got me thinking. I looked at my fellow egg collectors. In-universe, we were a bunch of teen-to-young-adult aged denizens missing out on all the fun because we desperately needed the cash. We became stressed together, overworked together, yelled at by our boss together. But in those sweetest victories, where we’d far surpassed our quota? We celebrated together.

Spam-crouching, and mashing the taunt, something changed. I felt a greater sense of comradery with these squids and octos than I did in nearly any other coop game. And it’s all thanks to the rhetorical framing of the game mode.

It accomplishes so many things. It’s world building which wholistically immerses you in the setting. But mainly, its dedication to highly specific word choice does exactly what I mentioned earlier: it elevates the experience to one I could really sit down and think about, rather than use to while away the hours, then move on to something else. So many games make horde modes that feel inconsequential like that; it’s just for fun.

There’s nothing wrong with fun being the only mission statement for a game, or an optional mode of play. But this is exactly what I mean when I say this is the nontraditional writing games can do so much more with. And Splatoon 2 saw that opportunity, and took it. And what a fantastic example of bittersweet, cold reality, in this, a bright, colorful game meant mainly for children…

Happy Holidays, everyone!

#Rabbot Reviews #video games #review #Splatoon 2 #Salmon Run #narrative #framing

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beardyallen · 6 years ago

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Here we go... (Part 2 of 3)

Alright, so let's talk about April.

[Warning: This is mostly just about my mental health. It’s not super interesting. You won’t learn anything about Beijing. Many of you will probably read this and imagine me sitting here whining. I prefer to call it venting. Feel free to skip this and go directly to Here we go... (Part 3 of 3). It’s where most of the fun stuff is. But...there’s a pretty dope comic about halfway down, so if you also suffer from depression, you should check it out. It’s a good comic. And it makes me smile when everything is gray.]

I generally only talk about my depression with a few people, but I think we could all benefit by having more open discussions about how it affects us. Too many people struggle with this illness, it's stigmatized, and future generations need to know that what they experience is more common than they think. Plus, I imagine that making this beast something that we can talk about will reduce its power and prevalence.

I'm not going to try to talk about the root cause of my issues as I'm not entirely sure where to even start, so I'll just share how it all manifests. And how that's changed over the years. If my mental illness is in fact something that I've been struggling with my entire life, I imagine that it manifested as anger when I was child, usually in response to anxiety around my social situation, exacerbated by end-of-the-semester stress. Why do I think this? Because it seems that I only really got in trouble for acting out in early December or late April/early May. And I was usually retaliating towards a feeling of isolation, invisibility, or worthlessness. It's a pretty strong pattern.

I'm not gonna share any sob stories about how I didn't fit in as a kid, or how moving into a tight-knit community in fifth grade led to a strong feeling of isolation that persisted through middle school and high school. I'm not going to talk about the bullying or harassment. These are things that happened, but they aren't the point. And I'm just as much, if not more, to blame for my circumstances as anyone else.

The anxiety is the point. The feeling that I've had at every stage of my life that I don't matter to the people around me if I'm not always around. That they don't think about me. That if I vanished from their life, they wouldn't notice. That I was replaceable. Or that I was a burden that they would rather shirk off. As far as I can tell, I've felt this way since kindergarten, and all of the anger I felt as a child was in response to stimuli that reinforced this notion.

And in April, the intrusive, invasive thoughts started up again. Yes, of course there were people who wanted to know what was going on with me. There were people who frequently checked in with me to see how I was doing in China. I had every reason to believe that I matter, that my presence was missed, and that I'm still important to people. And in spite of that, it's not how I felt. It even led me to start questioning whether or not my best friend cared about me, which is absurd because of course he does. Life happens. But the voice in my head is a prick.

On top of that, every source of stress in my life spiked. Complications with my teaching assignment manifested, including (but not limited to) issues with my paychecks. Financial reimbursements for my health insurance policy have not been disbursed despite repeated messages to those responsible. Since I'm currently not enrolled in any course credit, my student status was revoked and now those entities which own my student loan debt are looking for payments. My dissertation research stagnated as my collaborator has other super important grad school obligations to deal with, and my Masters Project has been put on hold again for reasons outside my control. It also seems to just get bigger every time I try to make progress. There's also a nagging voice in the back of my head constantly whining about how much more complex my project seems to be in comparison to other Masters projects I've seen from the department. But when the voice pops up, I do what I can to pummel it into submission. I can't live my life in comparison to others.

Beyond that, I randomly wound up with a case of insomnia. For three nights in a row, I laid in bed for hours staring at the inside of my eyelids, watching imaginary scenarios play out as my consciousness jumped from random topic to random topic. In spite of how exhausted I was, I just couldn't get my brain to turn off for more than 30 minutes at a time; during the one or two brief naps, I was privy to some of the most vivid dreams and nightmares that I've had, and my baseline dream/nightmare is already more vivid than most.

So work sucked, minor frustrations related to living in Beijing, no sleep, missing my friends, trying to not freak out about the fact that I'll be effectively homeless all summer (insomuch as I won't have an apartment that I'm officially renting or anything), worrying about the fact that I'm not making as much money as I projected, and just being sick and tired of being sick and tired. April was super fun, guys. Can't you tell?

Mental illness blows. Depression blows. Intrusive thoughts blow.

So I spent an absurd amount of time doing very little. Laying in bed. Reading comic books and rewatching Community. Not writing. Not researching. Being pathetic.

Wondering if I should reconsider my stance on medication. So let's talk about that.

From a philosophical standpoint, I don't much care for the idea of needing a medication to get myself on track. My mental illness is a part of who I am just as much as my intellect and sense of humor are a part of who I am. I'm no genius, but let's consider those individuals who have been described as such and think about just how many of them are suspected to have been depressed or grappling with some sort of mental illness. I'm not going down in history as anyone whose mind is something to admire, but I know that I'm smarter than your average bear. I'm a PhD student studing theoretical mathematics, probability and statistics. I'm simulataneously working on a dissertation related to subgraph density problems and a masters project centered around reconstructing familial networks in forensic databases. These topics are not related, nor has the coursework had very much overlap. Balancing two different graduate degrees is not common among people in my department, but I know that I can handle it.

So if I seek out medication as a means to balance my life, what sort of unforeseen impact will that have on my studies? It is not uncommon for the process of finding "the right medication" to take months, and as your life changes, so too does "the right medication." I have one year left in my program (maybe two if I'm unlucky, and that seems to be how my life goes), my diet is fucked, my sleep schedule has been jacked up for the last few months, and I haven't had regular physical activity excepting the 2 mile walks to and back from Wudaokou several times a week. My work life is tumultuous at the best of times, and all of this is changing in the not-so-distant future. I have been in academia my entire life, living on the same stress-rhythm for the past 24 years. What happens when I'm suddenly a research or data scientist?

Medication is off the table for the time being. I had bi-weekly counseling last semester which seemed to help with my stress levels, but at some point I would like some sort of diagnosis. But before I can seek therapy, I need to be back in the States, with some sort of stable life. That means August of September at the earliest. Probably September. In the meantime, I bounce between feeling like I've got everything figured out and feeling like I'm holding my sanity together with scotch tape. All the while, I question all of the things I thought I knew about how I wanted my life to look as I see more clearly every day just how messed up the world is. Ignorance definitely wasn't bliss, but knowing doesn't feel much better.

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Damn. That was pretty bleak. But I needed to get it out of my head.

Enjoy this dope little comic that I think about every Sunday to help me get through the week.

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Now back to it. I'm open to therapy, I know that it will help. It's part of my long-term plan for mental stability. And I'm open to talking about medication with my future therapist, once the "big issues" in my life that I can control are worked out.

In the meantime, I'm okay. Or at least that's what I'll say whenever someone asks.

Of course I'm not okay. For some reason that I haven't yet worked out, my brain focuses on the negatives waaaaay too much. I do my best to combat it, but generally I've just managed to make this work to my advantage throughout my life, planning for worst-case scenarios, being comfortable with failing when I try to solve a problem, being the skeptic in my research groups. It's made me a better mathematician. It's made me push myself further towards excellence. But it's also inherently held me back.

Before I really had a grasp on my mental illness, I would have periods of numbness. I would get absorbed by these intrusive thoughts and mistake them for my authentic voice. I would see everything around me as gray and conclude that my friendships weren't as wonderful and remarkable as they are, that my relationship is doomed to fail because I don't feel a spark or magnetism anymore, that I'm not actually supposed to be a graduate student and that I'm not good enough and that I've only made it this far as a fluke and eventually everyone will figure out that I'm a fraud. And I've made mistakes because of it. I've let friendships die, relationships fail, and...alright, so I've pretty much been kicking ass at the grad school thing, but I guess my response to feeling like a fraud is usually to push myself super hard until I start burning out. This actually happened last school year when I was preparing for my comprehensive exam, which led to my oral exam, which led right into the end of the semester, with several conferences that I was running and attending, and then a research workshop and then...my seizures came back. Maybe "seizure" isn't quite correct, but I'm not sure what else to call it when my body has a stress-induced reaction that feels like someone swinging an icepick in the back of my skull.

So I'm not okay. But for the time being, that's just going to have to be okay. [Queue i'm ok. by Judah and the Lion]

I could use a nap.

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yeats-infection · 7 years ago

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#2 for kindly philanthropist @floraldamerons... here is a remus/sirius AU based on the 1971 amchitka, alaska nuclear weapon tests, the 1964 anchorage earthquake (the second most powerful earthquake ever recorded), and more etc. etc. thank you to kayley for the inspiration, and i am sorry for butchering your prompt a little.

The radio crackled. It was the boy again. “We’re coming for you,” he said. “Over.”

“We’re going ahead as planned,” Remus said. “You probably don’t want to be in the blast zone. Over.”

“You wouldn’t detonate it,” said the boy. He sounded, for the first time in their three-day CB acquaintance, a bit nervous. Their little boat was coming up through the inside passage probably from Seattle or some bougie Vancouver neighborhood like Kitsilano or South Cambie, and Remus had entertained the notion that the boy, and indeed no one else on the boat, had never been at sea for so long before. Anyway he went on: “You wouldn’t detonate it if you knew someone was close. Over.”

This in fact was true. Remus had studied closely what had happened with Albert Bigelow and Earle and Barbara Reynolds sailing ketches into Bikini Atoll. But all that was up to the Atomic Energy Commission, by whom Remus was not technically employed. “I’m not sure,” he said. “Anyway it isn’t me who makes that call. Over.”

“What exactly do you do? Over.”

Remus put the mouthpiece down and ran a hand through his hair and poured himself another finger of whiskey. But then the voice came again. “Come in, Amchitka. What exactly do you do? Over.”

“I’m a scientist.”

“For the AEC?”

“From the University of Alaska Fairbanks. I’m a biologist.”

“So you’re a traitor.” Remus shot back the whiskey and poured another finger. It was getting to be winter and already outside there wasn’t much light. It was just a kind of grimy, gummy film on the horizon, and something about it was illicit, like old neon. “You’re a traitor to whatever animals you study. And you’re a traitor to all your fellow Alaskans.”

For a while Remus’s hand hovered over the knob that would tune the radio to another channel. But he hesitated and in the hesitation —

“How dare you,” said the boy. “If the fault goes — ”

“Are you from Alaska, and were you here when it went then?” There was a thin, muted crackle on the line. “Come in, you fucker,” Remus said.

“I’m — no.” There was a long pause. Then, idiotically, the boy said, “Over.” Probably he had never used a CB radio either, Remus was thinking, somewhere in the razor-thin verge between exasperation and venomous anger. Drinking, especially as heavily as he had been drinking since he had come to Amchitka, had shortened his fuse substantially, not that it had ever been particularly long to begin with. “I’m from Victoria,” said the boy, though he’d said his transmission was over. “We felt it a little. Over.”

This was so pathetically idiotic that Remus got up out of the chair and went to his bedroll for the cigarettes. He thought about going outside to smoke one but it was frigid cold and his long underwear was still wet from crouching in the ocean to make measurements in the scant stretch of daylight. And anyway he was supposed to be manning the radio, because he was also supposed to receive a transmission, in a quarter hour’s time, from the head of his department in Fairbanks.

“Amchitka, do you read — ”

“I’m here,” Remus said. “I study subtidal organisms. Mostly sea urchins.”

“Whyever would you study them.”

Remus had stepped on one as a child on the coast in Cordova. The spines had been so deeply embedded in his foot that his parents had had to bring him to the doctor. Since then he had admired the creatures for their tenacity. But it would not do to tell the boy this over the CB radio.

“How old are you?” said the boy.

“Twenty-two. How old are you?”

“Twenty-three.”

So he wasn’t really a boy. Even though it seemed wrong, by the tone of his voice, to refer to him as a man.

“You were in the earthquake then,” said the voice. “And you were — ”

“I was fourteen. I was from — well, it’s gone now. This town called Portage.”

He could remember sometimes in the oddest dreams running up the hill away from the wave toward the white eye of the sun or God stretched everpresent and unseeing through the dirty grey cotton clouds.

“Aren’t you afraid it might happen again?”

“It didn’t last time.”

“Well the bomb is five times stronger this time.”

As though Remus did not intimately know this. “It won’t happen,” he said.

“How can you be sure?”

Faith, he almost said. It won’t — it can’t. As though he had any kind of even apocryphal proof that God cared enough to prevent it from happening once more in his own lifetime.

“The fifteenth most powerful earthquake of all time happened right there,” the voce went on. “Right where you’re sitting. 8.7 magnitude on the Richter Scale, and an eleven-meter run-up on Shemya — ”

“Nobody died in that one,” Remus reminded him.

“So, it’s the same fault that runs toward Prince William Sound,” said the voice. “You never know, you know, how much it might — ”

“I know,” Remus reminded him, “I do know.” He poured himself another finger of whiskey and mulled over his last cigarette. The silence on the line was weighty and insistent as the sea. “I don’t fucking understand,” he said finally. “What do you want from me? I’m here to study sea urchins. They’re evacuating me tomorrow in advance of the test.”

“Can’t you — what about some clever sabotage?”

This was comically ridiculous. “I’m a fucking biologist,” Remus reminded him. “I saw them putting the warhead in the shaft and it looked like science fiction.”

It reminded me, he did not say, could not say, had been drinking toward now for a few years, it reminded me loudly and without recompense that I am altogether unsure if there is any place at all for me (Alaskan biology student, son of huntsmen and -women having wandered on the wild moors through the darkest of all nights and dead now seven years, survivor of the second largest earthquake in recorded history, inheritor of assorted colonial processes unconscionable) in this New Atomic World…

The radio fuzzed. “Lupin?” said a more familiar voice. “Come in, Lupin…”

It was his professor from Fairbanks. He hated the sensation of disappointment twisting with the whiskey in his gut. They spoke for a while about the sea urchins and assorted other measurements Remus had taken on the condition of the subtidal flora and fauna. His professor reminded him that he would be airlifted off Amchitka with the rest of the scientific staff early the following morning in advance of the detonation of the Cannikin warhead, which was scheduled for twenty-two-hundred hours. When his professor at last told him “Over and out,” Remus wandered through the tunings on the CB radio for another hour or so, steadily drinking, searching for the other voice in a kind of steadily constricting pressure, as though if he did not find this voice someone (perhaps himself) might die.

In the morning he woke at the desk with a hot railroad spike of a hangover steadily driving into his skull through his left eye, to the sound of the helicopter pilot knocking on his trailer door. He watched the test on the fuzzy TV that evening from his garrett room in Fairbanks. Trudged back to the lab on campus at midnight in the gathering snow to record into the official registers the necessary data from Amchitka. Slept there, most nights, for a long time. Understood distantly in the recesses of his very soul that one day he would have to go back there to take more measurements and that perhaps when he did something might be found, though who could say exactly what this was, and to whom such findings might bear significance.

Years later he was in Vancouver for a conference on echinoderms at UBC. After a panel on sand dollars’ exposure to radioactive material he found himself deep in conversation with an old mentor from Humboldt State University, with whom he had slept twice regrettably; he had a feeling it was heading for a perhaps even more regrettable third, and then, thankfully, they were approached by a hippie type who had tied back his long hair, which anyway he looked too old for, who introduced himself with a too-firm clammy handshake, and who said his name was Sirius Black.

“Dearborn,” said the Humboldt State professor manfully. “And this is Lupin, from Fairbanks.”

“I enjoyed the panel,” said Sirius Black, and thence came the voice. Time and space shifted under Remus’s feet with the percussive, violent gravity of the Pacific Plate on March 27, 1964.

They walked out together down University Boulevard away from the campus toward the forest and the beach. “It’s depressing really,” said Sirius Black. “I gave up all my idealism and became a scientist.”

“A scientist of what?”

“Physics. Reactivity. First it was sort of like a know your enemy thing.”

“And then what was it?”

“I don’t know,” said Sirius Black. “Something different. Have you got a cigarette?” Remus had only one left and they walked sharing it down the long path above the beach. “Anyway I’m here at the university. I saw the topic of the panel and figured it was worth a shot.”

It was almost aggressively not, I’ve thought of you.

“Besides it was sort of related. I’m interested in how other sorts of living beings process radiation poisoning. In fact, it’s — well my advisor was telling me it should be my dissertation. But I haven’t taken biology since grade school.”

“I’ll write something with you,” Remus said without thinking.

“Will you?”

“Yeah, I guess. I’ve just finished a paper. I was going to take some time to just — but I don’t even know what I’ll do.”

“Sail around the world,” said Sirius.

“What? No…”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know how to sail.”

“That’s a bullshit reason. That’s no reason at all. Can’t you learn?”

He laughed. He didn’t make a habit of doing this very often and it tasted in the back of his throat like sun or like the chorus of voices at the end of the Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” “I don’t know,” he said.

“If I were you I wouldn’t be afraid of anything anymore. You survived a 9.2-magnitude earthquake, and you watched the AEC prepare and execute three nuclear warhead tests.”

“I was drunk for most of the latter,” Remus admitted.

“I couldn’t tell. On the radio.”

“I’m shocked by that. I never — I mean I don’t talk to people like that, not usually. Probably it was just, it was only your voice. Not your face. It didn’t feel quite real. And the sun was only out like three hours a day. And I was drinking really quite a lot. Too much.”

“Have you stopped now?”

Remus had tried about twenty times. “It’s harder than it seems,” he said.

They walked to the quiet residential neighborhood of doctoral candidate housing in which Sirius lived in a surprisingly well-maintained bungalow in the perpetual shade of ancient pines. The walls of his suite were hung with psychedelic posters from Summer of Love concerts and tours gone by and one of them was signed by Jerry Garcia. To wit, Sirius put Patti Smith’s “Land” on the stereo. He offered Remus a gin and tonic, which he made with too much lime squeezed directly into the fingerprinted jam jars in a strong fist. Remus was watching out the window at the trees moving in the breeze and the distant sea, visible here as a strip of silver like a dropped chain.

Eventually, three or four drinks and two more Patti Smith albums deep, they found there was nothing left to talk about and nothing left to do but the obvious. Sirius kissed with far too many teeth, like perhaps more teeth than humans should even have, and he was extraordinarily talkative in a way that shouldn’t’ve been surprising. Remus had walked out on lovers for less and yet bore it silently until he couldn’t take it silently anymore. Sirius bit the join of his neck and shoulder so he elbowed Sirius in the gut. They wrestled for a while in attempt to delineate dominance practically and then they lay on the lumpy duvet gasping for breath and at last attempted it again.

Sometime in the middle of the night Sirius woke him coming back to bed from turning off the record player, which had been shuffling back and forth against the playout groove. The moon was coming through the Venetian blinds onto the sheets in stripes of bright paint. “Will you go back there,” Sirius said, kneeling in the bed.

Remus yawned. “Where?”

“To Amchitka.”

“I have to. Measurements.”

“Do you have any idea what — ”

“No — God. I’m terrified to see. Actually mostly terrified maybe you were right all those years ago.”

“About what?”

“Being a traitor.”

“Well you wouldn’t be alone.”

Remus sighed. He was sore and his head hurt from drinking. “I guess not,” he said.

They smoked a joint together, sitting in the bed, and watched the dawn. When the sky had filled with grey Sirius kissed him very tenderly as though trying to draw very old words from his mouth. At noon he drove Remus to the airport. On the plane back to Fairbanks Remus fell asleep and dreamed for the thousandth time about running up the hill toward the sun. Upon arrival back at the university he found his advisor scheduling the department’s return to Amchitka.

#my fic #rs #wolfstar #empire building #occ

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messier2102 · 5 years ago

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If I haven’t already wrote this before or announced it yet, then I’ll first like to start this post by announcing that I’ll be heading back to Singapore some time next month for about 2.5 weeks. The (return) flight ticket has already been booked for just a mere £500 (it was ~£900-£1100 when I checked last November/December!), but I have to deal with a 7 hours transit at Doha airport. But that’s fine, because I’ll have my laptop with me and I’ll be busy using the (overall) 40 hours to-and-from journey to write my dissertation report, which is also the topic of this post. Efficient time management much?

The weather is starting to become cooler this week, but I don’t think it’ll start to actually turn cold until mid-August, or early September. I’ll still be coming back here for a couple of months to carry on with my job hunt – so far, I’ve sent out my CVs to various parts of the world – like Denmark, Japan, Germany and even in Thailand. The process to get a working visa is hard, but I’m somewhat confident that with my newfound technical skills and expertise, I should be able to get what I want.

Weekly spending:

14th Jul Sun Groceries: £5 Total spending: £2538.85

15th Jul Mon Total spending: £2538.85

16th Jul Tue Groceries: £12 Total spending: £2550.85

17th Jul Wed Total spending: £2550.85

18th Jul Thu Lunch: £4.70 Dinner: £10.40 Total spending: £2565.95

19th Jul Fri Groceries: £6 Total spending: £2571.95

20th Jul Sat Dinner: £9 Total spending: £2580.95

I actually wanted to write a short introduction about Neural Networks (which is highly related to my dissertation project), but at the moment, I don’t understand it enough to write much about it. In fact, I don’t even think I’m qualified to write about it at the moment, and I’m not sure how long it’ll take for me to understand it to a “passable” level.

Anyway, the main task of my dissertation project – and what I was working on for the past month and the coming 1.5 months – is to implement an algorithm that can detect and draw bounding boxes around all the insects in a given image. The insects in these images can be sparsely distributed or densely packed together. For the former, it’s not too hard to detect with the right parameters and pre-processing – but of course it’s not so simple either, like just using template matching. For the latter, I totally have no idea how to approach the problem.

To give a better idea, for the image below, it’s easy for me to make the computer detect the exact location of where the insects are because it’s so obvious. A simple find edges and contours algorithm will get me an accuracy of >50%, with a few false positives here and there on the wooden frame, and on the labels. Just last week, I finally found a way to measure the accuracy of the algorithm. Now, the challenge for me is to pump it up by 90% by finding the right hyperparameters (I hope I’m using the term correctly here).

Of course, I wish that my dissertation were that easy. The same algorithm that works on the above image will not work on the images below. The caveat is that I’m only allowed to use automatic methods only – that means that it’s not like I can just make a GUI to get the results that I want. So far, I’ve just started having all my packages and I’ve got a few algorithms on my list to try. Implementing them, however, is another problem.

Either way, I’m sorry that I cannot even provide a simple explanation of how Neural Networks work at the moment, but I can give a very brief overview on the image classification/Computer Vision process. This is by no means a detailed explanation of the overall process, but rather, what I understand from the process off the top of my head. Computer Vision is a really vast topic and there are so many things that you can explore at every step of the way. Hell, I can even spend 3 months on a research topic about the best pre-processing methods and write a 30-50 page report about that.

Pre-processing In any image analysis/computer vision project, the first step is to pre-process the image. There are a lot of things that you should do to an image first – like resizing it (simply because a 256×256 image will process much faster than a 3200×3200 image), removing the noise (usually, this means smoothing the image using some kind of blurring filter), and segmentation (the simplest being thresholding, to create a ‘mask’).

Typically, this step isn’t very hard. You don’t even need to apply any coding at this stage – even using Adobe photoshop or Microsoft Paint to crop the image or re-colorize some parts is already considered ‘pre-processing’. I tend to use ImageJ to try different filters on the image first to check the result, and then deploy the code on Python to get the same results.

Algorithms This part is the reason why I’m posting this so late – it takes FOREVER to train the CNN model, but I think it’s important to include this since it’s the whole point of this post. By far, the gold standard for any image classification/detection problem is the use of Neural Networks, which I’m trying to implement on my project (and I’m pleased to say that after many months of getting stuck in the installation process, I finally got TensorFlow and Keras up on Python. You see, I’ve been using Python 3.7 all these while and it’s not compatible with those packages for some reason. Then, I downloaded Python 3.5, and while I could make TensorFlow run, I had some problems with OpenCV. I was stranded there until just yesterday where I downloaded Python 3.6 and shifted all my packages and lo-and-behold, it works!).

If you’ve been following the news recently, there’s this “FaceApp” application that’s been going around that makes your face look older than you currently are. The magic behind it is something called “Generative Adversarial Networks” (GAN), which are a type of neural network. Of course, I’m not using GAN in my project, so there’s no need for me to find out more about it yet. Anyway, the key thing here is that Neural Networks are like, the hottest thing in data science right now. In the last 5 years or so, almost every image classification problem will first approach the problem using some form of neural network algorithm, and the results are very promising – with about an 85-95% accuracy.

Anyway, I copy-pasted a code from the TensorFlow tutorial website and trained it on a built-in sample dataset. The training took ~5 minutes (may be faster if I just ran it from the console) and the result is…wrong. It classified the image as a Coat with 100% probability, when it actually is an Ankle Boot. If you are interested to go through the whole process yourself, you are welcomed to try your luck at https://www.tensorflow.org/tutorials/keras/basic_classification.

BUT, as my professor told me, the problem with these deep learning techniques are that the “hard part” – the intermediate step of actually processing and applying the algorithm to the image – are already done for you by the experts. These days, you just need to install the packages, feed the correct input to the pre-written algorithm, train the model (which is automatic), and finally get the output. Then you just check if the output is correct or not and get some sort of a truth table. Unfortunately, for a graded project, it’s hard to give good marks for this because you are not actually “thinking” or coming up with your own solutions, but just piggy-backing on the works of others. There’s no merit to give for just downloading images and packages!

Computer Vision is something that I’m really interested in, but unfortunately, I did not have the chance to take up a module on this in my undergraduate or postgraduate education – other than a small, small part in my Biomedical Imaging module about simple thresholding. Everything that I have learned about this topic is purely from online sources, A LOT OF TRIAL AND ERROR, and a bit of luck (but I’ve been very lucky with my results so far). On the other hand, seeing that I didn’t do too well for my signals and controls modules, the nitty-gritty details in Computer Vision might just be too maths-intensive for me to comprehend.

Last but not least, although I’m still stuck at Andrew Ng’s Machine Learning course on Coursera, I think I managed to learn some similar content in my Database Systems module, which takes a more theoratical approach, rather than focusing on the mathematical details. I highly recommend anyone who has a month or so to enrol in this course because it’s perfect for absolute beginners – you just need the basic discipline and time to get through it, especially so if you are bad at maths.

Results Finally, the last part of any image classification problem is obtaining the results of the classifier – that is, how well or not well did the algorithm perform. At first, I thought it was something so simple like just getting a truth table by counting the number of algorithm-generated matches and comparing if it matches with the ground truth rectangles, but it was more complicated than I assumed that it took me 2 weeks to figure it out!

Even at this step, there is no one fixed way to get the accuracy of the algorithm – and this all depends on the images that you are dealing with, like how many samples are there in an image? Say you have a dataset of 50 cat images and 50 dog images – each image contains either only 1 cat or 1 dog.

You have an algorithm that determines if a cat is present in the image. You apply your algorithm and you will have a list of cat images that are correctly identified as cat (true positive), cat images that are incorrectly identified as not cat (false negative), not cat incorrectly identified as cat (false positive) and not cat correctly identified as not cat (true negative). Okay, this is still a little confusing to me, even if I have been dealing with a question like this for every year since polytechnic, but I think I got it correctly (pardon me if I made a mistake – how shameful!). Anyway, you sum up all these numbers and you get some sort of a final value from 0 to 1 that tells you how good your model is – in the best case scenario, all of your 50 cat images are correctly determined as cat images, and all of your 50 dog images are correctly determined as not cat images. TP = 50, FP = 0, TN = 50, FN = 0.

You can just find the accuracy using the simple formula of TP + TN / (TP + FP + TN + FN), which you will get 1.

In my case, it’s not so simple because I have many different kinds of boxes in one image – how do I calculate the accuracy of my algorithm?

The quick answer is that I used something called the “Jaccard Index” to get the overlapping areas, and from there, get the number of True Positives, False Positives and False Negatives (True Negatives are not taken into account because there is simply no way to get them, unless perhaps you count it at a pixel-level). Then, I find the Precision and Recall for the algorithm and finally calculate the F1 score, which is the measure of how “good” my algorithm is.

I’m going to stop here because I really didn’t think that I’ll be writing about something so technical, and besides, I have better use for my time anyway, like ACTUALLY working on my project instead of writing a blog post about it. On the side, I’m also watching 1 or 2 lessons on YouTube every day about Neural Networks, and I highly recommend this as an advance course after taking Andrew Ng’s Machine Learning course.

youtube

Signing off, Eugene Goh

1 YEAR IN CARDIFF – WEEK 43 – PROJECT If I haven't already wrote this before or announced it yet, then I'll first like to start this post by announcing that I'll be heading back to Singapore some time next month for about 2.5 weeks.

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bartsugsy · 8 years ago

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I just wanna say, I'm so happy you're embracing your feelings towards Rebecca. It's just reached a whole other level of ridiculous now heh 😂😂😭😭.

this was probably the wrong (right?) time to send this message because i’ve been yelling about this theory all evening and….

i have some more Thoughts

ok, i think i sort of accidentally went back to trying to really fathom out her character again, but it always feels pointless, because i don’t know how we’re supposed to take her. i don’t know ultimately where her story should be or where it should be going. as far as i can tell, she’s there to further along robert’s story. that’s it. and that makes me annoyed because as much as i sort of just utterly despise her, why do i want to watch a female character help build up a male character without the writers even bothering to even try to make her character work in any kind of sensible way, or fleshed out, or even the slightest bit consistent? she’s so sloppily written and… you can sort of figure things out about her, but nothing that makes me understand why she is someone i would root for?

like. i just want to know what the writers think of her. are we supposed to really be that invested in her? and if so, why haven’t they tried harder to make that happen by making her seem like more of a real multi-faceted character? as opposed to someone who, until literally two days ago, has never made a decision that someone else didn’t influence.

i just don’t really know where they can take her? because now she seems to have realised how shitty robert treats her and i enjoyed her earlier this week, tearing a strip off of him and rejecting him because she deserved to have a scene like that, but…

idk i’ve spent a lot of time talking about her with people today and thinking through her very thinly constructed character and it feels like they’ve started to do a 180 - they’ve had her take a stand against robert, they’ve had her stand fast in this one decision that she’s made by herself, against what other people have told her (yes with the prompting from vic, but she’s stood by it, so i’m sort of giving it to her anyway, baby steps etc). is that the extent of her character arc? where else can she go from here?

rebecca spent years - 5? years? 6? - idolising robert. She thought she was in love with him and she thought that she was the only one who knew him. She thought she was his aaron, essentially - the one person in her family who knew he was the sort of person who would cheat on chrissie, who was allowed to see all of him. i think she thought that she was more special to him than chrissie, and in that, didn’t actually ever see the real him at all.

earlier today i accidentally rewatched the first rob/rebecca kiss - the one that happened the day before ssw, rob’s inexplicable way to prove to himself that he wasn’t going to cheat on aaron that still makes literally no sense to me and almost annoys me more than The Incident because of it, but is saved only by the fact that it had less than zero effect on the story. the things that that scene - and the scene before it - did establish were: robert treats rebecca like shit and rebecca doesn’t really seem to notice. she just lets his words and tone mostly roll off her, still presses forwards and tries to see if he’ll give into her. she doesn’t stop or give up at that scene either. he strings her along just enough that she can just sort of blankly ignore the shit he says to her otherwise, especially when she brings aaron up.

and i think she must be jealous of aaron. it’s the only way her story works, in all honesty. for her to think that she was always something special to robert and to slowly be forced, over the course of the months of her returning to the village, to understand that the person she spent years she was to robert is in fact aaron dingle.

that and she must think of robert in a slightly delusional way - she puts him on a pedastal, ignores a lot of the bad things about him in favour of the good, because he really does treat her like shit. he’s occassionally genuinely nice to her, cares about her just enough, but largely treats her like a play thing - someone he can use to get his own way. he has so little regard for her feelings and she makes it so easy for him, lets him treat her that way, that he just continues, has really no respect for her (as little respect for her as i imagine she has for herself).

but despite every shitty thing he’s ever done to her, still she wants him. even after they’ve ostensibly drawn a line under things, she still makes promises to him, still tries to help him, still tries to stay in his life and bribes him to help her and… for all that i think she spent so many years convinced she was the person who knew him best, i think she blithely ignores so much of him in favour of this idea of who she thinks he is in her head.

this is literally the only way i can make sense of her continued responses to him, alongside both his behaviour to her on show and his canonical behaviour to her previously.

(i’m not really sure what to say about the first abortion anymore, because it 100% seems like something robert would do and i always stood by that, but in the light of her talking quite calmly about it to chrissie and saying it was the right thing to do, i sort of wonder if maybe rebecca was just throwing it in robert’s face for shock value, if she didn’t put up quite the fight that was originally implied, if it seemed a lot more of a joint decision? or maybe it wasn’t, but rebecca still recognises retroactively that it was the right thing to do? she certainly doesn’t seem to blame robert for it or any trauma she’s suffered relating to it when speaking to chrissie? which makes me think that she was trying to hurt robert and blame it on him, more than anything else?

idk, i feel vaguely uncomfortable about this line of thinking, hilariously enough, because i always want to make sure i’m holding robert as accountable as possible to his numerous fuck ups, but i think canonically speaking this is no longer as big of a fuck up as we once were led to believe it was. and at least that makes a damn slight more sense that she’d still continue loving him, wanting him in that same blind way as she does when arrives in emmerdale. no much more sense, but some.)

ANYWAY BACK TO THE TOPIC AT HAND

so i think rebecca is in love with this idea of robert that she has in her head, and there are ways you can parallel that with aaron and his relationship with robert during the affair

the difference comes from the second thing we know about rebecca, which is that she’s very easily led - and has shown very little agency at any point during her time on the show. where aaron would fight back against robert, rebecca never has - until recently.

we see him time and time again openly manipulate her. i won’t go into detail because i’ve done it already. one or twice.

(me: rebecca is such a boring character. also me: writes literal dissertations on her PICK A SIDE LO smh)

(me: liked rebecca before the Incident. also me: now writes thousands of words on why her character doesn’t work HYPOCRACY EVERYWHERE)

(me: knows that the character i thought rebecca white was was someone who despite everything, would ultimately do the right thing by the people she cares about and was largely better than giving into drunk, awful robert’s ridiculous seduction and had mad respect for her when she initially walked away, but also knew that she could potentially be at the mercy of Plot. also me: has been dealing with that and having to realign my every notion on who rebecca white is ever since because i am an obvious slave to canon and if she honestly didn’t do anything wrong that night, why the hell did she try to walk away in the first place)

(me: apparently has never held robert sugden to the same standard. also me: loves him anyway bc at least when he’s doing terrible things the show either invests in redeeming him or acknowledges that his actions are terrible. it took a long time for me to even like his character the first time i watched it but i got there and that time and backstory and the fact that it was so in character makes it easier to sympathise with than rebecca the walking plot device. still think he acted worse of the two of them that night, but as always, that’s just my take on it. but at least he’s shown remorse. she’s done nothing but imply she’s as big a victim as aaron in all of this. which. no.)

A N Y W A Y

She has the least amount of agency of any fictional character I’ve ever scene, has never been able to make a decision for herself that wasn’t somehow influenced by someone else… until this week.

Rebecca decides once and for all to keep the baby. Again, yes, Vic had to prompt her to take that step, but she’s still learning, she’s not used to being a grown adult person but she can totally take care of a living breathing child.

she also, to my first point, has finally stopped buying robert’s bullshit. maybe it’s something about being pregnant and contemplating motherhood and one of his comments was just the straw that broke the camel’s back, but she’s been outright wary of him, completely unwilling to be around him, in a way she never was before.

so…. there we have it. character development, such that it is. is it satisfying? sort of….? but not really? there’s still not much else to her, is the thing. and where else does she have left to go? she’s found a spec of agency, she’s realised that her feelings of love weren’t for the actual flesh and blood robert sugden, but the version of him she has in her head.

she’s on a mission to get aaron to see the same (not aware that aaron knows far worse things about robert), despite her determination just one day before that she didn’t want to get involved.

but… again, where can this storyline develop that’s satisfying not only for robert and aaron but rebecca too?

it’s my firm belief that actually the most interesting direction to take her in would be to take her character development to the extreme - have her go out for revenge. become a character that grows from having no agency to taking every single drop of agency for herself and getting her own back at the man who she held in her heart for years, but turned around and crushed it

(around the time she realised that not even a baby would make him want to be with her)

everyone around her thinks she’s keeping the baby because she thinks it’ll win robert back. but if she’s keeping the baby for her and wants robert out of her hair for good, or wants to teach robert a lesson, or wants to take revenge because robert is eventually interested in the baby and still has basically no concern for her…

to be honest, with the way she was able to still look at robert, to let every horrible comment he’s said to her go and still want to be with him, still actively try to be with him despite being turned down repeatedly, it actually feels like a more believable direction for her character to take than anything else. because… that blind desperation has to come from somewhere. out and out villainise her - they’ve built seven months worth of backstory as to how and why she could be pushed to the extremes and it would make her a hell of a lot more interesting. hell, it would be better constructed as a dive into soap villainy than chrissie’s turn ever really was (which was ok, but extreme and pretty out of odds with the character we’d seen from her before - i really don’t mind though because i fucking loved her scheming overdramatic ass). plus, rebecca deserves to be able to put robert through some pain

(obviously not ultimately really hurt him in any way but, you know, still)

idk, it’s just. a more enjoyable concept. it would fit her character magnificantly, when all is said and done. she’s been so meek, so easily manipulated for such a long time, has made near on every decision around robert, that giving her this opportunity to really do a 180 and take is to a soapy extreme would be amazing.

will they do this? i’m assuming not? if we’re supposed to like rebecca???? and i still don’t really know if we are or not.

what could they do instead? a lot of things that are less interesting, probably. and less satisfying for all of the characters involved. like. i guess she’ll just plod along, hating robert but staying firm in her decision?

or maybe she’ll start liking robert again which would make no sense but i guess the plot means that everyone forgives everyone else on a soap in one way or another eventually, but when ‘not liking robert’ is actually a genuine part of her character development… idk, is that satisfying? is that a good thing for her character? because i don’t feel like it is and i don’t feel like she should like robert again. he doesn’t deserve it from her. and i don’t have any interest in watching him make it up to her.

i don’t know. it’s 2am now and i want to sleep. i feel like maybe i’d be able to start comfortably theorising about her if i knew whether or not we were supposed to like her character. i do know that… there are a couple of ways they could take this storyline that would be ok with me, but this is literally the only way i could think of that would help save rebecca’s character and still make sense -

- but i just don’t think, regardless of what we’re supposed to feel, they really care about her enough to worry if she makes sense or not, so. she could really go in any damn direction (and i’ll be here once more, scrambling to make sense of an illogical character all over again)

(see, this is why i know i should actually just give up)

#THIS IS PROBABLY NICER TO REBECCA THAN IT IS TO ROBERT IN SOME WAYS TBH #and it's as objective as i can get which isn't much but it's something #it's still coming from the place of someone who ships robron so u know #casual unapologetic bias and all that #emmerdale meta #ed #answering anons #also i need you all to know that this answer is just over 2.5k words long #and i'm posting it at 2am so no one is gonna read it #so many excellent life choices have been made on this day #i dont even want to try and spell check it ur all on ur own

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vocalfriespod · 5 years ago

Text

Literally Exploding with Nerd Rage Transcript

Carrie Gillon Hi, welcome to the vocal fries podcast the podcast about linguistic discrimination.

Megan Figueroa I'm Megan Figueroa

Carrie Gillon and I'm Carrie Gillon.

Megan Figueroa So we always have to figure out who introduces the podcast each week. And it It feels like My Favorite Murder to me, where they never know who goes first.

Carrie Gillon It's true.

Megan Figueroa I just okay. So it also reminds me and I want to say thank you for all the well wishes on Twitter, I defended my dissertation without passing out

Carrie Gillon but with passing

Megan Figueroa with passing, and I tweeted that it was perfect because that morning I was listening to My Favorite Murder. And they were talking about how nervous they were to play the Orpheum in Los Angeles, their hometown. And I tweeted at them that I was like, so grateful that like these wonderful ladies were talking about how nervous they were. And that I have my dissertation defense that day and Karen Kilgariff have tweeted, replied to me and said, "Give them hell," and it was so awesome.

Carrie Gillon I know. I was, I was so happy.

Megan Figueroa Yeah, she's so sweet. They're both amazing.

Carrie Gillon Yeah, they're very supportive. And I really like that.

Megan Figueroa I know, it's very shine theory with them. They're like,

Carrie Gillon yes.

Megan Figueroa upliftin other women. Yes.

Carrie Gillon Yes. Which we should all strive to do.

Megan Figueroa Yes. So the internet really helped me and thank you all. You all uplifted me. So yeah,

Carrie Gillon that also reminds me, B. Got an email a few weeks ago now, I think, from Olivia James, who is one of the cohosts of Super Serious Social Justice Podcast, which you should also all listen to. Because obviously, there's the social justice aspect that both of our podcasts have, so that's awesome. Anyway, so she sent us a message and she said, "Hey, ladies, you guys have been one of my favorite podcasts ever. However, on Grammar Nazi, you ask who other than classic majors thinks Latin is the best language. And I have to come forward and say, me, that's fucking awesome. Of course finding an old language cool doesn't mean you have to be a snob either. So thanks for fighting the good fight on the grammar sno front." And so I was wanting to say yes, Latin is cool.

Megan Figueroa It is. On that episode did I mentioned, I probably said this, but like Rushmore, I'm thinking of Max.

Carrie Gillon Yes, I saved Latin. What did you ever do?

Megan Figueroa Yeah, exactly.

Carrie Gillon Which I think is on there as well.

Megan Figueroa Yeah, I mean, you know, we'll rep it again.

Carrie Gillon I just don't want it to be more important than other languages. I think all languages are very cool.

Megan Figueroa Yes.

Carrie Gillon That's the only thing.

Megan Figueroa Yes.

Carrie Gillon And she also, "I also wanted to thank you for mentioning the grammar policing is very, very ablest. I rarely hear folks mentioning ableism. And it's so embedded in language." So true. It's, it's, it's everywhere. And I know I still have some and I try to dig it out, but it's embedded really in there.

Megan Figueroa I know, especially since so many times. I mean, not just linguists. I'm gonna call it linguists here a little bit, but other people forget about sign languages

Carrie Gillon yes, everybody does. Yeah,

Megan Figueroa it's, it's horrible.

Carrie Gillon Yeah, one of the things that most recently they came up about that was I can't remember who it was, but somebody did an analysis and showed that women speak far less than men do on screen. And so someone said, Well, you know, Shape of Water isn't going to help with that. And I was like, Well, okay, that's true. Speech different from Sign in that sense, but she's still using language on screen. And I think we have to find a way to say that still counts. Like still has lines. Right, right. Yeah.

Megan Figueroa Right.

Carrie Gillon So she's a very important character. And I don't want us to ignore that. So

Megan Figueroa well, and I watched the Oscars, and of course, I was on Twitter. Seeing what the Deaf folks that I follow, were saying they were happy about the representation of the Shape of Water, at least the ones that I was following, and they were happy to see it win.

Carrie Gillon Yeah,

Megan Figueroa it would be it wouldn't be good to somehow represent that those. Those things are happening.

Carrie Gillon Yeah, it's still she's still using language and that matters.

Megan Figueroa Right. Yeah, it kind of erases it. If we say

Carrie Gillon Well, nobody said that.

Megan Figueroa That's not language

Carrie Gillon but it does still erase it in the sense of making speech more important than sign. And that's problematic.

Megan Figueroa Yeah, yes. We got to fight the good fight, but a lot of people that forget about sign.

Carrie Gillon Yeah. And speaking of Well, not quite that but continuing on the same kind of topic. So the end of her email is "I'd love to hear you guys do an episode on language learning disability, for example, person first versus identity first language. Anyway, you're the best. Thanks for doing what you want to do." And I think we mentioned this before. We do want to get to that and we just haven't yet. But yeah, absolutely. It's important.

Megan Figueroa Yeah, definitely. There are several episodes that we can do about ableism.

Carrie Gillon Oh, so much.

Megan Figueroa Yeah. And language around disability.

Carrie Gillon Yeah. Yes. All right. And then we also wanted to thank dictionary.com for listing us as one of the language podcasts you should listen to.

Megan Figueroa Yes.

Carrie Gillon And if you don't know it, we will post it again. But you should listen to all the podcasts on there.

Megan Figueroa It was just really exciting because I never thought that I would be able to like, you know, say, hey, the dictionary is talking about me.

Carrie Gillon Me either! I never in a million years thought that the dictionary would talk about me, even though I have co-edited a dictionary. It just doesn't feel like yeah, quite the. I don't know. I just wasn't expecting it. So like that's a thank you dictionary.com

Megan Figueroa I really felt like I made it because at 16 my AP English teacher who I loved, said her favorite book was the dictionary and I just like adored her and I wanted to be like her. So now I'm like, well, your favorite book talked about me.

Carrie Gillon That is pretty cool. One last piece of housekeeping. We're going to have a bonus episode for March and it will be on Mr. doesn't-have-an-accent Mike Rogers. And how problematic that is. I'm sure you can guess part of what we're gonna say. But you know if you're interested you can get that by becoming a patron at the $5 a month level.

Megan Figueroa Yeah, it's pretty much gonna be like, nerd rage .com

Carrie Gillon speaking of, that's what this whole episode is.

Megan Figueroa It's nerd raging for like 30 minutes

Carrie Gillon there's a lot of me sighing. like an excessive amount of me sighing.

Megan Figueroa Not just sighing. Heavy sighing.

Carrie Gillon Yes. I know.

Megan Figueroa And then me being flustered and not knowing what to say. Just too many feelings

Carrie Gillon well

Megan Figueroa boiling.

Carrie Gillon Yes.

Megan Figueroa Coming to the surface. All right.

Carrie Gillon All right. Well, hope you enjoy this one.

Megan Figueroa Nerd rage. Nerd rage, right?

Carrie Gillon Yes. Yes, this episode is going to be nothing but nerd rage.

Megan Figueroa Yep. And now I'm like, just now this reminds me of the thing that was going around the Modcloth shirt called the podcast cohost shirt.

Carrie Gillon Mm hmm.

Megan Figueroa Thinking about how it was sleeveless, just enough fabric or lack of fabric so that you could just gesticulate wildly with your nerd rage

Carrie Gillon Everyone was complaining about it, but I was like, but it's kind of a cute shirt.

Megan Figueroa Cute shirt. Yeah. I mean, they have some ridiculous names for their clothes.

Carrie Gillon Yeah. And they always have right when they first started, so

Megan Figueroa yeah. calling it a cohost, a podcast cohost shirt. They were just like, what should we call this one thing that came up.

Carrie Gillon Well, one reason why I actually kind of liked it was because I mean, women are podcasters, which is kind of nice. Because that's not the stereotype.

Megan Figueroa That's true. That's a good point.

Carrie Gillon So I didn't hate on it at all.

Megan Figueroa Yeah. But I really think is they need like a podcast cohost like sweatshirt, or like,

Carrie Gillon Yeah, I know.

Megan Figueroa Something really comfy.

Carrie Gillon It's true. I mean, you know, you can wear your pajamas when you're podcasting. Yeah, you don't have to be wearing such cute clothes. But I still liked it. Well, so today, we're talking about this Time article that kept being sent to us. And I just wanted to say that actually, it's kind of an old article from the Muse from 2015. And I think I'm pretty sure this is a list of words that I was asked to speak about for The List the TV show. So I've already spoken about this list before, but I think we need to speak about it together.

Megan Figueroa Yeah. And I, I realize now that I mean, the fact that this was from 2015, and that Time can like retweet it or up it again speaks volumes. This is just a thing like people are clicking on this.

Carrie Gillon Yes, like total clickbait.

Megan Figueroa Yeah, like, I mean, the people that shared it with us on Twitter, of course, we're like, look how ridiculous this is. But there are other people on Twitter sharing it like, mmm-hmm, people should listen to this or you know, like they're legitimate people out there that are like, we'll read this and be like, "Okay, wow, I shouldn't use these words anymore."

Carrie Gillon Yeah, people take it seriously. Who is this person who wrote this list? Jenny Haskamp who is she, why is she an expert to you?

Megan Figueroa Right?

Carrie Gillon Nothing wrong with her. But you know, she's not a language expert any more than most people are so. Why take her more seriously than us? Who actually are.

Megan Figueroa literally, literally, experts on language, thank you.

Carrie Gillon I mean, if you're gonna listen to other people about stuff, make sure they actually are experts of what they're talking about. And even then, you should still obviously take things, you know, somewhat skeptically. Make sure that you have, like, you're not just taking what everyone says. verbatim, right? Like Think for yourself, but like, anyway,

Megan Figueroa yes. And it actually coupled well with another thing that we were sent at the end of January where this asshole bar owner in the East Village of New York or Manhattan, the owner of the Continental posted a sign on his door that said, "Sorry but if you say the word 'literally' inside continental you have five minutes to finish your drink and then you must leave. If you actually start a sentence with 'I literally' you must leave immediately!!! This is the most overused annoying word in the English language and we will not tolerate it. Stop Kardashianism now." Heavy sigh.

Carrie Gillon It's just so packed with bullshit.

Megan Figueroa Yes, packed with bullshit

Carrie Gillon like the the Kardashianism thing. That's that's an attack on women, especially young women.

Megan Figueroa Yep. Yeah, I mean, we've mentioned it before, and we'll say it so many more times, I'm sure because people are hanging on to this. When you're attacking the Kardashians for the way they speak. It's not you're not attacking. I don't know.

Carrie Gillon Wealth, or celebrity you're attacking women, you really are.

Megan Figueroa Yeah.

Carrie Gillon Like if you were talking there them that you wouldn't really talk about the way that they speak or the words that they use, you would talk about the message that they're sending. If you want to say that they're problematic in some way or other, of course you can and you might be right. But you need to actually say what's problematic if all you're doing is using Kardashianism as a shorthand for young women of a certain class, like, it's not okay. Be specific.

Megan Figueroa Yes, be specific in your critiques of, I mean, they might be very legitimate critiques, but we can't take you seriously if what you're attacking is the way that people speak.

Carrie Gillon Right.

Megan Figueroa And I mean, oh, This. I have no words. I mean, I do I have tons of words. I just can't like, I hate this. I hate. I will never go to the Continental. that's not a thing that's gonna happen.

Carrie Gillon No, definitely not. Yeah, I mean, this guy is a real piece of work. So first of all, his name is Trigger Smith, which is an amazing name. He also hates "it's all good." "You know what I'm saying?" And "my bad." Which, okay. I think we know what that's code for.

Megan Figueroa Yeah.

Carrie Gillon But even worse, the bar became notorious for banning saggy jeans, a policy that he's defended by saying, "if you have a problem with that, open up your own bar with no dress code or door policy and see how long it lasts. That crowd will alienate and scare away your mainstream crowd until that's all you have left."

Megan Figueroa That is a that is seeping with racism.

Carrie Gillon Right now. No other way to interpret that.

Megan Figueroa Yeah, like, scare away mainstream. Like, I mean, it's all coded like

Carrie Gillon coded language for black. Yeah. it's horrible. So not only is he sexist, he's also racist. And, you know, this goes along with my interpretation of the world where I think a lot of the isms and phobias go together. You know, some people only have one maybe, but I think most people have a good package of them. So if they, you know, show themselves to be racist, and you're a white woman, beware, they're going to also be sexist at some point, and vice versa.

Megan Figueroa Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's intersectional isms. intersectional. phobias. Yeah, they they do not discriminate with who they discriminate against.

Carrie Gillon Right? They really only like one kind of person

Megan Figueroa Oh, so fuck you Trigger. Fuck you.

Carrie Gillon wow. All right. So "literally," I think the reason why people pick on literally not in setting aside the gender stuff, although that's obviously part of it is because people have this idea that literally has to only mean in a literal sense. But there's two things wrong with this one, originally literally referred to letters, like, of the alphabet. We don't use literally in that way any more. And also that's related to literacy, you can you can see the connection there. So if we're going to use it the original way, then we should be taught using it to refer to literacy or something like that. We don't. The second problem is literally has been used in in a more intense way like as an intensifier for at least since 1708. So Alexander Pope, who is not exactly known for being loose with his language, use once said in a letter to Henry Cromwell in 1708, "everyday with me is literally another yesterday." That does not mean in a literal sense.

Megan Figueroa Yeah, it just cannot. It cannot be literal sense. No.

Carrie Gillon So so you're wrong. This use is very, very old. And people only started complaining about it relatively recently. I think it was last hundred years. It might have been more recent than that. But it's not been for the whole time. So back in the 1708, no one was complaining about literally being used in this intensifier way.

Megan Figueroa And, I mean, I hate to go back to sexism, but I have to think about how how much I love the character Chris Traeger and Parks and Recreation played by Rob Lowe and how they've written him to be this like adorkable character who always uses literally as an intensifier

Chris Traeger Pawnee is LITRALLY the greatest town in the country.

Megan Figueroa And it didn't hit me until when we were talking about doing this episode that I find it so charming that Chris does this all the time. And I don't know if I find it as charming if it was a female character that they had written to do this. Yeah, so this is my like internalized misogyny at play here, and it's horrible. It's frustrating.

Carrie Gillon It is very frustrating and I'm pretty sure they knew what they were doing, I'm pretty sure they were like, okay, we can have a male character do this but we can't have a female character do this.

Megan Figueroa And we're not like questioning his intelligence or anything or his competence at his job because he's like the city manager, right. He has this important job. And and of course, this is like, in contrast to Leslie Knope, who has to be perfect all the time. And they do talk about like, there's a lot of storylines about how she has to You know, work harder and everything because she's female. So yeah, they probably did it on purpose.

Carrie Gillon I'm pretty sure that they did. They're very clever writers. I think they knew what they were doing. And I also want to point out that a lot of people talk about how literally means figuratively and so you're misusing it because you're using it with the opposite interpretation. But that is not what it means. It's an intensifier, not figuratively, so again if we change "everyday with me is literally another yesterday" if I say "everyday with me, it's figuratively another yesterday" that sounds really bizarre

Megan Figueroa spiritual,

Carrie Gillon that's not what it means.

Megan Figueroa Yeah,

Carrie Gillon it just means it's like another yesterday to a great amount. Like it's REALLY like another yesterday and that is also another case of something changing into an intensifier "really." So really used to mean in a real sense, just like literally

Megan Figueroa Ah, of course, yeah,

Carrie Gillon over time became an intensifier, and nobody complains about really, truly did the same thing. Very did the same thing. If you look at the etymology, these things all just mean real.

Megan Figueroa Oh,

Carrie Gillon and they've all become intensifiers and no one gives a shit.

Megan Figueroa And now it makes me like feel like literally it's my baby and I want to protect it. Like why is why is everyone bullying literally when you see that really is the same way and all these other ones?

Carrie Gillon I think it feels more contentful I mean, it's a slightly longer word. We can feel the literalness still in it, whereas with very I mean, that's been an intensifier for so long. We don't really think about ver- is like real, but we are we should we should so real. We really should and we don't so anyway,

Megan Figueroa but it's like "veritas." Like it's very like that kind of is that Really?

Carrie Gillon That's where it comes from, yeah.

Megan Figueroa Oh what?!?!? See, I don't see that immediately.

Carrie Gillon Yeah, so veritas is related to very, yeah,

Megan Figueroa WHAT. Okay, see,

Chris Traeger that idea is literally the greatest idea I've ever heard in my life.

Carrie Gillon So I should also mention that Ben Zimmer is the one who did all the work on this and showing like just how old literally is and how very and really and truly have also equally undergone the same change over time. So yeah.

Megan Figueroa Oh, thanks, Ben.

Carrie Gillon Yeah, props to Ben. so anything else you want to say about literally?

Megan Figueroa I just I fucking like I love literally, like literally my favorite word.

Carrie Gillon Samsies.

Megan Figueroa I mean, yeah. Yeah,

Carrie Gillon and just get over yourself guys if you think like it's like the worst thing ever. Really? Like it's okay to dislike it if you just like it. You just like it, but to like complain about it publicly? I think. you're just trying to make yourself seem cool, but it's not really cool if everyone kind of semi agrees with you anyway.

Megan Figueroa Yeah. And yeah, and you might be loving your sexism show or something else.

Carrie Gillon Definitely. I definitely don't get sexist. So, yeah. All right. So let's look at some of the other words on this list.

Megan Figueroa Yeah, I was saving myself here. Because, right when I read the first word, I was like, Oh, god, this is terrible.

Carrie Gillon That?

Megan Figueroa that!

Carrie Gillon "That" is a useful, useful word. And there are two different "that's" and so which "that" are you talking about? And both of them have uses.

Megan Figueroa And guess what? She probably doesn't know because she's probably not an expert on language.

Carrie Gillon Nope.

Megan Figueroa I'm sorry, Jenny, or whatever your name is, but

Carrie Gillon well, so in this case. So her example is I have several friends that live in the neighborhood and she said, No, you have several friends who live in the neighborhood. we've already talked about this one. Both are fine.

Megan Figueroa Yeah. Yeah.

Carrie Gillon And she says it's superfluous. Most of the time. It is superfluous sometimes like you don't absolutely 100% need it. You can delete some uses of "that." "I said that he left" or "I said he left." But sometimes, even where it's sort of like, optional, I think it's easier to read if you add the that. But anyway, whatever that's not unimportant. You use it. You don't like it, don't use it.

Megan Figueroa And this is another thing where it's like different when you speak versus when you write like, Yeah, when I'm writing, and I have to follow the rules of like society. I'll be like, I'm editing and I'm like, Okay, yeah, I can see how I should probably, like, delete this. But when you're speaking, if it comes out, it comes out, like, no one's gonna go back and correct themselves with the word that. It's just a ridiculous thing to ask me.

Carrie Gillon Right. And we do want to point out that the title is the 15 words you need to eliminate from your vocabulary, not from your writing. Like, maybe this is a different conversation with writing, although I still have some problems with it. But yeah, you can't get rid of "that" from your vocabulary.

Megan Figueroa Yeah.

The next one!

Carrie Gillon No.

And then we went.

Megan Figueroa Oh god.

Carrie Gillon So this is this is a style question, right? So she's saying, I went to school, if you should consider drove skated, walk around, flew or whatever. And if you're writing, especially if you're writing something more evocative, I could see how you want to want to use a better verb.

Megan Figueroa But this is writing again, right?

Carrie Gillon Mm hmm.

Megan Figueroa I mean, she's saying vocabulary. I feel like she must mean in writing.

Carrie Gillon Probably maybe the headline that might not be her fault. But "went: is sometimes the right verb. Sometimes you don't know.

Megan Figueroa Um, oh, the next: honestly and absolutely she does not like these adverbs, eh.

Carrie Gillon I mean, they are sometimes overused and sometimes I think people use honestly when they're like trying to obfuscate but I don't think it's always the case. Her point is the minute you tell your reader that this particular statement is honest, then you've applied the rest aren't. Yeah, I don't think it's quite that strong. But you have you're saying like this is more important than what the rest of what I've said is Yeah, and you know, sometimes you might not want to do that, but I just honestly is fine.

Megan Figueroa Yeah. And absolutely "adding this word to most sentences is redundant." Ah, I mean, again this is Yeah, this is just so much more relevant in writing it seems like she sounds like she's talking about writing.

Carrie Gillon Yeah, yes.

Megan Figueroa oh look our friends very and really.

Carrie Gillon Okay. So in writing I do delete. So if I edit some on part of what I do for a living is edit. And I do take out a lot of berries because they do seem superfluous. However, in speech, not even noticed. I would never notice them

Megan Figueroa right. And listen to what she says about really, unless you're a valley girl visiting from 1985. There's no need to use really to modify an adjective or a verb or an adverb. Pick a different word to make your point.

Carrie Gillon Bullshit.

Chris Traeger You're literally the meanest person I've ever met.

Megan Figueroa Yeah, so ah hi sexism? Um, you're still here. You're always here, aren't you? Oh,

Carrie Gillon yes. sexism and ageism.

Megan Figueroa Yeah.

Carrie Gillon And I do think this is the most hilarious point. I don't remember who pointed this out on Twitter but someone was like, oh, but woebegone is okay. So very is bad, but woebegone, that's a better option. No, no. I'm not saying woebegone is always wrong. But in many cases, in many instances, that's the wrong word choice.

Megan Figueroa Oh, yeah. cuz she's saying it. What is she saying? If you're very happy, be ecstatic. If you're very sad, perhaps you're melancholy or depressed, woebegone even. Oh, my gosh. Yeah.

Carrie Gillon Yeah. I mean, anyway, it's fine, you know, to play around with vocabulary to like, find a better word, that piece of advice is not necessarily wrong. It's just eliminating from your vocabulary. redonkulous

Megan Figueroa Yeah, yeah. And and the fact that anyone would tell anyone to do anything like that. okay. Listen, our whole podcast.

Carrie Gillon That's true, but this is basically don't like, yeah, don't listen to these people. do what you want to do.

Megan Figueroa Yeah. I mean, the only time I would ever tell someone not to use a word is when it comes to slurs.

Carrie Gillon Yeah, you know. So I definitely say stay away from slurs.

Megan Figueroa Yeah, but I mean, now that number seven is amazing. Listen, I love the word amazing.

Carrie Gillon Yeah, I mean, it's overused. Sure, but come on. It's fine.

Megan Figueroa Oh, always and never. Okay, she doesn't like those.

Carrie Gillon That makes no sense because sometimes you really need to say, this never happens or This always happens. Now. Often people use it when that's not true, but it's sometimes true. And so you have to use them and you should not be eliminating these very important words - Haha very - from your vocabulary.

Megan Figueroa Oh, there's literally literally number 10. I'm surprised it's not number one.

Carrie Gillon We've already talked about that. And we could talk about it for ages. So if you wanted to hear us talk about it more, just let us know. Because

Megan Figueroa I know there's so much more to be said. And I can just talk about how much I love it.

Carrie Gillon I could give you more examples from literature where literally is used as an intensifier, not as figuratively, ah,

Megan Figueroa and I use it as both.

Carrie Gillon Yeah, of course, of course we use we use literally literally, of course we do. But, it's had these two meanings since 1708. At the very least, side by side, because words do that words often have more than one meaning and we don't really worry about it that much.

Megan Figueroa Right. Okay, so the word just, she describes it as a filler word, which is true for some instances of "just" but it's not always the case that it's a filler.

Carrie Gillon Well, she does say if you're using it as a synonym for equitable, fair, even handed or impartial, then you can use it, but otherwise you shouldn't use it. And I do think that just can be overused again, in writing - in speech doesn't matter. But in writing it can be and again, I will sometimes edit those out because they don't really help but again, you can't eliminate it. And I just keep making the same point over and over again. So I will stop.

Chris Traeger that literally went on forever. I thought you were never gonna stop talking.

Megan Figueroa Okay, so we have number 12 is maybe 13 is stuff 14 is things, stuff and things. Listen, sometimes. I just, ah, again, same point. I'm not going to get rid of saying stuff and things while I'm speaking. It's a ridiculous thing. And yes, when you're writing, if you go back to like, your English class in high school, of course, your teacher is gonna circle it and say, use another word, use what you are talking about or whatever. But

Carrie Gillon yeah, most of the time, you do want to have a better, more evocative word. But again, yeah, it's fine. And I forgot to mention with just the only people who get picked on for that are women.

Megan Figueroa I was gonna say, I, and I use just a lot to ask for things. And I realized that I mean, it's kind of hedging, or I'm like, when I need to ask for something, I like to soften it. And it's because of how we as a society, want women to be, I mean,

Carrie Gillon and what's wrong with being nice when we ask a question?

Megan Figueroa Yeah, I mean,

Carrie Gillon there's nothing wrong with that.

Megan Figueroa Right.

Carrie Gillon So like, Yeah, sure. We socialize women to be nicer. And sometimes that's bad, but in this case, it just don't think that's bad. Men should be more like women in this case,

Megan Figueroa yeah. Yeah, everyone should be more like women.

Carrie Gillon In this in this case. Yeah, I don't want to say across the board because there are some things that we are socialized to do that I think are problematic, but

Megan Figueroa it's true.

Carrie Gillon I dont' think asking in a nice way is bad.

Megan Figueroa So the last one is irregardless, which is always a fun one.

Carrie Gillon Yeah, I mean, I I just think it's a fun word, and I will use it sometimes. I mean, obviously, you wouldn't use it in a formal setting. Well, unless the whole point was to talk about words that are constructed differently than we might expect, but people complain about it. Because regardless and irregardless mean the same thing, but there are so many examples of this in English so for example, flammable and inflammable. mean the exact same thing. So, if your complaint is well, regardless, is redundant. Well, so is inflammable. So. and?

Megan Figueroa Also she says this about it. This doesn't mean what you think it means hefe, which is really weird to me that she decided to all of a sudden coda mix here and say hefe instead of boss. Um,

Carrie Gillon well, I would think it doesn't this doesn't mean what you think it means boss would sound kind of weird. So she would have to say something like, I don't know homie or I don't even know what would be a closer equivalent. Because it's like, I don't know. It's You're right. It's weird that she borrows a word from Spanish. to I don't know what bond herself to the reader.

Megan Figueroa Yeah, I have no idea what she's trying to do there. Because I don't know enough about her. To know why she would use a Spanish word there.

Carrie Gillon I mean, she might be a Spanish speaker. I really don't know but it does feel a little like pandering. but to who?

Megan Figueroa But in a weird way, I know. to who

Carrie Gillon That's the thing. Like, maybe pandering is even the wrong word because it's like, I don't know. I just don't understand.

Megan Figueroa Yeah, so um, and also she ends the article by saying "these 15 words are a great place to start trimming the fat from your prose: bonus, you'll sound smarter." So,

Carrie Gillon I mean, okay with the stuff and things, if you use better nouns, like nouns that actually describe what you're talking about, then yeah, of course, that's gonna make you sound smarter, but I don't know.

Megan Figueroa But the idea that I mean, it's problematic to me that there's this idea that the words that we choose to use, define whether we're smart or not. I mean, that goes back to so many isms, right?

Carrie Gillon It's true, but she does say sound smarter not makes you smarter. And this is all about presenting yourself to a public and when you present yourself in a certain way, then yeah, certain people are gonna judge you. So basically what she's telling you implicitly is you will be judged if you use these words, which is true. that part is true.

Megan Figueroa Yeah. But she, like doesn't want to offer up any like statement. That's like, even though it's fucking unfair. You're gonna sound smarter if you use these words and get rid of these, or you'll sound smarter if you don't use these 15 words. So unless people are like, you know, couching things, in terms of like, oh, there's systemic reasons why we don't like these 15 words, so maybe get rid of them. And you'll sound smarter. I'm like, uh, goodbye.

Carrie Gillon Right. You have absolutely have to make explicit what is going on. And she doesn't do that because she buys into it.

Megan Figueroa Exactly. Yeah. So I think that's the biggest problem I have with these 15 words kind of lists and they come up all the time, and it's always by people that do buy into it. It's not.

Carrie Gillon And no one ever asks a linguist, well, except for The List. So thank you The List for asking me.

Megan Figueroa Yeah. Maybe they don't ask linguists because it would just be a bunch of nerd rage spilled onto the paper. It's gonna be like this podcast or this episode. We're like, all over the place with our anger.

Carrie Gillon Hulk Smash.

Megan Figueroa Hulk Smash. Exactly. Yeah. And of course, like, as we're going down the list, there's not much more to say, we have the exact same thing to say about all of these words that she uses because it's the same point over and over again, you know, like there's no reason to eliminate there words from your vocabulary. When you're speaking.

Are there any other words that we can think of the people complain about? I mean, literally, it's just so picked on it and irregardless too. One of the things people say about irregardless is it's made up well, I hate to tell you, but all words are made up at some point.

Yeah, there's a whole I mean, it's a it's a can of worms. So I maybe shouldn't even bring it up but Latinx is a thing that everyone's like, it's a made up word. And like, I always want to say

Carrie Gillon That's true, but like again,

Megan Figueroa exactly.

Carrie Gillon All words are at some point and many have been made up in the last 20 years that we don't complain about.

Megan Figueroa Yeah, exactly. I don't it's always something that's like, there's something deeper going on when you're like it's a made up word. I don't want to use it.

Carrie Gillon It's an excuse if you don't want to actually directly attack what you want to attack because I know that that will make you look like a shitty human being. So instead, you attack the word or the language that the person uses because then you can be sneaky about it, but we see you we see what you're doing.

Megan Figueroa Yeah, and this is a huge problem for singular they, you're being a fucking asshole. When you like if you're saying oh, I just it's so hard for If you're really gonna dig in deep and say, I can't use singular they, because of like, my grammar or whatever, you're being an asshole about something else. if you're not willing to make an effort with that, and I know it's gonna be hard.

Carrie Gillon It's not that hard though. I mean, people have been using singular a since at least Shakespeare's time. What are you're talking about?

Megan Figueroa I was trying to give them a little bit of credit because I was just shitting on them. But yeah, it's not that hard.

Carrie Gillon But I mean, out of all the things that they complain about that is not hard, like so a lot of people get confused because they think when you use singular they you're supposed to use singular agreement on the verb, like "they is." Which if that is your dialect, that's fine for those of us that that's not our dialect. No, you still use "they are" just like with you. It doesn't matter if you is you singular or you plural, you still use "you are" and it's fine. But if we had to switch to "they is" is then I would be like okay, that's hard. Yes, you're that's a grammatical distinction. Really hard to break. so I've got another list because I want to keep on raging. So again, many of the same ones come up again like really, but for some reason this person doesn't like "you."

Megan Figueroa Okay?

Carrie Gillon Because I don't want you to use like to speak directly to the reader, I guess when you're like writing

Megan Figueroa Oh, of course it goes back to writing.

Carrie Gillon Yeah, this one is specifically about writing Okay, I'm gonna shit on that. Like, that's really what it is. So yeah, but there are times when "you" is acceptable still, I think. "Feel" and "think" you should, you know, find different words for those of course because they're not good enough, I don't now.

Megan Figueroa Um, when I was a English tutor, I was tutoring students that were in AP English High School, AP English, and their AP English teacher didn't want them to use the word "be" or any of its forms.

Carrie Gillon Oh, it's so bizarre. Like a lot of people have this bugaboo about "be." Because they think it they think it doesn't mean anything or doesn't do anything.

Megan Figueroa Oh, it's so important.

Carrie Gillon we we can't do present tense without it in English for most things,

Megan Figueroa yeah, so I was like, as a linguist, as I was seeing this, I was like, Oh, this is so frustrating, but I have to like, tutor like help them get a good grade in the class and like, you know, rework, rework the sentences to help them not use "be," but it was so frustrating because I was like, really hard to do because "be" its just everywhere, and it's so important

Carrie Gillon It’s so bizarre, although I there is one place where I have this weird hatred of it. and it's the hashtags #amwriting and #amediting. Why not just #writing, #editing? what's the am doing there? I hate it. And it's so stupid. And I know it's just me. And I'm not saying anybody should stop doing it. Because no, that's dumb. But like, that is what I'm thinking. I'm like,

Megan Figueroa I totally do hashtag #amwriting and I have no idea why I saw it once and that's the only reason I use that hashtag

Carrie Gillon Cuz that’s what people use! But if it was just me, I would use #writing or #editing. why do you need the am? Anyway it’s silly, it’s my pet peeve that is not a real thing.

Megan Figueroa Yeah, I’m trying to think, I used to give my students the assignment of “tell me your linguistic pet peeves” and “literally” always comed up - “comed” haha!

Carrie Gillon Oh my.

Megan Figueroa That’s a remnant from my dissertation.

Carrie Gillon Oh my, that’s a little dirtier than I was expecting.

Megan Figueroa I’m sorry. Comes up. “Literally” always comes up. I can’t think of any other words that they really hated. But it’s always like 5 or 6, like enough people in each class that hate “literally.”

Carrie Gillon This person also hates “as.”

Megan Figueroa Yeah, try to get rid of that. Try.

Carrie Gillon There are two kinds of “as”es. One that introduces a whole clause and one that is more like a preposition, like “as a linguist, blah blah blah.” They’re talking about the first one. “As you write this word, poke out your eyes.” That’s literally the example they gave. First of all, that’s a totally fine use of “as” but they think you should use “because” instead.

Megan Figueroa Oh ok.

Carrie Gillon But that doesn’t make sense. “Because you write this word, poke out your eyes.” No. That means something different. Ask a linguist!

Megan Figueroa Yes #AskALinguist. I feel like anyone listening should totally tweet at us words that they heard people hate that make no sense, cuz I’m so interested in this.

Carrie Gillon Yes. Me too. And the same words keep coming up again and again. “Just” came up. There’s obviously things that trigger people.

Megan Figueroa And they’re reinforced in our English classes and in public school. Not just public school, all schools.

Carrie Gillon Yeah school.

Megan Figueroa School.

Carrie Gillon Alright, unless there are any other words you wanted to discuss?

Megan Figueroa Ahh… I don’t think so.

Carrie Gillon Ok. Me either. Alright. that was us nerd-raging on lists of words you’re not allowed to use anymore. And don’t forget: don’t be an asshole!

Megan Figueroa Do not be a fucking asshole. Do not be an asshole and use whatever words you want to use that aren’t harmful to other people. Alright bye

Carrie Gillon Bye

Carrie Gillon The Vocal Fries podcast is produced by Chris Ayers for Halftone Audio. Theme Music by Nick Granum. You can find us on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram @vocalfriespod, you can email us at [email protected].

#transcript #Ben Zimmer #literally #nerd rage #just #word complaints #linguistic discrimination #linguistics #language #English #things #stuff #be #feel #think #irregardless

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neptunecreek · 5 years ago

Text

Speaking Freely: An Interview With Ada Palmer

Ada Palmer is a Renaissance historian whose work lies at the intersection of ideas and historical change. She is currently on research leave from the University of Chicago, where she teaches early modern European history. She is also a writer of fiction; her 2016 novel, Too Like the Lightning, was a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Novel.

Ada’s research encompasses many topics, including the history of censorship. In 2018, she worked with EFF’s own Cory Doctorow on a project that looked at censorship and information control in information revolutions.

I’ve been thinking about censorship for a long time, but much of what Ada said during our conversation still managed to surprise me. We talked about censorship during the Inquisition, and how that parallels to today’s online censorship challenges. We also discussed what Ada, as an historian, sees as the harmful long-term effects of censorship, some of which might surprise even the most dedicated free expression activist. It was an honor and a pleasure to get to interview Ada for this wide-ranging edition of Speaking Freely.

York: My first question is what does free speech, or free expression, mean to you?

Two very different things, because I’m both an academic studying a phenomenon, and then a human being living in a world. So, as an academic studying a phenomenon, you observe, you describe … and in that sense, I can—when having my historian hat on—speak very neutrally about it. I spend a lot of my time researching major censorship operations of the past—researching the Inquisition, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, researching the Comics Code Authority. With your historian hat on, you can discuss these things very neutrally, even with a sort of fondness of “yes, this is my subject, and these people are terrible, and it’s kind of fun in that way.”

This is very different from when you zoom out from that semi-artificial historian neutrality to the realities. One of the things that has colored my approach to free speech is trying to de-separate and reunify those things. One of the problems we’ve faced trying to understand free expression, and its significance, and what the consequences are of infringing it, is that so much of our historical research on it tries to present as neutral, because that’s how you present historical research—distanced and balanced. But, in a way, that undermines the power of that historical research to show how bad it is and galvanize action. Does that make sense?

York: Absolutely.

In that sense, I consider my work parallel in facing some of the challenges as my colleague Kathleen Belew, who works on the history of white supremacy in the U.S. We’re studying phenomena that we’re fascinated by, but when you try to think about them directly and honestly you have an ethical responsibility to consistently remind the reader of the terrible consequences of them.

York: I’d like to dig into that a bit more. Tell me about one historical phenomenon in terms of censorship that perhaps I or our readers wouldn’t know about.

One of the victims of censorship that I’ve never heard anyone else talk about, although I’m sure someone must have, is the later future capacity to tell histories of the period when censorship happened. Because, since there was censorship, it sort of invalidates the historical record and the documents that survived, which you know were coerced or doctored (or if they weren’t, were written in a state of fear and self-censorship). It renders that whole historical record patch unreliable in a way that then makes it easier for later people to come and make claims about that period that you can’t refute using the historical sources.

To give the specific example that made me think of this: I work a lot on the Renaissance and the early period of the Reformation, and this is a period where everybody knows the Inquisition is in full operation. And lots of people tell histories of the Renaissance where they claim that all these important people, big ideas people who changed the world, were secret atheists, secretly anti-Catholic, or anti-Christian. And you come to this person who’s made this claim and you show them tons of documents and the person comes back and says “oh, there was censorship, so they weren’t being honest, and if you read between the lines they really think this…”

And it’s true there was censorship, and so you have to be very careful in interpreting the documents. The fact that there was censorship means anybody can come to those documents and claim that anything was false because censorship was there, and that what people really did or thought matches their narrative.

York: Wow, that’s really interesting, I hadn’t thought of it quite that way.

Yeah, we’re very conscious of the consequences of censorship during the short term, within our lifetimes. But censorship sort of poisons the historical record for centuries after it by making this tool by which people can invalidate things.

It’s similar to how we see people invalidating things now—like “that climate study wasn’t really valid because those people got funding from a leftist political group”—they’re invalidating the material by claiming that there has to be insincerity in the development of the document. And the more a period is known to have censorship (which isn’t the same thing as actually having it) or other pressure that are in some sense potentially distorting or affecting what people say and write, the easier it is for people to make the claim that they don’t really mean what they say.

I don’t think we think about truths on that larger historical scale being one of the victims of censorship.

York: Yeah, the way that you framed this reminds me of something I’ve been thinking of, which is how the LGBTQ movement here in Berlin was censored by the Nazis...but that’s kind of the opposite of what you’re saying. Here it’s the lost information about what happened in Berlin, and what you’re talking about is the mistruths that result from that.

Yes - it will never be possible to write a history of LGBT issues during and before this patch of censorship. Everyone’s always going to be combing through partial records trying to construct what might have been. A good historian will be modest in their claims. You can coax a lot out of a few documents, though.

It’s easy for anybody who has a strong pre-expectation of what must be true to project that pre-expectation onto the material, because anything that doesn’t match that pre-expectation can be dismissed as unreliable or false. And so it will make it both easier to create histories that distort in a pro-LGBT and an anti-LGBT way and in many other ways that will tie into future political issues we haven’t even gotten to. [You] know, 50 years from now when the new frontier of ethics is, I don’t know, octopus rights (because we will have already given civil rights to high primates and will be working on octopuses next), the factions in that battle will be able to exploit documents to advance narratives on any and all sides of a polarizing issue.

York: That’s really fascinating. I don’t mean this to be such a big question, but … what led you to that particular interest in the historical aspects of censorship?

I was led to it because I did my dissertation on Atomism and Epicureanism and we associate these with the history of atheism, which I was always very interested in. So I sort of came to it wanting to find secret atheists. And yet the more I looked at the material, the less I saw any evidence of that, and the more I saw rather orthodox Catholics nonetheless being interested in and reading this radical material.

As I’ve published and had to defend this thesis, I will then over and over have the following conversation:

“But aren’t all these people secret atheists?”

“No, here’s all the things that they say that is incompatible with atheism.”

“Oh, but they’re just being disingenuous.”

It’s been fascinating to watch that ineradicable repetition of “oh, but they’re just secret atheists, right?” But this happens with all our myths about the past. And yet, when I’m working with Renaissance materials, every single book I pull out has been censored, especially in the printed period where quite early in the dissemination of the printing press, the Inquisition had this system set up where you had to submit a text to a censor before you could have permission to publish it. Every book has a page at the front that says who censored it and that it has official permission to be censored, and that it’s good. And on many Italian books it’ll be one page, but if they’re produced under the Spanish or Portuguese regime where the Inquisition was better funded, it will sometimes be dozens of pages or, in a few of extreme examples, half of the book will be filled with letters from censors. The censorship is extremely visible and extremely integral to the text.

At the same time, the Inquisition was allowing the circulation of Lucretius, which says there’s no such thing as immortality of the soul, and prayer doesn’t work, and the gods didn’t create the cosmos...there’s this confusing apparent paradox of: “Inquisition, why are you spending so much effort and yet allowing these things that we think should be your number one target to circulate with your permission and even recommendation on the title page?”

And so I’m fascinated with trying to figure out what the Inquisition was doing when it wasn’t going after who we think it should’ve been. If you had a time machine, you’d go back and tell the Inquisition “You know, you’re fighting the wrong battles —if you want to really want to ferociously control the world, you should be going after Voltaire and not these bizarre Jansenist theologians no one in the future will have heard of.”

And so I became fascinated with the question of what the Inquisition’s actual goal was … and then that became a larger interest on a global scale, which is what my current project is: taking the patterns I’ve observed in European censorship and comparing them to China, the USSR, the Indian subcontinent both before and after British rule, to try to figure out what big global patterns there are in censorship that operate differently from what our expectations are.

York: I’ve thought about that as well, in terms of how countries censor the Internet. In my previous work at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, I managed a project that looked at the various reasons and ways in which governments censor the Internet and the tools that they use to do so.

Okay, I want to talk about a couple of parallels here: You’ve got some countries that are more secretive, and others that are very visible in the way that they display blockpages. And then you also talked about the goals of the Inquisition, and I’d love to get your thoughts on why governments—and companies for that matter—censor today.

So, in recurring patterns, one thing I’ve noticed is that pretty much every censoring operation post-printing press—which is of course earlier in the East than in Europe—recognizes that it isn’t possible to track down and destroy every copy of a thing. You’re never going to track down all of the copies once it’s been printed, and efforts to attempt to do so are actually remarkably rare in addition to being consistently unsuccessful. We think of the Inquisition as doing a lot of book burning, but an Inquisition book burning was the ceremonial burning of one copy of a book. In fact, the Inquisition kept examples of all of the books they banned in order to have them for reference.

So what is the Inquisition doing if it’s not trying to obliterate texts? I think it’s trying to do a couple of different things. A big one is projection of power, because every time you pick up a book, the first page you see is that the Inquisition had control over this book. Every time you’re thinking about publishing, you’re thinking about getting past the censor. Whether you’re the author, publisher, or especially the reader, the act of reading becomes an act of being reminded of orthodoxy, power, et cetera, especially in the practice of expurgation, which ties into the visibility question for the internet.

The expurgation system was basically “you may have this book, but you must go to page 210 and cross out paragraph 3—that paragraph is forbidden, but the rest of it you may have.”

What you produce at the end doesn’t actually obliterate the content—you can put a light behind it and see the text, it’s not that hard—but what it means is that every time you turn the page and see the blacked-out parts, you’re reminded of power, reminded that there is an authority out there, lurking. And one of the most telling examples of this is that the content censored isn’t always what we’d think of as the most meaningful.

Here’s an example: There’s an encyclopedia of animals, think a subset of Wikipedia, published by Conrad Gessner in the late 1600s, and he’s collected material that’s been sent to him by people all over Europe who observe animals. He has pictures of animals and little articles, and it’s really as close to Wikipedia as anything gets, because it’s crowdsourced in the pre-modern world.

And the Inquisition looks at it because he’s a Protestant and because they look at everything. And they say “okay, you can have the animals,” but under each animal he’ll usually thank the learned and excellent Doctor So-and-So. But if Doctor So-and-So is a Protestant, he must cross out “learned and excellent,” because Protestants aren’t learned and excellent—they’re bad and wrong. And so you have to go through this six-volume giant encyclopedia and find every point where he praises a Protestant as learned and excellent, and cross it out.

Notice no information has been destroyed at all—what this is is a didactic tool, it’s just like making Bart Simpson go through and write “I will not do X” over and over again on the blackboard.

York: [laughs heartily]

It’s making you go through and write “Protestants are bad”, “Protestants are bad”, “Protestants are bad” on every single page. So it’s about turning your reading process into a tool of power for this entity, to reinforce barriers, to reinforce what is taboo and not taboo, and to remind you through every bit of the reading process that there is this authority out there. And that’s what parallels the versions of censoring the internet where they make it obvious, whether it’s having a box pop up, or having the page partially load—that reminds you with a little chill that you tried to do something forbidden. And it has a didactic, power-projecting purpose.

York: That’s so interesting and true.

I see that over and over...they know they’re never going to eradicate material that’s already there, but they can turn that material into a tool for advancing their own agenda. And then the other half of this is that a lot of these activities aren’t for erasing information that already exists, but to cause self-censorship and prevent the production of new things that don’t yet exist.

The motto for the book I’m currently working on is, “The vast majority of censorship is self-censorship, but the vast majority of self-censorship is intentionally cultivated by an outside power.”

York: Yeah, absolutely.

We had a great discussion in class at one point about the Galileo trial—you’re the Inquisition, here’s this guy Galileo, you think his ideas are dangerous. You then have a giant, showy trial that makes him a hundred times more famous than he was before, so that everyone is talking about him and he remains a major figure in the history of culture for hundreds of years afterward...what are you doing? It would be much more sensible to have him quietly murdered, which is not hard in 1600. It would be more sensible to smear him, say nothing, accuse him of sodomy, any normal sort of destroy-your-enemy tactic of 1600 makes more sense, if what you want to do is silence Galileo.

And a student in the class was asking: “How do we judge when censorship succeeds?” The answer is we have to figure out what the goal of the censorship was, because if the goal of the Galileo trial was to silence Galileo, it was one of the worst failures of anything anyone has ever tried to do in the history of the planet. But if you think of it differently, the goal of the Galileo trial is that it gets Descartes to withdraw his treatise that was about to be published, and then revising it to be way more orthodox and way more Catholic, and then publish that, which continues to be the dominant force in the French intellectual world for a century, and results in a much more orthodox and much more Catholic France than it would have if Descartes had published the uncensored original version—that’s the victory of the Galileo trial.

York: This feels like what we’re seeing in Egypt at the moment—the silencing of some of the louder voices in order to prevent more people from coming forward...of course, the main impact is self-censorship.

Yeah, and...I’ll talk to people sometimes about censorship and they'll want to say things like “okay, we’re going to talk about real censorship, not self-censorship, that’s different.”

York: [laughs]

And I have to say “No, it’s not different.”

The other one I sometimes run into is “We’re going to talk about state censorship, because only state censorship is real censorship—”

York: Yes, that’s my life.

[Palmer laughs] Nooo, it’s not true! And if you want an absolutely foolproof thing that’ll shut that person up for a few minutes while they try to come up with a rebuttal: “The Inquisition wasn’t the state. The Inquisition was a private organization comparable to Doctors Without Borders or Unicef that was organized through Rome, but run by private organizations like the Dominicans and the Jesuits, and was decentralized with lots of offices all over the place and often competed with the state.

In addition to which, the First Amendment—Congress can make no law—there is absolutely no incompatibility with the Inquisition operating in the U.S. right now like the way that it operated in France and Spain and everywhere else. What it is is an organization that has permission to have private police, and have private prisons, and arrest people on private authority and do its thing...the U.S. allows all that stuff. There’s nothing in the First Amendment or the U.S. legal system that wouldn’t allow the Inquisition to operate. There are particular things about policies against religious restriction that might mean they’d have to work around certain local laws in certain states, but [the Inquisition] could absolutely operate the same way here, and it wouldn’t be against the state, and it wouldn’t be against the First Amendment.*

And when you get that across to people who are trying to argue that it isn’t censorship when it’s not the state, I’ve found that to be very successful in getting people to wake up and see that it’s more complicated. Because nobody would ever argue that the Inquisition wasn’t censorship.

York: In that sense, I’d be really curious to hear your thoughts on the increasingly centralized—I mean, I’ve called it censorship but I’m not sure everyone agrees—behavior of platforms like Facebook.

Right, it’s a major example of the dangers of centralization, which is to say that we want to have lots of platforms that have radically different policies so you can move from platform to platform and voice to voice, and they all can regulate stuff, because they’re private groups and they do. But if you have a plural set of voices, then you’re always going to have some spaces where things can be said, just like you have a plurality of printers printing books, and some will only print orthodox things and some will only print radical ones. It creates an ecosystem in which the consumer of media knows perfectly well which printer to go to.

One of the things that electronic stuff is enabling is that for the first time we’re approaching levels of things that were sort of undreamt of in the pre-digital world in terms of scale and efficacy...they’re now possible. You can make a program that can hunt down every instance of a particular phrase and erase it from being there. That’s something the Inquisition would surely have liked to do if they could have.

It’s always been the case, before and now, that when you get to the very bottom of it, there’s a deeply human penetrability of all censorship systems, because censorship has to be done by people—not only by people, but generally by more educated and more literate people. What is the Inquisition? It employs thousands upon thousands of fresh-out-of-college lit majors with a first job out of college where you go through books, and read them, and report dangerous content. And that’s your day job while at home you’re writing your own treatise.

We have letters of these young scholars whose first job it is while they’re looking for a second job.And we even have letters where they’re writing to each other, like, “Oh Francoise, I got your book to censor today, and I’ll be sure to do an extra good job and make sure that it gets through.”

It creates this level of sympathy and human penetrability to the system. [The] great example of this is a treatise against Jesuit education and endorsing radical enlightenment education, written by one of the leading lights of the Portuguese enlightenment in the 1740s. And it’s printed in Naples because he knows he can’t get it printed in Portugal where the Jesuit-led local Inquisition is very powerful...just think of the Inquisition as very, very decentralized: a plural group of organizations that have to run themselves separately but are pretending to be one thing. He has it printed in Naples. And the local Jesuits find out, intercept the boat at the port in Lisbon, raid it, and seize the entire print run—this is as close to eradication as the Inquisition gets—and they destroy that print run, leaving only the copies that the printers in Naples had as their reference copies. However, within three months, a new edition of this book is printed in Portugal by one of the Inquisitors whose job it was to destroy the first edition. He’d kept a copy from the library of banned books, and then liked it and secretly printed it.

The human being is the point of penetrability there. And that doesn’t happen to every book the Inquisition tries to destroy, but it sure happens enough that it makes an enormous difference. So whether it’s a fresh-out-of-college English major who decides this radical book is actually kind of cool and lets it slip, or it’s this person printing an underground version of a forbidden book, there’s always been this hidden level where, when enough of the culture supports an intellectual movement, the human beings doing the censoring also become sympathetic to that movement and let it slide.

That has enabled, for example, the proliferation of local materials against attempts at global censorship. When, the L'Encyclopédie de Diderot et d'Alembert radical enlightenment encyclopedia is printed in France, France loves it. It’s full of the richest, newest enlightenment philosophy, it’s full of cool technical illustrations. We have a wonderful report of where the King and Queen were looking up how silk stockings are made, and she was excited to learn how her silk stockings work. We have an endorsement from the king and so on. They gave it official royal permission to be printed despite all of its radical and especially anti-centralized church stuff. It got as far as volume seven until the Papacy was like, “No, this is not okay.” And so it was banned in Rome. And when things are banned in Rome, the order is it must also be banned in France, and France has to have a ceremonial book burning and ban this book. But everyone in France likes this book, including the king. So what they do is have a ceremonial book burning in which they carry the Encyclopédie over to the fire, but then set it aside and burn in its place volumes of Calvinist sermons which they don’t like.

And so they keep the Encyclopédie, and from then on everyone in France knows that it’s officially forbidden but they don’t care. And they keep printing it in secret across the border in Switzerland, and smuggle it in, and it’s allowed to be smuggled in with such regularity that people who are printing more radical forbidden works wrap them inside the Encyclopédie—because if the border guards catch you they’ll just let you go, because the whole of France is angry at the Pope about the ban and wants to support the book.

That’s a space where you can say the region of an empire was able to, independently because of a cultural movement, allow the dissemination and proliferation of a text even when it had been banned by the central government. But we’re talking about books, and those take weeks to travel on horse. In the electronic world, that kind of regional, local autonomy and permeability starts to become much harder. Hackers can hide things on the darkweb and so on, but your average citizen of 18th-century France had much more access to the Encyclopédie than your average citizen in Guangzhou in China right now has access to electronic materials banned by the central government. You see that difference?

York: Yes, definitely.

So I think that’s one of the key things that’s changing.

York: I think what concerns me is the effectiveness of censorship now.

I think of it as saturation—how much of the material can be touched by the censorship. And that varies. So if we look at something as simple as how the Kindle automatically updates books that Amazon puts in, but the Kobo doesn’t change ebooks unless you give it explicit permission. If some malign actor took over the administration of both Kindle and Kobo, that malign actor could delete every copy of 1984 off every Kindle simultaneously and replace them with a propaganda wheel. But, in the case of the Kobo, it would say, “We want to update your copy of 1984, is that okay?” A few people would not know what was going on and say yes. But a few people would notice what was going on, say no, and a large number of Kobo owners would retain the original text. That very simple difference between the design of two ebook readers would therefore result in 100% saturation of censorship implemented through the Kindle, but maybe between 30-80% of saturation of censorship through the Kobo, depending on how many Kobo users get alerted to the censorship before they hit okay on the button. And both of them are censorship, but one of them is far more irrevocable.

York: That’s certainly true. I think a lot about how architecture of a technology influences the impact of censorship. Okay, I have one last question for you, one that I’ve been asking everyone: Do you have a free speech hero, either from past or from present?

A lot of people don’t know how hard Diderot worked on the Encyclopédie. Diderot was prizedly, personally an atheist, and his atheistical writings are absolutely gorgeous. They’re fascinating to read from a modern standpoint, because the atheism of his century was totally different from post-Darwin atheism, it’s the atheism of somebody who doesn’t have science on his side.

York: Oooh—

...who doesn’t have an atheistical explanation for how the world works, and why forest animals have forest camouflage and desert animals have desert camouflage. Who, when he writes about it, admits that science is in fact on the side of theism and that he doesn’t have good explanations for things, but that he nonetheless in a groping and incomplete way feels like atheism describes the actual events that he sees in the world around him—the chaoticness of daily life, and the lack of apparent meaning and providential action in human life. And therefore he feels sort of, as he says, on an irrational and instinctive level that atheism is true, and he’s trying to grope toward a coherent atheism but doesn’t have it yet. It’s really beautiful and some of the most heartful, honest—a philosopher telling you that he doesn’t know the answer and that he’s uncertain of his own convictions. Beautiful material.

In the 18th-century, or really the very end of the 17th, is really the first point in Europe’s history that there started to be atheism as a movement. But it wasn’t just a silent thing or something that people use as a slur toward other people. There was actually atheist literature, atheists talking to each other, atheist poetry, and Diderot was perfectly positioned to really be the leader and center of this movement. But he self-censored everything, and he didn’t publish any of his atheistic work in his lifetime at all. He circulated it privately among friends and that’s it, because he was the editor of the encyclopedia.

The purpose of the encyclopedia was to enable universal education for the first time, to empower everybody by giving everybody the knowledge to understand their tools, their agriculture, the way society was put together. It was a project to try to transform the world to where everybody had the power that only elites had before. And, as he also articulates it, it’s insurance against a new dark age. That if a new dark age should come upon humanity and only one copy of the encyclopedia survives, it would preserve all the technology, all of the social and ethical development, kindness of law that had developed at that point so it would be possible to reconstruct all of those things, and humanity would never be doomed to lose its achievements again.

He knew that if the editor of this project was known to be an atheist, that they would absolutely crack down on this and they would never allow it to circulate. So, in order to protect everyone else, in order to protect the achievements of everybody else leading up to him, and in order to achieve effective immortality of everybody else’s life, he self-censored his own and didn’t allow any of it to be published in his lifetime, leaving orders that it be printed not only after his death but after the death of his daughter, who was a pious Catholic and he didn’t want her to be sad that her father was going to hell.

As the result of this, some of his works were permanently or temporarily lost or inaccessible. This is a bit part of why Voltaire’s works are on high school syllabuses and almost nobody knows Diderot wrote anything that wasn’t the Encyclopédie.

Rameau's Nephew, which is one of the most absolutely most amazing philosophical works I’ve ever read—the work in which Diderot wrestles with the fact that by radically changing the education of the new generations, and encouraging them to dismantle current institutions, and create better ones—Diderot realizes that this also means creating a future in which his generation will no longer have a place, in which his values will be outdated and replaced by values that will be better but also frightening to him and to his peers who didn’t grow up in that world. [It wrestles] very directly with the problem of progressivism versus conservatism, and the fact that being progressive means that by the time you’re old, the world will be a place where you’re no longer comfortable.

It’s an amazing work, and it survived only in one handwritten copy which was missing for over a century until it only turned up by chance in a used book stall on the side of the Seine in the late nineteenth century. If that one copy had been destroyed, we wouldn’t have it at all. And he decided to risk that for all of his work in order to give us the encyclopedia and universal education.

York: That’s really powerful. Thank you so much for sharing that.

What we want is a world where nobody ever has to do that again.

* Under US law there are some situations in which a private actor may be considered a "state actor" subject to First Amendment restrictions. But these are difficult and highly specific legal questions. Although EFF has First Amendment experts, we are not historians and do not know enough about the Inquisition to know whether a good state action argument could be made under modern US law. Nevertheless, recent history has shown that modern-day private censors like the Moral Majority and Focus on the Family, or the various private groups that sustained the Hollywood Blacklist, have been able to exercise great influence without official state action.

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